Fighting Fake News at its Source

fake news is old news

lies and propaganda have been around as

long as

human speech we can look at google’s

search history

what if i told you that the term fake

news

has really only shown up since the 2016

elections

but then we can see it show up across

the world

and it stays widely used until today the

term became famous in 2016.

first president trump used it to

belittle the media

and then people discovered those

large-scale networks of made-up news

using outrageous headlines to drive

traffic to other websites

some of them just to make a few bucks

but others of them were part of a large

foreign influence campaign

that’s what came out in 2017 and as you

know led to a lot of

news coverage all across the world

since then i think we all agree that the

problem has only grown bigger

and the last weeks have shown that we

really haven’t found a solution

or even figured out where to start

my name is bastian poger i’m originally

from germany i’ve spent some time in the

states

both working as well as studying at

harvard business school

i’ve spent most of my time working

during my career

in online marketing for tech companies

all these newsletters that you didn’t

expect all these

banners that creepily follow you from

website

to website that was my job so on the

market for our data

our privacy i was the one buying the

data

in the last two years i lived in

indonesia and southeast asia

indonesia is the world’s third largest

democracy this by the way

is my lovely fiance when she exercised

her

right to vote going into those same

elections she was voting on

i was consulting a political party

during their marketing efforts

that’s that’s around two and a half

years ago and

when i did that i realized something

that

really really shocked me every single

political party in indonesia

and now i know around the world is

running

millions of fake accounts what

are also called bot networks those fake

accounts are

social media profiles that look a lot

ordinary voters but are actually run

by computers by engineers by software

and supported by manual workers so that

by just clicking the right buttons

one person could handle thousands of

accounts at a time

and they use those accounts to boost

certain content on social media

by liking posts by adding comments by

retweeting stories

and those stories were oftentimes

dubious

including fake news posts to

mislead common real voters

what this did is to push propaganda to

the top of their feeds on facebook and

twitter

and other networks and that’s when i

realized

this is actually how fake news spreads

how how did this all end the indonesian

elections

resulted in claims fraud two candidates

two declarations of victory two sets of

results

huge protests and riots people dying in

the streets

of the capital that probably sounds a

little bit familiar to you

it does to me now that i’m living in the

united states

the parallels between those two

elections are really really striking

and i think it shows that misinformation

and the negative consequences

are not a uniquely american problem

it’s not the product of one single

politician

it’s a systematic problem it’s about how

we share information

how we find information how we figure

out what is true

and what is not

today fake news is used all across the

world

to spread fake news it’s used in

democracies

everywhere but it’s also used by

autocratic regimes by dictatorships

for example the regimes in saudi arabia

and in china

have been caught red-handed running

those huge propaganda machines

creating fixtures content at scale

content that supports their agenda and

very often posts that blame foreign

influence

and conspiracies for problems at home

let’s take a step back let’s remember

what the internet was supposed to be

like 15 20 years ago

we all believed that the internet could

bring us all together

could democratize society give a voice

to everyone

enable us to understand each other

better

the term web 2.0

it means everyone can post on the web

we’re supposed to lead

to true participation we actually had

reasonable debates on facebook in random

forums i missed that time

do you remember this this is 2006

time magazine’s person of the year was

you all of us because we and i quote

control the information age and we ask

you

does it feel like you’re in control

right now 10 years ago in 2011

we had facebook revolutions the arab

spring

people that overthrew the dictators all

across the middle east and we

praised social media for it and they

really deserved the credit

so what happened since then what

happened to the internet and social

media

we see polarization staggering political

violence

hate crimes hate crime is up we just saw

online communities inspire and plan

an attempted coup against the u.s

government

when these rioters were storming the

capital evidence shows

that they truly believed that they were

defending american

american democracy they believed even

that the military the police would

eventually support them fake news is

killing people every single day

spreading genocide like it did in

myanmar by spreading lies about the

coronavirus about masks

there’s really little evidence that

today in the information age

we’re much better at distributing

information about

the viruses about the disease that we

were in 1918

during the spanish flu think about that

the first well-known example of

systematic social

media manipulation was of course

vladimir putin

and his campaign to influence the

american elections in 2016.

silicon valley would have called it a

growth hack

but do you really understand what was

happening and it’s been four years

and we’ve seen countless hours of tv

coverage

do you really know what’s happened how

is it that a campaign by the russian

government

that only cost a few million dollars

caused so much more damage

than decades of propaganda and had so

much more impact

than frankly a billion dollar ad

campaign

by politicians for the last few years i

worked on trying to figure out what

exactly happened and this is how it

works

it comes down social media propaganda

comes down to two distinct elements

first try to create or identify

some very high quality profiles or pages

profiles profiles that seem trustworthy

to a specific audience

that can be like a fake local newspaper

or a facebook page that pretends to be

an activist group

it can be a real public persona like the

twitter account of a former president

comes to mind of course

it could be state propaganda that

dresses up as an independent newspaper

there’s an example of russia today it’s

a media company controlled by the

kremlin

that creates high quality youtube videos

in five different languages

these profiles will share questionable

content

oftentimes of pretty high production

value to gain your trust

the example on screen is a video that

was viewed over 20 million times and is

full of lies

about the vaccines and these accounts

these posts

probably many of you you have already

read about this is what’s being talked

about in general

more recently social media giants

twitter and facebook have been more

active in deleting those accounts in

some of these posts

but they fail to go to the core of the

problem and that’s where step two comes

what’s under the surface what is

boosting these high visibility pages are

armies of fake

accounts bot networks when i talk about

bots in this context i mean social media

accounts

that look and behave like human beings

but are controlled by software

for a small team controlling millions of

accounts

and that pretend to represent millions

of people

for now you might be able to identify

some of these bots

by their bad grammar or by their empty

profiles

but with ai with artificial intelligence

improving at really high speeds

and governments honestly putting

billions into those disinformation

networks it will get harder and harder

to differentiate the human from the bot

let’s look at those let’s look at some

of those numbers facebook officially

according to their own numbers

deleted over 5 billion fake accounts in

5 billion that’s roughly double their

official user number

but then on top of that there’s studies

and really anyone you asked who works in

the field

that says a large part of the remaining

users

of their current 2.7 billion users are

also

fake accounts one study by the think

computer foundation foundation puts that

number at 50

so somebody obviously puts a lot of

money into creating fake accounts there

who would that be a really brave

whistleblower

facebook engineer sophie shang came out

just a few months ago

and she talked about how campaigns all

across the world

run these manipulating manipulation

campaigns

and how facebook just ignores them

it’s really not hard for a good engineer

to build a whole army of bots

accounts that like comment share

retweet posts and what these accounts

are doing has two effects

first it pushes these posts to more real

people

it pushes them to the top of our feets

and second we perceive this content

differently

if a post is 10 000 likes if somebody’s

followed by a million people

we’re much more likely to believe them

it’s called social proof

it’s a bias we all have and that’s

usually useful

just how easy is it to get your hands on

such accounts

let me show you this screen recording is

from a few days ago

these facebook accounts only cost seven

cents you can get buy accounts

with different level of quality and

profile completeness

and you can buy accounts for other

social networks as well

instagram twitter

gmail reddit

even linkedin and tick tock this page is

one of many i found

and allows super easy ordering or a

shopify checkout

what does that mean for democracy when

everyone with money can just

buy themselves fake grassroot popularity

it means our opinions and our voices

can get crowded out and it means that

any sort of public support or opposition

to our night to an idea

can be created of thin air it really

goes against the core principle

of democracy and what we stand for that

everyone

is supposed to have one voice one voice

no matter how rich you are there’s a

study by carnegie mellon that shows that

fifty percent of covet related tweets

were posted

by sophisticated bot accounts carnegie

mellon

called those propaganda machines how

many people do you think have died

because of these propaganda machines

and then there’s this myth that many

educated people believe that only the

uneducated fall for fake news

we all fall for fake news studies show

that those those with higher education

are just as likely to fall for fake news

especially if it confirms

their worldview so this is how we got to

today we’re

31 of americans 31

many many million of them with a college

degree believe that the last elections

were stolen

the good news here is we found the

weakness of fake news

there’s actually a study published in

the nature journal of science

that shows that we could almost

eliminate the spread of fake news if we

were only to eliminate fake accounts and

bots

if only facebook and twitter will

eliminate them

but those companies have a huge

financial interest to keep them alive

at least to a certain extent because

they need to show growth in their

quarterly user numbers

to their shareholders because they’re

selling those views and those clicks to

advertisers

clients and pay real dollars to

advertise to real people

so if we summarize i come to three

conclusions

first fake identities are the main

driver of fake news

and other toxic content because they

undermine accountability

to buy popularity and those fake

accounts

have become a really common tool around

the world to promote your point of view

to undermine democracy

to crowd out the voice of real people

second the big social networks facebook

twitter youtube

would see a significant drop in user

numbers if they would delete

all the fake accounts they would

massively lose users

and they would massively lose revenues

which means they’re pretty unlikely to

do that

if we don’t force them and lastly

thirdly

with artificial intelligence becoming

smarter and smarter

for example now being able to create

human faces

of humans that don’t actually exist it

will be harder and harder to identify

those fake accounts and fake news

which means we should really not think

that a solution can be to ask people to

just do your research or

hey just be careful what you share that

implies that only uninformed people fall

for fake news

it implies that somehow it’s possible to

determine

everything that’s true and everything

that’s false we need to find