- Hi, I'm Henry Brady, former Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy, and a political scientist who studies American institutions, especially such things as trust in American institutions. I'll be moderating today's session.
We have an all-star cast here today, and I'll introduce them in a moment. First, let me set the stage.
We live in an era where a majority of Republicans believe that Donald Trump won the presidential election, whereas Democrats believe overwhelmingly that Biden won.
Where a substantial fraction of people believe that COVID is fake or that the vaccines for COVID have not been thoroughly tested and that they have bad side effects.
Where Watchers of Fox News believe that Christians in America face more discrimination than black Americans and other people of color.
These beliefs exist against the background of partisan polarization between the two political parties and lack of trust for major American institutions. Republicans trust the police, the military and religion, whereas Democrats trust education, science and the press. Partisan polarization and disinformation, the decline of journalism, especially local journalism, and the rise of the internet with its ability to spread rumors and lies as truths seem to be at the root of these problems.
What can we do about them?
We're gonna spend some time first asking, what's the problem? And then trying to see if we can come up with some solutions.
The panel is a distinguished one.
Geeta Anand is Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, and Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism.
Erwin Chemerinsky is Dean of Berkeley Law, and one of the nation's leading authorities on the First Amendment in the Constitution.
Hany Farid, Associate Dean and Head of the School of Information is an expert on digital forensics, deepfakes,
cybersecurity, and human perception.
Susan Hyde is Chair of the Department of Political Science, Co-Director of the Institute of International Studies and a scholar who studies democratic backsliding, countries that are becoming more authoritarian by the day.
And John Powell is Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute and an expert in civil rights, civil liberties, structural racism, and democracy.
I'm gonna moderate the panel, as I said, let's get going.
So what are the sources and nature of the problem?
Let me start with Hany Farid, who knows a lot about the internet.
What is disinformation? What has changed socially and technologically to ignite the current storm of disinformation? What are the dangers from social media, especially?
- Thank you, Henry. And good to be here with such an amazing group of my colleagues here from the Berkeley Campus.
Let's start with some definitions. Let's start by distinguishing between disinformation and misinformation, which are often used interchangeably.
Disinformation is the intentional spreading of lies and conspiracies.
Think, for example, state sponsored actors trying to sow civil unrest or interfere with an election, think partisan hacks and trolls on Twitter and Facebook.
Misinformation, on the other hand, is the unintentional spreading of lies.
Think your quirky Uncle Frank Facebook posts about how Bill Gates is using COVID to implement a mandatory vaccine program with tracking microchips. (By the way, a pretty bizarre claim that some 28% of Americans believe.)
So disinformation of course, is not new, and we should acknowledge that. For as long as there's been information,
there's been disinformation. However, in the digital age, I don't think it will surprise you to learn that, and particularly in the age of social media, the nature and threat of disinformation is quite distinct.
So first, we've democratized access to publishing, many great things have come from that, but that now anybody with nothing more than a handheld device can instantaneously reach millions of people around the world.
Second, the gatekeepers of social media are not traditional publishers. And so posts that drive engagement are favored over just about everything else, with little consideration to journalistic standards or harm. Now here it's important to understand that critical to social media success is driving engagement and time spent on the platform and in turn ad revenue. So this is accomplished, not by chance, but by algorithmically determining what shows up on your social media feed. These algorithms aren't optimized for an informed citizenship, civility or truth, instead, repeated studies from outside of the social media companies and inside of the social media companies have shown that social medias algorithms favors outrage, favors anger, lies, and conspiracies, because that drives engagement.
And it's this algorithmic amplification that is the most significant difference today in the disinformation landscape.
So let me just say a few more things, Henry, 'cause you asked a series of these questions that I want to try to hit each of them.
An additional threat to this algorithmic amplification or manipulation is the risk of filter bubbles.
And which, as you said, at the very beginning, Henry, we seem to have two alternate realities because we are all consuming content inside of an echo chamber and a filter bubble driven by social media.
And so although disinformation is not new, what we are seeing is a scale and belief and even the most bizarre conspiracies that is unprecedented in history.
So here's another example, for example, the far-reaching far-right QAnon conspiracy claims among many things, that a cabal of Satan worshiping cannibalistic pedophiles and child sex traffickers plotted against Donald Trump during his term as president. It's a pretty outrageous even by Americans conspiracies. However, a recent poll finds that 37% of Americans are unsure whether this conspiracy is true or false and a full 17% believe it to be true.
In addition, we're seeing widespread vaccine hesitancy promoted all over social media with huge, huge implications for our public health. We're seeing, as you said at the beginning, widespread U.S. election lies with huge implications for our democracy. And we're seeing widespread climate change disinformation with huge implications for our entire planet.
So this disinformation is leading, and I don't think this is hyperbolic, to existential threats to our society and democracy. And I don't know how we have a stable society in a democracy if we can't agree on basic facts, because everybody is being manipulated by attention grabbing, dopamine fueled algorithms that promote the dredges of the internet, creating these bizarre fact-free alternate reality.
I'd very much like to believe in Brandeis' concept, that the best remedy for these falsehoods is more truth, not silence, but this only works in a fair marketplace of ideas, where ideas compete fairly on their merits, but social media doesn't come even close to being a fair marketplace of ideas, it is manipulating users in order to maximize profits.
And there it is, Henry, is the big difference today from 20 years ago, is how we are being actively manipulated in terms of the information we are being presented.
- Thank you.
So, John Powell, we've just heard the technological reasons why things have changed and outlined really adroitly, what about human beings and our psyches and then maybe, especially Americans, how much of this is based upon our tendencies towards tribalism and other?
What can we do to minimize that and to limit the degree to which those kinds of factors affect the way people process information? Is that part of the problem?
- Thank you, Henry.
First of all, I'll say, delighted to be here with such distinguished guests and I look forward to hearing and learning from all of you.
The problem, we sort of have a better sense of the problems that we do have solutions. The problems are multifaceted.
I'd suggested that the internet, social media, has sort of complicated the problem by far. I'm reading Martha Nussbaum's book now on religion and fear. And Aristotle was talking about this problem 2000 years ago, and that it could be hijacked. And so part of it does sort of mesh with human nature and society.
Tribalism is interesting. I'm part of more in common, and I looked at some of their materials in preparation for today's talk. I'm not in favor of the term tribalism, and I'll tell you why.
First of all, think about the U.S. history and our relationship with tribes here. In a sense you could say by many of the accounts, the tribes were much more welcoming to the Europeans than the Europeans were welcoming to the tribe. But even more pointedly, tribalism, as we understand it, evolutionary, tribes were small. They ranged from anywhere from 50 to about 150 people. They were people you had contact with every day, they were people that you knew. So in that you had all kinds of what we would call biases. These were the people you trusted, but tribes couldn't be a thousand people, tribes couldn't be a million people.
And so what we're seeing, I think tribes is actually a misnomer. So what allows for people who don't know each other, who will never see each other to actually feel like they're part of a same group and hostile to another group, whether it's blacks or Jews or Muslims.
So I think tribalism, like I said, is a misnomer, but I do think changing demographics actually plays a big part.
As discussed, there's polarization and identity along ideological lines, but there's also along social lines, along people. And there's very strong correlation between anxiety of change of demographics and polarization.
It doesn't have to happen. I think it sort of seeds, it creates the environment and then people use it. The elites use it to actually constitute or exaggerate the fear and the threat.
And one thing that's very important, I think to sort of point out is that the other is not natural, the other is socially constructed, the meaning and content of the other is socially constructed. And it's not saying we're all the same, but the meaning, especially saying that someone's not fully human, that there are threat, that they are like an animal, that they're smelly. There are certain words that show up over and over and over and over again, whether you're talking about again, blacks or Jews or immigrants.
And so dominant group, if you will, leaders oftentimes using that to sort of create a sense of us and them. So this is calculated. I suggest this is not misinformation, this is disinformation.
The tools available are more profound than they used to be 20 years ago, but also the changing demographics
end by just saying this, think about the report of the census data, I was very unhappy with the reporting. The reporting from my perspective was laced with fear, and it may have been implicit, but it was like almost like saying white people be afraid, you're about to lose, the minorities, black people, Latinos, they're coming, and you're gonna lose. It had just scores of stories about this white anxiety.
And it didn't paint a picture of how we might be a society without the racial majority and living in harmony and peace and coming together, it said nothing about the explosive expression of American families.
Now, one of the fastest growth are mixed race, mixed ethnicity families, that's potentially a positive, is simply was absent from the story.
- Thanks, john.
So that's the human side. And then there's journalism. Historically, the way we've learned about others is through journalism.
Geeta Anand, have things changed for journalism, and it's part of the problem the decline of journalism, or did journalism never have a chance with respect to the internet?
And also, are there other historical periods that looked like the one we're in now, and is there a hope that we can get out of the mess we're in?