Research at the center for media engagement at the university of texas at austin. Professor wally founded and directed the Digital Intelligence lab at the institute for the future which is a 50yearold think tank based in the heart of silicon valley. Also cofounded and directed Research Team at the computational propaganda product at Oxford Internet institute at the university of oxnard. Hes written on political manipulations technology for a variety of publications including wired, the atlantic monthly, vice, techcrunch, the guardian and many others. His research has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, washington post, wall street journal and also made appearances on the today show. In frontline, is presented to members of nato, u. S. Congress and uk parliament. Its a great honor to have him here with us tonight during this incredible and important research. Give him a warm welcome. [applause] hi, everyone. Great to be here. I think my bio sounds kind of fake. Crazy. This is the last leg of my tour. Happy to be here in san francisco, specifically here at city life. Thank you everyone for having me. I can think of a better place to end this to her and talk about really a book on democracy at the end of the day and the way we rebuild technology. A lot of people assume when they talk to me about my work that i am a computer scientist. That is essentially not true, nothing could be further from the truth. I kind of thought maybe i should try to play the game and be like yeah, i took a few classes, i know a little bit about hdmi output at the end of the day, on the kind of person who studies by talking to people. I spent time in places, i spend time with people and i go deep. I go deep on subjects. For the better part of the last decade, ive been going deep on the subject of what i call propaganda. A fancy term for the ways in which automation and computer code, algorithms and things like that get used to manipulate Public Opinion. What weve seen in the last four or five years, the u. S. Election and referendum in the end the massacre in india recent problems caused by whats up that led to offline violence, we seem social media become used as a tool for manipulation and disinformation. A lot has changed. In the early 2000, we had a perspective that social media was going to be something that would be the savior of democracy in many ways. Thats shown through google kind of talking phrase of do no evil. Was also showcased by a lot of the work that came out about digital utopia and cyber libertarianism. Thats not where we are now but we are not lost. Everythings not lost yet. Its not just a book about how screwed up everything is and how scary the world is. Its a book about solutions, every chapter in this book ends in a solution. After spending nearly a decade working on this, i realized there are a lot of things we can do. I will end the talk today on those things. First, lets talk about storytelling and what it means to be somebody who studies technology by talking to the people who build technology. Tonight im going to introduce you to four people, four places and for ideas that i learned in the last several years. These are people, places and ideas have been instrumental in this book and how ive been thinking about technology. The first person is named phil, hes who the book is dedicated to. Hes my advisor, hes not the director of the Internet Institute at the university of oxford and he took me under his wing when i came to the university of washington in seattle. Phil, at the time, had been studying, hed been in tunisia starting the people who were using the technology to communicate about democracy, to organize protests, to do all of these things. He had written a book with the press called the digital origins of dictatorship and democracy. The discussion in this book was all about the ways in which the internet played role from the beginning of the internet and countries for books facilitating democracy, helping people to realize freedom but also for helping people to realize control. So phil obviously was thinking about these kinds of things very early on. I had just come from being a fellow on the Obama Campaign 2012 and i had become enthralled when i was working on the campaign with the ways they were making use of data. I was blown away by how sophisticated the data was. Theres a lot of excitement about the Community Organizing aspects of the campaign but really, none of that would have been anything without the connection and data the Obama Campaign had. So what they did, they married the data and masses amounts of works with personal stories and humanizing the data in a way that was able to reach people. A resounding message of hope and things like that. When i met bill, phil taught me something really important. Something i had kind of known but really im saying to all of you, technology and Politics Today are inherently connected. You cant have one without the other. Some extent, you think of technology simply as tools or media and the ways media is used to communicate with people, this has always been the case but in todays world, technology and politics are very much intertwined. The campaigns that tend to do the best around the world these days are the campaigns that have the most technological savvy because the reality is, if you have a lot of data and if you can marry it to a sophisticated a. I. System, you can do hyper specific targeting to people and speak to them in a way they would like to be spoken to. So phil in seattle, university of washington taught me that people and technology are intertwined. The next person i want to introduce you to is a person named andrew. I met andrew in england and i had taken a job at the university of oxford we had gotten grant money to study propaganda in about 2013 and european research. They wanted to know the way in which russia was using social media to influence democracies. So i got offered a job and said would you like to go to oxford with me . Yeah, twist my arm, of course i want to come. One day i was at a conference and i was standing around, kind of scared about it and this guy approaches me and conspiracies theorist want to talk to you. They wanted to know who i am and are you going to Start Talking about aliens or anti vaccine stuff . I have to carry on with you . I dont want to talk to you about that stuff but andrew said to me hey, i make and build automated profiles on social media in england. I was like what . Are control 100,000 accounts on twitter, i do on behalf of the labour party. They dont pay me to do it or anything. I believe in it. I said wow, this is pretty crazy. We got to talking and struck up an unlikely friendship and he really taught me a lot about the ways in which people can use technology to amplify their voices online. A lot of what i talk about is about social media, campaigns look like people on social media but that are not actually people what they are automated profiles. One person could have many, many accounts online. You can use the accounts to retweet messages and get up likes and the evolution of machine running in a to talk to people in a more sophisticated fashion. It taught me that theres always a person behind the technology. The technology doesnt exist on its own. Social media today would have you believe the algorithms are a political debate, they dont have values, they make decisions in a way that no one will figure out or decide upon but if you follow the work of people, they have something called social media collective that does fantastic open work, you know that algorithms and software and technology always have human value in the. The people who build these things and coat them have their own beliefs. For instance, if you train a Machine Learning tool and what you have to do is go through the process of taking data and you have people do that. If all the people who tagged the data wightman, the algorithm and being racist. They should go in a certain neighborhood hypothetically. The neighborhoods of color, where the bus goes, the places that get free passes for the bus and not getting as much bus is coming through. Its an algorithm or tool with a set of values. When you amplify information, when you use social media, it tends to replace them. The algorithms that prioritize certain information, theres politics there and decisions that go into that process. If i had a dollar for every time someone said it something arbiters of truth, i would have 10000 because they dont want you to think that they arbitrate it. Im here to tell you thats not the case. Algorithms that prioritize Sensitive Information to people, they prioritize the things you see. For the longest time, even tod today, organizations like facebook, twitter, have make decisions about how to prioritize news to people. Think about that. That matters. Andrew taught me that you need to look at the person behind the tool. Its not enough to do quantitative research, we often need to know about whose building for their building and who they are doing it for. You might think its savvy political campaigns during the work but it turns out when you dig down deep, defined shadowy pr and marketing organizations that say i have your social media profile and have 10000 accounts in the next few weeks, surprise surprise. They are using fake profiles and fake information. Its a whole weird world out there. The third person or to introduce you to is a woman named marina, she was my boss at the institute for the future. I never even, a day or two days after trump 12016 election, the first time ive ever been there and they flew me out with a bunch of Research Scientists and politicians who are really concerned about the reputation of a. I. A. I. Hadnt been weapon iced, it had the word like smart and change their mind about politics, it was more thought a. I. Was used behind the algorithms but marina listened to all of the speech and in her way, set at the end of the talk, this is a continuation of russian stuff, she grew up in ukraine and the former soviet union and she said maybe what we need to think about isnt that this propaganda is new because its not. The tactics arent new. They are continuations of things for a very long time, its the technology and the way its being leveraged thats making it potent. If the automation we see, we see things things with problem of scale. Quantum computing. All of these issues are things that we need to consider. We also need to consider is the people are behind it. Rena taught me we need to look at history. I think the way that they have done it in the past and understand not just the way the propaganda is used but the technology we used to assess it. What we say matters. Right now, theres sort of an epidemic in this country, im using the word fake news. Its been weapon iced. If you want to ask what you can do as an individual, dont use the term fake news, use the term dis information which means purposely spread false information or you can say mount information which means stupid. Jump news. The terminology matters, its no surprise to me that people who spread these lies are taking on the terminology and making the same exact arguments about how you say you are doing this but then they say you are doing this. It doesnt necessarily change their minds, is to create confusion and generate empathy. It makes people mad and polarized. We think theres sophistication in the sense that their coming and talking to us and making us suddenly become interested, thats not what they are doing. They are there to make you not wanting to engage in democracy. Think of the system is broken so you are so angry that you speak vote for somebody who speaks your anger. Its right that this comes out of the soviet playbook but you should know the russians are the only people do propaganda. They benefit from speaking about propaganda and talking about all the time. Its the thing that only happens from that. Propaganda and what we called operations happens all over the country these days. It suggests that during elections and in 70 or 80 countries, this stuff has been weapon iced by government and campaigns. At the marker citation of propaganda, almost anyone can do it these days. My next book, its more scholarly so probably even more boring. My next book is called manufacturing consensus and its a chunk of consent and the idea behind the book is that we use these technologies for popularity of things. The more you make something look popular, the more it seems like a viable idea. One more person. The last person. Last idea. Kathleen. Shes my boss at the university of austin. Shes the dining editor and before that, a sports reporter. I dont know how you make that transition. Shes fantastic. When i went to ut, i lost hope because of everything going on. My spending time thinking about the ways its broken . I was at journalism and kathleen is the director. Kathleen taught me that we need to place faith in institutions we arty have. We dont need to create brandnew things, we have the federal elections commission, we dont need the federal misinformation commission. We dont need one more commission to do things in washington. More specifically, we need to invest in journalism. In this country, is done amazing things. There are so many people who work for great publications around the United States that want to do good work and want to protect democracy. I talk about the ways in which journalism has been not just challenged by the digital era, or organizations who cant handle the individual era, organizations google, google news, youtube, facebook, twitter massively benefit of the work of journalists without getting money to them. These organizations like the media, youtube faced misinformation, what is it duplex started making wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is a nonprofit. Youtube was using it as their resource that youtube would go to with misinformation. Google news belonged to snippets of articles. When people started researching it, you can reach the actual article. When you click the actual article, sorry, the research showed that no one read the full full article. They just read the little piece. They put all the work in doing this investigation, writing the full article, post a snippets and no one actually reset. We wonder why the news industry is failing, why is having a hard time. Maybe not failing maybe thats the wrong word but we can reinvigorate it. Im going to tell you exactly what my argument is. The Technology Firms around the country should have to put 10 billion or 20 billion into a public trust. Let it be overseen by groups, people who have a stake in making sure the money is spent wisely and well. They have committed to 250 million or so for the initiative, google gives out that money. They make partnerships with organizations and they make decisions about who gets and who doesnt. What google has done when they have experienced backlash of other policies and algorithms not prioritizing full articles, they do prioritize news. So thats not good enough. The Technology Companies have helped this problem and they have exited to it. Weve seen Mark Zuckerberg sitting before Congress Thing and no analytical and fat stuff, we have a handle on that and its kind of our faults but they havent really given back. I havent really systematized their response to this problem. Theyve done some things and theyve been working hard in many ways but its not enough. These are multibilliondollar company Richest Companies in the world. They get treated more like nation these days and they are treated like a regular company. So kathleen taught me to reinvest in journalism and be skeptical of what we see today and not think that journalism has failed. Journalism is a lot better. With all these things in mind, we have an interesting picture and we have this book and this is a book about the future. I spent a lot of time about what weve been through. This is the next wave of technology, deep fake videos, virtual reality, automated voice systems and it sounds just like a person. Its a lot about the ways in which this next wave of technology is more potent of misinformation. The subtitles provocative for a reason. Its supposed to scare people. Best case, you will prove me wrong. You will not let the technology be the truth. Im going to do a little reading and ill end with some solutions. Conclusion. Human rights in mind, finding solutions to the problems with misinformation and political manipulation is a daunting task. This information landscape is vast and it extends beyond our current ability to contain it effectively. Moreover, the internet grows larger every day. In 2017 report, on the state of the software which combines research from companies, weekly 2. 5 quintillion bytes of data every day. I dont even know what that number means. Moreover, the number of Internet Users by 1 billion or 3. 7 billion active users in the five years previous to that report. 2012 2017, the internet grew by 1 billion users. 2018 forbes article says 90 of the on my Data Available in the world generated in the previous two years. 90 of the online Data Available in the world generated in the previous two years. This means people working to gain Public Opinion in social political oppression using all my tools have almost unimaginable amounts of Data Available with new information deeming out to them every millisecond. Caps off access to potential targets and can leverage online enmities, automation to remain on trackable. Important ethical and legal considerations along with the possibly of finding a skillful operative made prosecution a poor strategy for propaganda. He said, weve got to get the system. It is time to build, design and redesign the next wave of technology at the forefront of our minds. Thinking about responses to the rising propaganda, i find it helpful to break them down for the shortterm, mediumterm and longterm. Because of the nature of technology today, i consider dual or technologybased responses to be the shortest term of all. Many of these efforts have approaches focused on triage help for the most egregious issues associated with 2. 0, the internet of social media. Tweets to social media algorithms, identifies trends or Software Patches to his existing tools. They include new application for identifying news or plugins that tra