 Goed afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, goed afternoon. Welcome to the Friends of Copenhagen Lecture in cooperation with the Tilburg University Society. My name is Diarmatroos. I'm a journalist for Dutch media, an anchor for Dutch media, like B&R News Radio and the television program Buitenhoof. And today I will be your host. We have a very important topic today, disinformation and democracy. And it's going to be a very exciting day, also because of our special guest today, Mrs. Anne Applebaum. Thank you so much for being here. But first of all, of course, I would like to give the floor to the chairman of the board of Tilburg University. His name is Mr. Kumbekking. Give him a big round of applause. Thank you so much, Diana. Welcome to you all. On behalf of the university, special welcome to Anne. We've already met over lunch. And a very warm welcome to all of you. We are here to listen to the lecture on disinformation. And as a political scientist, I am extra interested in the topic of the day. Together with de vrienden van Kopenhagen, the Tilburg University Society, organized this lecture. It's already the third one. And we're very proud of the university to be part of all these festivities. And it's truly, truly encouraging to see that the auditorium is so full as it is today. Very good to have you all. And we're looking forward to the lecture. The friends of Kopenhagen, they are working very closely together with the university. And with the new board of the friends, headed by Wouter, they are very, very ambitious. So that is very good for us as a university to know that our alumni, that the board members of our alumni association are very ambitious. And we are very much looking forward to the fact that we will realize these ambitions together. Wouter, hè? So enjoy the day. Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, let's see what the connection is between the two. I would like to invite to the stage now Wouter Schepens. He's the chairman of the Friends of the Kopenhagen Institute. Give him a warm welcome. So, welcome also. Welkom. Also, there was already a remark about the cooperation between all these organizations. Can you tell something about it? De Friends of Kopenhagen is the alumni network of this university. Oh, maybe a little bit higher. I think we had our 25th anniversary last year. So, already for quite some time, we as alumni want to be part of the Tilburg University community. We try to play an active role in that we feel ourselves as ambassadors of this university, telling our colleagues, our friends, how good this university actually is. Because I think for no less and less so, but still Tilburg University used to be a little bit of a hidden treasure. We are here in Tilburg, which I'm sure is debatable amongst alumni. But this is de schonste staat van het land. We all know that, we can debate it. But still, a lot of people don't know that. That's what we have to offer here. So, that's one, and secondly, we organize a lot of activities for our alumni. We want to be a part of this network, a vibrant network, organize good meetings in a nice... Can I please take the microphone for you? I will be your assistant. Even louder, all right. So, that's the point. Lots of activities, a lot of people, even more people. We invite you all to become a member of our society, because we would like to spread this word and have more activity and more diversity, really, in our society. So, everyone is welcome, all the alumni? Absolutely, absolutely. So, that's what we want. I think that we used to have the reputation of being a little bit exclusive. It was a reputation. But I think now that we want to be... We want to stay unique, but we are inclusive. We want to have more young people on board, across all the studies of this university, because we feel that enriches our organization, our society. The power of a network is in the diversity of its members. I'm convinced of that. So, that is also something that is challenging for you as a chairman. Yes. Yes, because if people look at me, they say, again, this is the guy with the gray hair. I still feel very young. I don't wear a tie and I jumped on the stage. I hope you notice. I can tell you that all the board members in our group are much younger than I am. I'm the only gray one. But still, I mean, yes. It is a challenge to attract young people. What we also notice in the broader sense of society is that people are a bit reluctant to commit themselves to organizations. And as we are a society of, let's say, for the members, but also by the members, we want to have active members, that is a bit of a challenge to get everybody involved en to organize activities at appeal to all our members. But I think we are on the right track. And when it comes back to your personal motivation, what was your personal motivation to join the Kopenhagen, the Friends of Kopenhagen? Well, I'm grateful for this university. I think that I spend a very important part of my life here. I think I literally, at least intellectually, I've grown here, which was helpful. So I really feel, I feel a sense of gratitude. But I also feel a sense of proud. Right, I mean, this is an institution that I don't shy away of telling the story of Tilburg University. And I like to meet other alumni and to have interaction with them and to learn from others and to share ideas and to make sure that this university that we can play a little bit, a little role in building this ecosystem and helping the university to flourish. Oké, we are living in an interesting time, of course. Ja, it is an interesting time and I think that universities are very important. I'm very much looking forward to the speech of Anne on this information and democracy. That's also something that I'm concerned about where we're going. We had a very interesting workshop before this and there's a sense of doom and gloom and I hope we can give it a positive twist also this afternoon. Well anyway, even if it remains doom and gloom in de outcome of the presentation, we invite you all for beer and wine afterwards. Ja, so. It will all end in a good way. We will drink to the future anyway. Oké, maybe to reflect on this year, the coming year, are there concrete plans? Yes, what we noticed, we did some research amongst the alumni and we had an annual fee of 500 euros and we felt that it was too high en we decided to reduce that to less than 300 for people who are 35 years and older. For people who are younger, it's even less. This is a bit of a sales pitch, I'm sorry. In that fee, all dinner drinks activity is included. So it's a bargain. It is a bargain. So that is a plan. This is really a very concrete step to invite people to become a member, a broader membership base, more activity and more fun. Oké, and there are some to register. Yes, we will have a flyer. When you leave this room, we will call you, we will hunt you down. We want you to come with me. Looking forward to that. Oké, I would like to thank you so much and you're gonna jump down again? Yes, I have to now. You can also take the stairs. Give him a big round of applause, thank you. And now I'd like to welcome Mr. Sylvester Eifinger, who is the chairman of the Tilburg University Society. So it's a cooperation today. And also he's the professor of financial economics at Tilburg University. Sylvester, for me, it's really a personal pleasure to have you here because last week, you know already, I had to interview the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, for an hour on live television. En I called you to have some insights regarding economic problems that we have in the Netherlands and also in Europe. And there's a very select group I call when it comes to this important interview so I would really like to thank you again. Because it helped me so much and it was all over the news. It even went globally in the Washington Post. You saw? Because he defended President Trump. So, thank you so much. But I'm not here to talk about me. I'm here to introduce you so that you can introduce our keynote speaker because you personally made it happen that she's here today. Give him a big round of applause. Sylvester Eifinger. You think why is this man walking so slowly because I had an accident almost a year ago with my quadriceps. And this is the first time that I walk without a stick. Becoming... But the mind is young. However, the body is sometimes depreciating. That's what I can learn from this episode. Thank you very much. It's my great pressure to introduce Professor Anne Applebaum. En... Before I introduce her I could really recommend her webpage which is fantastic. Not only with her columns from the Washington Post but other columns she writes, articles. It gives also a very good description of what she has done and that's very broad. And Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post. She's historian. She is a prize, a Pulitzer prize winning historian. That's very special. She is also a professor of practice at the London School of Economics. We spoke about this this morning what she's doing. She's running an institute arena a programme on disinformation in the 21st century and also about propaganda and these kinds of things. Which will be the topic of our lecture which is not disinformation and democracy but democracy and disinformation. She's formally a member of the Washington Post editorial board and she also has worked as a foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator magazine. Political editor of the evening standard and that's very important from 1988 and to 1991 when there was this Wende in the Soviet Union and also in the East Block she covered the collapse of communism as the Warsaw correspondent of the Economist magazine and the independent newspaper. Very special period. Can you imagine you're there in this midst, this turmoil where you are reporting for the most important newspapers around the world. But she wrote also books. Her newest book Red Feminine, Stalin's war on Ukraine was published in October 2017 and last year there was a Dutch translation of her book which was published under the title Rode Hongersnood Stalin's oorlog tegen Ukraine with Ammo Antos publishers in Amsterdam and this evening we have dinner for de Vrienden van Kopenhagen and of course there will be also a copy of that book available for the members there. So you see how exclusive the club sometimes is but anyhow, that's another thing. Her previous books which were also very special, Iron Curtain The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944 1956 which describes imposition of the Soviet totalitarianism in central Europe after the Second World War. Iron Curtain won also several prizes. Every book of Ed wins one or more prizes. She's also the author of Gulak A History which narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camps system and describes daily life in the camps making extensive use of Russian archives and this book I think the most famous book everybody maybe read that a book in Dutch or in English won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1994. Then both Iron Curtain and Gulak have a poet in more than two dozen translations including major European languages. So for example both books are available in Dutch both Iron Curtain and Gulak and I really recommend you to read that but more than that and has of course a very dynamic life as a writer, as historian as a columnist but she's also the co-author of a cookbook can you imagine from a Polish country house kitchen that's because of course and is married to a former Polish minister who is now in also doing advice where you work and has also a residence in Warsaw next to London of have a penthouse or something in Washington no, no, sadly not sorry but anyhow what is important is that also has written over the years in the New York book review the review of books The Wall Street Journal New York Times, Financial Times but most of all most of all she's famous for her columns in the Washington Post I read them everyone and I reread them because they are so nicely composed and so strongly analytical that it's a joy to read it it's a joy to reread it recently she published two important columns this week this very week first on the 15th of January that's about Brexit now you saw this turmoil in the House of Commons and the title was Theresa May Experience a Historic Parliamentary Humiliation that was on the 15th of January but two days before that there was also a column by Anne on the Trump-Putin revelations tell us what we already know all along so that was two days earlier you see how broad she is and if you read the columns they are razor sharp there are very balanced analyses from I would say the US perspective UK perspective and the continental European perspective I don't think many people can write these columns she has also lectured at Yale, Harvard Columbia Universities as well as Oxford, Cambridge and London and she held in 2012-2013 also Special Roman Chair of History International Relation at the London School of Economics where she still Professor of Practice and that's of course a very reputed institution Anne was born CC 1964 en af de gradation of Yale at the University was a martial scholar at LSE and sent Anthony College in Oxford en her husband Radislav Sikorski is now a Polish politician and writer and they have two fantastic children which is also an effort in this special terminal time commuting between Warsaw and London but not always with Washington is not easy sometimes I have the feeling that you write your columns in at the airplanes or in the airports is that true? I already guessed that so ladies and gentlemen I want to finish may I ask your attention for the third Vrienden van Kobage Lecture by Professor Anne Uppelbaum on Democracy and Disinformation so thank you very much I hope you will notice that I too jumped onto the stage and thank you for that amazing introduction it reminds me of a very famous story told about Henry Kissinger which I confirmed is true the story is that he was once at an event like this one and he got up on the stage and somebody was introducing him and they said and now we will hear from Dr. Kissinger who needs no introduction and he said he is a very distinct accent which I cannot imitate but he said I may not need an introduction but I so enjoy them so thank you very much I was also in those introductory marks about whether I might talk about doom and gloom there is a bit of doom and gloom and what I am about to say so while I am doing that and I will return to this at the end I want you all to think about what this room represents and what it represents is something that political philosophers call civil society meaning you are all here not because someone is paying you not because I take that back but not because the government ordered you to be here you are all here voluntarily this is your working as alumni organizing support and promotion of cause that you think is good namely that of your university and these kinds of institutions civil society institutions are one of the unique and important aspects of western democracy and institutions and people like you who work for them who I think are going to help us get through the current crisis so while I am talking keep that in the back of your heads and now let me let me take you to a historical moment imagine this imagine a moment in which suddenly everybody is an author and everybody can publish and everybody can write and the controlled access to information for a long time are suddenly now irrelevant and the establishment is crushed in a tide of new information and new ideas multiply and conflicts are sparked and suddenly there is a series of wars and the wars last for a hundred years and they tear apart the continent of Europe they pit people against one another they cause terrible political crisis and they tear apart no, that was not a little description of the present I'm not talking about the invention of social media I'm talking about the invention of the printing press which was the radical 15th century technology that destabilized the church that undermined monarchies that brought us the reformation and presumably there are maybe a few people in this room who think the reformation was good maybe quite a few others who don't but doesn't really matter but you might also remember that the reformation and the ensuing polarization of societies did bring us religious wars a hundred years of them and Christians of different kinds split into tribes and they fought for power and they burnt one another at the stake and centuries past before Europe was at peace but if that description of the 15th century did sound a lot like the present I think there's a reason for it because it is my genuine belief that we're living through an equally transformative an equally revolutionary moment why are so many elections and so many democracies taking surprising turns why are nationalists and xenophobes who sound the same suddenly gaining support in countries with really different economies and different histories like Poland and the Philippines and Britain and the United States why do divisions seem so much deeper why is dialogue so much more difficult why are compromises so hard to find well this is my guess and my guess is that just as the printing press broke the monopoly of the monks and the priests who controlled the written word in the 15th century the internet and the social media have in the space of really a few short years undermined not just the business model used by democratic political media for the past two centuries but the political institutions behind them and connected to them as well in other words this is a we're not just talking about a problem of fake news or false stories we're talking about something that is much deeper this is an information revolution that is affecting all society in many different ways let's just start with that business model I was just talking to a Dutch journalist this afternoon and she agreed with me if you look around the democratic world everywhere you see large newspapers and powerful broadcasters weakening sometimes disappearing and with a few exceptions and a few countries that are lucky enough to have either strong state media or a few strong newspapers the financial assumptions that have supported most of them for last century don't hold advertisers and readers have moved to the internet there's no model of payment that's replaced hard copy subscriptions but as they grow weaker other things die too and these old fashioned newspapers and news organizations might have been very flawed and I work for some of them and I believe me I know about that but many of them had nevertheless as their founding principle at least a theoretical commitment to attractivity and to fact checking and to the general public interest and these were news organizations that were designed even by their business and advertising model to reach as many as people as possible they sought to bridge gaps to reach across society and that was their raison d'etre that's why they existed they also served as a filter eliminating egregious conspiracy theories and fringe ideas again, for better or for worse but more importantly whatever you think about their objectivity or their quality or lack of it they also created the possibility of a national conversation a single debate and again in some big European countries well funded public broadcasters still do that but in many smaller countries independent media has become very weak or has ceased to exist entirely and has instead been replaced by media which is either controlled by the government operated by the ruling party or else controlled by the ruling party via business groups connected to it in the United States which is a very large country there is no broadcaster or newspaper which both sides of the political spectrum considered to be neutral and which both sides accept as authoritative what is the result of this is polarization people choose sides they move apart the center disappears and polarization has other side effects in many democracies including the United States there is now no common debate let alone a common narrative and this is not a question of people having different opinions or different biases or different political interests people don't actually have the same facts so one group thinks one set of things is true another believes in something quite different and we find ourselves arguing not about the way to move forward but about what happened yesterday social media we all know now I think it accelerates and accentuates this phenomenon because it allows people and indeed it's algorithm sometimes force people to see only the news and opinion that they want to hear whether it's factual or not so the algorithms that reinforce narratives have created homogenous clusters online otherwise sometimes known as echo chambers or filter bubbles what that means in plain language is that people get their news from their close knit ideologically similar friends whom they trust most members of an echo chamber share the same prevailing world view and they interpret news through a common lens but this deeper polarization has other effects for example it creates distrust for what used to be considered neutral or apolitical institutions the civil service the police, the judiciary government run bodies of all kinds now fall under suspicion because one side or the other or sometimes both suspects that they have been captured by the opposing party this this new suspicion also has had a lethal effect on traditional political parties these were once based on real life organizations like trade unions or the church but now instead of looking to real organizations more and more people now identify with groups or organizations or just ideas and themes that they find online in the virtual world so people can reach across traditional social and geographic lines to form interest groups in ways that undermine traditional politics but both for the better and for the worse these new parties that succeed in converting virtual support into real votes do so because they've taken advantage of this change and one thinks of Macron's En March or the very different Italian 5 star movement or indeed the Gilles Jean movement whatever you can call it happening in France now in many places though this may be one of them this phenomenon has also led to deeper fragmentation and again increased partition so groups, grouplets hunker down, they barricade themselves into ideological ghettos and they aren't worrying anymore about the general interest and that observation leads naturally to a more central point which is that this new information network with its kind of deep divides and its suspicious clans is also far more conducive than the old one was to the spread of false rumors whether generated naturally and to campaigns of either insider or outsider manipulation to put it bluntly and this has been proved in several different studies and surveys people who live in highly partisan echo chambers are much more likely to believe false information if they receive it from highly partisan sources that they trust so the more partisan and the more polarized the more susceptible to conspiracy theories to disinformation campaigns and false information en this of course is a weakness that can be exploited in due course many people are going to exploit it but since we're all aware of news from the United States whether we want to be or not it's worth pointing out that the first national government to understand how this new system worked was the Russian government we now know that in the US election professional Russian trolls deliberately sought out partisans in other words they looked for those alienated groups online ranging from anti-immigration groups who were pro-Trump to black lives matter activists they also created fake anti-Trump groups whom they targeted in an effort to get them to not vote for Hillary Clinton in other words they targeted people with false information both either to get them to vote for Trump or to stop voting for Clinton in a couple of instances they even sought to use fake facebook pages to organize real events protest marches even orchestrated clashes between different groups as we now know this kind of activity was combined with a more traditional form of cyber attack the hack of the democratic national committee material from which was spun into hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of stories ranging from democrats or anti-catholic that was one strand to Hillary Clinton runs a pedophile ring in the basement of a Washington DC pizza restaurant you laugh but that famous conspiracy theory known as pizza gate inspired one man who lived in North Carolina to get in his pickup truck drive to Washington with his gun go into the pizza restaurant break down the door shoot his gun into the air and say where are the children that you've kidnapped and the pizza restaurants they're in the basement and we didn't have a basement and there was of course nothing there and he interestingly apparently felt very abashed and embarrassed before he went to jail at the same time each one of these groups can run twitter campaigns that promote particular memes and hashtags in order to make these ideas seem more popular in pizza gate in kind of supporting making posts on facebook and so on seem more popular than they were particular messages were amplified by the use of bots as the younger people in this room know but maybe some older ones might not these are bits of computer code that can be programmed to imitate human social media accounts and can pass on particular stories many millions of them now operate on all the social media platforms where they are used for all kinds of things but among other things to distort reality to make particular ideas trend and seem popular and to make particular narratives seem as if more people are reading them as well these tactics are now widely used across Europe as well although I don't think the awareness here of how they work is as widespread during the German elections last year I took part in a data analysis project at the London School of Economics en we found plenty of evidence actually of all these tactics which in Germany were aimed at boosting the support both real and fake of the alternative for Deutschland or AFD which is Germany's far right party pro Russian media and Russian trolls working hand in hand I must say with the international alt right which now also operates online you don't have to be Russian to do this spent the months before the election echoing and repeating divisive messages immigration, anti NATO, pro Russian and of course pro AFD they targeted very specific groups they targeted people who are already on the German far right they targeted the Russian speaking community in Germany which is much bigger than you think thanks to immigration from the former USSR it's several million people and to some extent the far left too and the point was they were trying to drive as many people as possible into echo chambers where they would hear messages over and over again some true and some false in order to motivate them either to vote or not to vote depending on which the group was I haven't myself worked on the Dutch internet but I know that I know that similar studies have been done here it's a very similar pattern and I will contribute an observation from a friend who follows Russian bots in the United States very often finds Dutch accounts echoing Russian accounts in the US context just in case you had any doubt that globalization is real for anyone who's been following Russian use of the internet in Central and Eastern Europe these US election tactics were nothing new sponsoring extremism is something that the Russian state like the Soviet state before it has been doing for many years throwing compromod or secret material into the public space is an old tactic governments in Hungary, Slovakia Macedonia and Poland among others have also been brought down by secret tapes or leaks like the ones used in the US election as in the US election this so called secret information was often spun into hundreds of conspiracy theories that may have borne no relation to the original text online disinformation campaigns involving fake websites or fake photographs or fake stories have long been used to great effect in Ukraine as well of course maybe that's why having followed politics in Eastern Europe for many years when I watched the US election unfold in 2016 I had this very clear sense of deja vu maybe here is where I should confess that I have a personal interest in Russian disinformation campaigns a few years ago I was the focus of one of them it had some very interesting spy novel elements there was an Australian journalist who began writing about me he had actually fled the United States in the 1980s following an FBI inquiry into his KGB connections and by some accounts he was the last KGB recruit in Washington he was never very important but he had some minor job in the US government when he began writing about me more recently his technique was much more up to date he wrote articles containing a mix of truth and lies my book contract was described as mysterious income from questionable sources maybe the CIA he posted this material on these quasi serious Russian business websites and then he let others do the rest it was very eye opening I watched the stories move around through a kind of system that I realized had been constructed for this purpose so eventually these articles were echoed or quoted in a dozen places so other websites with ties to Russian business on Russia today on the website of the American Libertarian Ron Paul in the comment sections of Polish newspapers and this trickle continued until months later WikiLeaks in November 2015 well before the organization became notorious for its role in the US election tweeted one of these articles to Julian Assange's 4 million followers it was very unnerving but it was also very educational and very interesting because as I watched the story move around I saw how this world of fake websites and fake information exist to reinforce one another and give falsehood credence many of the websites quoted not the original source but one another there were a lot more of them than I had realized though I also learned that many of their followers maybe even most of them were fake they were also bots in my case it also turned out not to really matter most of the people I know and encountered in my life have never read any of these stories they live in a different part of the internet and they didn't see them and also I'm not that important enough for it to really matter and I just had to learn not to care about this particular disinformation campaign just as I've had to learn we all learn I think now not to care about all kinds of other things about me and my friends and places that I care about that are said online my point is different namely that these systems have been in place for a while that the production of false stories relies on entire ecosystems that those who created them are constantly updating them and that it's time we tried to understand them better they are not confined to electoral politics or electoral years botnets these groups of bots that are linked together can be used in a lot of ways even when nobody is voting and repurposed amusingly our German project discovered a commercial botnet based in Nizhny Novgorod in Russia which promoted the AFD as well as escorts in Dubai car advertisements en materiaal attacking Alexei Navalny who is the Russian anti-corruption activist other studies have revealed how the exact same trolls used to promote Trump were turned around a few months later to attack Emmanuel Macron in other words these are often commercial operations you can rent them you can ask a botnet to do X or Y and it will do it it's also important to understand that it can take other forms disinformation a few years ago the US defense department uncovered a Russian effort to hijjack more than 10,000 twitter users at the pentagon messages were sent linking to stories about sporting events or celebrities when you clicked them the links took users to a Russian controlled server it downloaded a program that allowed Moscow's hackers to take control of the victims twitter account so this scheme was rumbled it was discovered but think about what might have happened if it had succeeded so imagine the chaos that could be unleashed if authentic defense department social media accounts with the authority of the US armed forces behind them began tweeting disinformation what if this happened during a natural disaster or what if it happened during a terrorist attack what if the terrorist attack was begun deliberately and the disinformation campaign planned in advance to go with it as each tweet backed up the others and covert Russian agents amplified the messages the result could be real panic or confusion nor do you need the defense department to be the only target as I've said we now know that Russian trolls created both Facebook and twitter accounts that pretended to be anti immigration activists in Idaho as well as Black Lives Matters activists in on the east coast what if these were commandeered at a crucial moment during a race riot or at a moment of political unrest couldn't they be used to increase anxiety and fear and might that not have long term political effects as well now all these examples I've cited are Russian but of course that is misleading Russia is simply ahead of this game they just got interested in it before others did for historical reasons the Russian secret services understood the possibilities of internet disinformation before anyone else in the Soviet era the KGB had whole departments devoted to what we now call fake news famously spreading not just Soviet propaganda but also for example a very famous rumor that the CIA had deliberately invented the AIDS virus you laugh it was a big story it appeared in multiple newspapers all over the world the US you know this was very late in the day this was in the 1980s and the US was at that time speaking to the Soviet Union at one point there was even a threat made we will do no more scientific cooperation with you unless you stop this rumor it was considered a big deal at the time so the Union is now gone of course but there are also reasons why the KGB's descendants have devoted so much time to thinking about this in the present it's a very cheap way for an impoverished superpower to meddle in other countries politics moreover the Russians have a direct interest in weakening and dividing western democracies more so than most you know this is for some day for a longer conversation but the Russian interest in undermining the west is both practical and ideological on the what Russia fears about the west whether the Kremlin fears rather is not our tanks or our soldiers what they're really afraid of is the power of democracy rhetoric this is something that Putin saw himself when he was in East Germany in 1989 it's what they saw in Ukraine in 2014 when people were waving EU flags and chanting anti-corruption slogans this kind of event this kind of revolution is what he is afraid of and so the easiest way for him to fight it is to undermine the systems both in the eyes of Russians in particular but also in the eyes of people who live in this part of the world so it is absolutely an ideological and political strategy we would like to undermine what the west is and what it stands for so that it doesn't become attractive to Russians but although the Russians were the first to invest in these things others will follow them and are already doing so the Trump campaigns means of campaigning in the US wasn't that different from what the Russians were doing anyway other governments might do it political parties, private companies somebody recently described the recent Mexican election to me as a bot war with no rules of engagement almost every group in Mexican politics was creating bot nets to fight against the others there is no big bar to entry into this game it doesn't cost very much certainly relative to creating weapons real weapons doesn't take very much time it's not particularly high tech and it requires no special equipment now I can imagine what you're thinking now if only we could stop this from happening if only somebody was in charge of stopping disinformation campaigns I don't know supporting the traditional press and fixing the partisan divides and here we come to the black hole at the heart of the problem which is that nobody is responsible for solving it democratic governments don't censor the internet they aren't in the habit right yet or right now of funding independent media and of course if they did it would cease to be independent the militaries of France or the Netherlands or the US are not set up to fight information wars NATO can control tanks but it is not going to wade into the social media wars that go on in its own member states even counterintelligent services are very queasy about taking part in political debates inside their own countries it just isn't their job to penetrate echo chambers to counter conspiracy theories or to bring back trust to democratic institutions let alone to reinvigorate the traditional press but if public institutions can't do it if military institutions can't do it and tech companies won't do it then who can and the answer is going to be unsatisfying because I don't think that there is one silver bullet solution there may be some clues from the past as I've said in the 1980s we know in the past we're also a kind of high point for disinformation in response to for example the CIA had invented the AIDS virus story the Reagan administration created something called the active measures working group a kind of interagency group that brought together a wide range of people from the CIA to the United States information agency today's equivalent might be a European wide body with a similarly broad range perhaps including tech companies academic institutions like this one media civil society civil society and policy makers maybe together they can again define the disinformation agenda create tools and bodies that can track it empirically and transparently and push back strategically more research analysis is also part of the answer but again some of the solution may also lie inside the tech platforms themselves imagine what could be achieved for example if the major internet platforms could be persuaded that the world they are helping to create is not one that will be conducive to the work that they do what if they could be persuaded for example to cooperate on the issue of online anonymity without question anonymity on twitter on reddit in comment sections of newspapers gives almost complete freedom to people who are driven by bile or greed or ideology in real life we are all suspicious of people who cover their faces online i mean who cover their faces in real life if somebody walked in the room right now with a mask on we would not necessarily accept them into the group we would be made nervous by them perhaps online you should also have to prove that you are before you enjoy the full protection of the law if tech platforms wanted to do so they could create ways for people to prove they are real without necessarily revealing their identities to all and sundry we should be able to back up our e-mail and social media accounts with their credentials bank details, phone numbers, addresses government issued identities we don't need to give the actual details of these to tech giants we just need the custodians of our data electronic token confirming that we want to use one identity to back up another some systems for authenticating online identity exist already for example twitter issues a little blue tick you get a little check mark to accounts that it regards as verified although it's criteria opaque and it's pretty arbitrary who gets to be verified and facebook has a similar scheme what about making verification white and not a privilege so why can't everybody have a blue check mark and this would at least tilt the scales in favor of real people most people might choose to only read e-mails and engage on social media with authenticated accounts that belong to real people just like we like to know the names of real life people before we dispense must of our time and trust on them that would at least raise the tone of discussion and make it harder for outsiders to interfere tech companies drag their feet on this because vast numbers of their accounts are fake perhaps 20% in the case of facebook and maybe up to half on twitter but if the tech companies won't do it maybe governments should in Estonia the government has created a system that gives every resident of the country an online identity a totally secure passport that gives them both rights and responsibilities online what if the european union were to offer the possibility of e-citizenship of the possibility of e-citizenship to every European what if social media platforms were to require participants to have this kind of online identity before they participate I'm just throwing out some ideas I think this is a area where there's a huge possibility for creativity what I would like to avoid is a situation where either facebook or the Dutch government takes it upon itself to begin censoring online communities because we see that's begun already it's not very successful it creates a pushback maybe there are more fundamental things we can do to the structure of the internet to make it less chaotic in other countries I've heard of people calling for social media advertising to be regulated the same way that advertising is regulated in other spaces why is it that people who make a political billboard have to follow certain laws whereas people who make a political ad on facebook don't, it makes no sense german government has now made facebook liable for material that appears on its site in germany for material that violates the country's their laws on extremist speech that's not going to work for everybody not everybody has germany's laws country by country we've been thinking about how to do this you know the counter argument is that regulation won't work that the platforms and the internet more generally are changing too fast although a british politician of my acquaintance recently reminded me that in the 19th century the laws that established protection for factory workers during the industrial revolution were also written in waves and they were also written altered over time to suit changing technology capital markets which is an equally complex equally fast moving world in the world of financial you know somehow we managed to regulate that too even though it's absolutely packed with people who are trying to cheat and who could make fantastic amount of monies by doing so nevertheless there's a regulation that works why can't social media be regulated as well not censored regulated some of the work I've done in recent months at LSE suggests some other possibilities what if for example we start from the assumption that people who live in highly partisan echo chambers reject standard attempts at fact checking and so what if journalists try to reach them in different ways we're running an experiment with some Italian computer scientists and an Italian newspaper which is going to try and find different ways using narratives and different graphics and different authority figures to try and reach especially distrustful audience on the topic of migration finally part of the answer odd though it sounds is you and by that I don't mean you as members of the alumni association of Tilburg University but I mean or you as academics and you as citizens because it's going to be very important over the next several years and even decades for the inhabitants of democracies to find ways of influencing and changing the new forms of media that might capture the hearts and minds of voters and not just their attention it may be that everybody has to find ways to teach children to be literate in the 21st century or else indeed to teach university students in order to help people learn to distinguish propaganda from real stories on the internet everybody might find they have to interact with politicians and with judges and with civil servants in new ways and all of us might find ourselves participating more in public life than we used to the analogy that I like to use is to water so all of us right now have running water it comes out of the tap we turn it on, it comes out anytime thinking about where the water comes from is it clean, who cleans it what does it cost, it just comes out of the tap and we drink it and we're used to that and the way in which we're used to running water is the same way in which we're used to our democracies, it just works you vote every four years or every five years and you get a politician and maybe it's better or worse but whatever it goes on we might have to start thinking a little bit more the way that people who live in African villages with no water think about water where does it come from how do I get it how do I bring it to my house in the morning how do I make sure I have enough throughout the day democracy might stop being something that's automatic that we can assume is always going to be there and it may be that we all need to begin to think about how we enhance it do we join parties, do we join associations do we become active readers of the media, do we somebody behind me just now asked what should be done to help independent media and I said you should buy a newspaper and he said I don't know if I buy a newspaper I don't mean buy a newspaper I mean buy the newspaper buy the institution one new form of philanthropy may have to be local newspapers they don't survive anymore Dutch public television will always be fine NRC Handelsblot will always be fine local newspapers might not be fine it may be that they need to have new sources of funding perhaps philanthropic perhaps through foundations we all might need to be thinking about that look the revival of democracy which has for so long been dependent on reliable information and on information that reaches everybody in an era of unreliable information is going to be a major civilizational project just like it took hundreds of years to end the religious wars in Europe it may take some time before the real solutions to this problem are found too at the end of the day I think we have to hope that the very basic human desire not to be fooled wins the day also that the deeper values of democracy the principles of tolerance, respect for rule of law, the importance of strong and neutral political institutions we have to hope that these prove stronger than the weight and dissatisfied anger that you often found we often find online so thank you very much thank you so much for your inspiring insights it's a very interesting topic like we said earlier we going to invite some panel members and also have interaction with the audience just a few questions to start us off what is your biggest worry when it comes to... that wasn't enough it was a lot I'm so curious what's your biggest worry my biggest worry is that we don't deal with the problem you know, while in time that it isn't understood that people don't take these things seriously that's my biggest worry because we see a lot and we don't act on it we see a lot and we don't act on it and as I said it is this running water analogy is real we assume everything is going to go on the way it is just because that's how it does until the moment when it stops and I would like us to think about the problems before we get to that moment you had some comparison with transitions when it comes to information earlier years ago when the printed press was invented and when we compare it to now are there some learnings then that can help us to solve the problems nowadays I feel like somewhere in this audience there is a student of the religious wars in Europe who could probably answer that question better than me but some piece of it has looked so how and why did those wars eventually and they ended please forgive me historians this is really very general kind of more or less they end when ideas of religious tolerance and the idea of the neutral state and the enlightenment make it possible for people to live together in one society so some new you know some some new set of agreements or some new set of agreements about how we live and how we communicate will eventually merge I also saw a lecture of you and then you were also talking about the transition when the radio was invented yes so this is a so I have I mean really almost every moment in history when there's a big change in the way that people get information there's a political impact and the the other recent one that's very important was the moment when radio was invented and the invention of radio the first two people who really understood radio and who understood how it was different from the news and how it could reach a different kind of audience were Hitler and Stalin and they both used the radio brilliantly they understood what its impact could be having somebody's voice in your room was different from reading it in a press and they both used it and the responses to radio were interesting one of them was the BBC the BBC was created with the idea that we need some kind of radio that reaches everybody and literally was the idea that we have everybody in one conversation so there's BBC Wales and BBC Scotland and BBC Cornwall BBC is meant to reach young people and old people and so on it still actually has that mission to this day I wouldn't say it's still entirely successful but it's by comparison to others it still functions in that way everybody will appear on the BBC whereas not everybody in the United States will appear on Fox News not everybody will appear on CNN so it still has that function another response the other great user of radio was Franklin Roosevelt who created the idea of the fireside chat so instead of using radios this sort of aggressive language in your living room it was avonkular, friendly come into the White House and sit and talk to me he also was very good at radio maybe there are some examples from Dutch history that you can tell me as well learning how to live with it, use it getting people used to it we have a lot of transitions of course you are a historian but when we take a small step into the future is there also a worry about next step that are coming like voice cloning maybe yes so this is partly because it's you know that's maybe farther away than we think one of the great fears now is fake video and what's called deepfakes in other words somebody might be able to take an image of you speaking and make it seem as if you're saying something completely different in the case of me saying something completely different it's not really that cataclysmic maybe it's a problem for me but what if it's the prime minister or what if it's the commander in chief or what if it's the general president on the ground in Syria so what if you could make the president seem to be saying something he never said and this is a possibility it's already it is possible it's getting closer I think the answer to that is going to be something technical in other words the creation of tags or something that will allow you to see that video has been manipulated but I don't know there are some people who say this is going to be happening next week and there are some people who say it's only 10 years from now so you don't maybe you don't have to worry yet well I worry about it but in a deepfaking video faking sound we can already fake pictures so Photoshop is already with us although if you think about it once people knew that there was Photoshop and people are now more aware of what Photoshop is I know if I look at a picture that seems odd I ask myself whether that's and so it may also be with all these things that we also begin to develop antibodies the danger of course the danger is that sooner or later nobody believes anything and if you don't believe any video or anything that you then you have a problem having not just democratic politics not just democratic politics but really almost any politics I would like to invite you to take a seat in the meantime I would like to have some people on stage and their names are Anita van Osmarte in the court, Bauke, Dynamite Erich Koster, give them a big round of applause come on the stage because as you know earlier this day there were a few sessions which you also participate and from each session oh they are going to move the tables a little bit to the front of the stage so that we have some better contact while they are moving there were four sessions and from each session we have a panel member that has some questions regarding the discussion that was been there earlier this day regarding the audience we have two microphones in the room yes the colleagues there are at the back of the room so if you want to say something make a remark have a question also for expert today our keynote speaker Anne Appelbaum please stand up and briefly introduce yourself when you stand up and I will ask the mic to come to you then you can briefly introduce yourself and then ask your question this will all be in English of course okay while everyone is seated take a seat please Anne also you asked me that it is very important for you to also know the views that are here in this room present today yes if we are going to spend the afternoon me answering questions it will be very boring for me I already know what I think I am really interested to know what you think alright there may be some specific questions that you are very interested in when it comes to all the Dutch people that are here present I mean I would like to hear the Dutch version of what I just was discussing how are you dealing with these issues here it is a because the context is slightly different every country has slightly different media between institutions everybody is coming up with different answers and I would love to hear what you think is happening here so please make a wish happen and also give your views regarding how we are coping with this problem first of all we have two mics on the table for the four panel members I will start here maybe you can share the mic over there maybe everyone can briefly introduce themselves your name and what you are doing in daily life and your interest in the subject of the day can you please start my name is Bauke Dainema I am a student here in Tilburg but I live in Utrecht where I did my bachelor degree and from this year on I am starting my master degree in business communication and digital media so the name media is in the title itself already and also during my bachelor I have a critical view on information and media very broadly so from Utrecht I started having a critical view on a lot of things we hear from politicians and from science and from basically everyone which is sometimes a bit scary you have to to live with it of course ok thank you for now regarding your session maybe I can ask you to introduce yourself now briefly good afternoon my name is Eric Koster I've been a student here and University of Tilburg Class of 2006 I think I'm a lawyer by profession so one disclaimer I'll try to keep it short as possible maybe your personal interest regarding the subject of today of course I'm a lawyer so that means my daily is just focusing on fact checking because the rules and the regulations I'm actually in favor of regulations given my profession but you know it's already in my files in my cases I usually see that the counterparty and my party we're checking the same fact however we interpret it differently so even if you have clarity on what's the actual fact you still can have a dispute about what's the consequence thereof ok thank you for the introduction my name is Anita van Os I'm a consultant and member of advisory board and with regard to my interest in this subject I think what is happening the developments have so such a huge impact that for me it's unbelievable that you are not interested in this subject it affects all of us thank you so much I'm Martijn de Kort klas of 2002 international business I'm an entrepreneur and I'm a politician on the state level the provincial states for which party the labour party social democrats ok thank you so much and I read somewhere that you really believe in an equal society and when it comes to disinformation and democracy what's your view on that it should have for you it should affect everybody in an equal way well maybe also because you were at the first session that we are now debating also with the audience of course and with you all for present but you were there does information inform climate policies you were there what were the highlights during the discussion we had a very interesting presentation and the interesting part about it is scientifically there is so much information on climate change but we saw that there is not just a problem that a lot of people don't act there is also the problem and I think there was an eye opener for most people in the group even when we have a scientific report by the IPCC in this case the translation of the huge report into the summary that is actually used by policymakers is done by politicians countries had to unanimously agree on the summary of a scientific report and we were shown which parts were left out parts that didn't fit in this case ideas of China and Brazil because it didn't help their negotiating position so I think that was one of the most for me and I heard from a lot of other people in the group one of the most shocking aspects that the summaries of scientific research are decided upon by politicians in this case and the class was moderated by Professor Reijer Geilich and also he is connected to the IPCC that's correct what was your question regarding to the session to an apple bomb what I what I really wonder is how can we you told us about how people live in their own echo chamber nowadays and we see that you told us how important it is that you have news outlets that are neutral so to say like you said in the US it's now either you are on this side or on that side and you have the news channel that matches that you gave examples of for example the Netherlands where you do have some independent media what I see is that in discussions that I have online for example on climate change I try to listen to people's fears I try to really seriously go into the debate with them and I also try to inform by not giving information from my party because I understand that they think that's biased but by quoting the national newspapers by quoting the national television channels and the response I get 9 out of 10 times is fake news even those neutral news channels have already been well hit by this fake news well idea that Trump and others put in to the minds of people so how can we how can you deal with people that are so stuck in their echo chambers that even news by in the Netherlands the NOS the Volkskrant Algemeen Dagblad is being counted immediately as fake news no that is that's the main question I mean you have the you know people now treat maybe even particularly those institutions as somehow biased or belonging somehow to the other side I mean so there's a lot of work has been done studying how and why people accept and reject information and the best thing I can say and this is you know kind of primitive stage of understanding this is you have to figure out what it is that will make people trust you or not so much you but will make people trust that information so does it depend on who it comes from does it depend on what it looks like does it depend on what form it takes for example I mean this may be something that takes it's worth maybe your party experimenting with you know if you communicate I don't know figures and data to people do they accept that or do they reject it if you communicate in the form of narrative stories do they accept that or do they reject it which are the you know which are the means of telling the story or presenting the information can you give people and it may also be that the answer is not the same across populations one of the things that Facebook has done whether we like it or not is it has made it possible to you know to kind of identify different groups online and it may be now that it's no longer possible for your party for example or for a newspaper to just give out one message maybe you need several messages maybe you need to reach different kinds of people in different ways you know I don't have any and this is something that you know once you begin thinking like that what's the way to reach this kind of person then maybe you get to some kind of answer I'm sorry it's not very helpful but it's a beginning it's not so much you have to listen to me because I'm right and I have scientific facts you have to think you have to kind of switch the way of arguing thinking what is it that people will hear because at the end of the day it's about trust why do people trust some sources and not other sources how to maybe just beginning to think like that might help you want to reflect in a way that is what marketing does you identify different target groups and you adapt your message to the different target groups Facebook was created for marketers this is exactly and Trump is a master marketer and this is of course how the Trump campaign did Russians did their advertising campaign in the US as they had different messages for different groups and as I said they had messages to radical black socialists saying don't vote for Hillary Clinton she's not left wing enough and they had a different message for people in Idaho so that is exactly how they think so maybe there's a count maybe there's a we have to think like that too maybe there are some questions already in the room or some remarks some views that you want to share with us we can cope with this can you please stand up yes and the mic is coming where is the mic please help me out you have to run I think okay briefly introduce yourself and then please your remark or question first of all Jean Dobre Jean Dobre my name is Maciej I study here second year liberal arts in Tobokin University college and what I wanted to ask about is that of course we're talking about how people are susceptible to fake news and such however in the countries that were hit the hardest by well the waves of populism this wave of course well misinformation like United States France, Italy we see a large popularization of middle class people who struggle economically in the regions that were hardest by well really this financialization of European economy and well the reforms that were being introduced post 1980s and especially post 2008 after austerity politics were introduced my question is or just like an well open invitation to our question really is maybe the media is only the mediator of really what's going on that is people being disfranchised to an extent that they have the rage that it's not really well assessed not really well dealt with and that's how they express it okay so you say that the media has a role in as in that this kind of misinformation et cetera walks by people being desperate by people not having well the quality of life improved and economics is it really an economic question rather than a media question is the source of this economic that's the to an extent, yeah that argument has been going on for several years now what's the source of this I mean I believe that there are and this we're now into a different subject which is the sources of populism or the sources of anti establishment sentiment in western countries the difficulty with saying that it's economic is that many of the people who are angriest are not the poorest and many of the countries that are the most disturbed are not the ones that have had the biggest economic trauma in other words you can't make there doesn't seem to be a kind of direct connection between having suffered from the 2009 collapse and then having this I accept that it's a factor and I think the undermining in particular of the western business and financial establishment that happened in the wake of 2008 and 2009 you know they were seen as kind of since 1989 of having some kind of super authority they could figure everything out you know the washington consensus could fix every country and so on this was undermined and this is certainly a piece of the story nevertheless if you look at who voted for brexit for example it does not track with poverty or economics you know if you look at in which countries there's been the hardest hard right backlash you know you opened by speaking polish the country in europe that has been within its own terms the most successful economically over 25 years is Poland there has never been a recession the economy has continued to grow living standards are completely different now from what they were before and yet it has had this there has been a big backlash and a nationalist government in power there is a way to make an exact and by the way many of the people who vote for the nationalist government again are not the poorest people so it's very hard to make an exact link between economics and this other problem so it's a factor and if we were having a wider conversation about populism which maybe we'll get to then we would certainly have to talk about it it's part of the story but I don't people who try to shrink this problem down to economics we've all had funnily enough in the last several decades this very Marxist way of thinking about politics that everything is explained by economics that the job of the prime minister is to increase economic growth that the point of politics we've had this very economacentric view of politics and I think that's falling apart because people want other things and a lot of what's happening now is to do with identity politics or other or cultural issues that somehow weren't even part of the conversation 10 years ago is it the combination about the economic problems and the cultural problems people searching for cultural identity so I mean yeah I think people want as I kind of alluded to this in my talk as traditional sources of identity disappear you know trade unions what was the left until recently it was a political party that emanated from a real life organization which was the trade union movement you know what was the Christian what was Christian democracy it was a political movement that emanated from a real life thing namely the Catholic church and the institutions around it and as those institutions become weaker and people look for different kinds of identities online and then the parties break down too we have one question over there because there's also sorry just a minute no no we want to have another question maybe you can give the mic to the just one question and then we go to the second session hi I'm Frederick I'm great to hear you in person I really enjoy your columns so my question is so if it's not the economics perhaps maybe it's just the system of the social media that creates this dynamic of polarization, of populism of the whole revenue model that makes us act like strategic actors because we need to have revenues we need to get our we need to communicate in a way that's polarizing cause otherwise it doesn't generate any clicks yeah there's something to it I mean that's how Facebook works that's what it is, that's what I meant that's what the algorithm does the more popular something is the more popular it becomes one of the ways to become popular is to say something extreme so that's a known phenomenon ok, thank you so much so I mean not to get into too many deep into the weeds, but yes there is a one of the conversations to have eventually is the question of should there be a public service algorithm we created public service television we created public service radio that was one of our responses to the invention of radio and television in order to keep our societies whatever talking about the same thing maybe there's an argument for a public service algorithm could you rethink and this is for computer scientists and psychologists and political scientists to talk about is there a way to write an algorithm so that it brings people together instead of dividing them ok, thank you so much and also thank you so much for your vision on this subject Erik Koster I would like to go to the second session the truth of fiction as counter punch to fake news was hosted by professor Heingers what were the highlights very interesting actually as the good days going on going by here I'm starting to get into the dooms camp so to speak, because the scope of the problem seems to be so huge I think Miss Heingers actually she explained to us that she's looking for manners in which you can train people themselves to start recognizing the difference between fake news and reality basically which is difficult and part of that is by if I'm not mistaken by suggesting that people start reading more reading novels because nowadays, especially current novels and more recent novels they start using realities and placing let's say the story within a reality of itself yet the story is still a fiction which if you keep doing that and you keep reading those books you start developing your own way in recognizing what's fake and what's not and trying to find that a difference between the two and of course they pulled a little trick on us today cause they asked us can you ask a question during the session however you thought of the question before the session started so basically my question has been evolving for the past two hours because you answered most of them already it started out basically with the suggestion should we have an independent agency paid for by the government of course which makes it in itself perhaps not that independent that already checks news real time although I also see issues there so then we get to censorship pretty fast, that's the problem and I do have some historical awareness so I do see some issues there which basically makes me rethink my question and you also said in the end it also boils down to people not want to be fooled so it's up to us as a society as citizens as well and that's basically what you are saying also I think it would boil down to training people to recognize fake news or not and helping them I love the idea of using fiction to do that, I hadn't heard that before but as a way of talking about what's real and what's not because when you read fiction of course you suspend some it depends on the book obviously but you suspend some sense of reality and you follow the story I mean nobody said that to me before so I'd love to hear more from a professor who's trying to teach that it's really interesting is here maybe you can give a brief reflection on it where's the mic where's the mic but we also well the idea was exactly as you were saying so we are used in literary studies let's say or in cultural studies we are used to what we talk about as the willing suspension of disbelief when you start reading a novel you start on page 1 you do it till page 300 and you recognize this is a world as such a reality as such I do know that it is not the real self to believe in it as long as I'm reading sorry that I'm with my back to the audience no no no it's no problem and then what we talked about and there are some really interesting novels that have disappeared lately for instance we talked about Houvelle Beck in France and we talked about Erpenbeck in Germany and they are using in their novel reality in the literary reality very much historical figures or things that are going on in real society as well so then as a reader you have to be aware ok this is the willing suspension of disbelief I do not really believe it but for the sake of the reading I believe in it but I also can make links to what is happening outside in the real world so the point was that was the argument of the session when you are trained in reading this type of novels you are sort of more street wise when it comes to fake news more street wise but also more capable of seeing ok this is a rhetoric part connected to the fakeness this is something that I see in reality and you know that you have to jump maybe or make the connections between the two it's a very interesting idea no it's fascinating I mean a lot of the people who are studying this subject are people who have in the past been interested in what are post modernist ideas about literary criticism so it would be interesting to try and cue in a way this you know the idea of the proliferation of narratives and trying to figure out what's true and what's false is something that you know what a wonderful idea and you could cure it by going back to literature and thinking in a literary way so it's a great idea is there someone else who wants to reflect on this subject there is someone here and someone over there we start off over there please stand up then the mic other side thank you so much a briefly introduction and then your question or remark please my name is Karl I'm really pleased that I can be here because this is a lot more interesting than my math class this might not really fit in this subject but the last years we saw a big rise in alt right and alt left and you know they are really convinced that they are on the right side and in my opinion the only way we can improve our country is by working together so do you see it as a threat that you know our society is starting to get so polarized thank you yeah I mean yes I think the the root of the fake news problem is this problem of polarization and polarization is the real problem it's the deeper issue it's not just about fake stuff online it's the it's the impact of it and so then the question is what are the anti what are the politics of anti polarization look like you know who are the figures what are the issues can you get people to work together so lots of people are doing different kinds of thinking about it in the united states there is a charity or sort of NGO organization called Better Angels and it takes the name from a famous speech given by Abraham Lincoln who talked about the better angels of our nature meaning the better things this is at the time of the American Civil War the things that link us together and Better Angels is a group you can read about that that seeks out people they actually call them blues and reds you know people who are conservatives liberals in america they have a kind of program where they bring people together and make them talk and the point is not for each side to convince one another it's assumed that nobody will win the argument the point is not to argue the point is to come up with constructive projects they can do together to think about what it is about the american system they both admire what is the constitutional traditions we support them it sounds a bit kind of mushy when i heard it first described to me i thought sweet talk it doesn't sound like it however i have to say i know several people who are part of starting this movement and it is it is taking off with this amazing speed and there are now dozens and dozens of these groups all over the country who are meeting and having these conversations i have no idea maybe in a smaller country you might achieve more with that thinking about for example in studying what keeps people apart it is almost always the case that people will harsh things about one another online that they would never say in real life when you are sitting next to a real person you have a different kind of conversation than you have with somebody on twitter and so the idea of this organization was can we bring people together and have real conversations and therefore have a more civilized conversation and not just scream at each other and trade insults online thank you another question can you please stand up then the mic can ok maybe you can help us out maybe you can give it a big room thank you my name is Wil Hoefnagels we have a very professional popular professional i am a banker in a french bank in the service of compliance in brussels my question is in the 70s there was some really fake news i asked my father what can i do so that i don't read the wrong things i bought 3 newspapers and indeed he always bought a left newspaper a right wing newspaper and a local newspaper of course not the companies of the newspapers what do you tell your children you've got two kids to weapon them to distinguish this information fake news and truth beautiful personal question so that's an interesting question my children maybe this will be true of everybody my children are one of the things that make me quite hopeful not because they are so great although of course they are but they are they are very savvy about what they read online they grew up reading everything online they never read paper newspapers so they are absolutely used to this world they are they pay a lot of attention to where things come from they compare and contrast they look for things that they think have good sources and not in a way i'm wondering if some of this conversation isn't about people in their 40's and 50's whereas actually people who are much younger are going to figure this stuff out pretty quickly because they're raised they're raised with it they get it they don't need it explained to them they've all personally experienced whether it's either being bullied online or seeing fake stories about their friends some of it they've already had these experiences with false stories online in a personal sense I also find that they and all of their friends amazingly are incredibly skeptical of social media they don't have facebook pages they are they're very wary about what they put online they know about privacy they know that the social media companies are using their information I find they're quite they're more savvy about it in some ways than older people of course we've always had multiple news sources we've always tried to look at lots of things and we always tried to tell them to do that too but I almost think they do it that generation does it automatically thank you so much for the question we are going to head on to Russia because you were at the session Russia and the west from cold war to cyber war was hosted by professor Randall Le Saffer if I something like it maybe you can reflect what were the highlights during the session and also your question well I think the highlights was the workshop focused very much on the relationship with Russia and there was a kind of implicit assumption in the room a little bit we are the good guys well they are the bad guys well maybe there is some room to challenge that and then maybe I can go over to your lecture because actually you started with a kind of description what happened in the cyber world and actually it seems that we have been subject to a kind of Russian cyber rage over the last years I think even you can call it a cyber war from the side of Russia and the interesting question is what's behind that and you mentioned it's the fear for democracy and then you mentioned that for a few years the relationship with Russia was ok until democratic movement started in Russia in the Arabic spring time so that caused a huge race from Russia so the question is isn't it our assumption that democracy is the best systems for all nations and that our push towards Russia with regard to democracy causes all the problems met Russia could pushing less maybe improve the relationship with Russia and even create a kind of collaboration in the cyber world thank you it's a nice idea the only problem with that thesis is that it leaves out the Russians and the Russian democratic opposition I wish that the CIA was clever enough to have created it but I don't think unfortunately that it's true and so most of the the pro-democracy movement in Russia such as it is sometimes I think pro-democracy is the wrong way pro-justice or pro pro-fairness in some ways most of that is coming from inside Russia so it is not us pushing democracy in Russia it's coming from people there and I'd also say I think it's true that Putin's animus towards the west does it dates from both the 2011-12 demonstrations in Moscow and elsewhere and also from the democratic revolution in Ukraine but it's also there's a deeper issue which is that he in the first 10 years when he was in power his essential and I'm kind of exaggerating to make a point but his essential message to Russians was okay, I'm corrupt you know and the system isn't fair but at least you're all getting richer and at least we now have stability and that was actually a very successful political message and it lasted for 10 years and he had I think real legitimacy just with that message the problem is now that Russia is not getting richer and the glaring unfairnesses of the society are bothering people more it's not just kind of intellectuals in Moscow there have also been different kinds of demonstrations and strikes against even things like pension reform all over the country and this makes the Kremlin very nervous and so part of what the other thing that they are doing now is that now the message is okay I'm corrupt and okay the economy is not going that well but at least I'm making Russia great again and so at least now Russia is a big player in the Middle East and look how seriously we're winning the war we're winning the war against the EU and our guys on the far right are going to take down European institutions and so we're winning so there's a way in which it's almost a kind of militarized rhetoric that is now the basis of Putin's legitimacy and Putin knows he's not democratically elected he knows the system is rigged he's not like he's mystified by that therefore but he does worry like all autocrats worry about legitimacy and about staying in power and so this now I think is one of the ways in which they stay in power is to constantly denigrate and undermine both in their own country European and western institutions to make sure that Russians don't think those are better and also to make them look better I mean that's sorry that's a long answer but what do you think the attraction of all the strong leaders we see Erdogan we see Trump we see Orban different leaders strong leaders what's the attraction I mean throughout human history people have been attracted to strong leaders I mean look democracy is the exception you know this little liberal democratic moment that we live in is exceptional in human history I mean there aren't that many examples of democracies that last even for even for many decades let alone centuries so in a way the default human position is authoritarianism of some kind whether you know as monarchs it's taken different forms in the past than it does now but is it also the real problem that we were that we're being arrogant about the liberal democracy all these years I don't think we've been arrogant I think we've been complacent I mean I think we begin to assume we begin to assume it would always be that way because it has been this way actually for an amazingly long time since the Second World War so I mean I think probably if we were having this conversation in 1948 we wouldn't be so complacent people would be very nervous about the liberal democracy will it survive will we be taken over by the Soviet Union so there was a there was a lot of anxiety about it and people worried about it now we've had since really since 1945 we've had however many decades that is of democracy really democracy and prosperity the whole time although it goes up and down a little bit and we are complacent we just assume it will it all has to be like this just because it has been for 6 decades how many decades? 7 decades our last session the session the battle for truth rationalisation unease and trust in science hosted by professor Achterberg Bacodijnema yes thank you very much the session was about science and about fragmentation in science and about people not believing science and started to create their own truth and we focused on Peter's own research on four subjects one being the flat earth society people believing that the earth is not round but flat and for instance people will believe in conspiracy theories and I think this lecture by you really compliments it pretty well because it's about what do we believe and what do we believe is true do we believe science because it's based on facts and statistics or do we believe on politicians who hopefully have done their research well but not always not always, no of course but one question we talked about briefly in the session was about whether all science is based on an opinion and then I tried to to make a bridge with your talk so my question was because people like Trump are really making the distinction clear between fake news and then something that's probably real news or true news is that something that's that can be captured and is there something like I don't know if that's a term already but like a journalism paradox in which a journalist tries to be a fly on the wall and tries to capture everything as good as possible but always fails in that because every question is very very hard and very complicated so that the real true news can never be met because every news company is of course owned by someone who has been educated or has a social cultural background that is not the same across to everyone I mean there are several different questions in there but is the question of is everybody coming from some perspective en does everybody share some bias yeah of course they do the question is whether it's a whether it's a bias that serves the purposes of liberal democracy in public debate or whether it's a bias that serves a different set of purposes I mean the idea that there's some kind of perfect news is of course wrong and I'm always very careful when I talk about objectivity is a goal you know it's a thing people try for it's not something anybody ever achieves I mean nobody is there is no perfectly objective writer you know you know so I think we just have to think about which biases are most useful to our society and which are less so I mean the question of scientific information is actually really interesting I know that a lot of people who study conspiracy theories and who study disinformation have spent a lot of time studying the vaccine conspiracies because these are of course apolitical you know it's nothing to do with you know although just as a little aside apparently the Russians push that too that's amazing partly because they worked out that it creates uncertainty about the medical establishment and the medical establishment for a lot of people is the metaphor for social institutions and so on also President Trump is against vaccines he's been very quiet about that I think it may be Melania but I'm not sure anyway they have some problems with one of their sons with their son but yeah so it's an interesting problem you can study it in a pure way then you can study political disinformation and of course the interesting thing about it is is that the people who believe the conspiracies if you give them scientific journals like you know the really good top scientific journals they will use those journals and critique them and go on with the conspiracy in other words giving people the journal doesn't solve the problem I mean so this is one of the most famous examples of how you know factual information when you give it to literally hand it to people they don't believe it what does that tell you it tells you that the basis of trust and belief lies somewhere else I mean it may turn out there are some people who you can never convince it may be that you have to reach people in some different way you may have to get them maybe their neighbor has to approach them and say I had my child they may have to see people dying from measles before they you may have to have some other means of reaching them other than just giving them a scientific journal other questions yes lady in the back of the room please stand up they come with the microphone and they can see you, thank you so much hi Martin Ayanovic Polish citizen and Dutch citizen I'm coming a bit from a more positivist background than maybe the students sorry I forgot your name I do believe there are facts though we might vary in how we interpret them no no I think there are facts if we agree on that I was thinking how in science how do we cause we were talking about the problem the different sources provide different kinds of facts so how do we deal with that in science through triangulation through meta analysis of a sort so I was kind of playing with an idea what if grocery stores have sort of a label for how healthy a food is if we had some kind of seal an index indeed that shows to what extenders overlap in how facts are presented in media across the spectrum and then you could have if a fact is covered in a similar way by 90% that would be great 70% still okay we would have a bit of an idea where do you stand what are your thoughts about there have been a number of ideas like that somebody I know has been working for a long time actually trying to create an index that would for example rank websites on the internet and give them sort of check marks or stars or something depending on how you can imagine what the blowback to this would look like some kind of reliability index and then you could base it on you could even do it in a computerized way based on you could have a list of 30 different kind of criteria is the website registered in a transparent way so there have been several people who have been thinking about could you do something like that could you give a ranking and then people can decide to look at the low ranked website and make up your own mind just like they give calorie counts on the back of cookie cake things that you buy in the supermarket and you can look at it and say I don't care if I can eat it anyway and you could decide that about the website so I don't care I know this has a low ranking I mean it's a little tricky because then the question would be who's doing the rankings and can they be hacked or can they be attacked and there was an idea to create a kind of consortium of universities to do this it might have happened but there are a lot of both technical and philosophical things to think through but there are people who are thinking about that it's a good idea I have room for two final questions the lady over here please stand up and then you have to find a question oh my name is Cecilia van Peske I studied psychology here at the university many years ago and I learned back then as a psychologist that we only know really what our own habitat is once we are outside of that habitat it was the metaphor with the water when the fish is outside of the fish tank then he only knows what water is almost a little bit like the Higgs particles I would say what I find very interesting about the discussion and I was in a group talking about EU-Wasian relations is and we are not really fully touching upon that but I know we are limited in time the root causes of this because I do think that and I spent 3 years in Doniesk in the conflict that we have just presently we are actually still in for the OSCE and the only question I basically got every time when I was in the Netherlands having my break here in Tilburg having a little R&R was did you see these Russian green men it was literally the only question I ever got because that was the view that we had in the west that was what we wanted to have the answer of nobody asked me ever who is shelling your compound that night and that came from the west that came from Ukrainian territory nobody was interested in this fact and I just want to emphasize again we really don't know what we are facing at this stage also with this information although I agree that there are facts it's not a black and white world and I think especially that is what these children already know they know it's not just a black and white world because they also didn't grow up in a black and white world we still did we still did in the 70s I just want to keep that in mind for further discussion ok, thank you so much the final question was over there at the other side sorry we have to wait for the microphone oh yeah you're running our final question before we round it up yes, thanks very much I'm Richard Gord maybe the microphone can be a little bit higher ok, I will not spoil too much of your time but correct me if I'm wrong but maybe I've missed a scenario in your lecture because you told about the story of the tap water for us being automatic you know something we know but what about electricity being in fact generator of this information what if we run into a third world war and you're an historian so I think you know the theory that every now and then every decade we run into a war and in fact I myself believe we are somewhere in 1935 preparing and re-arming in fact for war and in fact for a world we don't know so in fact when there's a major disaster of nuclear bomb exploding no electricity being only the time that your cell phone lasts on the battery that would at least in theoretical sense solve your problem of this information if there's no internet indeed but I think that somewhere that scenario is realistic in the coming few years and the change and the parallel in fact with the former two world wars is that those people of those generations my grandparents in fact are still used to survive in a world like that we do you have a question regarding this in fact I'm missing that parallel in your analysis what would happen maybe Anne can reflect on your view I mean no it's true I wasn't talking about what would happen after nuclear war I wasn't thinking about it but actually your deeper point you know shouldn't we include the possibility of even more radical things happening and more profound disturbances is right we have assumed for a long time that everything will just go on the way it has because it has for a long time and we have forgotten that we have not abolished nuclear war we have not abolished other kinds of weapons we have not abolished dictatorship we have not abolished warfare and all of those things are possible again yes but in fact we would rely back on traditional media sorry we would rely back on traditional media writing things down and paying cash money I think traditional media also needs electricity thank you thank you I was saying thank you to him no I mean I think you know I think in the circumstances of there being a nuclear war there would be a lot of issues as well yeah sorry we would also have trouble with newspapers and your final call to action for the audience so everyone get out and tweet something or maybe stop with twitter or stop tweeting give a big round of applause en we are so great that you were here today and there is also we have a little present for you please Nina you can bring it to Anne thank you so much I really appreciate it I really enjoyed it, thank you very much another big round of applause please and also for the panel members we have a little present it's your book called The Rat Famine wonderful souvenir from a fantastic day what's the parallel with this book regarding the topic we are discussing today so that would require another hour conversation no this is a book it's a very different subject it's about an atrocity that took place in the soviet union in the 1930's the ukrainian famine in my head it is linked and the link is they had the use of dehumanizing language and hate speech why was the famine possible ultimately it was possible because Stalin successfully polarized the soviet population and he convinced some people that others didn't deserve not to be citizens but not to live and that's how this particular dictatorship worked so it's a longer conversation thank you thank you also so much for the panel members thank you for all the opinions in the room if you are depressed about the future the drinks now are ready just like you already said and then we have an optimistic way of ending this day please a big round of applause for you and also for the panel members and for Am thank you