My name is Nicole. It can. I am a policy manager at Phil Fact for a fact as the UK is independent fact checking charity.
We're a team of independent fact Chequers researchers and policy specialists who famed expose and counter the harm that bad information does.
And I'll hand over to Professor Phil Hebert, who is joining us this evening.
They'll join to introduce yourself. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining.
For hosting us tonight. So, yes, I'm Phil Howard, I'm director of the Oxford Internet Institute.
And we'll talk a little bit about our latest misinformation work and the book Like Machines.
The book was written, I guess, over the last two years,
and the project as a whole started when I was based in Budapest and in the summer of 2014 when Malaysian Airlines flight was shot down over Ukraine,
I watched my Hungarian friends get several kinds of misinformation about who had shot the plane down and why.
There was the story of democracy advocates who had shot the plane down.
Maybe they thought Putin was flying to Malaysia on a commercial airlines.
There was a story of American soldiers, U.S. soldiers who had chockful plane down.
And then my favourite story is the story of a lost tank from World War Two.
That have come out of the great forests of Ukraine confused and accidentally shot the plane down.
And it's at that point that I realised that there were actually several nuances to the strategy of Russian origin, misinformation.
It wasn't a strategy that involved ceding one story that people could respond to or contradict.
It was a strategy of seeing multiple conflicting, sometimes equally ridiculous stories that nobody could respond to in a consistent way.
Opposition couldn't pick the narrative to to address. And so what surprised me over the years, and I tell some of these stories in the book,
is seeing how this strategy of misinformation has gone from being something that leaders in
authoritarian countries used on their own people to being something that dictators use against voters,
democracies, to being a strategy that political leaders and democracies use against their own voters during elections.
And that slide, that slide, that transition is what the book Lie Machine is all about.
Now, the book is broken into several different chapters, several different kinds of case studies.
I think the important place to start is probably with a definition, right.
Definition. What I would I think a lie machine is a lie machine for me is a system of technical infrastructure
and social organisation that puts some untruth into the service of a party or a political ideology.
Let's unpack that. I think one important part is the social organisation,
an ultra conservative or white supremacist group that wants to come up with a bit of misinformation about the impact of immigrants on the economy.
And then the technical system is a social media platform that serves up junk news,
fake news to the people who will be receptive to it or the people who might be receptive to it.
So the lie machine actually has those two parts of the social organisation and the technical system, the algorithms for distributing content.
Over time, I think we've seen that there's actually several different functions here.
There's a there's a production function where you have teams of trolls in Russia,
in many countries now that have come up with a story, come up with a bit of misinformation.
Does the distribution system that involves social media algorithms and your social media inbox.
Right. That puts content into your feed. And then there's the marketing system that is often a secondary news organisations to give stories,
additional spin or let stories build on each other.
And I think we've seen that at work. Unfortunately, around covered by one of the greatest misinformation packages I've seen involves
RFID chips and Bill Gates and the origins of crowbarred in a lab in Colorado.
Or maybe it was northern Italy. There's a complex story, a nuanced story of conspiracy.
It builds on the anti Backes movement. Right. So a longstanding, longstanding movement of misinformation around the values inoculations.
It it also builds on our lack of trust in what the government might be doing around Corvet.
Right. So there's there's multiple things that are complex lie machine and build on.
And the misinformation around COBA is particularly pernicious. Right.
And so one of the storylines involves a conspiracy from Bill Gates to inoculate us
against covered through putting in a process that puts RFID chips in our arms,
a big overarching story. That's some ways it's easy to refute with evidence.
In other ways, it's such a large package. It's hard to know what part of that kind of storyline to start with.
The problem for us as researchers is, is figuring out where this stuff comes from.
And as a researcher, often it's best to be multi method.
So we have some people who do fieldwork with the labs, the trolls who produce this content.
We do some big data analysis to figure out the trends, how somebody actually games will search for games, YouTube search.
There's a real craft to talk about figuring out how to make use of social
media algorithms and then figuring out how political actors have to use them.
And right now, we're sort of at a sensitive moment where we know a lot of the traffic around misinformation is on platforms that we can't study.
Instagram and I have a Tinder story I could tell later like, but there's a serious tick tock, YouTube, WhatsApp.
There's a range of platforms that are actually pretty tough to study in a comprehensive way.
And that's where a lot of the action is now in terms of misinformation trends.
I'm going to talk for another ten minutes or so.
Then Nicole and I can have a conversation about what what what she's observing, what we're observing together.
I thought I'd offer a quick run through some of the evidence that we prepared for the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence when it was looking back at what happened in 2016 in the US up through 2017 and 2018.
As you may recall, the Senate asked major heads of heads of major technology firms to come and testify.
And each of the firms turned over some fairly large data sets of accounts that they knew were managed from St. Petersburg.
And this data sets a special because they're they're amongst the few fully attributed.
The accounts were clearly set up and managed from IP addresses in St. Petersburg.
And the firms from firms, Facebook in particular,
gave over some three and a half thousand fake U.S. citizens to US based profiles that have been managed for a long time.
Look, look at the data. We found that some of the profiles had been active in other social media as early as 2012.
So of the surprises in the Russian accounts were active much, much earlier than we expected them to be active.
When we look at the rhythm of their activity during the electoral year,
it's pretty clear that there are bursts of activity are timed with natural spots in the electoral calendar.
So the big national conventions, the debates between Clinton and Trump, each of these are bursts of Russian activity.
Election night, first Russian activity. So they started much earlier than we expected.
Their activity parallels, parallels, events and politics.
One of the other surprises for us is that the bulk of the activity we study.
Happened after 2016. So when Facebook turned over data, they turned over data from about 2015 to middle middle of 2015,
the peak of Russian activity was not on election night in 2016.
It was much later, early into 2017. That's when the whole of Russian activity occurs.
And to me, this suggests that it's almost as if the Russian government's.
Russian government decided that they were successful or having some success or having some impact can put more money,
put more staff into managing these accounts.
So they started much earlier than they expected. Their activity parallels the natural rhythm of the electoral calendar.
And the bulk of their activity has been since 2016.
Now, another interesting finding is that the bulk of their activity moved from Facebook onto Instagram.
Instagram is a fairly closed, closed, closed platform.
Independent researchers, independent researchers don't have systematic access to what's what's found there.
That's a real challenge for researchers. That makes it difficult for me to say what kinds of misinformation trends are there.
But we do know that the centre of the Russian activity really burst on Instagram after 2017 and 2018.
Facebook ads add purchases were relatively minor parts of the campaign.
And maybe you and I talk about the role of AD advised.
I think in this data that we were looking at for the U.S. election, political ads where we're not as important as the organic content,
the content coming from fake users who tweet about soccer scores and some soap operas
and family photos from fake families and then start talking about politics possible.
Those are the bulk of the profiles that we found in this Russian dataset.
And then the themes that these accounts work on are all the polarising themes that we know in the U.S. context.
These are about Black Lives Matter.
Gun rights, abortion isn't a series of hot button issues in the US, some of which also are hot button issues here around race and political speech.
And the Russian strategy is to pick up these. The government strategy is to pick up these, to try to generate polarising content.
And the best of their most successful of their campaigns are the ones where they
can get two different groups to meet on the street at the same time to protest,
to have a physical, violent interaction, if possible. That's one of the outcomes.
That's one of the goals of misinformation campaigns that we've tracked since having a close look at what happened in the US in 2016.
Our teams at Oxford have looked at how many other similar efforts there are around the world.
In 2017, we counted 28 countries with organised misinformation campaigns.
These are not lone wolf operations. These are organisations with receptionists and hiring plans and performance bonuses.
Sometimes they have retirement plans. They have regular job ads, retirement plans, phones and desks.
These are formal organisations. In 2017, we found 28 countries like that have these these operations.
In 2018, there were 48 countries. And last year there were 70 countries.
These kinds of organised misinformation campaigns in authoritarian regimes, as you can imagine.
These are often military units that have been retest doing this information.
But in democracies there, their regular PR firms,
their political consulting firms that dabble in subcontracts and create these kinds of Astroturf movements.
We sometimes call them to put out misinformation.
It's not just a problem. It's not just a challenge coming from authoritarian regimes.
One of the big changes when we we've had last summer when we did our inventory last summer,
is that we found that there were several governments that were imitating the Russian government apparatus.
This French agency, Saudi, India, Pakistan, Venezuela, all now had small operations like what the Russians had in effect in two countries.
We found that the governments had sent staff to Moscow for training on how to do good information operations.
So there's a real learning curve right between between these types of regimes.
And since covered, a significant amount of that expertise has gone into covered related misinformation.
Let me say about a little bit about what that looks like, because it's and it's different all over again.
In an important way, China has really arrived as a producer of misinformation.
For the last few years, they haven't really they haven't really produced a lot of content in English.
When protests erupted in Hong Kong, then they started to worry about what English language social media users were thinking about the protests.
And they put out content about how the protesters were rioting, thugs, criminal gangs.
And that was the first moment. And they worked over multiple social media platforms that aren't actually accessible in China.
So so that that was a moment where it was clear the Chinese government was interested in influencing opinion on Twitter and Facebook in English.
For Harro. Having developed that skill once covered Sprunt of the world and appears to come from one,
the Chinese government stepped up messaging around the origins of Koban.
And they put the CGT in the major broadcaster, other broadcaster into production as a sort of source.
I mean, to producing fake news stories about Crovitz.
Now, what's challenging is that I think the very definition of misinformation is changed over time.
And so now a lot of the Chinese language, the Chinese origin, stories around covered are actually about asking questions.
So they don't they don't argue that covered actually originated in a lab in the United States.
But they'll ask the question, did crowbarred to cover it, really originate over 19, really originate or did it come from a lab in Colorado?
Question mark. That's the flavour. And it's not just by asking the question they allowed.
They allowed to enter doubt. They may have a quote from a doctor somewhere in the world who's who also asked the question.
But there's no evidence beyond them asking the question. There's a range of themes.
Chinese get on. The Russians also. Russian government also does misinformation around Colvard.
Both regimes have two or three common common themes they hit.
They like to talk about how democracies are failing,
how the political institutions here can't make good decisions, are being responsive, can't control the virus.
They talk about the aid that China and Russia are offering to northern Italy, to the White House.
My reticence masks for the White House. And this becomes a big story.
And then there's the third story. Consistent story probably is about how China and Russia are leading the science.
Phil, my strap too quickly. Your microphone is rubbing against your shirt.
May we ask you? Got it. Thank. Thank you. Of course.
And so is the misinformation is about failing democratic institutions.
It's about how China and Russia are leading the science. And it's about how how those two governments are providing aid to the rest of the world.
All stories which they're able to pull up push out to a billion social media users a week.
We got that number by adding up the total reach of all Twitter accounts, YouTube accounts, Facebook accounts,
Reddit accounts and Instagram accounts that have signed up for content from Russia today and CGT and in a range of other national government sources.
So it's quite a large audience once in a while.
The reach of social media reach more stories from those two governments will outstrip the reach of a story from the BBC.
But he and The New York Times, most of the time, that won't happen.
But once in a while, they can actually reach more people than professionalised news outlet.
The last thing I want to offer is sort of a long term look at what I think is the existential threat to democracy.
I think that it's probably safe or conservative to say that every national security issue, every budget bill,
every tax bill will come with some kind of automated or troll based campaign for it or against it.
It could be a complex humanitarian disaster. It could be an economic crisis.
It almost doesn't matter what the issue is. Somebody will try and blame immigrants or try to blame another country.
And that that mechanism for spreading information is misinformation is probably
going to be a consistent part of national politics in most democracies.
I think we've seen China arrive. I think China will be much more active on a range of other issues.
After COGAT. I think we'll see many of these techniques applied to special interests,
special interest lobbying of government whenever some lobbyist needs legislative relief.
Some clients use these tools. These tricks will be in the toolkit.
Right, for for for the political communication managers.
And then I don't think we've seen artificial intelligence yet behind many of the campaigns.
But I think we will. I think it is on the horizon. We've seen a few dramatic examples of how fake fake political images, videos can be generated.
But beyond that, I think if a lobbyist can work out what kind of face will reply to or will will be most interested in
hearing from this behavioural research that suggests women respond well to men with a deep voice.
And men respond well to women with a high pitched voice.
Some of that behavioural research will start to feed the construction of faces and messages that will be customised directly for us.
And that that sort of feeding of behavioural data into messaging is is one of the things I think is on the horizon not for the next election,
but possibly the one after that. And then I think the really deep threat here is, is to the role of science in public life.
So many of these campaigns are about undermining our confidence in experts and evidence.
A lot of them support politicians who go with their gut on key issues and and ask critical questions.
But but not in the sense of looking for evidence.
They just repeat her retort with whatever whatever lobbyist fed them information most recently so that the role for science in public life,
I think, is being diminished by misinformation campaigns, especially around health and public life.
So I don't think it's too late and the book does end up being trite.
So there are a couple of things we can do. Making sure to call the trolls that might be on our own accounts and reading things before we share them.
Government needs to invest.
Schools need to invest in in media campaigns to help young people learn critical thinking skills, not forward everything they see.
I think probably that we need a new economic model for journalism itself.
Some of the revenue that's ending up the social media firms probably does need to
be redirected to professional news outlets so they can do the investigative work,
do the fact checking and produce truths that help us make decisions when we vote.
There's certainly a lot of big, big public issues in front of us to do with race and to do with health.
And so I think it's it's important that we clean up public life in this way.
So I have the the there is a code y l i e s for purchasing a book, if you want to use that.
I hope you're still interested in this topic at the end of the conversation. But, Nicola, I'm happy to start chatting.
What do you think? What's the most. Serious misinformation campaign you've looked at the last few weeks.
Thanks, Bill, for setting that I was really interesting to hear it,
particularly around the hostile states that you've seen who are manipulating the stories in this area,
because it feels from my perspective and feels like we only look at the misinformation that's circulating in the UK.
But it feels like a lot of the narrative that we've heard Rhines misinformation are included.
19 in the UK has been focussed on family and friends sharing organic content and sharing stories, and particularly on social media.
I think it's really interesting to hear the actually the hostile states are are active and taking advantage in this space.
I mean, just to pick up on that a little bit.
You mentioned you mentioned China's strategy of asking questions rather than or setting out the argument.
And I note that Artie, the Russian state broadcaster, their slogan is question more.
So how do we how do we push back on this idea that actually is questioning a bad thing?
Should we be questioning less questioning? Yeah, that's a that's a that is a great question.
It's up to the. I would say that there are some institutions and organisations that we can trust and should trust a little more.
We can't all individually be expert in everything. And, you know,
as in as much as a government has both experts and political appointees figuring out
which experts to trust is part of the challenge of being a modern modern citizen.
Now, doing that work, of figuring out who to trust. Probably involves having a diverse media diet.
Right. So if you're a liberal every once in a while, you should cheque a conservative newspaper just like the conservative.
Every once in a while you should see what the liberal papers are writing about and understanding that.
And we can't all be expert in every single issue is I mean, I think that's a reasonable, reasonable limit to modern modern democracy.
Being passionate about a few things that we do research is is the way we can still contribute to public life.
Yeah, I completely agree. So just to talk from a full fact perspective, when we see a claim that we want to fact cheque,
we will all is published that on our Web site and always publish the source that we have made that decision from as well.
So we're really keen that people make up their own minds using the data that we have used to to come to their own conclusions.
I'm visually struck by what you're saying about the kind of variety of conspiracy theories basically that we've seen in the last few months.
And it's something that we've certainly picked up on and I feel factor as well.
So you mentioned Bill Gates. And I think what's interesting that Bill Gates is that there's not just one story about Bill Gates.
There's about 10 different stories about what Bill Gates is is apparently doing
and and how he's trying to manipulate various things or make money or microchip.
All of us in some way. I just think that really fascinating that there's such a variety of different things
out there and not just stories that are circulating in the UK or even Europe.
It's becoming a real international information space.
And that's certainly hope and certainly helped, by the way, that we are receiving information these days.
The social media companies obviously are global.
I feel like we're certainly in a kind of a more precarious situation just through the prevalence of English language as well.
That certainly seems to be spreading a lot more across other countries.
But then equally, we are in a privileged position that there are many more people who want to rebut those stories
and want to be able to or are able to fact cheque them in some way or otherwise about them.
Whereas in other countries who have minority lime juice, perhaps it's it's not happening in the charter effectively.
Yeah. We've I think we've noticed, too, that there is very little fact checking in Arabic.
For example, if a country has a big civil society and maybe has some donors who are willing to support.
Some sort of up to users to flag content, and then it's up to social media platforms to to evaluate the flag content and act responsibly.
And I think the real challenge probably you and I would both be frustrated by is that we have no sight of what
we have very little sight of the fact internal fact checking happens or what the internal flagging process is.
So many of the firms. Absolutely. I know that Twitter most recently have been fact checking various places, most famously Donald Trump,
obviously, but we have no insight into who's making those decisions in the companies.
And what the processes for deciding which posts to cheque or whether, you know, what content there working.
I mean, I'm curious about your impressions. I have the impression that in response to COGAT, Twitter has actually been pretty responsive.
They're certainly sharing more data sets.
And as you say, they're they're flagging posts that are that are misleading or maybe expressions of hate speech.
I believe Facebook is doing a little bit more, maybe not as good as creatively as Twitter,
but also that both firms are doing more around code than they ever did from the previous three years.
Other kinds of political issues, even though there was still additional.
So you read what you think. Well, how do you think the different firms have been responding in different ways?
Yeah, I do think we have to give the different firm some credit for how they are responding to this very unique information crisis.
As I mentioned before, it's not just around one country this time.
So obviously, the Internet companies where we're thinking that the biggest information event of the year would be the U.S. election,
actually, we've had a pivot and tackle these claims across basically a big country and the world has had some version of this.
So do you think we need to give them some credit? We haven't seen them take action.
We've seen them make policy changes. I mentioned Twitter. As you said, Facebook.
I've done various things, as have Google. I've been particularly introduced by.
Yeah. I've been particularly impressed by how much the companies are willing to promote an accurate information ahead of other sources.
So particularly if you take Google search or YouTube when you're searching and
even Twitter and Facebook when you look for specific terms in the search bar,
it's it's accurate and kind of informative sources that come up first, which is a step further than we've ever seen them go before.
So I think that's really positive and we have to acknowledge that. That being said, there's certainly a lot more that they could be doing.
So there's more to do. There's always more. I think for me to make it smart and it's that transparency space.
So I mentioned Twitter not liking, hey, they're making their decisions.
Actually, that's the problem. All of the Internet companies have. And I think transparency would be the the biggest thing,
especially when we're talking about content and what people are trying to say online, particularly beliefs.
You know, we talked about conspiracy theories before. There's certainly nothing that says that you cannot believe a conspiracy theory.
So these are really big questions are in freedom of speech at the minute that we have to be conscious of.
And I think that the best way to tackle that is around greater transparency. I agree.
I agree. I'm a liberal. I think one of the last conversations we had was about the fact checking the sites.
Have you noticed any of these in your domain? No. Are they closed or the more of them open?
So I say that again.
Fake fake fact checking sites, so we tend to be fact checking sites but are not actually doing the chicken work that you're doing.
Yeah, I think that's a really it's slightly niche part of the problem, but it's certainly a really important one.
You know, you mentioned before that people need to know who to trust or know will expire as they can.
They can trust it to give views on things that are way more complicated than they want to look into or have time to look into having fake fact.
Chequers certainly is a real threat to the real fact Chequers out there who are trying to do good work and are trying to be transparent.
So I think that's certainly a problem. It's not something I've seen, particularly around over 19 in a structured way.
But I think there's certainly a lot of people out there who are trying to promote the truth of what's
happening in the way that they see it and trying to do that in a very factual and factual in a time.
And they have to that. Yeah, good.
So we take a few questions or. Absolutely. And it's a great question from David Horrigan.
Naturally, he's asking to Britain, the USA and other Western governments have similar programmes as part of their soft power.
I think that's picking up on what you're saying around Russia and China. I'd be really interested in your view on that.
I think the answer the answer is yes, but they're different.
So when we do our inventories. So the answer is yes.
When we do our inventories of government expenditures on misinformation.
If if a democracy, for example, has an information campaign that's trying to discourage women from becoming ISIS brides and moving to Syria,
that we don't count that as in our in our count of what governments are spending on on social media manipulation.
So that might be an example of a fake grassroots movement that does is normatively valuable.
So we don't include those kinds of campaigns in a democracy, if there's a PR firm that has clearly been caught running a misinformation campaign.
Call client or logs, and we do we do count that the answer is yes, these things do exist in democracies.
And if they're if they're tied to a national, reasonable national security issue,
whether there's judicial oversight, we don't we don't include those campaigns.
But if they're freelance lobbyists just playing with technology than we we do those in.
There also aren't very many of those.
There are as many examples of those in the military militaries in Western democracies, because there are other having authorised.
Thanks. Let's take another question then and from Chris, I think it's linked to that.
So he's asked, are you investigating what kind of audience they're susceptible to different kinds of misinformation?
I think the really interesting question around the different types of campaigns that various
organisations are countries are running it is that it's actually really tricky to study it outright.
There's no there are no statistical models that will relate a tweet to a changed vote.
We can't make that kind of direct causal connexion. And what we do know is that there are there's a very long tail to misinformation.
So you can still measure the number of young voters in the US who think that Hillary Clinton was up to something in that pizzeria in,
you know, outside Washington, D.C. They don't quite know what. But do they think there was something going on there?
You can still you can still measure the number of UK citizens who think that they'll
be saving hundreds of millions of pounds for the NHS by leaving it in the EU.
So there's a there's a long tail to a story once it gets out reinforced.
It's difficult to disabuse people on it. We think that older voters may be a little bit more likely to share this information.
We don't know that they are more likely to believe it themselves. So.
So it's it's not simply that older voters are more susceptible to believing the stuff they are more likely to share.
We we do think that people who spend who have more of their main Newstart coming from
social media are exposed to more misinformation than people who have a diverse media diet,
some TV, some print and some digital.
So there's a few effects we know. I'm fully aware of. The other things we effects we know is that it's fairly common across many countries.
We've studied to find examples of prominent female politician or women journalists
or feminist intellectuals who are driven off social media because of some nasty,
particularly nasty campaign that's targeted. So one of the certain effects is has been in pushing some women out of public life.
And another. That's definitely and that's that's one of the definite effects.
It's really interesting you're saying about this prevailing view in the US that Hillary Clinton was up to something.
I wonder if that's actually one of the biggest detrimental impacts of disinformation campaigns.
It's not that one particular story or claim is believed.
It's this kind of deepening distrust in either a particular person or particular institution or process.
And that's that's one of the really kind of things that we need to fight against. But it's really hard to fight against because it's so intangible.
Well, as you say, it can be about process. So if there's misinformation about about an election, the trust in elections or vote counting.
But if especially major politicians say things, things that undermine their own electoral system,
that that becomes a vicious cycle where people trust they're not sure they should even bother to vote.
They don't vote or they make unusual choices. That creates a cycle of cycle of mistrust and political and in our own institutions.
Absolutely. This is what I think. And another question actually, from Mike Thomas.
Do you think that the motivations and intentions of information operations have changed?
And he's mentioned since the early nineteen hundreds.
Are we just more susceptible to misinformation given the amount of faith that we're exposed to in modern life?
Interesting your views on that. Fascinating. So I think several things have changed since.
Since the last century, most misinformation, campaign trade, mostly misinformation campaigns were very large.
They were coordinated by states in times of war or major crises.
They involved paying large amounts of money for radio stations that were broadcast a large areas or dropping pamphlets from aeroplanes.
There were propaganda campaigns, but they used to be the only major governments could do them.
And it usually involves sort of military units and acting and the resources of the state to enact them.
So the first thing that's changed is now it's it's much cheaper, right,
to do direct propaganda messaging over social media that will target particular people on the basis of race or gender.
So it's much, much more focussed. It's much, much less expensive. And it's so much faster.
It's direct and fast. I also think there's a qualitative change.
And how the propaganda is structured in that so much of it is now baby tested.
So that there'll be one message that's tested on the subpopulation of other the side of the population.
And what's once you get the click through rates, you hold that,
you pick this AJP and then you hold it variation B Prime and B and B probably make another variation of that process of A B testing, rapid testing.
A message refines the message so quickly and delivers it to a more and more accurate target.
And so I think that's a significant qualitative difference from from the intentions of envelopes from from years go by.
But Nicole, what do you think? Yeah, I agree.
I also wonder and people are much more aware of of these tactics, Niren, and are aware that it could be happening.
And I think, you know, even in the U.K., we had a particular rise in consciousness in twenty, seventeen ranks and particularly in soulsby poisoning,
where we saw really coordinated campaign from the Russian state then and obviously this year as well.
There's been, as I mentioned before, there's been a lot of, um,
a lot of news and a lot of an education campaigns been wanting to see exactly the kind of things you mentioned before.
Take care before you share that with the U.N. campaign that ran earlier last week.
There's the BBC you've done once as fowleri in checking your source, thinking before you share and all of those things.
So I do wonder if people are much more aware of it now. And that also means that the tactics have to change.
I think also journalists are getting better at reporting this kind of stuff like that.
So there are more fact checking organisations like yourself that help everybody by providing a
resource that I think news organisations are pretty standard pig for pretty much every election.
Somebody will write about the information operations of play. You know, Nicole, I think listening to you talk about innovation in this,
I am I do want to point out that much of the innovation happens during a U.S. presidential election because
that's when tens and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent doing tricky things with new technologies.
And so what happens in November in 2020 is going to have follow on consequences for other democracies.
Whatever tools and tricks get practised over the next five or six months in the US will come to other democracies.
And I think there are there are things that the platforms will do, I hope,
try to prevent the leak of those tactics, but that the big cycles of innovation seem to be.
2012, 2016, 2020. That's that's one innovation in this area.
What happens? Yeah, I think that's completely, completely true.
Do you think, though, that there is a risk that we get too caught up in, particularly in the US election cycle?
Yes, I think it's problem. Yes, because you would know this from from your own your own work history.
Yes, because many of the things that. Political leaders do the US illegal in the UK or the EU.
This just would not be they could not be done work that the punishments and fines
involved would be would be serious and swift and immediate court in the US.
That tends to be a lot more.
It's a much less regulated environment. Elections officials don't have the resources to track everything very well.
There's a lot of variety state to state.
So in some states, elections administrators will catch things and others just don't have the resources to do it.
So I think you're right, we shouldn't and we shouldn't assume that whatever nasty tricks get developed in school will be applied elsewhere.
But Klepto, which would be nice to be ahead of the game, could make sure that they don't come here.
Absolutely. Ahead of the game is definitely the goal here.
And I wonder if that's ever possible, given the amount of resources that various actors put into.
As you say, a B testing. A lot of them are finding the best technique for this one.
There's one interesting way we're about YouTube earlier. That's one interesting way we are ahead of the game, and that is with fake videos.
So it turns out that it's fairly hard to produce at the moment.
Hard to produce a good fake video. And when you try to compress it, I think video uploaded to YouTube,
YouTube can detect something about the thickness and the way the compression works.
So for the moment, there's a there is that there are ahead of the game.
Technically, it's complicated. Not sure there's ever been a successful.
I think that's successful misinformation. Fake video uploaded to YouTube, letting the new pop into my you.
I'm not I'm aware of,
but I've wanted to keep it interesting is that people are swayed by fake videos and actually there's almost the other problem of,
you know, somebody gets caught on video doing something, you know, ads or or less than ideal.
And then there's the possibility that they could claim that that was a fake video in itself.
So we've also got that risk. And, you know, these technologies are becoming more and more available as well.
We've got a couple of questions here. I the role of the media particularly.
So some. I'm sorry, John Rosenfield has asked, is there a problem of misinformation media due to the problem of editorial process?
I think that, yeah, a couple of people have picked up from the point that there's demise of local media that look media's and, you know,
they're all competing for attention and so potentially increasing their stories to be more sensationalist or have more dramatic headlines.
And how much a problem do you think that is and how much is contributing to the misinformation, disinformation space?
I think it's a medium sized problem. So it's I think the instinct is right that more or more outlets need to generate sensational titles,
headlines, and that editorial editorial decisions to shape the quality of reporting.
I would say that the. I would tell you that there's some evidence that.
People thought our own social media users on our own. Do tend to have good information behaviours on the whole.
So when when we see a mistake on Wikipedia, we tend to edit it and correct it called positive hurting.
We do things as a group that tend to be helpful. And when we see an obvious piece of junk news, we tend not to forward it.
Certain people do all the time, but most people most of the time don't share misinformation information.
Most of the junk news, most of the news out there isn't for the average social media user.
It's not consumed by the average voter. It's actually a fairly particular niche.
That is the audience for that stuff. And it doesn't come from mainstream mainstream outlets.
For example, we did a study once of misinformation on national security issues targeted at military personnel who were on duty overseas.
So this is this is about information about Syria.
What was going on in India, Pakistan targeted at NATO military personnel who were doing their service.
And one of the things we found is that people doing military service are amongst the most sophisticated news consumers we've ever seen.
They don't they don't share any of that. They know where it comes from and they don't call it.
The challenges, their friends and family, so the people who immediately open, who are not doing the military service,
but who are interested in military conspiracies, and they're the ones more likely to spread misinformation on national security.
So its editorial process is definitely a part of it.
But. But I think if more people got their news from professionalised news outlets, I think they have a higher, higher quality information diet.
Yeah, I I agree with you, there is a medium problem. Obviously, a@ feel bad to actually we spend a lot of your time fact checking newspapers,
particularly where they have, you know, misrepresented statistics or pools.
Pools are the worst, actually. A lot of people get misinterpret pools.
And so we do quite a lot of fact checking of the newspapers.
And I think what's been interesting in Cuba, 19 actually, is that the I mean, I'm very much generalising here,
but a lot of the newspapers in the UK where publishing some of the conspiracy theories, particularly around 5G, for example, at the start of the year.
But we've really seen that stop. I think newspapers are being a lot more careful about particularly things like conspiracy theories or or cures.
That's another thing that we've seen there in Cuba, 19, which may I ask your question?
Yeah, of course. So since since starting a full and since having such a big impact.
REPORTER Have you noticed that media outlets are doing less fact checking on their own?
So most people's professional outlets are supposed to have fact Chequers. Right. There's different processes, but.
Most of them are supposed to do their own fact checking.
Have you noticed that journalism is withdrawing a little bit on their own fact checking staff resources?
Because full fact is there to do that proofing?
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question.
I mean, the answer is I don't I don't know specifically if newspapers are or media outlets are particularly withdrawing from facture.
Obviously, it's a really difficult time in the media landscape, in the media and various organisations are are cutting their staffs.
And I think there's probably a mixture. Are the be an amalgamation of fact Chequers and investigative journalists?
And I think certainly investigative journalism is it's one of the key aspects of the media that needs to be protected.
And because it is such a valuable job, beyond's beyond the reporting of the single story,
actually diving underneath and explaining how we got here and what's happening and making sense of some really complicated issues.
And I think if that gets lost and then that does only help this problem of of only meeting that minor,
only getting the surface understanding of a story, that's certainly an issue.
And I think what we have seen, though, in the last couple years in particular,
and especially Válková 19, is more organisations setting up and setting up teams.
He will look at claims they're circulating on social media in particular.
So, you know, we saw this last year with the elections that happened in the U.K. We're seeing it Dankova,
19 people like BBC News keep an excellent team looking at social media and claims that are being circulated there, but also Channel four.
So I think that's that's increased certainly not years, but I think being a really positive increase as well.
We're getting towards the end of this. So why don't we finish on a bit of a positive note?
Hey, what's your top tip on how we solve this problem, solve the problem?
So I think the top tip for individual individually is to be more careful about forwarding right.
To go through our own follower lists and get rid of the people who are we really don't know and be careful forwarding cut.
That's that's the individual tip. I do think that there's a structural thing we can do.
And this is in some ways, this is pie in the sky thinking.
But I think I think data is how we express ourselves now that the stuff we buy on our credit card,
our physical location in space, what we do with our mobile phone, all that stuff generates all that.
All those devices, users of devices generate politically meaningful data.
And right. Though, most of that politically meaningful data goes to Silicon Valley.
So my top tip solution is something I've actually borrowed from the blood diamonds campaign.
One of the innovations of the blood diamonds campaign was that there's this
argument that if you could if you could tell a consumer where a diamond came from,
most consumers would not buy the diamonds that came from the nastiest bits of pits of Africa.
They would buy clean diamonds. And I think we should be able to look at any device that we have and ask it to tell us
who the ultimate beneficiary is of the data that comes that's collected on a device.
So the diamonds, you can say who is the ultimate beneficiary of purchasing a diamond?
Who's the ultimate beneficiary of the location data coming from my phone or the consumption data coming from my refrigerator?
At the moment, devices can't even do that. The answer is that it's mostly some Silicon Valley firms and their third party, third party organisations.
But if we could get a device to tell us who's benefiting from our data, then maybe we could add organisations to that list of beneficiaries.
Can I as a citizen, if I want to add my faith based group, some covered health researchers had a couple of academics to my flow of data.
I probably would. I think many of us would contract volunteer to put they put data in the hands of health researchers if we could.
Right now, we don't even have that infrastructural choice.
So I think that the first thing we really need to do is, is break this monopoly of flow of data to Silicon Valley.
Yeah. That's really interesting. I love that comparison to the blood diamonds and everybody being more conscious.
I think there's a lot going on to say about conscious choices,
particularly we think that the environment and if we can apply that same mentality to our choices of how we spend our time online or our user bases,
I think that's a really interesting concept.
I guess I would build on that and say that we need we need collaboration across a variety of different sectors to push for this change.
It's been really fascinating what you've seen the last couple weeks,
the fall and a variety of advertisers pulling their advert as fans from a variety of different platforms.
I'm not sure that's the long term solution, but it's certainly an interesting lever that's being Piltz.
And I think it's see the platforms respond in some way and make some changes, particularly Facebook.
But, yeah, I think collaboration and collective action is needed to tackle these problems.
And just off our last minute, we've had one request which had very much back.
Could you please tell us a tender story? Tender story.
So one of our store, one of our researchers a few years ago for the twenty nineteen UK election,
found a tinder bot that would flirt and then talk about Jeremy Corbyn.
And the only way we the only reason we know about it is that the campaign managers who built the bot on Tinder
went on to Twitter and thanked the bot for giving them a few percentage points edge in a couple of key districts.
So so they actually went on Twitter and said thank you to the Tinder got named the districts where they thought it had given them an edge.
I don't know whether the tweet dated about actually did get particular PS elected,
but the campaign managers who testified to it on Twitter seem convinced that it was worthwhile.
So whether or not you believe it and that's the important point, is simply that whatever platform emerges,
we'll have people talking politics on it a little bit and we'll have other people trying to manipulate politics.
The. That's certainly a great example of innovation, places, surprising places.
Yes. Absolutely.
And we haven't even touched on on some of these new platforms that are emerging and their role to play in in the information environment.
Come. But we'll pause there. We have run out of time alone. Sure we can.
Of these issues for longer. Apologies to those questions that we didn't get a chance to answer.
I'm pleased to have a look at Phil's great book.
You can buy the book. There should be a link just at the bottom of your screen, says Bifold Pirates' latest book.
Go ahead and click that unfiled. You want to repeat that? The court as well.
It's capital. Why so? I guess. Right.
And it works a little on the Yale University Press. Great.
So thanks very much to all four of Martin SKO for arranging this event. Thank you to everybody for joining this evening.
I hope you have a enjoy the rest of your evenings and. Yeah, think before you share the creepy headlines.
Thanks very much, everybody. Canticle.