 Okay everybody, please come back to your seats We're about to begin our next panel. Okay folks, we're thank you Please if you can come in from the back quietly come back to your seats. Welcome back My name is Mikha Sifri the co-founder of Civic Hall and the co-presenter With the Knight Foundation today of the symposium on tech politics and the media So our second panel today is on the topic of how social platforms are Reshaping the news We're gonna look in this panel at how the new online environment especially dominated by platforms like Facebook and Twitter Are changing how people Find the news how the news finds them What news they find credible and how this May be affecting our political environment and what we can do about that We have a really terrific panel a couple of really strong presentations we're gonna start with from that panel and To get us going I'm gonna hand the baton off to our moderator Claire Wardle Who is with the first draft coalition? Which she'll tell you more about it is a new nonprofit that's focused on trying to find ways to challenge What she calls the misinformation Ecosystem Claire hi everyone this is really gonna be a great panel, so I'm gonna get us moving pretty quickly But I hope that you all saw the lineup and and recognizes quite a treat to get all these people in one place So we're really gonna be discussing today How social platforms are reshaping the news? I was quite astonished that we just had an hour-long panel and the phrase Facebook was hardly mentioned Which is a rarity now at any journalism type meeting But how does the online environment affect the information that Americans are receiving and I mean obviously you can tell them by my accent This is a global problem, and I'd like us to think about that as well But how can we ensure that people have access to credible information at first draft? We're really trying to think about verification particularly around unofficial sources So fact-checking has had an amazing year But how do we think about the unofficial source material that's surfacing on the social web? How can we provide training to people consuming this information so they can be critical of the information that they're finding and Sharing they themselves are publishers. So today we have Eli Parasas So many of you probably saw the infamous Google doc, and I think Eli is gonna talk to us about what's happening now with that And he's a co-founder of Upworthy We have Sam Blakesley who's the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy at California Polytechnic State University And we have Zaynep Suvetchi who I'm sure many of you follow her on Twitter and read her great articles in the New York Times She's gonna talk very much about What this means and what responsibilities the social platforms have and Brian Seltzer who the senior media correspondent at CNN worldwide And of course the host of reliable sources and when you had that moment before the election where you told every to triple check I may have jumped up and down on my sofa like Tom Cruise So I'm gonna ask each of the panelists to come up one by one Share some thoughts with us, and then I'm gonna open up to the room I'm sure we're gonna have a very lively discussion. So if I can hand over to Eli first and tell us about your Google doc Hi everybody So I've been thinking a lot about this fake news question lately and Rather than tell you what I think I wanted to just share a little story about how I kind of accidentally created this crazy Google doc and And what I've learned from that and and what I think we can all take away from that in this conversation so the story starts on November 19th and It was when you know shortly after the election and when there was a lot of kind of The conversation around fake news was starting and I was hearing that the you know the People were describing this as kind of a hard problem to solve especially from the platforms and You know I was thinking about it and I was feeling like okay There are some very difficult problems in this, but there are also some pieces of this that really aren't that hard and I decided to kind of give myself five minutes to brainstorm so you know I started with a blank page which is kind of Whenever I have a problem in my life as my wife could tell you I start with a Google doc and And you know initially was thinking about you know just brainstorming for myself and Got to about you know five ideas and Then I ran out of ideas and I thought you know, hey, there's a lot more a Lot of people who are gonna be smarter about this and more creative and more thoughtful than me And I wonder if there's a way to get their thoughts And so you know I tweeted it out. I tweeted the link to the Google doc out and and I think actually Zanef was one of the first people who retweeted it and It you know the next few hours were really exciting because in an hour there were about three pages of ideas and In six hours there were eight pages and there were about 75 active users in the document And in a day there were 20 pages and it was growing fast And it kind of just grew from there and this slide makes it look like a big mess And it was a bit messy at times, but one of the really cool things That I saw happen was you know if you jump in there now. It's surprisingly organized and That wasn't me. I didn't have anything to do with that. I'm sort of like a fairly bad Proprietor of this document, but as often happens in Online spaces people, you know jumped into the fray to start to organize it and someone added an index and someone made the font like classier and actually is in there every day making sure that people have the right font and You know as far as I can tell they're actually like volunteers who are around the clock in this document Keeping it formatted well. So, you know now it actually looks like this Which is cool and it's a hundred and thirty six pages of ideas about what we could do about fake news and You know, I think I Did very little other than get this in motion This was really kind of like Jack in the Beanstalk like it grew on its own while I was sleeping overnight and You know pretty soon it started getting some coverage From the New York Times and the Guardian and it got slashed dotted, which I just have to say like in 16 years of making things on the web For people who know slashed out like I was very proud that that was the first time that it happened and if you're curious It did take the document down for about an hour. So even Google is not impervious But most encouragingly I heard from a bunch of folks at Facebook and at Google that they were in the dock And they were not just passing it around, but they're actually adding to it Which is not like it's not exactly, you know Getting Russian and American scientists together in the Cold War to stop like nuclear war But it was inspiring to me on some level to see people come together in this technical way And think about this problem together So what did people say? So I think there were a few areas of Convergence that I heard a lot One was that the space where related articles are suggested On platforms is actually very powerful space and it's powerful Not just as an opportunity to kind of set the record straight But also as an opportunity to interject other points of view and to help people see How their point of view contrasts with other points of view that are available There was a sense and I think Claire's work, you know speaks to this that sourcing metadata and better kind of better understanding of how facts are being generated and from where and how can we You know, how can we track that Could be a rich area of inquiry There was a sense that social lacks some of the things that search has and that's one of the problems So that something like PageRank that is a theory of authority could be very useful in shaping what Information people get in social There was a lot of energy around shutting off the money that supports fake news And there was a lot of excitement about using design to send cues that are not literal, but Help people understand How to receive information There were also a lot of interesting Disagreements and we still I think in this room probably have a bunch of these disagreements I think these are really rich areas too So one was you know sort of this question about is this a supply problem or a demand problem? Is it a the shape of news problem or is it a? Consumers are not Media-literate enough question. That's a really interesting and rich conversation which there are you know Hundred person comment threads in the document that you can read if you so desire. It's kind of fun You know, there's a question of kind of how much is the obligation of platforms to show people cross-partisan points of view and Is that a is that a duty that they have or is that actually something that we're imposing on them? There was a lot of conversation about whitelists and blacklists and there was a lot of conversation around sort of Machine learning and fake news and whether that is a good thing or potentially very bad thing In the course of making the document. I also Got some great email notifications like this one Which appeared in my inbox in which someone suggests in a comment that we should pay to support real journalism and Nick Denterman marks it as resolved and True story and one of the other delightful aspects of this experience was realizing Just how many different types of anonymous animal Google has created for users who are in the document and are not off So if you're wondering this is what an or ox looks like But there's also a more important point which is that You know despite all of these anonymous animals romping around No one erased the doc and anyone could have And that's kind of amazing like there's no porn in there. There's no like people dumping weird stuff no one to face it and It's actually probably the first question that everyone asked was like What are you doing to protect this thing and my feeling was you know, I like that it's a little bit fragile That it's like easy to mess up And I think that when people can see things that things are fragile and they can see that You know only if we all kind of come together under certain rules Does this work? They actually take more care and That fact actually is kind of inspiring to me because I think if the election hammer, you know hammered home an idea It was that we're not very good at cooperating and collaborating and listening to each other right now And here's a place where people did that and even though they didn't know who they were collaborating with even though They didn't agree. There was a problem to be solved and they got in there and tried to solve it and You know it also just put me back in touch with That thing about the internet that I think we all recognize is so powerful about it as a medium that It opens up spaces for for for things like this So I think if you squint your eyes and look at you know the convergent ideas and the arguments I think a lot of it has to do with authority and I think what we're dealing with is that the old systems for signifying authority are breaking down and The new platforms, you know my view haven't figured out how to theorize it or signify it Well at all They can't even really articulate what their philosophy of authority is But I think the document points to a third conclusion, which I'll leave you with which is that in our haste to Find ways to construct authority That work for this new era. We have to be careful not to just roll things back to the old model because the old scheme, you know didn't allow large groups of people to talk at all and That's why I like the word more authority more than trust because it is this double-edged sword And it does have this power connotation And I think the central question that we have today is how do we build a new way of looking at authority? that exists side-by-side with all of the anonymous animals and You know, I think thanks to all of these hundreds of people whose name I don't know. I think we're a little closer to finding the answer to that question and I just want to conclude on on a thought which someone randomly added to the dock. I don't know who But they added this quote, which was that in all this vastness There is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves So thank you. Thanks Eli and now from Sam Good morning. My name is Sam Blakesley from San Luis Obispo, California I come at some of these issues from a slightly different perspective as a recovering politician I'm on the other end of the barrel of the gun and wanted to share some of my perspective You heard Eli's very insightful comments as an aggregator 30,000 foot view Collating the best ideas. I'll talk to you a little bit about sort of the worst ideas coming from the bottom Working from the bottom up and hopefully the combination of those two perspectives will help inform this larger discussion I served for almost a decade in the California State Legislature Served under Kevin McCarthy who when he was the minority leader in the Assembly. I was later Took his roles a minority leader in the State Assembly and served in the state Senate and have been involved in a number of campaigns And I found that earlier discussion about Horse racing very interesting as most of the sources for many of those reporters are Campaigns which I want you to treat these conversations as horse races But what I will share with you is that when I left the legislature about four years ago Many of my peers went on to Congress But I started a think tank at the University to talk about public policy and technology And our fundamental question was how do you drive? real change and We looked at a lot of civic engagement tools that were out there What we concluded was that what you need to do is really upset and Frighten legislators You really need to get their attention with an existential question. Are you going to survive? That next election because of what you said or what you did and Create tools that allow the public to engage our legislators So we had a conversation last night about the successes and failures of civic tech And there's a lot of frustration that some of the promise had not been borne out and my counter was yes Actually, in fact, it has been enormously successful We wanted to build homes. So Ultimately, we put hammers in the hands of people They took those hammers and instead of building homes went out and attacked people and we'd have people with hammers their hands attacking each other Relentlessly through social media But what we didn't do is create the yardsticks the measuring sticks the lumber the other tools that go into creating homes And so what we're doing at the University is trying to ask that question How do you bring the tools set together to fulfill the promise of civic engagement? Don't try and reinvent Facebook, but create the tools that work with tools like that to affect your outcome I'll give you a quick example When I was in the legislature Probably the most powerful person that you would bump into was likely a lobbyist It might be a lobbyist for AT&T might be a lobbyist for the Sierra Club It depends on your district But there was one person who was more powerful than a lobbyist and it was a journalist With an uncomfortable fact and a cell phone number your cell phone number and Time and again, what we would find is I'd be in committee and I would get a text from someone in my office saying Reporter a is calling about subject B. We need you back here right now Let me tell you we didn't have that reaction when the LA Times Had a question of the San Francisco Chronicle the Sacramento B But when our local reporters in the San Luis Obispo Tribune the Monterey Herald the San Jose Mercury news the Santa Cruz Sentinel When we knew a reporter was calling on a sensitive subject in our district Everything changed went into war room mode pulled everyone in did a lot of research as to how that reporter had reported on issues previously What facts may be out there what other staff and other offices were receiving similar sorts of calls? Because we understood that once a story locally hit the front page it would change our behaviors now Why am I talking about local elections and local reporting in a conference here in New York City where we're talking about the Trump election? Quite frankly because the Koch Network and others and I'm a registered Republican and a proud Republican Understood a long time ago that to change the world you have to work at the local level 936 legislative seats have flipped and it didn't happen in November of this year 32 different state legislatures are controlled in both houses by a single party that didn't happen in November of this year There has been a decided approach toward working at the local level and speaking with those who affect local races So we've been creating a tool set that seeks to do just that and what we're focused on is how do you? acquire hard facts So that an average reporter can have primary source materials So they don't have to simply use a feed from someplace else and then try and put a local headline on it But actually create a tool that gives local reporters Salient facts and then create the tools that allow them to push it into a social media world where networks can activate I'll give you another example As a Republican representing an agricultural district. I oftentimes found myself At odds with my state Farm Bureau Of course, they represent the cotton industry in the Central Valley. They represented the wine industry in Napa They represent of the strawberry interest and Monterey, but I'll tell you when my local head of the Farm Bureau Began writing letters the editor about a vote I took it was all hands-on deck get back to the district meet with that member and the same thing was true about the Sierra Club So what I wanted to convey was there's some I think frustration maybe disappointment Maybe even consternation as to whether or not social media is fulfilling its larger Hope for purpose with civic tech and I will answer that Until we build the full complement of tools that empower people at the local level to activate Energize and scare their legislators to death It will not meet that potential and as tempting as it is to look at the sign shiny object of what's happening in Washington Or what's happening with Trump or what's happening in the last election five minutes ago It takes that longer term perspective where you want to be a change agent and use these tools in a new peer to peer A world that's violating all the norms and paradigms that we all grew up under and we believe That's the future and those tools are really on the cusp of being delivered in the very near term. Thank you Say no, I'm always hidden by podiums So I want to talk about let me start my timer. I want to talk about what we have shifted to in Terms of how we share information The first thing is I think we kind of say things like oh, we've always had too much information and this isn't new It's true in some sense, of course But I think we shouldn't underestimate what a major shift we've undergone in the space of few decades, maybe as an adult I assisted a couple of times Some international Journalists who had traveled to Turkey my home country and I remember once they were covering a story in northern Iraq So we traveled to the region We were the only camera basically with high-quality Sort of capacity probably within miles and maybe hundreds of miles of where we were we had to travel to the nearest large town to find a satellite uplink and if That story made it to the evening news that had the attention of tens of millions of people But if we weren't there it didn't have that kind of attention and I'm not even close to retirement and right now if I went to the same place there would be dozens and dozens and dozens of cameras capable of the same capacity in Everybody's hands within hundreds of meters of where I stand This has happened within my adult lifetime and as I said, I'm not even close to retirement. This is a major shift we've gone through a Process in which we used to have kind some gatekeepers and some kind of curation and captive attentional source through mass media to one in which the problems we're dealing with are Very different than every institution. We've set up has been set up to deal with so previously You had politicians and you wanted to get news from them. So you played the access journalism and you try to get Them to give you quotes and then they treated you nice and that led to all sorts of issues. Those were our problems right now There is at real Donald Trump and that's it, right? You don't have access journalism anymore. You have a competing media outlet that is speaking You know just skipping over the journalists and journalists are writing about what did he tweet last? We are not equipped to deal with any of this So and we've shifted in terms of consumption of news to a modality where we have demand and demand defined in the moment driving our consumption so when the 2012 election came around and There was all this there was this big debate between horse race journalism and Data journalism quote-unquote to both of them, right? You had the sort of let's report from the process Side of it and you had say 538 which at the time was at the New York Times saying look at the polls This is pretty clear. This narrative tension you're creating is Not really there. We do know who's gonna win more or less Right at the time I was really on the data journalism side in the sense I thought this is great if we have sort of some clarity on where the polls are we can stop Obsessing with the horse race and maybe cover the policy maybe cover the important things so fast forward to 2016 Everybody around me is constantly refreshing the 538 model page. It turned out to be the same thing even with the data side the business model of What do we demand right now turned out to be People still wanted to horse race at the moment because this is really attractive to us But demand is not a unidimensional thing. This is the same problem with fake news This is the same problem with clickbait. This is the same problem with Traditional media outlets also shifting to meet this demand is that the business model we have in the online distribution systems We have have defined demand to be what I demand right now Which is not I will argue healthy or democratic Because there's no reason that we have to demand we have to define demand as Right this moment to give an analogy to the shift we've undergone like the human species have evolved for I Don't know since the Pleistocene 100,000 years as we are to cope with food scarcity Within a century or so we've shifted to a food abundance model, right? So every instinct we have is I might start next week Let's try to eat as much as I can sugar salt all those things and when we shift to something. That's a different problem Saying people demand candy in fat and sugar right now Therefore, let's give school children candy for breakfast and candy for lunch would not be an acceptable answer What I think we have to do with the shift to this immediate demand thing is to redefine What we mean by demand when you go to Facebook for example with the fake news problem? They will point out to you it's driven by demand and they're right right it is driven by demand in the moment But we can figure out how do we redefine this demand so that we ask people well Not what do you want this month? What do you want this moment? What do you want this month? What do you want this year? Which means looking at these really hard problems of it as long as the business model is page views in the moment It's not going to matter whether you're doing horse race journalism by Savvy journalists, it's not going to matter as far as I can tell if it's going to be Putting polls into a probability model the page view model is going to get you a kind of click baity horse Tracy in the moment demand so we can ask people perhaps if we want to go someplace healthy how would you like this to be covered and Would you actually Find a way if we found a way for you to pay for this would you pay for it in a manner other than ads? I know this is a big ask in the sense that I'm saying as long as we have this business model Whatever else you produce is going to converge Towards demand in the moment if we unless we find a way to ask people What do you want? Not this moment, but this year and unless we find a way for to sell them Look, you're paying for the same way because ads are paid through the products you buy right this fizzy brown sugar drink isn't a Dollar to produce it's half of it is the ads Unless we find a way to pay directly for things we value Think we're going to be having these discussions and this is a significant And this is a very important discussion because we have in the moment Besides this in the demand here you want candy. Let's give you more candy model of information Proliferation this is combined with a moment of great Failure I don't have another word for it off our elites I keep thinking you know they want to run the world, but they're running it to the ground literally in many ways the elite failure and the Mistrust and mistrust and institutions and inequality all those things are meeting with this model of mass Participation that is very myopic in that it only asks people what do you want right now? Would you like some candy and finances itself this way if this has never led to good things? historically such Information diffusion revolutions in the past in early 20th century that met with elite failures have produced great I mean besides the wars and upheavals it's a very adult that's enough very dangerous Interregnum so my pitch is that It's not a minor transition. This is a world historical kind of transition it happened within my lifetime We're not ready for this and We're not going to fix this with tiny things. I like what Facebook is doing now with fake news It's not gonna be enough. I like what all the journalists are doing. It's not gonna be enough I have a million little ideas But I feel like we need to actually activate our real fear that this dangerous Interregnum is leading us to a potential global catastrophe and we're in the first stages of Watching this. Thank you Brian, can you bring us back from that? I'm gonna be a little more optimistic although. I agree with too much of what I just heard No slides for me just a couple of minutes Thinking about a specific the specific issues Involving the president elect in his use of social networks and how newsrooms are or are not responding You know keeping in mind that everything I'm saying here applies to Trump today And it will apply to someone else in four eight or 12 years It'll apply to others in other countries as well. I Was reflected on Facebook on the way over here thinking about how Facebook has done more in one year than it has in ten years With regards to the quality of the content in the news feed What I mean by that is last summer. I remember pressing a Facebook engineer In an interview about filter bubbles and about whether they feel any responsibility at all to pop my own bubble to pop Others bubbles to force conflicting Alternative information into the news feed if all I'm seeing is one color to force the other colors in The answer was essentially no they try to avoid saying the word no But the answer was no and I think now six months later Facebook has come a very far way from that if you look at the warning labels On fake news stories first here about to launch in Germany and soon other countries I agree that it's not enough, but it is a huge leap forward from where the company was A year ago, and I think it's worth just keeping in mind where the face books of the world were Say a year ago with regards to these issues, of course no one was talking about fake news The plague was not as obvious as it is now I agree with Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post that we should probably retire the term Except in settings like this Because I think we have a shared definition In newsrooms and in academia that is not shared by the by the rest of the audience But I'm struck by Facebook's change in tone on this how sudden it's been And I think that bodes somewhat well when we're talking about how social platforms are reshaping news Obviously though the warning labels these flags that say disputed puts the impetus right back on us in newsrooms Put the impetus right back on newsrooms to fact check and to show why we know something is fake And how we know it's fake to prove that this is the worst of the worst And obviously these warning labels do not solve what is a much bigger problem that we're starting to see coming much more sophisticated versions of fake news fake videos etc But but I see that what Facebook's doing in the past few weeks Acknowledging it the plague putting it back on newsrooms is valuable My overall fault on this as someone who lives inside a big newsroom and sees how colleagues react to this stuff is that We all know as sources go direct our jobs are more and more about verification about verifying what those sources are saying elsewhere Right now it's about Trump's tweets later. It'll be about somebody else My impression is that newsrooms oftentimes have the facts know the truth Don't always forcefully quickly clearly report it out I think if you all think about your experience of this, you'll you'll probably see what I mean Trump will tweet something We dismiss it we tweet about it snarkily people make fun of it opinion columnists make fun of it Journalists quickly annotate it and move on And that's not enough His tweets are examples of how social platforms are reshaping news to his supporters His tweets are the news in the same way that Elizabeth Warren's tweets to some of her supporters are the news and the same for standards and other Democrats They are news we can't afford to ignore sources going direct can't afford to ignore this verification role Yesterday great example Trump saying his approval ratings Are rigged that the polls are rigged Makes me shake to think about I think about approval ratings as the ultimate check-on power If he is going to believe the polls are fake We're in for an even rougher ride Whether he believes it or not some of his voters do believe it. They do believe the polls are rigged It's dangerous obviously But it's not obvious actually to everybody who's seen his tweets So my reaction to that I think there's a lot of newsrooms initially react by Shrugging try to dismiss it try not to get distracted the big word about Trump's tweets distracted Then thankfully I changed my mind Went back and interviewed the pollsters for HW Bush for George W. Bush for Clinton for Obama Tried to get as many perspectives as I could write as detailed a story as possible explaining how the polls are not rigged and the reason I did that among other reasons is that I Think of links now as weapons I think of links as weapons weapons that are wielded in this kind of virtual combat on Facebook and Twitter And again, if you think about your news feed you look at the comments threads You'll see what I mean Someone throws a link at somebody else like it's a knife in order to end an argument or win an argument or fight back Trump does a really good job of generating those links Conservative media does a really good job of generating those links liberal media to some degree doesn't okay job better to fake news sites do a really good job of generating those weapons newsrooms right now Starting to do a better job, but not not enough We need to think about this idea that these links are weapons and act accordingly Same thing today Trump said that today shows doing badly. There's one thing I know about its morning show ratings I didn't just tweet about it. I wrote an entire story about it Is that 30 minutes that could be better used another way possibly but we have to verify and to bunk this content We need links to throw back to to share to provide to the audience that does want to know Same thing when Trump tweeted during my program reliable sources a couple weeks ago He was mad about meet the press. He complained about meet the press. We were in a commercial break I wanted to do my scheduled topic after the commercial but instead we had to research what he meant during those three minutes We had to go back from commercial hold up the laptop show the tweet and explain what he meant explain YMBC did what I did on meet the press We had a chance at that moment to educate a million viewers about why Trump was saying this and why mbc wasn't wrong to do what it did newsroom leaders newsroom leaders have to recognize and I think are recognizing That we are in the media literacy business and that educational function is real and it's getting more real as sources go direct One view is that folks don't care if a headline is true. They don't care if it's fake news. They care if it feels good and it feels right I'm staying more optimistic for now. I think most people do care about their sources of information They do want to seem smart. They do want to be smart My inbox is stuff with people that just want to know what the heck to do right now and what to believe And that's a marketing problem for us and a media literacy problem Finally one bigger picture point for today before we get back to the panel before the election There was a failure of imagination. I think we all sort of know that now There was a failure of imagination a failure to imagine What a trump win wooden could look like? Let's not make that mistake again We have to imagine what the incoming administration could do to further delegitimize and disrupt journalism Disruption in a negative sense of the word. I'm not saying we should assume the worst I don't think we should assume anything But we should anticipate worst case scenarios Far worse than what's been talked about so far Using the power of the state to punish true telling journalism to discourage dissent to shame and stifle critics We should anticipate and plan for the worst and I know some folks like fluid abrams who's on this afternoon Are doing that But I just want to point that out that that's the focus of my program now trying to anticipate what actions like that could happen Thank you Thanks very much, Brian. So of course, I have a million questions. I'm sure everybody has a million questions So while you start thinking about questions, um, obviously I was very taken by what Zaynit was saying And this is what I'm really struggling with which is The platforms are commercial entities So your point about sugar is correct Most of us probably reach for our phone the first thing we do in the morning We can't have a dinner with somebody without checking our phone every five seconds It is an addiction and they have created platforms Which are addictive because they need us to be on those Feeds for as long as possible to serve ads to us So when I stay awake and like worrying about this stuff as much as I think Facebook is shifting as much as I love the fact They're in your google doc How do we really solve some of these really entrenched problems when we think about a healthy public sphere? Is there a way to do that in a commercial context or of course, I'm british I'm going to talk about public service. Do we have to rethink a really fundamental level how people are getting their information? I give the Candy example another one you can have is gambling right? It's clearly a compulsive design And I a lot of the platforms their goal is to keep you there as long as possible Whereas your personal goal probably is to get information you need from a credible source So once again, what do we do? We try to put healthy menus in front of us We exercise we build gyms. We do a lot of things right to shift from a manual labor society to one We have mechanism in a mechanization. I think We really need to figure out how to shift the time frame So that the question we keep giving people isn't what do you want now for facebook? Or twitter or anything You know, you can't you I don't want to the business models driving this. I have long lobbied for Give us a subscription option And let's find ways to cross subsidize news through other mechanisms because as long as this is the business It doesn't matter if it's going to be macebook. It's going to make the same decisions I say the same thing I was actually really taken by what you're saying too because the other thing I study is protests and social movements And one of the things we face the same problem. It is increasingly easier To have a big protest that you know gets together organized in a week You know occupy in two weeks organize the global protest in 80 cities tens of millions of people What we don't have is the time frame for the follow-through. What are we going to do next? How are we going to threaten those legislatures? How are we going to? Signal our capacity to them that if you don't shape up we are going to threaten your reelection your primary If you're corrupt, we're going to threaten you with jail time How do we signal our threat over a long term rather than look? There's a million of us you can ignore because we're going to go away tomorrow, right? This is the same problem shifting the time frame in which we strategize and think I feel is the biggest problem we face Among the people who want to change things for the better And I'm terribly worried because as I started saying our rulers Um The Davos crowd and everybody else. They're not managing this either. So if we don't step up and save this Um the drivers asleep at the wheel and there are lots of cliffs around So how do we shift everything we do away from? What's this moment to what are the next 10 steps 20 steps? We got to exercise and build muscles not just eat the candy that's served to us So I I agree with everything that you said, but uh since that doesn't make for an interesting panel the I do think there is a piece of this that Like the the topic of the the conversation is how social platforms are reshaping news And I think one of the things that it's it has to force This moment has to make us reckon with The way that news is not properly shaped for human psychology in a social era And if we don't like you can do all the you know Healthy menu stuff that you want and if if There aren't some of the understanding of culture about exercise like it doesn't work. So specifically what I mean is I think the conversation that journalists have about trust and the conversation that Most people have about trust are almost completely different conversations where the word doesn't mean the same thing And the thought experiment that I sort of run is imagine someone in your life who is You know who has your back and Really wants to take care of you and is sometimes right and sometimes wrong Versus someone who is always correct, but self-centered Which of those people do you trust more as a person? And I think there's a clear answer when you look at human psychology We trust people who have our interests at heart We don't trust people on the basis of their being correct factually And um, I think in a social era where everything that we receive is from someone else through that Human trust connection trust means something very different from verified facts or a certain process of journalism And so I think if we want to create a civically engaged and thoughtful You know public Figuring out what it means to create journalism that is shaped so that people will actually trust it And that recognizes that people are emotional As much as rational that they're you know As as More interested in stories than facts like all of these things become really critically important Um along with you know the role of the platforms I'll just add real quickly if I can't realize comments about trust and how we've found that to be Absolutely essential, you know, they are a you know, Dan rather Walter Cronkite present company accepted It's very difficult to find Entities at the national level to whom you ascribe those values Having said that there's lots of people in your local community that you will absolutely trust You'll go in a trench and fight for them and I I kind of liken this to What we're seeing with isis versus the us 7th fleet The news has gone from a very large hierarchical top-down fact-checked system Of moving enormous resources and capabilities onto certain areas where attention is needed But the countervailing approach to that in a peer-to-peer world is what isis does Which is it takes information it motivates a large group of people and empowers them to act individually, which is the exact arms race solution To that environment where you have an asymmetric System where you cannot compete at the same levels in new york times Or washington post and so you were asking about how do we respond to these changes to social media? It's happening so quickly. We are in that arms race Right now and I think what people need to appreciate is we're moving to that peer-to-peer isis model of information dissemination Which is keenly dependent upon there being Speakers in that space who have trust with their constituencies Can you guys hear me? Oh, either way, I'll have both mics So the thing is The big commodities Or resources that we need to focus on definitely our attention and trust Right herber simon said this in 1971 if Information is the oversupply. What does it consume? What is scarce attention? This is so true The other thing is this global multi decade decline in trust and institutions including the press And including electoral democracies including liberal democracies And to be honest as a lifelong media critic I think a lot of the decline in trust is kind of well deserved in many ways Except if we don't save these institutions, we are not going we're going to end up with even worse This is the problem for someone for a lot of people who see this lack of trust If I had this magic wand, which obviously I don't but One of the things I would scream about is this enormous decline in local news resources This is like New york times is going to survive bus feed is going to survive cnn is probably going to survive they will adapt Probably You will survive what we have seen over the past 10 years that the change in the business model is that at the local level Every newsroom is laying off people the crucial stuff the politics happens not just at the presidential race local level We're seeing this so as a result where you would actually have politics happen You're seeing this enormous gap in reliable trusted local intermediaries And it is in that setting I just read a story in the times this morning some kid in maryland set up a fake news site Made up crap a thousand dollars an hour through facebook ads and google ads, right? It's this monetization of this business model with this the money that would have gone to You know imperfect local news But still A normative ethos of facts the same ad money has shifted away from this thing We need Where is that money going to the kid in maryland who's making a you know thousand dollars an hour Making up bill clinton sex ring stories um You know they say follow the money. I think it's so significant And I I feel like we should have a campaign don't just subscribe to the new york times fine subscribe to the new york times Subscribe to whatever local newspaper you have even if it sucks and then go and make it better show up and say I'm a subscriber make this better You know, I no longer use online services where I don't pay very much because I want to be their customer I do not want to be what they're serving to the advertisers We have to really say how do we save these things even if they're not great and make them better It's a tricky thing, but that's what I see just adding one quick thought on that about facebook I see a lot of facebook groups local communities essentially reorganizing their papers as facebook groups And what facebook could do on that front would be really interesting to see they indicated last week They're interested in local news really curious to see what they can do to help those Groups that have kind of replaced the local paper in some towns Yes, some research that we did at the tail center actually not local metropolitan Paper but very small hyper local who said we wouldn't exist if it wasn't for facebook exactly what you're saying brian Um, okay, who's got some questions? We've got about 15 minutes left. So um, yes If you could just say who you are before you ask the question. Hi, I'm susan. I'm with the us vote foundation I'm just curious about this Terminology, I've been thinking about it a lot over the past months of fake news It sounds to me like it credibilizes what's actually propaganda And I mean in the cyber world propaganda is considered cyber warfare And fake news kind of seems to get by as a legal thing to do Because it's news, but it isn't really News kind of justifies it just that term tacked on And I I actually live in europe. Um, so I have this fortunate Bit of distance, even though i'm an american, of course, I feel everything just the same way as people who live here, but Um watching what's been happening. It seems all very playbook Like first create fear. There's so much fear that someone is now going to knock on your door and maybe even take you away Uncertainty the complete undermining of the trust of the press And questioning of it in tremendous doubt And so you've got the classic model to come in And make changes that people don't want but they don't know where to turn When does this become almost, uh, like a warfare situation or illegal and I mean, it's just odd because you can see Exactly what's happening by looking at that historical playbook and maybe that's A challenge and for the press to educate This is just a model that's being followed brilliantly Yeah, I'll hand over which is very very quickly for me in the last six weeks The big learning is this is much more than misinformation. This is disinformation and talking to somebody from the eu yesterday about the sophistication The different models in scandinavia versus the Balkans weaponizing Basically information using orthodox priests to push out. I mean, this is a much bigger scale And I think in the u.s. We were only just starting to wake up to this and that's partly why fake news is so unhelpful Because we're talking all the way through Weaponized propaganda all the way through to a nine-year-old hoaxer and putting them all in the same bucket It's not helpful and we're not actually thinking about solving it until we think about typologies and think about them as different problems. So Okay of the nine-year-old or the maryland kid If he was selling a product that was false or that was Not a real product and getting money for it There would be a criminal aspect to that Isn't he just doing that in a different form or is it okay because it's information Yes, I mean as people who spend time in europe, there's many different regulations that we think about I mean, I have no So there's a really interesting fake story about me about a month ago It it had one paragraph of completely real quotes about that I said on tv and then four paragraphs That totally fake quotes that were made up and I have no recourse, right? And I think we should be honest about that no recourse. It's an anonymous site fake domain. I'm sure it's not even online anymore Uh, were I to have recourse wouldn't that same sort of issue apply to real news organizations? Uh, I don't know what that answer is, but I'm expecting it to get more and more sophisticated and more and more anonymous So, uh, as it's been described as a game of whack-a-mole I don't know how to win in that whack-a-mole game I used to love that game on the boardwalk this game. I don't know how to win In this environment, I just real quickly have that I think this is a Took a long time for us to get where we are with these institutions that we've cherished for so long in our democracy have Now fallen to such sort of low esteem by many And I would say that it's going to take many years I think to rebuild these institutions that we've historically depended upon for civic life And I will finish with I think obviously journalism has to make this fundamental decision Am I going to fight for in my integrity? That being a trustworthy Speaker of truth to power Completely independent of what those were who those words help or hurt And I think in our earlier panel we had The usa today share the dilemma of sort of picking aside and the blending and merging of opinion and news And the challenges that produces in terms of whether or not that changes That the standing of an institution to be a truth speaker or to be trusted by a very large spectrum And I think this dichotomy of are you going to Fight for a certain change that you believe is good or will you simply fight for integrity? Such that you will be believed regardless of which side it may help or hurt Is is a first step I want to say I mean I sound gloomy, but I don't think we're out of options by any means Eli's document has You know all those pages and If you want just two simple things I demonetization of misinformation would get rid of a good chunk and would make it harder And algorithmic changes to those few gatekeepers like google and facebook that downplayed Based and weighted based on credibility. There are lots of ways to do this algorithmically that wouldn't be perfect But that would help put the thumb on the scale away from misinformation Would go a long way in helping But ultimately we would have to solve The reasons people don't trust media the reasons people don't trust their electoral So we would have to solve the demand side We would have to solve those problems in the long term But in the midterm, you know once again, let me run those things We will fix a good chunk In the right direction. So I don't think we should do like nothing until the demand is solved. No, that's nihilism We have options. We just need to mobilize both short term midterm and long term At all levels We have options Are there any other quick we've got time for one last question. I'm nocica I work at the town center and the colombia journalism review I mostly agree with everything But I have a little bit of discomfort when it comes to the idea Of shaping the news around human psychology or you know, using an understanding of Psychology in order to think about how we frame things or write headlines or whatever Um, do you think that it's right to do that? Or do you think that we just have to think about doing that now that social platforms have forced us to I mean, personally, I think it depends on what the objective is But if the objective is an engaged and civically aware society then I think it I don't believe that it is sufficient to Put the truth out there and hope for the best And I think that there are an extraordinary community of journalists who are uncovering truths that That don't Reach the populace that don't shape how people see the world and that therefore don't enable the democracy to activate and defend itself and I mean the irony for me of the fake news doc is like I think fake news is a thing But I actually think it's like 20 of the problem And 80 percent of the problem is like the truth is not loud enough And it's not clear enough and it's not connecting with people enough And if you don't solve that problem like you can get rid of fake news and still have all of the All of the problems that we're talking about right now. There's no either or yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So, you know, there's But but I think your point, you know At the 80 percent what I see right now trying to be a little bit optimistic here is I see newsrooms becoming more forceful Becoming louder or trying to and maybe there are more More ways to do that that can be explored In some ways as jack shiferoe this week trump may be freeing journalists a little bit To be louder about the truth and to not hold back It's not going to happen everywhere and we're going to always have to contend with these Opinion outlets that are trying to confuse folks But I see newsrooms trying to get louder and I think maybe that's the next google doc What what can what what more can newsrooms do to get louder about the truth? I mean people praised cnn and msnbc for a very simple thing Banners on the bottom of the screen that said not true We actually haven't done it for a while. There's a lot more to fact check that isn't being fact checked on on screen But I think there are You know I think this is a moment where journalists are talking about those issues in a way They weren't two or three or four years ago and that's a positive thinking about for example What is the best way to look into the camera and tell someone something's not true How to how to how to persuade them that you're right how to persuade them to trust you Those are conversations and discussions that have always happened to some degree but are happening a lot more now And uh, and that's a positive. I think so can I say, you know, I I think you were like a bright spot but Mostly I know spot right But I think the 2006 mass media performance is a great example of why people don't trust it across the political spectrum it was a I mean How to say this I think it was a spectacular failure of journalistic duty. Even as I say we should subscribe to them I would the thing that worries me is that now that they're kind of In battled with the Trump administration that they'll start feeling good about it and forget what happened I would like to implore that we don't let them forget What the coverage leading up to a very consequential election actually look like Rather than what it should have looked like. I think this is going to be if we survive the next few decades This is going to be along with sort of the process leading up to the iraq war the failure of journalism then led to so many horrible things downstream that we're still experiencing Um, I did a just a lexus search, which is how you search newsrooms. I searched using a range of things to look at hillary clinton email stories versus Donald trump conflict of interest stories the hillary clinton email stories outnumbered Donald trump conflict of interest stories five to one On washington post new york times and politico and those are among the better outlets we have I just want to say it was a spectacular failure. Do not Let that Learning I hope Pass without learning from what failed and why because we understand why it failed the document of availability from wiki leagues You know, you got a process and oh look they're dropping something every week The on the one hand on the other hand reporting the failure to understand that polls Aren't magic ones telling you that you have to cover both candidates properly That scandals may look nice, but you need policy coverage. We understand what failed So what I would like to say is again, I think you're good And if you're and I would say the same if you're sitting up next to me But we also need to I had a question on twitter. My local newspaper sucks. What do I do? I'm like We gotta subscribe and then show up and say this sucks. I want coverage of my issues if we don't show up Our democracy is not going to be saved by anybody else coming up No, there's nobody else but us to just show up and do this Yeah, no, I just think agree with with everything with that and and I think this is one of those things where the solution is not going to be found In the paradigm of or at the level of the problem And so I think like flash forward five years or ten years and think about how we've solved this problem It probably isn't through a linear extension of the tools that we're using to solve it now And I think when Whoever spoke to the opportunity for extraordinary creativity I think that is the that's the area for hope is that there is a whole set of tools that Didn't exist before that we don't even necessarily think of as related to this problem That we're going to have to employ to solve it if there were these collective failures Where are the new newsrooms? Where are the startups? Where are the new tools? Where are the creations out of the ashes of this election? It's only been two months, though So it's still time. We actually have to stop now I know that we could carry on to get lucky. There's a very long lunch, but if you can join me in thanking the panel and I'm sure this will continue So just before we break for lunch I'd like to just introduce a dear friend of civic hall and a dear friend of actually all of us First let me say We didn't choose our venue location lightly If libraries did not exist today, they'd be banned There's no way the copyright industry would Allow for the free dissemination of information on a scale that libraries currently do And that said libraries today also remain the most underutilized piece of civic infrastructure that we have and because of the fact of our democracy the current state of Disarray and confusion It's more important than ever for us to recognize how important libraries are to civil society And libraries themselves are challenged with lack of funding lack of understanding of what they actually do dealing with the digital world Just to give you some sense of our next speaker's challenges He has to raise in addition to the public funding that he gets From government he has to raise something like two million dollars a week Just to keep the lights on And to be able to do that while also thinking about how to reinvent the library So they're not just relevant to underserved communities, but they're relevant to all of us It's not an easy thing to do and it requires a vision And a dedication that our next speaker Has and so without further ado, I'd like to quickly introduce you to Tony marks the president of the New York public library So while we're passing around the basket Andrew, thank you. It's great to have you all of the house. It's great to have civic hall blossoming as it is we're so looking forward to The years ahead and then particularly in your great new home and just the explosion of what civic Civic hall is doing in this town and beyond and of course great to have the night foundation here as partners And a stalwart supporters of all the values that we are talking about So i'm between you and lunch So i'm going to be brief So I just came back from the old world europe last night and Was thinking about you know, this is not the first time we've seen a revolution In the technology of information About 500 years ago Usually on display. It's currently being refurbished, but in display. We have here one of the oldest Gutenberg bible in the americas Was the printing press So let's think about what we learned from that revolution 500 years ago The most important thing we learned is That it produced an explosion in information in the printing of books and the availability of books An explosion in literacy Because there was so much more to read And an explosion in challenges to the old order The enlightenment is after all the result of that technological revolution Orders were thrown aside revolutions of all sorts cultural religious political economic It was very very messy It's still Very very messy And it didn't start on a high note People think that mr. Gutenberg invented Printing press in order to make the bible available That is not the case He invented the printing press In order to make money on a exploding market demand for indulgences Right people couldn't get them fast enough And he calculated if he could print them Instead of having a scribe write them The world would be his oyster and indeed it was Tech revolutions of information often start With silliness Sorry, I think that's all right to say about indulgences So here we are at the explosion of the next tech revolution An astonishing one right we all those of us who are lucky enough carry in our pockets The library of congress and the library of alexandria on steroids And What I carry in my pocket Is the same device that the richest person on the planet carries That's amazing And yet we are at the moment of the indulgences Most of what you find Through that device is superficial crap That's right president of the new republic library just called it superficial crap, and I'm being polite Right you skim the surface of information Instead of all the books being available you can read two sentences snippets as they're lovingly called My kids What are they doing it is Superficial doesn't even begin to say what it is It is invidious social Comparisons on steroids And no attempt by an industry that knows better and was invented for better To compete with the crap to bring Quality information forward So we've got work to do just as we did 500 years ago When we had to turn that previous revolution And yes, the library is more dedicated to that now more than ever It's interesting. We sort of assume that new technologies are always the exciting solution Sometimes the old Institutions Are the exciting solution in new york city today The public libraries of which they're 215 get more than 40 million physical visits a year That's more than all the museums and all the professionals sporting teams combined And yes, I do have to raise money to keep that going Andrew But that tells you that the life of the mind is alive and well here in the information capital and it's the technology That's not keeping up Something between two and three million new yorkers new yorkers Do not have broadband access at home We're lending It to people to take home by the thousands, but we can't solve the digital divide. It must be solved And if you get on line Whether it's coming to the library to get on or taking a broadband that we lend you to take home You need to be able to read more than two sentences of the quality information If we're going to have the kind of politics and the kind of public discourse That today's conversation aspires for us to have So this library is committed to not only providing the civic space for all new yorkers to come together The collections and the computers and the great librarians We are committed to being the education provider in every neighborhood Because this tech revolution we're in right now like so many revolutions is actually increasing inequality When it should be decreasing inequality And here we are So we'll do anything from pre-k literacy to after school to English language citizenship Computer skills. We're teaching coding in the poorest neighborhoods of new york all for free And we aspire to the day When we can get every book available To anyone to read for free from their library, whether it's in new york Or whether it's in the middle of the country or whether it's in africa And we're going to get there in a way that the tech industry has not or has given up on as far as I can tell Why and I'd say this is fundamental to your discussions today We're not a school. We're not a university. We don't have a curriculum. We're not going to require you to do x and not y We trust in something more fundamental than that. We trust in the abilities of everyone To learn To use information to become more informed citizens to be more skilled in the workforce To find meaning and identity in their lives and to learn about others meanings and identities So that we can live together So that we can work together so that we can build together We trust that when the noise of the day is done The best solution to fake news and garbage Is getting everyone the possibility of learning And all of the great wisdom and they will choose as they should and always have What is fake and what is real? And they will move forward And we as a society that goes back to the enlightenment unleashed by the previous revolution of technology of information We will still bet fundamentally In that human possibility And if we do it right, there'll be noise. There'll be bumps. There'll be ugliness. God knows We will get To a better result. We couldn't be more delighted and proud To have you all here to host this conversation here In the centerpiece of this great system Welcome We will get through this To a better result And now it is Now it is my absolute honor and privilege to invite you to lunch in the back of the room