A website as cspan. Work. Of attacks on cspan, a look at a history, current state and future of the internet and it is fluent on democracy. The white house chief digital officer for technology and journalist and former assistance security,or national participated in this discussion at the aspen ideas festival. Of thank you for comment. This session will break down into three parts and in each part we wont how who the question, cap we will talk about the question, can democracy say the internet . We will talk about bots, leakers, facebook. Whether democracy in which media and organizations has moved, everything moved online more weather we can survive or just. Ld. A will start with nate, professor of law at stanford law im going to start with nate persily. Nate is the james b. Mcclatchy professor of law at Stanford Law School and his scholarship focuses on Voting Rights, political parties, Campaign Finance, redistricting and Election Administration. He served as a special master or expert to craft districting plans for many states and is a Senior Research director for the president ial commission on Election Administration and his current work examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns and Election Administration. And broadly thats what hell be talking about here today. So with that lets welcome nate. [applause] thank you so much. It is an honor to be here. And it is an honor to be on this panel. We have a lot of people following me. My role is to set the table and they are going to break the china. I will talk about the issues and they will dive deeply into it. Obviously,ig topic dealing with the question of how the internet affects democracy. I want to focus on three questions. Want to focus on three questions. The first is what are the unique challenges that the internet poses for democracy, ok. And second, given those challenges who should address those problems. And then finally, what would those reforms look like. But i want to start with a few caveats which, there are several pointyheaded academics like me in the audience and i always get these objections, whenever i talk about democracy and the internet, which is that weve all seen this before, thats the first academic disagreement. And the answer is yes. Some of these problems weve seen many times before, whether its fake news, or hate speech or even foreign intervention in domestic elections. Yes, weve seen it many times before. But the question i want to focus on i think the panels focusing on. What are the unique features of the internet that either are differences in kind or such differences in degree that we really need to focus on the technology. The second academic objection is that what you think is so bad is actually pretty good. And look, the internet is a Technology Like any other, right. There are going to be bad things for democracy that occur because of the internet, there are going to good things. And ill talk a little bit about how there has sort of been a sea change in the way weve thought about this in the last year particularly because of the election. And then the third academic argument, well, ive published on that before. But let me talk a little bit about how i got into this area because as farhad mentioned i am a campaign and Voting Rights specialist dealing with Election Administration, redistricting and then Campaign Finance. When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Citizens United versus fec, which is maybe the most reviled decision of the Roberts Court or really the Supreme Court in the last 20 years. Most people looked at it as this sort of, you know, great crime that the Supreme Court had committed on the nation as giving corporations personal rights, right. That corporations are people, too. I looked at that case and i said you know thats not what this case really is about. Its really about the transforming nature of the internet for communication and heres why. That case was not about a corporate Television Ad that was sort of washing over captive eyeballs as they were watching the super bowl or Something Like that. What it was about was an ondemand movie that you could download off of say Something Like hbo on demand, right. And it was produced by a Nonprofit Corporation called, as you know, Citizens United. And it really presaged the future of political communication, when we are no longer going to be receiving most of our information and communication through linear programming over the television but through a range of devices and in particular over the internet, you know, mobile phones and the like. And so that was my entry point in thinking about it. And so the question that i wanted to to ask in an article thats titled the same thing as this panel, is what were the unique features that the internet sort of that the internet posed for american democracy. And prior to the 2016 election heres what i thought this book was going to be about, right. It would be about what everybody sort of looked at as Digital Campaign geniuses, right of the obama 2008 campaign or 2012 campaign. Maybe it would be about the revolution in Small Donor Fund raising and and micro targeting another theme that we saw in those previous elections. Maybe it would be about again the change in television as the main mode of political communication. But as you know now when we talk about the affect of the internet on democracy were not talking about these issues, right. What were talking about are things like fake news, right. Were talking about twitter bots sort of automated programs that send information over the internet to social media users. Were talking about foreign hacking, right and dark posts on the internet, right. And so all of the sort of euphoria in some ways about the effective of the internet on democracy has been replaced by this extreme pessimism since the 2016 election about how its going to threaten democracy. And so heres what i think are the sort of six features of the internet that make it different than the previous communication ecosystem in terms of how it affects democracy. The speed of communication, right, we get information more quickly than we did previously. The fact that virality, right peertopeer sharing has become the main way that we get Information Online or a lot of us get Information Online. Third, what weve had anonymous speech before the capacity of an anonymous speaker to reach a worldwide audience is unprecedented when it comes to the internet. Forth and here is, you know, the echo chambers and filter bubbles. The idea that we are selfselecting into our own information that is sort of preselected for us by the platforms and the like. The issue of sovereignty of course came up in this election and or the lack thereof, which is that for the first time it would seem that you know the United States election was in some ways penetrated by a foreign power. And then finally, the new problems created by the extreme power that corporations like facebook and google and maybe others have when it comes to political communication. So let me start with just talking about veracity and virality together. And so, you probably heard this quote a lot, you can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on, right. Attributed to mark twain in 1919, at least if you look on the internet, its attributed to him. Of course he he died in 1910. So its one of many examples of fake news that you could but the point still remains, right which is that that especially in the internet age, there is the capacity of lies in any communication to reach around the world and back again before it could be corrected, before it can be mediated, before it can be assessed for its veracity. Now why is it that this happens . So, the big story, right in terms of the speed of communication is that we can do it individually, right, so that each one of us can essentially be a broadcaster, whereas previously, you had, you know the sort of, elite broadcasting companies, you had the newspapers, whether the local or the national level, who could act as mediators that would stop certain types of information or at least would put in road blocks for a certain types of speech and information from getting to the mass public. Now that had positive and negative consequences, right. So that when Walter Cronkite said thats just the way it is, americans believed him right, and there was a kind of neutral source for information that people could count on. Of that excluded certain voices from the left and the right, right. But now what we have is a media ecosystem in which republicans are trusting certain sources, democrats are trusting different sources, and there is little trust in the media as an institution at all. Now that lack of trust in the media, right, is 8 representative of a larger lack of trust that americans now have in almost all elite institutions, right. And i should say its not just in america, its happening around the world. So this lack of intermediaries right, this sort of, elite intermediaries that put a sort of squelch speech, or set the ground rules for what could sort of be transferred from political actors to the mass public is what makes the problem of fake news possible. And that everybody who talks about fake news hates the moniker fake news and you can count me as one as well, right because fake news is not really news, its also describing a very heterogeneous set of phenomena. On the one hand you have you know, the daily show or the onion satire which is of course fake news and that was actually the first time we talked about fake news that was the phenomenon were referring to. It also refers to things like, i have on the top here, fake news for profit something we did see in this election really at a scale that we hadnt seen before. So youre probably familiar with 150 macedonian teenagers, right who put out these particular articles such as the pope endorses donald trump. And why is it that they put up these pro trump websites . Well, it wasnt that they actually had some affinity for donald trump it was that because of the way google and other Services Provided ads on to those sites they could make money by putting up something that then would get a lot of clicks. And so the fake news for profit issue and topic came up. But then beyond the that sort of relatively small problem of people who are putting up websites in order to make money off of the ads. You also have as weve heard in this sort of in the most violent consequence of fake news Something Like the pizzagate scandal, right where someone sort of believing the conspiracy theories that were sort of stirred in the cauldron of reddit and 4chan these websites then actually took action by going to a pizza shop and firing a gun. And so all of this again is a product of the fact that you dont have the traditional intermediaries and that it is a more populist right and popular form of communication. Now, if you look at the data on fake news you do find as buzzfeed, buzzfeed is done by the way some incredible journalism on this and others have shown, as well as academics who kept playing catch up. A remarkable amount of sharing of fake news right, and the Pew Research Center and lee rainie can talk a little bit about this afterwards, finds that america about 23 of americans say that they have shared a fake news story, right. And if you look at the tweets or the engagement on facebook, which i have up here you find significant sharing of fake news during the election. We do not know however what effect fake news had on this election. My colleague mat gentzkow at stanford actually says he doesnt think it played a dispositive role. But the problem here is how do you define fake news. How do you get your arms around all the different types of falsehoods that are out there on the internet, right. But what but we can say is that the media ecosystem has changed as a result of it that there are certain incentives that werent there in the pre internet world and that we have, sort of, a lot of this content out on the internet. One of the reasons is because of the ability to engage in anonymous speech online. Now look, we have a long tradition of anonymous speech something we should be proud of, right. The federalist papers, publius, you go go throughout the sort of anonymous pamphleteers of the founding era or later. Now, anonymity is something thats actually sometimes protected under the constitution. But it is also in the internet age facilitates, get this, misinformation, the problem of foreign intervention, it aides in the propagation of hate speech and then the issue of bots, which i was referring to before that that computers can essentially imitate human beings. Now let start in talking about the issue of bots. So just to be clear what a bot is . Its it sounds fancy but its not, its basically just code in the 10 computer right, or in an algorithm in a Search Engine that produces, you know a response or or delivers communication to you. Bots can be good, bots can be bad. You can have a bot that tells you what weather it is every day, right. Its just a computer code that gives delivers information. When we talk about the kinds of bots that affect campaigns and affect elections though we are often talking about in particular twitter although its really interesting that there are now bots on youtube and there are bots on facebook that theyve been pretty aggressive in trying to police them. But these bots are automated accounts that pose as individuals, in a sense, or they seem like there might be individuals, who retweet content, produce content sometimes the bots are sort of sent in to comment on other peoples posts but it creates a false impression of popularity. So Something Like one third of the followers that donald trump had on his twitter account during the campaign were bots. And but Hillary Clinton had them as well, right millions of bots were followers of Hillary Clinton. Interestingly enough donald trump retweeted bots by theres some debates about this 100 to 150 times during the election. But thats because you dont know who a bot is, right to sort of the average observer. Analysts, the reason we know these sort of statistics on how how many bots are out there is because if you figure someone is tweeting, some account is tweeting 24 hours a day 7 days a week you think well maybe its not human, right. And so there are ways of trying to figure out whos a bot and whats and whats a bot and whats not. But its a significant amount of the twitter accounts, twitter says its 8 , some analysts say its closer to between 10 and 15 certainly during the debates in right around the president ial debates about 15 of the election related conversation was being done by these automated accounts. About 45 of the twitter accounts in russia are bots, ok. And so its a significant issue going forward. Just as anonymity allows computers to impersonate individuals, it allows individuals to engage in unaccountable speech like hate speech, right. There is a big debate as to whether hate speech actually has been going on, going up over the last year or so. The best analysis is done by josh tucker at nyu and i present one of his slides here, where he finds that actually during the election, there was not an increase or a spike during the in the run up to the election, during the campaign that there wasnt a spike in hate speech. There was a rise in White Nationalist speech it seems following the election, ok. Right and a blip also in masochinist speech, right, after the election. But that part this research is still ongoing and that theres no question that theres been a rise in hate speech directed toward journalists, many of whom are here, right now at this conference and hate speech on basis of race and gender and and religion and the like. And that there are sort of cesspools of hate speech on the internet in places like 4chan and reddit and the like that produce something, you know, things like the pizzagate scandal. Now just as there are these cauldrons of hate speech online theyre cauldrons of everything online, right that there are locations where you can go to get reaffirming information that satisfies your preexisting biases. Whether its cat videos, right or whether its White Nationalist rhetoric, whether its supporting a political candidate or the like. When people talk about the problem of echo chambers, most of the time what theyre talking about is how Search Engines and social media reinforce your political beliefs by feeding you information that is preselected for you, right. And there is evidence that look it is no surprise to you that websites like the drudge report and fox news tend to be more republicans that go to those sites right. That democrats are going to be more likely to go as it shows here huffington post, New York Times and the like, right. Interestingly and this this is from my colleague Shanto Iyengar at stanford. The only the two publications that fall right in the middle are real clear politics and usa today at least during the during the election. Thats because everyone is real clear politics is for the polls, right. And so and so thats why that was sort of fell at right in the middle. And so the challenge in thinking about whether the internet is reinforcing our preexisting beliefs, its not a its not enough to just say well look conservatives gravitate to conservative sites, liberals gravitate to more liberal sites. The question is as compared to what, right. Because we are self segregating in all of our areas of life, whether its