constitutional law at the sandra day o'connor college of law at arizona state and co editor of extreme speech and democracy next to him tolik mcgonagall who's a senior researcher lecturer at the institute for information law at the university of amsterdam and the reporter of the council of europe's committee on experts on the protection of journalists next we have jonathan corpus all who's an associate professor for global digital media at the university of massachusetts at amherst and co editor in chief of the journal of television and news media next to me is me she chaudhary she's founder of the software freedom law center the leading nonprofit advancing the rights of online human rights violations in venezuela and then finally on my right alex were hakka product policy manager for human rights and freedom of expression at facebook i'm gonna ask to just switch places with you meet me she so i can be a little bit closer to all my panelists  and we're going to turn to and again i'm suzanne awesome as the ceo of pen america based here in new york city the topic of our panel is fake news in the context of elections and just very briefly from penn america's perspective late last year we put out a comprehensive report on fraudulent news called faking news faking the news fraudulent news and the fight for truth examining the issue from a free expression perspective and documenting the risk that is posed to free expression open discourse and democracy by the proliferation of fake news but i'm going to turn it over to jim to kick us off our panelists have kindly agreed where possible to try to keep their remarks brief so that we could move on quickly to discussion with all of you jim thank you very much i had some very complimentary and true things to say about of this conference and its organizers but to save time i'll skip them and go right to my talk laws prohibiting lives and political campaigns have been on the books in the united states for more than a century and nineteen states currently have statutes prohibiting false campaign speech in some form the united states supreme court however has never directly ruled upon the constitutionality of such laws and i'm going to talk about whether such laws are constitutional this afternoon and since a prohibition of lies  regulates the content of speech the constitutionality of bans on campaign lies will turn largely on part of on the scope of the basic first amendment rule which you may have heard it heard about the rule against content regulation according to many prominent commentators as well as to a spate of supreme court dicta the rule against content  s discrimination extends to all expression except in the words of justice kennedy when confined to the few historic and traditional categories of expression long familiar to the bar on this view which i have referred to as the all inclusive approach bans on campaign lies would be subject to strict scrutiny and almost certainly invalidated a narrower conception of the rule against content regulation championed by professor robert post and supported in my own work is that the rule applies primarily to speech this part public discourse that is expression through which citizens in a democracy govern themselves through the contributing to the formation of public opinion note however to the extent that cams campaign speech is considered public discourse or right back at the same place that it would  be subject to the rule against content discrimination and likely be invalidated in my view however at least some bans on campaign lies should be conceptualized not as public discourse but as a regulation of government demanded government managed domain akin to regulation of the government workplace classroom or courtroom and in these government manage domains government has a lot more authority to regulate the content of speech for instance it son controversial that lies in the courtroom otherwise no one is perjury can be punished consistent with i should say a few words about united states versus alvarez the supreme court's only comprehensive decision to date on the constitution of laws banning lies and that to a led by justice kennedy before justice said absent from these few categories for the law allows content based regulation of speech is any general exception to the first amendment for false statements so it applied strict scrutiny and invalidated the law now in contrast both the concurring and dissenting opinions that's the magic number five i've said that with respect to lies they would reserved strict scrutiny for  restricting false statements about philosophy laws of restrict false statements about philosophy religion history the social sciences the art and the like that is to public discourse but in addition read maybe a little bit creatively by me the same five justices certainly the concurrence by justice breyer and i think the dissent by justice alito as well five justices i think can be read of saying that  that certain type of restrictions on campaign lies might not be pop might be a part of not be part of public this of course it may be hide off for special regulation so let's the special government election domain there can be no sensible objection to the government setting the time for an election designating polling places designing the ballots et c counting ballots announcing right so there is clearly a election domain and in fact government in the united states and probably in any democracy has a permit of duty to provide for elections  laws regulating election speech are part of this election domain or part of public discourse now we have a number of cases regulating speech that the supreme court has upheld actually upheld regulating speech a part of election it is upheld the power of government to exclude the names of marginal parties and candidates from the ballot  voting even when it's such as engaged as a means of political protests and to even to forbid electioneering near the polls as justice scalia aptly observed protection of the election process justifies limitations upon speech that cannot be imposed generally so while not quite conceptualizing it as a domain allocation i suggested functionally the court has in these of cases upheld content based restrictions on campaign speech because it is in fact a special domain so the important question is how do you allocate speech between about politics or  domains so let me suggest that the two criteria first whether the regulation promotes the purpose of the election domain to assure the elections are conducted fairly and efficiently and second what effect will this have on the court this regulation have on the core democratic function of public discourse which is to promote political legitimacy and to provide information and perspectives to the electorate so let me give you just a few examples and then i will close let's start with where i think there could be some regulation and that's laws punishing the making of knowingly false statements about voting procedures there was a famous incident where fliers were distributed that said republicans vote on tuesday democratic democrats on wednesday for those of you know  think it would be allocated a law like that would be allocated to the election domain because it directly promotes the fairness of elections and as to the effect on the domain of public discourse prohibiting such deception about about election procedures won't impair speakers from contributing to public opinion and nor will it rob the electorate of of valuable information or perspectives  chill anyone from providing such information now just because something is in the election domain doesn't mean it's automatically constitutional no but this so directly promotes that purpose and so has such little impact on public discourse that i think it would be considered constitutional now let's go to the other extreme aside of the spectrum where something that i think would be allocated to public discourse even though it's regulating  procedure so she on her blog tells of the fib some fib about medical necessity of late term abortion she just lies to defeat a ballot initiative but these lies are indistinguishable from lies that people tell on their blogs as part of public discourse all the time i think if you pub have you punished people for lying about a ballot initiative on their blogs you would have a real chilling effect on public discourse and so this for this reason any attempt to prohibit lies about ballot measures should be allocated to the bane of public discourse and invalidated and the court with lower court cases the united states uniformly come to that conclusion not with that pellucid brilliant reasoning of course but they should adopt it but i think the result is right and for similar reason any broad prohibiting citizens from lying even about candidates for public office should be deemed a regulation of public discourse and invalidated but what about and i'll close with this what about laws prohibiting candidates from lying about each other that to me is the hard case because that could be considered a basic ground rule for fairness of elections sort of like telling boxers that they can't hit below the belt that's just the basic rule of fairness just don't lie about each other at the same time speak to influence public opinion generally they speak to influence public opinion to get themselves elected so i don't think it's part of public discourse i do think it's part of the election domain but now the point i made earlier and i'll end with this just because it's part of the election domain doesn't mean it's constitutional i think that as justice breyer pointed out in his dissent in alvarez you got a really watch out in this domain for the risk of some serious censorious aureus is the word selectivity by prosecutors government officials themselves are gonna be policing themselves a lot of elected officials i'm not sure they can be trusted to uh to fairly apply these laws i think it's a hard case when you're talking about just limiting candidates from lying about each other also if i had more time and i could discuss this depends on the nature of the lie i'm sort of torn i think the supreme court though they're gonna strike that down as well so we're probably suck at with laws that might affirm laws about election procedures and that's probably not a whole lot more than that the organizers delighted to be here um just in case you hadn't realized that the post truth era has really come of age two thousand and sixteen oxford dictionary's announced that post truth was its international word of the year two thousand and seventeen a group of german linguistic experts declared that alternative facts were their non word of the year two thousand and seventeen to disable this information which are informed by european human rights standards i'm going to go as fast as i can and to borrow a joke from the irish comedian darrell breen if i'm talking too fast please try and listen faster  anybody wants if anybody wants to challenge anything i'd say i say i'm happy to provide footnotes on request later so the six steps the six steps to disable disinformation here we go i think the first important thing we should do is distance ourselves from the fake news the second is to disaggregate the term and break it down into its component parts then we have to distill the component parts or types of expression that are actually problematic once we've done that we should try to discern which strategies and measures would be proportionate and appropriate for the problematic types of expression then and i suppose restrict would have been better here but i wanted to have a explain in a few moments as well and plenty of grounds for fearing the lack of compliance with international and european human rights standards the final thing we have to do and this is a bit of a recurrent recommendation in the conference is discuss with all actors what could should and must be done if anything so let me let me take these one by one but first of all a little working definition of fake news and one important thing to say here at the outset is that even though i'm focusing on european human rights standards those standards are very congruent with the joint declaration on freedom of expression fake news disinformation and propaganda that was adopted last year by the specialized mandates on freedom of expression andor the media and i think it's important to stress that because there's a lot of emphasis in both approaches on the need to create an enabling environment for free robust expression in which everyone can participate and to recognize the different roles duties and responsibilities rights duties and responsibilities of different actors in that multimedia ecosystem and an enabling environment and also to be very  clear cited and avoid generalizations so the working definition of fake news i would call it or describe it as information that has been deliberately fabricated and disseminated with the intention to important to distinguish so called fake news from other forms of disinformation and by recalling that it's news news is very important in democratic societies we as citizens of certain expectations as regards the quality of news we expect or hope that it will be accurate and reliable and this this makes it something of a primus inter pares of different types of expression in democratic society it's after all the basis on which the public are able to form in opinions make decisions and participate in deliberative processes so as he fake news as a a form of disinformation somewhere along a spectrum  of other kinds of disinformation and disinformation then would be part of the broader complex multimedia ecosystem fake news the point has been made already it's as old as the hills but it's contemporary usage has infused it with new levels of meaning new emphases new new new associations what's crucial the real game changer is the ease speed scale and sophistication with which it's produced and disseminated but the term itself and i want to take distance from it it's problematic for three reasons it's vague it's simply simplistic and it's it's dangerous it's over broad it can mean different things to different people and there's a high level of subjectivity in how its interpreted it's simplistic because it doesn't it is great difficulty in capturing the multi actor nature of the present ecosystem and this is an environment in which institutional media individual media actors civil society whole range of organizations are contributing to public debate there's an increased prevalence of strategic communication some of which can be can be can be harmful there's also an increased prevalence of automated expression all these different voices are competing for very very limited space so the different ways in which information is produced disseminate and promoted they're all complicating the the scene it's dangerous because when it is used by politicians and particular political leaders to  vilify certain sections of the media this sets a very dangerous precedent they the undermining of journalists and the media who are contributing to public debate in this way makes it more difficult for them to  lots of people and try to try to try to shove different types of expression under the one under the one banner and rightly or wrongly so there's differentiation but between them and that's appropriate some people would parody or satire in there but these are clearly forms of expression that are protected by european and international human rights law because they have the aim of agitating provoking contributing to public debate in that way and truth freedom of expression under the european convention human rights isn't limited to truth and there's also an important distinction between facts and valued judgments facts can be proven value judgments not necessarily although they should have some basis in fact xual circumstances defamation and hate speeches sometimes my view erroneously placed under fake news then those elements may be present but they're not necessarily present so avoid generalizations conspiracy theories but climate change historical events vaccinations etc they're  typical forms of fake news propaganda could be and could be included there by some people again important reference point is article twenty one of the iccpr and   let me see how many bits i can skip well when it comes to devising appropriate strategies may be useful to to classify them as pre emptive or preventive think of media literacy information literacy news literacy more longer term strategies of trying to to support pluralistic diverse media and and ensure their sustainability trust  notices that that that certain content might might be disputed and you should think twice about sharing it then you could have a range of regulatory measures which we'll come back to in the in the in the present the big announcement this morning from the european commission for the in yep okay this morning and the european commission came out with its communication on how to tackle online disinformation and here we'll see a number of at least bullet points that'll be useful for the discussion later and we talked about we can maybe talk about appropriate ways of calibrating responses so here the proposed measures they the commissioners proposed that by july online platforms should develop and follow a code of practice on disinformation there should be more longer term an independent european network of fact checkers a secure european online platform for disinformation to facilitate the exchange of information in particularly cross country in a cross country way enhance media literacy support member states in ensuring the resilience of elections against cyber threats and online disinformation the promotion of voluntary online identification systems that the public can can can identify disinformation support for quality and diversified and also sustainable media and then a coordinated strategic communication policy and just to flash up what the code of practice would involve thank you very much sorry that it was longer  thousand have been killed from the so called war on drugs and unsurprisingly police figures would suggest a smaller figure of five thousand so along with this growing proximity to physical violence in filipino public life is  ordinary people as well as high profile online influencers are very recent features to filipino social media it was once described just like five years ago a shaped by traditional cultural values that emphasize circumspection and conformity and so the experience of toxic incivility an unfriending friends and family is actually a very new phenomenon in the philippines so the public debate has been trying to make sense of what exactly has changed establishment using new digital weapons but their feelings of exclusion have deep historical roots and lineages a second perspective a technological fetishistic perspective is to blame facebook for all the ills in filipino politics some filipino journalists and academics have been trying to lobby facebook to beef up their content moderation and actually take down offensive content and block fake accounts facebook has responded about two weeks philippines is difficult to execute given that the philippine constitution and the strong protections for free for free speech would they after us legislation of course as a former colony so flagging the content or blacklist well meaning can be dangerous if criteria for selection are not transparent and can even further entrench political divides so in our report we take a different approach from looking only at the content and technolog understanding the production process of digital disinformation so what we try to do is to shine a spotlight on the industries organizations and individuals we call architects of network misinformation and we wanted to think of the prevent mechanisms against israel its production process so what did we find and we have a fancy infographic here where we argue that the real chief architects of disinformation come from the advertising pr industry these executives lead teams of digital influencers celebrity influencers in fake account operators and together they've not only normalized political deception but instituted systems that make it financially rewarding so this information campaign is actually a project based work arrangement often taken on as a sideline job and because it is a temporary arrangement it enables moral displacement so nobody would identify as a full time troll so it's never their fault occupying the top level of the hierarchy adhan pr executives play the role of high level digital strategists they hold leadership roles in boutique pr agencies handling a portfolio of corporate brands while freelancing for political clients so these executives would tell us in interviews that these techniques have already been mastered in corporate marketing and they pages or inspirational pages that actually garner a very organic and real following while they would be occasionally slipping in paid content on their feet and these paid content could be for corporate  pernicious consequences to democratic politics particularly in how it would seed revisionist history narratives silenced political opponents and hijack news media attention so based on this architecture that uncovered the policy recommendations that we came up with would address vulnerabilities in the political and media ecosystem so we tried to come up with local level interventions one is about disclosures of political  so i'll just end with questions around regulation on which is what the panel tries to engage with so currently the terms of the global debate on this information puts facebook in the hot seat demanding their accountability and algorithms and content moderation but how can a global level response complement also locally driven interventions that target specific vulnerabilities in local political systems in our report we identified ways to encourage transparency little or is this already too much i think we all recognize that there is no one size fits all solution to fake news around the world but how can we arrive at a system of monitoring and evaluating local efforts across different countries our second question is about how to support local journalists who find themselves on the frontline on on the fight against this information what we find interesting that journalistic exposes in the philippines real masterminds it's an industry open secret who the strategists are behind political campaigns but because these executives hold the key the key to large sums of potential advertising revenue must they remain untouchable and finally are we able to discuss ways in which we can support workers from slipping into the digital underground nobody identifies us or really wants to become a troll but become at some i have only one slide the reason you're using the word fake news in this dialogue so much is because the president of the united states has popularized all over the world the phrase freak news meaning the news i wish you wouldn't believe we're all discussing things on those terms as though those were the terms that we had set by some philosophical or legal process proposing here is just let's go back a step from all this fake news and lying question let's understand this is as a different problem and that problem is of a media diversity problem an echo chamber problem these two are then further tied into a larger political economy issue which reveal to us a competition law issue and truth in advertising enforcement issue as a side dish therefore the argument i'm offering is that this is not a free speech and expression issue i'm conscious of the fact that i've just created work for a different set of lawyers than the ones in this what has happened is that in most of the developed world too many people now get their news from one of the two advertising companies and those advertising companies base their advertising on behavior collection so that entire system of public opinion has been turned one hundred and eighty degrees over there are only two companies that define the experience of the internet for most people we now have a very small number of news distributors distributing a very large amount of news that the ones who are guarantee or stand behind in any way and the real business is not delivering truth to people their real business is collecting the behavior of people who used to read the newspaper in order to figure out what was going on and maybe looked at department store advertising while turning the page the supposedly neutral platforms use personalized algorithms to curate our news feed based on precise data algorithmic system created by private companies that care only about the bottom line this is the primary primary difficulty because the political economy of the news has shifted the distinction between editorial material and advertising has been completely eliminated in the world we now live in the advertising companies generate editorial material out of the stuff to get from us whatever you put whatever you behavior is out there and the primary business is surveilling that readership in order to generate more closely targeted advertising in a political economy of this kind there is no way to prevent the deterioration of the discourse especially by controlling free speech and expression it's not what the platform companies don't do anything it's not that they're never doing anything when the heat gets too hot they take some measures to that if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation it is that no official high or petty can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics nationalism religion or other matters of various other such vibrant in liberal democracies we also have some recent proposals on fake news the bot media in india turns out fake news all the time the big biometric database add her is wonderful there are no problems with it that is the government policy statement being treated as news in india and that's why all these distinctions become very difficult what is news what is fake news anytime anyone wants to say administrative problem poor people going on without food there are technical vulnerabilities in other people being denied no newspaper wants to print your stuff because criticising adha is an is not patriotic criticizing adha is not what any organization now wants to be seen doing either that's right this is not a free speech problem it's a competition law problem in truth in addition to the truth this truth in advertising problem is because parties who want to now operate at a scale because they've become such bigger because everybody's been connecting the world they cannot manage to pay enough people to read reaction to when facebook's wanted to partner with the pointer institute to flag falls new stories or the trends fiasco it will only exacerbate the situation and the charge of liberal media bias will only be flamed we should understand this as a problem not of too much diversity either too many voices too much democratization too much vernacular and too much the language of the street and politics it's good for people to be able to speak at this time in the afternoon i will try to be very brief and i will try to make sense but i don't make any promises so now i was asked to offer a latin american perspective on this issue latin america is huge so i want to warn you that i might be making some broad generalizations here under that might not be entirely applicable to every single country in latin america but this is just about trends america at least fake news is old news this is not a new phenomena at all and the reason we're talking about this today asked me she said is that it's become a buzzword and i want my colleagues have said to step away from that buzzword for a second because i also think that the traffic news is an oversimplification that's just a way to stop us from having a discussion that we need to be having about increased interest of states and regulating this information i'm going to be talking about this information under the pretense mostly of protecting national security  together and this is important because more often than not the mechanism that it's chosen to regulate one will also regulate the other the first approach is basically one of intermediary liability of or putting election today but this is just this is very complex and there's so many things happening and for instance on dudas has a project a recent project regulating a a acts of hatred at least is a trust issue we don't trust our governments and we don't trust media and you don't have any reason to trust them in the first place and the approaches were we regulate literacy and more than that even about critical thinking because either way whichever approach we choose we are asking people to not make this decision but not least alex thanks suzanne and joining everyone else i just want to say thanks to agnes in to columbia for for hosting us here today it's great great to be here i'm gonna try and go quickly here so that we can get to the discussion as as soon as possible but i want to talk a little bit about sort of facebook's overall commitment around these issues and so as everyone has probably heard you know far too many times facebook is a mission driven company and you know our mission is to give people the power to build communities and bring the world closer together and in order to do that we want to help people to share authentic information and to participate in an informed community and you know we take action against threats that we see to that informed community you know for example this year we're increasing the size of the team that works on safety and security and content moderation issues from ten to twenty zero people so you know we recognize at facebook the significant challenges and the risks posed you know our community into societies by misinformation but also the significant risks to freedom of expression posed by getting the response wrong whether that's wrong at the sort of corporate private actor level or wrong at the sort of government regulatory level so a little bit on sort of our approach and and how we're thinking about it is really sort of four pillars the first is about stopping bad actors from using our services the second is about disrupting economic incentives the third is leveraging newsfeed ranking and the fourth is empowering our community and our partners to make sort of more informed and better decisions about the content they consume you'll notice what's not in there importantly is sort of becoming an arb truth or a commitment of any sort to delete or remove fake news or misinformation however you want to define those things when and as we see i think there's not a whole lot of clarity on what a good definition for those ideas would look like  because we really believe that that's that's dangerous fundamentally from a freedom of expression perspective for us to take on you know that responsibility of determining truth from fiction instead what we're trying to do and what we want to do is look at sort of objective and content agnostic signals of bad behavior that we've found to sort of be associated with many purveyors of misinformation you know whether that's in the election context or elsewhere and then to empower our community to sort of better better evaluate and decide about the content that they see so to just sort of quickly run through you know how we're thinking about each of those those four elements the first on stopping bad actors from using using our products and services you know one of the things that we saw particularly in the elections context is that you know most of this sort of bad content this misinformation that was sort of politically motivated originated with fake accounts and you know one of the things that we have in our policy is of course at  facebook is that you have to use your authentic identity and you can't have multiple accounts you can't have a bot you know your account must be an authentic individual and so we're really focusing on removing those accounts in those bots that often tend to be the source of or the originating source of a lot of this sort of bad content and misinformation again without looking at you know the specific content itself the second thing under that pillar is really continuing our investigations into the threats around organized networks and trends so groups like the ira which we tracked and removed their accounts and ability to use our products the the third piece under that is sort of of course working with our industry partners and working with others in civil society in the academic community to sort of fight threats across the internet because this is not a problem of course that's unique to to facebook or to anyone any one company but something that we we feel strongly about sort of working together to find collaborative solutions on the the second sort of key element of our strategy here is around disrupting economic incentives because lots of this misinformation i mean we focus a lot even in the elections context on sort of the the the sort of political motivations behind her to the goal of election interference but you know what we actually see is that lots of this is just sort of pure financial motivation so you know i think many people probably read about the the now famous sort of macedonian fake news factory and you know putting out articles on both sides of a divisive issue this isn't about swaying a vote it's about attracting you know ad revenue to sites that have a bunch of you know either malware or sort of just advertising on them it's about financial incentives rather than strictly political ones and so you know we're working to really demote and sort of down rank in news feed the types of links that go to low quality ad filled web pages so when you click something and it's sort of an ad that takes up you know half the page or the page has malware or something associated with it that's the type of content that we are demoting and sort of attempting to limit the distribution of on on facebook the second thing that we're really doing around economic incentives is working to make advertising on our products more transparent for everyone so we've announced that for any given page on facebook that's running advertising you'll be able to see all the ads that that page is currently running regardless of whether you've been targeted or not so you can just go to that page and see you know everything that's being run and going even a step farther than that for political related advertising and providing a fully searchable archive of all political ads including targeting information and spend information and i think that that gets to some of the points that you know me she was making about sort of the need for that transparency in in advertising about who's behind things and how it's being funded and the third the third piece is sort of really working just to prevent sort of bad actors and spammers from buying ads in the first place so you know for instance pages that would share content that gets repeatedly marked as false by a third party fact checker that we partner with you know might no longer be able to advertise on the on the platform and we've also announced that again for political and issue advertising we're also going to be doing location and identity verification for advertisers who purchase who purchased those ads to help ensure that they're authentic actors and that the community can you know understand where that is coming from the the sort of the next pillar really is this idea around prioritizing informative content and demoting inauthentic content and you know again this is sort of things around clickbait engagement ba sensationalism not not about the content itself but rather about sort of how people act around the content so if for instance you're much less likely to share or like an article after you click on it and read it then you are if you've never actually opened it that's a sign that the content itself is probably bad in some way and is something that we might want to down rank or or give less distribution on facebook and at the same time we want to prioritize content that's highly meaningful to people so we've announced sort of that we're working to prioritize content that comes from broadly trusted sources and also sort of local content because one of the one of the key challenges right now in the facing the sort of news industry in particular is the the lack of sort of local focus materials and we want to sort of work with local news partners to promote that type of particularly relevant informative content for people and then the sort of fourth the fourth pillar really is about empowering our community and partners we want to give people on facebook tools to better understand what they're seeing one example of this is a product called article context that it provides additional information about news sources and about sort of who's controlling them context from wikipedia context from other places so that you have you know a better perspective on you know where this position or where this article is coming from related articles which surfaces information on sort of fact checking or you know other perspectives on the same issue to try and you know get it that get through this sort of the the concerns about the filter bubble or  similar and then really supporting journalists in the news industry many of you have probably heard of our facebook journalism project where we're working you know with journalists around the world in our partnership with the pointer institute on third party fact checking and also really working on sort of digital and media literacy efforts so right here in new york we're partnering with the city university of new york school of journalism for our news integrity initiative to sort of provide educational resources to you know educators and the public and doing a lot of work to sort of also run you know public service announcements on you know how to better identify potentially misleading content and how to sort of not share that type of information and we're doing that both sort of in those psas in traditional media and and on facebook itself so i think i'm told that i'm about at time but i'm happy to you know sort of continue the discussion on on any of this thank okay so i'm gonna start with a few questions and then we'll open it up for discussion my first question is to what extent can the problems that many of you have outlined be addressed by some version of extending offline rules to the online space which you know as me she and others have pointed out hasn't been done and then you're here in the u s we have rules around political advertising we've had the past fair time rules  that news broadcasters television broadcasters have to give equal time to candidates from different parties their disclosure rules about transparency around th source of political ads how much of this problem would be solved if those rules were simply extended online those rules have been tested by courts here in the u s they passed muster you know is how big a part of the solution could that be i should say first that i'm not sure that the fairness doctrine would pass muster now with this court it did in the red lion case and what was that nineteen sixty eight or nine or something but i have serious doubts that you could even apply that to broadcast media now well i do see the introduction of the honest acts ads act and also some what kind of a support from the black phone companies for it obviously the different details which is just extending the existing  on where the money in election comes from to online platforms i am always hesitant about having more regulations and more laws but having said that that of the last decade are no longer the same companies or the same kind of medium they have now become something much bigger which they themselves don't categorize for obvious reasons so there is some space for some kind of legislations like where is the money coming in our political advertising and what are you actually doing which may or may not be the same so it's a little complicated situation but i do think on the advertisement and the money in political advertising for those regulations already exists and those  are the things if used will it solve a lot of problem as i said i don't think it's a free speech problem alex yes i would just say you know certainly i think there there is a space for you know some of this to to apply to the online space and you know as i think as may she alluded to you know we we came out in support of the honest ads act which sort of gets it you know bringing these rules around sort of just closure for political advertising into the online space more explicitly  i think one of the the real challenges though is that the scale of online platforms is very different than a lot of the traditional spaces that these that these laws or regulations were written to apply to in that you know they cross borders the global and that poses challenges for sort of cleanly transporting just existing legislation or regulatory principles online i think you know what we look at is that one of them much more effective approaches is to sort of rather learn from those things and so that's you know in seen in the initiatives such as allowing you know add transparency within the product based on not not a regulation but based on sort of a principle that that's the right thing to do globally for you know all ads that are visible on facebook that anyone can see ads regardless of whether they're targeted so i think we can learn from those offline regulations but that they don't necessarily always cleanly apply to the online space alex just to follow up when you talk about the surf four principles do you think about those is kind of operating independently in each local geography you know when you talk about the bad actors who you're gonna try to disable are you looking at who are the bad actors you know in honduras in myanmar in the philippines or is it more of a global approach or some combination of both i think it's it's really a combination of both i think it at the high level there are sort of commonalities that you see across bad actors in general and that's things around sort of the the fake accounts or sort of the coordinated activity and those are things that apply really everywhere in the world and i think that you know really are in the same way and again that's getting back to the idea of looking at objective signals rather than then sort of specific content but certainly there are  specific groups and specific actors for instance it would operate in you know or target specific areas and that's something that you know we have again our our security teams focus a lot on sort of detecting that type of behavior as it relates to you know a specific election context or a updated in relation to how there's existing regulation around tv and radio and how political advertising there should be track should be disclosed it is not yet covering online advertising advertising but at the same and so i think it needs to be updated however there will still be gaps and i think we currently need a framework do you think about a pr practice digital influencers so these are people who actually are in paid sponsorship arrangements for corporate brands and it's common practice i'm still for them to not disclose these  and of course what more in terms of political sponsorships and an endorsement so i think in the realm of digital influencers there are gaps there so you a lot of you touched on this but i'm curious you know if you could put a finer point on it several views are spelled out kind of this value chain and you did it in some detail in relation to the philippines but you know there's there's a campaign or you know somebody vying for office or a political organization that wants to direct an outcome and then they work through you know in the philippine case it sounds like you know people at agencies or well known companies that are in the pr realm then they work through these you know more looser networks of digital influencers who have big groups of followers you know they then you know they're larger groups that sort of retreat and then they're sort of the user and the end users or the end recipient of this information if you think about the various kind of choke points along that value chain or chain of devaluation perhaps where do you think are the most what do you see is the most important kind of nodes in terms of  interventions that we're talking about and regulation in particular you know who should be targeted is it you know the the person who is paying the bills is it the person who is you know shrouding the secrecy is it the person who's just a mercenary but if you could choke them off you know the system breaks  d regulation of analog media i think they transcend those analog media and they're still overarching and relevant in the in the in the radically changed communications environment the challenge however is how to operationalize them and that leads into your second question i mean big big principles and values like pluralism and transparency they really have to be revisited and rethought and i think that that has to be a sophisticated exercise because there are so many different actors who influence the whole ecosystem in different ways and have different levels of power and i think it's only by by by thinking this through in a careful way that we can we can we can make meaningful policy interventions where necessary and i think the other thing to emphasize is that regulatory intervention while it may have a purpose for example for trying to preserve the integrity of electoral processes they have to be seen in a much more in a much broader and varied context lots of non regulatory measures are going to be complementary in that and i think they all serve different purposes i mean media literacy that's an ongoing long term solution which will also contribute to to the effectiveness of any regulatory interventions to influence how media a nd information are shared with the public but one thing that i think is is is is crucial in all of this is to see how transparency can be injected or enforced if necessary at all the different stages of the value chain that you mentioned so the provenance and nature of infamy it's clear to everyone and then you can reap the benefits of media literacy that people have the critical faculties to to analyze the value of that information  you said the choke points i i think there is a need to rethink intermediary liability laws and this may be a departure for somebody who's actually defined offended that quite a bit but i also think that every platform is no longer a neutral platform and everybody who started as just providing a platform is now  transformed into a very different kind of a being so what new york times is subjected to or abc news is subjected to necessarily also translates or for many of the other  also think that apologies are great to diffuse but they don't change business models there is a business model which very much relies on gathering behavior then selling advertising they can there can be a ton of annually and so this also tells us where our energies need to go we need strong legislation with teeth these are not general privacy laws which the silicon valley really likes because you can drive trucks through those general privacy laws what we do need is something about behavior collection in interstate commerce that how is that behavior collected and for how long not for more than fifty milliseconds or something and then what you do with that that's where it is it's not about the the politicians because again then we it's a slippery slope you're going to control the politicians from what they're saying then we're gonna start talking about i cannot say something the conservatives cannot say or i  conservative cannot say so the legislation very narrow not on free speech and expression not but definitely on behavior collection the political economy of all of this and in the know for you the the point of leverage is models of advertising targeting based on highly specific consumer data so it is sense turning back the clock to the era when if you wanted to do advertise for political campaign you know your choices were broadcast television or perhaps direct mail but there was no way of honing in on the individual consumer who might be vulnerable or open to a very targeted message and that if you were to regulate and deprive platforms of the ability to offer that type of targeting you know that would   think yes but i'm also saying that the black swan incident of the two thousand and sixteen election has gotten us all very uptight and that's why we want to think about everything here and i'm only limiting and i'm not talking about a if the fairness doctrine because i know that we no longer live in that world fcc doesn't do that anymore and we do not want the platforms to become the gatekeepers of who gets to speak w and it becomes a problem on both sides i personally would like i like the liberal bias the silicon valley has but that does not mean as a free speech defendant i don't want the others to say the uncomfortable things which i personally may not believe in so what i'm concentrating on is that the when internet and all the political economy is based on surveillance you collect data you collect behavior you sell advertising very closely connected to that behavior that business model itself informs us where that your points should be and i'm also saying is that sale of political advertising to anonymous persons who are now foreigners was is already not allow in existing laws in almost every jurisdiction no country allows it of course surreptitiously things happen and those laws need to be extended those are the two things sorry alex what is facebook's position on you know absolute ban on foreign purchasing of election related messaging so to sort of provide some updates on what we're what we're actually doing in this perspective we are we announced recently that you know everyone purchasing political ads on facebook and starting starting here in the us will have to verify their location and their identity and so in the united states that will take the form of sort of actually physically mailing postcards to a us based address to ensure that someone is who's buying a political advertisement in the united states is physically in the us and also verifying that person's identity to ensure that they are who they say they are so that's that's sort of a kind of the concrete step that we're taking to  prevent that type of you know foreign foreign advertisements say the putin government sets up an office in washington that can receive your postcard and send it back and they've got you know svetlana who signs signs and you know unique to platforms in that sense because when new york times accepts advertisements it does have human beings accepting those advertisements and they stand behind what they are accepting and putting in the paper and they say yes we've checked where the money for this political is coming and we're also following following whatever the regulations are actually telling us to follow we can if those papers were also giving us the news which we want and also standing behind it and if  to get the revenues and take away all the revenue which used to come to new york times for them why should they not also have the same responsibilities so you know i think there's there's a large a large number of models of advertising that that model where you know there's someone at an ad sales desk who's accepting every ad that's that's one model but they're you know certainly self serve advertising like a is available through online platforms also opens up a lot more opportunities for you know people who may not be able to engage in that very high cost traditional model to you know purchase advertising that they otherwise wouldn't be able to that's particularly you know in the case of small businesses we see that that's especially relevant but you know even again in the offline context there are you know other venues that are you know not a newspaper i mean you can place for instance a classified ad and there's not a significant amount of variation behind that if you look at you know ads tech two telephone poles there's not someone verifying that there's a wide range of business models for that relate to advertising and options for how to sort of place advertising you know both both online and offline and i don't think there's sort of a one size fits all solution that's appropriate necessarily you know for every platform or every type of advertising i should not make sure i clarify something although i said i doubted that a fairness doctrine would be constitutional as applied to online i think that  i hope that the court would allow regulation of disclosure for political advertisement online i'm fairly confident that they would maybe just as thomas dissenting  foreigners intervening and buying advertising advertisements as a very specific business model and i do believe that in the honest ads act it's it does say the same thing it's only saying that  efforts will be made which obviously those of us who are everybody lawyers know how reasonable it is to determine that but but we're only limiting to one point about political advertisements and also just tracing where the funds are coming from not about the general advertising business that's a question about that and then i'm going to open it up to our audience so please think about what you would like to ask our panelists you know how a boundary is there around political advertising i mean obviously there's certain kinds of ads you know for or against a specific candidate but i named that unquestionably would qualify but then you know we know there's a lot of messaging related advertising and the laws have changed so there are certain kinds of ads where you know the candidate has to approve this message and we've all seen that you know i'm hillary clinton and i approve this message  you know and then there are other kinds of messaging related ads that you know are in more of a gray area there's all kinds of advertising we see about you know for example the governor of new york and all the great things he's done you know they're not political advertising it's just  well there was the issue advertising versus you know the direct candidate advertising rule of buckley on now and i'm not expert enough on election law to know i think that's still a good law i think that there's a you know advertisement online or a corporation since citizens united wants to buy something online it's about an issue i think there might be some constitutional problems with that  really on what goes on trending on twitter would be covered by national media sometimes we would even see disinformation campaigns and those hashtags carried by global media and so those would escape the traditional definitions and regulations around a very strict narrow definition of advertising and i think we're trying to come up with that vocabulary of how do we make sense of this how can we also make it transparent which hashtags are being paid for by politicians and and what kinds of i want to open it up to our audience i think we're on yes has given us permission to go a little bit over so i think we have probably about twenty minutes in the back yes