I was 17 years old when the Berlin Wall
fell in November of 1989 and growing up
I think many of us always had the
assumption that the Soviet Union would
be the eternal enemy of the United
States and the Enlightenment ideals upon
which it was founded so it was
astounding in 1990 in 1991 to see the
Soviet Union begin to unravel it was as
if democracy and freedom had somehow
magically prevailed over darker forces
perhaps permanently and in fact it led
some commentators most notably Francis
Fukuyama a Stanford professor to state
at that time that we were witnessing the
end of history well in fact nothing
could be really further from the truth
in the early 1990s after this unraveling
Russia faced a huge problem which was
how to bring into the private sector its
over 225,000 state-owned enterprises so
for help they turned to Harvard
University and the United States and
specifically a group within Harvard
called the Harvard Institute for
International Development and they put a
charge a group of elite economists most
specifically Andre Schleifer and it was
also overseen by Lawrence Summers
Lawrence Summers you may know went on to
be president of Harvard and then later
the US Treasury secretary and in this
capacity these economists had tremendous
insights into what was going to be
privatized when it was going to be
privatized and on what terms and because
of they had this knowledge they were in
a position to profit from this mightily
and in fact that’s exactly what they did
she lifers wife Nancy Zimmerman set up a
hedge fund and they started this whole
group started to profit very very
handsomely from the activity happening
in Russia so as you can imagine this
didn’t go over terribly well but in fact
when it all began to unravel in 1996
over ethics concerns all that really
happened was folks got a slap on the
wrist and said don’t do that again
there weren’t any real long-term
consequences
so in fact Andrei Schleifer still
teaches at Harvard this is not a Harvard
bashing talk I know where I am
but the point is that you know we
throughout this exercise Harvard was
supposed to be teaching Russia how to
build rule of law and to build you know
democratic norms around a private
economy and what we in fact taught them
how to do is to build a kleptocracy and
we also taught them that when you do
things that are wrong under rule of law
there may not actually be consequences
so fast forward to 2014 this is a map
that I made of my hometown Baltimore
Maryland and it’s a map of the Twitter
users in Baltimore each dot represents a
user and each line represents a friend
or follower relationship between them
and what you can derive from this kind
of a map is a kind of fractional
distillation of all of the different
little communities within a given city
so I’m kind of on this end over here
where the geeks are and the TEDx and
that sort of thing and it shows you how
distant I am from the folks on the other
end which mostly tend to be younger
african-american folks so I looked at
this kind of capacity in this capability
and said this is an amazing opportunity
to do good for the world we can inform
urban planning we can figure out how to
end segregation and communities we can
do all these wonderful things to improve
cities like Boston or Baltimore but a
different cast of characters looked at
that same capability and said there’s
other stuff that we could do with this
so Russia looked at this and said oh wow
this could help us extend and enhance
our historical program of active
measures which is intended to corrode
and otherwise hinder the operation of
democracy extremist groups both on the
left and the right looked at this and
said this is a way to inflame people and
to get people at each other’s throats
social media companies looked at this
like Facebook and Twitter and said this
is a terrific opportunity to profit we
can sell ads we could even let people
pay for them in rubles how exciting is
that
and then came there’s another company
that came out of this which was
Cambridge analytical which you’ve heard
a lot about and Cambridge analytic I
looked at this as an opportunity to
basically be a mercenary shop to destroy
democracies on contract so
and this was taking root all over Europe
you can see some of the examples of
different political parties both on the
left and the right throughout Europe
that kind of signed on to this program
and so the big question that people have
around Cambridge analytic ‘simply did it
work and how did it work if it did so to
first kind of understand how it works
you need to understand what they claimed
to have been doing what they claimed to
be able to do was to assign every
individual on a social media platform or
another dataset a ocean personality
score ocean stands for openness
conscientiousness extraversion
agreeableness and neuroticism and they
can rank you on like each of a each of
those scales on a score from like zero
to 100 so the idea was that if you could
sort of identify like who’s the most
neurotic and has all these different
kinds of characteristics you would be
able to target those people and get them
to behave in different ways so this is
actually a slide from a deck that was
put together by SCL which was the parent
company of Cambridge analytic us you may
wonder where it came from SCO is a
military psyops firm that was employed
in Afghanistan and this is a dashboard
that they put together to try to target
young unmarried males so it gives you
some sense of like the very fine degree
of control that was possible in terms of
addressing specific audiences and they
basically turned this on to our Western
liberal democracies and so in terms of
how this actually works in practice what
they would do is develop several
different types of messaging depending
on what the personality type was so this
is just three of twelve different
messages that were developed for the
John Bolton super PAC and of course John
Bolton is now the national security
adviser and you can see each of these
YouTube videos was targeted to like a
different type of personality so there’s
some people that might be interested in
like you know being concerned about
Islamic terrorism or whatever there’s
other people that might be you know
responding to a message around military
service and tradition and then there’s
other folks that might be sort of more
swayed by like a more rational kind of
chemistry based argument you
so they had something for everybody and
then what they would do is target these
things that each of these little micro
audiences so you know the real question
you know is really did this actually
work well so the people paying for it
seemed to think it works so this is a
tweet from Aaron Banks who was one of
the main funders behind Briggs it and
the thing to know is that Briggs it and
it’s a Trump thing and all of it is tied
together it’s the same operation and so
basically they said that point nine
seven percent of the population
determined the result of that particular
referendum question it was just six
hundred and fifty thousand people that
made the difference so could you make a
difference of six hundred and fifty
thousand people with those kinds of
numbers feeding into it and the ability
to manipulate people’s behavior so I
have an unfortunate truth for you most
of us tend to think that we’re rational
people that we make rational decisions
based on the inputs that we receive and
then we can’t be so easily swayed and
all of that and maybe that’s true for
each of us individually but the fact of
the matter is is that we behave a lot
more like ants if you can start to
manipulate people as a population and in
a collective way you can have a lot of
power over how they operate and that’s
kind of the mindset that was employed
with this Cambridge analytical thing so
to really demonstrate this I did what
anybody would and I made a mathematical
model and put it into an atom animation
so that you could really understand some
of how this worked and again this is
just really an illustration it’s not um
you know what I would consider to be
scientifically accurate cuz the bottom
line is we can’t really know what these
social media companies are doing to some
extent but if each one of these dots
here is a user and each lie is a friend
relationship and these little activated
colors are news stories that are passing
through the network this is what a
relatively healthy network looks like
you know stories are kind of moving
around nothing particularly awful is
happening you can get a sense of how
information just sort of disperses
through it but what starts to get to be
interesting is when we start to inject
what you might call fake news now fake
news might be also described as like
toxic content or things that are
purposely
dividing people you know by spreading
false messages or inflammatory messages
and you can see that as you start to
inject these kinds of divisive stories
into the network it starts to actually
affect the network so like friend
relationships break have you ever had
the experience of seeing something from
a friend you’re like I can’t take this
anymore you unfriend somebody that’s the
kind of thing that you start to see here
and you also see specific actors that
are sharing certain kinds of stories
changing their position to the in the
network now what really starts to be
crazy is when you put this on to kind of
steroids that are made possible by this
psychographic personality based
targeting and when you target people
this way you’d have massive effects on
the on the network very quickly because
you know exactly who is going to respond
and in what way to the stories that
you’re sharing with them so you can make
really really rapid changes in the
topology of the network by injecting
that kind of content into it and that is
effectively what I believe and what
other researchers believe we’ve been
experiencing since like 2014 2015 in the
United States as we’ve seen that social
media has had a huge impact on our
political discourse so when it’s all
kind of sudden done you end up with this
very sick kind of ailing network that
has a lot fewer connections in it than
it used to have and it makes it a lot
harder for real content good quality
news to actually traverse and get to all
the different nodes that’s the same
number of nodes it’s just less connected
so that’s kind of scary to think about
but a thing to think about when you
analyze a model like that is what
actually happened like you know what
changed and so where anybody’s minds
changed did anybody say like oh I was
gonna vote for this person but now I’m
gonna vote for a different person not
really that’s not the nature of the kind
of change that these people were hoping
to achieve the kind of change that they
were hoping to achieve is exactly what I
said about not spreading good
information about breaking people apart
about creating more extreme and divisive
kind of camps of thought and so what
that also does is when you sort of run
all that data on the net
work it trains the algorithms about what
people want to see it changes the
changes trains the algorithms for what
everyone wants to see so it starts to
get a distorted idea about what normal
is within society and that’s perhaps the
most toxic aspect of this entire
approach and it’s something that the
social media companies are taking almost
no responsibility for fixing so you know
there’s a bit of a moral leadership
problem in Silicon Valley and I say that
not to chastise anyone in particular but
there are some parallels with the
situation in Russia in the early 1990s
that we can draw here so you know it
turns out that Sheryl Sandberg’s mentor
was Lawrence Summers Mark Zuckerberg was
at Harvard under Lawrence Summers
there’s kind of a ethos that if you are
elite enough and you can kind of get
away with it then the rules maybe don’t
apply to you because Facebook has been
making the argument that they don’t
really need any regulation that
everything is just fine you know you
don’t need to monitor us everything is
good but the fact of the matter is that
they’ve created a huge problem for the
world as well as some doing some great
good but on July 25th 2018 Facebook’s
market valuation dropped by a hundred
and twenty billion dollars the single
biggest drop for a private company or a
public company in history just two days
ago Facebook was fined five hundred
thousand pounds by the UK Information
Commissioner’s Office for the Cambridge
analytical scandal that’s five hundred
thousand pounds for whoops actually
accidentally breaking Western democracy
is that right I don’t think that that’s
good so you know we have these other
Silicon Valley leaders some of whom are
I think mostly good people some of whom
were maybe not so good people but at the
end of the day when we start to put
profits and money ahead of our values
and ahead of what we need as a society
and ahead of people will be led astray
and I think that we need to have a
renewed called call for moral leadership
in the context of Silicon Valley so
there are always going to be times all
of us here are the builders and leaders
of our own organizations there’s always
going to be times when we think that
there’s a big inflection point the
change is happening in the world this
time is different
and that it’s the end of history the old
rules don’t apply well I think we’ve
learned through enough of this kind of
experience throughout history but
especially in our recent history that is
just not true all of us are called to
constantly re-evaluate our values
against what we’re doing in our
organizations and to make sure that
we’re doing the right thing and putting
people ahead of profits that we’re
watching out for the consequences of
engineering and generally watching out
for society’s needs so I call on you to
really ask yourselves you know as you
lead your organizations and do your work
are we being responsible are we setting
a good example are we potentially being
naive and are we holding ourselves
accountable to those we claim to serve
because at the end of the day this
really is about what kind of world we
want to live in do we want to live in a
world where there’s special rules for
the elite and that you know some people
get to do one thing and other others
don’t and we don’t worry about the
consequences or do we want to live in a
world where there’s equality and justice
for all I know what kind of world that
I’d like to live in do you thank you [Applause]
fell in November of 1989 and growing up
I think many of us always had the
assumption that the Soviet Union would
be the eternal enemy of the United
States and the Enlightenment ideals upon
which it was founded so it was
astounding in 1990 in 1991 to see the
Soviet Union begin to unravel it was as
if democracy and freedom had somehow
magically prevailed over darker forces
perhaps permanently and in fact it led
some commentators most notably Francis
Fukuyama a Stanford professor to state
at that time that we were witnessing the
end of history well in fact nothing
could be really further from the truth
in the early 1990s after this unraveling
Russia faced a huge problem which was
how to bring into the private sector its
over 225,000 state-owned enterprises so
for help they turned to Harvard
University and the United States and
specifically a group within Harvard
called the Harvard Institute for
International Development and they put a
charge a group of elite economists most
specifically Andre Schleifer and it was
also overseen by Lawrence Summers
Lawrence Summers you may know went on to
be president of Harvard and then later
the US Treasury secretary and in this
capacity these economists had tremendous
insights into what was going to be
privatized when it was going to be
privatized and on what terms and because
of they had this knowledge they were in
a position to profit from this mightily
and in fact that’s exactly what they did
she lifers wife Nancy Zimmerman set up a
hedge fund and they started this whole
group started to profit very very
handsomely from the activity happening
in Russia so as you can imagine this
didn’t go over terribly well but in fact
when it all began to unravel in 1996
over ethics concerns all that really
happened was folks got a slap on the
wrist and said don’t do that again
there weren’t any real long-term
consequences
so in fact Andrei Schleifer still
teaches at Harvard this is not a Harvard
bashing talk I know where I am
but the point is that you know we
throughout this exercise Harvard was
supposed to be teaching Russia how to
build rule of law and to build you know
democratic norms around a private
economy and what we in fact taught them
how to do is to build a kleptocracy and
we also taught them that when you do
things that are wrong under rule of law
there may not actually be consequences
so fast forward to 2014 this is a map
that I made of my hometown Baltimore
Maryland and it’s a map of the Twitter
users in Baltimore each dot represents a
user and each line represents a friend
or follower relationship between them
and what you can derive from this kind
of a map is a kind of fractional
distillation of all of the different
little communities within a given city
so I’m kind of on this end over here
where the geeks are and the TEDx and
that sort of thing and it shows you how
distant I am from the folks on the other
end which mostly tend to be younger
african-american folks so I looked at
this kind of capacity in this capability
and said this is an amazing opportunity
to do good for the world we can inform
urban planning we can figure out how to
end segregation and communities we can
do all these wonderful things to improve
cities like Boston or Baltimore but a
different cast of characters looked at
that same capability and said there’s
other stuff that we could do with this
so Russia looked at this and said oh wow
this could help us extend and enhance
our historical program of active
measures which is intended to corrode
and otherwise hinder the operation of
democracy extremist groups both on the
left and the right looked at this and
said this is a way to inflame people and
to get people at each other’s throats
social media companies looked at this
like Facebook and Twitter and said this
is a terrific opportunity to profit we
can sell ads we could even let people
pay for them in rubles how exciting is
that
and then came there’s another company
that came out of this which was
Cambridge analytical which you’ve heard
a lot about and Cambridge analytic I
looked at this as an opportunity to
basically be a mercenary shop to destroy
democracies on contract so
and this was taking root all over Europe
you can see some of the examples of
different political parties both on the
left and the right throughout Europe
that kind of signed on to this program
and so the big question that people have
around Cambridge analytic ‘simply did it
work and how did it work if it did so to
first kind of understand how it works
you need to understand what they claimed
to have been doing what they claimed to
be able to do was to assign every
individual on a social media platform or
another dataset a ocean personality
score ocean stands for openness
conscientiousness extraversion
agreeableness and neuroticism and they
can rank you on like each of a each of
those scales on a score from like zero
to 100 so the idea was that if you could
sort of identify like who’s the most
neurotic and has all these different
kinds of characteristics you would be
able to target those people and get them
to behave in different ways so this is
actually a slide from a deck that was
put together by SCL which was the parent
company of Cambridge analytic us you may
wonder where it came from SCO is a
military psyops firm that was employed
in Afghanistan and this is a dashboard
that they put together to try to target
young unmarried males so it gives you
some sense of like the very fine degree
of control that was possible in terms of
addressing specific audiences and they
basically turned this on to our Western
liberal democracies and so in terms of
how this actually works in practice what
they would do is develop several
different types of messaging depending
on what the personality type was so this
is just three of twelve different
messages that were developed for the
John Bolton super PAC and of course John
Bolton is now the national security
adviser and you can see each of these
YouTube videos was targeted to like a
different type of personality so there’s
some people that might be interested in
like you know being concerned about
Islamic terrorism or whatever there’s
other people that might be you know
responding to a message around military
service and tradition and then there’s
other folks that might be sort of more
swayed by like a more rational kind of
chemistry based argument you
so they had something for everybody and
then what they would do is target these
things that each of these little micro
audiences so you know the real question
you know is really did this actually
work well so the people paying for it
seemed to think it works so this is a
tweet from Aaron Banks who was one of
the main funders behind Briggs it and
the thing to know is that Briggs it and
it’s a Trump thing and all of it is tied
together it’s the same operation and so
basically they said that point nine
seven percent of the population
determined the result of that particular
referendum question it was just six
hundred and fifty thousand people that
made the difference so could you make a
difference of six hundred and fifty
thousand people with those kinds of
numbers feeding into it and the ability
to manipulate people’s behavior so I
have an unfortunate truth for you most
of us tend to think that we’re rational
people that we make rational decisions
based on the inputs that we receive and
then we can’t be so easily swayed and
all of that and maybe that’s true for
each of us individually but the fact of
the matter is is that we behave a lot
more like ants if you can start to
manipulate people as a population and in
a collective way you can have a lot of
power over how they operate and that’s
kind of the mindset that was employed
with this Cambridge analytical thing so
to really demonstrate this I did what
anybody would and I made a mathematical
model and put it into an atom animation
so that you could really understand some
of how this worked and again this is
just really an illustration it’s not um
you know what I would consider to be
scientifically accurate cuz the bottom
line is we can’t really know what these
social media companies are doing to some
extent but if each one of these dots
here is a user and each lie is a friend
relationship and these little activated
colors are news stories that are passing
through the network this is what a
relatively healthy network looks like
you know stories are kind of moving
around nothing particularly awful is
happening you can get a sense of how
information just sort of disperses
through it but what starts to get to be
interesting is when we start to inject
what you might call fake news now fake
news might be also described as like
toxic content or things that are
purposely
dividing people you know by spreading
false messages or inflammatory messages
and you can see that as you start to
inject these kinds of divisive stories
into the network it starts to actually
affect the network so like friend
relationships break have you ever had
the experience of seeing something from
a friend you’re like I can’t take this
anymore you unfriend somebody that’s the
kind of thing that you start to see here
and you also see specific actors that
are sharing certain kinds of stories
changing their position to the in the
network now what really starts to be
crazy is when you put this on to kind of
steroids that are made possible by this
psychographic personality based
targeting and when you target people
this way you’d have massive effects on
the on the network very quickly because
you know exactly who is going to respond
and in what way to the stories that
you’re sharing with them so you can make
really really rapid changes in the
topology of the network by injecting
that kind of content into it and that is
effectively what I believe and what
other researchers believe we’ve been
experiencing since like 2014 2015 in the
United States as we’ve seen that social
media has had a huge impact on our
political discourse so when it’s all
kind of sudden done you end up with this
very sick kind of ailing network that
has a lot fewer connections in it than
it used to have and it makes it a lot
harder for real content good quality
news to actually traverse and get to all
the different nodes that’s the same
number of nodes it’s just less connected
so that’s kind of scary to think about
but a thing to think about when you
analyze a model like that is what
actually happened like you know what
changed and so where anybody’s minds
changed did anybody say like oh I was
gonna vote for this person but now I’m
gonna vote for a different person not
really that’s not the nature of the kind
of change that these people were hoping
to achieve the kind of change that they
were hoping to achieve is exactly what I
said about not spreading good
information about breaking people apart
about creating more extreme and divisive
kind of camps of thought and so what
that also does is when you sort of run
all that data on the net
work it trains the algorithms about what
people want to see it changes the
changes trains the algorithms for what
everyone wants to see so it starts to
get a distorted idea about what normal
is within society and that’s perhaps the
most toxic aspect of this entire
approach and it’s something that the
social media companies are taking almost
no responsibility for fixing so you know
there’s a bit of a moral leadership
problem in Silicon Valley and I say that
not to chastise anyone in particular but
there are some parallels with the
situation in Russia in the early 1990s
that we can draw here so you know it
turns out that Sheryl Sandberg’s mentor
was Lawrence Summers Mark Zuckerberg was
at Harvard under Lawrence Summers
there’s kind of a ethos that if you are
elite enough and you can kind of get
away with it then the rules maybe don’t
apply to you because Facebook has been
making the argument that they don’t
really need any regulation that
everything is just fine you know you
don’t need to monitor us everything is
good but the fact of the matter is that
they’ve created a huge problem for the
world as well as some doing some great
good but on July 25th 2018 Facebook’s
market valuation dropped by a hundred
and twenty billion dollars the single
biggest drop for a private company or a
public company in history just two days
ago Facebook was fined five hundred
thousand pounds by the UK Information
Commissioner’s Office for the Cambridge
analytical scandal that’s five hundred
thousand pounds for whoops actually
accidentally breaking Western democracy
is that right I don’t think that that’s
good so you know we have these other
Silicon Valley leaders some of whom are
I think mostly good people some of whom
were maybe not so good people but at the
end of the day when we start to put
profits and money ahead of our values
and ahead of what we need as a society
and ahead of people will be led astray
and I think that we need to have a
renewed called call for moral leadership
in the context of Silicon Valley so
there are always going to be times all
of us here are the builders and leaders
of our own organizations there’s always
going to be times when we think that
there’s a big inflection point the
change is happening in the world this
time is different
and that it’s the end of history the old
rules don’t apply well I think we’ve
learned through enough of this kind of
experience throughout history but
especially in our recent history that is
just not true all of us are called to
constantly re-evaluate our values
against what we’re doing in our
organizations and to make sure that
we’re doing the right thing and putting
people ahead of profits that we’re
watching out for the consequences of
engineering and generally watching out
for society’s needs so I call on you to
really ask yourselves you know as you
lead your organizations and do your work
are we being responsible are we setting
a good example are we potentially being
naive and are we holding ourselves
accountable to those we claim to serve
because at the end of the day this
really is about what kind of world we
want to live in do we want to live in a
world where there’s special rules for
the elite and that you know some people
get to do one thing and other others
don’t and we don’t worry about the
consequences or do we want to live in a
world where there’s equality and justice
for all I know what kind of world that
I’d like to live in do you thank you [Applause]
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