Renée DiResta

00:00people though they really are it's just hard business especially when you didn't see it coming two one hello renee hello thanks for doing this i really appreciate it thanks for having me uh i listened to you on sam harris's podcast and i was utterly stunned i had to listen to it twice because i just couldn't let's get into let's get into this from the beginning how did this start out how did you start researching these uh online russian trolls and bots and and all this jazz yeah so a couple years back in around 2015 um i i had had my my first baby in 2013 and i was getting on these preschool lists and what i decided to do was i started looking at um anti-vaccine activity in california because i had a kid and i wanted to uh you know put them on preschool list where i was going to fit with the parents basically as someone who vaccinates and i started looking at the way that

00:54small groups were able to kind of disproportionately amplify messages on social channels and some of this was through very legitimate activity and then some of it was through really kind of coordinated deliberate attempts to kind of game ways that algorithms were amplifying content amplifying particular types of narratives and i thought it was interesting and i started writing about it and i um i wound up writing about ways in which um gaming ways in which people were kind of using automation to just be in a hashtag all the time so it was kind of a way to really gain control of shared voice and what that meant when very small groups of people could achieve this kind of phenomenal application and what the pros and cons of that were and then this was 2015 so the way that that this sort of awareness of social media challenges came came about was actually when

01:47i was working on this other people were looking at it from the same um looking at the same tactics but how they were being used by isis by the terrorist organization and there also you had this very small group of people that managed to use bots and amplification to really kind of own a narrative really push this this brand this digital caliphate to kind of build it on all social platforms almost simultaneously and the ways in which information was hopping from one platform to another through kind of deliberate coordination and then also just ways in which information flowed kind of contagion style and i wound up working on uh thinking about how the government was going to respond to the challenge of terrorist organizations using american social platforms to spread propaganda so what we came to realize was that there was just this information ecosystem and it had evolved in a

02:35certain way over a period of about eight years or so and the kind of unintended consequences of that and the way that russia kind of came into the conversation was around october 2015 when we were thinking about what what to do about isis what to do about terrorism uh and and terrorist uh you know kind of proliferation on social platforms this was right around when adrian chen had written the article the agency for the new york times and that was one of the first big exposes of the internet research agency the first time an american journalist had gone over there and actually met the trolls been in st petersburg and began to write about what was happening over there and the ways that they had pages that were targeting certain facets of american culture so while we were in dc talking about what to do about terrorists using these platforms to spread propaganda

03:25there were beginning to be rumblings that russian intelligence and you know russian entities were doing the same thing and so the question became can we think about ways in which the internet is vulnerable to this type of manipulation by anyone and then and then come up with ways to stop it so that was how the the russia investigation began was actually around 2015 a handful of people started looking for evidence of russian bots and trolls on social platforms so 2015 if we think about social media and the birth of social media essentially it had only been alive for i mean what was twitter 2007 i believe something like that so eight years like eight years of social media and then all of a sudden they figured out how to game this system and then they figured out how to use this to make people argue against each other yeah so i think so there was this uh if you go back to like um

04:22remember like geocities and they yeah okay aol using that of course um so we're probably about the same age um so there have always been you know kind of uh the thing that was great about the internet like internet 1.0 we can call it right was this idea that uh everybody was given a platform and you could use your platform you could put up your blog you could say whatever you wanted you didn't necessarily get attention but you could say whatever you wanted and so there was this kind of consolidation as social platforms kind of came into existence content creators were really excited about the fact that now they not only had this um this access to write their own stuff but they also had access to this audience because as the network effects got more and more pronounced more and more people came to be on social platforms and it originally wasn't even facebook

05:07if you remember it was like you know there's like friendster and myspace and social networks kind of evolved when i was in college facebook was still limited to like you know a handful of like ivy league schools and so i wasn't even eligible and as you watch this consolidation happen you start to have this information ecosystem really dominated by a handful of companies that grow very large because they're providing a service that people really want but there's a kind of mass consolidation of audiences onto this handful of platforms so this becomes really interesting for regular people who just want to find their friends reach people spread their message grow an audience it also becomes really interesting for propagandists and trolls and in this case terrorist organizations and state intelligence services because instead of reaching the entire internet they really just kind of have

05:55to concentrate their efforts on a handful of platforms so that consolidation is one of the things that kind of kicks off some of the um one of the reasons that we have these problems today right so the fact that there's only a facebook a twitter and instagram and a couple other minor platforms other than youtube i mean anything that you can tell it's an actual person like youtube is a problem right because you can see it's an actual person if you're if you're narrating something you you know if you're in front of the camera and explaining things people are going to know that you're an actual human being whereas there's so many of these accounts that i'll go to like i'll watch people get involved in these little online beefs with each other and then i'll go to some of these accounts like this doesn't seem like a real person and i'll go and it's like hashtag

06:41magga there's a american eagle in front of a flag and then you you read their stuff and like wow this is this is probably a russian troll account and it's strange like you feel like you're not supposed to be seeing this like you're seeing the wiring under the board or something and then you'll go through the timeline and all they're doing is engaging people and arguing you know for trump and against you know whatever the they're angry about whatever whatever it is that's being discussed and they're they're basically just like some weird little argument mechanism yeah so in 2016 um there was a lot of that during the presidential campaign right and there were um there was so much that was written you know we can go back to the free speech thing we were kind of chatting about before there was so much that was written about um harassment and trolling and

07:30negativity and these kind of hordes of accounts that would brigade people and harass them of course a lot of that is just real americans right there are plenty of people who are just on the internet sure um but there were actually a fair number of these as we began to do the investigation into the russian operation in uh it started on twitter in about um 2014 actually so 2013 2014 the internet research agency is targeting russian people so they're tweeting in russian at russian and ukrainian folks people in their sphere of influence so they're already on there they're already trying this out and what they're doing is they're creating these uh these these accounts it's kind of wrong to call them bots because they are real people they're just not what they appear to be so i think the unfortunate term for it has become like cyborg like semi-automated you know sometimes it's

08:18automated sometimes it's a real person but a sock puppet is the other way that we can refer to it a person pretending to be somebody else so you have these sock puppets and they're out there and they're tweeting in 2014 about the russian annexation of crimea or about mh17 that plane that went down which russia you know of course had no idea what happened and it wasn't their fault at all and gradually as they begin to experience what i imagine they thought of was success that's when you see some of these accounts pivot to targeting americans and so in 20 late 2014 early 2015 you start to see the um this strategy that for a long time had been very inwardly focused making their own people think a certain way or feel a certain way or have a certain experience on the internet it begins to to spread out it begins to to look outwards and so you start to see these accounts

09:09communicating with americans and as we were going through the data sets which the twitter data set is public anyone can go and look at it at this point you do see some of the accounts that are kind of um you know that were that were somewhat notorious for being really virulent nasty trolls anti-semitic trolls going after journalists you know some of these accounts um being revealed as actually being russian trolls now it doesn't kind of um exclude the actual american trolls that were very much real and active and part of this and expressing their opinion but you do see that they're mimicking this they're using that same style of tactic that harassment to to get at real people and if they do get banned if their account gets banned they just simply make another account they use uh some sort of uh you know um what is it a virtual virtual server what is that called

10:04i mean vpns or vpns that's it yeah so if they do that they can kind of do that as long as they want they can continue to make new accounts and it probably also emboldens the actual amer because they're going to go out a little bit further than everybody else a little bit crazier and it kind of changes the tone of discourse within these communities that are arguing about a certain subject things get nastier and they get nastier because of the interference of these trolls like it seems like they've they've actually managed to not just cause a lot of discourse but to change the way people are interacting with each other and to make it just make it more more vicious yeah so the what they're doing is they're operating in communities so one of the really common criticisms of you know people who um a lot of people think that this didn't have a huge impact didn't you

10:56know did it swing the election we have no idea um but the what it does do in the communities that it targets is it can change that tone and that's where you see um it's it's i mean i think everybody's probably had this experience you're part of a group and then a new person gets added to the group and the dynamic changes it's very much the same kind of thing just that these are not real people who are joining the group and so there's this um opportunity to to to you know kind of expand the bounds of tolerance just that little bit more or try to normalize using particular ways of communicating that maybe a group wouldn't naturally gravitate to but then it does so there are definitely ways in which any any type of troll doing this doesn't have to be a russian troll has this ability to kind of shift the language shift the community shift the uh the culture just a little bit

11:48now when did why did the agency do this and do we do we know do we have someone who's ever left there or become a whistleblower who can give us some information about what the mandate was and and how it was carried out there have been a couple of uh whistleblowers and actually some investigative journalism in russia that's covered this they describe the the employees of the so it's the internet research agency so it's a little bit like a social media marketing agency plus um tactics that we would not expect a social media marketing agency to use things that are a little more like what you would expect to see from an intelligence agency so besides just making your pages and your blogs and your social posts they're also in there kind of uh connecting with real people and real activists and pretending to be something that they're not to develop kind of a one-on-one

12:39relationship but most of the most of the the whistleblowers who have come out there's a woman named ludmila savachuk she wrote an expose i believe on this and it's described as being much like you would expect if you were doing social media grunt work um you have a certain number of posts per day you you know you're driving trying to get a certain amount of engagement you're trying you've got to kind of hit your quotas most people are young millennials the people that work there um they're well-versed in trolling culture they're well-versed in internet culture you know they're up to speed on like popular memes and things like that and so you do see um this and then the other thing that they do is uh they talk about in mueller indictment you see some really interesting descriptions of like the stand-ups that they have stand up is a thing you do at a tech company everybody kind of stands

13:27up and talk about your goals and responsibilities and blockers and things and in these stand-ups they would be sitting there saying things like um if you're targeting black lgbt people make sure you don't use white people in your in your image and your meme because that's going to like trigger them so trying to get at the the very niche rules for you know for communicating authentically in an american community which is you know online you know you sometimes um there are very specific uh ways in which a community expects a member of that community to communicate yeah and so they are in there and you can read in these filings by mueller's team and by the eastern district of virginia um the the the degree of granularity that they have to recognize that if you are running a black lgbt page and your meme is of white people you're going to cause some tension and consternation

14:20and assuming that that's not necessarily what you want to be doing you should go find the meme of black lgbt people to put in the you know to put as your meme for the day so there's a lot of um there's a lot of sophistication there's a lot of understanding of american culture and then there's a lot of understanding of trolling culture and so these things combine to be a rather effective uh you know very effective social media agency and is there an overwhelming sort of narrative that they're trying to pursue they're trying to push so what we saw so i did the um i did some of the research for the senate and the senate data came from the platforms so what i had was um the attribution was made by the platforms it wasn't like renee deciding this was ira it was the platforms giving it to to our government and the information in there um what it showed was that

15:13across all platforms across twitter across facebook instagram youtube they were building up tribes so they were really working to create distinct communities of distinct types of americans and that would be for example there's an lgbt page that is very much about lgbt pride there's they created it and they created it and they've they curate it and they create it curate it it has a you know there's like a persona a lot of the posts on the lgbt page were written by what sounded kind of like a millennial lesbian was the voice um so it was a lot of um you know memes of lgbt actresses and they would brand it with a specific brand mark it was a rainbow heart um lgbt united was the name of the page it had a matching instagram account which you would also expect to see from a media property right you would expect them to see in both places and this um you know what were they

16:07pushing it read like a like a a young woman talking about um crushes on actresses and things actually you know it was it was really besides the sometimes wonky english virtually indistinguishable from what you would read on any kind of like young millennial focused social page it wasn't uh none of it was radical or divisive it wasn't like the way that they got the division across was they built these tribes where they're reinforcing in-group dynamics so you have the lgbt page you have numerous pages targeting the black community that was where they spent most of their energy a lot of pages targeting far right so both old far right meaning people who are very concerned about what is the future of america look like and then young far right which was much more angry much more like trolling culture so they recognize that there's a divide there that the kinds of memes you're

17:04going to use to target younger right-wing audiences are not the same kinds of memes you're going to use to target older right-wing audiences so there's a tribe for older right-wing younger right-wing in the black community there's a baptist tribe there's a black liberation tribe there's a black women tribe there's one for people who have incarcerated spouses there's a wow brown brown power i believe was the name of it page that was very much about um mexican and chicano culture there was native americans united and all of these are fake all these are fake oh these are fake and what are they trying to do with all these so you build up this in-group dynamic and over and they did this over years so this was not a short-term thing they started these pages in 2014-2015 time frame most of them they started some other ones that were much more political later we can talk

17:55about the election if you want to but with this tribal thing you're building up tribes so you're saying like as black women in america this is um here's posts about things that we care about here's posts about black hair here's posts about child rearing here's posts about fashion and culture and then every now and then there would be a post that would reinforce like as black people we don't do this and so or as lgbt people we don't like this and so you're building this rapport so like me and you we're having a conversation we're developing a relationship on this page over time and then i say like as this kind of person we don't believe this so it's a way to subtly influence by appealing to an in-group dynamic or appealing to like as members of this tribe as lgbt people of course we hate mike pence as black people of course we're not going to vote because you know

18:48we'd hate hillary clinton because we hate her husband as um as people who are concerned about the future of america as texas secessionists you know so so everything is presented as members of this tribe we think this as members of this tribe we don't think this but a lot of the posts so a lot of the posts were not even political they were just sort of affirming the standards of the tribe yes so they were kind of setting up this whole long game yep and then once they got everybody on board how many followers are these do these pages have so the there was kind of a long tail there were um i think 88 pages on facebook and 133 instagram accounts and i would say maybe 30 of the facebook pages had over a thousand followers which is not very many and then um maybe the top 10 had upwards of 500 000 followers so there's you know the same way you're on any social campaign

19:48sometimes you have hits sometimes you have flops right and what was interesting with the flops is you would see them repurpose them so they would decide you know the same way if you're running a social media agency well we've got this audience this page isn't doing so well let's like rebrand it a little bit change it up try to try to make it appeal to somebody else so you do see this there is a there is um i got this data set and i was going through these instagram memes and you know 133 000 of them and i was um there was a cluster of images of kermit the frog i was like what the hell is kermit the frog doing in here and so i so then i go so this the way the platforms provide the data is i got like a csv of the posts and then i got a folder of the images and so in order to like connect the dots i had to have the image up on one screen and the this um

20:41thing the csv up on the other screen csv it's like a spreadsheet okay yeah and i and we you know turned it into a database that we could track things a little bit more easily across the platforms but um so i have this cluster of kermit the frog memes and i go and i look and i realize that they're attributed to an account called army of jesus and i thought well that's interesting cause what you know these are some of them are really raunchy it was like it was like kermit miss piggy like you know i mean it was just like like stupid uh stupid crappy memes um attached to army of jesus and what the hell is going on here i keep going through it hundreds of kermit memes and then i get to a post where they say like um this page is owned by homer simpson now kermit went to jail for being like i don't know they made some like some joke it was stupid and all of a sudden

21:31the data set turns into homer simpson memes so again like this kind of raunchy homer simpson culture um and again it's attributed to army of jesus and then i go through all this and realize that they didn't get to actually making army of jesus a jesus focused page until like 900 posts in so they just renamed the account at some point it used to be called nuts news and then they nuts news was what they called it when it was the kermit the frog meme page and then it gets repurposed when they realize kermit's not doing it it's not getting the audience they want homer simpson's not getting the audience or engagement they want and then they pivot over to jesus and then all of a sudden they start you know the likes and and things start pouring in so what they're doing is they're actually like either deliberately or they're just creating placeholders um it's kind of a red flag when a brand

22:21new account that was created yesterday suddenly starts talking about some highly politically divisive thing or whatever but if you lay the groundwork and you do it over a period of two years then somebody who goes and checks to see what the account was where it came from how old it is is gonna see something that was two years old so it's an opportunity to create almost like sleeper accounts where you create them now and then you activate them you politicize them you actually put them to use a couple years in the future so we saw all kinds of uh you know we saw this over and over again there was a black guns matter account that turned into an anonymous account at one point um they were pretending to be anonymous you know the activist yeah so so they repurposed this black guns matter page which just had it was it was advocating that black people buy weapons and carry and it's

23:10like a pro second amendment page but for the black community and then they took that page when it wasn't getting i guess a ton of engagement and it became uh it was called um oh gosh i remember the exact name of the anonymous page and i don't want to say it was something that's legit but but uh they pivoted into an anonymous page and when they do that do they go back and repurpose the con the content of the earlier posts do they change that was not clear that wasn't clear we didn't get that information from the platforms um there was a lot of stuff that i would have loved to have more insight into we could see again you know you'd think if you started following an army of jesus page and you had all this raunchy kermit from like a year ago that would raise some flags i would assume that they scrubbed it and restarted but i don't know your podcast with sam

23:59changed how i look at a lot of the pages that i actually follow because i follow some pages like that have classic cars or something like that and then i'll see them and most of it is just photographs of cars like beautiful old cars and it'll have you know they'll have a giant following and then all of a sudden something will get political and i'll look at it and go oh wow like this is probably one of those weird accounts like they're getting people to get engaged with it because it represents something they're interested in like classic muscle cars and then they use it for activism and they use it for to to get this narrative across i think i i mean i've seen it happen with some of mine too um i think one of the challenges is like you want people to be aware that this stuff exists but you don't want them to be paranoid that it's everywhere i am personal i know that's a problem

24:54everybody's into control now i look at this all day long and sometimes i see things and i'm like you know what are the odds um but and i and i try to you know not feel like you know you don't want to feel like you're in some like tom clancy novel but yeah it's it's this balance between when you make people aware of it and i think people deserve to be aware but they deserve to understand how this plays out the flip side of that is you do wind up in these weird you know you see it happen on social media now or um click into a trump tweet and you'll see like you're a russian bot no you're a russian bot no you're like they're probably not russian bots you know it's everybody you don't like on the internet is not a russian pot exactly and so that's where you get at um the interesting conversations of you know in some ways getting caught this is this is one of the challenges

25:47with running disinformation campaigns right it it makes it really hard for people to know what's real after the fact it leaves you a little bit off balance right feel like um you know when you feel like you can't quite tell what's real and that's part of the goal right it's to make you not have a not feel entirely balanced um in your information environment is this real is this not and so in some ways there's not much downside to doing this right because you do you know if you either knock it out of the park and you influence the election and you influence people and you have this secret covert operation going on for years or you get caught and then there's a you know until there's some confidence in the ability of platforms to detect this stuff there's real concern among everybody that um that you're you're encountering something fake now the the overwhelming narrative is that

26:45the russians were very much invested in having trump win right and if they were very much invested in having trump win was the reason why they focus so heavily on the african-american community because the african-american community traditionally seems to vote democrat so they were trying to do something to break that up or trying to do something to weaken the position of the you know the incumbent or hillary clinton and maybe put some emphasis on jill stein or some alternative candidates yeah so the way that the political campaign the political aspect of it played out so they established they started building these relationships in 2015 and you know they're doing this this tribal thing we've got our in group we're part of this community and then what you start to see them do is um early they're actually there was a tiny tiny cluster in the early primaries

27:38where they were supporting rand paul and then they pivot to trump pretty quickly and use and probably rand paul just didn't pull well and they were like there's no way to get any lift here but but maybe trump was getting you know some actual lift in the media and so so you see them move into supporting trump and then for the remainder of the data set for from 2015 through the end which was mid 2017 or so is when this thing ends um it's it's adamantly pro-trump on the right and on the right you see not only pro-trump but you see them really working to like erode support for mainstream or traditional republicans traditional conservatives you see a lot of the memes about like um are you with the cuck servatives or the conservatives and they're you know and so the conservatives of course are like they've got pictures of like lindsey graham and john mccain they hate john

28:29mccain john mccain shows up a million times um and uh marco rubio ted cruz well i think that they you know one of the theories is um and and i believe this is probably true they really strongly disliked hillary clinton because there was concern that she would you know things that she was saying about increasing freedoms in russia were very threatening they thought the best bet to get sanctions removed was trump so they had specific outcomes that they were hoping for and that was one of you know so there's always like a political motivation so there is this narrative around they just want to kind of like screw with american society create divisions amplify divisions when you look at the political content the clear and and sustained support for trump and even more than that the clear disdain for hillary clinton there is not on facebook and instagram there was not one single

29:21pro hillary post there were some anti-trump posts because if you're running an lgbt page of course they're going to say negative things about trump you know and they're saying it so you should vote for jill stein there was early support on some of the left-leaning pages for bernie sanders but you actually see the support for bernie sanders come in more after it becomes clear that he's not going to win because then they're using bernie sanders as a way to say this was stolen from him by the evil clintons or jill stein you know here's a true true independent real liberal we should be voting for her if we want to support a woman so there are these feminism pages really pushing this narrative of jill stein so you have the left-leaning pages totally anti-clinton and then you have the right-leaning pages staunchly pro-trump and also strongly anti-crews anti-rubio

30:12anti-lindsey graham basically anti every now what's called establishment republican and there's this uh kind of pushing of people to opposite opposite ends of the political spectrum this is where you get at the conversation around facilitating polarization so not just um it wasn't enough to just support donald trump it was also necessary to strongly disparage the kind of traditional conservative moderate center right in the course of amplifying the trump candidacy does that make sense yes it does i know there's a lot of stuff yeah it is a lot of stuff but it does make sense and one of the things that was really bizarre to me watching the election and i was trying to figure out is this because trump is so bombastic and he's so outrageous and he's just a different person that the way i was describing it on stage was that like finally the have a king because they never had a king before

31:10like everyone who was running for president was at least mostly dignified i mean basically it's really difficult to go back in time and find someone who isn't find someone who there's no one who insults people like he does i mean he insults people's appearances he calls them losers he called stormy daniels horse face i mean he says some outrageous so part of it was me thinking like wow maybe he's just ignited and emboldened i actually had this conversation with my wife today she was like uh it feels like racism is more prevalent like it's more it's more accepted people feel more emboldened because they're in their mind they think he is racist i can get away with more things trump is president like there's actually videos of people saying racist and saying hey trump's president now we can do this so i was thinking that well maybe that's what it was just sort of like

32:05some rare flower that only blooms under the right conditions poof it's back right but when you think about the influence that these pages have had in establishing communities and this long game that they're playing like the lgbt pages even though they're on trump they really want to support jill stein because they know that'll actually help trump because it'll take votes away from hillary clinton that they it seems different like political discourse discussions online and social media the way social media reacted i mean there was a lot of people that were anti-obama uh before you know either either of his elections that he won but it seemed different it seemed different to me than this one this one seemed like like we had moved into another level of hostility that i never experienced before and another level of division between the right and the left that i never experienced before

33:04and uh like a willingness to engage with really harsh nasty comments and just to dive into it you would see it all day i mean there's there are certain twitter followers that i think they're pretty much human beings but i would follow them and they would just be engaged with people all day long just on people and criticizing this and insulting that and it seemed like it seemed dangerous it seemed like things had moved into a much more aggressive uh much more hostile and confrontational sort of chapter in american history if this is all done at the same time this is happening how much of an influence do you think this ira agency had on all this stuff that's the uh that's the question that we would all like the answer to and i unfortunately can't give it and so in your mind though yeah let me let me let me kind of caveat that um the thing that we don't have that nobody who

34:12looks at this on the outside has is we can't see what people said in response to this stuff so i've looked at now almost two hundred thousand of these posts um is what i spent most of last year doing was was this was this research and we can see that they have thousands of engagements thousands of comments thousands of shares we have no idea what happened afterwards and that's the problem so when once the stuff comes down it's really hard to go back and piece it together so i can see that there are some of per your point the the really really just horrible troll accounts that they ran they didn't necessarily have a lot of followers but you see them in there like adding people so they're you know at and then the name of a reporter at the name of a prominent person and so they're in there kind of like draft on the popularity of you know famous people basically um

35:06and they're just saying like horrible and it's the tone is so spot on and one thing that was interesting with a couple of them is like if you go and you look at their profile information which was also made public they would have like um they would have a like a gab account in their in their profile that was like so they would um so it was a remarkable piece of of of kind of the culture in which you see that like they're actually sitting on gab too right and and so they can also go and they can draw on they're in reddit there's you know 900 or something troll accounts were found on reddit they're on tumblr and so they're just picking the most divisive content and they're pushing it out into communities and at the same time we can see that they're doing it but we can't see what people do in return we can't say did they just block did they have the fight back did

35:54was there a huge you know when this happens on a facebook page and they're doing something like telling black people not to vote as black people we shouldn't vote what do people say in response and that's the piece that we don't have so when we talk about impact a lot of the impact conversation is really uh focused on did this swing the election we don't have nothing that i've seen has the answer to that question um the other thing is but the second question the thing when i think about impact i think from from i think you and i agree on this um it also matters how does this change how people relate to each other and we have no real evidence of no information on that either this is the kind of thing that lives in some you know facebook has it the rest of us haven't seen it now are most of these people is this mostly facebook is it mostly twitter or where

36:47what does how does it break down yeah so there were um there are my like little stats here because i want to give you the wrong data there were 10 and a half million tweets of which about 6 million were original content created by about 3 800 accounts there were about 133 let me just read it 133 um instagram accounts with about 116 000 posts and then 81 facebook pages and 17 youtube channels with about 100 videos and so they got about 200 million engagements on instagram and about another 75 million or so on facebook um engagements are like likes shares comments reactions you know um so it's hard to contextualize what we think happened you know you can go and you can try to look at how well did this content perform relative to other real authentic media targeting these communities and what you see with the black community in particular is their instagram game was really good um

37:52they're so they're on their instagram accounts the you know the top five three of them targeted the black community and got you know um tens to 100 millions of engagements so i would have to pull up the exact number is it mostly don't know it off top of my head yeah it's um it's on instagram it's all memes and then you know so we have the memes and then we have the text on instagram you can't really share so it's amazing that they got the kind of engagement that they did even without the sharing function one of the things you can do is if you know the names of the accounts and they're a lot of them are out there publicly now you can actually see them in regram apps so people were re-grabbing the content so facebook says about 20 million people excuse me engaged with the instagram content but what isn't included in that is all of the regrams of the content

38:44that were shared by other accounts so the spread and the dispersion of this it's an interesting uh an interesting thing to try to quantify because we have engagement data but we don't know did it change hearts and minds we don't know if it influenced people to go follow other accounts we don't know if it influenced people to not vote there's just so much more i think still to to understand about how these operations work well we can kind of we can assume that it had some impact right i mean yes as you were saying earlier when a new person enters into a conversation it changes the tone of it how much of what they did was their own original post and how much of it was commenting on other people's posts so i thought you're actually going to ask a different thing there no how much of it was them repurposing our own posts right repurposing real american content

39:38um did they do that as well yeah tons of times but let me let me uh so they created a lot of their own stuff particularly in the early days and so you can actually read the data set and one of the things when we started finding these posts i was struck by how sometimes it read like esl and then sometimes it read like perfect flawless um professional english and then other times it read like normal english vernacular just the way that we would talk to each other and i started digging into what that was so when it was vernacular english when it was when it when it read like fluent american american english it was um usually cribbed from somewhere else so they would go and they would find a local news story from some obscure local paper and they would crib and then they would paste that and then so the facebook post would be that cribbed sentence from that article and then

40:29their meme and maybe they would add a sentence underneath it to give it some kind of context or angle when they would write their own stuff you would see the sloppiness that's where you could see um subject-verb agreements not quite there the you know ways in which like russian possessives are different than american possessives the slips there and then the other thing was the really funny stuff which was um you know a post that's supposed to supposedly written by a texas secessionist right so you can probably have an image of a texas secessionist in your mind as i say this and it would be things like um hillary clinton is a terrible individual and as a uh as a terrible individual it's uh completely impossible for us to back her in her candidacy for the american presidency furthermore you know it's like furthermore ergo you know it is clear that and i'm like

41:21it reads like remember you're like in you know english in college or something you've got to like write a formal essay i was like oh okay come on you your way through it right so nobody actually talks like this especially not you know you're you're texting stereotypical texas so it was funny seeing these um incongruities and that's unfortunately one of the best ways to tell what you're dealing with is actually to kind of look for those incongruities now and see uh as you read communications online like can you know does this does this read like an american does this read like a communication and what we started to see was one way to not get caught for your lousy english or your you know your cultural lack of kind of native native abilities is to just repurpose other people's stuff and so that's where you would see memes getting shared from on both the right and the left you know

42:22you'd see a lot of these like turning point usa memes that they were repurposing and pushing out or you would see occupied democrats or the other 98 percent so memes from real american pages real american culture and they would just sometimes slap a new logo on and just repost it as if it was theirs so it does in those instances read just like you know authentic american content and in many ways it is authentic american content how many people are working for this agency do we understand i don't remember off the top of my head it was um somewhere between a couple hundred and thousand i think i don't know if it's bigger than that and they're just they just moved offices and um it's a funny story i guess they moved offices and then um people started calling in bomb threats to the office and it was just like every day a new bomb threat would get called in so they couldn't work basically

43:14i assume this is like some american intelligence agency just like with them but there's people calling in these bomb threats to try to keep them from working and i think um there was an article that came out really recently that said that like army cyber or one of our one of our agencies worked to just like um take them offline during the during the midterms a couple days around the midterms i wonder if whoever's calling it in is doing it in bad russian yeah that would be so ironic so that was really funny like moved to this nice new office building and someone chucked a molotov cocktail through the window at some point of course yeah of course um so it's spy versus spy yeah it's it i mean it only makes sense that in this bizarre and unpredictable and really unprotec unprecedented environment that we find ourselves in that something like this would come up and

44:02just sort of throw a monkey wrench into the gears of of real conversation online i mean it's it's a really amazing time in that we're getting to see this kind of stuff happen in real time we're getting to see these these sort of weird attempts at manipulating things and i think in a lot of ways successful especially with less sophisticated people that don't really understand that they're being trolled and that someone is with them and there's it seems i mean i've there's a bunch of accounts that i have bookmarked that i follow but i don't follow so i don't follow them on lines i don't want them to know i'm following them because i just go to them and some of them are so strange a few of them are flat earth accounts this is something that i'm finding yeah the conspiracy theorists yes and some of them literally have almost no it's all memes and they don't say

44:59much if anything underneath the memes and i go to it i'm like what what exactly are they doing here like what exactly are they trying to do with these because they just they're they're very weird there was one that i came across um i was looking at the uh the conversation around gmos and because we have seen one of the things that russia does besides the social bots and you know the american screen with like americans directly um is the house so this was a republican house committee house science and technology committee about a year ago said that they were seeing evidence of um both kind of overt propaganda and then ways of um disseminating the propaganda so there's always the dissemination and then the accounts and then the content so it's like you look at three different things to try to get a handle on whether or not this is real or fake um so when we talk about the accounts we're

45:55looking at are they real people are they you know automated are they not automated when you're looking at the content you're usually looking at the domains and that's kind of the last piece because you don't want to have any kind of bias get in there but you're just trying to see is it being pushed through like overt russian propaganda domains like their think tanks and things and then the third is the dissemination pattern is it being pushed out through automated accounts is it spreading in ways that look anomalous versus how normal information would spread so one of the things that the house committee looked at was using that kind of rubric um russian you know these dubious pieces of content and narratives around american strategic industries so the energy industry oil and fracking for example or the um you see a lot of stuff with gmos and agriculture you know this very

46:49narrative of you know putin and russia being the land of organic plenty in the united states serving its people toxic poisoned vegetables this this sort of stuff and meanwhile at the same time there's competition for who's gonna get the you know large contract to provide rice to some part of the world so so there's like an economic motivation underlying this this kind of narrative and i was looking at one of these accounts and it was tweeting an article about hillary clinton a vote for hillary is a vote for monsanto but it was tweeting this in you know it was like three months ago or something it was like mid 2018 or late 2018 when i was looking at this i'm like well that ship sailed a long time ago guys why are we why are we tweeting about you know hillary's votes it's because they just um they're just there to it was written by a russian think tank and so they just have these

47:40automated accounts retweeting repurposing this content from forever ago and it doesn't even make sense it's just out there to amplify a particular point of view or bump up a site what were they trying to do with the anti-vaccine posts yeah that was a that was an interesting thing so i would say not much to be honest um the there were 900 maybe 800 i think um tweets about vaccines in the content and so facebook and twitter you have this sorry facebook and instagram you have this building up of tribes twitter you have instead they're just talking about whatever is popular right they're talking they're posting they're talking about whatever is current new whatever scandal has just broken anywhere and you know so twitter is less about establishing relationships and more about joining the conversation and nudging it and so most of the vaccine-related posts it was

48:40not a big theme for them it wasn't something that was on like facebook and instagram where that's where they're really leaning in like this is what we want americans to think about so no mention of vaccines on those platforms not on youtube on twitter you see it in 2015 funny enough during the disneyland measles outbreak um much like there's a whole lot of conversation around vaccines right now because of the outbreaks in washington and new york back in 2015 you saw the same thing lots of conversations about measles because the disneyland thing that happened down here and so they're in there and they're saying vaccinate your kids don't vaccinate your kids they had a couple of conspiracy theorist accounts um i am trying to remember the name it was a looked like a blonde woman i think its name was amy um and uh amy was a was a conspiracy theorist and amy was a fake person amy was a fake

49:30person yeah i wish i could remember yeah it was a twitter account um god what the hell was her name she was amy black um there are certain of the certain other personas actually got a lot of lift there was one called woke louisa that was a black woman there was uh yeah i mean they nail it right they they're not dumb um there was 10 gop the fake tennessee gop page how much autonomy do you think these people have that are creating these things i mean are they creative are they it sounds like some of them are actually pretty funny yeah they're funny they're funny that's why they work that's what everybody thinks it's just like you know incompetent it's not it's actually really good that's where that that's i think the thing that you know even with um whatever you know political proclivities you may have i think you can at least recognize humor even if it's laughing at your side

50:23and i will say that some of the stuff especially targeting the the right wing you know the right wing like youth kind of pages were they were funny they really were and it was i think that is people assume that like they're too smart to fall for it um it's just those liberals or it's just those conservatives or you know uh it's it's really it targets everybody and they understand the psychology the motivation the narratives and the culture and they produce the content accordingly and i imagine that they had a grand old time doing it because there was some stuff in two narratives that came out in 2017 the first was when facebook started to moderate their pages they started to scream about how facebook was censoring them so the exact same narrative that you see today about how any moderation is censorship it's you know a picture of like um zuckerberg and it's like nice page

51:23you've gotta be ashamed if anything happened to it you know and that's the meme that they're putting out there when they're complaining that their fake page got taken down um there was uh tons and tons of these memes also about the russians did it mocking the idea that the russians did it so this is as the story is beginning to come out before we've had the tech hearings before we've had the mueller indictments before we've had the investigation you see these memes um where it's like oh my speedometer was broken it must have been the russians or a picture of hillary clinton and it's like in a like little golden book kind of thing and it's like the whiny child's guide to blaming russia for your failures you know and it's again it's funny like the stuff is funny and they're like meta trolling and you imagine them sitting there like you know they have a picture of like some like

52:10you know buff guy carrying a gun and they're like i'm not a russian troll man i'm an american okay so you're looking at this and you're like it's just so spot on and again i can't see what the people commented under it if they were like right on or if they were like ah this is um but so that's where you get at the they if you know people think like oh i'm too smart to fall for it or oh this is targeting those other people no it isn't that's the problem it's just um it's gonna target you with the thing that you're most likely to be receptive to just because of psychological bias and and tribal affiliation and you're not sitting there thinking how is this person who is purportedly just like me screwing with me and that's why that's why it does manage to attract a following and get retweeted get reshared um it's good well it's so clever because it's so comprehensive there's so

53:06much involved in the fact that they're willing to do this for years and years before they really sort of activate the political aspect of what they're trying to do it also it's it's strange that they're so sophisticated about our culture because we don't know a goddamn thing about russia the average person knows putin bad evil warlord crimea he invade you know like we we we have like a four-year-old's understanding like if you had a if you just grabbed a person a random person that's your college educated person and asked them to describe what's so bad about russia wow it's like communist over there or something i mean they hate us first of all they have bombs like there's so little understanding of their culture but yet they know so much about ours that's one of the weird things about being an american when you go when you travel overseas and you realize

53:55how much they know about our elections how much they know we don't even know who the there is running their country we don't have any idea but they know about trump and they know that hillary did this and they know that bernie wants to give the money away and you know it's it's crazy it's it's it's weird and these people must have like a deep education on uh american culture american politics i mean do you think they're training these kids yeah yeah absolutely i would so they did a couple things that um came out in the mueller indictment first of all a couple of people actually came here and did a road trip around america literally just to learn we went to texas yeah yeah basically texas tell me where you keep the beef jerky but that's uh that was in the uh one of the i think the mueller indictment of uh from february 2018. there have been three kind of big

54:47documents that have come out too from eastern district and one from mueller on um on how it all worked out i think another misconception is this notion of a hundred thousand dollars in ads they spent 18 million dollars in 2017 i believe was the stat that came out during another one of the mueller indictments so they're not just you know the money is not just going for the salaries and the ad buys the money is also going for um they were talking about using kind of consultants and this is where you get at this thing that comes out during the stand-up where they're like black people who are lgbt don't want to see white lgbt memes and and this degree of granularity the degree of sophistication but then also what you see them doing is engaging one-on-one and that's where it crosses the line from social media operation to this is much more like uh like spying

55:37did you watch the americans no i do oh i love that show you should definitely heard is great it's great there's too many things to watch totally but what's interesting is the um it does paint a pretty interesting picture of like this um this couple under what's you know deep cover that are engaging with and pretending to be americans and forming relationships and apparently it's based loosely on real people yeah that's what i've read also but what you see in the um in the mueller indictment is the text messages is the the messenger the facebook messenger messages where they're going back and forth with real activists and they're saying things like um you know hey my ad account got shut down can you run some ads for me or the um hey i want to help your protest um we're fellow black lives matter activists and we see you're running a protest up and i think it was like ithaca or something

56:29binghamton how can we help you we can give you some money for posters and they're sending money for posters or they reach out to a trump supporter and they say like we think it'd be really funny to have a hillary clinton impersonator sitting in a truck flatbed truck that's made up to look like a jail let us know if we give you some money will you find the hillary clinton impersonator and put her in jail and do this hillary for prison thing and so this is where another thing that they did was using facebook events to create real world protests so they're not limiting it to ship posting online and making people feel attention online they're actually sending people out into the real world to have in-street violence and so one of the things that they did was they coordinated a facebook event um one for the texas secessionist page and one for the there was a pro-muslim called united

57:23muslims and on the same day at the same time in texas they have a rally to support texas culture and resist the islamicization of texas across the street from a rally to defend muslim culture and so they like there's literally no you know they just create these facebook events on these pages and and then they promote them with ad dollars and other things and and you literally if you go and you look at the texas reporting from that day um i don't remember if it was dozens or hundreds but a sufficient number of people showed up that they had literally on opposite sides of barricades police officers in the center screaming at each other because one group is there for the resist the islamicization of texas and the other group is there to like defend muslim culture so you get two you know two opposite sides of the spectrum in the same place at the same time and you literally incite like a

58:16mini riot so they they were about 81 of these events where they were holding um black lives matter style rallies for victims of violence police violence memorials for people who were killed by police officers you know things that real americans would do but this wasn't being done by real americans and that's that's the insidious thing right is is how does how does facebook detect that how to you know how do you when you see this come to defend texas culture and you're a you know die-hard proud texan you know you're not thinking like somebody in st petersburg is is organizing this and that's the i mean i think that the idea that this was just some memes um is just not it it doesn't respect the significance of what they were trying to do and how effective that they were with these other things or even if they're just trying it out just a little bit just working to see what works they're

59:16always experimenting they're always trying to find ways to create that tension and that's the thing that i think is so interesting about this right this evolving this idea of an information war where these tactics evolve and you are really at a disadvantage when it comes to actually detecting them yeah and on the outside if you're looking at that you'd say well okay what is their objective why would they have this texas secessionist page across or a rally across the street from a pro-islam rally why would they do that you know if you're on the outside you think about the amount of effort that's involved in doing something like this and they're also doing this with no leaders right there's no one there that's running it when they get there so all the pro-texas people go here we are looking over there it's a enemy i think a couple times there were comments um on some of the like

60:10archived pages and things where you could see the screenshots of people being like dude you held us all come out there and like nobody showed up right who's in charge you know they're probably throwing a lot of things against the wall hoping that they still have something sticks well you see this on the um there was a page called black matters and black matters was interesting because they went and made a whole website so they made a website blackmattersus.com which i think is still active it's dormant they're not updating it but i believe you can go and and read it um and it was designed to call attention to police brutality type things and so there's this black minor's u.s page and then there's the black matters facebook page the twitter account the instagram page the youtube channel the soundcloud podcast the tumblr the facebook stickers they had facebook

61:01stickers that looked like little black panthers like little um little cats yeah little black cats they were actually really cute very well done um so you have this entire fake media ecosystem that they've just created out of whole cloth all theirs and then what they start to do is they start to put up job ads and so it's come be a designer for us come be a come right for us come photograph our protests come um you know they have like a kind of like um black guy dressed in a cool outfit like hipster you know holding a sign like join black matters um you see them go through a couple different logos the same way you would if you were starting a you know media brand they start posting ads for do you want to be a calendar girl send us your photos do you want to be on a black reality tv show send us video clips of you um do you like they begin to do real work to ingratiate

61:56themselves with the community they had a physical fitness thing it was called black fist and the idea was that it was um kind of vaguely militant-esque um in that it was supposed to teach uh black people how to handle themselves at protests should there be police violence how to fight back and they actually went and found a guy a physical fitness you know a martial arts um guy and they were paying him via paypal so so he was running classes for the black community under this blackfist brand and they would like text him or call him he played some of the voicemails on tv actually i heard them after my report came out i think they tracked him down and um and he just talks about how they yeah they just paypal them you know a couple hundred bucks every time he ran a fitness class what were the voicemails like it was um hello we are fellow black men concerned about police

62:54you'd be surprised they actually had a youtube channel with um two black men named williams and calvin and there was this channel williams and calvin and they were actual black people yeah yeah so they hired these gentlemen i hired these guys um to be a fake youtube channel um and it was a it was called a word of truth i think was the name of it and so williams and calvin these two guys would um would give their word of truth and their word of truth was usually about you know how up america is which i mean there there are very real grievances underlying all of this and that's the problem right they have things to exploit um were they writing these things for these gentlemen i imagine i mean imagine they were they were definitely paying them and they organized the channel seems likely the channel's organized yeah so these guys that particular one i think that they were actually

63:43they were in on it they knew what they were doing oh really that they knew they were working for the worst things one of the guys who was in that channel popped up again in 2018 right before the midterms like maybe even the day before i'm trying to remember the timeline here and he made a different video saying he wanted to this was amazing saying he wanted to leave the internet research agency kind of so he was saying basically i'm tired of doing this work i want to i want to do a leak i want to show you all of the things that the internet research agency has done and so they actually put out this so this guy who had been in the williams and calvin video so people recognized his face in the 2018 midterms goes and says he wants to leave and he's going to leak all this information and sorry it's damn cough um and he wants to to like confess i don't remember all the

64:36specifics because it was right before my thing came out and i was so busy working but um but yeah he pops up again and he he's saying he like wants to expose the truth and i think most people didn't cover it didn't pay attention youtube shut down the channel and deleted the video immediately um why did they do that i think that it was seen as another influence operation you know you don't trust the um so even him saying that he's going to expose it was probably just another level well what wound up coming out this was this is so convoluted i'm sorry i know it's like hard to explain without visuals um what they wound up doing was they did drop a bunch of docs so they did release a pile of documents in which they claimed they actually hacked the mueller investigation and mueller had nothing and so this is again another kind of convoluted piece of this where they do

65:32release information and so in this particular example they release information that we believe they actually got through legal discovery so the documents that the investigation provided to one of the indicted russians were the documents that they then leaked claiming they had hacked the mueller investigation so they're constantly doing these things to generate press generate attention create just that degree of people don't know what's real or they read the headlines that are then released by the more propagandist overt russian propaganda and they think that that is the true story that that is that that the russians hacked the mueller investigation so there's always this um how do we create fear uncertainty and doubt how do we throw people off how do we come up with these extremely convoluted spy games that leave people feeling unbalanced that make people wonder what they can

66:26trust who they can trust and what's real and even as somebody who looks at this stuff you know day in and day out for years um i i i do still regularly get surprised by the uh by the sheer kind of ballsyness and ingenuity of of of you know some of the stuff as it as it comes to light well it's really fascinating that they went so far as to hire people to make a fake account on youtube and hired these black guys to pretend that they're doing it on their own and they're really being hired by the russians and then when the guys leave you don't know if they really did leave yeah you don't know if this is just more it's like in like you were saying earlier if they get you and you buy into it hook line and sink or they win if they get you to think well how much else is they still win because you're looking at everything with sort of this tainted lens now everything seemed

67:23and in a sense that's probably the ultimate goal is to disrupt our social media environment and to sort of hijack the the natural conversations that are taking place yeah and i think it's i mean it's effective there's certain you know i was in estonia last year um and they've been targeted by this stuff for decades now they're you know the 25 russian-speaking population most of the news that they get is from russian media right you know right on the border um they talk a lot about the extreme commitment to educating their citizens to make them realize that this kind of thing does happen this is what it usually looks like um don't share it you know just ignore it let it go by and i don't think we are quite there yet i think that there's still plenty of people in the country who don't believe it happened or for some reason are completely incapable of separating

68:25the russian social media influence campaign happened from it means donald trump's election is a legitimate or it means donald trump colluded right those are very different statements you don't have to collude in order for someone somewhere to unsolicited go and support your candidacy so you can believe two things simultaneously one that trump did not collude and that his election is perfectly legitimate and that this had no impact and two that it still happened and that i think is um i i'm consistently amazed when i read my social media mentions at how hard that ability to hold those two ideas is for for people they just believe that if they're supporters of trump they absolutely cannot acknowledge that this operation took place and i or if they are passionate supporters of the far left um it's more of like an equivocation you know well we don't really know if they did it

69:25well the u.s does bad things too well how do we know you know so that's where um it it it plays out very differently depending on which part of the political spectrum you sit on well it falls right into our the issue that we have with cognitive dissonance if we believe in someone or if we want someone to win especially if it's our team or our person or on our side you know like i i yeah i saw a lot of this when donna brazile released uh her book detailing how the dnc sort of rigged the primaries against bernie sanders and and for clinton there were so many people who were clinton supporters that just didn't want to believe it and i was like well why wouldn't you believe this woman like you believed her before when she was supporting clinton and then when she leaves now now you won't believe her it's because it's inconvenient and we we're real weird in our binary view

70:15we want things to be good or bad one or zero this is it and this is a super complex issue it seems like they've been doing this for a long time and they've gotten really sophisticated at it and i think there's a lot of people that have been sucked into it that have no idea that it's actually influenced the way they've they've formed their own opinions this is where it gets really strange people are so malleable and they're so easily manipulated many people are that something like this like a real good solid concentrated effort to try to target these groups that have these very specific interests and really dig in and form roots and then go i mean it's so sophisticated their approach is i'm on one hand horrified and the other hand deeply impressed me too now was this freaking you out when you had to like go over all these memes and you were actually laughing at them

71:13and you're like god damn it well you know there's that tweet that goes around every now and then you don't have to hand it to them and i'm always like how do i um how do i properly convey a um recognition for the you know i i don't think we do ourselves any favors by pretending it all sucked and didn't matter and they're incompetent right i think that you have to acknowledge that you have a sophisticated adversary that is very capable that is very determined that is constantly evolving um and to treat that with the degree of respect it deserves i think that that's just common sense actually um i i i read media on both sides of the aisle and i i you know um i feel i try to stay current actually on what memes are percolating in lots of different spaces in part just because i am always curious about what's organic versus what seems to be disproportionately amplified or

72:10what new communities are popping up i just think it's an i think the spread of information among people is just a very interesting you know it's it's something that interests me a lot i think crowd psychology is really interesting i think ways that crowd psychology has transformed as the internet has kind of come into being particularly with things like the mass consolidation the ease with which we can target people you know we didn't even really talk about that but the um one of the things with there's always even in the decentralized internet there's always been propaganda there's always been um crazy conspiracy theories all this stuff but it's that you can reach the people who are likely to be receptive to it now and as people self-select into tribes particularly in this country right now one of the things that's remarkable is the way in which once you've

72:58self-selected into that tribe and this is the media in your ecosystem and you share it with your friends and facebook ensures that the people who see it or the people who are most likely to be receptive to it or if you run the ad targeting you directly you know send it into the feeds of people most likely to be receptive to it we have this interesting phenomenon where consolidation targeting and then these gameable algorithms mean that it's just this kind of information goes way farther way faster than it ever could have in the past regardless of whether it's russia pushing it or um iran as we've seen a you know network of iranian pages went down recently we see this globally now we see countries targeting their own people with it and it's just this is the information ecosystem this is like the new infrastructure for speech and it sorry privileges this kind of

73:54do you want a cough job sensationless content yeah do you have something great just just remember to have them cold you're going around don't feel bad i'll get you one hold on a second um who's who's seen all this stuff is this stuff i mean it has obviously facebook has uh checked this out i'm sure twitter is aware what is the reaction been and is there any sort of a concerted effort to mitigate some of the some of the impact that these these sites have yeah lots of it actually so i think um in in 2017 um was when we started like we being independent researchers i guess people on the outside of the company's academics began to find the content you know really began to investigative journalists would identify the name of a page and then me and people like me would go and we would scour the internet looking for evidence of what was on that page so i found a bunch of the stuff on

74:59pinterest for example wrote about it um a guy by the name of jonathan albright found a crowdtangle data cache and with that we got the names of a bunch more pages bunch more posts we had some really interesting stuff to work with originally the platforms were very resistant to the idea that this had happened and so as a result of that they were in you know there was a the first thing that zuck said in 2016 when you know trump gets elected twitter it goes crazy that night with people who work at twitter saying oh my god were we responsible for this which is a very silicon valley thing to say um but what i think they meant by that was their platform had been implicated as hosting russian bots and fake news and harassment mobs and a number of other things and there was always the sense that it didn't have an impact and it didn't matter and so this was the first time

75:54that they started to ask the question did it matter and then zach made that statement fake news is a very small percentage of you know whatever on facebook the amount of information on facebook and the idea that it could have swung an election was ludicrous so you have the platforms kind of uh the leaders of the platforms digging in and saying it's inconceivable that that this you know could have happened and as the research and the discovery begins to take place over the next nine months or so you st you get to when the tech hearings happen so i worked with um a guy by the name of tristan harris he's the one who introduced me to sam um and he he and i started uh going to dc with uh third fellow roger mcnamee and saying hey there's so much there's this body of evidence that's coming out here and we need to have a hearing we need to have congress ask the tech companies

76:55to account for what happened to tell the american people what happened because what we're seeing here as outside researchers what investigative journalists are writing the things that we're finding just don't line up with the statements that that nothing happened and this was all no big deal and so we start asking for these hearings and actually myself and a couple of others then begin asking them in the course of these hearings can you get them to give you the data because the platforms hadn't given the data so it was that lobbying by concerned citizens and journalists and researchers saying we have to have some accountability here we have to have the platforms account for what happened they have to tell people um because this had become such a politically divisive issue did it even happen and we felt like having them actually sit there in front of congress and account for it

77:48would be the first step towards towards moving forward in a way but but also towards changing the minds of the public and making them realize that what happened on social platforms matters and it was it was really interesting to to to be part of that as it played out um because one of the things that senator blumenthal one of the one of the senators did was actually said um facebook and twitter have to notify people who engage with this content and so there was this idea that um if you are engaging with propagandist content you should have the right to know and so they started to push messages twitter sent out these emails to all these people saying you engaged with this russian troll and facebook created a little field a little little page that told people if they had liked or followed a troll page so it was really trying to get at making the platforms accountable but they did

78:50it outside the platform through email huh which is interesting because i would never read an email that twitter sends me right you're like this has just got to be nonsense i didn't get one so i maybe i i guess i just got lucky but um i might have had a multiple day back and forth with some russian people but that was i think one of the first steps towards saying like how do we make the platforms accountable because the idea that platforms should be accountable was not a a thing that everybody agreed on in 2015 when we were having this conversation about isis and that's where there's the through line here which is um and it does connect into some of the speech issues too which is what kind of monitoring and moderation do you want the platforms to do and when we were having this conversation about isis there was a um not insignificant collection of voices

79:44that were really concerned that if we moderated isis trolls on twitter now not the beheading videos there was sort of universal agreement that the beheading video should come down but if we took out what were called the isis fanboys which were like 30 40 000 accounts at their peak um that we would yeah there's a document called the isis twitter census for anyone who wants to actually see the research done on understanding the twitter network in 2015. there was a sense that like one man's terrorist was another man's freedom fighter and if we took down isis fanboys um were we stifling their freedom of speech freedom of expression and like goodness what would come next and that when you when you look at that um that fundamental swing that has happened now in 2018-2019 where there's that same narrative because originally no moderation was taking place and then now there's a feeling

80:38that it's kind of swung too far in the other direction but the original conversations were really how do we make twitter take responsibility for this and legally they aren't responsible for it right they are legally indemnified against the they're not responsible for any of the content on their platforms none of the platforms are there's a law called communications decency act section 230 and that says that they're not responsible they have the right to moderate but not the obligation to moderate because they are indemnified from responsibility so the question becomes now that we know that these platforms are used for these kinds of harms and they are used for this kind of interference where is that balance what do we want them responsible for monitoring and moderating and how do we how do we recognize that that is occasionally going to lead to in incorrect attributions people losing

81:36accounts and things like that so yeah they're they're in a weird conundrum right now where they don't ex they're trying to keep everything safe and they want to encourage people to communicate on the platform so they want to keep people from harassing folks but because of that they've also they've got these algorithms and they they they tend to miss very often like this whole learn to code fiasco where people are getting banned for life for saying learn to code which is about as preposterous as it gets i think the learn to code fiasco is going to be the tipping point where a lot of people in the in the future when they look back on when did the heavy-handedness become overreach learn to code because i mean jesus christ i mean that if you can't say learn to code i mean i look at my mentions i mean on any given day especially like yesterday i had um a vaccine

82:32proponent yeah i watched it yeah yeah peter's great and and you know and it seemed like what was really disturbing to me was like the vast majority of the comments were about vaccines and so few about these unchecked diseases that are running rampant in poor communities which was the most disturbing aspect of the conversation to me that there's diseases that rob you of your intellectual capacity that are extremely common that as many as 10 of people in these poor neighborhoods have almost no discussion it was all just insults and and you know you chill and this and that you know it's like my mentions are going to be interesting but well they're going to be a disaster today i know i know um well let me let me i think that one of the challenges for the platforms is a lot of things start out like learn to code i remember i watched that play out um covington catholic was another thing that

83:27i mean god um would learn to code there was some of the people who were trolling and just saying learn to code and you know whatever you don't have a right to not be offended but then there was the um the other accounts that kind of took it that step further and began to throw in like the ovens and the other stuff yeah learn to code right and that's one of the challenges with the platform which is if you're trying to assess the um just the content itself like if you start doing keyword bands right you're going to catch a lot of that you don't want to catch but the flip side is if you you know the this is the challenge of moderating at scale which is um where you know what what side do you come down on do you come down on saying like 75 percent of people with hashtag learn to code are just you know um not doing anything incredibly offensive and then the 25 who

84:24are they really change the tone of the overall campaign and the hashtag for the entire community and that's where you see twitter i think come in with the more heavy-handed and just shut it down kind of thing i don't i don't know that there's an easy answer i think that we are you know even today what was the latest kerfuffle elizabeth warren got an ad taken down on facebook and then there was a whole conversation about was facebook censoring elizabeth warren i i personally didn't think that it read like censorship what was the ad about it was um it was an ad about funny enough her uh platform to break up facebook whoa so facebook take that down like yeah listen it sort of read more like a cell phone like she had a picture of facebook's logo in the um in the uh image and there that violates the ads terms of service and the reason behind that is actually because uh facebook doesn't want

85:19people putting up ads that have the facebook logo in it because that's how you scam people right that's a great way to to rip people off and so probably just like an automated um you know an automated takedown like an automated like it halts the ad you have to go and make some changes and then you can push the ad back out again uh but it just happens at a time when there's like so little assumption of good faith and so little assumption of um such extreme uh anger and polarization and um you know assumption that um the platforms are censoring with with every little kind of moderation snafu that it it makes it i think i don't know how we have the conversation in a way that's healthy and looks towards solutions as opposed to the left screaming that it censored the right screaming that it's censored the um you know trying to get around how do we both moderate and not moderate which is a

86:12tough position to be in um i think yeah i don't have any good no one does that's part of the issue and vigil discussed that pretty much in depth what she was saying this is about moderating in scale when you're talking about millions and millions and millions of posts and a couple thousand people working for the organization and then algorithms and computer learning that's trying to keep up and that's where things like learn to code and people are so outraged and pissed off because when they do get banned they feel like they've been targeted well you really just ran into some code and then it's really hard to get someone to pay attention to your appeal right because there's not enough people that are looking at these appeals and there's probably millions of appeals every day it's almost impossible yeah and there's you know depending on which um which side you're on you also hear like

87:06um this person is harassing me and i'm demanding moderation and nobody's doing anything about it yes uh so it's it's definitely i think gotten worse um it's it's interesting to look back at 2016 and wonder how much of the um where we are now is in part because not a whole lot happened in 2016 and 2016 it was or 2015 in particular very light like almost no moderation just kind of let it all hang out there and i i look at it i look at it now particularly as it evolves into this conversation about free speech public squares um and what the new kind of infrastructure for speech and what rights um we should expect on it it's a really tough um you know i think some of it is is almost like the people who are who hear the words free speech and they just assume that it's people asking for carte blanche right to harass and saying you know um how do we balance that you know i think jack and vijaya

88:15were saying this on your show um how do we maximize the number of people who are involved make sure that all voices do get heard without being unnecessarily heavy-handed and moderating a thought or content and instead moderate behavior and instead moderate particular types of signatures of things that are inauthentic or things that are coordinated and looking at this again gets to disinformation too rather than trying to police disinformation by looking at content really looking instead at actions and behavior and account authenticity and dissemination patterns because a lot of the worst trolls and stuff are just using these throwaway accounts and then they yeah disappear well i have the impression myself that when we're talking about censorship we're talking about moderating content that really we're talking about this current era and that what's coming is essentially

89:12we're like putting up a small like twig fence and a herd of stampeding buffaloes on the way in terms of the the more invasive or the more the more potent levels of technology that are on the way i just feel like i feel like we're everything is moving in a very specific direction and that very specific direction is less boundaries between people and information and that includes communication and it's going to be insanely impossible insanely difficult or nearly impossible to to moderate in 10 years i just don't think i don't think that's going to be i don't think it's going to be in the wheelhouse i just i think it's going to we're entering into some weird place where we're either going to have to stay off of social media because it's just too toxic or grow a thick skin and just be able to deal with anything and then if that's the case how are we going to be able to differentiate

90:12between things that are particularly designed to to manipulate us specifically designed to manipulate us and change our opinions by foreign entities like this you know this russian troll farm i do think the the you know when i think about like so we believe that disinformation is in part facilitated by gameable algorithms consolidation and then the targeting the kind of things we've talked about through this conversation then i think that the algorithms piece the manipulatable algorithms that's really squarely the responsibility of the platforms i don't think that there's any regulation or um you know any kind of framework that's going to come from congress that's going to address that well that was pretty clear from the facebook hearings right i mean they barely android phone and an iphone they they really don't know what's going on tim apple yeah that's the king of the world

91:12he says he did that on purpose which is even more hilarious just say you up man i mean to say that you knew tim cook his real name wasn't tim apple i think that dude it is funny he called him to apple though i did i appreciated the rest of like every ceo in silicon valley changing their twitter channel afterwards yeah that was funny but i think the uh which i just left my train of thought on that too sorry we're talking about you you were talking about them oh yeah regular gaming algorithms regulating yeah so i i think that ultimately the algorithmic piece does remain squarely in the purview of the platforms and that's because it's an arms race right as they change their algorithm a little bit tweak it for the product function which they just do in their roles business there is no regulation that's going to come down fast enough to catch that i think actually finance is an

92:03interesting parallel here because like in the financial markets there are these multi-tiered levels of regulation and oversight so that there's always some entity responsible whether it's the exchange or a self-regulatory organization or the government the sec looking to see if like information integrity in the markets is being maintained right there's no shitty algorithm coming in to manipulate people it's just making sure that we have that level of trust so i think that right now the tech ecosystem is lacking regulation in all of its forms so that will likely change but the argument for decentralization is i don't know how you execute it i the antitrust thing in particular as it as it comes up so much more now um excuse me i don't know under what economic grounds you make that claim that's way outside of of my wheelhouse in my area but there is something to be said for this you know

92:59return to decentralization in some way i feel like it lets people have what they want um it lets you you know reddit's a great example you have these um it's almost like federalism you have this central platform but then you have these little communities under it and each community has its own norms each community has its own rules nobody who violates the moderator rules in a reddit and screams censorship is really taken seriously right this is the rules of the community you're in the community there you go and this was how um in the olden days of the internet like use nets and things you would have this is the community that you've chosen to be a part of if you don't like the moderation standards you go to this other community right i think the concern with consolidation is that people who do get moderated away feel like there's nowhere for them to go

93:48that they've lost access to the entire world um so i think if you have that decentralization it in some ways um it it it stops being quite so much of a freedom of speech issue if you can't speak on you know if you if everything is like if there's 50 different platforms and you fall foul of some sort of norms or standards or community membership in this one you can go over here to this other one right then the idea that somebody has moderated you away or de-platformed you or something is much less um potent maybe if they're alternating though if you dock someone or something along those lines yeah they're still like again moderation at the lower levels versus um kind of top level like you're summarily booted off yeah that seems like the best approach right like it seems like the best approach is to sort of let these communities sort of establish themselves but even inside those

94:48communities then you have people that gain power through moderation and they start abusing it and then it becomes some sort of a weird hierarchy it's like the decentralization in general is probably the right move for all this stuff but how does that happen with something like facebook or twitter without government intervention and i you know that's one of the things that tim poole was bringing up like if you guys don't do this we don't handle this it's entirely possible somewhere down the line you're going to be regulated by the government do you really want that i think that that's an inevitability whether they think so yeah at this point yeah what do you think is going to happen well you know honestly i say that and then i think back to the reality which is in this congress with this executive i don't know how we get any regulation through um i i think we've seen some examples like

95:47the honest ads act which was introduced right before the first tech hearing if i'm remembering the timeline correctly so that would have been like late 2017 and what they said was um it's you can no longer have like a free-for-all with ads on social platforms where nobody knows who paid for it or where it's coming from or anything like that and um and what they you know that so senator klobuchar and senator warner and i think senator mccain also was was part of this um create this law saying that the platforms have to follow the rules that tv and radio already follow and this is an example of recognizing the role that that you know these are no longer startups that can't be you know that can't meet these obligations it used to be that facebook was exempt from these um from these uh disclosure requirements because their ads used to be those remember those tiny postage stamp size

96:45things that were on the right side of the page so they had a finding and it was they were they were um given the same exemption that campaigns get for like skywriting and postage and uh pencils you know where it's like literally the form factor of the content makes it such that you can't put the ad disclaimer on there and it used to be that all of the advertising on facebook was regulated using that same finding that that that these postage stamp size things are too small to put the the disclosures on and then of course as we know that evolved into the ads being looking much like an organic post and so now they do have these little things that pop up where you can see why you got targeted and what it is i think that that's an example of like the credible threat of regulation and the public opinion moving the platform to take an action that it wouldn't have necessarily done

97:35on its own so it's not regulation but it's it's a nudge through public opinion and the credible threat of future regulation we've seen california go after the platforms also recently there was that california gdpr thing from last year california state legislature saying we're going to pass a privacy requirement and and they did it they got it done what is the privacy requirement oh boy um i feel like i'm probably not the best person to explain this because i don't know the specifics but the gdpr was the law in the uk and in europe that protects the data it creates particular protections like you're you have to re-opt in for targeting there's certain kinds of targeting that they can't do certain types of data that you can request they delete so this is a provision that took effect in europe last year we don't have that same law here in the u.s where we don't have the same data

98:35protections as the europeans and so california gdpr was the california state government the state senate legislature passing a law that basically mimicked a lot of the provisions of what the europeans were given under gdpr but what that did was it created a law that applied to the people of california and so facebook and twitter and the others don't want to be in a position of having to have this um you know kind of balkanization or legal requirements and so they in turn have now i believe gone to congress suggesting that that we're going to need to have a federal solution that applies to all of the us so federal level privacy regulation because they don't want to have to adhere to the privacy regulations of like each individual u.s state one solution that's been tossed up was that people would have to somehow or another confirm their identity then instead of it being an anonymous

99:32post that it would have to say rene deresta like i know who you are you have to have a photograph have some sort of a government id shows that it's you that we would somehow or another minimize trolling minimize disinformation if you if your account was connected to a social security number or whatever it was the problem of course is that these damn things get hacked all the time and if your twitter account gets hacked now they have your social security number they have your address they have your information that you use to sign up and you know there's a lot of unless there's some way and there isn't to absolutely lock down all that data and make sure that it's inaccessible to some sort of third party that doesn't seem like a likely course of action either and i think um the question of identity i think most social science research um that i've read has suggested that

100:30that's not necessarily the be-all and end-all i think it depends on per your point what you're trying to do i'm thinking right now of the um there was this request for ftc comments for net neutrality and i know that um a lot of them were you know whoever left them there are a lot tons i think millions actually of these fake comments that were left on the net neutrality um call for public comment where they were scraping um like the you know those those crappy data brokers those horrible things where like your name and your address is up there and like no matter how hard you try you can't get it down um so scraping those to grab names and addresses and then email addresses and leaving um leaving comments pretending to be those people it's it's hard nobody most people don't want to enter their social security number into some form or validation right um a lot of people

101:25will point to things like well you know america has a strong commitment to anonymous speech so um but do what is that cultural thing well i mean you know people will point to like yeah federalist papers and places and so on and so forth and whistleblowers and whistleblowers yeah i think i've seen i remember when facebook did make it a requirement to you have to validate your actual name and address they send a postcard to your house if you want to run political ads um and then i remember people complaining that people who didn't have you know that this was going to um oh is it oh god this was during the daca arguments so um yeah during that this was during some of the illegal immigration debates right right as this was happening people began complaining that immigration activists who were undocumented would not be able to run facebook ads because they didn't have a

102:19you know identification to verify with so no matter what people put out there's going to be somebody who has a complaint about it sure so we're in this this like um this gridlock everybody recognizes that the situation sucks and that social media is a disaster on a myriad number of of fronts and there's not much in the way of uh plausible solutions i think for disinformation in particular just to stay in my wheelhouse we're trying to push towards multi-stakeholderism which is just to say can we create the back channel channels of communication that have come up for election integrity and things over the last few years last year and a half can we standardize that in some way can we create an oversight body maybe the ftc that is at least responsible for having some oversight to make sure the platforms are doing enough but this is i think this is going to be

103:24the the theme of 2019 does it does it go the anti-trust route does it go the privacy route like uh does it do a kind of hybrid combination of multiple um you know tackling multiple problems at once i'm really curious to see how we shake this out because it just seems like no you know even agreeing on what the problem is we're not quite there yet yeah and you're you are seeing calls like particularly from elizabeth warren for breaking up a lot of these larger institutions not just but not just even social media but even amazon she's talking about breaking up a lot of these bigger companies um it's the problem with that is like to what and make them what and then what happens and then you know one of the what if one of those things that you broke up that becomes twitter becomes more popular than the other twitter and it has much more attendance then what do you do yeah you

104:20should get one of those people on to to just talk about that because um lena conner or somebody who um really matt stroller knows the space in and out and i just don't um the i you know personally what i feel like the a lot of people are moving into smaller communities a lot of people are moving into groups or moving into whatsapp uh chats they're recognizing that this system as it is right now has this toxicity and are withdrawing a bit i don't know if you've seen this in your friends your community but well i have it and jamie and i were actually talking about it yesterday in terms of the the use of twitter the use of twitter's dropped and i'm one thing that i notice is that my follower numbers doesn't move very much on twitter as opposed to like instagram i don't really use facebook but instagram there's a giant difference in how many followers i get per day

105:20on either platform and it seems to me that the people that are using twitter they've kind of like locked in they've found their little communities and it's mostly toxic i mean i mean i'm sure i'm generalizing i'm not it's i am for sure it's probably not even 10 toxic but it seems toxic you know when you look at those kind of comments and anytime something happens it seems like the reaction to it is very rarely is it some sort of uh objective rational discourse it's most likely just insults and you know swears it's weird it's just people are communicating in a way online that if they communicated in real life there would be blood in the streets i think about that a lot actually yeah i do i think that the um what are the you know especially i was listening to your do your thing with with tim and and jack and vagina the idea of the public square and i use this

106:24metaphor too like when i write about them the the privatized public square but then i think about it sometimes i'm like we've never had a national public square there's no such thing in the history of america as a national public square there are regional public squares or town squares state squares you know where there is again this kind of federalism um people who have self-selected to live in a particular community there's norms in that community but if i were to go up to you in a public square and start screaming in your face or you know being an and trying to get a whole mob together to go after you like probably somebody would intervene either a bystander or the police and we have notions of like nuisance and things like that we have notions of like there's there's more of an intuitive sense of the balance between speech which is to be protected and then the

107:14kind of fighting words and that sort of thing there's no clear lines on that there's not much in the way of norms and when you're online there is nobody who's going to come and and step in and intervene in a way that would play out in in real life so the i think that we have we just haven't quite ported those norms of basic good behavior in the real world um into this massive roiling crowd that's just sort of always on at all times and that's that's sort of more where we are on social media well i think there's actually a carryover to real life from social media that you can find in these protests at universities when conservative speakers come and then antifa wants to shut them down and then you have people like the proud boys fight with antifa i don't remember that before ever i think this is this is a byproduct of the type of communication that's the norm

108:10on social media i really think that's what's happening here i really think that instead of social media mimicking real life real life is starting to mimic the kind of interactions that people have on social media and with violent repercussions it's certainly if not violent very aggressive and angry in a way that i mean go back before social media when was the la i mean in 2000 in the 1990s how often were there these in incredibly volatile protests at universities where you have conservatives and liberals screaming at each other and you have these these people that are being de-platformed and and they won't let them speak at these colleges and then they're they're gathering up this online mob to try to bolster support and then people come to meet them we're going to stop them at all costs and it's kind of it's kind of flavoring real life versus real life being represented in social media

109:10yeah i don't i don't remember it from when i was in college either no didn't exist not not the expert on you got to go back to college protests and that you know maybe people would point to the 60s you got to go back to kent state that's what i was going to say you got to go back to war protests but they were protesting something very specific an unjust war that nobody wanted to be a part of this is a weird time yeah it is it um i know it feels unstable yes yes that's the best way but it's also awesome i'm enjoying the out of it i mean well because i i love the fact that it it for the first time in my life it does not seem like the government has a handle on how people are behaving and thinking at all like they don't know what's going on it's like you've got people that are you know people that are trying out socialist tropes and and and socialist ideas for the first time in the

110:08mainstream and they're getting a big groundswell of support behind it and you have a lot of people that are like pro-nationalist and pro-america for for the first time in a long time and that's getting a lot of support there's more discourse now even if it's toxic and i think a lot of it isn't i think like i said if if ten percent is toxic it seems like it's all toxic if one out of ten people calls you a piece of you're like ah i gotta get out of this forum right i mean that's that's really how it feels i think that's true i think that's true there's definitely a um i've noticed that too the actual numbers of of of horrible trolls or maybe this afternoon will be different i don't know they'll try to prove you wrong but real i i you know i'm on twitter a lot and uh it's the platform i use more than any other um so for all the you know for all the complaints i do feel like there's some

111:02real value there for me personally and um and i i like i like the serendipity of of the unexpected being pushed into my feed occasionally sometimes it's you know uh sometimes of course i get angry or you know feel annoyed or think why the hell you know why why this um but i think ultimately the there is a lot of value to the platform i think we're unfortunately i really do believe that so much of the polarization in the conversation around speech is people who got burned during the laissez-faire days of 2015-2016 in mentally linking up the idea of free speech with the idea of being harassed online and i think when you look at um this is purely an opinion i have absolutely no data to bear this out but when you look at those pew studies that show um that younger people are more likely to want you know safe spaces or less um you know less offensive opinions i

112:12i do sometimes wonder if that's a um an effect of coming of age at a point when you know random were screaming at you on social platforms 24 7 versus like i didn't have that experience growing up i didn't have that experience until i was like 25 you know so um so maybe there is something per your point about that um the almost there is not much of a difference as you know people spend so much time online this is where you're having your social engagements is where you're having your conversations so it does shape the way people think about you know their experience of what it means to have a conversation and what it means to speak freely i think that's one of the interesting uh you know it doesn't help that the um that free speech has sometimes in many cases become a figly for i want carte blanche to you know say all kinds of mean to people all day long with no consequences

113:09yeah they think they should be able to do that because that that falls into the blanket of research um there's also an issue i think with young kids today that have smartphone addictions people today i should say forget young kids how about me humans smartphone addictions and when you're online and when you think about the majority of your interactions with human beings there's a lot of folks that are on their phone eight hours in a day that's probably me but think about those interactions yeah that's a shocking number of interactions with people that you're not even in direct physical the presence of you're you're not looking at them you're not you're not waiting for them to talk you're not considering what they're saying you're not reading social cues all the things that make us human those are all thrown out the window you're just looking at text

113:58yeah and it might be coming from russia the text that you're getting upset at and responding to i mean for your research really there's a direct possibility it's not even a person or a person but not not really representing their actual thoughts just trying to push your buttons yeah no that's true it's uh it's not even russian trolls it's just the um the amount of i think it really is we're in the unique time where it's hard to know who you're engaging with it's hard to gauge whether it's good faith it's i mean i i react sometimes where i'll see a response and go click into the person's feed to try to decide if i should take this as a seriously good faith inquiry or if it's like a like a you know kind of vaguely cloaked you you know right right right you don't have to do that when you're in person it's a very different a very different experience yeah i have

114:52a friend of mine who's a young single male and he was going through his uh direct messages and these girls were sending him all these naked photos and videos and uh he's like look at this man i go let me see your phone and i said let me click on that link i go she has one picture on her page you dummy this is probably not even a person like who knows what this is someone from nigeria is trying to get your credit card information yeah yeah catfishing yeah yeah i mean they're trying to get you and he's like oh yeah like why how do you not go to her page because i just you know i thought it was a girl sending me naked pictures you know they just do that sometimes well they definitely do do that sometimes but i mean people are weird they do all kinds of weird things but you know there's there's a lot of these fake accounts and i don't know what they're trying to do they're trying to

115:39get money from people or that does come up i've seen um every now and then if you follow reporters on twitter particularly ones who have like open dms they'll periodically post the insane catfishing you know stuff that they get where it's like um all about money or yes um i don't have i don't know i god bless people who have open dms i don't know how they do it yeah they're glad yeah i don't get it so overall are you happy that you got into all this does this does this change your perceptions of online communication um i feel like there's i have tried over the years whether it's conspiracy theorists communities or terrorists or um or you know russia iran state the state-sponsored actors the domestic ideologues um i have tried to always say like here is the specific kind of forensic analysis of this particular operation and then here is what we can maybe take from it and

116:43make make changes we've we've seen some of that begin to take shape and so i feel grateful to have had the opportunity to work towards connecting those dots and work towards having this conversation um meaning meaning helping people understand what's going on i think i am not i i am most concerned about the as this gets increasingly uh easy to do through things like chat bots um you know now there's these um you've seen the uh the website this person does not exist.com no so it's uh there's a technology called it's a machine learning technique generative adversarial networks and they um it's these uh basically they're in this particular application working to create pictures of people faces of people and so this website is uh when you go to it it pulls up a yeah there you go so this person does not actually exist this is not a really cute one yeah and so these are all um these are

117:48computer computers generated yep so and you can see created by gans it says it down at the bottom there so these are not real people and so we have increasingly sophisticated chat technology we have increasingly sophisticated like you're not going to detect that image somewhere else that old trick of like right click and look and see if you're talking to someone with a stock photo that goes right out the window as stuff like this gets easier and easier to do well then deep faking right yeah the deep fakes on the video front um i think that it does change i think we haven't quite adapted to what is it like to live in a world where so much of the internet is fake and i do think per your point about identity that there will be groups of people that self-select into communities where identity is um mandatory you know where this is who you are and you have some sort of verification

118:36versus people who choose to live in the world of um you know drink from the firehose take it all in and try to filter it out yourself um so we look at these evolving technologies and i don't necessarily feel you know particularly optimistic in the short term i think that ultimately it does like we change as a society to a large extent in response to this we think about um you know there are going to be some fixes that the platforms are going to be able to undertake they're going to be we're going to get better at detecting this stuff maybe and you know the adversary will evolve hopefully we um get better at detecting it as it evolves but it's i think we fundamentally ultimately change like people become more aware that this is a thing they are more skeptical uh that does change are there our ways of of interacting with each other uh but i feel like that is going to be

119:31the direction that this goes there's the more like you know the thing that keeps me up at night would be more the um the ease of of turning this from a social media problem into like a real world war problem meaning um as an example back in 2014 one of the first things the internet research agency did september 11 2014 they created a hoax saying that isis had attacked a chemical plant down in louisiana it's called the columbia the columbia chemical plant hoax is i think there's a wikipedia article about it now but what happened was they created a collection of websites they created fake cnn mockups twitter accounts text messages that went to local people radio station collins you name it everything to create the impression that a chemical factory had just exploded in louisiana and there was some attribution to isis this was done on september 11th so this is the kind of thing where this

120:31actually did go viral like i remember this happening not as a social media researcher i just remember it actually being pushed into my social media feed so you have these um and we didn't know that it was the internet research agency for a year and a half after but this is the kind of thing where you look at parts of the world that aren't the us like the recent drama between india and pakistan and you can see how these kinds of things can go horribly horribly wrong if the wrong person is convinced that something has happened or if there's a you know or if this leads to a riot or if this leads to real world action i think that's um one of the main fears as this gets better and better the video fakes get better the people fakes get better what you know what do you do then so yeah what do you do then when you see those images those images fake images those are stunning they're so good i

121:28mean it just makes you wonder i mean and we're going to get to a point where if someone's not in front of you talking you're going to look at a video you're not going to have any idea you know they're doing those deep fakes with famous actresses faces and they put them in porn films and it's it's stunningly good i mean it's it's amazing and they're they're also with someone like me i'm doomed because there's thousands of hours of me talking i've said everything yeah so you could take this new uh there's these new programs that are editing audio and you could splice together audio and video now they don't even splice it the computer will generate yeah just it's insane it generates your lip movements everything i mean it's really stunning it's really stunning and it's only going to get crazier and crazier and it's going to be very difficult unless something is actually happening

122:17right in front of your face it's going to be very difficult to be able to differentiate and then i'm worried about augmented reality and virtual reality and this stuff making its way into it i mean we're going to dive willingly with a big smile on our face into the matrix have you watched that recently no i haven't i watched that on a plane like a month ago or something it was recording so well no it holds up really it holds up like it's it's insane except for the um except for the phone booths so one thing we're like there's no phone booths anymore but everything else is um wow yeah it's it's i don't know i guess you've seen it recently i just bought it on 4k because like i forgot in 99 there wasn't barely hd back then i just wanted to see what it was like rewatched it forgot how good it was and like two two and a half hours flew by like the whole movie yeah it's it's amazing

123:07how that seemed preposterous in 99 or whatever it was like oh this is just sci-fi and now you're like hey this is a little closer like this like the idea of have you messed around at all with uh like htc vive or oculus i i tried i was at vc briefly like back in back in um five six years ago now and i tried one from um i think it's usc right the southern california there's a bunch of really good labs down here and i tried one where it was like a zombie holodeck simulator and it was um it wasn't just the vr it was also uh it was immersive so they had a backpack on me um and it was it was actually scary as hell yeah i was like this is really good this is i like i love first person shooters i think they're so much fun but this was just the first time where in the in the game you have like a bat or something and you're like trying to beat zombies together with a bat and they're like all

124:04up in your face and um i don't know if that thing ever came to market but damn was it good well they have a company called i think it's called the void now and they have this uh wreck-it ralph one and i did it with my kids recently and you put on a haptic feedback vest and you go through this environment and it's great i mean you're it's very clear that you're in a video game it doesn't seem real but it is so much better than anything that existed five years ago and you go okay well what is with the exponential increase in power of technology what is this going to be like in 10 years what's it going to be like in 15. it's going to be impossible to differentiate because now it's a vest it's just a vest you're not strapped into a chair you can move around so you're going through this whole warehouse that they have set up for these games you know you're even picking up physical

124:52objects and they look different in your hands than they do when you when you look at them without the head gear on yeah there's like centers for that like i know in vegas they have them i haven't been to they have one outside of disneyland it's in disney downtown disney it's called the void and then you go into these there's one star wars one there's a wreck-it ralph one now they have them in uh malls small ones you sit in these little eggs and you go on roller coaster rides and you fight off zombies and go into a haunted house it's getting weird and it's just that we're you know i was a kid when video games were these ridiculous atari things where you stuck a cartridge in and you're playing pong and now we're looking at something that you're looking at these images of people you see pores you see there you see the glistening of their lips you see their eyes

125:42it's it's very strange it's very strange to think that those are not really people and that we are probably going to look at i mean all you have to do is create something that is so large and and the propaganda is so terrifying that it causes you to act without double checking triple checking and making sure you verify the fact something's really happened and then it sets into motion some physical act in the real world that you can't pull back like and this is just not related necessarily but what happened with hawaii when they got that false warning oh my gosh that nuclear missiles were headed their way yeah that was uh can you imagine it was crazy yes and it was just someone hit the wrong button yeah i mean if we come to some sort of a point in time where someone does something like that on purpose and shows you video that you really think new york city just got

126:38nuked and you know you have to head to the hills and there's a giant traffic jam on the highway and people start shooting each other i mean if if russia really wants to with us what they're doing now with just this you know this ira agency and all of these different trolls that they've got set up that's sort of trying to get people to be in conflict with each other this is this is with primitive crude text and memes what could be done in the future it's terrifying we live in a weird world yeah yep we're in agreement yep let's end it there all right thank you so much i really appreciate it thanks for coming down it was great and thank you for all your work and exposing all this stuff it's really really interesting and terrifying uh tell people how they can get a hold of you so they control you on twitter my handle's at no upside no upside and you don't necessarily have an

127:37instagram it's more like family my instagrams my kids yeah beautiful all right thank you renee really appreciate it thank you bye everybody you