 with the news hour and working with us and making possible our arts coverage. We've given it a name, Canvas. It has enabled us to tell stories that really are the heart of people think of news as straight news, and yes it is, but if we couldn't tell the kinds of art stories that we are able to do, we wouldn't be telling the whole picture of America. And frankly, it also enables us in so many ways to get away from the coast, to get to the middle of the country, the heart of the country, and again to tell stories that are so important in our role as journalists. So I just have to say the thank you tonight as we begin this conversation. It is, thank you, it is, the title is Making Issues Move the Role of Data and Digital in Our Democracy. And you could not ask for two individuals who are better suited to talk about it than Teddy Goff and Ori Renaud. I think you have their bios. You know that Ori is at the White House heading up digital strategy there. Teddy Goff, of course, ran digital for the Obama campaign, has been very involved in governance and in digital on the political side. He now runs his own firm. But I want to start this conversation with kind of a personal question so that people know where the two of you are coming from. First of all, where did you grow up? Second of all, just to kind of place you generationally, may I ask how old you are? And third, how did you get news and information when you were becoming an adult? Teddy, I'm going to start with you. Sure. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And I've moved four miles in my life. I'm 34 years old. So, you know, I was in college when I think I was one year behind Zuckerberg and his set. So I remember clearly when Facebook was coming along and then after it, Twitter and everything else. I was an avid reader of the New York Times as a kid. And I still am, but obviously the kind of form factor for the Times has changed. I'm a person who spends an embarrassing amount of time on Twitter. And I try to get, you know, credible news sources from it. But the discovery mechanism is Twitter these days. What about you, Ory? So I grew up in New York as well in Queens. I went to college in Manhattan. So we have a very New York-centric view here. I'm also in my early 30s. And I get a lot of news and got a lot of news growing up. I think online early on, I was that geeky kid who loved computers and loved the Internet. I think I'm less social-driven in how I get my news. I think that some of the really interesting things that have happened in the past couple of years are how news has been able to find platforms other than their own websites. I'm a big fan of Apple News, for example. So going beyond what some people might think, you look at Twitter and that's it. I think Twitter is a great place to hear a perspective on news from people you follow. It's not the best place to get the news on its own. So I want to add, and to both of you, Teddy, to both of you, do you think average Americans are better informed today than when you were growing up or not? I think it depends how you define better informed. But my answer is no, they're worse informed. I think they receive more content. There are more ways to receive a greater diversity of content and some of that's a good development. The last panel spoke about that very compellingly. I don't think that older, the days of the mainstream media that it's easy to be nostalgic about were perfect by any stretch and they left a whole lot of marginalized voices out of the discussion, of course. But they also made sure that everybody was reliant on essentially a single set of facts or maybe two sets of facts but not a hundred or a million sets of facts. And I think it's impossible to look at the dialogue today and conclude anything other than that it's utterly transformed to its own detriment by misinformation and confusion and that's a result of the media discovery ecosystem that we have today. How do you see it, Ori? I think people have the opportunity to be as informed as they ever have. And there's a responsibility as an American citizen to inform yourself as to what's really going on and I think today's information environment provides more opportunity to find information, to find facts, to learn the truth than ever before. There's responsibility that comes with that. There's challenges that comes with that. It's a more complex information environment. The gatekeepers that have traditionally been at the forefront of that information environment are changing. One thing we see a lot is people talk a lot about followership and reach and all that but when you think about engagement, who's actually driving reactions and engagement and interest online? Individuals drive far more engagement than brands. You look at this in media and you look at the engagement rates of a major publication versus some of its top journalists. You look at it in politics, in government, in consumer brands. Individuals are driving that engagement. People want to hear from other people they know and they trust and so that voicefulness becomes a key part of it. That presents challenges but it also presents a lot more avenues through which people can be informed. So does that mean you think on balance that people are better informed because of the influence of individuals more than ever? I think people can be better informed. They have the opportunity. So scenario, whether you're the President of the United States or somebody running for the Senate or you run a non-profit right now or you're in office or you are in a position where there's an issue that really matters to you whether it's the environment or you want to do something about tax cuts what's the best way to get that message across right now, Ori? So I think one thing to note that's important is digital has gotten a lot easier. It's not the secret sauce that you need a lot of expertise in anymore. The secret to digital is speak like a human being and be authentic. Create content people actually care about. So for those of you who are in this room working at community foundations a lot of these great organizations used to be that you needed to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a website you needed a video production team or consultants that would charge you $30,000, $40,000 a video designers, creators, all this stuff. It's gotten a lot easier. iPhone videos are fine. There are tools out there that let you design graphics like Canva that are easy to use and simple. Digital has made it a lot easier for all kinds of groups to get messages out. And it's unfortunate that sometimes people get in their own way. We get in our own way. If you're on Twitter and you're looking to a PDF report are people really going to open that on their phones? If you're writing a press release that sounds like it was written for the board of your organization and with no other audience in mind is it really going to break through? So digital is easier than it's ever been. The bar for authenticity is higher, but that's a good thing. So you pretty much only touched on digital there. Does that mean that it's 100% digital or do you worry about the legacy media, old fashioned media? How do you think about how that message is going to reach many people you need to read? I've spent a lot of time thinking about that because one of the challenges coming in to a new administration and I think every administration faces this is where does digital fit? Digital in the White House has evolved going back to the Clinton years and the Bush years and the Obama years. And I think where we are right now is digital isn't this separate thing. It's part of everything. When you think about the New York Times article you just read. Yeah, you could have read it in print or maybe you heard the story on their podcast or maybe you saw one of their reporters in a clip online. More likely you saw an article on Twitter or you went on their website. Digital isn't a separate thing anymore. It's kind of a part of the entire information ecosystem. I'd say it's the overwhelming majority of the information ecosystem. So Teddy, does that sound like what you would do? Whether you were working in the Obama administration, working on that campaign, or for the kind of work you do right now? Yeah, I agree with most of what was just said. And I certainly think that there's digital in the so-called legacy media. I don't know why people call it that. The traditional media are interwoven. The New York Times subscription base is bigger than it's ever been during the rise of Twitter. The two can complement each other and support each other's growth. I believe that. And I think when you think about a media strategy you've got to think about how to get a message out everywhere. I guess I do think, and I presume we'll sort of get into this, it's important not to be too utopian though about how one finds an audience today or what it means to deliver a message that's interesting to people. A lot of messages aren't going to be that interesting to people, but they may still be important. A lot of messages may have difficulty finding a passionate audience. They may resonate broadly but shallowly. And I think that's part of the reason why we're seeing polarization in our politics is that these platforms obviously create an incentive for those who are yelling and screaming or talking to some community of passionate concern. That can feel great when it helps produce or accelerate the Arab Spring or when same-sex marriage, that movement moves so quickly because people are telling their stories and people are finding their community and everyone's retweeting each other. It doesn't feel so great when it has to do with hate, when it has to do with fear, when it has to do with grievance. I think a question that everybody in media and politics and tech is going to have to fight over and hopefully come to some non-dystopian resolution too is how do we continue to make sure that people can be well-served by content, can find the content they care about, can be well-served by politicians and media. They're giving them the kind of things they care about without playing to the absolute worst instincts in human nature. And that's a real challenge, I think, for people who are trying to get attention around a less sexy issue or something that's out of the news or something where you're urging moderation rather than something at the extremes. Don't worry. How do you do that? Let's just talk about it. There's a lot of discussion, there's a lot of criticism out there right now. Go ahead and respond. Well, I think you said something really interesting. You talked about interesting versus important. If it's important, we need to demonstrate why it's interesting. I'm thinking about a lot of the audience in this room. When you think about what your goals are, what your metrics of success are, if you're looking for the same level of engagement on a piece of content, on a piece of information that really kind of tugs at the heartstrings, that has that emotional pull, as you are on something, let's say, related to tax policy, which I love when people get less excited about, you're not going to get the same engagement. That's okay. But if it's important and not instinctively interesting, how are you demonstrating why it's important? How are you demonstrating the relevance to the audience you're trying to reach? At the White House, we make a lot of videos that explain policy. We make videos that really kind of dive into why are we doing this, why does it matter, and we make some funny videos. We know that the funny videos are going to do way better, but our metric of success is different. If we make an animated explainer video on a piece of policy and it does a million views, that's great. If we try to be really funny, we did this thing with, there was a video clip where some people heard Yanny and some people heard Laurel. It was this weird internet thing. We made a video on that. That did like 30 million views. Different measures of success, and that's okay. I'm as happy and as proud with the million views on the policy issue because it got through. We were able to talk about why it matters, why we're doing what we're doing to an audience that's engaged. And is there a limit to that? Is there a point where you say the entertainment piece of this, the humor piece of this is taking people's attention away from the point we're trying to make? I don't think so. I think there have been numerous examples of people in elected office being funny and being serious. I think President Obama was great at bringing pop culture into the White House. It was a great way to get people engaged. Once people are engaged, there are more opportunities to talk about policy. Eddie, what about that? You know, I think, you know, I guess to me to think about a funny video is almost the wrong example. You know, there's nothing wrong with a funny video. Funny videos are going to get views. I have no problem with politicians or media outlets or anybody else putting out funny videos. I guess to me the bigger concern is let's think about some other examples of what can draw an audience. So it's obvious that, you know, these are all kind of different examples, but the sort of freak show element of politics, you know, Speaker Pelosi ripping up a piece of paper is going to get more attention than an actual policy issue of concern to people's day-to-day lives. It's obvious that hate and vitriol get a lot of attention. It's obvious that, you know, whatever is in the Twitter, you know, news cycle of the day gets a lot of attention. So, you know, I think there's going to be nice examples where, you know, a serious policy explainer gets a decent amount of views and the goal wasn't virality and that's considered a success. There's going to be examples where funny video gets a lot of views and that's innocuous. I think if you look at the ecosystem as a whole, the incentive structures are badly misaligned and the whole system is built to monetize, you know, people's reactions to things that are, you know, sort of orthogonal to whether it's healthy to the discourse or productive to the actual policy outcome. Right. And that's my question. I think you said something really true there about incentives being misaligned, especially when we talk about media. So I come from a media and journalism and publishing background and I think one of the things that is great about government is we don't monetize our content. So it's not like there's an incentive to get more views versus less views. We can focus on the topics we want to be talking about. When you're in publishing and you're monetizing through display ads or through content recommendation engines, you are dependent on the amount of clicks you get for your lifeblood. If people aren't coming to your site and that's how you're monetizing, you're done. And so there's an incentive there to get people there regardless of the value or depth of the engagement that follows. I think the good news is a lot of people in media are starting to experiment with other avenues of monetization, with other incentive structures that provide different ways to look at it. So one of them is Quartz. It's a global business publication. It doesn't have any display ads. It's built around native content and therefore they're not in the business of chasing clicks for the purpose of monetizing display ads. When they first launched, they sold sponsorships on share voice. People, brands wanting to be a part of that particular content experience, be a part of that publishing ecosystem and not having to worry about how many times did this display ad load, and by the way, it probably loaded on the bottom of the site where nobody saw it anyway. So the incentives in that kind of legacy structure, again, legacy, I don't know if it's the right word, but they are misaligned. And for media, not just journalism, but media to do well, I think we need to have serious conversations about what engagements are of high value. If somebody loaded a pre-roll ad and watched the video for two seconds, was that worth it? How are we going to create mechanisms for people to be drawn in more deeply to long-form content? Sometimes people think the internet is snackable, short-form, punchy, pithy. There is room for long-form on the internet if you can demonstrate value. What's the incentive for anybody engaging in the internet, Teddy and then Ori, to think about the health of our democracy, which is what we're here to talk about, to think about where we're going as a country, to think about our values as Americans? I think the short answer is they're not provided that incentive. I mean, there's a narrow slice of people who care about that because they care about that and they may seek out content or conversations that get to what you're talking about. I've been thinking a lot, I'm sure we all have, about the politics of optimization and what that means. I used to be a lot more rosy about it, not just because I used to win elections and now we've lost some elections, but I think this has happened all over the world. I've said this a lot of times, but it's no coincidence that President Trump is considered good at Facebook and so is President Duterte and so is the Brexit movement, and so is the German far right and the French far right and President Erdogan and President Orban. Some of them may be Prime Minister. Sorry, I probably got that wrong, but I mean, these platforms serve to the advantage of these types of autocrats and I don't think that President Trump necessarily belongs in Lee with all of those people, but with some of them he does. And so I think it's a short, let's talk about a type of optimization that I think most of us would find innocuous. If you log into Facebook and if you have a friend who just got engaged to be married or just had a kid, that's probably going to be the first thing that comes up. And I think we all think, well, that makes sense. That's good news, that's much more interesting than most of the posts. Okay, I'm fine with that. I think it's a pretty short hop from there to let's serve ads to people who may care about health care, let's serve them ads about health care, people who care about immigration, let's serve them ads about immigration, and it's a pretty short hop from there to find pockets of people who are racist, people who are intolerant, people who are driven by grievance or fear of the other, fear of immigrants, fear of women, whatever it may be, and serve them content that's going to stoke that and mobilize them further, help them find each other and radicalize them each other even further. And so it's hard to really, I think everyone thinks, well, engagement photo on Facebook, why shouldn't I be served that? That's nice, that's a better experience for me, but it's a very short line I think from there to some of the much more malign effects that we see and it's the same kind of monetization mechanics and obviously the same technical mechanics that drive both. Ori, clearly a lot of what Teddy's describing is going on right now. How do you see that from where you sit? So I think you asked about the incentives online and I think when you think about the ways in which people organize, when you think about the financial incentives of media, when you think about the kind of civic society nature of information and media, digital isn't that fundamentally different in kind from any other form of media, it's different in scale, it's different in scope. And so before the era of, say, Facebook ads, as you were talking about, you could target a particular type of person by saying, I think they watch that kind of TV show. I'm going to buy ads on that kind of TV show. Now you can buy it by whatever particular interest area Facebook offers. The CDC, for example, we're working with them really closely running ads around the opioid issue. We built a website called Crisis Next Door where people could share stories about how they've been impacted and then we turned those into ads. The idea is to fight the stigma of opioid addiction and show how it's a crisis that touches every community. The targeting that we're able to do with those kinds of pieces of information is very valuable. It's not based on medical history or anything like that, but based on geographic areas where CDC is telling us there's a higher level of concern with the opioid crisis, things like that. That's a good thing. That increases the efficiency of the delivery of the message. It reduces waste. And so old media, new media, legacy media, digital media doesn't matter. It's all about how you use it. The tool itself, I don't think, is the evil part. And so let's talk about... I mean, let's talk about the political motivations here, the policy motivations, political motivations. They exist everywhere. And the motivations to stick to the facts, to stick to what's accurate. I mean, where are we? We are now in an environment where misinformation, disinformation is flying around. What is our responsibility? What's your responsibility at the White House? Teddy, how do you see... Teddy, how do you see the responsibility of folks, whether they are in public office or whether they work in public policy? And then, after this, I want to ask you about the role of the social media companies. Well, I was going to get to that, so I had to short circuit that, but I think it's impossible to answer the first question without getting to what it sounds like your follow-up is going to be. I mean, to me, it goes without saying that the press should report the truth is going to be debates about, you know, what's interpretation and what's truth. But, you know, I think reasonable people can agree most of the time on what truth is and the press should report that. It goes without saying the politicians should speak the truth and not originate or further disinformation. That's not the politics that we have right now, but it should be the politics, and I think it's hard to dispute that. You know, to me, the problem... And I think, you know, Ori said earlier, I agree, but more 30 years into the Internet age and 15 years into the Facebook age and people can educate themselves and learn how not to further disinformation and things like that. But I do think that the primary responsibility here has to rest with the platforms. That doesn't, by the way, make me particularly optimistic that we're going to get a solution anytime soon. But there's study after study after study that shows that if a person has been exposed to something that's false and then they're also exposed to a fact check or something that says this has been disputed and that's true, the damage is done. They are highly likely to remember, recall, and believe the thing that they said and in fact they're likely to distrust the fact checker. And that may actually just sort of make this vicious spiral get worse. So, you know, to me, the only possible solution is going to come when fewer people are exposed to less misinformation and there's no way to achieve that. I mean, again, we can all do our part, you know, individual people can do their best to be educated and not share misinformation. Politicians don't have to do it. The press can, you know, figure out ways to do it less, although I don't think they do it that much. You know, but fundamentally, to the extent that these campaigns are, whether it's domestic or foreign, you know, these are almost always campaigns. They have a purpose. They have a political bent. They may be trying to make money as well. You know, those campaigns need not to be able to spread their content on Facebook and elsewhere and have it achieve, you know, massive reach in part by way of an algorithm that is designed to make a handful of shareholders money. And there's no solution, I think, that doesn't, you know, sort of originate there. What about that? I mean, the obligation and responsibility to be accurate and to think about what it is that's either misinforming or disinforming the American people. So, I think, in our role at the White House, the thing we can do best and what we try to do is to share as much of the detail as possible to make the case but to share the why, to delve into that information and to, frankly, work across government, our sphere to make information more accessible. So and so says the budget increases funding for this and that's really bad. So and so says it cuts funding and that's really good. Okay. How do we make it so that to find the answer, people don't have to wade through a 600-page PDF? How do we surface that information to make it more accessible? And you're right. Some people are going to get the information that isn't true. Some people are going to believe it without digging in. I think in government, what we can do best is give people as much information as possible. It's their tax dollars. And in digital, what we need to be thinking through is how do we use the digital tools and resources that exist to make information more accessible than it's ever been before? There are going to be disagreements. We made a video explaining why pulling out of the Paris deal was a good idea. It talked through the lack of burden sharing, the lack of enforcement, the differentiation between levels of countries in terms of obligations and the French embassy in D.C. took the video, edited it, crossed out our words and put their own words into it. Okay, cool. They have a different perspective. They literally took our exact video file, manipulated it, not in a bad way. I think we need to be careful about how we use some of these words and some of the implications of them. And they made their case. And then people get to the side. And what is the role of ... I'm going to come back to this in a minute, the folks who are originating the material, but what is the role of our social media platforms? Facebook has made, Twitter, YouTube. What is the role of these incredibly powerful social media platforms? I don't think there's an easy answer there. And I think the answers also depend on what kind of problems and what kind of content we're talking about. These companies have started something called the Global Internet Forum to Counterterrorism. And it's actually an incredible effort they've put together where they're able to take down almost all terrorist content, about 98% of it, within two hours of posting, automatically without a human ever seeing it. They're doing something called hashing where if a video goes up on YouTube, an ISIS video goes up on YouTube, and YouTube takes it down, they'll add it to the hashing database, and when that video goes up on Facebook, doesn't matter if the file name's not exactly the same, doesn't matter if it's not the exact same length, Facebook will be able to take it down automatically because the digital signature that video is in their database. That's the kind of content moderation I think we all agree we want these companies doing. It's the kind of content moderation these companies feel comfortable doing. When we get into who gets to decide what's true and what's not, we get into much more complicated issues. In the life space, for example, there was a piece of content that was taken down. It was of a medical doctor saying that a late-term abortion is never medically necessary. It was ruled to be disinformation. There was a medical doctor who disagreed, and there was a big debate about that. Should Facebook be in the business of deciding that? Should a medical doctor be able to express an opinion contrary to that of the fact-checker? I think the toughest question here, I don't have the answer, the toughest question is who gets to decide what's true? Until we figure it out, my personal view is that government doesn't get to decide what's true and shouldn't get to decide what's true and that these platforms, to your point about incentives and shareholders, I don't know that they're going to get it exactly right. So I think temporarily we're going to continue to be talking through these questions, we're going to continue working through these issues, figuring out who is the arbiter of what's right and not. I think there's a lot of risk in getting it wrong. I think that if there are no rules and no police, then the advantage rests with the criminal and the advantage rests with the bad actor and that's the case in the offline world and that's the case in the online world. So I agree that there's going to be lots of areas where reasonable people can disagree and where whatever this governing body that I'm postulating is going to get it wrong and people are going to be very right to resent that their piece of content was taken down. That's the case in the real world is we have hundreds of thousands of people in prison for smoking marijuana and that shouldn't be illegal either. So I think the question is how do we, instead of doing nothing, do something? Something would be better than nothing and then as we do something, we could improve upon that something. I agree it shouldn't rest solely with the company and I agree it shouldn't rest solely with the government. Perhaps there's some way to have a coalition of government, the companies and third parties but I guess the thing that I want to point out is they're already in the business of moderating content and we use the word policing. Policing what content you see. So I said earlier, you log into Facebook and you see which friend of yours just had a baby. They have decided that you are more interested in that than in your other friends post about the sandwich you had for lunch. And by that same token, they have decided that nudity is not allowed on Facebook. Okay, seems reasonable. They've decided that photos of breastfeeding count as nudity so you'll never see a photo of breastfeeding on Facebook. Not sure I agree with that one but okay, I can see the logic there. So they have decided that they're not going to engage in questions over what does and doesn't constitute hate speech accepted to absolute extremes like terrorist speech or violent dispute. And so I guess what I think on that is neutrality is a choice. And if they're in the business of deciding that breastfeeding is inappropriate then it's not that they've decided not to get into the battle of hate speech. They have gotten into the battle over hate speech and they have put their thumb on the scale in favor of those who engage in hate speech. They are proactively supporting hate speech. If they were a non-algorithmic platform if they were a non-algorithmic platform if it was the way that it once was on Twitter and Facebook that you log in and you see a chronological feed of whatever one you follow has said I think there could be a much more reasonable case to make but instead they are serving you the stuff that you think is most relevant and that feels innocuous when it's a baby photo or an engagement photo it's not innocuous when it's something that's hatred or misinformation or both. So Ori, why don't the platforms have more responsibility or maybe you think they do and do you have conversations with the president about what he writes on Twitter and his... There are two very different questions in there. Okay, I'm trying to bring you back about what he writes and the obligation he feels or doesn't feel to make sure that it's that it's accurate. So I think you mentioned what it would be like if the platforms had a chronological feed with no recommendation engine, no algorithm. From a purely digital perspective from a user experience perspective I personally love that and I think those platforms wouldn't be what they are today and we wouldn't be having this conversation. With the sheer amount of content what they've decided to do you could say had to do you could say all of us wanted them to do was provide experiences that are more relevant, that are easier to sort through but that was a decision and you know I think for those of us who spend most of our days online we wouldn't mind seeing everything in one place. There are ways to build those kinds of tools on Twitter especially TweetDeck, things like that. And so inherently those decisions are going to be made if these platforms are going to scale. I think my point isn't that there's no solution it's that I don't know what the solution is and that in every single situation you talk about there's going to be that risk of getting it wrong and we have to balance that risk versus kind of the reward. You talked about the analogy of crime and I think it's an interesting one what a lot of people in criminal justice will say better than one better than X number of guilty people should go free than one innocent person should be in jail the stakes aren't quite the same I think we disagree on who's innocent and who's guilty because I would agree with that I would just flip it as to who ought to be in jail who gets to decide, right? If government is it driven by politics is it driven by elections what is that due to democracy? It's a hard decision, I'll give you an example you were talking about not quite terrorist content but potentially harmful content Senator McConnell posted a video of protesters outside his house making violent threats Twitter took it down because it showed a violent threat in most cases when the victim or target of the threat puts up a piece of content saying hey this just happened to me that wouldn't come down Twitter made a decision in this case that it should there were a lot of reasons behind it they explained it, they talked about how it revealed personal information including where he lives okay in most cases they're comfortable revealing that information eventually they put it back up they said we got it wrong fine we'll work with you we put it back up these companies themselves will say we don't always get it right on the conservative side we talk a lot about how there's a disproportionate impact on conservatives when views are censored online some of the companies will say yeah that happens we're working on it some of the companies will say we got it wrong in all these cases we're sorry we know this happens we think it happens just as much on the left and we get it wrong about the same regardless or left or right okay that's another perspective what do you think I think when you get it wrong and you fix it three or four days later the moment's been missed conversations move quickly the news cycle has accelerated and so when somebody wants to weigh in on a policy debate and Twitter or Facebook or somebody incorrectly by their own standards takes down their post only to put it back up three or four days later the moment's been missed the damage is done it's not that it's repaired once it's put back on and I think the president is concerned about this for all Americans regardless of their political views we built a tool a couple of months back where people could share stories about how they've been impacted by whatever you want to call it censorship tech bias by online speech issues and the original kind of introductory text of the tool was conservatives are feeling this experience is happening whatever the president line edited it to say all Americans regardless of their political views and so I keep going back to there's no single person or entity organization or group of entities or organizations I trust to get it right and just quickly on that question earlier do you have conversations with the president about what he writes on Twitter we don't talk about the Twitter account ever here I'm not going to talk about the Twitter account and how it's managed and get into that issue so Teddy we're going to take questions from the audience in 30 seconds but what about you know this idea that that we really don't have a path a clear path forward for these social media platforms to figure out what their healthy role is in our democracy I think that nine times out of ten when people talk not just on this on any issue they say they fear the unintended consequences of making a change that's because they're fine with the status quo that's what that means and you know I think conservatives have very successfully argued that the tech companies are biased against them even though look at Facebook's most shared posts every single day eight, nine, or all ten of them are going to be Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire in places like that so you know there's no evidence to support you know to support that claim you said 30 seconds I'm going to go a little over sorry but you know I was in the Philippines a couple weeks ago it's a horrifying situation most people have a cell phone they may not have a TV they may not have a desktop most of the carriers have deals with Facebook where Facebook is free and the rest of the internet is not so if you log in to the internet that's Facebook you can read the headline you can't even click off of it because that's going to incur data charge so Facebook is the intermediary for an entire country of 100 million people's entire ability to access the news and there's a very weak mainstream media there there's essentially two mainstream media outlets one of which is very likely about to lose its license thanks to the Duterte government so misinformation is all you can find there how is this going to work and so we're worried about America as well we should be we should also worry about the rest of the world I think Ori is completely right that there aren't obvious solutions that no one should have all the power that there need to be appeals process transparency you know lots of stakeholder engagement and so forth but the answer can't be let's do nothing for fear of unintended consequences because the consequences we've got now are intended and pretty rotten we have time for two or three questions one back here one over here yes sir hi there Simon Galperin from the community info co-op this is a question for Ori and the night foundation given the Trump administration's role and dis dis and misinformation and rhetoric that has led to the death of journalists from Maryland to Turkey what are we supposed to think about you being here telling us about how we should be interacting with our communities and ways that protect democracy and uphold our values and to the night foundation what are we supposed to think about this conversation in juxtaposed to the conversation we were just having before about how important diversity equity inclusion is we use words like love we talked about Reiki and now we have an administration up on this stage that is actively working against everybody in this room so I'd like to ask Ori why you think you should be here and the night foundation why they think Ori should be here and deserves to speak to us well I would say before Ori answers I will say Ori was invited to provide a view from the White House where he could speak freely on what he could talk about and that that was not going to include regardless of who was in power speaking about certain topics and so I don't I'm going to let Ori answer that question in his own way I'm certainly not speaking for him but I will state on behalf I think of the night media forum and certainly myself who extended the invitation that I welcomed the fact that he was willing to come but what some might have considered was hostile territory so I am absolutely aligned with your commentary I understand where it comes from but not everything can be answered when you represent any political party so I'm going to ask Ori to answer what he can answer and I thank you very much for the question so I'm sure you can go back to something you said a couple minutes ago when you were talking about the Philippines there is a danger to only having one side of an issue to only seeing one perspective and to only being willing to listen to one perspective and in that particular example to only having one source of information the reason I have confidence in our country and in our democracy and in the American people to find the truth is because there is a multitude of sources of information there are a lot of examples abroad where really tragic violent incidents have happened because of disinformation in WhatsApp groups for example closed networks where other information isn't able to get in there and so I'm always happy to have conversations with folks who disagree with me I have a lot of liberal friends and I think we all have different perspectives if we're not able to talk about those perspectives we're going to get more and more into our silos have a harder time understanding many people who disagree with us and that's not good for the country thank you we have a question over here thank you thank you for being here my name is Rick Tims and I teach at Queens University of Charlotte and as I'm hearing you talk today about who can regulate the web and how or should it be done I'm thinking back to the earliest days of radio and the earliest days of radio weren't regulated until it became necessary and it actually was precipitated by the sinking of the Titanic where the radio operator couldn't get back to shore and so government intervened at that time and said there's a reason here for us to do something the same thing happened with television this of course is a different era and it's a different time but I'm curious to know what parallels you think there could be for where we are now to become some kind of a balance between the owners of the medium and government to regulate thank you that's an excellent question you know I was just talking to a media historian who said that with both radio and television it took about 30 years roughly from the advent of the technology to the settling down of both business and regulatory framework that became the common place of media I don't know if there's some magic to the idea of 30 years maybe with the internet it takes 40 years or 100 years but I do think that we are at an early stage of figuring out how this is all going to work these technologies they don't feel that new we've been living with them for a long time but they're relatively new and I do think there's a parallel people talk about censorship and so forth and I think part of that has to do with the fact that people perceive and rightly so or justifiably so anyway Facebook to be a platform rather than a publisher and that's a very obviously open debate that I'm sure many in this room have thoughts on you know when it comes to TV no one is guaranteed the right to a half hour daily news show on NBC and no one seems to think that's an injustice so there are gatekeepers there deciding what kinds of content you have access to and what kinds of content you don't have access to and I get why these are participatory platforms you're checking in with your grandkids and you're talking to your friends and you're posting photos from your birthday party there I do think that the word censorship is a bit of a boogeyman the idea of gatekeeping who's got access to mass media is something that we've all accepted and I think justifiably so I think some ideas have no business getting a platform and so that history with radio and TV is part of why I'm so enthusiastically in support of you know a more aggressive regulatory framework when it comes to social media Please join me in thanking this panel Thank you so much Judy Heavy, Ory