 I want to just note one thing that as I've listened over the course of the day I think we should keep challenging ourselves on is this question of whether or not this really is an issue where the left or the right is more or less likely to be purveyors of truthiness or whether the sort of open net in a sense on the substance in fact favors in the sopa example or others that Yokai use favors a certain kind of truth or the process of letting truth to spread. I suspect we are more in this room well I should say we're probably not by and large devotees of Fox News just listening to the the commentary and I guess I resist a little bit this impulse that this is you know the left is always right or correct and that the right is always pervading misinformation that may not be right but I do want to just note that I think we should keep challenging ourselves in that way the the openness of the net itself as an example in the sopa case seems to be one where there actually might be some favoring of certain kinds of cultures and technologies and topics where the spread of the kind of thing that were that you okay laid out might actually have somewhat more grip than that left-right thing anyway throw that out as just an observation as we switch over to Christian and Esther thank you. Thanks so much John okay well while that gets set up welcome to interventions for individuals tools and personal empowerment I'm Christian Sandvig like the sessions in the morning we're moving to a format now we're going to do some rapid fire presentations so I appreciate your your patience with our brevity I have two big points for you and then Esther my co-moderator will say her points to frame the panel and then we'll introduce the people on the panel in the order indicated in the program so my two big points are these I'd first like to tell you a way to think about interventions for individuals that that I think might be useful and then second I'd like to to throw down a research and tool building challenge so for the first point how many people have ever run across this book anyone it's obscure and old right so it's Mark Steffick's book way back in 1996 did they even have the internet in 1996 that's so long ago but he said in 1996 that actually there are four ways to think about the internet trying to get out of that light in my face there are four ways to think about the internet that he called archetypal metaphors and his point was that the internet is a really complicated technology and it can be used for many different things but that the metaphor that we have underlying our thoughts about the internet is really going to condition what public policy or regulation seems useful what design interventions seem useful and so on so his four ideas about the internet is that we think about the internet number one as a library and this was the 90s we had this electronic library the digital library that doesn't mean that we digitize libraries it means that that's the metaphor we use to think about the internet as a place that has information that we can look up his second was we think of it as the mail or you could say the telephone and so that's more about individuals and interpersonally communicating in some way the third is that we think of it as a virtual world and the fourth is that we think of it as a marketplace now I find these really valuable in thinking about this conference as it's unfolded so far today I think the dominant metaphor in this room so far has been the internet as a library the library is where you go to look at newspapers in the reading room right and it's where you go to look up facts and but you know obviously that metaphor doesn't really work with the internet the library is publicly funded and the library has these trusted intermediaries called librarians right and the internet doesn't have that it has this other class of inner intermediaries so the the way that I think about the presentations that we're going to see about interventions for individuals are really that we have kind of two areas of work that I've seen a lot on one is a kind of help the patron of the library metaphor or empower the individual or you could say blame the patron so in other words that the library doesn't produce the information that you want and the solution should be that we should get the patron up to speed but you don't know how to use the card catalog properly if we can just help you out then we'll help solve this problem about information what I'd like to do is also draw attention to I think what was your guys challenge in the morning and that was to move away from this library metaphor to say that what might be happening is that on the internet we actually have a metaphor of the library but what's actually happening is a marketplace so you think of it as a library where you're looking things up but Facebook thinks of it as a marketplace where it's selling you or Google thinks of it as a marketplace and so a second class of tool that I haven't seen as much work on but that would be great to do would be a class of tool that tries to point out to the user that they are in fact in a marketplace when they think they're in a library and that could involve the political economy of the internet could involve money flows we've heard something about that but then I'd like to depart from these two areas in which I think we've done a lot of work and issue a kind of research challenge where I don't think there's been a lot of work although the panelists that are coming up may prove me wrong and that's I want to move to my second big point and talk about Robert Merton this is not Robert Merton this is not Robert Merton anyone know who this is Kate Smith alright there we go Kathleen Hall Jameson nails it yes so Robert Merton very famous Columbia sociologist he coined the phrase role model he coined the phrase self-fulfilling prophecy he wrote in 1945 about Kate Smith and he was afraid he said you know Kate Smith is such an amazing media celebrity in this year of 1945 she is so powerful as a media celebrity that it may be that she can get people to believe things that aren't true just because she is this really powerful celebrity and he he I imagine I don't know that he did but I imagine maybe in 1945 he had a conference at Columbia that would be just like this one so it would be like our conference he didn't have the gift of naming that the Berkman had because he he called this idea pseudo G'mineshaft he did have a gift of naming but just not in this case and what he meant by that is that in 1945 people were thinking about propaganda right it was on the mind and and he said technology is really interesting because what's happening is that technology is creating this false community of values where people will believe that they are in a community of values with Kate Smith and they'll believe what she has to tell them about issues of the day when in fact it's an intermence it's an instrumental relationship and they shouldn't believe her and he was really concerned about this and so he actually said in 1945 though he had this different take that I haven't seen at the conference here today instead of saying what we need to do is to find the facts that are wrong and combat them he took it in a very different direction he said really what we have is a situation where we could create what he called a climate of reciprocal distrust when there's too much emphasis on facts and misinformation and the danger he said is that society will be experienced as an arena for rival frauds and that this is the major challenge that we face is not that thanks is not that that there is misinformation and we must respond with fact but rather that all facts will be devalued and he said that what might happen is that we would begin to fetishize sincerity and the natural and the spontaneous and I was really struck by that with Tim's comments about his botnets that were fake sincerity you know by by using the mechanical Turk and so so his big concern was not that there are facts that are wrong or that people could be persuaded to believe things that weren't true by say Kate but rather that all facts are being devalued and so this is my research challenge I wonder if it's possible to have a tool that would be empowering for individuals but that it wouldn't actually address specific factual problems instead it would address this climate of reciprocal distrust or address all the status of all facts and say how do we make society as something that's not experienced as an arena for rival frauds so okay so that's my my challenge hack day you guys can solve that one for me he's not looking all right that's like there's no hope then they're not going to address it okay so all right and now I'm gonna hand it over to Esther and and she's going to speak briefly and then we'll move on to the rest of the presenters in the schedule thank you okay so let's start with a factoid where did Stephen Colbert go to school okay Northwestern yes so he is Northwestern University School of Communication alum although you might think he's a Dartmouth alum no had you guys actually watch his show so the Stephen Colbert and the Colbert report did go to Dartmouth but the Stephen Colbert in real life went to Northwestern anyway thought I'd throw that out there I wear very proud of him at Northwestern of course so we've got no sorts of challenges things that we have addressed and things that we haven't really addressed and so I'm going to throw my part into that mix part of the title of our session is tools and then part of it is personal empowerment and I think we've heard a lot about tools and we've heard a lot about what content is out there and what are the what is the misinformation that gets around how much of it is around what I don't think we've talked about that much is how people actually see the content that's out there so so people what are they actually doing how do they understand what's out there right so we can come up with all sorts of tools but if there's a tool out there and no one uses it did it make a difference right so that's just one another angle to think about all this and so I want to share just a tiny bit of my research about how your average person out there actually encounters some information that they see online so thanks to support from the MacArthur Foundation I've been studying young adults and how they approach the internet for the last five or so years and here I just wanted to report on a question that I posed on a survey to some young adults about being able to read URLs correctly right so here's a multiple choice question and I'll give you a moment to look through the options and I have a feeling in this room most of you probably get this right think for yourself what you think you would pick well here's the one that's right and hopefully that's not too surprising to too many of you but what did these young adults the supposed net digitally savvy net generation pick well they picked all sorts of other things just over 10% of them actually got this question right so what does this say about people's ability to figure out the the credibility of content they encounter when they can't even tell what website content is hosted on right so that's the point here just wanted to show you just two examples of websites that I think are interesting little case studies of what you might encounter depending on what websites you're surfing this particular example I didn't know about until we were running a study and we asked people to we gave them a hypothetical about unfortunate incident with a broken condom and how would they deal with it and so one of the search terms one might put in in that instant is morning after pill and if you do that search on Google one of the hits you are one of the results you get is morning after pill.org which sounds potentially relevant so you click on it and if you just sort of go with the flow you read the site but eventually if you're really careful which most people it turns out are not it turns out that this is a website that is very much against the morning after pill and will in no way let you know how you can obtain it. However there seems to be very interesting misconception about the whole idea of .org domain names for those of you who know how domain names work .org and .com are pretty much equivalent you can buy it the same way there's really no difference in in terms of the credibility of content that might be hosted on .org or .com interestingly that's not at all how the average person perceives these sites .org seems to have much more credibility so that's just one example another one that you may have heard of or may have seen before and this one came to me again I didn't know about this website until a student actually used it for a homework assignment and then I incorporated it into a project this one is if you search for information about Martin Luther King one of the websites you get is Martin Luther King .org raise your hand if you've ever seen that website okay so some of you know where this is going by the way not to be tough on Google on Bing it comes up pretty much on top as well or near the top so if you go to Martin Luther King .org this is the website you get I'll give you a moment to look at some of the content if you're actually somewhat critical and if you're in the context of a truth in us meeting so you know that I must be showing this to you for a reason you might start noticing things that might not really make sense on a website about Martin Luther King so if you scroll down you see a link to Storm Front which takes you to this website and here you find out who sponsors this website and then you might think hmm that might not be the most credible information for Martin Luther King content what we did so first of all again because it's a .org site a lot of people think it is credible they actually talk about it as a source they would use if for example they were doing a homework assignment so one thing we did and this is one of these challenges where I think we need way more work of this sort because basically what happens is we create all sorts of tools and on occasion if we're lucky there are interventions that people think of training sessions but we never evaluate them right we don't know of training sessions we have out there to improve people skills actually work so I designed a very tiny I mean these are expensive a very tiny random assignment training intervention where the idea was to help people learn about this website and the questionable credibility and several months later then observed people who had gotten the training and people who hadn't and basically found that of the people who went through their training about URLs and specifically this website so it was a very targeted program almost nobody would have relied on this website whereas almost half of the people who didn't get their training would have relied on this website so there are actually ways of intervening and helping people understand better the content of what's out there and the credibility of content that they find but currently we just don't seem to be doing a lot so I thought it was interesting when Ethan was talking about the culture of MIT Harvard I thought where that was going is that at MIT we have the tools and then Berkman the policies I think and sort of institutional level questions a little bit missing from this is I think then the people but what's great about Berkman is that actually it's really good about incorporating social science and seeing how people actually use services and how we can study people on the ground so we do have that but I so my call for where to go with the rest of the conversation is not to forget the people that we're actually talking about right the average users what do they know what can they do and how can we not just create tools but actually make sure that they know about the tools and know how to understand what's out there better so that's my call for the conference thank you