thought it would be really interesting to bring up some other topics that are sort of in the news that are turned off who it is specifically around information us artificial intelligence in this whole sort of phenomenon or topic of people using this information and so they're fortunately and all the great things in the promise of the future of things that go on there and i get to talk about misinformation disinformation of a view which is a major problem for a society ok so i followed yours in advance this is going to be a bit of a downer fake news is what people mostly think about this problematic but they do this is a pretty general term right and it's a rather nonspecific term which even come to mean in the common use news i don't like great and  so the the professionals in the industry use a much more specific terms and i'm going to use those tonight so for the purposes of this talk i'm going to use misinformation which means things that are true things that are false or misleading ok that's what misinformation is this information is the same thing except it's being done for a purpose ok could be to selling snake oil it could be to get you to vote in a certain way could get you to act or to just not to be you know kind of career politicians were involved in a trial exploitation bring run a pizza restaurant right and in doing it they did it with all busy these code words and e mails right that's how they cracked nobody really believe that except some people did you know somebody believed it so much the government car drove multiple hours went into the pizza store with an ar fifteen took over the whole place shot his gun in the air a lot of people ran out he cornered himself off and searched the place didn't find anything you got aggressive right nobody got hurt thankfully but you know this is what we did in two thousand and sixteen ok so miss him for it you know although everybody from this is new when chocking misinformation is not new it's been with us forever right it's been certainly some succumbing in the country thousands of years before that but what is new is that in today's world it is much more dangerous and much more pervasive th people had a set of common facts as a result of that you had newscasters like walter cronkite who within his broadcast every day with and that's the way it is friday march th one thousand nine hundred and eighty one which was his last broadcast by the way and the reason here to this broadcast that way was because that's what people got out there not the way it was over the course of time and on that day right the most important things were happening that people need to about he was widely referred to as the most trusted man in america because there was a poll in the early seventy's where he was voted the most trusted man in america ok you had people like andy rooney who did his little opinion piece of the in sixty minutes rate and nobody confused andy rooney's two minutes a very entertaining opinion on some topic of the day for the fifty eight minutes of really serious news right that it happened before the sixty minutes program right and the same in print media nobody compute the weekly world news and the national enquirer the new york times the wall street journal people knew the difference yellow journalism write the opinion was on page two really easy to tell what was opinion of what was moose truth in advertising laws allow us to as a society believe that if you saw an ad on t v or heard on the radio it was doesn't mean the disinformation and misinformation didn't happen in the good old days pridgin one thousand i remember fondly in other countries right they don't have it and some other countries they don't have an independent news right straight the news own by the government and the government sometimes in some cases often wants to like the world least spin being told right and in those countries the citizenry just have never trusted the news they always look at it and trying to figure out how they're being lied to and what the lies mean to them because it's really the meaning behind the lies that's where the real meaning comes from but those media didn't broadcast in the us in the good old days right now they get that doesn't mean that our government didn't lie to us they did it but when they did it was very quickly found out right and that doesn't mean that  disinformation didn't happen this information still happened on a large scale people who put in a lot of effort and make this information happen so as an example of this and the scale and the kind of effort it went into in the us to make this information campaigns work i want to look at the two thousand primaries ok so george w bush was losing in the early primaries you may remember to john mccain ok karl rove who is running bush's campaign painted at one point and said you know i think it's time we take the gloves off it that was spreading that group how could they have gone out and printed a large number pamphlets and paid people to go to these meetings and put them on the cars ok they had a fake poll that they were and you can read more about this they had a fake poll that they ran where they asked a lot of normal questions in the poll and then they asked the really central question of how do you feel about voting for a republican candidate who's had no legitimate black trial or conceded the primary that this was just politics and purportedly john mccain said you know some things are just politics he had an adopted african child who we humans wife are very fond of who they have had some medical problems they helped her out medically and you know this was a very personal but it was very effective you know we have one president versus another president so who knows how is it today that's how it was before and that's  disintegration was before but how is it today thousands of new sites right massa sharing on social media and this is a good thing right we have great loss we have a lot of really high quality news sites many more than the big three and maybe more than the spring where you had a peaceful peaceful transition to a democratic government that was enabled by the massive sharing on social media that's an unprecedented kind of power for the people that write these are good things but we also have yellow journalism an advocate journalism that are being confused with real loose right and these guys the yellow journalism sites are getting really good at their job they're blending in factual content so you can't tell where the yellow journalism and their factual content you know swap with the digital doesn't have a the trending stories in the st one was of interest to me so i clicked on it about a couple of paragraphs and i'm like you know this doesn't sound like news to me so i go over to my laptop and look up exactly the same article and on the website of the news organization it was marked as an opinion advertising that's coming across these other media those mechanisms which are created decades ago just don't work they don't scale and newspaper funding is dramatically reduced right these guys are hurting and they're laying off staff investigative report reporting the st one to go it's  person to go there are so another part of the landscape i want to talk about is the combination of psychology and technology that's hitting today it's a combination of a lot of these great things and technology when combined with certainly the psychology of people that we've had forever provide powerful tools for bad actors to have things like filter bubbles and echo chambers where the natural tendency of people wanting to talk to people who are like them and talk about ideas that they feel are true combining together to get people who are only talking to people who are like them and only hearing ideas that they already believe write which means when you get something in there that doesn't stick you know stand  mustard and it just echoes right that those missing pieces of misinformation grow in power to be exactly chambers right you know the fact that people are busy we have limited attention behavioral fault call it  modern life very busy anding on that we have these psychological properties that are very powerful so we these things are allowed us to be very successful when we have things like tiger trying to eat us right but now they hurt us when we have  trying to do the equivalent to be us so you have a confirmation bias which is the idea that when you hear something that's close to something you already believe even if it's pretty obviously false you're much more likely to believe it right because it's resonating with things that are in your court right and this is a very robust it's been studied again and again in the psychology literature and you have things like the reiteration effect in the availability cascade which are just fancy of the technical names for things that we intuitively know as you repeated often enough and it seems true right marketers and advertisers use this all the time but the really important thing is these things are really powerful right so if you know that the more it's repeated to you the more it's going to seem true it turns out that doesn't protect you right and then that if it will build a cascade this effect and groups and sites is even more powerful because of more mechanisms that reinforce the belief that it's true right so these psychological mechanisms when you get this daily louche of information coming out are targeted information provides a pretty powerful tool base so that's the landscape right but i told you at the beginning i was going to tell you how bad it was i told you i was going to be a bad guy right so how bad is it really well i'm going to talk to you about five different things that are going on today all right that will give you a had some politicians who would go to one town and say one thing right and then go to another town and say the opposite great this was actually the reason why the traveling press corps stood up some reporter said you know we need to travel with these guys and when they say one thing to one in the opposite to another well that's news and they're probably neither town trust them anymore great so fast forward to not the good old days anymore but today and well that's possible again right so you have posts which are just you know targeted advertising on facebook posts which allow you to whisper in one county years one thing and whisper in another county are the exact opposite and if you you aren't just limited to towns either if you want to whisper in dog lovers ears one thing and dog haters here's another thing you can do that too ok and this was used so during the  election the trump campaign was publicly courting black voters they were saying come for me i'll help you out more i've got your back right come in and vote for me while they were at the same time using dark posts to discourage the black the ok now if the black voters had known they were trying to discourage them to vote i don't think many of them would have thought that they got your back right but dark posts let's keep that more private right you have cambridge analytical which was very much in the press but they say you know the more we know about all these people the more we can whisper the right things to commence the rights of the more i know about you  gathered profiles they did work together profiles on two hundred and thirty million americans right now to put that in perspective today there are ballpark three hundred and twenty five million americans ok and that includes babies that includes a lot of kids who aren't able to vote right and it's worse you don't actually need cambridge and a little bit to do this stuff there is a community of people who do the equivalent of selling modern day snake oil right they have the shiny products they have misleading ads they try to sell people right they have a conference it turns out where they talk to each other about how to do this ok and conference they say you know facebook helps me find the people busy who will buy my misleading advertisements might just information right they say what colorful language but y that's what they do and here's how the mechanism works all right so what they do is they craft a piece of misinformation and then they put it out there randomly to a small set of people they see who sort of believe it and then they use a nice little facebook tool that they've created for targeted advertising we just find me more people like that ok then they find more people like that they pick a little random sampling from that and then they say they throw it out there again they say who they find people they're really fall for right and then they say ok now we're talking finally more people like that and what they see and you can read more about this here this that that mussoorie what they see is their advertisement goes out and flounder for a little bit it's not making very much money and then it starts getting a buck and then it takes off and now they're printing money ok it's making this really works it's a powerful tool ok so these dark pools of personal data collection w the st thing that's going on there when you go you know about this nd piece is that misinformation is profitable this isn't even this information this isn't doing it for a purpose this is just putting out things that are true or misleading to make money people are getting rich this way so there is a town in macedonia and this is been written a couple of places that used to be the porcelain maker for the whole of yugoslavia right and now it's got industrial scale misinformation to whole bunch of businesses stood up churning out misinformation there are teachers there who teach people how to do misinformation and brag about how many of their students are millionaires right there are people who did this who say i earn more in a couple of months than most people in macedonia are in their entire life right and facebook to their credit after this was found out they shut down a lot of these fake sites right but  businessmen are concerned they're retooling for two thousand and twenty all right and they're pretty confident they're going to be able to retool and get their engine at the scale that they want to back up and if i was to bet on it i'd say that they're likely to succeed ok so when they did this before they were using pretty simple techniques to create a fake persona or they grab a picture that was of somebody attractive they put it on and they use it to put up some garbage right but now they're saying well you know that's too easy to detect we need to make something better so they're doing things like going out to somebody who's had a facebook site for a lot of years done a lot of real stuff and saying hey sell me your username and password you go off and make yourself another one right so me yours and you know and i'll give you some money for it right and they're paying about two  they're working to stand up right now for two thousand and twenty the rd i d i want to get in front of you is that your bots all right and the way that social media works is people share a lot of stuff but it also tell you what's trending tell you what's popular and then you look at that more right so the people who want to get misinformation disinformation out to you what they want to be popular right so of the ways they do this is they make a bunch of bots that go out and look at a lot and shared a lot and send it around to other parts of the great and that makes they are brigham's think that this is getting popular then it gets promoted and now a lot of real people are seeing it and then it's taking off as a really popular rate even if it doesn't go up an intro it still gets you know a decade it gets pretty popular if it's something that is interesting like the pope you know endorsing a candidate or the immigrant crime wave that is completely nonexistent in the u s right immigrant communities are more safe than an immigrant communities in the u s when you can't tell that from a lot of the misinformation and disinformation rigs out there right if it's something that's really interesting then that gets you know that actually will get really popular right it'll be charulata and the box will just kick start right so  there is a deep research area and you know a decades long research area it's an area i used to work in in making life like behavior right making simulated lifelike behavior and the bot community hasn't tapped into that i don't know if they will but if they do it will be a lot harder to detect but it's actually worse than that so i talked about human bots ok so there are people who have decided that they want their message for some definition of they are there to be amplified and they created a community of people that basically functions like the bots right so twitter has these private chat rooms that you can only have fifty people in them and so what they do is they use a lot of these chat rooms and they're cardinal rule is mutual read it one of the puts a piece of information reality and you do the math and it's a big scale right you know you have members and multiple room for communication between private groups so let's say you have one hundred dollars rooms and they probably are more than fifty people have room and they have one hundred thousand dollars each that's a pretty big scale you multiply that out there so this is harder to detect than bots and worse if ramifications for free speech right what is it how do you judge the same that you shouldn't be amplifying this message even though it's just because you have a file of them versus you amplify the message because you really believe that you know how different are the  that's the rd idea the th and you want to get in front of you of of the things that are going on is referred to in some of the industry as there is no way to retract a tweet ok if you want if a tweet is going out there the best you can do is put out a counter message rape and if you're say kentucky fried chicken and you have to put on a counter message and you say something like you know content we don't use five like a genetically engineered chickens for our food what do you remember from that this is an actual rumor by the way the nd fight they got to a lawsuit against a tree so this is this is the core problem right and it's a big problem so there were the horrible you know school shooting down in florida right and a bunch of the surviving students went out and became activists activists so we want to work to help make this better and what happened after that was a lot of vicious rumors against these kids right and so one of these vicious rumors that went out was you know with the rumor spread really far and there was a very active community of well connected people for really well connected people who were deep bunking the rumor as it went out ok and so an academic group going to study this and they said ok let's look at how this thing spread and let's look at you know the big monkey and duck and one of the things that they found out is that over half of the spread of the rumor was actually caused by the be bunking because this is that repeated and it seems true it turns out if you repeat it with a knot in front of it well you know five legged chickens are pretty memorable get so for the fish thing that's going on i want you to look at this sample of facebook pages from recent time and think about how well they have in common ok this is just a small sample give you an idea of what's going on the nation state sponsored did this information and propaganda that we are being faced with i want to just look at two of these and one instance of what they've done all right so part of texas they knew their big were going to go on they kept the two groups separate and no violence happened right but this isn't the only instance where this kind orchestration of physical events were done with these fake facebook pages have been others have been documented and it's not the only time when they do in russia playing both sides right if you take away one thing about this nation state sponsored this information this fifty point  want you to take this one away ok so the purpose of nation state sponsored by some permission is not to commence a lot of people think that other countries are trying to convince us but that's not what they're trying to do that's not what propaganda documented by and if you can pick away to my ideas about this nation's basic state sponsored disinformation it's that americans were duped into amplifying the message and i don't think there's anybody wants to be d of messages and counter messages and crisis action and after the list of face fakebook sites came out they said well let's look at see what happened in this these two echo chambers and so you look at the are are you affiliated accounts there  orange and you see how they're playing both sides right and these countries are experts at this rate when the russian interference came out one of the early data points that came out was that they spent one hundred thousand dollars in facebook ads right but this is misleading the real research that we know about today was two thousand seven hundred dollars big facebook accounts they reach an audience of  hundred and twenty six million people right the number of voters in two thousand and sixteen was one hundred and thirty seven that was just facebook we know so far that the preparations were at least two years and we know it's i'm going to months ago thirty two dollars bit accounts were deleted and it's just last month six hundred and fifty two russian iranian fake accounts and if you analyze this one of the scary things is you take all of this what this possibly could have cost and it's a fraction of what one military airplane calls cheap so that's the five things are going on now i just want to talk about two other things quickly so when this happened in two thousand and sixteen a lot of people said oh my goodness we really have to get mechanisms in place to keep all these other people from being pulled right but the problem is we are those other people creating this misinformation and this information is so pervasive and it's hitting all of the important topics we care about especially important topics that are making policy ok are way behind we're losing it's much easier cheaper to misinform and to correct this scale of resources in misinformation course resources and correcting the news continues to be under attack politically out all right so what kind of person do so as an individual you can read multiple sources ribault sides of the aisle reputable sources ok read european stuff as well as us stuff read the yellow journalism stuff occasionally to see what kind of stuff being spent not too much through depressing learned media literacy we've had the luxury of being in a relatively benign and permission environment for most of our history but that's no longer the case we all need to bone up over media literacy take time to fact check that it seems fishy take time to fact check but even more important if it seems important take time to fact check because the misinformation disinformation very subtle and if it's important to find out whether it's known to be pots or air support reputable journalism by subscription or two but there's no magic bullet ok the advantage right now is to the attacker but in a big way the are they all do fabulous work turf yes i think all the big organizations are trying to do efforts to help with the misinformation problem and some of them are putting it out rhythmic changes like trying to raise the  corrections with the misinformation if it's in a certain context cool doing at facebook has a whole set of fact checkers that if you flag something it will go down if three of them agree that it's misinformation then they'll then it will be marked as contested bill will reduce it you know with a promotion and it gets but all of these are not keeping up with the scale of the misinformation that we're seeing and they're all they're all doing some good they block your site they also turn off the payment space but they have to detect that it's a fake news site before they can turn off the payments spigot so if if they're successful is standing up their engine again they'll have both and what i do really terms of research is thinking about kind of this holistic approach to designing hardware along with the rhythms of software together in order to be able to possibly put into this photo thing and i kind of agreed with him if that's true it's amazing has this gigantic screen super high resolution and it shakes it vibrates it beeps at you you can do pretty much anything you want to do m but there's also going to be new windows of opportunity merging and we've seen a few of those today like you know playing who came on in this augmented reality world where  one it's this massive thing that probably has the computing capabilities of your calculator watch and from there into vans to bigger other computers of various types paradigms that are working together and all of this was really possible because of something called borstal many of us for a lot is this kind of projection by word of more back in the sixty's i said you know the is a log scale so it's just it's been an explosion in terms of the number of devices so and this is going on for decades we're so used to well next year i'll just go to review a show or to and what we see is that over the ringback years the performance has been consistently improving and this is also on a walk scale which means that my for my computer has been getting faster exponentially and then getting this kind of two really should not be surprising because if you think about acknowledging over the years techno he's always follow what's called  managers how much smaller can i get and adam is you know at the skill points something with each curve as we have this accelerated growth there was a new technology to be developed so that by the time this technology saturated another one comes along to provide that  so the question is well what does that mean there is that it like the computer industry should just shut down all of that stuff you know or you know some people call this difficult logical fellow period because there's no new devices out there but as a designer of computer chips i really think of this as an exciting opportunity because this is going to believe me into what i think is the golden age of design where instead of relying on the next generation of pro simultaneously to get to results quickly or specialization and this specialization is really conspired by where our brain different portions parts of our brain are specialized parts to do different things networks the planning really and we have been looking at this and thinking about it but we realized and i think a lot of people have also realized this is that's impossible because of what we call a virtuous  the combination of three elements that really came together the right time st with the internet and with lots of pictures of dogs and cats in the world label dogs and cats here's my super dogs companies were building bigger faster machines dedicated to computer graphics computation and then smart people realize hey i can do love bridge this hype afford to do computations for these neural network can you imagine a little flying drone had nothing that follows your own you could be the star of your own movie for all of your life you can be great you can be scary and there's all these different maybe you want to talk to other cars from conditions etc and what really this leads us to think about is well where is the right place to do how do we do a lot of competition do we do with all my car war do