Translator: Elisabeth Buffard Reviewer: Maricene Crus
I can imagine that in this room,
most of you have a Facebook or Twitter account.
If that’s the case, these past few weeks,
you may have seen this image:
a firefighter who was assaulted during an intervention
and lost one eye.
If you haven’t, perhaps you have seen this other image:
the image of a priest also assaulted at the beginning of the year in Avignon.
Or maybe you’ve heard about the 40,000 migrants
who sleep every night at the hotel at the expense of French taxpayers,
or maybe you have heard
about Saudi Arabia’s campaign funding for certain candidates
or the newly granted voting right
to all French prisoners.
These news items seem totally unrelated.
And yet, they share two common points:
the first is that they are all false;
the second is that they’ve all been shared
tens or even hundreds of thousands of times
on social networks in the past two months.
The spreading of rumors,
false information, fake news,
conspiracy theories on social networks,
has grown to such an extent in recent years
that it has become a real social problem.
The media have talked a lot about it,
notably during the UK Brexit referendum campaign
or the US election campaign last fall,
and more recently in the context of the French election campaign.
Yet rumors are not really a new phenomenon.
They are even regarded as the oldest media in the world.
You, like me, when we were at school,
I am sure that we all participated
in spreading dozens of rumors or urban legends.
Where is the problem then?
The problem is that these rumors, this false information,
have become direct competitors
of the information produced by traditional media.
Social networks have taken a very important place
in the media landscape in recent years,
to the point of becoming one of the main sources of online information,
and even becoming the main source of information
for the youngest of us,
even surpassing search engines.
So this evolution at first seems innocuous, but it isn’t.
When using a search engine,
to find information,
the information comes to you according to a logic of popularity.
When you make a query on Google,
Google will isolate sites that address the topic
you want to be informed about,
and its algorithm, PageRank, will look at how the sites are connected.
It will bring you as the first result
the site that received the most links from other sites.
Google actually considers that when you, as an Internet user,
propose a link from one site to another,
in a way, you vote for it.
So Google thinks, “The most important information
is the one the Internet community considered to be the most relevant.”
On Facebook, the logic is very different:
it is not a principle of popularity that prevails but one of proximity.
The most visible information in your Facebook news feed
is that of your closest friends.
How does Facebook go about evaluating this proximity?
Quite simply depending on the intensity of your interactions.
The more you like, the more you comment,
the more you share the information posted by one of your contacts
and the more the edge rank, the Facebook algorithm
considers that this person is important to you,
thus that the information they publish must be brought to your attention.
Again, you will tell me, after all,
being informed first of the people you are closest to
rather than those from whom we are most distant, what is the problem?
The problem is that when Facebook
becomes our first source of political information,
the machine seizes up a little.
You, me, we all have in our Facebook contacts
people whose beliefs or interests we do not share.
We all have this somewhat racist old uncle who posts on the network
the same kind of jokes that wreck family meals,
or that childhood friend who suddenly discovers they have a political fiber
and begins to flood the network with information
from an obscure micro-party.
I don’t know about you, but anyway, I have that kind of friends,
but when these friends post this type of information,
I do not like their posts, I do not comment them,
I do not share them.
Facebook interprets this lack of interaction
like this: it thinks that in fact, this person is not important to me
and that what they say does not matter to me.
The weeks pass, as and when,
what these people post will begin to disappear
from my news feed, to the point of disappearing totally.
And you see what the problem is:
the problem is that if we use nothing but Facebook to get informed,
in the long term, we will be confronted,
only to information which confirms our opinions.
This is called
ideological confinement, ideological bubbles on social networks,
the idea that when you get your information on social networks,
you only see information that reinforce our opinions
while for public debate to function properly in a democracy,
it is necessary to be confronted to contradictory arguments.
Yet, ideological bubbles weren’t invented by Facebook, far from it.
In our everyday lives,
we all live in more or less hermetic ideological bubbles.
It’s a safe bet that your vote is fairly close to your spouse’s,
or you share a number of beliefs with your close friends,
in the same way, the news media you consume
say a lot about your political orientations.
What is the problem then?
The problem is that with Facebook,
ideological confinement, ideological bubbles
have become a real business.
Why?
First, because of Facebook’s economic model:
how does Facebook make money?
Facebook makes money by exposing you, the users,
to advertising.
In another era,
we’d have said that Facebook sells available brain time to advertisers.
We do not say that anymore.
Yet the principle is exactly the same.
The more time you spend on the platform, the more Facebook makes money.
And how does Facebook make you spend time on the platform?
Simply by offering you the contents you like,
which is the one you loved yesterday,
from your closest contacts,
whose beliefs and interests you share.
But this goes even further:
with Facebook, the production of rumors has entered a new era.
It has entered a click economy
which generated a real industrialization of the production of rumors.
You may have heard about this case,
during the US election campaign:
some journalists at Buzzfeed realized
that a large number of pro Trump fake news
emanated from sites hosted in Eastern Europe,
particularly in Macedonia.
They wondered why hundreds of sites in Macedonia
started to produce information, fake news, pro Trump, anti Clinton.
Intuitively, they thought that the candidate’s campaign team
had paid networks in Eastern Europe to produce that false news.
They traveled to the area and the reality was quite different.
They actually found out teenagers,
15, 16 or 17 years of age,
unrelated to the Republican candidate’s campaign team.
Not only did they have no connection
to the Republican candidate’s campaign team,
but their motivation was absolutely not political.
It was much more pragmatic: they wanted to make money.
These Macedonian teenagers realized that pro Trump information
was the most shared information on Facebook.
They thought, maybe we could get some of their income
by inventing false news about Trump,
by posting it on Facebook, bringing US Internet users to our sites
to expose them to advertising and make money.
Their bet was a successful one since for those who managed best among them,
in any case those who were the most productive,
they could generate an income of $ 5,000 per month
while the average monthly income in Macedonia is less than 400 euros.
So you can see that the problem of false news on the internet
is also an economic problem.
But it is not just an economic problem
because, after all, to generate so much income
there has to be people who share this piece of information.
And there are many such people.
The real question to ask is why people share false information,
why do people share rumors?
You will say, maybe the Internet makes us stupid, gullible
to the point of sharing anything.
The reality is a little more complex.
Psychology studies looking at rumors
have shown that people who share rumors
may in fact keep a critical distance from their contents.
It’s not so much that people believe it;
it is rather that they adhere to the world view that is conveyed by this rumor.
And what do rumors tell us today, the one I told you about earlier?
They tell us about the betrayal of elected representatives,
they tell us about the confiscation of speech by the mass media,
they tell us of a certain number of anxieties linked to globalization;
we can see what’s behind fake news,
it is a much deeper problem,
which is a sense of exclusion
felt by an increasing share of society,
exclusion from the common space, the public space, the media space.
And this sense of exclusion
is reflected in a growing distrust
of the political and intellectual elites in our country.
What the Internet has done since the early 2000s
is precisely to allow those people excluded from the media space
to make their voices heard,
to be able to disseminate their arguments in the public debate.
So, of course, this irruption does not always occur very politely,
or very courteously, it is not very pleasant.
But at least it has the merit of forcing us to face reality.
And the reality is that today we live in a very pluralistic society.
And I’m not talking about pluralism of opinions,
I am talking about a pluralism of values,
a pluralism of ways of seeing, ways of conceiving life in society.
So the challenge for the coming years will be to succeed in building
spaces of common debate that respect this pluralism,
that is to say respecting the principle of absolute and unconditional equality
of all citizens to speak and make their voices heard,
but at the same time, spaces of debate allowing
people who share completely different values and ways of seeing the world
to join the discussion.
So how do we do it?
Maybe, in the end, we each have our truth.
Maybe we cannot compare values.
On the other hand,
the criteria from which we distinguish true from false,
fair from unfair, desirable from undesirable,
can be compared.
As for the fake news,
a number of journalists have understood it,
who have embarked on fact-checking initiatives.
Their logic is to say:
we will check the rumors on social networks,
but we will not judge the information according to what they say,
we will judge it according to the method
by which they were produced.
Do they respect the basic principles of journalism?
Crossing their sources, argumenting from evidence,
separating the facts from the comments.
So for the media, the posture is a bit tricky
to be both judge and party,
judging competitors in this information market.
But this posture is to say,
“We can compare the producers of information
depending on the method they follow.”
and it is relevant.
So no, do not censor fake news,
because in that case, the solution could be much worse than the problem.
No, let’s learn to live in a loudspeaker society
where everyone can make their voice heard,
learn to debate in a pluralistic public space,
teach children and adolescents to learn and evaluate
the quality of the information based on the method followed by its producer.
And then also adopt a combative posture.
Let’s stop leaving the web and social networks
to the most retrograde voices.
This has been understood in particular by a number of associations
or civil society organizations
which today offer counter-discourse platforms.
If you are on a social network
and you come across homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist information,
you can go on these platforms
to try to find counter-arguments and post them on social networks.
The challenge is not to convince the one facing you.
Spoiler: you can’t.
No, the challenge is to occupy the land,
to show that other voices can be heard.
What is coming in the next few years, is a true information war,
and in this information war,
we all have a role to play.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I can imagine that in this room,
most of you have a Facebook or Twitter account.
If that’s the case, these past few weeks,
you may have seen this image:
a firefighter who was assaulted during an intervention
and lost one eye.
If you haven’t, perhaps you have seen this other image:
the image of a priest also assaulted at the beginning of the year in Avignon.
Or maybe you’ve heard about the 40,000 migrants
who sleep every night at the hotel at the expense of French taxpayers,
or maybe you have heard
about Saudi Arabia’s campaign funding for certain candidates
or the newly granted voting right
to all French prisoners.
These news items seem totally unrelated.
And yet, they share two common points:
the first is that they are all false;
the second is that they’ve all been shared
tens or even hundreds of thousands of times
on social networks in the past two months.
The spreading of rumors,
false information, fake news,
conspiracy theories on social networks,
has grown to such an extent in recent years
that it has become a real social problem.
The media have talked a lot about it,
notably during the UK Brexit referendum campaign
or the US election campaign last fall,
and more recently in the context of the French election campaign.
Yet rumors are not really a new phenomenon.
They are even regarded as the oldest media in the world.
You, like me, when we were at school,
I am sure that we all participated
in spreading dozens of rumors or urban legends.
Where is the problem then?
The problem is that these rumors, this false information,
have become direct competitors
of the information produced by traditional media.
Social networks have taken a very important place
in the media landscape in recent years,
to the point of becoming one of the main sources of online information,
and even becoming the main source of information
for the youngest of us,
even surpassing search engines.
So this evolution at first seems innocuous, but it isn’t.
When using a search engine,
to find information,
the information comes to you according to a logic of popularity.
When you make a query on Google,
Google will isolate sites that address the topic
you want to be informed about,
and its algorithm, PageRank, will look at how the sites are connected.
It will bring you as the first result
the site that received the most links from other sites.
Google actually considers that when you, as an Internet user,
propose a link from one site to another,
in a way, you vote for it.
So Google thinks, “The most important information
is the one the Internet community considered to be the most relevant.”
On Facebook, the logic is very different:
it is not a principle of popularity that prevails but one of proximity.
The most visible information in your Facebook news feed
is that of your closest friends.
How does Facebook go about evaluating this proximity?
Quite simply depending on the intensity of your interactions.
The more you like, the more you comment,
the more you share the information posted by one of your contacts
and the more the edge rank, the Facebook algorithm
considers that this person is important to you,
thus that the information they publish must be brought to your attention.
Again, you will tell me, after all,
being informed first of the people you are closest to
rather than those from whom we are most distant, what is the problem?
The problem is that when Facebook
becomes our first source of political information,
the machine seizes up a little.
You, me, we all have in our Facebook contacts
people whose beliefs or interests we do not share.
We all have this somewhat racist old uncle who posts on the network
the same kind of jokes that wreck family meals,
or that childhood friend who suddenly discovers they have a political fiber
and begins to flood the network with information
from an obscure micro-party.
I don’t know about you, but anyway, I have that kind of friends,
but when these friends post this type of information,
I do not like their posts, I do not comment them,
I do not share them.
Facebook interprets this lack of interaction
like this: it thinks that in fact, this person is not important to me
and that what they say does not matter to me.
The weeks pass, as and when,
what these people post will begin to disappear
from my news feed, to the point of disappearing totally.
And you see what the problem is:
the problem is that if we use nothing but Facebook to get informed,
in the long term, we will be confronted,
only to information which confirms our opinions.
This is called
ideological confinement, ideological bubbles on social networks,
the idea that when you get your information on social networks,
you only see information that reinforce our opinions
while for public debate to function properly in a democracy,
it is necessary to be confronted to contradictory arguments.
Yet, ideological bubbles weren’t invented by Facebook, far from it.
In our everyday lives,
we all live in more or less hermetic ideological bubbles.
It’s a safe bet that your vote is fairly close to your spouse’s,
or you share a number of beliefs with your close friends,
in the same way, the news media you consume
say a lot about your political orientations.
What is the problem then?
The problem is that with Facebook,
ideological confinement, ideological bubbles
have become a real business.
Why?
First, because of Facebook’s economic model:
how does Facebook make money?
Facebook makes money by exposing you, the users,
to advertising.
In another era,
we’d have said that Facebook sells available brain time to advertisers.
We do not say that anymore.
Yet the principle is exactly the same.
The more time you spend on the platform, the more Facebook makes money.
And how does Facebook make you spend time on the platform?
Simply by offering you the contents you like,
which is the one you loved yesterday,
from your closest contacts,
whose beliefs and interests you share.
But this goes even further:
with Facebook, the production of rumors has entered a new era.
It has entered a click economy
which generated a real industrialization of the production of rumors.
You may have heard about this case,
during the US election campaign:
some journalists at Buzzfeed realized
that a large number of pro Trump fake news
emanated from sites hosted in Eastern Europe,
particularly in Macedonia.
They wondered why hundreds of sites in Macedonia
started to produce information, fake news, pro Trump, anti Clinton.
Intuitively, they thought that the candidate’s campaign team
had paid networks in Eastern Europe to produce that false news.
They traveled to the area and the reality was quite different.
They actually found out teenagers,
15, 16 or 17 years of age,
unrelated to the Republican candidate’s campaign team.
Not only did they have no connection
to the Republican candidate’s campaign team,
but their motivation was absolutely not political.
It was much more pragmatic: they wanted to make money.
These Macedonian teenagers realized that pro Trump information
was the most shared information on Facebook.
They thought, maybe we could get some of their income
by inventing false news about Trump,
by posting it on Facebook, bringing US Internet users to our sites
to expose them to advertising and make money.
Their bet was a successful one since for those who managed best among them,
in any case those who were the most productive,
they could generate an income of $ 5,000 per month
while the average monthly income in Macedonia is less than 400 euros.
So you can see that the problem of false news on the internet
is also an economic problem.
But it is not just an economic problem
because, after all, to generate so much income
there has to be people who share this piece of information.
And there are many such people.
The real question to ask is why people share false information,
why do people share rumors?
You will say, maybe the Internet makes us stupid, gullible
to the point of sharing anything.
The reality is a little more complex.
Psychology studies looking at rumors
have shown that people who share rumors
may in fact keep a critical distance from their contents.
It’s not so much that people believe it;
it is rather that they adhere to the world view that is conveyed by this rumor.
And what do rumors tell us today, the one I told you about earlier?
They tell us about the betrayal of elected representatives,
they tell us about the confiscation of speech by the mass media,
they tell us of a certain number of anxieties linked to globalization;
we can see what’s behind fake news,
it is a much deeper problem,
which is a sense of exclusion
felt by an increasing share of society,
exclusion from the common space, the public space, the media space.
And this sense of exclusion
is reflected in a growing distrust
of the political and intellectual elites in our country.
What the Internet has done since the early 2000s
is precisely to allow those people excluded from the media space
to make their voices heard,
to be able to disseminate their arguments in the public debate.
So, of course, this irruption does not always occur very politely,
or very courteously, it is not very pleasant.
But at least it has the merit of forcing us to face reality.
And the reality is that today we live in a very pluralistic society.
And I’m not talking about pluralism of opinions,
I am talking about a pluralism of values,
a pluralism of ways of seeing, ways of conceiving life in society.
So the challenge for the coming years will be to succeed in building
spaces of common debate that respect this pluralism,
that is to say respecting the principle of absolute and unconditional equality
of all citizens to speak and make their voices heard,
but at the same time, spaces of debate allowing
people who share completely different values and ways of seeing the world
to join the discussion.
So how do we do it?
Maybe, in the end, we each have our truth.
Maybe we cannot compare values.
On the other hand,
the criteria from which we distinguish true from false,
fair from unfair, desirable from undesirable,
can be compared.
As for the fake news,
a number of journalists have understood it,
who have embarked on fact-checking initiatives.
Their logic is to say:
we will check the rumors on social networks,
but we will not judge the information according to what they say,
we will judge it according to the method
by which they were produced.
Do they respect the basic principles of journalism?
Crossing their sources, argumenting from evidence,
separating the facts from the comments.
So for the media, the posture is a bit tricky
to be both judge and party,
judging competitors in this information market.
But this posture is to say,
“We can compare the producers of information
depending on the method they follow.”
and it is relevant.
So no, do not censor fake news,
because in that case, the solution could be much worse than the problem.
No, let’s learn to live in a loudspeaker society
where everyone can make their voice heard,
learn to debate in a pluralistic public space,
teach children and adolescents to learn and evaluate
the quality of the information based on the method followed by its producer.
And then also adopt a combative posture.
Let’s stop leaving the web and social networks
to the most retrograde voices.
This has been understood in particular by a number of associations
or civil society organizations
which today offer counter-discourse platforms.
If you are on a social network
and you come across homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist information,
you can go on these platforms
to try to find counter-arguments and post them on social networks.
The challenge is not to convince the one facing you.
Spoiler: you can’t.
No, the challenge is to occupy the land,
to show that other voices can be heard.
What is coming in the next few years, is a true information war,
and in this information war,
we all have a role to play.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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