I was 17 years old in November 1989 when
the Berlin Wall fell and when I was
growing up I always had the feeling 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 the
beginning in 1990 to see the Soviet
Union begin to unravel and naively I
start had this feeling that somehow or
another democracy and freedom had
magically prevailed over darker forces
and some observers most famously Francis
Fukuyama observed in 1992 that we were
witnessing the end of history what a
grand thought but in fact nothing could
be further from the truth
Russia faced a huge problem around 1992
which was how to privatize quickly all
of its 225,000 state-owned enterprises
and for help they turned to Harvard
University and an elite group of
economists they’re led by a man named
Andre Schleifer on the left and overseen
by Lawrence Summers Lawrence Summers
went on to become the president of
Harvard University and later became the
US Treasury secretary and this group of
economists started to privatize very
quickly all of the businesses in the
Soviet Union but the problem was was
that they’ve had really intimate
knowledge about what was going to be
privatized by whom and when and what on
what terms so they started to figure out
that they were in a unique position to
profit from this knowledge so Nancy
Zimmerman who turned out to be Andre
Schleifer his wife started a hedge fund
and made massive profits based on the
knowledge of what was happening in
Russia at the time and this continued
with other members of this Harvard
International Institute for
International Development which started
to really have a corruption problem
because so many people involved were
profiting so in effect while Russia
invited Harvard
the United States to teach them how to
set up good governance and the rule of
law and a capitalist economy what we
taught them how to do was to build a
kleptocracy so as this situation started
to collapse in 1996 some apologies were
issued Larry Summers said he was sorry
for that this happened there were some
small fines issued but there wasn’t
really any kind of big consequence for
anyone and really it was just people got
a slap on the wrist
so in fact fly fur is still teaching at
Harvard so not only did we not
demonstrate how to do good governance
and install the rule of law we
demonstrated how to avoid accountability
when you get caught stealing and Harvard
undergraduates got the message that if
you were elite enough the rules simply
didn’t apply to you so let’s fast
forward to 2014 this is a map that I
made of my hometown Baltimore Maryland
in the United States and it’s a map of
all the twitter users in the city at
least all the ones I could get and each
dot represents a user and each line
represents a friend connection between
them and what you can also see in this
is communities of interest that start to
emerge and each color indicates that to
some extent but you can see that people
are very clearly grouped and so I saw
this and felt gee this is a really
terrific tool for helping to improve
society and understanding how society
works and urban planners could use this
to you know increase their knowledge of
how things functioned but a different
cast of characters saw the same kind of
data and had different thoughts so
you’ve heard about Cambridge analytic
and the efforts in the United States and
also here in Mexico and throughout
Europe to use social media data to try
to influence how politics and how
society works it’s really the opposite
of the vision that I had so Russia also
saw this and married the idea to their
historic program of active measures
which is really their way of inflicting
conquer creating conflict in an estate
that they want to try
to take over or otherwise control by
injecting disinformation and other kinds
of exploiting the divisions that exist
in society so the Cambridge analytical
effort coupled with this effort from
Russia really pulled things in this
general direction and started to create
serious problems throughout the West and
in fact you know the goal of active
measures is actually to capture the
economy foreign policy and defense and
various parties throughout Europe both
on the left and the right were set up to
try to promote this kind of ethnic
fascism that really suited Russia’s
interests and was also compatible with
the people funding Cambridge analytic as
interests so around the beginning of
2017 some of us that were looking at
this from a data perspective started to
figure out what was going on and this is
a very complicated data visualization
it’s not important you try to understand
this fully right now but what we were
able to do here was to figure out who
was connected to Cambridge analytic
which players were funding things and
that’s quite difficult when you start to
consider shell corporations and those
sorts of things so this is a tool that
we use to try to understand what was
happening with Cambridge analytic oh and
you probably had heard about in the
United States about 87 million or maybe
even hundreds of millions of Facebook
users profiles were captured to try to
understand personality data and friend
networks and all that stuff in order to
direct advertising at these folks and
the same thing was actually done here in
Mexico Cambridge analytic apart nerd
with a firm called piggy our pig GI to
try to capture this data and here in
Mexico by offering free Wi-Fi access in
exchange for personal data and being
able to direct ads at people and they
kind of caught got caught in the act of
doing this early or this year in 2018
and the founder of piggies Joel Philips
said about Cambridge analytic it maybe
they weren’t the best people to take
money from so it’s an issue here as well
now the question that a lot of people
have is how
this actually work this is a slide taken
from Cambridge analytic ah’s website and
the way that they attempted to influence
society was by assigning five different
scores this is called the Big Five
personality profile test to each person
so they assigned two score for openness
conscientiousness extraversion
agreeableness and neuroticism and based
on those scores their estimation is that
they were able to direct content that
would resonate the most fully with each
individual and so Cambridge analytic
‘got this technique from their parent
company which is called SCO or strategic
communications Laboratories and they had
actually gotten their start during
wartime psychological operations so this
is actually a slide from some of SCL
materials from Afghanistan talking about
how to target young unmarried males and
you can see that there’s a whole bunch
of parameters and whatnot that they’re
using to try to get down on who exactly
they want to reach but the idea is to
change people’s behavior and they would
use techniques like this so suppose you
had a piece of beachfront property
yourself and you wanted to keep people
from swimming there you could put up a
sign that says no swimming private
property or you could put up a sign that
says no swimming sharks sighted and
which one do you think would work better
so this was the kind of stuff that they
were doing in Afghanistan and then
pushing into their work in Cambridge
analytic oh and so they used a technique
called dark posts which at the time
allowed advertisers to direct specific
messages to specific personality types
so this is a sample of three different
images that were used with videos that
were created by the John Bolton super
PAC John Bolton you may recognize the
name he’s now the national security
adviser of the United States which
probably should cause you some concern
but anyway they would direct specific
messages to each individual personality
type so one of these might be like
inciting fear of Islam and immigrants
another one might be talking about
military tradition another one might be
being more about science and rationality
and that kind of thing so they figured
they could resonate further by targeting
his ads very specifically and so the
question is did any of this actually
work and I would say that in general the
jury is still a little bit out but if
you ask Aaron Banks who was one of the
leading funders of brexit and a lot of
Cambridge analytic ‘iz work there he
says it did he said that they created 1
million online followers that reached
upwards of 25 million most weeks the
engagement was huge otta
but if you actually look at the
statistics the votes the number of votes
that it took to determine brexit was
just 650,000 so it didn’t take changing
very many people’s behavior to actually
make a difference in an election like
brexit so a lot of us kind of think hmm
you know does this really add up like
I’m a rational person I make decisions
based on information that I receive I
think clearly how can you know people
whispering into my ear on the internet
change my mind and I feel yeah you know
that’s a perfectly valid point of view
but at the end of the day people when
they start to operate as a collective
organism don’t really act like rational
individuals they act a little bit more
like ants and that’s no disrespect to
ants we love ants but if you really want
to manipulate people you need to think
of them sort of as a collective and you
need to think about sort of how you’re
going to corral them into doing what you
want them to do so naturally to model
this I did what anybody would do which
is to create a mathematical model that
simulates exactly how this might work
and so what we have here is two distinct
social networks that we will do or Mille
and you can see that as we inject normal
kinds of news stories into those
networks they tend to travel around and
even move back and forth between them
without too much trouble everything is
sort of going as you’d expect this is
sort of what I would describe how say
like social media worked prior to these
disinformation efforts and you can also
see that the network doesn’t really
change very much you know it might
change very slowly maybe some of you
would add a new friend connection here
or there but mostly it stays kind of the
same and you know this can continue for
basically indefinitely as long as we’re
injecting normal kinds of news stories
into it but when we start to inject
of kinds of news stories what some
people might call fake news you can
start to see some changes start to
appear in the network for one thing some
voices from the edge start to move
towards the center and get more
attention because they’re saying things
that resonate with people in a certain
way and you know that can continue for
some time you can see that the network
doesn’t really get to affected by that
but it does you know reveal some changes
as those kinds of stories move through
the network but here’s where it gets
really interesting when we start to
inject stories into the network that are
targeted at people that we know are
going to resonate with those stories so
that they can get maximum reach we can
start to affect the composition of the
network very very quickly and so as you
can see as we keep injecting more of
these targeted kinds of news stories
into the network it keeps on sort of
falling apart really and it makes it
harder for other kinds of information to
move more freely and that’s really kind
of what the end result of this kind of
activity can tend to be is that real
normal good news stories have a harder
time moving around but also crucially
we’ve retrained the algorithms that
choose what everyone sees to think that
they don’t want to see stuff that they
did want to see before it’s a big change
so you can see normal stories have kind
of a harder time getting around now and
you’ve got this kind of hobbled broken
Network so you might be skeptical and
say well how does this model that you
know this guy came up with reflect
what’s actually happening in social
media it’s just a black box right well
sure it’s just a black box but so is
Facebook right you know you don’t have
any idea what their algorithm is doing
we don’t have any ability to understand
that all we know is that we’re doing it
and that social media we know works in
something like this way right so in
effect what we’re doing is operating the
world’s largest sociological experiment
that has ever been done on live subjects
and as damage occurs we’re you know
mitigating the damage after the fact as
best we can without full knowledge of
what even was done in the first place
it’s crazy
so you know you can ask also in that
model what actually happened where
people’s minds actually changed
certainly we think probably behavior
change because people found out about
different things and interacted with
people in different ways maybe some
people were more engaged and other
people were less engaged but in reality
probably not too many people’s minds
were actually changed but again the key
thing is that the algorithms that decide
what everybody sees got fed bad
information because of this altered
behavior so if you think about Facebook
on July 25th 2018 they suffered a loss
of market capitalization of over a
hundred and twenty billion dollars in a
single day and that was mostly due to
fallout from the Cambridge analytic a
scandal now you know you hear from both
Facebook and Twitter Jack Dorsey runs
Twitter that they don’t need oversight
that they can figure this out on their
own they don’t need to be regulated
everything’s gonna be okay
just give us maybe a slap on the wrist
and we’ll move on and indeed Sheryl
Sandberg who’s the CEO CEO of Facebook
guess who her mentor was Larry Summers
at Harvard and so you know you kind of
have the feeling that there’s this sense
that if your elite enough the rules
don’t apply to you and that Harvard and
Society are holding Zuckerberg the
executive to a different standard than
what they wanted to hold Zuckerberg the
undergraduate to when he went to Harvard
and so you know these people these are
other executives in Silicon Valley we
have kind of a moral leadership problem
in Silicon Valley and these are not
necessarily bad people maybe Elizabeth
Tom’s as bad people but the rest of them
you know there’s some of them are my
friends and friends with Jack Dorsey but
there’s kind of this you know we aren’t
putting in people over profits there’s
this huge desire to make money and not
to pay attention to ethics and to and to
people and we’re not necessarily being
account
so I would encourage you to you know
whenever anybody tells you that it’s the
end of history and that things are gonna
automatically take care of themselves
and we don’t need regulation and please
leave us alone and we’re elite then it
the rules don’t apply to us it’s not
true right there’s always work that we
have to do in terms of having a moral
compass of pointing our society in the
right direction of putting people ahead
of profits and you know it’s a
tremendous responsibility that we have
so all of us here as builders as
creators of our companies and
institutions I would ask you to ask
yourselves are we doing what’s right are
we doing with what’s ethical are we
being accountable to the people that we
serve are we being naive and its really
boils down to the question of what kind
of world do we want to live in do we
want to live in a world where people
that are elite don’t have to obey the
rules or do we want to live in a world
where there’s equality and justice for
everyone I know what kind of world I
want to live in do you thanks [Applause]
the Berlin Wall fell and when I was
growing up I always had the feeling 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 the
beginning in 1990 to see the Soviet
Union begin to unravel and naively I
start had this feeling that somehow or
another democracy and freedom had
magically prevailed over darker forces
and some observers most famously Francis
Fukuyama observed in 1992 that we were
witnessing the end of history what a
grand thought but in fact nothing could
be further from the truth
Russia faced a huge problem around 1992
which was how to privatize quickly all
of its 225,000 state-owned enterprises
and for help they turned to Harvard
University and an elite group of
economists they’re led by a man named
Andre Schleifer on the left and overseen
by Lawrence Summers Lawrence Summers
went on to become the president of
Harvard University and later became the
US Treasury secretary and this group of
economists started to privatize very
quickly all of the businesses in the
Soviet Union but the problem was was
that they’ve had really intimate
knowledge about what was going to be
privatized by whom and when and what on
what terms so they started to figure out
that they were in a unique position to
profit from this knowledge so Nancy
Zimmerman who turned out to be Andre
Schleifer his wife started a hedge fund
and made massive profits based on the
knowledge of what was happening in
Russia at the time and this continued
with other members of this Harvard
International Institute for
International Development which started
to really have a corruption problem
because so many people involved were
profiting so in effect while Russia
invited Harvard
the United States to teach them how to
set up good governance and the rule of
law and a capitalist economy what we
taught them how to do was to build a
kleptocracy so as this situation started
to collapse in 1996 some apologies were
issued Larry Summers said he was sorry
for that this happened there were some
small fines issued but there wasn’t
really any kind of big consequence for
anyone and really it was just people got
a slap on the wrist
so in fact fly fur is still teaching at
Harvard so not only did we not
demonstrate how to do good governance
and install the rule of law we
demonstrated how to avoid accountability
when you get caught stealing and Harvard
undergraduates got the message that if
you were elite enough the rules simply
didn’t apply to you so let’s fast
forward to 2014 this is a map that I
made of my hometown Baltimore Maryland
in the United States and it’s a map of
all the twitter users in the city at
least all the ones I could get and each
dot represents a user and each line
represents a friend connection between
them and what you can also see in this
is communities of interest that start to
emerge and each color indicates that to
some extent but you can see that people
are very clearly grouped and so I saw
this and felt gee this is a really
terrific tool for helping to improve
society and understanding how society
works and urban planners could use this
to you know increase their knowledge of
how things functioned but a different
cast of characters saw the same kind of
data and had different thoughts so
you’ve heard about Cambridge analytic
and the efforts in the United States and
also here in Mexico and throughout
Europe to use social media data to try
to influence how politics and how
society works it’s really the opposite
of the vision that I had so Russia also
saw this and married the idea to their
historic program of active measures
which is really their way of inflicting
conquer creating conflict in an estate
that they want to try
to take over or otherwise control by
injecting disinformation and other kinds
of exploiting the divisions that exist
in society so the Cambridge analytical
effort coupled with this effort from
Russia really pulled things in this
general direction and started to create
serious problems throughout the West and
in fact you know the goal of active
measures is actually to capture the
economy foreign policy and defense and
various parties throughout Europe both
on the left and the right were set up to
try to promote this kind of ethnic
fascism that really suited Russia’s
interests and was also compatible with
the people funding Cambridge analytic as
interests so around the beginning of
2017 some of us that were looking at
this from a data perspective started to
figure out what was going on and this is
a very complicated data visualization
it’s not important you try to understand
this fully right now but what we were
able to do here was to figure out who
was connected to Cambridge analytic
which players were funding things and
that’s quite difficult when you start to
consider shell corporations and those
sorts of things so this is a tool that
we use to try to understand what was
happening with Cambridge analytic oh and
you probably had heard about in the
United States about 87 million or maybe
even hundreds of millions of Facebook
users profiles were captured to try to
understand personality data and friend
networks and all that stuff in order to
direct advertising at these folks and
the same thing was actually done here in
Mexico Cambridge analytic apart nerd
with a firm called piggy our pig GI to
try to capture this data and here in
Mexico by offering free Wi-Fi access in
exchange for personal data and being
able to direct ads at people and they
kind of caught got caught in the act of
doing this early or this year in 2018
and the founder of piggies Joel Philips
said about Cambridge analytic it maybe
they weren’t the best people to take
money from so it’s an issue here as well
now the question that a lot of people
have is how
this actually work this is a slide taken
from Cambridge analytic ah’s website and
the way that they attempted to influence
society was by assigning five different
scores this is called the Big Five
personality profile test to each person
so they assigned two score for openness
conscientiousness extraversion
agreeableness and neuroticism and based
on those scores their estimation is that
they were able to direct content that
would resonate the most fully with each
individual and so Cambridge analytic
‘got this technique from their parent
company which is called SCO or strategic
communications Laboratories and they had
actually gotten their start during
wartime psychological operations so this
is actually a slide from some of SCL
materials from Afghanistan talking about
how to target young unmarried males and
you can see that there’s a whole bunch
of parameters and whatnot that they’re
using to try to get down on who exactly
they want to reach but the idea is to
change people’s behavior and they would
use techniques like this so suppose you
had a piece of beachfront property
yourself and you wanted to keep people
from swimming there you could put up a
sign that says no swimming private
property or you could put up a sign that
says no swimming sharks sighted and
which one do you think would work better
so this was the kind of stuff that they
were doing in Afghanistan and then
pushing into their work in Cambridge
analytic oh and so they used a technique
called dark posts which at the time
allowed advertisers to direct specific
messages to specific personality types
so this is a sample of three different
images that were used with videos that
were created by the John Bolton super
PAC John Bolton you may recognize the
name he’s now the national security
adviser of the United States which
probably should cause you some concern
but anyway they would direct specific
messages to each individual personality
type so one of these might be like
inciting fear of Islam and immigrants
another one might be talking about
military tradition another one might be
being more about science and rationality
and that kind of thing so they figured
they could resonate further by targeting
his ads very specifically and so the
question is did any of this actually
work and I would say that in general the
jury is still a little bit out but if
you ask Aaron Banks who was one of the
leading funders of brexit and a lot of
Cambridge analytic ‘iz work there he
says it did he said that they created 1
million online followers that reached
upwards of 25 million most weeks the
engagement was huge otta
but if you actually look at the
statistics the votes the number of votes
that it took to determine brexit was
just 650,000 so it didn’t take changing
very many people’s behavior to actually
make a difference in an election like
brexit so a lot of us kind of think hmm
you know does this really add up like
I’m a rational person I make decisions
based on information that I receive I
think clearly how can you know people
whispering into my ear on the internet
change my mind and I feel yeah you know
that’s a perfectly valid point of view
but at the end of the day people when
they start to operate as a collective
organism don’t really act like rational
individuals they act a little bit more
like ants and that’s no disrespect to
ants we love ants but if you really want
to manipulate people you need to think
of them sort of as a collective and you
need to think about sort of how you’re
going to corral them into doing what you
want them to do so naturally to model
this I did what anybody would do which
is to create a mathematical model that
simulates exactly how this might work
and so what we have here is two distinct
social networks that we will do or Mille
and you can see that as we inject normal
kinds of news stories into those
networks they tend to travel around and
even move back and forth between them
without too much trouble everything is
sort of going as you’d expect this is
sort of what I would describe how say
like social media worked prior to these
disinformation efforts and you can also
see that the network doesn’t really
change very much you know it might
change very slowly maybe some of you
would add a new friend connection here
or there but mostly it stays kind of the
same and you know this can continue for
basically indefinitely as long as we’re
injecting normal kinds of news stories
into it but when we start to inject
of kinds of news stories what some
people might call fake news you can
start to see some changes start to
appear in the network for one thing some
voices from the edge start to move
towards the center and get more
attention because they’re saying things
that resonate with people in a certain
way and you know that can continue for
some time you can see that the network
doesn’t really get to affected by that
but it does you know reveal some changes
as those kinds of stories move through
the network but here’s where it gets
really interesting when we start to
inject stories into the network that are
targeted at people that we know are
going to resonate with those stories so
that they can get maximum reach we can
start to affect the composition of the
network very very quickly and so as you
can see as we keep injecting more of
these targeted kinds of news stories
into the network it keeps on sort of
falling apart really and it makes it
harder for other kinds of information to
move more freely and that’s really kind
of what the end result of this kind of
activity can tend to be is that real
normal good news stories have a harder
time moving around but also crucially
we’ve retrained the algorithms that
choose what everyone sees to think that
they don’t want to see stuff that they
did want to see before it’s a big change
so you can see normal stories have kind
of a harder time getting around now and
you’ve got this kind of hobbled broken
Network so you might be skeptical and
say well how does this model that you
know this guy came up with reflect
what’s actually happening in social
media it’s just a black box right well
sure it’s just a black box but so is
Facebook right you know you don’t have
any idea what their algorithm is doing
we don’t have any ability to understand
that all we know is that we’re doing it
and that social media we know works in
something like this way right so in
effect what we’re doing is operating the
world’s largest sociological experiment
that has ever been done on live subjects
and as damage occurs we’re you know
mitigating the damage after the fact as
best we can without full knowledge of
what even was done in the first place
it’s crazy
so you know you can ask also in that
model what actually happened where
people’s minds actually changed
certainly we think probably behavior
change because people found out about
different things and interacted with
people in different ways maybe some
people were more engaged and other
people were less engaged but in reality
probably not too many people’s minds
were actually changed but again the key
thing is that the algorithms that decide
what everybody sees got fed bad
information because of this altered
behavior so if you think about Facebook
on July 25th 2018 they suffered a loss
of market capitalization of over a
hundred and twenty billion dollars in a
single day and that was mostly due to
fallout from the Cambridge analytic a
scandal now you know you hear from both
Facebook and Twitter Jack Dorsey runs
Twitter that they don’t need oversight
that they can figure this out on their
own they don’t need to be regulated
everything’s gonna be okay
just give us maybe a slap on the wrist
and we’ll move on and indeed Sheryl
Sandberg who’s the CEO CEO of Facebook
guess who her mentor was Larry Summers
at Harvard and so you know you kind of
have the feeling that there’s this sense
that if your elite enough the rules
don’t apply to you and that Harvard and
Society are holding Zuckerberg the
executive to a different standard than
what they wanted to hold Zuckerberg the
undergraduate to when he went to Harvard
and so you know these people these are
other executives in Silicon Valley we
have kind of a moral leadership problem
in Silicon Valley and these are not
necessarily bad people maybe Elizabeth
Tom’s as bad people but the rest of them
you know there’s some of them are my
friends and friends with Jack Dorsey but
there’s kind of this you know we aren’t
putting in people over profits there’s
this huge desire to make money and not
to pay attention to ethics and to and to
people and we’re not necessarily being
account
so I would encourage you to you know
whenever anybody tells you that it’s the
end of history and that things are gonna
automatically take care of themselves
and we don’t need regulation and please
leave us alone and we’re elite then it
the rules don’t apply to us it’s not
true right there’s always work that we
have to do in terms of having a moral
compass of pointing our society in the
right direction of putting people ahead
of profits and you know it’s a
tremendous responsibility that we have
so all of us here as builders as
creators of our companies and
institutions I would ask you to ask
yourselves are we doing what’s right are
we doing with what’s ethical are we
being accountable to the people that we
serve are we being naive and its really
boils down to the question of what kind
of world do we want to live in do we
want to live in a world where people
that are elite don’t have to obey the
rules or do we want to live in a world
where there’s equality and justice for
everyone I know what kind of world I
want to live in do you thanks [Applause]
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