[Music]
like many of you my life has been shaped
by the internet about eight years ago I
met my now husband on Craigslist he had
an extra room in his house and I moved
in and for the last 15 years I’ve worked
with my family to run the first internet
paid newsletter as well as to host a
conference dedicated to understanding
the future of Technology and last year
my Craigslist husband and I started a
company by raising money through
strangers that we met through Craigslist
I’m sorry Kickstarter so today I’m here
to talk about something a little
different I’m here standing here in
front of you to warn you about the
threat that the Internet holds for
democracy and if you told me that a year
ago I probably wouldn’t have believed
you a product just laughed at you but a
lot can change in a year and the last 12
months have been pretty heavy we’ve had
increasing inequality intense political
and cultural polarization conflict and
unexpected political outcomes and more
surveillance and control and in the
middle of all this
actors emerging who are eager to take
advantage of the change and uncertainty
that we’re experiencing and the most
effective tool that they have to exert
large-scale influence and manipulation
is the Internet now I first got involved
in this in this question this problem
last year when I moved to New York to
run my company Scout dot a it’s a media
company that focuses on the social
impacts of technology and I was living
there in the home of Trump Tower when
the US election took place so the
circumstances around the election itself
already seemed kind of suspicious to me
because we knew that Russia tried to
hack into the DNC so I started
connecting with political researchers
and technologists because I was trying
to learn more about what had actually
gone on and that’s when I first
came across the work of Jonathan
Albright so Jonathan had scraped the web
and he’d put together a map of news
sites that were publishing during the
election and how they were all connected
and what he found is there there was
actually a whole shadow network of
alt-right and Russian propaganda and
fake news sites including Breitbart news
and these the shadow network was
publishing hundreds of links to one
another and they were doing that because
that would made it able for them to gain
search engine optimization so you can
see around the edges of the map here
those are the shat that’s the shadow
networks that you’re seeing and so what
that meant is that anytime bad news came
out about Trump these sites would
publish their own spin on the story or
another attack on his competitor and
within seconds they could populate
hundreds of additional automated links
to one another and the net effect is
that is that anyone who happened to be
searching the web or trying to learn
about the election in the US or either
specific candidate would see the spin
story ahead of any of the original news
content so talking to Jonathan about his
research was the moment that I really
first started to realize that this was
going to be a really big story and this
was back in December and I started to
spend a lot of time hanging out in
Brooklyn cafes I was doing research I
was setting up VPNs and I was constantly
worrying about people hacking into my
computer and that research led me to a
company called Cambridge analytic ah now
Cambridge analytic ah is a political
messaging firm that was hired by the
Trump campaign to run their online
efforts and over the course of the u.s.
presidential campaign Cambridge analytic
put together personality profiles for
every single u.s. voter and they used
those personality profiles to run
automated engagement scripts that cycled
through 30 to 50,000 ads a day in key
swing districts during the campaign and
because they used Facebook dark ads to
do this that means that they only show
up in the feed of the people who were
being targeted
which means that they were able to skirt
the regulatory I of the Federal
Elections Commission now it’s no
accident that the biggest donor to
Trump’s campaign and the largest
investor in Cambridge analytic and one
of the other largest investors in
Breitbart news are the same person and
Cambridge analytic Oh was actually using
that shadow news network that we talked
about earlier to track who is clicking
on which ads and to improve their ad
targeting
to those personalities and one of the
people that I talked to to learn more
about all this as I was trying to figure
out what was going on with a guy named
Samuel Woolley Sam is the head of the
Oxford computational propaganda project
and he and his colleagues have been
tracking how the Internet has been used
to spread misinformation for the last
ten years since they first started
notice that this was happening during
the Arab Spring and over the years
they’ve actually built up a network of
sources who are working on these things
they’re building different parts of this
and those sources help them understand
what they’re seeing online so Sam
brought me up to speed on a related but
separate trend which is armies of bots
that are being used to manipulate and
shape online conversations to create
large shifts in public opinion so
individuals and governments around the
world are actually creating hundreds and
thousands of fake social media profiles
that they’re farming out to the highest
bidder and what that means is that
around the world campaigns are using
these to do things like magnify the
voices of the political candidate so
that they appear more popular than they
really are they’re using them to comment
on high profile news websites like the
New York Times and The Washington Post
to help skew the conversation around
significant news stories they’re using
them to colonise the hashtags of their
opponents and to create doubt about
their personal and professional life and
they’re also using them to silence an
intimidate journalists slash anyone who
might you know have an opinion or be
critical of their candidate so in the
last few weeks of the u.s. presidential
campaign both sides of the aisle where
we’re using BOTS but as Sam told me
Botts outweighed hillary bots by a
factor of five to one and now when we
look at these technologies it’s really
important to remember that none of this
is illegal they’re actually like just
really great advertising techniques that
are now being applied to politics and
many of them have actually been used
individually to some effects before but
together they make up a nearly
impenetrable voter manipulation machine
and by leveraging automated emotional
manipulation alongside these armies of
bots alongside Facebook dark posts and
fake news networks and a be testing
actors all over the world are now able
to tap into this weaponized AI
propaganda machine to prey on the
personalities of individuals and to
create large shifts in public opinion
now Cambridge analytics has already been
hired to to run messaging for the White
House and they’re now targeting
elections in India and Kenya and
Australia and all across South America
because data personal data protections
there are very lakhs and breitbart
actually recently earlier this year
opened offices in France and Germany
because they wanted to try and influence
those elections and candidates in Mexico
and brexit and other you know dozens of
other countries all over the world have
all used these bot armies to try and
help them win their campaigns now in
China there’s something kind of related
but slightly different going on which is
that in China the government has
instituted a system called sesame credit
which gives every Chinese citizen a
score based on their social media
postings and they’re known associates
and their purchases actually which means
that you know if you anyone who does
something or says something or associate
with someone or buy something that could
be construed as anti China can now be
barred from getting on a plane and take
leaving the country or taking public
transportation and that system is
voluntary now but by 2020 it’s going to
be mandatory
so this problem really isn’t going away
by its on its own anytime soon and
that’s because the economics of the
Internet are really now biased towards
monopolization I talked about China
earlier because China and Silicon Valley
are two for like the two centers of
gravity they’re that are really driving
the future of the Internet and in China
the top priority is surveillance and
citizen control whereas in Silicon
Valley investors are demanding monopoly
business models that are built on
habit-forming products these are hard
incentives at the root of the new
Internet and until policy makers and
industry leaders change the game these
forces will continue to be destructive
to democracy Silicon Valley spent the
last ten years building digital
addiction machines things like phones
and apps and platforms and in 2017
political parties and nation states all
over the world learned how to hijack
them or they built their own platforms
so what do we do about this seems like
kind of a big problem one of the easiest
things that you can do is to talk to
your friends and family about the
internet economics that are currently
undercutting democracy if we are aware
that our social media profiles are being
used to manipulate our opinions we are
much less likely to be manipulatable
ourselves and for me the result of all
that sitting around in cafes doing
research in Brooklyn was an article that
I wrote called the rise of the
weaponized AI propaganda machine now it
was read my goal with that was to create
a shareable object that anyone could use
to help tell their friends and family
what was going on here and it was read
it’s now gonna read nearly 500,000 times
BuzzFeed wrote not one but two articles
calling me a conspiracy theorist which I
take as a personal badge of honor and
Tim berners-lee who was the creator of
the Internet cited the article as one of
the three biggest challenges facing the
Internet and his in its 25th year
anniversary post that he wrote
so the second thing that you can do is
to reach out to policymakers because
policy change is slow by nature but
there is an active and a really
passionate group of leaders
internationally and particularly in
Europe who are working on solving this
problem as a result of Scouts work on
this issue I was invited this year to
attend the Brussels forum which is a
group of two and 50-plus global leaders
people like the president of Estonia and
the Deputy Secretary General of NATO and
I went there to debate Sweden’s former
prime minister about whether or not the
Internet is a force for democracy so
when we started the debate about 80
percent of people thought it was a force
for democracy but by the time that I’d
shared with them everything that I’d
learned this year only 33 percent did
and while I am here talking to you my
co-founder is in Washington DC briefing
members of Congress and political
strategists about the same thing so here
in Lithuania this is especially
important because you know but wherever
we happen to live our local lawmakers
need to know about this just as much as
the lawmakers in Washington DC so my
request to you is call their offices
let’s write them letters let’s make
appointments to talk to them about it
because they can’t fix what they don’t
know or don’t understand now the third
thing that you can do is to make friends
at tech companies because one of the
best ways to create change within the
companies that make up the the
architecture of the weaponized AI
propaganda machine companies like
Facebook and Google is through their
employees they love their employees and
their employees are generally really
great people and they want their
employees to be happy so I’ve watched
again and again as Facebook has changed
its public stance about the role that it
plays to ameliorate its employees
immediately after the election
Mark Zuckerberg came out went on TV and
categorically denied that Facebook had
had any role in the election whatsoever
but after all the media and employee
pressure mounted he changed his tune and
in April Facebook released an internal
research report that found not only had
the company been involved
and been used for misinformation during
the u.s. election but they actually
deleted 30,000 fake profiles ahead of
the election in France so if you have
friends who work at tech companies or if
you work at a tech company make sure
that they understand how tech products
are being weaponized to undermine
democracy because not only will it help
them to create better more ethical
products themselves but it will give
them the leverage that they need to
start these kinds of conversations
internally at their companies now the
last and the most important thing that
you can do is to join the frontlines
building the next Internet now we’re
living through an unprecedented cyber
attack on our freedom on our democracy
and on our way of life I came here to
Vilnius a year ago I learned that
Lithuanian are constantly under attack
civic infrastructure your your culture
and at the time Trump was still at that
time a laughingstock really in the u.s.
he wasn’t taken seriously as a candidate
but I’m here today to let you know that
we in the u.s. are now activated the US
intelligence community the tech
community and citizens they’ve we’ve all
woken up to the threat posed by Russia
by autocrats and by private political
empires that threaten our way of life
and it’s time for us collectively to
build a new alliance that’s dedicated to
the creation of a truly democratic
internet because together we can create
a new internet thank you
[Music]
like many of you my life has been shaped
by the internet about eight years ago I
met my now husband on Craigslist he had
an extra room in his house and I moved
in and for the last 15 years I’ve worked
with my family to run the first internet
paid newsletter as well as to host a
conference dedicated to understanding
the future of Technology and last year
my Craigslist husband and I started a
company by raising money through
strangers that we met through Craigslist
I’m sorry Kickstarter so today I’m here
to talk about something a little
different I’m here standing here in
front of you to warn you about the
threat that the Internet holds for
democracy and if you told me that a year
ago I probably wouldn’t have believed
you a product just laughed at you but a
lot can change in a year and the last 12
months have been pretty heavy we’ve had
increasing inequality intense political
and cultural polarization conflict and
unexpected political outcomes and more
surveillance and control and in the
middle of all this
actors emerging who are eager to take
advantage of the change and uncertainty
that we’re experiencing and the most
effective tool that they have to exert
large-scale influence and manipulation
is the Internet now I first got involved
in this in this question this problem
last year when I moved to New York to
run my company Scout dot a it’s a media
company that focuses on the social
impacts of technology and I was living
there in the home of Trump Tower when
the US election took place so the
circumstances around the election itself
already seemed kind of suspicious to me
because we knew that Russia tried to
hack into the DNC so I started
connecting with political researchers
and technologists because I was trying
to learn more about what had actually
gone on and that’s when I first
came across the work of Jonathan
Albright so Jonathan had scraped the web
and he’d put together a map of news
sites that were publishing during the
election and how they were all connected
and what he found is there there was
actually a whole shadow network of
alt-right and Russian propaganda and
fake news sites including Breitbart news
and these the shadow network was
publishing hundreds of links to one
another and they were doing that because
that would made it able for them to gain
search engine optimization so you can
see around the edges of the map here
those are the shat that’s the shadow
networks that you’re seeing and so what
that meant is that anytime bad news came
out about Trump these sites would
publish their own spin on the story or
another attack on his competitor and
within seconds they could populate
hundreds of additional automated links
to one another and the net effect is
that is that anyone who happened to be
searching the web or trying to learn
about the election in the US or either
specific candidate would see the spin
story ahead of any of the original news
content so talking to Jonathan about his
research was the moment that I really
first started to realize that this was
going to be a really big story and this
was back in December and I started to
spend a lot of time hanging out in
Brooklyn cafes I was doing research I
was setting up VPNs and I was constantly
worrying about people hacking into my
computer and that research led me to a
company called Cambridge analytic ah now
Cambridge analytic ah is a political
messaging firm that was hired by the
Trump campaign to run their online
efforts and over the course of the u.s.
presidential campaign Cambridge analytic
put together personality profiles for
every single u.s. voter and they used
those personality profiles to run
automated engagement scripts that cycled
through 30 to 50,000 ads a day in key
swing districts during the campaign and
because they used Facebook dark ads to
do this that means that they only show
up in the feed of the people who were
being targeted
which means that they were able to skirt
the regulatory I of the Federal
Elections Commission now it’s no
accident that the biggest donor to
Trump’s campaign and the largest
investor in Cambridge analytic and one
of the other largest investors in
Breitbart news are the same person and
Cambridge analytic Oh was actually using
that shadow news network that we talked
about earlier to track who is clicking
on which ads and to improve their ad
targeting
to those personalities and one of the
people that I talked to to learn more
about all this as I was trying to figure
out what was going on with a guy named
Samuel Woolley Sam is the head of the
Oxford computational propaganda project
and he and his colleagues have been
tracking how the Internet has been used
to spread misinformation for the last
ten years since they first started
notice that this was happening during
the Arab Spring and over the years
they’ve actually built up a network of
sources who are working on these things
they’re building different parts of this
and those sources help them understand
what they’re seeing online so Sam
brought me up to speed on a related but
separate trend which is armies of bots
that are being used to manipulate and
shape online conversations to create
large shifts in public opinion so
individuals and governments around the
world are actually creating hundreds and
thousands of fake social media profiles
that they’re farming out to the highest
bidder and what that means is that
around the world campaigns are using
these to do things like magnify the
voices of the political candidate so
that they appear more popular than they
really are they’re using them to comment
on high profile news websites like the
New York Times and The Washington Post
to help skew the conversation around
significant news stories they’re using
them to colonise the hashtags of their
opponents and to create doubt about
their personal and professional life and
they’re also using them to silence an
intimidate journalists slash anyone who
might you know have an opinion or be
critical of their candidate so in the
last few weeks of the u.s. presidential
campaign both sides of the aisle where
we’re using BOTS but as Sam told me
Botts outweighed hillary bots by a
factor of five to one and now when we
look at these technologies it’s really
important to remember that none of this
is illegal they’re actually like just
really great advertising techniques that
are now being applied to politics and
many of them have actually been used
individually to some effects before but
together they make up a nearly
impenetrable voter manipulation machine
and by leveraging automated emotional
manipulation alongside these armies of
bots alongside Facebook dark posts and
fake news networks and a be testing
actors all over the world are now able
to tap into this weaponized AI
propaganda machine to prey on the
personalities of individuals and to
create large shifts in public opinion
now Cambridge analytics has already been
hired to to run messaging for the White
House and they’re now targeting
elections in India and Kenya and
Australia and all across South America
because data personal data protections
there are very lakhs and breitbart
actually recently earlier this year
opened offices in France and Germany
because they wanted to try and influence
those elections and candidates in Mexico
and brexit and other you know dozens of
other countries all over the world have
all used these bot armies to try and
help them win their campaigns now in
China there’s something kind of related
but slightly different going on which is
that in China the government has
instituted a system called sesame credit
which gives every Chinese citizen a
score based on their social media
postings and they’re known associates
and their purchases actually which means
that you know if you anyone who does
something or says something or associate
with someone or buy something that could
be construed as anti China can now be
barred from getting on a plane and take
leaving the country or taking public
transportation and that system is
voluntary now but by 2020 it’s going to
be mandatory
so this problem really isn’t going away
by its on its own anytime soon and
that’s because the economics of the
Internet are really now biased towards
monopolization I talked about China
earlier because China and Silicon Valley
are two for like the two centers of
gravity they’re that are really driving
the future of the Internet and in China
the top priority is surveillance and
citizen control whereas in Silicon
Valley investors are demanding monopoly
business models that are built on
habit-forming products these are hard
incentives at the root of the new
Internet and until policy makers and
industry leaders change the game these
forces will continue to be destructive
to democracy Silicon Valley spent the
last ten years building digital
addiction machines things like phones
and apps and platforms and in 2017
political parties and nation states all
over the world learned how to hijack
them or they built their own platforms
so what do we do about this seems like
kind of a big problem one of the easiest
things that you can do is to talk to
your friends and family about the
internet economics that are currently
undercutting democracy if we are aware
that our social media profiles are being
used to manipulate our opinions we are
much less likely to be manipulatable
ourselves and for me the result of all
that sitting around in cafes doing
research in Brooklyn was an article that
I wrote called the rise of the
weaponized AI propaganda machine now it
was read my goal with that was to create
a shareable object that anyone could use
to help tell their friends and family
what was going on here and it was read
it’s now gonna read nearly 500,000 times
BuzzFeed wrote not one but two articles
calling me a conspiracy theorist which I
take as a personal badge of honor and
Tim berners-lee who was the creator of
the Internet cited the article as one of
the three biggest challenges facing the
Internet and his in its 25th year
anniversary post that he wrote
so the second thing that you can do is
to reach out to policymakers because
policy change is slow by nature but
there is an active and a really
passionate group of leaders
internationally and particularly in
Europe who are working on solving this
problem as a result of Scouts work on
this issue I was invited this year to
attend the Brussels forum which is a
group of two and 50-plus global leaders
people like the president of Estonia and
the Deputy Secretary General of NATO and
I went there to debate Sweden’s former
prime minister about whether or not the
Internet is a force for democracy so
when we started the debate about 80
percent of people thought it was a force
for democracy but by the time that I’d
shared with them everything that I’d
learned this year only 33 percent did
and while I am here talking to you my
co-founder is in Washington DC briefing
members of Congress and political
strategists about the same thing so here
in Lithuania this is especially
important because you know but wherever
we happen to live our local lawmakers
need to know about this just as much as
the lawmakers in Washington DC so my
request to you is call their offices
let’s write them letters let’s make
appointments to talk to them about it
because they can’t fix what they don’t
know or don’t understand now the third
thing that you can do is to make friends
at tech companies because one of the
best ways to create change within the
companies that make up the the
architecture of the weaponized AI
propaganda machine companies like
Facebook and Google is through their
employees they love their employees and
their employees are generally really
great people and they want their
employees to be happy so I’ve watched
again and again as Facebook has changed
its public stance about the role that it
plays to ameliorate its employees
immediately after the election
Mark Zuckerberg came out went on TV and
categorically denied that Facebook had
had any role in the election whatsoever
but after all the media and employee
pressure mounted he changed his tune and
in April Facebook released an internal
research report that found not only had
the company been involved
and been used for misinformation during
the u.s. election but they actually
deleted 30,000 fake profiles ahead of
the election in France so if you have
friends who work at tech companies or if
you work at a tech company make sure
that they understand how tech products
are being weaponized to undermine
democracy because not only will it help
them to create better more ethical
products themselves but it will give
them the leverage that they need to
start these kinds of conversations
internally at their companies now the
last and the most important thing that
you can do is to join the frontlines
building the next Internet now we’re
living through an unprecedented cyber
attack on our freedom on our democracy
and on our way of life I came here to
Vilnius a year ago I learned that
Lithuanian are constantly under attack
civic infrastructure your your culture
and at the time Trump was still at that
time a laughingstock really in the u.s.
he wasn’t taken seriously as a candidate
but I’m here today to let you know that
we in the u.s. are now activated the US
intelligence community the tech
community and citizens they’ve we’ve all
woken up to the threat posed by Russia
by autocrats and by private political
empires that threaten our way of life
and it’s time for us collectively to
build a new alliance that’s dedicated to
the creation of a truly democratic
internet because together we can create
a new internet thank you
[Music]
Please follow and like us: