Jose. I should say here in silicon valley, we are in mountain view. Joining me tonight, got director of internet ethics, former chief Security Officer at facebook and director of the stanford intimate observatory. In director of journalism and media ethics. This evening is co presented with ethics, this is part of kq series on common ground. Its an initiative bringing people together for civil discourse featuring journalists, hosting provocative conversations about politics and policy, arts and culture, science and technology. Reckoning with force of disagreement among us about how to face the future, cultural and environmental uncertainty is series asked our shared responsibilities to the common good. Next, if youve got an open calendar tuesday 7 00 p. M. , the San Francisco exploratory them, we will look at how we overcome polarization will talk about tonight. Twelve tonights topic, its under attack, worldwide. Populism is on the rise. This information is number one and social media is the platform of choice. What can we do . We can start talking. I take it you got some show and tell to offer about the topic, perhaps you have already read in the New York Times, russia is again attempting to influence the American Election for president. Yes, we read in the times is a briefing given to members of the house on intelligence. But theres no detail so we dont know what they mean by that. From my perspective, five different kinds of interference and is not whether they are playing the same playbooks words something totally different show as examples of what we remember in the 2016 election many of us dont remember because we didnt see it on our feet. The audience was not the total target of all this. [laughter] but surprisingly, i think against wisdom, you will find a lot of the russian elections were aimed left and right. The two major types of disinformation from Information Operations is a term we use, and organized adversary to change the information environment, it had two directions. The first was medic warfare, which is about thriving division by creating radical means that are injected into political discourse. In this case, three examples from both sides of the profiles and personas created by Internet Research which is a private company that belongs to an oligarchy in russian known as putin chef, you see the one on the left is supposed to be a pro lgbtq group, in this case, lgbt coloring book for Bernie Sanders which is the kind of thing is a funny thing you might post with the goal of getting people to join your group and seek your contact. And most of the content had nothing to do with elections or politics, it was just what brought people in that would allow them to inject messages later. Secure borders from the right, the big topic for 2015 was immigrant sentiment. Bottom right, it pretended to be republican party, it turns out the entire time, the social media intern lived in st. Petersburg, russia. Theres more instagram, mostly and as you see, it comes from both sides. Its called black instagram, the number one topic was black lives matter. The big goal of theirs was to try to build africanamerican support for these big personas and inject messages about hillary being racist, as well as messages that might have been seen by conservatives and seen as being radical. Ill give you a second to look at this before i ask you some questions. Check out this post. This is a fake lack lives matter group. You cant see the top, dismantled by u. S. Government because they were black men and women standing up for justice and equality. You probably noticed the strange diction, english is not perfect. This kind of work is being done not by intelligent specialists the Intelligence Agency so the Internet ResearchAgency Employees were effectively millennials with english minors who couldnt find better jobs in russia. They are not professionals so the language is not perfect. Now that im a fake professor, i do this method who thinks this being posted from russia is illegal . Raise your hand if you think its illegal for them to do this. Only one person. Youre right, its not illegal for somebody out of the country to have an opinion about black panthers unit they lie about who they are. Violation of facebooks terms to do this. They do not have the force of law. His fake news . Raise your hand if you call it fake news. Interesting. Theyre not making any falsifiable claims so this argument of what was the reason why the government prosecutes black panthers is the kind of thing you might find in a freshman africanamerican sentiment. Remind us the window. Of the real professors, im not actually a political scientist. [laughter] this window is the idea of what is the range of acceptable discourse, these are the things allowed in any society, things that are within reasonable bounds of discourse and can shift back and forth of people being on the extremes. Anybody want to guess who received this email . J podesta gmail. Com. Real tough for russians to figure that one out. Telling him he tried to sign into his account, he was sent by the main intelligence director, now we are talking about real intel people, they like to kill folks overseas, their joke here is there saying the person tried to break into the account from ukraine which is an inside joke. The link said google site goes to a ul, a redirector that sent him to a site google accounts. Net. When he got there, its a perfect looking google login and he asked one of the it people whether this was jet or not and apparently he replied, it looks okay but it doesnt look okay which is the most important time in the history of race. Lots in and they download the email. They broke into using more technically sophisticated work in this. Once they had that information, they would not release fake accounts, with the cherry picked from his email the email told the story they want to talk which was sanders was ripped off in the primary to do so, they powered message through emails where people were saying not nice things about Bernie Sanders so first they did this whole history that we take it into. The failed so they tried again to d. C. Weeks which they pretend it was a real site like wikileaks, d. C. Weeks reached out to a bunch of journalists and said here are some documents from the dnc and the journalists complied. Political ran a blog they go through the most embarrassing things they could find. Even the New York Times ended up running with the story over and over they wanted to run with. If you go into paragraph nine or ten, it says it might be part of russian Information Operations but it doesnt matter that your headline thats what people are reading. Another example from disinformation, these are two real messages from india, people use the internet. 4 billion people have an account on whats up, its not like facebook where you post something that a Million People can see, you can send up to 200 people. They are part of many groups, school groups, work groups so messages get passed along by individuals copying and pasting messages that are injected in. The one on the left is from attacking the conservative Political Party in charge of the p ggp possibly from a Congress Party that are enemies, basically lying about the price of gas and other countries. The one on the right is racist propaganda for blood donations camps being fake. This information looks different because if you look at this, its saying i am from this black lives matter group. When you see this disinformation, its coming from your uncle or aunt or coworker, its much more personable. It is harder to amplify what happened is you have professional groups that look for Political Parties and the bjp group is about 1 Million People which signed up to push disinformation on behalf, they dont believe it disinformation, they just believes its right news so they get a notification through an unofficial group in the copy and paste it and spend all day sending it to 400 Million People. We are still seeing this russian lead activity around the world, this is a report, i owe. Stanford. Edu. What we found was Disinformation Network in africa run by the group, a company he owns and has actual military mercenaries so people who go into countries actually kill people, they are supporting autocrat on the ground with guns and with disinformation. Theyre doing so for Foreign Policy outcomes of russia but the personal financial benefit. He has things like diamond mines and the like, hes backing two of the six people, probably to get gas and oil rights in the future. The interesting changes from 2016 now is one, this is no longer people sitting in st. Petersburg, theyve been hired in those countries. They report people back to st. Petersburg and one of the guys made a mistake and posted a picture is moscow account which is awesome but people doing this work are sitting in sudan so its much harder to catch them and their language is better and cultural knowledge is better in multimedia. The newspaper that seems like a legit newspaper mostly about russia, about Foreign Policy, its a newspaper and owned by him. They are building the entire pipeline and they can maneuver the media and they can amplify the media online. Thats a little overwhelming. Thank you. [laughter] there are so many Different Things but one of the first things that occurs to me, the question of whats out, there are so many people around the world who are on encrypted platforms and even though you can argue journalism and regulators are doing a good job with the information in the open, doing even less good when the information is encrypted. Whats app is a particular case where theres that kind of communication paradigm. Restaurants to get to people in the community. The order stuff from the restaurants and they pick it up. Restaurant order, you share it on the whats app. His interpersonal acceptance of liberal privacy in the sense that i dont mind doing something with me even though i dont know you and your particular service. The u. S. , its different. If i get a message from somebody i dont know other than first of all, i may not have that connection with the people in that sense so theres a huge advantage that disinformation access has in cases like india where whats app is interpersonal as much as its also a transactional thing at the same time. About the window, one of the things that would help to understand is it existed because of the paradigms of ownership in the media, as long as media was owned by a a few organizations, they have the acceptance of the values. You and i have millions of people sharing it, theres no such thing as a acceptable vendor. Whats acceptable in a democracy for public speech was broken. Part of the question is, who is responsible for the changes and it wasnt that long ago social media started. When it started, people are not sharing news articles. The whole idea of social media was to connect with friends and family and the paradigm shifted from time. Part of the responsibly relies on social Media Companies as they guide you as you should use it for this or that and in 2013, Mark Zuckerberg said who want to be everybodys personalized newspaper. Facebook is not something people thought of as a personalized newspaper but suddenly, theres encouragement that you should share news stories. Traveling, im your aunt phyllis and i enjoyed this message. How it comes across. Some of the response ability lies with the platforms themselves. Some of it is with us, i think one of the early promises of the internet, the way people thought was the effort of walking, people said we are all journalists now and it turns out no, were not. On social media, potentially loudspeaker for other peoples messages. Thats a different role. With all kind of bought into this role and we find ourselves doing this so when we talk about response ability, we have to talk about these different layers. I found an interesting call last month by npr, they ask people who should have the main responsibly addressing disinformation . Addressing is pretty vague. Not to do it or respond to it or highlight it but the numbers were these, 39 said the media had the main responsibly for addressing it. 18 pointed to technology companies, 15 the government and 12 to the public. All those who felt it was the medias primary responsibly, 29 of democrats assigned responsibly to media and 59 republican. We are polarized even on back, even on whos responsible for doing something about this. I can say as a journalist, often times people dont want to accept the information they receive. This is it, i got the answer for the question you had and the response is no, thats not what i believe. Its a matter of opinion because some people are not looking for information, they are looking for confirmation and to signal identity and being part of a certain group. Increasingly, reading about the fact that people often know theyre likely sharing information and they are okay with a pretty its to say this is what i believe. I think whats interesting for the rest of us is we have these common human weaknesses that make us even if we dont potentially mean to. I have learned and i know my colleagues will tell you that i have to check myself all the time, if i find something that is the best illustration of what i believe, like this just occurred and it totally confirms everything i believe, just have to get on it because more often than not, its a set up and its designed for people like me to respond that way share probably with others in outrage and perpetuate that miscommunication, this information which is often not an outright lie, out of context or made to push a certain narrative. As recently as two years ago, i was among those who were keen to affect politicians and regulators as so behind the times, unable to find the lefthand and righthand so of course, its no position to craft laws out of date almost as soon as the ink was dry. I dont know, the whole disinformation situation online i dont know theres anybody whos on top of it even if they did something but read acts all day. What is the message for what we can do from a regulatory standpoint to try and control some of the or is it a hopeless task . In the u. S. , we are limited by the First Amendment. Yesterday, i was in washington, i got home at 2 00 a. M. Today, so if i look like im asleep with my eyes open, i might be. Section 230 of the decency act, which has become the big punching bag for people on both sides when they say Tech Companies need to fix things but it turns out, the vast majority things people complain about is really the complaint about the First Amendment. Critical speech is almost never criminal or civil liability in the u. S. Even if its false. Multiple times is said to fly intentionally, in most cases, its not a crime and it cant be punished. Deformations about a person but political topics, you can. Most of the stuff we are talking about is something youd never be able to adjudicate as false anyway even if we are a different country. Regulatory in the u. S. , theres not a lot of options. Its mostly been about things already illegal in this country, most effective regulation has been the next block which is like a 27 letter german word i cant pronounce, and that is a law that requires Tech Companies to enforce german law. Its about true or false has had real issues when it applies to things like sarcasm and the like. The u. S. Regulation that i think the place and regulate his around content of the mechanisms by which people can do political advertising so id like to see rules, everybody is guessing what the rules are more political advertising online. Lets not pretend people dont burger signal as well, multiple people in here have given during pledge drives and if you havent rachel knows your name and she will come pick you up after words. [laughter] you could limit it so you cant hit just take uad members that live in Santa Clara County but advertise too much broader people and have rules about transparency. My colleagues at stanford who study these issues believed even have such laws as long as their content neutral and applied to the actions of the platforms about what tools they provide and such but to actually regulate the speech of individuals will effectively never happen in the United States. Any thoughts on that . I want to take a step back and ask people to recall the light you saw it earlier about the different examples. One of the things that is common to all of them is the visuals in them and it has to do with what they are trying to do with our behavior when we see the visuals. In my mind to sort to the chaos ive ended up having to ask myself three types of questions. What actors are in the visuals and the post bc . Do we know these actors actors, bad actors. The different kind of vocabulary is is the supply side or demand side . Where are you, are you on the demand side because youre a reader and if so, are they supplying information so is this a supply activity then it could be people who could be anything but journalists are not the only people posting. Everyone posted any organizations involved. Third thing is what kind of behavior is going on . If they are expecting you to instinctively believe that think because it plays to your emotions and identity and sense of bias then they are expecting you to also share it. Theres an implication of what is called fast thinking. There is a Fairly Famous book called thinking fast and slow, excuse me, daniel honeyman. The easy way to understand all this is to just say they are making you think fast. When we think fast we will act with our biases. We are not going to cognitively call it what it is or make decisions based on more deliberation so the idea of it all on social media or posts, visuals is click, click, click your way to quick activity. That is the implication. Millions of shares can happen on a video before even people know or care if it is true or false because the place to what they alrea