 I'm Anne-Marie Slaughter. It's my pleasure to welcome you to New America. I'm the president and CEO. And these events are some of my favorite events when we have a new book, a New America book, and if you, on your way out, if you look at our wonderful bookshelf, and also actually you can see the framed covers right there. New America's trademark is that we sponsor and support books about very important public issues that people really want to read, not just the Washington Wonk crowd, but the world at large. And this is exactly that kind of a book, a book that takes very important, and as we are going to hear, highly topical issues, and communicates important questions and recommended solutions. But, you know, a narrative form that makes for really irresistible reading. And so I'm gonna be hosting, I'm gonna be moderating a conversation with Peter and Emerson, and then we're going to open it up to all of you. Peter Warren Singer was my student. He is, I had the pleasure of working with Peter at Harvard Law School when I was a faculty member, and he was at the Kennedy School. He is now a strategist and senior fellow here at New America, and he has written multiple award-winning books. The one that you may be most familiar with is Wired for War. Indeed, I recall when Peter first joined us at New America, that was his most recent book, and it was really the talk of the town. Many of his books are on the required reading lists for different parts of our military. He's also a contributing editor at Popular Science, and he has a host of different accolades. I'm just gonna give you a few. He's been named by the Smithsonian as one of the nation's 100 leading innovators, which is in a world where we're all adopting different titles. You can just say I'm a strategist and innovator, which is a pretty good thing to be. He's been listed by Defense News as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues. He's been on the foreign policies top 100 global thinkers list, and this one is my favorite, and I actually just discovered it from Twitter the other day. I thought actually this was a joke, but he's an official mad scientist for the US Army's Training and Doctrine Command, and there's a Twitter handle about mad scientists. And also, he's been listed as one of the most 10 influential voices in the field on cybersecurity by on Onelytica social media data analytics. I give you all those different awards or listings because I think it's important to see how both Peter and Emerson come at the mix of these different issues in like war. So Emerson Brooking, who is the co-author of like war, is a writer based here in Washington DC, and he is a specialist. This will not surprise you on the relationship between social media and conflict. He was most recently a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he is the youngest person to ever get that designation, which is really something because it's, as you know, the council has a long roster of research fellows. He's also served as an advisor on information warfare to the National Security Council, the joint staff, and the US intelligence community. So with that, we're gonna talk about like war. Where everyone should start reading this book. What does the title mean? How did you come up with that title and what are you trying to capture in that title? And I will say that just in the last couple of weeks, as the publicity for this book is ramped up, I've been seeing it used as a noun. We hear it like war, as in, as similar to war, but I'm increasingly hearing it and seeing, both of you use it as like war, like a noun. I'll take that one. So first let me thank you for the kind introduction and all of you for coming out. Writing a book feels like a marathon. For this one it was a five-year marathon and then there is this 100-yard dash at the very end of it. So it's really exciting for us to see it come to this case. Like war, the concept of it is if cyber wars are the hacking of networks, like war is the hacking of the people on the networks by driving ideas viral through a mix of likes, lies, and the network's own algorithms. And the term came from, it's like everything in this space, it's a bit of a play. Part of it is it's a play on Clausewitz, war and politics through other means, that those are coming, they're crashing together. You see the tactics akin to war, the terrain matters besides battling back and forth. But it also is akin to the terminology that's used by the competing armies, and they call themselves that, the online armies, whether it's ISIS versus the US military coalition, the hashtag resistance versus Trump fans and alt-right or Kanye West fans versus Swifties, Taylor Swift's online army, and they engage in like wars, trying to achieve the most likes to not just gain attention, but to achieve the real world goal, whether the real world goal is influence the outcome of the battle of Mosul, influence the outcome of an election of a Supreme Court nomination to influence the outcome of what album you're gonna buy. And we see these like wars, in many ways the space is like war, but you see multiple like wars going on at the same time because they're not just battling each other, they're also battling kind of the overall system for attention, which means they don't just use the same tactics, they often jump into others like wars. So ISIS, for example, will see something trending and jump into that discussion. It'll see in the book we talk about everything from hashtag world cup to a YouTube celebrity interview, it'll jump into those, even though that one is battling for attention as well. And would these very many different actors from Kanye West fans to people in gangs to ISIS, would they, do they know the term like war? You coined like war, right? So you're saying they're engaged in like wars, but you think they'll recognize that. In other words, if I now coin, if I find a hashtag and start promoting it and quickly create a conflict with someone else, because you start with Donald Trump and the way he became a master at creating conflict, I'm a like warrior, is that right? You wanna take this, sir? You are, but I think for a lot of these folks, a lot of the groups and people that we chronicle in this book, it's subconscious. It's not a conception that there's a like war that they're pursuing. Instead, it just is what comes naturally, because we've seen millennials and young people begin to take increasing sources of responsibility in governments and intelligence agencies and national militaries in any civic organization. And they're all on social media and they all understand that grabbing and maintaining attention is the best way in just about every case to accomplish their goals. So it's a subconscious process which has had them arrive here. I would say though, I actually expected a little bit more pushback on using some of the terminology of war when we came into this a couple years ago, but over the last couple of months, it's moved into the discourse in a way that's a little bit surprising when you think about, so for example, Facebook is describing how it now has a quote war room to deal with disinformation efforts. To Zuckerberg described himself as in a quote arms race against these threats to his network. So the language of war that it, once it has nothing to do with this and even one of the episodes in the book is very soon after the 2016 election, there's a central kind of news hub and conversation site for engineers in Silicon Valley and they basically the day after the election banned discussion of politics because they say, politics has no space in what we're doing even though they've just literally shaped the outcome of the election. So we moved from that two years ago to now we're using war room, we're using all of these kind of terminologies. So I think it's gonna continue. It reminds me of another New America book, Rosa Brooks's book, how everything became war and war became everything. So that same kind of blurring now of how we engage in conflict and various points. But as you say also, the object of this conflict is to gain attention which is in itself, I guess obviously soldiers or the military has always wanted to shape the narrative but this is to grab the attention of more of an entire audience. Before we get to the details of what like war is and how it's used, I want you to give us a very immediate example. So I wanna ask you how the, what we're going through right now with the hearings of Brett Kavanaugh to be a Supreme Court justice is like war. So if you were watching the hearings and it felt like there was a kind of war playing out on your Twitter feed or on Facebook, it's because it was. And the actors on both sides were using all of the same tactics that groups have used in war zones. Now it wasn't, this is not a saying of collaboration or the like, it's just these are the ways that you operate now, these are the ways that you win and it extended everything from one of the chapters in the book talks about open source intelligence gathering. There's more information available than ever before and you can combine that with crowdsourcing so you recruit to the crowd and say, help me figure out X. So on one side you had, so Kavanaugh has this strange story of the $200,000 in baseball ticket debt. So ProPublica, a media group that wouldn't exist without this space is organizing an online hunt, send us all the photos from Washington National Games and help us figure out who sat next to him and then we will backtrack who those people are and we'll figure something out which is the exact same model in the book that was used to document Russian war crimes in Ukraine. On the other side you had the strange Zillow investigation if you're familiar with this where basically it's the doppelganger theory where a group got together and basically said there's a doppelganger of him that she was not lying but she's confused about who it was and this also connects to one of the other things in the book, the power of narrative. It's a very key narrative line they're trying to push but basically they combined everything from Google Maps to Zillow data which now allows you literally to see the layout of homes where the bathroom and stairs are and the like which again this information would have been previously possible. That then connects to one of the other things that you have in this space which is that was not really a hunt for the truth it was to bury the truth under a sea of alternative theories which is a Russian disinformation model and there were many, many examples of this playing out in this debate, false stories pushed by false personas, everything from her parents had been in a legal dispute that he'd been the judge on all these different things that were pushed out there and the like so you had that so the two sides end up in very different worlds with very different facts but what's fascinating to me is you even saw the attempt to change history itself or rather the place that we turn to for history which is Wikipedia which is itself a crowdsourced site and in the book we talk about this example of very soon after the Russian shoot down of the airliner over Ukraine Wikipedia becomes a battlefield where Russia quickly tries to change the what's on Wikipedia to prove Russia had nothing to do it the same thing happens during the Kavanaugh hearings where he uses a term I'm not gonna say it because my boss is here a sexual term and says it's actually a drinking game well unfortunately there's literally no evidence on the entire internet that it's a drinking game so someone within the house of representatives again using this kind of these techniques we can geolocate it to that goes to Wikipedia during the middle of the hearing and changes the definition to create the evidence of it and so again you just have these back and forth these hashtags and kind of where we conclude is we'll see who wins out in this war but these kind of tactics will continue in every political debate moving forward because whoever wins is going to think what happened online mattered it helped them win in the like war over Kavanaugh's hearing that is truly terrifying so there are four or five seats up here for people in the back if they want to come in and sit come on up so I wanna come in on one thing and then turn you have this there's a wonderful part where war by other means which is consistent with your point but the first thing you say which goes to your point social networks reward not veracity but virality which is to your point and which is so deeply depressing right that the point is not truth the point is what will go viral and the practitioners the successful practitioners of like war are those who figure out what will go viral and often what will go viral is exactly not what is true because the truth is nuanced and complicated but you can come up with some outrageous claim or simply some radically oversimplified claim and that's what will go viral so let me and I'll direct this one to Emerson but five years on this book and I know that cause I saw you all upstairs often working and I know you cut 70,000 words out of the book and it's a long process talk about the original idea for the book and how you all researched it so let me start with you. Sure. So I remember our first meeting on this topic it was in mid 2013 in Peter's office and we were just brainstorming back and forth because we had early examples of in 2012 there'd been an eight day conflict between Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces which in the real world had been an inconclusive air campaign but online they called it the first Twitter war because there were some 10 million messages that were exchanged as internet proxies for both sides tried to shape this online conversation and that seemed very new and it seemed as you looked forward that might have implications for conflicts in the future and then at the same time in 2013 there was one of the first live-tweeted terror attacks in Kenya, the Westgate mall attack killed 67 people but the most reliable source of information for a while on the attack was the terrorist organization in real time describing what they were doing and they seemed to have basically run around the information that the Kenyan government could put out so these early case examples in mind we start digging and as we begin researching the examples started piling up there was the emergence of the Islamic State in mid 2014 in the public conception we had to reorganize things then when we finally had a handle on it and the focus of the book was going to be a lot on terrorist communication we had our research, we put our first words to paper and then the 2016 election happened and the most potent social media personality became the real life commander in chief and it seemed obvious then that we couldn't just talk about military and terrorist utilization of these platforms because it obviously had political implications too and a lot of the ways we'd seen conflict unfold in this kinetic space was like a parallel to the way that politics happened as we move forward we discover as the information leaks out that there was also an active Russian influence operation that had used social media and targeted the 2016 election so then we realized that you could be more subtle in how you deploy these tactics and then as we reached the end of writing in August 2017 there was that rally in Charlottesville, Virginia where white nationalists proclaiming sort of ideology that could never really have gotten ground in a pre-internet age assembled and for a time were a potent political force so we really have tracked this phenomenon from the beginning and there's more to say but I think Peter you can talk to the organization of the book before you do and I think it's interesting that you started with terrorists and that's the belief well these are non-state actors these are the techniques that non-state actors use because of course they don't have official channels they have to turn to whatever they can and then of course you discover that both somebody running for president domestically but also Russia as the ultimate state actor are using these so in that sense it becomes no this is the way everybody's playing so Peter talk about the organization and the book but also if you will the book opens with Donald Trump's first tweet and then his tweet the day he says and misspelled I have the honor to be your president that's how you know it's him real Donald Trump so talk about that and how that then became the frame for the book sure so and it actually hits a little bit of why I think we and I say we like our community that wrestles with political issues but also media writ large politics campaign planners you name it kind of misunderstood or missed what was going on is that so in each of the examples that we begin the book there are people who basically do something that seemingly breaks the rules and yet they win there's this moment of it so whether it's Donald Trump and the story of him on Twitter and his unlikely rise to the next scene is ISIS launching an invasion but not doing it D-Day Normandy keep it a secret they want the world to watch they literally create a hashtag all eyes on ISIS and they use it to win the battle to the next example is a gang member in Chicago who doesn't wanna keep the fact that he's a criminal secret he goes on to YouTube to make sure everyone knows that he's a criminal and then sparks a shooting as a result but the point in all of this is that as we were looking across these topics it was strange that we're all connected everything is connected and yet we were stove piping it so the people who studied terrorism we're looking at the story of ISIS but they weren't familiar that hey some of these same things were going on and say Ukraine the people who care about American electoral politics were shocked and stunned by things that were happening that Russia was doing that anyone who studied Russia-Ukraine would be like but of course to the people that look at war were saying things that to circle back to the example of ISIS this is revolutionary this is new and anyone who knows Taylor Swift would be like no she's been doing this for years and so they were divided in that way in terms of kind of the cases they were also divided in terms of the academic fields and this hits a little bit of like the new America model and that it brought together history, communication studies, psychology but also technology policy all of these different fields where you might understand an outcome on a battlefield because of a study from psychology or you might understand a better answer for tech policy by looking at a military training exercise so the research for it brought all of this together and then there was one final thing or sorry I would have two final things that people weren't doing that you can do in this space you can study it but we're all part of it so you can join the fight so we for example downloaded apps that allowed us to literally join other nations real online armies to I would say a little bit more about that you downloaded an app that made you a Russian soldier in Ukraine? You wanna speak to, you're the that's like I can't just flip that I'll speak to the Russian one you can speak to that even So one of the pioneers in this space that's a nation has been Israel Israel's been focused heavily on public diplomacy for the entirety of its existence early aggressive internet adopter and understood how messaging needed to reach online and in 2012 and 2014 two big Twitter wars actually set up war rooms on college campuses where students could get together and basically examine like the Twitter conversation look at the hashtags that were trending and try to shift things a bit more in Israel's favor around 2017 a group of Israelis and Americans decided to export this model onto a mobile app where anyone anywhere in the world could sign up and then basically get marching orders so there's, it's gamified you get points whenever you participate in a particular mission you can go up the rankings and the leaderboards are a mixture of super pro Israeli Americans and IDF information officers to give you an example Conan O'Brien in mid 2017 visited Israel they wanted to make sure that there was a positive impression left on him and his visit so folks were enlisted to go do nice comments thanking Conan for coming So there's a great picture in the book of the ad that the Israeli Defense Forces have of essentially it's telling young Israelis you can do your military service this way and it shows sort of a smiling soldier behind a computer screen but the point is we can also do our military service this way and there's counter ones for other groups a different example of this kind of interactivity would be we set kind of you describe them as honey pots for Russian trolls where you lay out something that they can't resist jumping into which is a great way to identify them and study them same thing for neo-nazis they do all actually do that? Yeah, yeah a third category which our partners with Arizona State helped us out with there's a young team of researchers they looked at actually found a it's a meetup site for gangs so gangs not only use social media themselves but it's for different gangs to meet up online and like everyone else in a social network it's a mix of sharing news humble bragging not so humble bragging marketing and the like and part of it's throw your hood up is the idea behind it so you can join it these are rival gangs? Yes, different gangs so gangs both fight online but they also a gang in Chicago will link up with a gang in LA a drug cartel from Mexico might link in and then like everything else the personal connections that they make online then allows them to set up deals and the like Is this in the dark web? No, no, this is out in the open again everything's out in the open and then there's one final thing to talk about that is everyone there wasn't much interviewing of this space so we set out to interview the interesting important people and again the mix of them so everything from the co-inventor of the internet you know where did this come from what do you think about what's happened to tech company executives to extremist group recruiters to one of my two general Michael Flynn as he's joining the Trump campaign and obviously has gone through a very different turn and his life since then Wow so I want to ask you more about these individual characters because some of them are completely fascinating but let's think about this overall frame so we've been talking about how people practice that but one of the great values of this book is you take these examples and research from many different areas and you provide us a frame you provide us a term a concept and then you actually talk about the rules of like war so I wonder if you'll go through the rules at least briefly but enough so people can get a feel for what binds this together sure the rules oh yes yes I can hit a few we have different rules so as we looked at different online messaging strategies we came away with five rules which the best actors seem to consistently be using to stand out in this space the first was narrative was storytelling was understanding that no matter how unique the piece of information you're sharing it really helps if you make it part of a story our standout example here which I hope we'll talk more about him was Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag who were the villains of The Hills popular reality TV show in the mid 2000s anyway they were happy to talk to us and they were actually super nice people and nothing at all like their TV counterparts but the reason we wanted to talk to them was that for a while they captured the American imagination they were some of the most despised people in the country they, Spencer won the MTV award for best villain and he beat out Lex Luthor in the process so you have to weave a compelling story line and he knew that he was weaving that storyline he intentionally, so the narrative part is he set out with a goal his goal was to be famous and he figured out the best way to become famous was through narrative and the narrative that he figured out that would win was villain but it was needed in the story that was trending but then what was sort of fascinating about it is that they're now boxed in by the narrative that they built for themselves their type guess, self type guess exactly but I'm going to use this anecdote now I'm going to sort of talk about it because I think it's so key to our policy space a couple, because this sounds kind of silly but narrative, you know the lack of narrative can explain who won and who didn't in 2016 being able to own the narrative that phrase own the narrative has been used by everyone from the U.S. military to ISIS to the political campaigns to the Kardashians use it all the time but a few weeks after maybe it was actually a few days after talking to Spencer and Heidi to Spidey we go to the State Department and meet with the team in charge of counter ISIS messaging and very quickly we figured out they don't get it and Spencer and Heidi got it and that the U.S. campaign was going to fail because it didn't get kind of rule number one so you can just hit back so the narrative is first and it's interesting to think about how President Trump does exactly that we always talk about the distraction effect of the minute something's happening that he doesn't like he throws us something else and that is a way of owning the narrative then everybody's chasing this rather than that so narrative is first and one more thing on narrative and one of my favorite things we uncovered in the course of the research is how ingrained the human desire to apply narratives to everything is one of the first studies one of the first days of its sort like 1948 this group of psychologists get together and they make a video that just shows two circles in a triangle and an open box and the shapes are just moving around in different ways for about a minute and a half and sometimes they'll butt up against each other sometimes they'll go in the box sometimes they'll go back out of it but it's just these little shapes being manipulated on a projector and then something like 29 out of the 30 subjects that they studied who watched this video applied gender to the circles and triangles they applied particular motivations and they could describe a story that was unfolding so that shows whenever we have the opportunity we're trying to weave these narratives and that's why yeah it's a second other rules sure so the second is authenticity that someone should feel like a real person online we've already mentioned Taylor Swift she was one of the great pioneers in online authenticity she was an early adopter of MySpace her Instagram persona was one that you felt like if you're a fan like she's a lot like you and she was able to expand on that by actually sometimes she called it Tay lurking where Tay what? Hashtag Tay lurking yep okay she'd actually swoop into a fan's page and just leave a random comment along with everyone else so just having her feel like a real person and that's very much a counterpart to a darker example which is the way that the Islamic State managed its online presence where its most effective recruiters weren't some central office it was the highly social media active young jihadists who've gone there already who could post on Instagram and Tumblr their experiences and draw other folks in that way and you wanna go with them? I'll hit a couple of the quickly there is this idea of community and the internet brings people together and we all know the good and the bad examples of that but one of the things of community is community creates fellowship you're part of a group but you can't have a community without someone else not being in your community so it immediately creates division and so the groups that win build community another example is this mix of inundation and experimentation so the groups don't just send one message the winning groups don't just send one message they send scores of them but every single message is an opportunity to learn by what people click or not and then the profiles of those people that click or not and so the examples that we use there is this mix of the Islamic State it didn't have one media outlet it had 50 official media outlets each pumping out hundreds of daily messages but it also had the tens of thousands of accounts of the individual fighters they're pushing out, pushing out, pushing out and then something strikes one message works and then they double down on that and that's a very similar model to so Trump uses Twitter to drive narrative the Trump campaign won the election on Facebook with this model of messaging and experimentation and that's where it connects back to things like Cambridge Analytica and the like it's doing orders of magnitude more messaging to an example of how it's changed we've got some journalists in the room how it's changed the news business is Buzzfeed Buzzfeed follows this very same model of inundation and experimentation and so kind of the, you know we can go, I mean you gotta buy the book to get the rest of them but it's the idea of there are these new rules and yet many of them seem like contradictions so it's not just that it's not just authenticity it's planned authenticity so it really is Taylor Swift it really is Jeanette Hussein ISIS's top recruiter but they're doing it in a manner where they know the world is watching so there's also a performative aspect of it as well that's interesting so let's talk about some of the specific characters in the book because again one of the things I like about the book is it weaves together this amazing tapestry of very colorful characters from the president as you've said to Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montieth, right? Montock Montock, sorry I am clearly not Just a spidey Just a spidey, okay but do you each, so I'll ask each of you which is your favorite character in the book? Sure So something that really stood out and is one of the positive consequences of the social media revolution is how it empowers voices to not only get their messages out but achieve massive online followings who might never have had the opportunity before and a particular example that stands out to me was a seven-year-old girl in Silence Grove, Pennsylvania my mom's hometown and she's here today but a seven-year-old girl who started a newspaper for her hometown of Silence Grove because it was too small to be served by one anymore At age seven At age seven and sure it was stuff like Kat stuck up in a tree she did an exposé when her baby brother was born but she also attracted and then international attention because she was the first person to break news of a murder in her town because she saw the police cars she was nine at this point, so Okay, so she's adult Yeah, basically but she sees the police cars and she's the first one who runs over to investigate and then she's the one who files the first story Wow and that was an example, a positive example of what is broadly called disintermediation where the media, the middle, the barriers have been largely stripped away when it comes to who has the power to get their voice out there and that can be a force for great good I like that I'm gonna build on that before I get my example because it also shows, you know, you led with like it's a little bit scary but we use these characters of there's three little girls in the story under each under the age of 10 that show the different sides of this so she's this, you know, kind of wonderful positive story of she's a new kind of reporter and, you know, the build on it the police told her, don't report it she said, no, I'm a journalist I'm gonna, you know, so you've got her you've got a bit of a kind of another journalist but it's sad she's both a journalist and a new kind of victim and that's Bana the kind of new version of An Frank who was a little girl in Syria who tells her story of what it's like in a town under siege and, you know, it illustrates the difference of how information gets out if you look at the, you know you go back and look at the history of the diary of Anne Frank it's, you know, after she's dead it actually, the story isn't fully told for about nine years and Bana is doing it, you know, live but she's still, you know, she's caught in war and then the third little girl character is Janna Jihad who is another girl who's caught in a war zone she's a Palestinian she's a reporter but she describes herself as a warrior and she says my camera is my weapon because she seeks out battles to film and try and drive this Twitter war that Emerson was talking about so it kind of shows all the different sides of this and a good one, you know, one of my favorite characters of showing the positive side is someone that I think actually, you know Farah Pandith Oh yes who, you know, so Farah is a Muslim American woman who lost relatives to terrorism and kind of dedicated her life to fighting extremism joins US government, does well in it but also feels a little bit frustrated that she just can't, it's not enough so she leaves government and says the best way to fight these kind of ISIS recruiters that we were talking about is her own network of teenagers and she jokingly calls it Dumbledore's army if you know, Harry Potter, it's, you know the government can't defeat evil the teenagers will do it themselves and the idea is that if someone is being recruited by ISIS members, some teenagers being recruited by ISIS members, the best voice back is not gonna be state department, it's gonna be a bunch of other teenagers jumping into the conversation and saying, you know don't do it, they're not cool, whatever and to me that's just kind of it shows like the very same tools of crowdsourcing can be brought against the bad side of this, okay so I'm about to, I'm gonna ask one more question and turn it open to all of you so start thinking about your questions we've been talking about these stories and the power of narrative and how narrative communicates information in interesting ways and I opened with wanting to write books about important public subjects, public problems in ways that grip people but we are also here in Washington as a policy research institute so it's time to eat our vegetables a little bit and I do, one of the, this book also talks about how individuals should think about their role but you also talk about tech companies and policy recommendations so you don't have to give all the policy recommendations there is lots of good reasons to buy this book but do talk about where you come out both of you as people who advise government and who think hard about what policies should be. Well, I'd like to start at individuals and work a little bit. I'll hit policy if you had an individual to do that. So the bad news is that we as individuals can't do as much as the companies or government in this space but the main thing that we can do is be a lot more discerning about the information we see and also be familiar with our social networks and the folks who are in our peer groups who are sharing information because one of the big takeaways we found there are a lot of app comparisons between information flows online and public health crises and the spread of actual contagion. Basically all it takes is one credulous person in your group sharing information for it to spread among other people you know. This broadly the reason this happens is something called homophily, love of the same. It's the fact that we're more trusting of folks whom we've met before and in many ways homophily is a great thing. It's kind of if you look at the history of human societies it's the way that we can build big groups and how we can get along so well but the problem is that the speed of information online basically outpaces any attempt by say an expert or a fact checker or a countervailing voice to stop it. As that information gets into your network and spreads even if you were initially very skeptical of it you become more and more credulous just by token of your repeated exposure to it. A great example here is Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump for president which was the most viral and most widely read story in the 2016 election. And a lot of folks on the face thought maybe that was a bit absurd but they kept seeing it and gradually your resistance gets worn down and you're more likely to share it even if you don't read it and chances are you're not going to read it because over half of all these links shared on Facebook the story is never clicked on. So just that individual awareness is something that we stress again and again. So I'll hit on the policy side. In many ways I'd previously done a book on cybersecurity and I'll make a parallel to that and that starting 20 but really 10 years ago we started to take the threat of hacks of the network cyber security cyber war more seriously and we began to change everything from our threat intelligence to the organizations that we built we built a cyber command to training you name it and again it wasn't just government that did this wasn't just the military it was business it was individuals and the same thing essentially needs to happen in this space and we flavor it with examples of training changes so the US military's gone from effectively not doing well in this space in the first battle in Mosul to fighting back the conclusion opens with the scene from a military base where they basically train for the future and now they've created a fake internet over the fake villages that our soldiers train in to get ready for this kind of war but more structurally for the US government there's a fundamental issue here which is that we are the inventor of the internet but we are the nation that other nations point to as the victim they don't want to become literally in their defense planning and the like they talk about don't let what happened to the Americans happen to us and you look at the Baltics or the Swedes or the like is they've organized they've reorganized themselves around this space they've built a whole of government even a whole of society effort and that's everything from circling back to what Emerson was saying if you think about public health there's hygiene that you need yourself that you teach your kids but you don't say well that's it there's no role for school and yet we really don't teach digital literacy at an individual basis or on kind of a within education systems to it might be throwbacks during the Cold War there was a program called the Active Measures Working Group that basically brought together spies, diplomats, communicators, teachers and it tried to identify incoming KGB active measures incoming KGB plots to spread disinformation and then what do we do about it back then the battleground was the third world now the battleground's here but we don't have the equivalent of a Active Measures Working Group a final quick policy thing I would throw out there as an illustration of this is election security in that we have whether it's our community, media, government, when we think about election security we talk almost exclusively about the threat to hack the voting machine which is a real threat to be sure but it has never been done successfully on a national scale and we don't talk about the hack of the voter and the atmosphere around the voter which has been done on multiple occasions on a national scale and is definitively happening right now and when I say we don't talk about it's everything again from media to when the president held his only meeting on election security with his national security cabinet they only talked about voting machine style hacks not this side so we'll continue to be the victims until we learn about the threat reorganize around it, et cetera I wanna underline two of those points and I'll turn it to all of you one, Emerson when you were talking I went on Twitter initially in February of 2011 and started advocating for more action in Syria and very quickly became a part of a community of people who were monitoring the Arab Spring as a whole then but also particularly on Syria and then quickly people started to tag me if they had information that they wanted out and it didn't take long for me to realize that some of what I was passing on was in fact false I mean I realized there were plenty of people manipulating that and so I adopted a personal rule of I would not retweet anything unless it was tweeted to me by somebody I knew really knew and the same is true in any crisis many of us even like Hurricane Sandy who have sizable Twitter followings go on it's sort of a civic duty to try to pass on information that is coming from credible places but again you have to be very very careful that it's credible places so when we think about social media hygiene this argument about understanding how you can be manipulated and who's out there is critical and then just to underline Peter you ended where you started and it is so important and in the book you say you're looking at the fall of Mosul and the example you just gave and you've written about cybersecurity we are so fixated on the hacking of the system and we're all looking there and here is the hacking of the information on the system and the manipulation of the people using the system and that really is where you say like war is not about breaking into somebody's computer it's about manipulating people's attention and controlling the narrative and shaping the information environment within which people then act so I think it's a great point on which to end there's a much much richer set of stories and policy recommendations in the book but that's a good start so right here and Angela or somebody is going to bring you a microphone and then just please introduce yourself and I will sort of try to jump from the front row to the back and then forward again. Hi excellent session George Nicholson of the Global Special Operations Forces Foundation last spring at SICE Bill Moyers talked and he said one of his biggest concerns is the downfall of what journalists we don't we have people that I don't need to read anymore I subscribe to Facebook or I subscribe to Twitter and in that he expressed a concern of where is the verification where is the validation where is the vetting? Where are the editors? And Bob Schieffer over at CSIS made a comment about a year ago from the program he runs he says he was hired accidentally by CBS he wouldn't be hired today and I said well do you think that Edward R. Murrow would be hired? Do you think that Walter Cronkite would be hired? He said absolutely not and he said the problem with verification and validation if I don't put that out there I don't have time to verify it or validate it my competition will get it and they sell it so by the time you do the due process so that I think is a real concern about social media of how many people right now except use that is their only source of information and they assume because it shows up on Facebook or Twitter that it's valid. Let me hit that. The important thing also is it's not just this idea of creating new voices that can work around and again it's fascinating when you look at almost the same terminology has been used by everyone from President Trump to NBA stars to generals where the phrasing almost always is it's like owning your own newspaper and having the perfect editor he's the Ernest Hemingway of the space he self described but that same phrasing has been used by not the Ernest Hemingway part but it's like owning your newspaper moving around and that's brought good and bad by the gatekeepers it's brought new voices in it's allowed information to flow it's allowed a quickness of spread of information that hasn't been there before but it's also the journalists themselves have changed the way they operate so even if you're not on Twitter and you could say I'm gonna resist this space 96% of journalists are on Twitter and they're using it the exact same way the President does, ISIS does they're using it to find out news but more importantly find out what's trending test messages, test stories and it's also being used for which journalists are hired or kept on by the numbers of their followers and the like so even if you would say well I'm just gonna stick to the old trusted journalists they're being shaped by this space but again there's a continuation of this in that every time there's been a new technology it's changed politics, it's changed journalism so that example of Murrow on the radio you then get television and to be a good journalist to be a good presidential candidate you now need to be telegenic and the same phenomenon is playing out in social media you have to be attuned to what's going on in this space and different rules are driving new winners but there's no un-bringing the bell we're not going back so this makes circle back to your last question I like in it as you can tell I weave in a lot of pop culture there's a movie called Rounders that's about poker and it has a lesson in it where if you sit down at a poker table and you don't know who the mark is you're the mark and that describes a lot of us right now in terms of being the mark of not just being targeted but not knowing the basic rules of this space even though we're simultaneously the target and as we talk about we're the combatant right they're in the back in the red shirt on the office thank you I'm David Borden executive director of the group stopthedrugwar.org we've been focused on the human rights situation in the Philippines for the past two years and the deterrite phenomenon which has had an extensive and multifaceted social media manipulation component since before his deterrites election and continuing other powerful actors in the political system have social media manipulation operations we need a question and I'm just wondering is there work being done are there are there groups that are exploring ways to you know that societies and advocates can counter such campaigns great thank you I can can't tell you about particular groups I can tell you well first deterrite was not an inspiration but something else that pushed us to refocus as we wrote because here was an example of a political campaign used a lot of these like war strategies but once he came into office he essentially reappropriated his bot armies and rabid Facebook groups to then support his drug war which over just the first year killed twelve thousand uh... people often uh... without any evidence of cause I we followed the situation there but the sense is unfortunately the Philippines as it stands one side administration uh... really has a stranglehold on the social media conversation and they're in such a position that they're able to blackmail senators who speak up and are putting escalating pressure on one of the free outlets left there raffler so at this point it's not a great situation it's also a good illustration of the conflicted position that the companies are in because uh... and again and also going back to the previous question how you can't unring this bell so and you probably know this and in the Philippines like in many countries the internet is social media the internet is facebook uh... that's where most people are located in using it and literally down to it's used for uh... even some forms of identity babies are given a facebook page and this is a great story for it was a great story for the companies and they they celebrated it this was you know kind of almost a perfect story of growth and and and and again you know they're they're embracing the politicians that are using uh... facebook in this way and you know they're even are in twitter they're getting their own emojis created by the companies and the like and then you get the turn well what just happened on our networks and the companies you know uh... belatedly are coming to grips with this and what do we do about it and that story in the philippines has been repeated everywhere from me and mar to the united states you know this initially as companies sort of had the idea that you know the more we connect the better it gets or there was a there was a cross between doing well and doing good you know them these are these are in line and now they're wrestling with hold it maybe that's not the case and what are the responsibilities that we have for what's playing out on our digital kingdoms yeah you have that great quote one of the founders of twitter that were i think who just said we assume that if everybody could be online and speak freely everything would be harmony and life and it didn't quite come out that way yeah and they're kind of going through um... uh... we liken it to the stages of grief that that a parent is you know so it's um... what happened to their babies so there was denial right you know and a good illustration this was the zuckerberg it's a pretty crazy idea that you know uh... what played out on my network could have influence the election simultaneous to win the uh... facebook is telling political campaigns this is the best place to influence people and again you can see the going back to that if we don't well understand it uh... you know senators in the hearings to us not getting that uh... how does the company make money the company makes money through influencing our behavior so to say it doesn't influence your behavior is kind of you know is it misnomer but then you move forward and two years later there is this mix of kind of acceptance and bargaining acceptance yeah things happen bargaining government stay away because i'm gonna take care of it for you um... and you see that tension is i think uh... it's a hot political topic right now and it's gonna be i believe a hotter topic in the twenty twenty election because both parties have seen value in from when you were talking celebrating once celebrating silicon valley to now both parties have seen political value in going after silicon and then i see you back there next uh... you only should show me from the the wilson center so so the domain of course is not known manipulating people's minds for whatever purpose nothing much more about it go back from from kaltelia all the way to the compromise and very successfully and back to the the use of rumors in medieval islamic caliphate so it's always been so the question and newspapers that catered to closed groups and served as echo chambers so my question is what is what is aside from the form of the technology and the way it looks seems to be what's the essential difference or is there a potential that has something happened aside from looking at what there's something that's really no and one possibility as i think out loud has something happened to american slash western society that has made us much more susceptible now than we were in the past to this kind of manipulation means that the change goes back to your idea let's not worry about hacking the system that's where about hacking the voter maybe there's something became much easier about hacking the i've been thinking about this a lot because you know when we describe like war in the context of these kavanaugh hearings and these dueling narratives the battle of narratives is politics that's not new as you said but the medium does burst off the speed of it ability for a piece of information to gain viral momentum and all of the normal breaks that would have existed in civil society are absent we've talked a lot about that already but the other component is the cyclical nature of it and the fact that the social media platforms are both you know instant individual interaction but there are also tools of mass transmission and what that means is that say looking at the kavanaugh hearings example that we used it wasn't after the hearings as uh... the stories were being told about what happened on one side of the other it wasn't journalists uh... you know reaching out to staffers and being spun one way or the other it was journalists who'd been on this platform for ten or twelve hours who'd been observing this conversation anyone's observation or bit of information true or not uh... screen grab of an unflattering image or question mark after a particular statement could take such force that it became a headline that was then battling for these traditional uh... broadcasters uh... airtime and also entered into their own stories and due diligence so it's essentially is the democratization of this information that makes these information dynamics so different uh... from times past gives rise to the phenomenon that we talk about in the book maybe a way i think about it is so these different communications technologies you know this is a book that seemingly about today but it goes back three thousand one hundred years to the invention of literally writing itself and so basically when you get new communications technologies they either uh... created a means to uh... first preserve information and then spread information uh... and they either uh... allow uh... a connection between distance telegraph or a broadcast out to multiple people at once uh... radio tb social media is done is brought those both together for the first time where you have the in you have the connection of distance one-on-one but simultaneous to it you're broadcasting to the world and it's happening in in real time as emerson said so you're bringing together a lot of these changes that have happened in previous cycles uh... and uh... to your up your second question of kinda you know are we disadvantaged there is uh... part of the disruption comes from is gonna be a talk where you've heard about everything from taylor swift to now i'm gonna reference to tokeville to tokeville goes around america he says this thing in democracies really great but the one danger i'm worried about is if they get too many newspapers and i think he uses the number it's like thirty uh... as like that's gonna be the downfall of america will now go back to what i'm up for we all have a newspaper and uh... so you have that kind of disruption inside our system but you also have the very different uh... ways the internet has evolved on a global level so we have an open system verses a say you know we explore for the chinese model uh... or the russian model or what takes place in the turkey there are measures of control of both what people say online but also what they say online and then what happens to them in the real world that government authoritarian governments are able to do that we're not willing to for very good reason which means we have less of an ability to reach into their body politic verses their ability to reach into ours so another example like a difference is there's always been uh... propaganda there's always been censorship but you've not been able to reach in on a one-on-one basis and you've never been able to censor another nation's communications and what russia has specialized in is reaching in from a distance on a personal level but also a form of censorship which is not i'm banning communication but rather i'm flooding with so much disinformation that it's another way of taking the truth out of the conversation yes the woman in the back right there hi i'm hannah up church i'm a master's student at american university school of international service uh... and i'm interested if you have anything to say about not non-state various non-state groups that are interfering transnationally in elections so the the the one example i can think of off the top of my head was uh... during the recent german elections there was a concerted messaging campaign for the alternative for dutchland by not just some germans with some you know russian state support but also the involvement like very heavy involvement of the american alt-right uh... and i was just wondering what you might have to say about cases like that sure so you are seeing these uh... connections built in a global level between different you know previously domestic groups and uh... that might be human rights activists coming together or journalists coming together or it might be on extremist and hate groups and again we've seen uh... a spike related to the rise of social media and uh... this is whether you're looking at uh... you know the isis franchising model to as you mentioned uh... the far right and uh... that's uh... to kind of beat a hobby horse and one of the maybe more frustrating sides of our interaction with government on this is that we've framed the problems of uh... far right extremism and terrorism as a purely domestic issue and is purely a law enforcement issue when it in has clearly involved elements of terrorism whether it's uh... in the united states but also where you're seeing these ties built on a transnational level there's also though remember and it's goes back to the discussion of the company and how the terrain matters and maybe to the uh... previous question why this is different than everything this is a space that is a the terrain is a human created for-profit network and so the actions and you know clausowitz could wrap you could wrap his head around some parts of it but he wouldn't be able to understand other parts and uh... one of the things that's both a repeat and something new is so you've got these nazi actors that might be politically motivated but you also have mercenaries even mercenary bots or rather bot masters and one of the examples we use is there was this botnet of tens of thousands of voices that you know basically trying to steer the ebb and flow of global conversation and they were all interested in israel palestine trying to push narrative on that and then they're suddenly interested in brexit and they're suddenly interested in britain leaving europe it wasn't that all the bots change their mind someone basically the runner-up it changed their mind and then many of these we've since seen swing into things like the mexican election of the like so you've got you know just like in regular war you've got people that are politically motivated but you also have your mercenaries and then who might go to work for different of these political campaigns so uh... thank you this is harness classic of the wilson center and uh... coming back to your answer of it commercial terrain where everything is happening is this uh... new war which is based on social media and is it replacing or is it adding to the wars and violence that have been there what what and if it is adding shouldn't social networks cover the costs for this because this is like an unintended consequences from the car industry this is like um... this is like some this is like pollution yeah it's like pollution and in a way if they wouldn't uh... if a medicine has too many you know negative side effects would you just like abandon the medicine did you get that well first it's adding it's not replacing something that we try to emphasize in the book this is a significant new form of conflict we're going to see it more and more but it doesn't replace political violence and uh... we say you know all the words in the world you know a tweet retweeted ten thousand times can't do so much as bend a blade of grass without people acting on it so this is adding and complicating that picture but it certainly uh... is not replacing that traditional form of violence to your point about basically the externality and how much the social media companies should bear i i think calculating that cost will be an impossible task but what the companies can do and what they're starting to do is to recognize their uh... political influence and the fact that they're arbiters of these battlefields that now have real political consequences i think the first thing we can expect even if it does exact material cost on them the very least we should expect of them is to invest more and more in their content moderation practices in uh... say the the great example of the horrible example but of a vivid one of the rehing genocide in meandmar uh... at a time when facebook was the principal communications platform in meandmar and was the basis of information from which the growing genocide originated at that point in twenty thirteen uh... there was not one bromee speaker employed in a content moderation team at facebook they tried to rectify that later these companies have the money the problem is that stockholders don't reward content moderation practices but it is these companies responsibility and all note just in the course of time that we wrote this book the social media companies interest in understanding in their political influence expanded considerably so we're starting on that path but we're far far away still we've got time for two more questions, there's one here I'm Elena Ferguson formerly of the Frederick S. Party Center so my question is actually on the timely release of the confirmation that Russian trolls influence the negative press on the last Jedi so the negative press on the last Jedi? yes the movie so as amusing as it is though when we consider the importance of the Star Wars series and the proliferation of U.S. soft power during the cold war and the importance of that narrative would you consider this influence on a large state soft power through the effecting of their media narrative as another domain for targeted attack? I'll hit this one so I think it illustrates two phenomena the first so for those that are not familiar what's been outed is that there was a study done of negative comments that there was a campaign that went after the director of the movie The Last Jedi and also tried to create a boycott around it and basically in one of the again the great things of this space is that you can pull back and literally look at the data individually and then on scale and it essentially discovered that approximately half of it was of the critique was by it was kind of far right in nature and kind of key far right influencers but then within that there was a subset of accounts that were this set of Russian sock puppets and bots and the like and then it led to the story like why do the Russians hate The Last Jedi and what was going on is similar to what they did from the very start in the campaign targeting us and it didn't start in October of 2016 it started I mean we find the first ads for Facebook during the Republican primary period but there's a constancy of just like what an ISIS just like they found topics that might not be political but would layer on whatever was either trending or was already a wedge issue in American society and would target that and exploit it for a double reason one to try and achieve the goal of expanding outwards so we think of propaganda the American mode is we want you to like me Russia thinks of it as I want to create distrust, disarray, division inside your society so they're not creating the wedges they're exploiting them and so we've seen that similar kind of Russian activity on everything from obviously the election to since the election it's hit Charlottesville that Emerson referenced to the NFL anthem controversy it even targeted Nike after the Colin Kaepernick ad and it wasn't because they cared about it they saw a division opportunity and secondly a validation opportunity so the other players looking at them saying things like I'm really mad at Colin Kaepernick you then go oh well that voice it's the homophily it's just it's it's a valid voice I like it I'm gonna follow it and so there's that but so it's a like war tactic and then there's another funny one that's going on right now of lady Gaga fans again this is timely but using the exact same tactics of so she's got a new movie coming out and there's rival movies coming out so they organize just like the Russians did just like ISIS did in an online site created fake accounts and fake personas then pushed out to media negative reviews of the other movies to try and drive down the competitor to aid her cause so again we're seeing the like war strategy tactics cut across the space they were doing the exact same thing the Russian controls were just for a different goal I'm getting so depressed there is one more she goes but apparently the movies good so you can I want to go see the movie I want to go see see the movie the last question there in the back okay I don't know if I can top the last jet I happen to have to talk with me I was actually reading it on the way in similar topic so it is going to be Matt Shabbit with Glasswall Solutions previously with DHS's Office of Cybersecurity and Communications it occurred to me over the last maybe year and a half that you know in some ways we had perhaps outsourced what a lot of us call our OODA loop right the Observe Orient Decide Act to the press I'm going back generations and that without understanding the environment we're in maybe we need to take back some of that observation orientation internally and understand what it is we're seeing what it is that we're actually exposed to but the technology serves as a democratizer in many ways I'm wondering if the reason that you're not hearing more from the government on this aspect but you're hearing a lot about actually securing the infrastructure is because that same democratization is bringing the First Amendment much closer in to things that government traditionally wants to stay a little bit further away from you know I mean I know my experience when I was in government we were thinking about all of this the easy piece and it's not to say cybersecurity is easy but the easy piece was looking at election infrastructure voter rolls and the like trying to tamp down on access to those so I'm wondering if you have you know I'm obviously going to read the book but if you have any thoughts on what government's role is vis-a-vis the platforms and the individual from that perspective Great last question So this was a struggle if you're someone who believes in the values of the United States values, freedom of expression, freedom of speech it was our sense in the book we held off from proposing any sweeping government regulation of this space because any legislation even legislation along the lines of what's being pursued in Europe now with the outlying of fake news there's a clear but first it's likely unconstitutional but it's also there are clear lines there where you could see those sorts of laws being misused by government to limit free speech instead I think now in this country at this time the bulk of responsibility has to lie with the social media companies because they're not bound by the constitution they're private entities who have the power to impose more diligent content moderation practices as they understand that the sort of speech that traverse their networks can translate very rapidly into you know the marginalization of ethnic and religious minorities or the incitement of real violence they can take steps that government shouldn't so that's where we stand now I don't know that by saying so there's that and we play in the book with this idea that actually comes out of a cross between law schools around the world and sociology programs of there's free speech but then there's this notion of what's called dangerous speech speech that impels people to violence and that that aspect should be a particular focus of that that space there's also relevant to your your history and cyber security is that there's attention in the cyber security field that I see in the same thing in the like war field of companies get your house in order or government might be forced to intervene and I think that's where we are right now and part of that is bringing in both these tactics from other realms so uh... companies doing more what military people would call wargaming so it's not merely trying to find the vulnerability in their product but rather um... thinking about the consequences of kind of how we have of what's called beta testing pushing the product out in the world just seeing how it goes and getting feedback from it that's fine when it was a restaurant it's not fine when it's the nervous system of the modern world that's clearly being used for politics in war so rather than do that for you push it out in the world war game it for how might bad guys use this technology how might good guys misuse it so you shouldn't be surprised when terrace uh... live broadcast their attacks usually i never thought that would happen you could predict that too oh teenagers might live broadcast their suicides again that could have been predicted maybe not everything is solvable but they would have been in a better position the companies would and then moving forward we will see this repeated on many of their proposed solution sets and it's kind of a cool way to end the conversation uh... in terms of there's a consistent pattern of whenever the companies face a political problem as a result of their technology they look to new technology to solve that problem and the latest one is a i and uh... we will see a i weaponized against their customers they believe it'll also defend for it but it's introducing all of these interesting questions that i think they need to engage with in one of the most fascinating i find is this notion of should bots online bots be forced to be labeled as bots basically if a human is interacting with something artificial online does the human have the right to know and you can see the conflicted uh... way the companies are in this because they're create it's not just bad guys creating them they're creating the bots to help with things like marketing to um... it saves the money with help des if it was a hyper realistic chatbot however we also know that hyper realistic chatbots will be used to trick you into voting for someone or the like and so you get this this it's an interesting corporate question it's also an interesting political question that's kind of a moral legal one but it circles back to science fiction because it's basically the blade runner rule just instead of it being physical robots it's gonna happen first on our social networks so this has been a fascinating conversation and i know it right at the end you said the cyber security field and the like war field i think going forward that is the enormous contribution of this book you are defining a field uh... that affects all of us every day and so many of from our physical national security to the strength of our democracy to how our kids engage with movie reviews uh... but the point is you've you've given it a unifying frame and i hope going forward we will think about cyber security and i'm more traditional take care of the infrastructure ways and like war as a new theater of conflict that all of us have to pay attention to and i thank you very much thank the audience