 Hello everybody. I think we should get the show on the road. I want to welcome you and Give you some information and and admonish you to please if you have Smartphones turn off your ringer and even if you are going to be using Twitter or Facebook live during the event, which is okay. It's a public event Our Twitter handle is fake news panel. That's capital F capital N capital P fake news panel and This event is being recorded by C-span and by others and it is also being live cast and there'll be a video of it and There will also be a podcast That will be part of the brand new Graduate School of Journalism podcast series, which is called on Mike and that's M. I see Mike And that is available on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts So I'd like to start by saying that this is this event is a was a collaboration between the Office of Public Affairs The library and the Graduate School of Journalism I'm dear to English from the Graduate School of Journalism and I worked with Kathleen McClay and Cody Hennessey to to invite our panelists and And invite all of you And I we really want to thank Marlena Talvik for helping to invite the press here a lot of members of the media are here and Julie Hirono who just does everything with the publicity and the logistics and all the hard work of making Getting us to all come together as we have let me welcome the panelists now. We have a really distinguished panel So we have Right here to my left the first panelist here is Laura Seidel and she is the well-known voice on National Public Radio's digital culture Correspondent and I hope many of you heard or will You know will listen to her amazing story on disinfo media one of the stories that really brought this issue to alive in my mind She tracked down a company with many fake news sites and that aired for the first time last November and has been listened to many times since At a Missouri We're very happy to have somebody here who is a very high up as the vice president of news feed at Facebook and he you know 1.8 billion people are using Facebook now and Adam manages the team responsible for delivering relevant content that's news content to all those Facebook users and Recently a Facebook has taken some important steps to address the problem of fake news on their platform and We're delighted to have his presence We have Craig Newmark with us Craig is a web pioneer the founder of Craig's list he's a speaker and a philanthropist who often introduces himself as a as a modestly as a news consumer And his son can also claim to be one of the internet's best-known nerds But all of this comes right out from his from his own self description But he recently generously donated a million dollars to the Pointer Institute In order to promote verification fact-checking and accountability in journalism So as much as anyone I know Craig has taken steps to address the problem And we're joined by two members of the Burke of the UC Berkeley faculty as well Catherine Crump is a law school professor, and she's the co-director of Berkeley laws Samuelson law technology and public policy clinic and she specializes in first and fourth amendment and Media issues and all about censorship and what you can and cannot do And Jeffrey McKee Mason is UC Berkeley's university librarian, and he is a professor at the School of Information His scholarly work focuses on the economics of the internet online behavior and digital information creation and distribution Finally our moderator is Dean Ed Wasserman. He's the professor and he's the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism and His specialty is media ethics He blogs perhaps very appropriately titled blog called unsocial media and You can find that at E Wasserman comm and I want to thank you the audience for your interest in this hot topic With that Ed Wasserman Thank You Deidre and thank you all for coming out tonight in this chilly evening I want to also welcome a number of tech reporters in the audience from Reuters New York Times Mother Jones magazine the Guardian KQED in the Daily Californian We have a strong interdisciplinary panel here tonight And thank you all for for participating now the format will be we have roughly an hour and a half to play with and Figured we divide it approximately in half. We spent 45 minutes With the discussion confined to the panel I'm looking for I'm hoping for a lively discussion not necessarily an orderly one And then so you're welcome to talk to each other interrupt each other put your To move the conversation along. I'll be I'll be Tossing out questions and goading you when I'm not happy with your answers And then after 45 minutes or so will open the floor to questions Opening the floor as Neil Conan observed at a talk here not long ago always a troubling concept in seismically active California Let me just kick this off with an opening thought because I was thinking back to when I started getting interested in the media and this was late 60s early 70s and in the shadow of McLuhan and in a great deal of very excited and very very much utopianist talk about the world of democratized discourse that the media would enable and and if you had told me then that 40-50 years hence I'd have this device that would give me access to bigger audiences Then the widest circulating newspaper on earth had and would give me access to more information Than the best sourced reporter on earth had I would say well that sounds like paradise It sounds like that would be that would be what a democratized Communication sphere looks like when people are communicatively enabled And we would have then you know exceeded the paradise and and then instead here We are and we're finding that there is a dark underside to that and we're finding when we look around that people are in fact laboring believe things more people believe things that are not true than perhaps ever before And more people are acting on beliefs that they either dimly under beliefs. They either misunderstand or Understand are not untrue than ever before and we find that this this wondrous world of technologically enabled communications paradise has now turned around as biting itself in the backside so Let let me start by asking and I guess I would end with it We're finding more people than ever are enthralled By the shadows on the cave. So what do we do? Let me start with this question. I'm going to invite Laura Seidel the way in on it to get us started Fake news now has become a big messy topic. There's not even really agreement as to what it is In fact, it's being brandished as an all-purpose slogan to describe everything from errors to deliberate falsehoods It doesn't no longer is agreed upon is identifying a unitary phenomenon. So what what are we talking about? And what could we what conclusions could we draw about the way the term is now being fought over and The elastic way it's being applied. So Laura, why don't you start us off? well, I I guess I want to say there's a difference of intent and And that there is a big difference people who are in the fake news business They know what they're doing. They know it's fake as opposed to when a journalist who's trying to get it right makes a mistake So I would argue for example, some people have said well Judith Miller is reporting on the weapons of mass destruction was fake news It wasn't fake news. She made a Horrible, I mean horrible mistake But the guy that Deirdre mentioned that I found that's this is real fake news and it's very profitable I mean we decided we would take one story This was in 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 and in this case It was the story of an FBI agent dead in apparent murder suicide and supposedly this FBI agent had been investigating You know Hillary Clinton's emails and so the implication was that somehow this was part of if you know something about the alt-right conspiracy theories about the Clintons they murder people off and This appeared on the site called the Denver Guardian which sounded like a legitimate site it was not So trying to find where this came from was the idea who was this who was it that was behind this It was initially not that easy because usually you can go to go daddy You can discover that there's a website and that website is Somebody owns the domain name in this case. It was anonymous I enlisted a very smart techie to help me basically look at the internet You know a bit like a paleontologist just looking for fossils and he was able to eventually get me a name We got an address I decided the best thing to do was just to go knock on his door It turned out he was in Huntington Beach, California, and I had no idea what we were going to find and I took a Male intern with me because I was a little nervous about this But we went to his door and I held the story in my hand and and there he was his name is Justin Kohler Knocked on the door and I said did you write this? From NPR we want to know if you wrote this and he said no I said do you own the Denver garden? No, and he closed the door in our faces and we left him an email turns out. He's an NPR fan Seriously he gets back to us and says all right. I'll talk to you. Yes I know about it and yes I do on the Denver Guardian website and what was 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 alt-right was and how easy it was to spread fake news in the alt-right Echo chamber. However, as I did point out to him It was lucrative in fact he told me he was making between ten and thirty thousand dollars a month And he had a whole little empire it wasn't just this he had a whole bunch of others websites, too Where he was putting this stuff out there, but it was absolutely intentional Everything he said yes everything about that Denver Guardian story was totally false and we knew it was totally false that Is fake news and I really do think there is a big difference between a reporter making a mistake and What this gentleman was doing? I guess lastly You know on this topic. I would say I feel like one of the things though That's become that's going on is there's a sense of wanting to make everybody confused and I think that works in some people's advantage to have the world be confusing and I have heard people talk about Steve Bannon's interest in Certain far-right groups in Europe and Russia who actually do use this tactic. It is a political tactic and so I'm not saying he is but I think it's something to think about what is fake news. What is it about? What is it's intent and I think it comes down to that. I want to come back to how you make money with fake news But first you have identified a pure case of deliberate Fabrication yes, which everybody can agree is fake right, but the term is being applied far more broadly to capture it sort of underlying simmering dissatisfaction with a quality of information and the trustworthiness of information that people are getting and I'm wondering how this is now in a Political it's playing into the political arena in somewhat unforeseen ways, and I wonder what sense we make of that Jeffrey you have thoughts well, I Don't disagree with what Debra said, but I do think that for a lot of purposes when we're talking about information distribution and People wanting to get information out there as providers of it and people wanting to take information as consumers It's often useful just to think about quality as being the dimension and there's high quality news There's low quality news or information. It's a spectrum of course For some purposes I sometimes think of there being negative quality news There are certain cases where people are intentionally Manipulating intentionally as you say but even there there's a little bit more nuance to it I think the case you just described he said a it was a lark and be he was making money on it It doesn't sound like he was trying to actually persuade anybody to change their behavior He wasn't trying to manipulate people, but sometimes people are trying to manipulate in trying to use lies Essentially fraud to manipulate so there's a malevolent intent that can matter But I think first we think of it is especially if you're a platform provider for instance As a content platform provider you care about the quality of the news or the information that's being distributed through your platform and You want more good quality because you want more people to come to your platform and you want less bad quality That spectrum is very hard to draw any lines on And sometimes platform providers want different things in their consumers We might say the platform provider is in it for the money. They just want eyeballs and As long as they can attract eyeballs. They're selling those eyeballs to advertisers So they may care about a different aspect of quality on the other hand. They also want to repeat eyeballs They won't care about reputation and if they keep delivering bad information They're not going to get repeat eyeballs So I to think about how to design systems and how to understand behavior in this in this business I think first I like to think about it just as a spectrum of quality with certain special cases where the problem is not Just that it's low quality, but it may actually be malicious or negative quality But you're not suggesting quality that's driving the traffic Well to some extent I mean people want the information for different reasons I mean some people want information just for entertainment in which case they may want things that are actually fake They find it more amusing and entertaining so it's not a single dimension, but There is a I think in repeated use there is a correlation certainly between quality and what's driving the traffic that people are going to recognize a certain sources are more reliable than others and the Content provider if it wants to develop a significant business and keep that going is going to care about that quality. Yeah Can I just interject one thing? If I may which is that part of the problem is Facebook because it is an environment in which you are Looking at all kinds of things that your friends share And so it's not the same as going to the New York Times website versus going to Breitbart You're in an environment that feels comfortable and safe And I didn't mean that like just as a total criticism But that's part of the issue is that you're not now going to all these separate credible publications I'm going to stand up for the platforms. They and I'm not one of them in any sense I'm just acting as a news consumer, and I just would like news I can trust These are really tough problems one part of it is trolling and harassment I've been trying to deal with that on a professional basis for over 20 years All the platforms are taking steps to address this. It's just really tough for example Facebook is working with the international fact-checking network and are trying to work with people who are signatories to that agreement like Politifact and Snopes Google is working with the trust project, which is about means by which news organizations can say hey Here's what's trustworthy behavior and oversimplify that it's about having a code of ethics and being serious about it I've spoken with Twitter directly about the problem of dealing with trolling and harassment These are really tough problems The platforms are standing up for them Hopefully in the really near future. I'll be able to announce with Wikipedia New steps and serious funding about dealing with harassment and trolling So the platforms are standing up, but these are really old really tough problems to deal with Last week someone reminded me of about a fake news attacked from Octavian who faked a will from Mark Antony because he wanted to raise military funding and support to go after Antony and Cleopatra This is not new stuff. It is really tough and they are actually serious about it and doing something You also want to be quiet about how you talk about it because when you talk about techniques The bad guys are listening to what you're saying. You'll see it pop up in black hat Discussion boards, so you really don't want to leak stuff before you're ready to do something Well, I take your point. No, it's not new and I want to I want to hear from Facebook just but but What is what has changed in 2004? We had the swift boat 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 How does that and yet you they were each side accuse the other of proffering phony Fake news. What has changed now? What is what is different in the news environment now from 2004? Well, I think some parts of this a new and some parts of it are old, right? The problem of gullible people is timeless. They're the gullible people for a long time There will always be gullible people anyone who has email and has received a forward from a relative Understands this right. It's hard to get those things to stop But I I agree with Laura I think one of the things that's new here are the platforms and the ease with which someone can can create a news story Which although it may sound fantastical to many of us appeals to people's, you know Feel you know a Trump supporter may be inclined to believe things that enhance a particular narrative And you can easily create something that enhances that narrative Which then gets propagated and I think the speed with which that can happen Is something that's new and you know, we don't have the same same gateways controlling the media that we traditionally had So Adam you're you've been mentioned How does it look from Facebook side? So two different things One on what's changed. I think the nature of how people consume information is continuing to change And in the news specifically you see more and more publishers as less and less various to entry, right? The cost of distribution is going closer and closer to zero And there's more and more Competition too and it's anybody the guy where was he and we're interested in California isn't yeah He's outside LA. Yeah, so like you can do that in a way that was harder 12 years ago and much harder 12 years before that and that's continuing to change But I do think in general it's important to separate Issues because there are a bunch of different issues fake news is an issue I think what we're really talking about here is confirmation bias is another issue You know hateful speech, which we almost touched on the second and goes as another issue And so I think that yes sort of how we think about things I think at a high level we're trying to nurture an ecosystem So that means to create value for people but also to create value for publishers So that you know that can be symbiotic in some way on the people side We try to connect people with stuff that they find interesting Which is sort of our definition of quality and on the publisher side We try to create tools and I mean that's the Facebook journals and project recently to create the value for there But in pursuing both there's really two sides There's trying to nurture the good right so helping people find stuff that they find meaningful By ranking things better better design better help people connect with sources this guy Hopefully was following NPR on Facebook, but also to reduce the negative, right? And so fake news is one type of negative content You know this clickbait. There's nudity. There's hate speech bullying Violent content and so we try to divide things and are we thinking about things in those two different ways and then we pursue those Problems very differently because the nature of how you make progress is very different So let me ask a crude question. Does Facebook make money from what we would consider fake news? now so I think there's three things to be concerned about for Facebook's perspective around the Financial side of fake news and I actually think it's super important because from what we can tell our research a lot of Fake news publishers are financially motivated There are spammers. They actually sometimes switch from one party to another So one thing that we worry about but doesn't seem to be a real issue is people don't use Facebook to advertise fake news very much It's just not an effective advertising platform for fake news The cost of advertising is very different center to we also want to make sure that they don't use our Networks to sell ads on their sites that also doesn't happen very much because we have strict policies and people don't have in place We can actually manually prove advertisers, which is what we do the thing that I think is where The month the financial value gets shifted to the fake news publishers Using Facebook and this is something we need to further reduce is getting free distribution So posting something that's crazy getting a lot of clicks on it that takes a bunch of people to a website That's I mean you guys have probably seen this before maybe it's a paragraph and then like 80 or 90 percent ads We think of those as sort of ad farms and that's not financially benefiting Facebook, but it is Shifting financial value to fake news publishers, which is a bad thing So we need to do what we can to reduce the distribution that fake news publishers get as close as we can to zero And that's kind of what we were starting to try to do in December and we have more work to do Can I just add something on the financial front? This was an interesting thing that Justin Kohler told me which was You know one of his sites was caught by Google and they stopped running ads on his site But the minute that happened He his inbox was filled with literally hundreds of offers from other places that would run ads on his sites So so the it unfortunately that the opportunity to run ads on your site is Vast, it's not just the big companies you can tell it's profitable Be from because of the secondary effects for example. There's a group. I think it's sleeping giants They've identified what they think is a fake news site and every time they see an advertiser pop up on it They contact the advertiser asking them to stop advertising there and They claim it's they claim it's working a lot depends on how you define what fake news or a fake news site is But that that seems to be working Plus the ad networks the bigger ones like fit like a Google's in particular They're being asked to stop allowing advertising to be placed on Fake news sites There's a new ad network that an aggregator That's focused on avoiding this thing that Ken doctor just reported on I'm giving Ken credit because I forget the name of the network And so things are happening which are improving things me I Hate to be so critical as to name news ad networks by name but I'm really tired of seeing ads from tabula and outbrain and if that stopped appearing in my Reading on my phone. I'd be pretty happy So help me somebody on the panel help me with this I want to understand if I'm an enterprising young person in Macedonia, and I want to make a bundle All right, so I come up with I find some trending terms from Google some things that are clearly of interest or vast numbers of people And so I run a few stories and one has Kanye West and Hilary Clinton And possibly a love triangle with somebody else. I can't think of a moment But and and I know and I post this story and it's a complete, you know Fabrication nicely done though and I've got pictures I could do that too and next thing you know, I have five hundred thousand people Streamed there through somewhere where and at that point I have a serious I have a serious footprint and I so how who's making money from that and Who is this Google Google ad sense sending this that there's some automated Mechanisms, it's just it would be helpful I think if we all got to the same point and understanding the mechanics of how Illicit gains are made on the internet. Thanks to fake news. I can take a pass at this Okay, so if you are trying to make money off fake news, you actually probably won't start a website You'll start many websites. You'll create many pages on Facebook. You'll create many accounts on Twitter, etc You do this to diversify your risk, right? Because if you get shut down in one place, you don't get shut down everywhere else You then try and create essentially an engine that turns out a lot of content. It's usually very short It's usually very sensational often. It's deliberately fake and false You actually can sometimes actually their markets, but you can actually go and pay $20 for a paragraph And then you use an ad network, which is basically a middleman between you and advertisers And you basically then use that ad network to get ads on your web page usually very low CPMC Pc very low cost ads We're not talking about like brand advertisement If you go to a page and there's a story and like the ads are like for special face Cream that Ellen is using or I don't know. You know just like weird or Yeah, it's it's actually low quality advertising And then what you do is you just keep creating content and you do that in a bunch of different ways and you try to build up followings And I can get clicks anyway You can on any social media platform or through you know email chains Which we don't talk about a lot and other things and what you need to do is you need to have on average You need to make more money per visit and the costs you to create content for all the visits you get for that piece of content So if I paid you 20 bucks to write something crazy about Kanye and Hillary Clinton Whatever it was that and that cost me $20. I need to make more than $20 from all the people who visit that piece of content on average And it's just a machine and what you're always looking for and this is Craig's point before is how to Game all the platforms you can so it's a somewhat adversarial relationship So like you know, it's like it's spam actually is really what it is and so like any other spam if you You prevent one type of behavior. They usually come up with another type of behavior So one thing that could happen theoretically is if we manage all the platforms manage to completely reduce fake news to zero It's not like the incentives would go and they would just find new ways of making money That might not be fake news. There might be some other form of problematic content. So it's an ongoing ever-ending relationship is that It's a help it sounds it sounds as if what you're describing are Elements that are fundamental to the way the internet pays its way. These are not the fake news Preveyors have identified things that are not just incidental They are integral to the way the internet is monetized And if I could just read this quote from Evgeny Morozov in the Guardian The problem is not fake news But the speed and ease of its dissemination and it exists primarily because today's digital capitalism Makes it extremely profitable look at Google and Facebook. Sorry to produce and circulate false, but click-worthy narratives So I'd say it's a bit more general the cost of distributing Distributing information has gone almost to zero and by and large. It's a good thing, right? You and you can learn about I have a kid He's about to turn one. He was colicky. I actually spent a lot of time on unit figuring out How do you see the colicky big which by the way, it's not possible And like so there's all sorts of good about how bad was the advice you found Well, eventually I got to some like some some poor I think it was a father. It was just like look you just got to deal with this by the way It gets way better at you know three months, and you'll be fine. So just hang on Which was the best advice I got So in generally, I think it's good that information is easier to access but there are also Negative repercussions to your sort of introduction and so then the question is how do we address the negative without Reducing the positive effects, which I think are also very real. I think this is one of the fundamental things that's different now We've talked about what's different the fake news Misinformation disinformation that's been around forever, and it always will be what has changed. I Think is precisely the fact that the cost of distribution has gone to zero basically silicon and sand Are now cost is nothing and that's what we make CPUs and fiber optics out of and so we can distribute information And what that's enabled is that anybody can be a publisher the world now is anybody can have a platform and be a publisher and distribute Their information to anybody in the world at essentially zero cost not quite zero, but very low cost And that's created a number of things. Let's think about the big platforms I don't actually think the small fake news websites are that big a problem because they don't actually make that much money And they're not probably having that much influence It's when they start to get distribution through the bigger more reputable networks when they start to take advantage of Facebook and others Twitter and others to get their distribution. That's when we start to be concerned. I think much more The whether you call web 2.0 social media user contributed content those platforms that depend on the users as Laura said Bringing the content to it that's really different than the way publishing used to be done and it's different in an important way because The content platform providers now want to actually lower the barriers for people to bring content to them They want to make it as easy as possible for people to publish They're basically providing open publishing platforms where you can publish anything you want for free and you want to attract that Content if you didn't have that coming in you wouldn't have a plot. You wouldn't have anything at the same time you want to keep out the manipulations the spam the Disinformation but telling the difference is very hard. It's very costly. It takes you tell the difference That's why I would say quality is so important Actually, you need human intervention when you've got 1.8 billion people putting content on the platform Figure out how to screen out the bad content is very difficult. That's what's changed. Well, it seems to me I mean you have what I was trying to say about Facebook being the problem It's more than it's got an environment that's kind of squishy and nice and you got the baby pictures and the dog pictures and then somebody posts a fake news story emits this very friendly warm environment and I think people's Guard is almost down in an environment like that because it feels friendly, right? You got your friends there You got your family there and so I don't and I don't know what you do What Facebook can possibly do when it is meant to be a platform where you can share things with your friends And if you happen to be somebody who has bad information It can easily spread like wildfire well, I focusing right now on less fighting fake news and More on providing trustworthy journalism. There are trustworthy news sites out there which do a good job like there's from ProPublica Mother Jones is actually much better than people know and even more centrist than people know Consumer reports is really good and they're all the schools that I'm on that board So on the one hand you do it you can to support trustworthy journalism on the other hand. There are pragmatic things you can do To strike at fake news again the sleeping Giants approach Is one approach to fighting fake news depriving fake news operators of advertising dollars another thing you can do in other ways is a Frankly a cutting cutting the cord with respect to cable TV There are fake news networks which rely not only on advertising But on cable franchise fees and if cable franchise fees which sometimes run into the billions of dollars If they don't have access to them anymore Then that deprives them of a big source of our revenue so that fake news is no longer as Profitable as it used to in the process. We need to help reporters and news organizations provide trustworthy news That's part of my relatively new obsession about Helping protect reporters from harassment and cyber bullying We also need to help trustworthy news organizations the smaller ones in the case of media lawsuits and So people are beginning to float the ideas of much more affordable media lawsuit insurance It's not a very exciting topic intellectually, but if you're a reporter who's sued or potentially sued by bad actors You really want affordable media lawsuit insurance and I'll stop there even though I can go on and on To real quick just want to speak directly to you. I think your question one. That's related One thing you can do it actually and I think that my feet is a lot of baby pictures because I have a kid I have a bunch of friends with kids etc But actually how people use Facebook varies a lot from market to market from community to community So it's not always that either way though I think one thing platforms can do is provide more context of what what people are reading and fundamentally I think that's part of what we're trying to do with the third party fact-checking program Which is that you know that snopes disputed this but there's more types of content or context that we can surface to help make People help people make informed decisions about what to trust what to share in the first place So that's an area that we're going to continue to work on another though is to try to go further upstream and try to prevent the quantity of Fake news from entering the system in the first place And I think this is where in Craig just touched on this disrupting the economic models are so important if you can make it uneconomical Most of these families will go away. They'll do something else and there's a bunch of different ways That I think platforms can make it uneconomical for fake news publishers a lot of them use tactics Like domain spoofing like, you know ABC.co. It's the ABC.com or That was actually one of Justin Kohler's sites. Yeah, there you go Or redirect cloaking so it says one link and it takes you to another and takes you to another takes you to another So those types of tactics I think you know you can build policies around and automate the other thing You can do is which we haven't done a lot of yet, but it's an area I'm excited about is take a look at the landing pages if you go to a page and it's actually just 90% ads that's a sign. That's probably not a real publication. It's the Denver Guardian isn't actually a real publication It was just a made-up website. So these are the types of areas where I think we've done some work But we've got a lot more work to do and I think the other platforms are looking at it in a similar way Let me pivot off some of the things that you've been saying and let me suggest this that Facebook these various sites that we're talking about in deploring They can post stories they can draw readers if they can't set agendas and they have been reliant on mainstream actual established news media to essentially weaponize fake news and to give it significance and to give it public importance And I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what the media the by media I mean the media that I am that we at the Graduate School of Journal of Train are our students to Take part in the news media. What can they be? What are they doing wrong with respect to fake news? How should they be handling it differently from the way they are and how can they avoid being unwitting of Conflicts in the the kind of pollution if you like contamination of public discourse I I mean I I think one problem I see in the media is that sometimes when something is floating around They report on it or they even give it, you know Attention and I think that doesn't help is that this is my opinion that you actually start to give it Credence when you report on it So that would be one place But I think part of the problem too is though you have a public that wants to believe certain things and I don't you know Did fake news sway the election or Or did the people who I mean stories like the one that I tracked down, you know So that fed into this narrative that's out there that the Clintons were responsible for the deaths of all these people which is in fact A narrative that is floating around on the right in this country And if you're inclined to believe that and you see this story It just reaffirms what you believe or if these stories weren't out there Would you stop would no longer believe that I don't you know, were you gonna vote for Trump no matter what? I am that's a question that I still have, you know What impact is this phenomena actually having? Yeah, I have to say I tend to think that our concern over this is overblown and Driven in part by the fact that these stories like the ones you reported are just so shocking right? It's novel that someone can be so morally bankrupt and then have such power to influence the media narrative I mean, I think the other thing that it's worth paying attention to is what we really want companies like Facebook to be doing here I happen to like Facebook's Relatively gentle approach to this right to try to label certain stories as potentially fake Without taking them down because I think if we've been having a conversation about Facebook and free speech a year ago The conversation we would have been having would be quite different It would be about how much power do we want a company right a corporation? With an algorithm that's not public to manipulate what the public can see right and now we're all sitting here in Berkeley You know with concern over conservative media fake stories Potentially influencing the election in a way that we may not like But is that the the bigger concern and then how much do we really want corporations to use the tremendous power? They do have over what people read To manipulate that content because of what it says, but haven't they been doing that forever? I mean that's we we've gone from basically a world where there were gatekeepers And that's the way it was to one where there are no gatekeepers And so I'm not really sure that you know What's new is that we don't have gatekeepers and I think we're trying to look at what is the impact of that? I think part of the problem is that we spend so much time wishing or thinking we're still in that world We have gatekeepers So we looked at the gatekeepers for solutions and you asked what can the traditional media do so for instance a responsible journalistic organization like NPR I Think there's some things that can do but I'd actually like to expand that to for instance What can the Graduate School of Journalism or Berkeley do? We've been talking about the news providers and the industry that flows information I think a lot of the thing we need to address are the consumers the readers of information We're going to have fake news always and because of the zero cost of information distribution It's not going to go away We can always raise the costs of providing fake news and lower the benefits and moderate it to some extent But there's always going to be disinformation out there and manipulation and infomercials and so forth and so on What we need to really do is educate folks much better to be better consumers of information We have not been in this country addressing information literacy Nearly as much as we need to given the flood of information we've gone from world of scarce information controlled by Largely responsible gatekeepers whose reputations dependent on it to Overly abundant information where everybody has to now be their own filter has to be their own editor And we haven't been teaching our students at any level our Population to be good self editors, you know There's a Stanford study that probably most people are aware of that came out a few weeks ago That looked at high school students and found that going into college that they most of 85% of them couldn't tell the difference Between a genuine news story and a paid promotion They're always going to be paid promotions out there. We can't make those go away We have to make sure that citizens can distinguish between them and recognize what is paid content and what is actual journalistic reporting And that's a good example and there's a whole industry out there. That's devoted to obfuscating that distinction Yeah, so it is so that kind of ignorance in the part of the reader is a produced outcome speaking on behalf of news consumers I Want to be able to pay for news that I can trust What I'd like to in a news aggregator to see would be a let's say a checkbox Which says only show me news from news organizations that have publicly committed to trust worthy behavior that would be like an ethics code diversity policy and You know committed to a good accountability and corrections policy because people do make mistakes no matter what happens And then I wanted an organization of fact checkers Maybe the international network like the one run by folks like a pointer Institute and the American Press Institute So I want to be able to say only show me stuff from organizations that promise to do trust worthy news And that have a good record And you know that's enough for me Speaking in a simple minded way as a news consumer. That's what I want to pay for I already do pay for that I'm looking to pay a lot more for that in a number of different ways Which I don't want to be I don't want to prematurely announce. I would do things like sponsoring a more One way of pledge drives if only they would use my favorite theme But the idea is that I am putting my money where my mouth is a lot of other media impact funders are looking to do this in conjunction with the API Code where they're looking into the ethics of funding nonprofit journalism That's actually a thing and it's a very recent thing weeks ago But the idea is that I do think people are willing to pay for trustworthy news and Frankly, there's a lot of people who are willing to put their money where their mouth is in a big way and That's supported groups like pro-publica and NPR But but some people think bright part is trustworthy You know, I our foxes trustworthy news people have different ideas and other people think NPR is trust and let's see who will put their Money where their mouth is on the other hand again, there's the folks and including sleeping giants who are telling advertisers Hey, if you do you want to be associated with untrustworthy news? Let's see how that works out and Again, let's see how well Pledge drive works out particularly if KQED will allow me to use my favorite theme So so Craig the idea the idea is to threaten advertisers with reputational I don't want to ask you what that joke is Well what I propose to KQED and others for pledge drive my theme would be please dear God make it stop But they no one will go for it Yes, so so let me the idea of sleeping giant is to threaten Advertisers with some sort of reputational harm in exchange for advertising on these undesirable sites. Nothing. That's romantic. We're negative They're just saying to news sites. Hey, do you really want to be associated with this? and That's constructive and positive and I'm Mr. Positive but it does sort of open the door for Criticism and for sort of action taken against sites because you don't like what they're doing I don't like the messages they're showing not because those messages are corrupt or flawed or Deserving of a lack of trust. I mean People would go after Breitbart a good bit of what's on Breitbart is reported. It's reported out It's looks like journalism tastes like journalism. It comes from a different ideological perspective But that doesn't mean it is something that is that that should be Destroyed it's kind of part of the idea lot. It's part of the landscape of public discourse Yet, I can imagine a good many people some of whom are here tonight Who would disagree with that and would think that shutting down a site like Breitbart is an awfully good idea So I mean I worry about the ethical I worry about using ethics as an instrument of kind of political Reprisal and you seem to have this obsession with Breitbart and you're the one who's brought it up Me I'd say boycotts of any sort. That's a two-edged sword People do have to make ethical decisions about that Me after doing customer service on the net for over 20 years I can assure folks that there are a lot more people of goodwill than there are people of bad will out there You'll forgive my faith It's somewhat naive, but the deal is that I've been observing human behavior on the net for a long time And I actually have a lot of confidence in humanity But the thing is that we need to give people the tools that they need to act out of goodwill Understood. Let me just before we go to questions from the audience Let me ask about The dangers of overreaction and I think Catherine you brought up the possibility this is sort of overblown I'm not sure I entirely agree But I have some fear when I read the Google says it will take steps to keep its ads off quote Pages that misrepresent misstate or conceal information about the publisher the publisher's content or the primary purpose of the site Now if you go back and carefully kind of parse that sentence That's a fairly that's a fairly broad mandate to all to to to Basically perform capital punishment on sites that might expose Google to criticism Or might embarrass it in a corporate way, and I just worry a little bit that we might be There might be such a broad brush and the kind of public Sort of unhappiness with what they're seeing in fake news might be Might motivate and might propel a reaction that goes considerably farther than any of us are comfortable with Well, you're good at the sound by capital punishment on If you're on the third page of Google results forget about it if you're not the first page Well, now you're talking about the where you're located in the results But if you're talking about the advertising model as was pointed out earlier There are lots of advertisers out there and lots of advertising channels Google is not the only one and if they start Excluding large swaths of content from their advertising They're gonna be plenty of other people who swoop in as long as people want to go to those sites So as long as it's private individuals and private organizations exercising their right to decide what information They're going to value that doesn't worry me what worries me is if we start to say oh the government should come in and should Decide what news is good for us. We've seen countries that operate that way. I don't want to be living in one of them. I had a Chinese general I was in China and I I got an opportunity to have a off-the-record conversation with this Chinese general and I asked I asked her how much does the People's Liberation Army? concern itself with social media and She said Gave me some vague answers and then looked at me and smiled and said what do you think of Twitter revolution now? And I mean I think from the perspective of some of these other countries they are terrified of exactly what this unleashes and There's part of me. I have moments where I'm like I kind of know what they're saying I mean there is there is a sense that this does create an awful lot of instability and Uncertainty of what's true and it can be used against people. This is an increase This is a hell of an issue. It's I think it's a really Difficult difficult challenging issue for You mentioned if you would put up your hands. We have two people with microphones and Call on you for questions. So In the front one and I'm gonna do three at a time And three in the back Yeah, you Okay, and I just while you do this. I just want to share something that the Chinese Stated their their cyberspace authorities stated issued a policy. It is forbidden to use hearsay To create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts Which is Okay, yes, I was hoping you could discuss the fact that the term fake news is already being perverted President Trump accused some major media outlets of releasing fake news. There's been a sort of a Now the term fake news is being used for articles that are written that a personal You know a politician doesn't like and I think that makes everything more complicated because it's just a way of sort of, you know eliminating People's paying attention to real fake news and just being able to dismiss hard reporting going on and I think in some ways That's even more of an issue than fake news on the internet because unlike what Laura said I think that there's people who get fake news on Facebook sometimes in their communities. They're alerted to the fact It's fake news. I don't think consumers are a hundred percent Stupid, I think they recognize it a lot. I think so, you know, I don't think it's a I mean Clearly it's a big issue But I do think people are aware of it out there and are taking steps to point it out But with Trump going around saying bad news about me is fake news. I think that's a huge issue a constructive approach is again to promote the trustworthy stuff a couple weeks ago, I remembered from Sunday school It's better to a light of candle than curse the darkness. So the term fake news is abused It has emotional redness Resonance that doesn't come from let's say a gullible news or anything like that So we're still going to use the term fake news, but let's support the trustworthy stuff like pledge week I Think that there This is a tremendous problem. I think it's sort of like my I was saying this earlier My sister used to play at my older sister used to play this game with me where I would say something and she'd say it at The same time and then what it would it would just make you shut up and I feel a little bit like you know It's like you say fake news. I'm gonna say fake news too and now everybody's saying fake news and that is kind of crazy I think some of it I would like to see perhaps a different approach to sometimes to coverage We tend to move from event to event to event and recently I was with a group of people Another group of people were talking about this phenomena and maybe we need to think about Sticking with stories and covering them as they unfold instead of just jumping from you know that day's thing You know, so if we're going to follow, you know the health and human services department Just make that an ongoing thing that we're covering rather than just going for the day's Soundbite and maybe some of this is going to involve a different approach to news and rethinking how we cover it as well one small thing I'd add is I Think that it's definitely true that the term for the phrase fake news is being wildly, you know It's being distorted. It's being used for more and more things and your examples a good one But there's actually many I've seen over the last couple weeks or months I would say that it's not totally new one of the things that we look for so on Facebook We let people report things as fake news. We've done that for a long time And if you know if you go and you look at the reports people have reported things that they disagreed with long before the selection So that distortion though, I think significantly larger to your point today is not new entirely So I think what's important is that If you are, you know involved in the issue in some way as a publisher as a platform as a consumer It's just critical that you're very clear about what you mean when you say fake news and that you don't let all of the sort of conflation Prevent you from making progress and whatever it is that you feel is your sort of responsibility Because it's it is being distorted, but it's still an issue and I think that we each in each of us in a different ways need to continue to pursue You go to second question. Yes Oh Actually, I was gonna say something very similar to what that other person just asked but just a quick comment and a question The comment is I too have some Optimism optimism and faith that people who innocently pass fake news will get better at not doing it Just like we don't send emails anymore about Nigerians wanting to send us fortunes As we become aware of the issue. I think it will get better the question that I had Is similar to what that person said? That went when Trump called out CNN and called it a fake news site I thought that was really dangerous I mean clearly the story that he was referring to the one about the Russians the Russian report of Trump's behavior while in Russia The story was in a large sense true I mean that that is there was such a report the alley the the origins of the report were as CNN stated it The general nature of the allegations were what what were stated the idea that it was unverified and Possibly if not probably largely untrue was clearly stated and so there wasn't really anything untrue about the story but by characterizing By by focusing on the fact that the that the report itself might have been untrue and saying therefore that's fake news Set such a situation where now Not only you're mutting the meaning of the term fake news, but you're possibly To be extreme about castrating a news site like CNN to the extent that Trump can get people to believe that CNN is culpable of fake news It then makes the entire network Untrustworthy and you can then say oh, yeah, they're the network to post fake news We don't have to believe anything they say and it becomes very difficult then to decide who you can believe I mean, I guess my question is what can you do about that? Especially when it's the president that's involved I Agree that this is really awful and it's it goes to the problem I mentioned before I think We're going to have Disinformation and manipulated information and bad persuasion always and in fact we're going to have more of it because it's getting cheaper and easier to distribute it What we need are discerning critical thinking Citizens people who actually pay attention to where the news is coming from where the information is coming from and make judgments about that And something like what Trump did is anti-literacy It's telling people you believe what you want to believe and and don't and is standing up representing an institution or about to represent an institution That's very highly trusted the US government. He say don't worry about it. If you don't like it. It's not true This is a really serious problem that we've been facing for some time in this country Anti-science is another part of it. We have an enormous number of people who tell us we should be anti scientific Because we don't like what science is telling us so it must be false This is terrible if our institutions are telling us to be anti-literate and anti science and anti knowledge That's really dangerous. The solution isn't for the government or any other institution to come in and tell us what news is Correct or what information is correct. It's to help people actually value and celebrate information literacy and Critical thinking so that people learn early in school and throughout their lives to actually make judgments and not accept these Statements and for our own institutional leaders to be actually trying to undercut that I think is horrifying Well, I would just dissent a little bit in the sense that what Trump was saying was that the underlying Veracity of the report the intelligence people were passing along was non-existent So he can't very well welcome the fact that they were briefing the president president-elect on reality that did not in his view in his position was didn't exist and that the media have some Responsibility to determine not just whether somebody said something to some someone else But whether what they said was true and he taking the position wasn't true So he you know, he doesn't have a very strong hand in this one, but he tried to play it I think America's foremost media ethics critic provided a salute commentary and solution to this in the one case he points out that When you're talking about politics in the press It's kind of like visiting the monkey cage at the zoo I won't deliver this very well, but you know you look at the monkey cage and they're flinging feces at each other and You think well, they shouldn't do that But what you really think is that what the zookeeper should say is bad monkey And that's the role of the press in this environment He got to the point where we provided a solution to the problem in a segment called CNN leaves it there Where he pointed out that a politician just came out and lied to the reporter It was already well known to be a black and white lie. The reporter was taken aback obviously knew That this was a lie, but he said well, we got to we got to leave it there and So you can look up this segment called CNN leaves it there daily show about eight years ago and And again, this is this guy saying this is probably the most effective media ethics commentator in the country and If you don't get the joke, it's John Stewart So I have a I'm Tracy Taylor from Berkeley side a local news site, which I hope would be qualified as not fake news Catherine brought up the Question about Facebook if we'd had this conversation a year ago We'd be talking maybe about them censoring or curating our news in some way I think that that argument has passed a long time ago because it's been well documented We own we all only see a very tailored customized News in our own feeds what I as a Hillary Clinton supporter was reading on Facebook was totally different from what a Trump supporter was Reading for example, but I'm interested to know from you When did Facebook start seeing this rise in fake news on Facebook? How long ago before the election and why did it take you so long to actually address it? I think at least publicly you only started saying you were addressing it after the election Sure, so we've been working on fake news as part of a broader effort around quality and integrity working She's for a long time. So for instance, like you've been able to report something as fake news for I think years I think to you I did a report on it. So I know you're yeah, this is true. Yeah, we even actually This is this is true news Fact-checked in real time I appreciate it I think about a year and a half ago or actually about two years ago We actually even announced publicly a change we made to try to address fake news Now that said the amount of attention in the wake of the US election has been enormous And we're trying to always listen to our community. So the amount of intensity and the amount of work is increased But in terms of how much we've seen we actually haven't seen a ton of Increase around the election that the amount of fake news on the platform actually and I'm not trying to diminish the importance Of the issue is relatively small. It's a very small percentage about people see it should be smaller We should get it as close to zero as possible I agree there will always be some disinformation out there. So I want to be realistic But I think that you know as long as there's an issue we should try to address it as much as possible But more broadly, I think the question is like how can we make sure that we're creating value for the people who are? using our services on a regular basis and create value for publishers and I think fake news is an important issue but sort of part of a bigger set of challenges that we have and And So I know I appreciate the amount of attention fake news is getting so I'd like the fact that That there's scrutiny and that that that motivates us that makes us excited to go to work And it took us a few a few months about two months after the swallow activity to really get something out there I also want to make sure we don't this side of the other things that are important and then to address your specific question I wanted to take so long Actually for us, you know two months in the wake of the elections that are actually even less because it was before The break and the election was the 9th the 11th We wanted to be really careful Getting third-party fact-tricking organizations online working at the pointer Institute would have the right policies that people would have to adhere To making sure that the system would actually do the right thing. We want to start marking the wrong things as fake news All that was stuff that we wanted to be really careful about so we were trying to balance speed and Responsibility and that's that's always our challenge and The last thing I'll add is There's two sides to all these things right there's which I think you're alluding to which is you know If we start being more having more stringent policies around what content is shared We start to get dangerously close to impinging on speech and other issues and I actually don't think it's well gone away We actually received a lot of criticism just a few months ago about mistakenly taking down the terror and war photo from Norwegian publisher Which photos is there? There's a historical photo about the war in Vietnam Oh, okay, it's a series of children and one of them is at the naked picture from yeah, and so again one of pure little surprise Yes, took it down because it was a naked girl. I think it underage right and So that was a lot of criticism on the other side just recently So we're always going to try to balance that we're going to err on trying to Let people express themselves Because we're concerned with the same things that you're raising But we're also going to try to be as responsible as we can about addressing problematic Was that taken down by a person or by an automated response? So the way it works is very different than I think well then then then publications work So a publication like if you were the New York Times the decision about Posting that photo would be made in the sort of page one meeting at 9 30 in the morning probably and there'd be like 10 20 people That would argue about it for us that gets posted It could be tens of thousands of times You know in this case now just a few then it gets reported and then we have people actually review the reports and make sure the reports Actually violate our community status, which are public and there are things around no nudity. No violence, etc And that can happen relatively quickly Whereas changing the policy itself can take a little bit longer. So in this case it was reported it was taken down and we've since Essentially changed our policy to make a newsworthy exception for photos like this photo And so we're always learning we want to hear more and always just trying to get better at these things I'll just ask a quick follow-up on that didn't Facebook take people out of the equation After there was criticism from conservative groups that there was a bias within Facebook of taking down conservative news and They took people out of the equation and brought it back to just algorithms. No, so so not for not for newsfeed not for problematic content reports what happened is we For trending which is different than you see that sort of box on the left side of the web page We used to have people write these summaries for each report and we Tried to find a way to do that More sort of algorithmic. So what we do now is actually we source a headline from a from an actual publisher As opposed to having people write those headlines themselves. So good questions one two and Three so Okay My question is sort of like what Francis said at first But it's really an incredibly brilliant strategy. It seems so I hate to say even the t-word, but the idea of You know saying oh well, this is fake news It's almost like a playground strategy, you know We're like someone someone's doing something and you call them that and then they call it to you back And then if you react then you're doing this thing, you know And it's just like this sort of cycle And so it seems like the only way that it's it's being responded to you know The people who are you know on most of our sides of the aisle, you know, we would you know We're appalled right we're all appalled we're saying like what I'm saying and then on the other side They just completely believe it and so, you know, I suppose media literacy is that the way to do it? Can that happen? Quickly, you know, that's enough. I mean, you know, it's just that everyone's talking to its own side And of course there is a confirmation bias, but you know, they're really playing on that big time. So That was my question. I don't know if there are further comments on it, but there's other questions as well so I think I see a tremendous hunger in the news industry to do this The thing holding it back maybe is a bit of fear again of harassment and bullying and also Against well, we could call it harassment and bullying in the legal system the litigation stuff So I see people beginning to move on it. I think it's happening faster than I thought That's the silver cloud in the electoral lining You know, the news industry has the idea that something needs to be done There's one guy who was involved in an early phase in this who said that if we don't all hang together We're gonna hang separately And so I do see hope with this Things can happen for that matter one that we have one of the efforts in this again is the trust project And if anyone here wants to talk to Sally from the trust project, she's running at Sally Lairman We can get We can get you an interview with her fairly quickly Especially if she takes that empty chair up there But the thing is that things are happening and that's why I'm beginning to obsess about the issue of harassment and cyberbullying In not only in news media, but in general, but in news media in particular Monica I want to pick a tiny bone with you Ed Because I think what happened at the Trump presser last week was Actually something qualitatively new on this front and you know, it seems to me That you know at this moment on January 19th 2017 we're dealing with a Lot of things we've dealt with in the past, but also new problems What happened there was, you know, CNN and Mother Jones, you know had covered the story well before the election Reported on the existence of these memos from this former intelligence professional Did not say what they contained but said that they existed and that they had been passed to the FBI Buzzfeed published the memos What Trump did at the presser was you know when when Jim Acosta got up to ask his question said not you not you You are fake news your organization is terrible quiet like all these things in a row sort of deserve a little unpacking and So what I'm curious from each of you is how What you identify as the qualitatively new thing that's going on in this space and whether You see a qualitatively new doable Remedy Crank has already laid out his But I'm curious what the rest of you have to say I You know something when we were talking about it came to mind the faculty called CNN out in a press conference Was definitely new however the Obama administration initially didn't want to give As I recall interviews to Fox News because they didn't like Fox News and people were all over the Obama administration for this So in that sense, it's just it's a degree of difference. I mean, I don't think we've ever seen that where a President called somebody out like that and from what I'm hearing CNN at one point came to Fox News's defense over something with Trump and Fox News has come back and been supportive of CNN And so it seems like there is an effort right now for journalistic organizations to stick together To defend each other's right to report the news and that seems to me right now Very important thing that is going on at this moment to resist that kind of singling out that the Trump that Donald Trump did I guess I agree It is true. Of course the administrations have played favorites forever it did feel as if What Trump was doing was criminalizing editorial judgment and in a way to banish your you're off the table You're no law. I'm not considering you a journalist anymore You're proffering something else and that seemed to me to ratchet up the the combat if you like A question we're Ma'am you recently used to mention China a minute ago, and I recently one of the other students from the journalism school went to China on a sorry went to China on a an exchange with other journalists and Entrepreneurs and one of the things that they talked about was the Great Firewall You know where Google and Facebook are blocked within that entire country You can't even access that type of information and now earlier we spoke of Groups organizations that would help filter or create filters for the consumer on what media they may or may not be able to consume Where do we lie and you know getting the right media and trampling on our own first amendment rights to ensure that we are Blocking the wrong people and the right people in Well one of the things that I found heartening about this debate is virtually no one has suggested that a government-imposed solution is a good idea here We have a robust first amendment protection and although there are narrow categories of speech that are unprotected The Supreme Court has said you know quite recently in a case dealing with the stolen Valor Act right a case involving claiming that you Have won an honor that you did not win That speech cannot be Outside the first amendment merely because it is false right there has to be something in addition to that And I think anyone who doubts that the government should not be involved should at least try to go through the exercise Of what exactly it is that they want the government to do right do you want Congress to pass a law prohibiting falsehoods in certain areas right if not do you want them to say false speech is Impermissible leaving it's a prosecutor to decide what to deal with that when you go down that thought exercise I think it's clear that a government solution doesn't make a lot of sense And so you know we're left with intermediaries trying with this And I personally like you know the approach that Facebook has taken of labeling speech rather than Rather than Sensoring it because I think things we do have a different first amendment tradition here Just to goad you a little bit on this if my website is starved of traffic and forced to shut down because of something Google does How much comfort am I supposed to derive from the fact that it wasn't the government who did it? Well, but but I think I you know at least I hope I'm I'm saying that that's a concern, right? I Think we should be concerned as I was saying earlier about how much we rely on intermediaries And how much we want them to suppress speech in the name of combating false news because Because there are these choke points for speech right that Internet intermediaries are them payment card companies with the same way right if you use them to try to to try to cut off payment as was Done with WikiLeaks, right? to certain news sources and so yeah Doesn't matter to you as the website owner whether it's the government or someone else You still can't get the traffic that you were looking for Three more questions if you you and the back yes, the Man with the glasses. Thank you So like a precision machine If you have a microphone go ahead, okay In his 2015 book the devil's chessboard David Talbot the founder of salon comm uses Declassified public records to trace a long history of the New York Times basically allowing the CIA to plant stories For example They handpicked a journalist for the Times to send to Congo to cover Patrice Lumumba Who invented stories about torture chambers and political assassinations and stuff like this? I think you could also draw a pretty straight line from their coverage of The Gulf of Tonkin incident to their coverage of WMD's in Iraq for example So I was wondering first of all on what on what grounds can you really draw a distinction between? those falsified and planted stories and What we're discussing here today is fake news and Secondly, what can we do to combat or push back against false stories coming from mainstream or trustworthy news organizations? Well, that's a good question Who wants to who wants to have at it the if a news organization Signs up project to follow through with Corrections and accountability You tell them. Hey, this was not factual. Here's the evidence and then you see the results Give them a chance and then publish it Normally, of course, you'll just be publishing something which say how wonderful they were about fixing the article Yeah, I'm Mr. Positive. You've really you've identified an area of real frailty and vulnerability of the press if you've been lied to By an annul by a source you pledge confidentiality to blowing the whistle on that source becomes ethically extremely problematic and so government lies Delivered under those terms become extremely difficult to expose But I think it's still worth I think distinguishing between what you're talking about in the fake news that we've been discussing this falls within the bailiwick of reporters Negotiating and trying to sort of confirm the veracity of information. They're getting from sources what we're talking about now is the deliberate fabrication of information by by Essentially the equivalent of reporters acting for sort of personal benefit because that fabrication is extremely Profitable extremely useful and as a constant as a civic consequence of that a great many people go around believing things that aren't true so The ultimate the result of what you're describing what we've been discussing is very much the same Which is people believing things that aren't the case and then in that then they have a common Dysfunction I agree with that, but I think that Reporters are in a far better position Even though they are hoodwinked you don't have to they are misled they are deceived They're in a better position because that's their job is to try to determine the veracity of information They're given so I see where you're going with it But it's a kind of a different and continuing problem that journalism faces Yeah, I think that it's Fundamentally a more challenging issue. It's a related issue. We can argue with the same or different I thought it'd be the most important thing if the question is how do you address it? I think what you're pointing out if I is that you know Saying that the New York Times is trustworthy in this case like wouldn't have helped Which just points to the fact that we need multiple approaches to the same problem I think information literacy is an important one right a Skeptical reader can ask questions look at what the sources are which are cited etc I think skeptical journalists as well, which you know, whether the blowing whistles are just raising questions is also Important piece and then I think dialogue right you can talk with people that you know or people who think are experts and see Whether we facilitate it on a platform like Facebook or just in person about you know Why you may or may not want to believe this thing and an active debate there is really really healthy and those are parallel tracks to you know trustworthy labels or sort of reputations at the Publication level and I think a lot of this is just because you need you just need a multiple prong approach question Does anybody have a microphone? Yes, I wanted to know if it's true that right-wing fake news Generates more revenue than left-wing fake news I will say that Justin Kohler the gentleman that I tracked down claimed that he did that he tried to Come up with fake left-wing news stories, and they just didn't do as well, so He stopped doing that's all I I don't how do you prove that I don't know that's just what he told me Hello, so beyond the financial motivations there can be broad political and intellectual impacts of face new fake news So it can extend like virally far beyond any retraction or correction. That's issued afterwards So one issue or one idea is to like message people who saw the original story or derived story to try and curtail the impact of fake news, and I was wondering if you had any ideas about this or plans for Trying to help this issue Yeah, so I actually think that There's two there's two ways to approach that one is to let people know retroactively through you know Maybe if they read it, maybe if they shared it etc, and we're looking into ideas like that the other is to just try and you know further upstream either react more quickly or Read it from again train the system in the first place by disrupting the financial incentive So I think you know you want to you want to make sure that this little comes into the system as possible And then when it happens you need to react as quickly as you can and if it's if you didn't find it until later Then you need to consider Letting people know the question is who and how I don't know if we'll do that, but it's certainly something that we're considering Thanks, so I'm Sally Lierman, and I lead the trust project. Thanks for the shout out Craig. He's a funder and We're trying to to work on the positive end We're trying to work on the positive end in the sense of helping people identify quality news But what I wanted to ask you about was today Buzzfeed reported on a survey that they had done of Over a thousand people Asking where they got their news and whether they trusted it most people in the survey not to to as you might expect Do you get it from Facebook get their news from Facebook? Most people also said that they do not trust the news they get on Facebook So my question is what is this a good or a bad thing? Is this Could this be part of what is undermining trust in the news? And if it is then either way, what can we do about it? Well, it's I mean I I think you have an opinion. I know I don't I'm not really sure it's an interesting I just don't I Don't know what to make of survey results like that Because there's clearly cognitive dissonance here. You know, this is where I get my news But I don't believe it. I do what kind of a fool do you take me for? And I wonder whether that's become a cultural trope where of course I consume lots of news But I don't believe a word they say and yet it shapes my actions It shapes my world view it does it has all the effects of news that I would consider trustworthy somehow Somebody who anybody who would say, of course, I believe what I read in New York Times great newspaper People would look at you they'd walk away if you're in a bar They'd move down a couple stools because they think you're you know, you're a fool So I just wonder whether there is a larger kind of Mistrust in major institutions that you're seeing a portion of it doesn't have to do with the fact that what they read on Facebook They fundamentally disbelieve well, I should clarify that's an important point but the the numbers the percentages as people who trusted news on from their print From their newspaper and from the tele their television news was much higher and I agree I think the survey had some faults, but still there's something there that seemed noteworthy Yeah, I mean I love to speak to it So I think it's I mean there's two sides right a lot of people are considering news on Facebook I think it's important to note that we don't write news right we're a platform and we connect people with sources of news That they find interesting. I think That by and large, it's a good thing because I think that we've helped a lot of people discover a lot of content That they might not have discovered otherwise. We're not the only reason this happens I think the internet has done that more broadly in a much bigger way, and I think that's good You can I read the publications I read are not from San Francisco right in the middle of the 20th century you basically could only read one of you know One two or three papers if you lived in most cities in the country I think so I think by and large it's a good thing and I think skepticism is a good thing And so you know is it I don't really think trust is binary I think that you know you there's a certain amount of skepticism a lot of skepticism a little skepticism And I think that if people I don't want Facebook to be a place where people don't try anything So that means that we've got work to do but I also think the fact that we have a Skeptical set of people who use our platform is good to your points about now information I think that's actually terrific news to the extent that it was a good survey and was measuring what it says it's measuring That that a large fraction of our population Here's more of their news stories from Facebook than anything else is hardly surprising because that's where they're spending their time reading So that they see more news there than elsewhere completely unsurprising that they actually recognize that it's not and Platform that is a editorial platform that they aren't selecting the news They aren't verifying it that the reliability of it is lower and that you should be more skeptical about it That's also great news. I wish I believed it more, but but I think it's great news That people recognize that there are different qualities of information and that they should pay attention to the source And they should recognize that if they see it on Facebook They should just like we tell our students if you read in Wikipedia It may be right, but don't assume that it is go and check a little further if you're going to actually rely on it to Make a decision or make a judgment Jeremy, yeah, this is for Adam Since so many people get So much of their news through the thorough print of Facebook and I think a large contingent population That's all they receive and well most people here might visit news websites or watch television news and get kind of a package and a nice diverse mix of Stories that are oppositional to maybe what they feel and some stories that are feel-good and some things that are upsetting Facebook's algorithm seems to be designed for pleasurable experiences. You're seeing things that reaffirm your beliefs and and because content is just so Atomized based on just sharing stories and if I go on Facebook and all I see things that I agree with it seems That's what's incentivizing this this this faith news and the economic model fake news. How does this? How does someone like Facebook? How do you present content to people? That's maybe upsetting or oppositional to maybe their beliefs I mean, I I agree like I wouldn't even want to see things that I disagree with on Facebook But I have to admit there might be a certain value to that sure So I think a couple of things one is our mission on newsfeed is to connect people with stories They find meaningful not stories. They find pleasurable right and a lot of but we can't really know for every individual What they find meaningful and some of the things that we look at which are essentially proxies like to do like it Are gonna correlate with you agreed with it, but some of them are and we're moving More and more towards longer signals I'd call them things like did you spend a lot of time reading the article did you have a conversation about the article? By the way people on the internet have long conversations about things that they disagree with like all the time We find it's actually it's one or the other You know for videos that you full-screened how much of the video did you watch etc. And more and more we're moving to those Longer signals that said there are multiple forces at play here One is that people do self-select into the friends that they have on the platform and the publishers that they follow And they're gonna self-select into somewhat like-minded Friends and publishers which the same when they do offline The and that is a force towards less diversity by overall not always been overall There's also force in the other direction Which is people tend to be friends and with a lot of people hundreds of people as the average and they tend to follow lots of publications So for instance in Europe the average person has over 50 friends from outside of their country and it's hard to find 400 friends and 50 of them who live in another country that are all like-minded And so that pushes for diversity and we find by and large these forces roughly net out to as far as best we can tell And we continue to look into this because this is important It's a really important question that people are exposed to about about as much content that they disagree with on Facebook As they do office, and that's important and we want to make sure that that Stays that way We have about five minutes left. So we'll try to get a couple more She might hurt the guy next to her shoes Thank you So I guess I think fake news is a really important topic, and I'm glad we're talking about it But it also seems kind of premature to me to talk about fake news when Millions of people in America don't have any trust in the media establishment at all And so I guess my question is is our concentration on this a little bit misguided Should we be focusing on fake news or instead should we be focusing on building up trust in America in the media in general? And let me ask you do you think that fake news is another way of Describing this larger sense of mistrust in the media. Is that the reason it's taken on? It's been so widely adopted by people and applied to wrongdoing and has nothing to do with fabrication Well, I think I Think the issue is that some people might not trust anything any media mainstream establishment has to say they don't care if Facebook or somebody else flags it is fake they think okay if it's coming from a quote-unquote Establishment news source. I'm not going to trust it because I don't trust the you know establishment So what I'm wondering is why are we focusing on this kind of small? Subsect and why aren't we looking at the bigger picture? I actually I think it's a really important question and I I think unfortunately You know we haven't talked much about just the problem of financing media right now and that and you know There used to be you know armies of local news reporters who were within their communities and out there Representing their local community and so you could have a relationship with them And so we also are at a moment when local newspapers are going under and I feel like somehow to address this question We have to come up with a way to have More local news that's interactive with its community that has boots on the ground I mean I started the first news I reported was going to local community board means You know and looking at you know issues over like double parking, you know And but that that kind of being there in the community is really important because then people feel like it's their media I live in the mission in San Francisco and mission local Actually has become a source about my community and it has its flaws or whatever But I kind of trust them because they're right there and I think That problem right there is Huge and we need to do something to address it and you know It's probably bigger and beyond this panel One more question Hi, I wanted to ask about public data and accountability So my data analysis actually showed an increase in fake news shares from like hundreds hundreds of thousands in May to Millions in November per day and that's using what data I was able to find And I don't know like if you will trust me or Facebook right and on a broader level Facebook and Google can Instantly restructure the entire incentives around the media ecosystem right they can decide what news gets attention toward it And do they have responsibility to provide transparency about how their code impacts that for example? They could provide aggregate aggregate data about how much attention is being directed to what content and sites That would be like one example of this sort of accountability in public data So I should probably take this I think we have a lot of responsibility To be as transparent as we can Most importantly to communicate our values and our standards which guide all of our decisions And that's important not only from public accountability But also from a partnership perspective with publishers so they know what we're doing what we care about so they can You know decide to line or not align etc and for our users so to your point about literacy So they can understand how the system works I think that when it comes to issues like fake news it gets challenging and you can do things like aggregate data But it becomes challenging because of the adversarial relationship the more specific we are about what we're doing the less effective if it comes And so it's a balance and I think that we're getting better So if I'm my time at Facebook over the last three years We've announced every major ranking change proactively which wasn't the case when I started at Facebook eight or nine years ago So we do we do do we do put a lot out But I think what we have the most room to improve is to figure out how to more effectively scale that outreach because I regularly meet people who don't know who think things are that are Got Confidential that are not and so we have to move we have to figure out how to more effectively scale Originally that's a problem that I'm taking them pretty seriously Starting last year, but definitely I'm talking to people who are doing similar work Analyzing networks of fake news and for that matter about actors harassers and all that That's tough. So I'm going what a platform a tech platform can say about that is sometimes constrained by law regulation particularly in Europe I'll add since again. This is based on talking to people who are doing this Be careful because if you're doing analytical work, which can expose networks and some bad actors They fight dirty and so be careful Well with that we've run out of time I want to thank our panel from my left Lord Laura Seidel, National Public Radio, Adam Massary, Facebook, Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, Internet Pioneer Catherine Crumb, litigator and professor of law in the University of California Berkeley Jeffrey Maggie Mason Who is economist and professor of information University of California Berkeley? I'm Ed Wasserman Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Thank you very much