How You -- Yes, You -- Can Fight Digital Disinformation | Caitlin Dewey | TEDxBuffalo

[Applause] so three years ago when I was still living in Washington DC an actually terrifying thing happened at a local pizza shop I used to go to with my friends it was a Sunday afternoon December and a man from sales Bern North Carolina walked into the comic ping pong on Connecticut Avenue and fired three shots with an ar-15 style assault rifle thankfully not hitting any actual people now this man was a heavy social media user he was particularly interested in online conspiracy theories and at some point in his internet travels he came upon a conspiracy

theory that claimed a group of high-profile political operatives were using the basement of Comet ping-pong to run an illicit child sex ring now there was a fatal flaw with this conspiracy theory which the gunman only realized after he drove six hours and waved his gun around and got arrested and that is that comet ping pong actually doesn't have a basement in fact the entire story is invented it's completely made-up and today that man from North Carolina is serving out a four year prison sentence because he believed so fervently in this false story that he read

on social media now I imagine the story of pizza gate as this incident is known is familiar to many of you in the audience because Pizza Gate today is perhaps the foremost example of a growing phenomenon known as digital disinformation that's the deliberate systematic attempt to spread false content online in order to make a profit to advance a narrative or to cause harm and confusion ten years ago such attempts were largely confined to the fringes of the internet that or they were outright jokes that's the only joke in this presentation so please enjoy it because

today today everyone from investigators at the United Nations to Tim berners-lee who invented the world wide web acknowledged that digital disinformation represents a serious threat not only to our social networks but perhaps to society itself already in countries around the world Digital disinformation has been blamed for causing deadly public health crises for provoking mass violence even for swaying the results of democratic elections and the United States is by no means exempt from these corrosive influences one recent study by researchers at Dartmouth and Princeton estimated that one in four American adults visited a disinformation website during

a single five-week study period that is more than 65 million people the vast majority of whom likely did not realize they were consuming content intended to manipulate or mislead them now to be clear when I talk about disinformation I am NOT talking about the mainstream media journalists do you make mistakes I know I'm one of them but no professional journalists with any credibility is in the business of intentionally misleading readers that would undermine our reason for existing not to mention our entire business model I'm also not talking about any particular segment of the political spectrum

because studies show that we all fall for disinformation whether we're Republican or Democrat liberal or conservative PhDs or undergraduate students we are all susceptible to this and yet despite the universality and the scale of the threat I don't see many signs that everyday social media users are mobilizing against it many of us are familiar with the concept of disinformation certainly we see examples of it in our Facebook feeds in our inboxes we've historically thought of this as a problem for governments and big technology companies to solve I believe however that there are things we all

can do indeed there are things we all need to do in order to move the internet needle a little bit closer towards truth and evidence and science and verifiable reproducible fact and what I hope to do over the course of the next 10 minutes is convince all of you to go home to your computers and begin fighting back now before I draft you into this vast global war on disinformation I'd like to talk to you a little bit more about what it is because this information can take a lot of forms and it can come

from a wide range of sources from internet trolls to teenage pranksters all the way down to unscrupulous marketers and even foreign agents now Pizza Gate is just one example you already know how that one ends but the story of how it started is in many ways just as alarming and even more complicated see in the years since the pizza gate gunmen attacked comet ping pong a team of journalists working with the Center for Investigative Reporting have traced the conspiracy theory back to its early days and while they were never able to nail down exactly who

started it they did determine that it was spread at least initially by a highly automated highly coordinated network of twitter accounts which suggested deliberate and perhaps even professional effort to get the story out here's a more straightforward example this is a Facebook ad that was banned by the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority or a si now the a si is a regulatory body that among other things prevents marketers from making false or misleading claims now after getting a complaint about this ad which was sponsored by an anti vaccine activist the a si ruled that they

would not allow it that it was baseless and the reason for that is because the activists could not in fact prove the vaccines caused infant deaths as we know the overwhelming scientific consensus is in fact that vaccination is good and important for children's health for better or worse however most countries don't have a seis and Facebook continued to allow ads like this one for several months not coincidentally public health officials in both Ireland and Italy have since blamed plummeting childhood vaccination rates in those countries on digital disinformation here's another example these two images that you

see behind me are both memes that were posted to an Instagram account click that claims to represent black political activists in the US now as you can see the account repeatedly encouraged black voters to sit out the 2016 presidential election we don't know how many or indeed if any voters actually did in fairness it is very difficult to draw direct causal links between voter behavior and disinformation what we do know however is that two years after these were posted both images appeared in a report commissioned by the bipartisan US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which

concluded that this account and dozens of others liked it we're actually secretly run by the internet research agency an online propaganda farm backed by the Kremlin now this is by no means the worst the disinformation can do in fact it's no exaggeration to say that disinformation is a matter of life or death for tens of thousands of people in Myanmar a country that has been linked in decades of ethnic conflict investigators from the United Nations have tied false Facebook posts about the country's Roe hinga minority to an uptick in deadly violence against them and just

last year Facebook confirmed that many of those false posts were both written and coordinated by members of the country's military making Myanmar one of seventy countries around the world to fall victim to a government-led Digital disinformation campaign in 2018 now as you can imagine examples like these alarm a lot of people as they should because good accurate trustworthy information is the basis on which we make all of our most important decisions both as a society and as individuals for that reason tech policymakers and companies have thrown themselves at this problem of stopping or at least

slowing the spread of disinformation and to be fair they have seen some success but by and large Big Tex efforts to stop disinformation have fallen short of our expectations for them for starters a number of internet companies have tried to stop dissing formers from using their ad platforms or for exploiting their recommendation algorithms but we now know that dissing formers respond logically but just changing their basic tactics Facebook Twitter and other social networks have also picked literal billions of fake accounts off their platforms but according to Facebook's own estimates there are still more fake accounts

on its site today than ever before perhaps the most disappointing intervention at least to me has involved efforts to fact-check disinformation more than 70 organizations around the world have partnered with Facebook and Google on fact-checking initiatives and hundreds of other news outlets and nonprofits employ fact checkers of their own I myself spent several years debunking viral hoaxes and conspiracy theories and rumors as the digital culture critic at the Washington Post but what I learned very quickly is that fact-checking doesn't really appear to work for starters there's way too much disinformation on the Internet for individual

humans to ever go through and manually look into all of it it would take a very large and very expensive army of fact-checkers hundreds of years just to check out every fake tweet and add and meme on the internet right now and even then there's no guarantee those fact checks would ever reach their intended audience even when they do unfortunately we now know because of new research that these types have topped down our institutional efforts don't always appear to work that's because they don't always convince a lot of people now part of that is basic

human nature right when we share information online true or false we share it because it aligns with our pre-existing beliefs and when we're exposed to information that undermines those beliefs we tend to reject it because we see it as threatening studies of Facebook and Twitter users have also shown us that perhaps obviously people tends to friend other users online who share their ideologies and politics and that may reduce their exposure to what is known as cross-cutting information to further complicate things we are facing an absolute crisis of trust in mainstream institutions Americans faith in traditional

authorities from doctors to journalists to politicians is just about the worst that it's ever been and as a result fact checks that come from those sorts of figures do not carry the weight that they once did one recent study actually found then with choosing whether to trust an article posted on social media most people will weigh the identity and the trustworthiness of the person who shared it over the trustworthiness of the source of the actual information in other words disinformation is not a problem we can simply program away because it's also on some level a

matter of user error we don't just fall for disinformation because dissing formers are so smart because fact checks aren't readily available but because this information is easy and accessible in comforting sometimes and because we're not actively trying not to fall for it I encountered this all the time when I covered disinformation myself there's this one guy in particular a comedian in Phoenix who used to make up news stories and then make tons of money off the ads and he told me that his readers made his job so easy because they never took the time to

think critically about any of the nonsense that he spewed at them as long as that's true Facebook can tweak its algorithms all day long and computer scientists can train neural networks or whatever else to distinguish good information from bad but they need our help the situation does not improve until every day social media users also begin to take some responsibility for the content that they consume and share now the question then becomes how do you go about doing that I think the answer is actually fairly intuitive first off you yourself have to commit to only

sharing credible well sourced well-documented information regardless of how well it fits with your own personal beliefs and politics the second thing you need to do and this is admittedly a bit more awkward is to begin to act as a sort of personal fact checker for your own personal network now by that I don't mean arguing with strangers in the comment section or embarrassing your friends in public both of which I think are actually quite destructive but surely there is a way for us to engage our close friends and acquaintances in respectful compassionate maybe private conversations

about the information that they post online and also to let them know when something that they've posted appears to contradict the best available evidence now these two actions are admittedly very small maybe rather obvious and not everyone's going to take them but multiplied over just thousands or even tens of thousands of users they do begin to make a difference remember that most people judge the trustworthiness of information on social media based on the trustworthiness of the person who shared it which actually means that ordinary social media users have tremendous Authority and influence within their networks

if your friends and family members and co-workers and neighbors are inherently more like to trust the information that you share then each and every one of you sitting in this room right now are already better positioned to fight disinformation within your networks than the world's best professional fact checkers are now I should note I do realize I risk oversimplifying some of these issues in the interests of explaining them in 15 minutes this information isn't as always as clear-cut as the examples I've shown here and that does make fighting it vastly more complicated I also don't

want to let social media companies off the hook by suggesting that this is a problem users can solve themselves on the contrary we know that the company the creators of these platforms always have the ultimate power to influence how users behave on them with that said however we no longer have the luxury of waiting for government and for big tech companies to figure this out because this is already happening we are awash in disinformation right now I don't think I need to tell you that this is particularly urgent in the United States today and will

only become more urgent over the course of the next 12 months in fact just earlier this month the Republican Senator Richard burr warned that the United States would face an unprecedented flood of quote false reports conspiracy theories and trolls in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election in other words the question is no longer if dissing formers will attempt to derail our democracy we know they are and they will the question is what you will do the next time you encounter false information in your social media feeds because the stakes are far too high now

to scroll past it thank you [Applause]