 Please welcome to the stage Nancy Gibbs, Nabiya Syed, and Martha Minow. Good afternoon folks. Empty coffee cups, full bladders, but you're still here. If you are at all interested in how our information ecosystem has become what it is, then you are going to love the next 30 minutes of your life. I am so thrilled to be here with two of my personal heroes. On my left I have Nancy Gibbs, who is the director of the Shorenstein Center and the Edward Murrow professor of practice here at Harvard. And on my right I have Martha Minow, who's the 300 year anniversary professor at Harvard Law School, also former dean, which means that we have a perspective of what's been happening with media, what's been happening in the law, converging in the thing that we call our information ecosystem. I don't know about you, but I don't look at our information ecosystem and think that it's working perfectly. I think that I have notes, I have comments. But just to set the table a little bit, when we think about our information ecosystem we're talking about where we get information, where we come across expertise, where we get context for what's happening in the world. And for many, many years, journalism, media institutions were the ones that were the gatekeepers for a lot of that, right? They were the ones who had surface information, who had surface context. They weren't the only ones, but they really captured our attention in doing that. The promise of the internet, sort of the question that Jay-Z began the day with, the thing that made people excited, was that there were gatekeepers who had emerged in doing that kind of work and what the internet provided was an opportunity to remove some of those gatekeepers, right? Get perspectives of people who had not had a seat at the table to provide more information, more context, more expertise. And that seemed great. That's when I came online and I was very excited about it. But here I am in 2023. And I think that dream is maybe a little bit of a nightmare sometimes. So Nancy, I want to turn to you and talk about sort of the role of these historical gatekeepers of the folks of the sort of the media and what's happening with journalism. We've talked a lot about news deserts, right? About how so many are underserved and their information needs. At the markup, so hi, I'm Nabi Haseyid. I'm the CEO of the markup. I didn't introduce myself. I was too excited to be here with them. We talk about news mirages, areas online that look like you're getting information, but it's not verified. It hasn't gone through any of the standards and processes we'd appreciate in journalism. And so I'd love it if you could just talk to us a little bit, frame for us how technology sort of radically changed the media, not social media. We'll get there, the media space. Well, if you start with the idea that however imperfectly the press traditionally defined had a constitutionally protected role for a reason, which was a belief that some sort of independent accountability function was essential for a free society. And however imperfectly that role was performed, I think that was a very important idea. And however narrow and and unrepresentative those gatekeepers were, we saw, especially through the 20th century, the development of standards and rigor and practices and ethics around performing that role, which the arrival on the power of the platforms made dramatically harder. And I would say for three main reasons. One, as Larry pointed to, they completely blew up the business model. And it wasn't just that eyeball started moving from print newspapers and magazines to digital. It was that advertising moved not from print to digital so much as print to just the platforms, so that fairly quickly, just Google and Facebook were soaking up about two thirds or more of the advertising dollars. And every news organization of any kind was left to divide up the rest. That meant a lot of things. For one thing, performing that basic accountability function costs money. It takes resources. It takes boots on the ground who are going out and reporting the stories and finding things out. You know what costs a lot less than doing that? Having an opinion. And so there were many reasons why even as opinion tended to drive a lot of subscriptions and engagement, which was profitable. It was also cheaper than the hardcore news reporting, especially in the places we need at most, especially in war zones, which is dangerous and expensive and hard to do. And you know what? Audiences aren't often as interested. So you have all these downsides that go with the important public interest focused kind of information creation against the cheaper, easier, more engagement driving. And so to the extent that these trends, you know, some of these reflect human nature and what people care about. But the fact that resources were drained away from that core function, that is the reason the independent press was protected in the first place, the platforms had a lot to do with that. And then, of course, the larger context of that is the extent to which they drove an attention economy. I mean, those gatekeepers had the luxury, if you were the anchor of the CBS Evening News or the editor of Time Magazine or the New York Times, Time competed with Newsweek, The New York Times competed with The Washington Post, CBS competed with NBC and ABC. Pretty easy field of competition. You were not competing, not just with thousands of networks and Netflix and the streamers and Fortnite and video games and every single influencer and creator on TikTok. So even if you were willing to spend the money to do the work, to gather the information, to serve the public interest, good luck getting people to pay attention to you when you had so many other alternatives. So there are so many things we could talk about, but to me, those are some of the core ways that even news organizations that continue to this day to try mightily to perform that essential public interest role are facing headwinds that the platforms have a huge hand in providing. Wonderfully optimistic. I want to take us to another time in history where there was a cacophony of voices, right? And that is, we imagine this golden era of media, right? This golden era of this institutional journalism where it is the Time Magazine, the ABCs, like the big networks. But there was a noisy time before that too. And I would love to bring you and Martha and hear a little bit about how government policy sort of helped build the media that we revere and respect and feel that we are losing. What role did government policy play in sort of creating that era of golden journalism? Well, thanks so much. And probably it was never gold, but it was better than now. You know, the founding fathers of the United States believed that the press was essential. It's the only private industry mentioned in the Constitution and is treated as if it existed. Because it did exist. It is a private industry. It has been a private industry. Throughout the 19th century, it went through many changes. There was a period when the political parties were the major funders of major newspapers. So there was also a period of what we call yellow journalism, where it was basically about scandal. It really wasn't so different than what some people are critical right now. But the consolidation of certainly national media, but even in regional and local, occurred with the rise of technologies. And the technologies of telegraph first then radio, then television really provided a predicate for government policy, government policy to regulate scarcity, the scarce access to the airwaves. And in so doing, actually, the United States government believed that there was a public interest duty for anyone who received a license. That was true for broadcasting. It actually carried over to some degree, even with cable when scarcity was no longer the same problem. But government also has shaped the entire industry with the use of antitrust policy. Where is competition required? Where not? Changing rules about whether the same owner can own the television and the newspaper. Different periods of time, different attitudes about that. Government is all over it. Government also has been a major funder in the development context. Government, after all, paid for the development of the algorithm behind the Internet. Government paid for the development of public media, public broadcasting. Government creates the tax code that has enormous impact on this entire industry. So the government's fingerprints are all over the situation. I think it's so powerful to remember that government can set those incentives and not only think of regulation as something that can whack a mole the bad things. We live in a time where we observe a lot of harms online and the impulse has been to say, well, we need to regulate misinformation. We have to do something about this. And I wonder, and this is for both of you, but I'll start with Martha, about how carefully we should tread when we are entering into a realm of someone should do something about that with the law. And I would love some context too about what's live right now with talks about jaw boning and some of the cases in front of the Supreme Court. So the United States is on the extreme end of the entire planet and all of history with a protection of freedom of speech against government action, notably against government action, not against private party like platform action. But with that attitude, we should tread normally carefully. We have a Supreme Court that is completely embracing the most extreme version of the extreme version of a libertarian First Amendment. That said, the traditional activities of the government and, for example, antitrust policy. The Supreme Court is upheld the use of antitrust. The Supreme Court has actually also supported the free speech rights of the private editor, of the private moderator. So there are lots of roles for the government to actually reinforce a much more positive ecosystem. You know, I can't help but remember that when there was a violent video game case before the Supreme Court, there was only one justice who'd ever seen a violent video game, period. I think that there are more justices now who have some knowledge of technology, but these are not experts. And they've been ducking cases. We'll see, because I can't quite duck the cases that are now before the court between coming from Florida and Texas efforts to have content regulation, I personally think it'd be much more successful for government to go the antitrust way. Why not, why not require that there's competition on the moderating function? Why, where is it written that this is bundled content, bundled activities, that do not violate the antitrust laws? Looks to me like it violates the antitrust law. If there was competition around that, that's something government could enforce that would make a difference. I also would advocate for treading carefully, but it's also around, as concerned as I am around mis-and-disinformation, as serious as problem it is in our context of First Amendment concerns, that in some ways the content that I'm also really concerned about when it comes to the health of democracy doesn't have to do so much with mis-and-disinformation, but the platforms play a really critical role. That is the extent to which I think they distort our understanding of the state of debate in this country. We know that something like 87% of people who identify as sort of center right and 77% of people who identify as center left say they never post about politics and public issues online. The middle of our public sentiment space just don't want to be in this conversation online. The result is that the people who are talking and posting and tweeting and what we see and hear and what shapes our sense of the state of our political discourse is wildly distorted by more extreme views. We end up thinking the country may be more divided than it actually is, that our political opponents are more extreme than they actually are. When Larry talks about our need to learn how to talk to each other again, like in order for us to succeed at anything, to solve any problem, to address any of these issues, people have to feel like it's okay to express their values, their point of view, their starting point, someone can disagree with them, you can have an argument and it's not going to destroy you personally or professionally. In an environment where it is so easy to destroy people personally and professionally for an argument they make, are we really surprised why people might be reluctant to engage in any of these conversations and why even our technologists who have left private companies are reluctant to speak out about content moderation practices or trust in safety issues because they don't want to come under the crosshairs too and so that I'm really, I'm concerned about censorship, I'm concerned about self-censorship and I'm concerned about the way this environment we're operating in gives people lots of reasons to self-censor. I want to stick with that because I think there's something really important to underscore there which is we so often look to social media as something as oh this is causing the harm, this is causing the ills but in what ways is it like any technology a reflection of the society that we're in and other mechanisms, other spaces in which we might be bonding with one another and having that sort of connective tissue isn't happening and it's too noisy online to really figure that out and I'd love to hear from both of you and to what extent are we trying to pin this problem on social media when it's a much larger cultural one? I think it's hard to separate online experience and offline experience in these ways but to pick up a topic that is near and dear to Martha's heart the news organizations that were hardest hit economically by the rise of the platforms or local news organizations and as it happens they are the most trusted so we can least afford to lose those and they are most missing if you sort of look at the maps of news deserts and the maps of where political power is concentrated in this country it's the same places like you all know because you're students of how the electoral college works and how the senate works that a voter in South Dakota is way more powerful than a voter in California by orders of magnitude and yet that voter in South Dakota is also much less likely to have reliable access to relevant local information and so this is where I feel like if we don't at least start with rebuilding our local news ecology I don't see how we work up to a healthier broader public square well I couldn't agree more and if you don't have local news we have pretty good research that shows private corruption goes up government corruption goes up accountability goes down voting goes down so I for me this is a top of mind how do we build local news so I'm the chair of the MacArthur Foundation which is a part of a coalition of 21 foundations and philanthropists that are trying to invest we've committed half a billion dollars to rebuild local news but in addition I'm interested in initiatives like at MIT the center for constructive communication which is bringing people together initially in public libraries but also using technology to allow people to hear trusted conversations from people that they don't encounter in their daily lives I mean I think that the Nancy made such an important point the narrative that we have that we are polarized is self determining it's self fulfilling when in fact most people don't like what's going on and most people want rather similar things they want decency and opportunities for their families so I think that if we could have more the face-to-face conversations as well as more bedrocks in local communities and regional communities and build back trust I think that would be in my view that's the most important thing to be working on related to that sort of creating those spaces of us speaking to one another I want to pick up a thread from the earlier I think the first panel about this desire to have sort of different forms of content moderation the different ability to engage with platform in different ways and while there's some part of me that's very interested in give you know devolving that kind of control about your experience I do wonder about how that might challenge our ability to have shared realities with one another the useful role of the news whether you liked it or not is that it generated consensus around what the parameters of debate were for something about what was actually happening in the world and it's not clear that anyone's really stepped in to in a centralized way have that role we have small pockets of shared realities rather than consensus and we have a minute and a half left so I ask you a big question for that but I I wonder about how you especially as we're heading into 2024 what is the role of technology and helping us create that shared reality there's the other work that we should be doing to create that well the problem is larger than the technology we have rival media companies that use even old-fashioned distribution systems that tell completely different stories about what matters and about even if it's cover the same things different versions and this is before we have the deep fakes that were discussed in the last panel I think that trust actually is not something you can accomplish with a magic wand you have to earn trust and building trust with trusted navigators is going to be I think the only way that we will make it through how who are those navigators I don't know but it's I wouldn't look to the government actually as the navigators we actually are launching a new research initiative at shornstein around news influencers in the belief that we have to look beyond who considers themselves a journalist to who is actually performing the essential functions of journalists whether they identify as journalists or not and and what is fascinating is if you if you ask people whose primary news source is tiktok snapchat or instagram they trust individual influence influencers on those platforms more than they trust news brands it's not true on facebook and twitter where you know news and institutions are trusted more but on the platforms that younger viewers attending to use the trust relationship is with individuals and so we're what I want to study is not just engaging with influencers around sort of journalistic best practices around rigor in fact-checking it's for journalists to learn from influencers about building trust about building audience about the connection that they are making because I think addressing these problems is going to take real humility and curiosity and a willingness to expand our definitions of who we're engaging with and and who constitutes the the various entities of this ecosystem far beyond what we might have traditionally thought of trust feels like the right way to end a day of fascinating discussion and to applaud the launch of a new lab which is very exciting that will help us navigate how we trust institutions how we trust the technologies that mediate so much of our life and how we ultimately trust one another so thank you everyone for a wonderful day and a wonderful conversation thank you thank you please welcome to the stage faculty co-director of the applied social media lab professor james mckins thank you thank you all right well let's just give one more final round of applause to our distinguished guests and the great conversations that they set up also i want to give a special shout out to the president who couldn't make it here we hope that he feels better and by the way in a very nice gesture he actually called the green room before a couple minutes before this event was to start and he got on speakerphone and in a very nice gesture he you know said he's sorry that he couldn't show up here so we we do hope that he feels better now by the way in that call the only two things that i said were hello mr president and feel better soon but in just having a speakerphone call with president obama hundreds of my relatives can now go directly to heaven okay there's nothing that i will ever personally do that will surpass that i believe in my lifetime except possibly run for political office president obama did you hear something special on me during that speakerphone call did you see a hint of leadership let's form a coalition of two okay have your people call my people i don't have any people okay i can maybe borrow some of your people okay that's how you get people you want to get in in this building at the ground level it can only go up or stay the same because i don't have people but anyways i always leave my grass so i hope that um like me you came away from this event i'm feeling both sort of a sense of optimism but also a sense of grounding in the challenges that we're going to face so we heard about a lot of the problems that technology can cause for society we heard about how misinformation can corrupt our our democracy we heard about what happens when social media companies like twitter cut off api access to great tools like block party that help to safeguard of romable users online we also heard about some very positive optimistic things so we heard about for example from a larry lezick about how we can actually use technology to create online deliberations that strengthen democracy and that bring people together instead of pulling them apart so like i said i came out of this with a renewed sense of cautious optimism i hope that you feel the same way i hope that what we've seen today is that technologists don't always have to just be the problem they can actually be part of the solution and that if they work with other people if they work with other users if they think and reflect about what they're building then we can actually start to build technology that actually serves the public good and i'm going to take that message to michigan to ohio to pennsylvania okay coalition of two you were here when it started okay so before we conclude i want to offer thanks to project liberty who provided some generous funding for the lab as we're starting to ramp up we look forward to working with project liberty and other partners in academia and industry and out in the world to work on this difficult but but important challenge of creating technology that works for the social good i also would be remiss if i did not mention the new website that the lab has set up let me read from here to make sure that i get the url right the url is h t t p s colon forward slash forward slash asml.cyber.harvard.edu as we can tell only the best and fullest urls for these amazing people in the audience so we've just launched the website there's not a lot up there right now because we're still in the process of spinning up but over the next couple weeks as we start to ramp up as we start to hire you'll see a lot of interesting stuff up there and as a final note to all the technologists the engineers out there who are interested in building for the public good go to the website we've got JD's up we are hiring so with that thanks i hope you have a great day