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
like
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
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
in
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
more systematic solutions more scalable
solutions so what are those
when i lived in indonesia when i saw
these problems
i decided to launch human id
humanity is a non-profit it’s open
source it’s run by volunteers from
around the world
and what we have built is an online
login kind of like the
login with facebook just the humanity
login
is completely anonymous it’s completely
private it blocks abusive users and
spammers
and bullies and so on the technology
basically verifies users
but without saving any personal
information
and with this amazing team behind me has
been really an inspiration to work on
this together we’ve received support
from donors from around the world
from harvard business school and from
the mozilla foundation has really shown
me
that people are aware of these problems
and they want to solve them
but if you want to help you don’t need
to create your own startup to get
involved
here’s three things that i want to
recommend you
first as a voter let’s not allow
governments to use
fake news and online misbehavior as an
excuse
to undermine our privacy instead
let’s strengthen privacy laws so people
can feel
safe and protected online we need voters
to demand more privacy protect
protection just like they did in europe
and california where legislation was
introduced
more recently secondly
we also need to pressure the big tech
companies just deleting a few users or
posts
that might be good pr but is not a good
sustainable strategy facebook google
twitter cannot be trusted in moderating
free speech
mostly it doesn’t adjust it doesn’t
address the core of the problem we need
to pressure them
to find and delete bot networks and to
increase privacy and transparency
and lastly use your agency as an
individual
to champion startups and organizations
that offer
real alternatives get engaged
share with friends use privacy focus
platforms
apps browsers instead of the solutions
by big tech
support small projects that have a new
approach to community online
i see hundreds of entrepreneurs and
engineers every year
they come up with new ideas but they
really need your help
if they want to have a chance against
these big big powerful
entities we need to work together
we need innovation like this to have a
chance to fix
the internet let’s not give up on the
vision of a better internet
let’s give every human a voice one voice
let’s not allow fake accounts to flood
our voices out
imagine the power of community if users
feel safe and protected
but also feel accountable because
spreading lies or bully others has
consequences imagine a true democratic
debate
online from the bottom up imagine how we
could mobilize if fake accounts
wouldn’t undermine our communities
imagine the internet like it was
supposed to be a tool to empower us to
connect
us to unite us
thank you very much