Remember, as you walk the capitol hill, that you are building on the legacies of those who walked those halls before us. And you are starting a new legacy that we are building for future veterans. So carry that legacy forward. Thank you for all you do, day in and day out, month after month, and year after year. God bless you, and may god bless our country, the United States of america. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] in case you missed it, here are some clips of cspans programming this last week. Joe biden. Ent i have been covered by the best in the business and some of the worst. Some of you press guys who are lousy, just like some senators who are lousy, doctors are lousy, lawyers are lousy. But it does not matter. We should never challenge the basic truth that an independent and free press is a fundamental element in functioning of our democracy. Kevin mccarthy on the Affordable Care act. We watched in the aca, they provided more than 2 billion. 18 of those 23 coops have collapsed. The last six years, we have been holding hearings. We have been listening to the public and working on this bill. Olympic Gold MedalistMichael Phelps on ways to improve the international antidoping system. I do not believe i stood up at International Competition and the rest of the field has been clean. I do not believe that. I do not think i have ever felt that. I know when i stand up in the u. S. , i know we are all clean. The cause we are going through the same thing. We are doing all of that stuff. Terms ofk for me, in internationally, i think there has to be something done, and it has to be done now. Representative Jason Chaffetz chairing a hearing on transparency. You rely on guidance from the department, and you will have hold withhold that information from congress . To my knowledge, the guidance is not in writing. We are working to get wait a minute. You just made this up . It is not in writing . It is a Standard Practice no, it is not. Is this a Standard Practice . No, it is not. There is no attorney claim for when one Government Agency investigate another. Senator Bernie Sanders on the trump administration. We have struggled, from the inception of this country, the fight against racism, the fight against sexism, the fight against xenophobia and homophobia, and we are telling mr. Trump and his friends, loudly and clearly, we are not going backwards. We are going forwards. Senator marco rubio a hearing on financial fraud targeting senior citizens. If you look at the list of the top most wanted medicare fraudsters in america, they are almost entirely from south florida and almost entirely recent arrivals from cuba. To arreste are about them, they leave to cuba. It is an outrage. It has been extensively covered by the press. All cspan programs are available on cspan. Org, on our homepage, and by searching the video library. Next, a look at socalled fake news and its effect on consumers and the media. This discussion from the university of california berkeley includes the founder of craigslist and the person in charge of facebooks newsfeed. This is an hour and a half. Let me welcome the panelists. We have a distinguished panel. We have, right here to my left, the first panelist here is laura sydell. She is a wellknown voice on National Public radio. I hope many of you heard or will listen to her amazing story on disinfomedia, one of the stories that really brought this issue to light in my mind. She tracked down a company with many fake news sites. That aired for the first time last september and has been viewed many times since. Adam mosseri, we are very happy to have someone high up with the newsfeed of facebook. Adam manages the team responsible for delivering relevant content, news content, to all those facebook users. Recently, facebook has taken some important steps to address the problem of fake news on their platform. We are delighted to have his presence. We have Craig Newmark with us. Craig is a web pioneer, the founder of craigslist. He is a speaker and a philanthropist who often introduces himself modestly as a news consumer. And can also claim to be one of the internets bestknown nerds. But all of this comes right out from his own selfdescription. But he recently generously donated 1 million to the Poynter Institute to promote the efficacious in, fact checking, and accountability in journalism. As much as anyone i know, craig has taken steps to address the problem. And, were joined by two members of the uc berkeley faculty as well. Catherine crump is a law school professor, and she is the codirector of berkeley laws samuelson law, technology, and Public Policy clinic. She specializes in first and Fourth Amendment and media issues, all about censorship and what you can and cannot do. Jeffrey mackiemason is ucberkeleys University Librarian and a professor at the school of information. He focuses on online behavior, and Digital Information creation and distribution. Finally, our moderator is dean ed wasserman. He is a professor and dean of the graduate school of journalism, and his specialty is media ethics. He blogs, perhaps a very appropriately titled blog called unsocial media. You can find it at ewasserman. Co m. I want to thank you, the audience, for your interest in this topic. Ed thank you, deirdre, and thank you all for coming out tonight on this chilly evening. [applause] ed i want to also welcome a number of reporters and the audience from reuters, new york guardian, and the daily californian. We have a strong Interdisciplinary Panel here tonight, and thank you all for participating. The format we have roughly an hour and a half to play with. I figured we would divide it approximately in half. Spend 45 minutes with a discussion can find to the panel. I am looking hoping for a lively discussion, not necessarily an orderly one. Talk tore welcome to each other, interrupt each other , and to move the conversation along. I will be tossing out questions and goading you when i am not happy with your answers. Then, after 45 minutes or so, we will open the floor to questions. Opening the floor, as was observed at a toptier not long ago, is always a troubling concept in seismically active california. [laughter] let me kick this off with an opening thought. I was thinking back to when i was getting interested in the media and this was late 1960s, early 1970s there was a great deal of very excited and very much utopian talk about the world of democratized discourse that the media would enable. If you had told me then, that 40, 50 years hence, i would have this device that would give me access to bigger audiences than the widest circulating newspaper on earth had and would give me more access to more information than the best sourced reporter on earth had, i would say, that sounds like paradise. That sounds like what would be a democratized communications sphere looks like, where people are enabled. Instead, here we are. We are finding that there is a dark underside to that. We are finding, when we look around, that more people believe things that are not true than perhaps ever before, and more people are acting on beliefs that they either misunderstand or understand arent true than ever before. We find that this wondrous world, the technologically enabled communications paradise, has now turned around and is biting itself in the backside. Let me start by asking and we are finding more people than ever enthralled by the shadows on the cave. What do we do . Let me start with this question. I will invite laura sydell to weigh in on it to get started. Fake news has become a big, messy topic. There is not much agreement on what it is. It is being brandished as an allpurpose slogan to describe everything from errors to deliberate falsehoods. It is no longer agreed upon as identifying a unitary phenomenon. What conclusions can we draw about the way the term is now being fought over and the elastic way it is being applied . Laura i guess i want to say there is a difference of intent. There is a big difference. People who are in the fake news business, they know what they are doing. They know it is fake. As opposed to a journalist who is trying to get it right makes a mistake. I would argue, for example, some people say that judith millers reporting on the weapons of mass destruction was fake news. It wasnt. She made a horrible mistake. But the guy that deirdre mentioned, this is fake news, and it is very profitable. We decided we would take one story within a meeting and i got the assignment to take one story and trace it all the way back. One fake news story that got a lot of attention. In this case, it was the story of an fbi agent dead in an apparent murder suicide, and supposedly this fbi agent had been investigating Hillary Clintons emails. It the implication was that was in connection to if you know something about the altright conspiracy theories about the clintons, they murder people often. This appeared on a site called the Denver Guardian, which site called the Denver Guardian which appears to be a reputable site but is not. It was initially not that easy to find, because usually you can go to godaddy, and discover that there is a website, somebody owns the domain name. I hired somebody to basically look at the internet a bit like a paleontologist. He was looking for fossils. He was eventually able to get me a name and address. I decided the best thing to do is go knock on his door. It turned out he was in huntington beach, california. I had no idea what we would find. I took a male intern with me because i was a little nervous. We went to his door and there he was. Coler. E was justin i knocked on the door and said, did you write this . He said, no. He closed the door in our faces. It turns out he is an npr fan. Seriously. He gets back to us and says, all right, i will talk to you. Yes, i do own the Denver Guardian website. He absolutely knew he was doing fake news. In his case, he was a Hillary Clinton supporter, too. He said he started this whole thing as kind of a joke. He wanted to show how crazy the altright was and how easy it was to spread fake news in the altright echo chamber. However, as i did point out to him, it was lucrative. He told me he was making between 10,000 and 30,000 a month. He had a whole little empire it was not just this. He had a whole bunch of other websites, too, where he was putting this stuff out there. It was absolutely intentional. Everything about that Denver Guardian story was totally false , and we knew it was totally false. That is fake news. I really do think there is a big difference between a reporter making a mistake, and what this gentleman was doing. Lastly, on this topic, i would say that i feel like one of the things that is going on is a sense of wanting to make everybody confused. I think that works in some peoples advantage, to have the world be confusing. I have heard people talk about Steve Bannons interest in certain far right groups in europe and russia who do use this tactic. It is a political tactic. So, i am not saying he is, but i think it is something to think about. About . Fake news what is its intent . Ed i want to come back to how you make money with fake news. First, you have identified a clear case of deliberate fabrication. Everybody can agree it is fake. But the term is being applied more broadly for an underlying dissatisfaction with the quality and trustworthiness of information people are getting. It is playing to the political arena in somewhat unforeseen ways. I wonder what sense we make of that . Jeffrey . Jeffrey i dont disagree with what she said, but i would say it is more about information distribution and people wanting to get information out there as providers and people wanting to take information as consumers. It is often useful to think about quality. There is highquality news, lowquality news or information. It is a spectrum. There is some negative quality news. There are some situations where people are intentionally manipulating. Even then, there is a little bit more nuanced. In the case you just described, it was a lark, and he was making money on it. It didnt sound like he was trying to persuade people to change behavior. But sometimes, people are trying to manipulate. They are using fraud to manipulate. There is a malevolent intent. We think of it, especially if you are a platform provider, you care about the quality of the news or the information that is being distributed on your platform. You want more good quality, because you want more people to come to your platform, and you want less bad quality. That spectrum is hard to draw any lines on. Sometimes Platform Providers want Different Things with their consumers. Some are in it for the money. They just want eyeballs, and as long as they can attract eyeballs, they are selling those to advertisers. On the other hand, they want repeat eyeballs. They care about reputation. If they keep delivering bad information, they will not get repeat eyeballs. In thinking about how to Design Systems and understand behavior in this business, first i like to think about it as a spectrum of quality with certain special cases where sometimes it is not just lowquality but negative or malicious quality. Ed you are not suggesting it is quality that is driving the traffic . Jeffrey to some extent. People want the information for different reasons. Some people just want information for entertainment. In that case, they might want something that is actually fake. It might find it amusing. I think, in repeated use, there is a correlation between quality and what is driving the traffic. People are going to recognize that certain sources are more reliable than others. The content provider wants to develop a significant business and keep that business going will care about that quality. Just to interject one thing, what part of the problem is facebook. It is an environment where youre looking at all kind of things that your friends share. It is not the same as going to the New York Times website or going to breitbart. You are in an environment that feels comfortable and safe. I did not mean that as a total criticism, but it is part of the issue. They are not going to all this all these separate, credible publications. Going to stand up for the platforms. I am just acting as a news consumer. I just want to have news i can trust. These are tough problems. One part of it is trolling and harassment. I have been trying to deal with that on a professional basis for 20 years. Platforms have been taking steps to address this. It is just really tough. Facebook is working with the International FactChecking Network and are trying to work with people who are signatories to the agreement such as p olitofact and snopes. Google is working with the trust project, which is about means by which News Organizations can say, here is what is trustworthy behavior. It is about having a code of ethics and being serious about it. Ive spoken with twitter directly about the problem of dealing with trolling and harassment. These are really tough problems. The platforms are standing up to them. Hopefully, in the near future, i will be able to announce with wikipedia new steps and funding to deal with harassment and trolling. The platforms are standing up, but these are really old, tough problems to deal with. Last week, somebody reminded me of a fake news attack from a octavian who faked something from mark antony because he wanted to raise support to go after mark antony and cleopatra. You also want to be quiet about how you talk about it, because when you talk about technique, the bad guys are listening to what you are saying. You will see it pop up in black hat discussion boards. You dont want to leak stuff until you are ready to do something. Ed i take your point that it is not new. But what has changed . In 2004, we had the swiftboat versus the Bush National guard story. Both were stories that had some factual basis. They were important. They were fiercely disputed the veracity was disputed. Each side accused the other of proffering phony, fake news. What has changed now . What is different in the news environment now than in 2004 . Catherine i think some parts of it are new, and some parts of it are old. Gullible people are timeless. Anyone who has email and two has and who has received a forward from a relative understands this. It is hard to get those things to stop. I think one of the things that are new here are the platforms and the ease with which someone can create a new story which, although it may sound fantastical to many of us, appeals to people a trump supporter may be inclined to believe things that enhance a particular narrative, and you can easily create something that enhances that narrative. It then gets propagated. I think the speed with which that can happen is something that is new. We dont have the same gateway to controlling the media as we traditionally had. Ed adam, you have been mentioned. How does it look from facebook . Adam two Different Things. One, the nature of how people consume information is continuing to change. Specifically, you are seeing more and more publishers. The cost of distribution is going closer and closer to zero. There is more competition, too. You can do that in a way that was harder 12 years ago and much harder 12 years before that. That is also continuing to change. But i do think, in general, it is important to separate issues. There are a bunch of different issues. Fake news is an issue. I think what we really talking about here is confirmation bias, another issue. Hateful speech is another issue. Think in how we think about things at a high level,