 Thank you Stephen and I'm honored to have the opportunity to speak to you here at the world policy conference And I think it's it's a really timely topic Many of you might have on the way Over to Marrakesh picked up the latest issue of the Economist and their cover story Actually asked is social media undermining democracy and this is Really remarkable how our discourse our discussion about the internet has really changed in the past years I want to start with a quote from Hillary Clinton when she was still your secretary of state And she said the internet has become The public space of the 21st century the world's town square Classroom marketplace coffee house and nightclub. We all shape and are shaped by what happens there All two billion of us and counting she said that in May 2011 and really captured a very Optimistic mood about the internet at that time It was a place where people could or the place was seen as a place where people can globally connect Where they can share ideas and where they can actually shape the world for better And now fast forward to the end of 2016 and Hillary Clinton coming from an upset defeat in the US presidential election and she Calls, you know, the internet has become for her space where there's a fake news epidemic With real-world consequences and for her of course the real-world consequences mean that she's not president And she lost the the presidential Election but the fake news discussion is not just about the United States and the consequences are real and they can be seen Around the globe and so I think it's a it's a really good topic for world policy conference, you know, we had Brexit of course and in the Course of the Brexit campaign lots of fake news like this one were shared and spread we have the latest Stories in New York Times covered this this is from the Guardian Mentioning that in Myanmar fake images and also fake news are used to instigate Violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority Then also a topic we we talked about this morning at the conference and the independence vote in Catalonia and also in the context of The Catalonian discussion and there was lots of spread of fake news a lot of fake news For example about fake incidents of police brutality. I mean there was some some incidents with the police But also lots of made-up stories That were shared vitally on the internet, so No So we have heard the term a lot. I think it's it's important To take a moment and reflect what this term actually means fake news because we have found When when we look further into it that the term is widely used and on the left you see Fake news has become a political term It's it's been used by most most prominently probably by President Trump to discredit The mainstream media and calling that media fake news Often we make up news in terms as forms of satire I mean we we're not that concerned about that in the middle You see that fake news can just be result from poor journalism Journalists make mistakes media organizations make mistakes editors make mistakes That can result in fake news, but usually they get quickly corrected But what we really concerned is more on the on the right side what what is underlined in red which is intentionally Intentionally spread false information usually a story that's taken out of context That's intentionally misinterpreted to give it a different spin and to drive an agenda And that's really when you look at all these cases that I've cited if you look at US presidential campaign If you look at the Brexit campaign if you look at Catalonia, you will actually find that spreading fake news are not just Incidents on the internet. They're usually part of campaigns their strategy for political mobilization In all of these cases and I would argue here that we should understand really the problem of fake news as they are being used as a strategy for political mobilization and You can rightly ask and we should rightly ask ourselves what's actually new about this What's actually new about fake news and here's an example from medieval Europe spreading fake news. This is fake news about Jews killing Christian babies and Blood libel and this is an image that depicts that that was used to insert inside violence and programs against Jewish people So fake news Have been around throughout history So what's really new about them and this brings us of course to what we have been talking about here at the panel today The internet revolution the digital revolution the spread of the internet and the spread of social media Have given all of us here the ability to produce news and to Share them to distribute them to functions that used to be held by Radio television print that used to be the traditional gatekeepers of how news and information Is created and distributed distributed and these media organizations have lost this Central gatekeeping function function now everyone who is connected to the internet Who has the ability to use facebook who has a smartphone to take pictures can create stories and can share them On the internet and can also distribute news stories to friends and networks That's what what's really new and at the same time we see that the established media is In a crisis not only in a crisis of revenue as as steven earlier mentioned with declining revenue, but also That there's a lot of distrust in Established news media around the world and we can see that it's not the same everywhere So some countries there's still much more trust in news media in germany I will show you this another slide next. It's still quite high. There are other countries where it's much lower This is also a problem in the u.s. Where the the high penetration of social media So lots of use of social media combined with the distrust in the established Media system has really led to the fake news Problem and proliferation of fake news So let's take a look at germany also in in in germany And this is coming now from our own data. This is from a survey We did right after the germany election and What we seen here is that in germany There is distrust in the media But there's this particularly a group that has very high distrust in media in germany And those are the afd voters afd is the alternative for germany. It's this new party staunchly anti immigrant and that had an upset Surprise success in the germany election getting more than 12 of the national vote getting into parliament And you will see that they have very high numbers among afd voters Who distrust media and they are also the group? That is most likely to believe fake news and that is most active in sharing in sharing fake news And we would therefore also argue that in germany fake news were mostly used in the in the context of the Of the election campaign as a political strategy to mobilize afd voters And you will probably ask yourselves what and we are asking ourselves also about you know What what should we do about it? Do we need a regulation? What's the the responsibilities the ethical responsibility? Responsibilities of the social media companies our and with three things that are based from from our data that That we can explore more in the discussion and the red line or the red Column shows you The engagement with fake news and the green one this is a specific case I won't get into into germany the green one is the engagement of the debunking news So news that corrected the story and what we what you find consistently as lots of media entities now try to correct news Debunk fake news is that the effect is not as big as the initial fake news stories fake news Get much more attention and there's much more engagement with fake news on on on social media platforms That's the first thing The second the second thing is that a lot of fake news Result from poor what I would call poor journalism or poor press releases that are ambiguous And that are then are turned into fake news So here's another story that came up in the context of the german election campaign Where there was an incident where bottles were thrown at the german police and the initial Press release talked about a gathering of 1,000 young people and there were bottles weren't thrown at the police Then a media report made turned these 1,000 young people into 1,000 rioters And Then fake news stories appeared that we're talking about 1,000 young migrant rioters that were throwing bottles At the police and you can see That's what we see consistently is when there's ambiguous reporting if there's If there's a poor reporting on or poor press release That this is often taken advantage of to to put a new spin on it and and And use that spin for political purpose here again to put blame against migrants And finally what we see what really doesn't work that well and our data shows this too Is the fabrication of news if you completely make stuff up and the most Effective way to stop that is if organizations immediately put out a counter narrative on social media so for this was a fake news story that Apparently a german minister in a big german state had said the police should not talk about migrant Criminality that they should suppress this issue and When this news appeared immediately The the his his office put out a statement that that he'd never said that that this is not true that this is fake And you see that his actually debunking story was very widely shared and let that the the fake news stories was completely Ineffective so it's also really important that we very quickly react When fake news stories come up and I would like to end it here. Thank you for your attention