 I want to return to one of the questions that was asked at the beginning, and suggest some of the answers that I've heard throughout the day. There's a background idea, which is often mentioned in conferences like this, that hasn't been here. There is more total political true information available to the public in this country, if Ethan's radically important caveat aside, than probably has ever been available. So the concerns that are expressed are against a backdrop of at least more available true information. Ellen and Micah are partly responsible for this mass of information, as are many others in this room, and yet there's a dream of even more available true information. So the puzzle here is not, and the concerns here are not, the relative lack of available true information about political actors in America. What are the kinds of concerns we've heard? One that Rashad was just talking about, which we haven't talked about as much today, are concerns around bias, and systemic bias, and bias moving through media. Another, Josh and Ellen, and to some degree Craig, are still concerned that, although there may be, that people don't know enough true things, that there still should be more true information. We may have a rough sense of how Coca-Cola influences senators, but we need to have a very, very precise granular understanding about the relationship between Coca-Cola, Senator, and Bill, and what, and a Bill, and once we have that really precise information something will happen. There's another concern, which I think many of those involved in journalism have expressed, which is some sort of sense that journalism as an institution still exists, and it can be better. There is a possibility of a better institution. What I was interested in is sort of listening to different degrees of what are the false, there's two kinds of ideas. One is lies that people believe, and the other is things that people don't know. So Ellen and Josh are largely talking about things that people don't know. What kinds of lies are we concerned about, or what kinds of falsehoods are we concerned about? I don't think, and I could be wrong, one possibility is that we're concerned about false beliefs no matter what they are. So to test yourself, are you concerned if 70 percent of Americans believe that Stephen Colbert went to Dartmouth? So there's a, if there are false beliefs that may or may not have any sort of action impact, is there a concern? We may or may not be concerned, and people are going to have different sets of thoughts about this, about randomly distributed false beliefs. So if everyone believes five percent false things about political life, but they believe different false things. So I believe wrongly that John Tester is primarily funded by Coca-Cola money, and Ellen believes wrongly that Hastert has no relationship to agriculture. We have different wrong beliefs, there's no correlation between these beliefs, but we each individually have wrong beliefs. If you're concerned about that, you may be more concerned about sort of individuals' own relationship to truth, and less about systemic truth. My hunch is that people are not concerned about systematic false beliefs about Stephen Colbert, or non-systematic randomly distributed false beliefs even if they're about the political system. There does seem to be then a few different concerns that have come through. One is mass disbelief that has an obvious social impact that matters. If most people believe the death tax kicks in at $100,000, they might then make choices about that. There also seems to be a few mentions of mass disbeliefs or false beliefs about historical facts, which is interesting, because they don't necessarily have impact in the same way belief about Martin Luther King, belief about the Holocaust, sort of a mass misunderstanding of history, and I suspect that has to do with a sense of some way it might matter now or some relationship to bias. I think there's different people of different views about false beliefs that are briefly held and then rebutted in fact. There's been discussion about the difficulty of rebutting information, but if they're briefly held, is there sort of a wrong there? All of this to me suggests that it may be that the anxiety that is expressed here is an anxiety about falsehood, but it may in fact be that this is not actually anxiety about information. Several people have suggested this, but rather anxiety about power. If the anxiety is about power and not information, then the kinds of responses are different. Now historically, when in this country we have thought about anxiety about power in the context of political information, it's been the context of campaigns and lobbying, for what it's worth, and these have been relatively successful or unsuccessful, the kinds of strategies have not been tools but law. So kinds of tools in the 19th century are making lobbying illegal, or the Supreme Court refusing to enforce contracts to lobby because although that's information, true information in most cases. We do not want to, as a structural matter, allow this kind of true information to flow because we're concerned about power. Other kinds of structural reforms are limiting kinds of coordination between powerful entities, corporations, who can then play in telling true information about candidates, requiring some kind of disclosure. I am, you know, this is... I'm Nick Romney, and I approve of this message. Yes, Nick Romney approves of this message. That kind of disclosure, which you could then, again, I don't know how this would work in the other information space, or actually breaking up power, requiring not allowing subsidiary ownership. So I just want to sort of open up the space for kinds of solutions because I think there's a liberal tendency, and I use the liberal and the small L tendency. Paul Tillich, one of my favorite theologians, talks about this a lot, the sort of temptation, the seduction of always wanting to have more information and sort of the infinite search for more information before we act as opposed to looking at perhaps power and action. With that, I'd like to open it up to questions for our panelists, primarily, although... Or conversation. Or conversation. Yes. Or I'll call one. Yes. Melanie. I think in some ways, that theory you have about false beliefs or mass disbelief runs into one big problem that I see right away, which is religion, which is all about a whole lot of, depending on your point of view, false beliefs, mass disbeliefs, or some people's false mass disbeliefs. This is obviously a big problem for Romney, for example, and yet this is something that's a worldwide issue, so it's not, can't be, and also there are a lot of power issues tied in with religion. So I think that that can't be exactly right, so maybe then it has to be more limited to we're concerned about falseness more in the political sphere rather than falseness in general. Chris. Really thank you for laying out those distinctions. So two of the kinds of false beliefs are also different psychologically. You know, if you got the date of Mother's Day wrong and someone corrects you, you're not going to resist. You kind of want to get Mother's Day right. The kinds of misinformation that I'm at least interested in are the kinds of misinformation where when someone corrects you, you come up with an elaborate justification of why you're still right. And when you do that, that means that it must have some kind of deep identity significance to you. And that's why people not only believe these things strongly and won't let them go, but why they become associated with political views and associated with political parties and ultimately influence policy. So I'm absolutely interested in that kind and they're psychologically incredibly different in terms of how they play out for people. Yeah. I wonder if in talking about, in those last two comments we've come across with apologies to Ethan Zuckerman, a cute cat theory of misinformation. A lot of what we've been talking about in terms of individual solutions to misinformation have come with the obvious failing that the people who employ these tools are not the people that we're trying to reach. What we want to reach are people who aren't going to know that they need correction on political misinformation, but may really want to get the date of Mother's Day right. Mike. Mike Lux? Mike, use the mic. Just a thought about what Zephyr was talking about with historical information. I'm a person who tends to believe that narrative matters a lot more than specific facts, at least in politics, at least in sort of public dialogue. And because of that, I really believe that if you get history wrong, you get certain, even certain factual things about history wrong, a lot of times it deeply influences the way you think about politics, but it influences the narrative. And I think if we have a narrative that doesn't work for most people, and we in that sense is whatever context, you know, if you're a political party, if you're a political movement, if you're a journalist, but if your narrative doesn't fit with what people can accept or believe, then you're screwed in terms of getting your message out, whatever your facts are. Interesting. Does anybody know people who are working on tools? You know, we've been talking in this tools context, tools about sort of history fact-checking. Because I know there's a lot of critiques about... I have a question, actually. I want to push on to... Oh, no, go ahead. Go ahead, here. Yeah, to your last comment about fact-checking. When you get into history, it gets a little different, little trickier. Different nations have different versions of history, so actually you will find many consistent stories depending on your nationality, so I'm not sure if you can do anything there. So I actually want to throw a question back to two of our speakers, Craig and Josh, who gave us both... Do you have something to respond to this? I'm sorry. On the point of history, the desire to have misinformation around history certainly is important to many people who wish to misinform, right? You've referenced the textbook conversation, but it is a not-small part of folks who want to particularly undo civil rights protections, but a lot of them want to roll it back. Changing the history is deeply important. So they banned ethnic studies in Arizona, so they swore... Mother Jones did some great reporting on the lengthy and systematic effort that folks did in Texas to get on the Texas School Board because the textbooks... Texas is to education kind of like New York and California are to environmental law. If you've got to write a textbook that works in Texas in order to have a national textbook business. So if you can get misinformation into those textbooks, they become a national one. So history is deeply relevant to misinformation, certainly to those who have an effort. So there's a challenge for those at the hackathon tomorrow. All right. Back there. Andrew Puddingham from Global Partners in London. I mean, I listened to the conversation today as a bit of an outsider, so I offer you an observation as an outsider that the U.S. is thought to be the developed country with the highest level of religious belief and a level of religious belief that is normally only found in peasant societies rather than in vast industrial societies. And religious belief is really based on faith, not evidence. You know, the whole basis of... testing your belief in the deities that you... the evidence is not the basis on which you adopt that belief. So if you take a society which is deeply rooted in profound religious beliefs and in faith and add to that the political system of wash with money, uncontrollable corporate money on a scale never before seen in the history of the world that I can see, isn't that the key problem that you're all really talking about? That's what I'm hearing. It's about the religious rights in America and the combination of that with corporate money and I don't see that that's a problem that's fixed by a technological tool. That's a profoundly political problem to do with the national identity of the society you're living in and a technical tool isn't going to convince someone who is a deep Christian that there is evidence that suddenly makes them reconfigure their personal belief system. So I just wonder if it's the conversation in the right place to address some of the problems you're raising. It's really a question from someone coming from the other side of the Atlantic. So just to respond, part of me wants to sort of crawl up in a little ball in the fetal position. But on the other hand, I think of the way that attitudes in the United States have changed even with the description not contesting your core argument there completely. And so for example, public attitudes towards marriage equality for gays and lesbians have shifted dramatically in just a few years. Now that's partly politics. That may also be generational. I mean, it's a variety of things. I think the question that we're trying to address here is is the digital, the network public sphere, the internet in its commercial and non-commercial forms, can it make the problem more tractable or less tractable? So to keep the focus on that. I was going to go back and just ask a question to the speakers in this group, Craig or Joshua Rashad. Each of you mentioned that in one form or another the possibility of the market part of this system responding and that either newspapers might do a better job of debunking things because it improves their relationship with their readers and presumably that helps their bottom line or you can conduct a campaign against a bad media actor by trying to influence their advertisers to move a particular polluter of the media scape off his podium. And I was wondering if you could just, any of you or anybody else, how much of this is about sort of a market, you know, trying to influence the market for information and how much of this is outside of the market where, you know, foundations like Ford or others, you know, where the non-commercial side of the space, we are not going to clean things up. We shouldn't trust the, let me rephrase it, we shouldn't trust the, expect the commercial media marketplace to fix this problem much. Yes, no, disagree, agree. Yeah, go ahead, Josh. I think in a lot of ways to think about this sort of urge to defeat truthiness as a market force, similarly to how you can think of, say, international reporting and foreign correspondence. It used to be that market forces were such that it made sense for a significant number of newspapers to have foreign correspondence because the financial models work well that way. What the Internet has done is essentially disincentivize the Atlanta Journal of Constitutions of the World and the Dallas Morning News of the World and the Chicago Tribunes of the World from having those sort of folks, but encourage the New York Times' and the Reuters' and the folks who can appeal at a larger level. And I think in a lot of ways, you know, when I think about what I'm concerned about as journalism evolves, I actually don't worry all that much about political information at the national level. I feel that there's going to be a very vibrant space for lots of information, lots of reporters, some motivated by truth and justice and some motivated by political desires and all the rest. I really worry about the state houses and, you know, the city councils and the school boards because when you get down to that level, the market forces simply aren't there to encourage that higher, that sort of, you know, flight to quality. It just doesn't exist in the same way. Joe, and your question? Oh, yeah. All right. We're going to try and bring... I actually think they are what we have seen in readership surveys that have been done. So Politifact has 12 news organizations around the country that we partner with and several of them have done readers surveys about Politifact and what they like or don't like. And readers love it. And in fact, in Atlanta, you mentioned the AJC, Atlanta is advertising Politifact, not as an online product, but as a feature that you get in the paper. So they have TV ads that say the Truth-O-Meter exclusively in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and because their readership surveys show readers want that stuff, they want to see, you know, what did the mayor get? What did the Jacob County Commissioner get? And so I'm very encouraged by that because our, you know, our growth and our revenue has come more from state partners than it has from a lot of other sources. So I think, I think the market is there because people, particularly if it's done in an accessible way, I think people want this kind of journalism. I was just going to add to what Josh said that when he originally made the presentation my thought was, he said it's more happening at national level, but, you know, there's fewer journalists working in New Zealand since they first started taking the survey in 1978, you know, in local newspapers. People have cut a, it's since 1983, fewer people have cut it in newspapers since 1993, since you've been collected. And so the idea is, and more and more these local newspapers, when it comes to national stories, are picking up just copy wire, you know. So you have, I think it's problematic you only have three people covering Iraq and the Chicago Tribunal doesn't cover it because it helps to spread lies even faster if there's only a few people relying on a couple of people to actually, that's what the whole Associated Press Cartel when it came up, joined the US-Mexico-American War to spread lies, you know, in the 1800s in the mid-1850s. So the fact that they were losing the number of journalists, you know, my issues with journalism, you know, but the fact that we're losing the actual number of journalists, particularly, as you said, Josh, the local level, I mean, that's what I'm really concerned because most people, that's what they get the news from the local TV station. There aren't local news outlets really, I mean, you've seen experiments in local, in the local markets with online Jones, but people, they're not really gravitating to that still. They're still going to the main source of news, the daily paper, and the TV station. So the local level, I'm really concerned about this. Okay. Yochai, you were waiting? Yeah. I wonder the extent to which there are two very different conceptions of what we care about and that they're at war with each other. In the sense that when you focus about fact that is amenable to fact check as the anchor, is this a fact? Hmm. It's critically, probably more important than one particular factor or another or a hundredth particular fact because it's about the power to shape a shared narrative of what sort of way of thinking and talking is off the wall and what's not. But it's an act of power to pick up the phone to the newspaper and say, write the different word because I have testing that says that that makes people like me more. That's an act of power. An act of power we agree with or disagree with as a matter of political belief. But I wonder to what extent the focus on fact checking, the imagination that you could have a checklist at the end of which you would be a clean professional who's done their job. Not acknowledging the necessity of normative evaluation as a component of storytelling may be a problem. We may be building tools to let people spend another five to ten years feeling good about their profession. When they're profession, look at the story you told this morning Melanie about Berman. Comes from mass media, not from the net. When you say you can pick up the phone to so-and-so general manager of blottyblotty.org who is an employee of Berman. That comes out of an institutional demand to say, find someone with a respectable sounding name. With a respectable sounding organization on the other side, then you're clean. The fact is right, this person said this. That's the correct fact. This person is in this organization called this way. That's an example. After that I'm clean. And that institutional acceptance within traditional generalistic modes of that being, that's how I maintain my professional integrity is what pushes this idea of truth being about fact check. As opposed to the relevant question being about how we shape the narrative. And I think we need to not only keep those separate but understand that an emphasis on one undermines the possibility of seeing that the real action, if that's what we think that the where the real action is, is entirely in the other. Response, yeah. Denise. There's one other part of the story we keep forgetting that the onus on determining truth and toothiness is not just in technological fixes but also education, particularly of young people. We want to remember to get people while they're young and help them learn for themselves to determine how to evaluate information. Tom. Hi, I'm Tom Stites from the Vanyin Project. It strikes me that if we put this in a broad historical context about journalism, it begins to take on a bigger frame. It wasn't really until about World War I that most newspapers had reporters. The whole idea of checking facts of verifying information was essentially not there. The introduction of propaganda techniques in World War I actually drove the invention of the idea of reporters as something that's part of our journalism today. I think where we've found ourselves is in a cultural and social situation where the propagandists of today operating in our culture here now have become so sophisticated that they have captured the journalistic model that has been essentially in effect since after World War I. And they have wrecked it by essentially manipulating, he said, aspect of the culture. This idea of disengagement, of dispassion and all the other stuff that we actually know isn't true. I think that we're dealing here around the edges of an extremely large shift in what journalism is. And I think that, okay, it hits it on the nose. Is this facts? Is it narrative? Is it all of these things? I think that all of these questions are in process of becoming something we don't quite know what it is yet, but it's wonderful that we're in this room poking at it and maybe some more truth about what journalism is going to come out of exercises like this. Other comments? Wendell, you got the first word. You're heading into the last word section of the day. Thank you. I think it's important to keep in mind is that a lot of money is paid to manufacture these lines and a lot of money organization like the ones I used to work for. And part of that money goes to make sure that those lies or this misleading information tags an emotional wall. That's why you have race-like death panels and the government will take over that area. And a lot of time is spent to make sure that those terms do resonate emotionally with people. What we're trying to do here is a bit of a disconnect. It may be one of those tragic problems, but when you're trying to overcome someone who has taken as belief something like a death panel and trying to communicate facts, it's kind of like this. You're trying to refute some emotional, emotionally-received information. With factual information, it's just not like getting through, I hope, to really persuade people what they have been led to believe is true. Where we're going with this, I think that there probably needs to be a greater work by journalists than others to expose where this is coming from and to determine can the internet do anything to try to counter the lies that are crafted that way in language and in a way that people can actually understand and understand how they're being misled. Again? It gets a little... to respond to Ethan's challenge of action. What it means is that we can select from the various set of tools. So when Paul Resnick talks about clustering of stories and identifying stories by cluster in one tool and talking about diagnosing as left or right certain characteristics when we talk about the journalism code.uk of the mapping of the stories in terms of the press releases. These are ways that don't focus on facts but are efforts to try to combine tools like the one from Yahoo Research in Barcelona that I used to show which was right-wing and which was left-wing searches on Yahoo. They tried to diagnose a pattern of words, a pattern of stories, a pattern of means and map them both to political parties to press releases to lobbying efforts so that the armor that we walk with us or perhaps the persuasion is one that is aimed toward trying to diagnose memes and linguistic moves and narratives and similarities and stories onto a particular position. So we know who is trying to persuade us with these things. It's a very different cluster of tools in terms of what it's trying to identify. There's one more comment, Sasha. Sasha, I think it's our last comment. Yeah, it's just sort of, I guess, a provocation for tomorrow's hackathon. So one of the things we've been doing in the back channel is extracting all of the proposals and ideas people have and putting them into the matrix of things we'll play with tomorrow and that one way, a thought experiment that I'd like to invite people to do even if you can't come tomorrow is also trying to consider sort of flipping it on its head. If you were going to attempt to spread falsehoods, what tools and mechanisms would you use? What tools would you want to design to do that? And that might be an interesting way for us to enter into a conversation about how we would counter it. Great. All right. Okay, thank you. Thank you to our panelists and we're going to hand the baton off to our hosts. So we're going to bring some confusion.