October 15, 2020 • 28 mins
This week on Turnout, Katie Couric explores how disinformation is used to suppress the vote and how it’s being tackled by activists and citizens alike. While disinformation has been used to subvert the voting process for decades, long before the internet, it is now thriving online like never before. “Bad actors” are lurking behind your screen and on your social media platforms, eager to sew chaos and distrust in the election system. But, fear not! There’s hope and also something YOU can do. Jesse Littlewood from Common Cause shares tips for how to spot disinformation on the internet and what to do about it (hint: don’t engage!). And, in an effort to provide some sort of check to Facebook’s unbalanced power, British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr tells us how her group, the “Real Facebook Oversight Board,” plans to hold Mark Zuckerberg’s feet to the fire.
More about the guests and organizations featured in this episode:
Jesse Littlewood is the vice president for campaigns at Common Cause.
As part of its election protection work, Common Cause has launched a Stop Cyber Suppression program, where you can report disinformation or join the Common Cause Action Team’s Social Media Monitoring program.
Carole Cadwalladr is a British Pulitzer-nominated investigative journalist who broke the Cambridge Analytica story after working with whistleblower Christopher Wylie for a year.
The Real Facebook Oversight Board
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When we talk about voter suppression, we often use the
term bad actors, individuals that are actively trying to suppress voters.
Jesse Littlewood is the vice president for Campaigns at common Cause,
a nonpartisan democracy organization that works to protect voting rights.
(00:20):
Bad actors can be foreign that actors can be domestic.
Bad actors can be individuals or bots pushing information out
into the media ecosystem. In our viral virtual world, bad
actors are lurking behind every screen, working to intentionally spread
incorrect information across social media and other types of media,
(00:44):
to create an environment where it feels like voting isn't
something we all do together, but it's some kind of
partisan battle field. But never fear, because our democracy has
its protectors too, including you. You've taken the challenge and
you've chose and to be a disinformation fighter. Put on
your capes, Democracy heroes, it's time for your training. You
(01:06):
are a newly deputized troll buster. The first crime fighting
superpower that you can tap into is skepticism. The first
thing is to be skeptical of anything that makes extremely
explosive claim or takes a singular incident as a proof
of some kind of widespread pattern. Another super strength that
you have at the ready good information. Flood your feeds
(01:29):
with it. Let that audience know how to find the
trusted source of information Secretaries of State Office of your state,
or the website can I vote dot org which goes
to the National Association Secretaries of State not will work
people directly to the right information for their state. Finally,
be aware of the kryptonite that may weaken your powers.
(01:50):
Don't engage something I often find very hard to do.
You have to combat the urge to reply or debunk,
um or dunk on any kind of wrong content that
you see online. No matter any response that you put
to a piece of online social media content, the social
(02:11):
media algorithms will read that as engagement and try and
push it in front of other individuals. So even the
frownie face or the retweet that says this is garbage
will end up telling the social media algorithm this is
highly engaging content. We should put it on in front
of other people in their feed. Instead, you should flag
(02:32):
it within the platform. Facebook and Twitter and many other
platforms have processes where you can report disinformation when it
comes to voting in elections. The other thing you can
do is report it to the disinformation experts a common cause.
You can also join our social media monitoring team become
part of this growing movement of democracy advocates that are
(02:55):
using their online personas to fight against disinformation and to
protect every voter. I'm Katie Curric and this is Turnout
today on the podcast The Scourge of Disinformation. Well, it's
not exclusive to the Internet age. We've seen billboards, flyers,
and unsolicited phone calls. It is thriving online like never before.
(03:20):
A tweet or a post can be spread to millions
almost instantaneously, and there's almost no cost to doing it,
and it gives more opportunity for the bad actors to
try a bunch of tactics, to throw spaghetti against the
wall and see what sticks, because there's very little downside
to them. The platforms in the action that they can
(03:42):
take against these bad actors are pretty limited. That can
be difficult for them to wall off their platform from
a bad actor who wants to come back on the
platform and be able to try something again. So far
in our podcast series, we've covered the physical barriers to
the ballot, like the financial burden of a poll tax,
(04:02):
the hoops you have to jump through to register to vote,
and the arcane laws that keep formally incarcerated people from voting.
But when it comes to cyber suppression, Jesse says voters
should be aware of three types of information disorders, disinformation, misinformation,
and malinformation. Disinformation is something false, even if it sometimes
(04:27):
contains a little nugget of truth that is deliberately created
and spread to harm a person, a group, an organization,
or make trouble when it comes to our elections. So
disinformation is used for voter suppression when you tell people
the wrong date uh day, the wrong place, or the
wrong manner in which they can vote, in order to
(04:47):
confuse them or cause them to miss their chance to
cast a ballot. Misinformation is similarly false information, but it
isn't necessarily intended to cause harm. You can think about
it kind of like accidental disinformation. The rules can actually
vary pretty significantly state to state. So some of the
misinformation around voter suppression that we see online has to
(05:11):
do with people incorrectly assuming a one size fits all
approach to something like mail and balloting um and instead
can create confusion and can actually cause people to um
understand something wrong or to choose not to make use
of a safe, secure and available option for them to vote. Now,
the very last type, the third type of information disorder
(05:34):
is called malinformation, and this is the one that not
a lot of people necessarily know about. So malinformation is
sort of defined by true information that's used to cause
harm of a group. So one example could be leaking
private information about someone in order to embarrass them, or
helping other people to abuse them. That could be private communications,
(05:57):
it could be personal information. What NOM and Causes doing
to stop cyber suppression works on two levels. The first,
as Jesse mentioned earlier, is flooding the Internet with those
trusted sources of information. The second level is removing as
many instances of disinformation as possible. We're working with the
(06:17):
social media companies to make sure they strengthen their terms
of service, while we're working as well with disinformation experts
and big data experts to analyze the overall social media
conversation and flag disinformation and bad actors to the companies themselves.
And then we've also recruited hundreds of social media monitoring volunteers,
(06:40):
nonpartisan volunteers that are active on social media, who we've
given advanced training on how to identify and flag incidences
of cyber suppression, so we document it, analyze it, and
then we take action on it. Volunteers are actually extremely
important because there are some places that the big data
and social media experts can't see because their private social
(07:03):
networking locations. So a great example is a private Facebook
group or next door the neighborhood platform social media platform
where you have to verify your address and then you're
placed within a neighborhood and only the people in your
neighborhood can see your content. So volunteers who are active
in their communities on social media are the only way
(07:25):
we're able to monitor and help document and remove disinformation
as it comes to voting in elections on those platforms.
Combating cyber suppression also means looking into a crystal ball
of sorts to stop the lies before they take root
and spread. By reviewing our database of disinformation, we can
(07:46):
understand what are some of the most pernicious narratives that
could impact voters, and we're creating effective responses to that,
either by pre bunking that with the correct information that
helps protect people from believing something that's not true, or
helping people understand what is true and why they may
(08:07):
have received some disinformation about something that comes to voting.
One of the challenges of playing whack a mole when
it comes to disinformation is one how the platforms read
their own policies can be really different than how the
voting rights advocates and voters themselves can be affected by it.
And some of that has to do with geography, right
Like when we post content on social media, usually we
(08:29):
don't specify specific geography we're talking about, and the voting
and elections rules often very state by state. But the
platforms aren't necessarily able or willing to educate their moderators
and to make clear enough rules to help prevent disinformation.
That has to do with some of these cases that
(08:50):
can vary from place to place. That's I don't think
it's an excuse. We're talking about our democracy, the most
fundamental part of what keeps our country running and gives
all citizens and all voters the ability of making decisions
for our country. It's really not an excuse that it's complicated.
These are super smart, super wealthy, super accomplished individuals that
(09:13):
run a highly highly successful company. I believe, I truly
believed that they could figure this out. If they applied themselves. So,
how do we hold social media networks accountable? Put Mark
Zuckerberg's feet to the flame that's coming up right after this,
(09:38):
Mr Suckerberg, is Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum? Senator?
We consider ourselves to be a platform for all ideas.
In April of two thousand eighteen, Mark Zuckerberg appeared before
the Senate's Commerce and Judiciary Committees to discuss Russian disinformation
on Facebook and a massive data breach. Let me ask
(09:59):
the question to in does Facebook consider itself to be
a neutral public forum? And representatives of your company have
given conflicting answers on this? Uh, Senator, Here's how we
think about this. I don't believe that there are certain
content that clearly we do not allow. That data breach
happened four years before Zuckerberg was in the hot seat.
Facebook rolled out a new tool today that will start
(10:22):
notifying users if you are among the eight seven million
people whose personal data may have been harvested by political
consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. In two thousand fourteen, a British
voter profiling company called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge an Cambridge Analytica
Cambridge Analytica. A company called Cambridge Analytica harvested private information
(10:44):
from the Facebook profiles of more than fifty million users
without their permission. That private information was primarily used for
political advertising in the two thousand sixteen presidential election, and
it was one of the largest leaks in Facebook's history.
That massive story, which was a two thousand nineteen Pulitzer
(11:07):
Prize finalists Hi Carol, but just the right time then
was exposed by British investigative journalist Carol Cadwalader. It's not
just a company which has all this power, It's an
empire which is ruled by the boy king, Mark Zuckberg.
(11:27):
I invited Carol to come onto the podcast to find
out how much this ubiquitous social media platform is destroying
our democracy and what, if anything, we can all do
about it. The thing I find most terrifying about Facebook
is this realization that there is just simply no body
(11:48):
on Earth that can hold this company to account. It
really is bigger than governments and law enforcement agencies and regulators.
Decisions are made by per sinalities. There are no checks
and balances at all on that power, and in that way,
it is the nearest comparison is to North Korea. Facebook's
(12:12):
family of apps, including Instagram and What's App, has more
than two point nine billion global users every month, which
is nearly two fifths of the world's population. But the
danger of that kind of power is that it's not obvious.
In fact, for Carol, it took those years of reporting
and a few key moments to be able to see
(12:34):
the wolf hiding in the hoodie. The Federal Trade Commission
has voted to find Facebook nearly five billion dollars from
mishandling users personal information. One of the key moments was
when Facebook was fined five billion dollars for the data
abew scandal with Cambridge Analytica. And this was a record fine.
(12:57):
You know, it's the biggest ever by the ft see
and Facebook share price actually went up on that day
because it was it just wasn't that bad. I mean,
five billion dollars really is nothing to accompany the size
and scale of Facebook. And then the other moment was
for me was when Mark Zuckerberg he kept on refusing
(13:19):
to come to Britain to answer questions to our parliament
about what happened in the Brexit referendum. Mark Zuckerberg will
not appear in front of Parliament in the UK after
he declined the invitation from the chair of the Digital, Culture,
Media and Sports Committee, Damien Collins. It's this sort of
extraordinary moment of really thinking about what that kind of
(13:41):
power means in the world. And I think, you know,
I think people in America are just sort of waking
up to a bit of that really starkly in terms
of the next few weeks in the election. Let's talk
about disinformation during the election. How prevalent is it and
how worrisome is it. I think it's incredibly worrisome. The
(14:02):
way to think of it is it is this sort
of toxic pollution. It is a sort of oil slick
almost which was sort of spread through the entire information space.
Lies and misinformation is spread at speed and scale because
the algorithm favors it. A British news organization did a
(14:22):
series of reports in September which were really interesting around
the topic of voter suppression, and which is because they
got hold of the r n c's entire voting database
from two thousand and sixteen and they discovered, you know,
in the voter files people have been marked for deterrents
and that was voters who were targeted with suppression ads
(14:48):
who they were trying to stop turning out to vote,
and they discovered it was black and minority voters who
were disproportionately targeted for deterrent using Facebook's tools. And you know,
this mass of data, including stolen Facebook data, to to
(15:10):
to target them. And there's something really, really really disturbing
about that. You know, it's the machinery of fascism, the
idea that this American company is being used to touch
to racially profile people and then target them with the
(15:33):
intention of trying to stop them turn out to vote.
I mean, it's just it is the stuff of dystopia.
Facebook is being used to subvert democracy. Coming up, how
Carol is subverting the subverter h m HM. For years,
(16:03):
Carol Cadwalader reported on the ways Facebook funneled racism and
unchecked disinformation into millions of users feeds, manipulating the world's
most powerful democracy. During the two thousand and sixteen presidential election.
This time around, Carol wasn't about to stand by and
watch Facebook interfere and yet another presidential race. It's an
(16:26):
emergency intervention. It's borne out of this recognition that there
is no way of holding it to account, and that
it essentially is a dangerous weapon that is um about
to be is already being deployed in an incredibly consequential election.
(16:47):
And from this realization that there is no way of
of making Facebook do the right thing, there is no
actual mechanism or lever to do this, so we had
to just try and invent our own, she gathered together
a coalition of academics, legal experts, and civil rights leaders
to act as a check against Facebook's unbalanced power. The
(17:09):
group calls itself the Real Facebook Oversight Board. Facebook was
terribly proud of the fact that it had this idea
for setting up its so called oversight board, and originally
Mark Zuckerberg. You know, it was three years ago they
started talking about it, and it still hasn't appeared. So
it's it may they say, it may be up and
(17:32):
running before the election. But even if it is, it
doesn't really matter because all it is looking at in
the initial stages is it's a kind of supreme court
for Facebook is the idea. But all it's going to
be able to rule on initially is if somebody's had
their post taken down, they can appeal and the Oversight
(17:53):
Board can make a decision on whether it should go
back up again. And when you think of the sort
of the number of harms that Facebook is doing in
the danger it represents, that is like, honestly the least
of them. The group kick things off on September with
a live press conference hosted where else on Facebook? Is
(18:13):
this sort of a guerrilla act of subversion. Basically, it's
kind of like punk. It's sort of punk theater. This
is a live press conference. You'll first be hearing from
six board members. And the amazing thing is that these
really brilliant academics and civil rights leaders got the idea
(18:34):
immediately and sort of like jumped at the prospect of
it and have really thrown themselves into it. With that,
I would like to introduce Shoshanna Zuba, author of the
Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and Professor Emerita Harvard Business for Shoshanna,
Thank you Kyle. Our group has come together for one purpose.
(18:55):
We demand comprehensive action to ensure that they Strock cannot
be weaponized to undermine the vote and with it, American democracy.
What are you doing with the real Facebook Oversight Board?
What are your goals so for the first press conference
that we did. You know, those there's a lot of
(19:18):
people on the board with a lot of diverse opinions,
but we tried to see what consensus there was around
a couple of kind of minimum asks, and we did,
actually you reach consensus essentially one of them. Facebook has
now done. So its first task was around anything to
delegitimize the election during that crucial period between closer poles
(19:41):
and tour before a winner is announced. And now Facebook
has announced that it's not allowing political ads to it
for what it's saying, I think it's for a week
after the election, but it's made this thing about any
ads which de legitimize the election, you know, declare victory prematurely.
It's it's banning those. But the other key demand is
around organic content, which is so because that is we
(20:04):
know it's going to be like the real problem during
that period. So we are asking for a anything which
is calling victory premature, lee casting doubt about the validity
of the election, misreporting, voter fraud, etcetera. That we're saying
that those should be clearly labeled. And then the other
(20:27):
key demand is just that there are just asking for
Facebook to enforce its own policies. So Facebook has policies
around incitement to violence, for example, it just doesn't enforce them.
And one of the people it doesn't enforce that policy
on is the President of the United States. It's an
awesome idea, but realistically, Carol, I mean, is it? Is
(20:50):
it somewhat impotent? I mean, what can this real oversight
board do? Yes, I mean that is the point there.
It is impotent because we are all impotent because we
don't have the power. Facebook has the power, and there is,
as I say, nothing on earth that can change that. However,
(21:11):
the only thing that Facebook ever, ever, ever, ever ever
responds to is public pressure. It is pressure from the
American press and the American people. So, um, the only
thing we can do is create a noise and to
(21:31):
try and amplify the voices of people who need to
be heard from. And you know what, to be honest
with you, one of my thoughts about it was, if
the worst does happen, and terrible things do happen, and
Facebook doesn't take the steps to prevent them, and it
deliberately enables the inciting of violence, etcetera, etcetera, there is
(21:56):
going to be a framework in place of people who
are able to mobilize and to be a counter voice
to Facebook, because you know, it has all of the
money and all of the lobbyists and all of the
spokespeople and all of the PR firms and all of
the contact, so it gets its message out very powerfully
across the media. And parts of this is about is
(22:18):
sort of an organized response to have these other voices
who can explain the harms and why it is so
important that action is taken there and that their voices
are heard in the media. So it's you know, it's
a fool's errand I'm sure, but at the same time,
it just felt that because we could try, we had
to try. One of the things we all have to
(22:40):
do is understand that we absolutely have a role to
play in this. Not just a journalist, I'm a citizen,
and it's like we do have to really understand that
we have to step up if we don't want to
see our countries sort of descend into authoritarian chaos. Then
it really is as up for us as individuals to
(23:04):
um to realize that the only way that any of
this is going to stop, the only way we're going
to help hold these companies to account is. You know,
it's got to come from us as individuals. We've got
to find ways to work together. And there is power,
(23:24):
you know, which can come from a united band of
people who are do stand up to power. I mean
that's been so that story has been so powerfully told
with Black Lives Matter, and I think that hopefully a
lot more people realize that actually you do need to
(23:45):
sort of stand up and be counted and to be
trying in whatever way you can to hold the line truths, facts,
evidence based reporting, rule of law institutions. These things are
so important and we have to realize their value and
defend them in whatever means possible. Really, Facebook has made
(24:09):
some attempts to monitor the content on its platform. Recently,
the company announced it would ban anything that denies or
distorts the Holocaust, as well as q and On, an
organization that promotes and perpetuates outrageous conspiracy theories. They are
now making some decisions on you know, like the Q
(24:29):
and on stuff. Although there is you know, that doesn't
go far enough. I'm optimistic that the challenges that our
democracy face today can be overcome because we've overcome harder
challenges in the past. For Jesse Littlewood Hope Springs Eternal.
(24:51):
We are faced with a whole suite of challenges to
voters and to the belief in the integrity of our democracy.
But we've confronted even tougher problems in the past, and
while not perfect, our democracy was improved and expanded through
those other challenges. So I think we have a resilient
system and a pretty resilient population. It's a path that
(25:13):
is a hard one, and we are currently headed in
the wrong direction when it comes to rebuilding trust and
civic participation. But if you talk to young people today
who are civically engaged, they're involved in the fight for
to stop climate change no I know, know know, or
(25:40):
they're involved in advocacy around gun control or the way
that we should be approaching those subjects. Every day shot
all right, every day prob my name is VA and
here with the bad. They're involved across the board on
a whole different set of civic issues. So there's an
opportunity to rebuild a sense of civic engagement, and voting
(26:05):
is one of those ways. I think it's a problem
when people in the voting community say that that's the
only way you should get involved. It certainly is an
important one, but it's not the only thing that is
going to help get us out of it. Participation is
the secret. I don't believe we're going to be able
to litigate, lobby, or legislate our way out of a
diminished civic society. It's going to take active participation on
(26:28):
behalf of individuals to be able to improve the condition
of our democracy. Next week on turnout, we're the moral
compass of the country. Why kids these days maybe the
real democracy heroes. There's a visionary power that young people
(26:49):
hold and that is something that we need to continue
to follow. Young people, not a certain generation, are the
moral compass of the country. Hey, listeners, Before we wrap up,
I want to share some of those websites again. If
you want to report the disinformation you see on the Internet,
go to common Cause dot org slash disinfo. To keep
(27:10):
up with the Real Facebook Oversight board, visit Real Facebook
Oversight dot org. And for all you need to know
about how and where to vote in your state, go
to vote dot org. And finally, for the latest election coverage,
make sure to sign up for my morning newsletter wake
Up Call. Just go to Katie Currek dot com for
that Turnout is a production of I Heart Media and
(27:33):
Katie Curreic Media. The executive producers are Katie Curic and
Courtney Littz. Supervising producers Lauren Hansen. Associate producers Derek Clements,
Eliza Costas and Emily Pento. Editing by Derrick Clements and
Lauren Hansen, Mixing by Derrick Clements. Our researcher is Gabriel
Loser and special thanks to my right hand woman Adriana Fasio.
(27:57):
You can follow me at all my election cut ridge
at Katie Courrect So until next week, I'm Katie Curric.
This is Turnout. Thanks so much for listening. H
When we talk about voter suppression, we often use the
term bad actors, individuals that are actively trying to suppress voters.
Jesse Littlewood is the vice president for Campaigns at common Cause,
a nonpartisan democracy organization that works to protect voting rights.
(00:20):
Bad actors can be foreign that actors can be domestic.
Bad actors can be individuals or bots pushing information out
into the media ecosystem. In our viral virtual world, bad
actors are lurking behind every screen, working to intentionally spread
incorrect information across social media and other types of media,
(00:44):
to create an environment where it feels like voting isn't
something we all do together, but it's some kind of
partisan battle field. But never fear, because our democracy has
its protectors too, including you. You've taken the challenge and
you've chose and to be a disinformation fighter. Put on
your capes, Democracy heroes, it's time for your training. You
(01:06):
are a newly deputized troll buster. The first crime fighting
superpower that you can tap into is skepticism. The first
thing is to be skeptical of anything that makes extremely
explosive claim or takes a singular incident as a proof
of some kind of widespread pattern. Another super strength that
you have at the ready good information. Flood your feeds
(01:29):
with it. Let that audience know how to find the
trusted source of information Secretaries of State Office of your state,
or the website can I vote dot org which goes
to the National Association Secretaries of State not will work
people directly to the right information for their state. Finally,
be aware of the kryptonite that may weaken your powers.
(01:50):
Don't engage something I often find very hard to do.
You have to combat the urge to reply or debunk,
um or dunk on any kind of wrong content that
you see online. No matter any response that you put
to a piece of online social media content, the social
(02:11):
media algorithms will read that as engagement and try and
push it in front of other individuals. So even the
frownie face or the retweet that says this is garbage
will end up telling the social media algorithm this is
highly engaging content. We should put it on in front
of other people in their feed. Instead, you should flag
(02:32):
it within the platform. Facebook and Twitter and many other
platforms have processes where you can report disinformation when it
comes to voting in elections. The other thing you can
do is report it to the disinformation experts a common cause.
You can also join our social media monitoring team become
part of this growing movement of democracy advocates that are
(02:55):
using their online personas to fight against disinformation and to
protect every voter. I'm Katie Curric and this is Turnout
today on the podcast The Scourge of Disinformation. Well, it's
not exclusive to the Internet age. We've seen billboards, flyers,
and unsolicited phone calls. It is thriving online like never before.
(03:20):
A tweet or a post can be spread to millions
almost instantaneously, and there's almost no cost to doing it,
and it gives more opportunity for the bad actors to
try a bunch of tactics, to throw spaghetti against the
wall and see what sticks, because there's very little downside
to them. The platforms in the action that they can
(03:42):
take against these bad actors are pretty limited. That can
be difficult for them to wall off their platform from
a bad actor who wants to come back on the
platform and be able to try something again. So far
in our podcast series, we've covered the physical barriers to
the ballot, like the financial burden of a poll tax,
(04:02):
the hoops you have to jump through to register to vote,
and the arcane laws that keep formally incarcerated people from voting.
But when it comes to cyber suppression, Jesse says voters
should be aware of three types of information disorders, disinformation, misinformation,
and malinformation. Disinformation is something false, even if it sometimes
(04:27):
contains a little nugget of truth that is deliberately created
and spread to harm a person, a group, an organization,
or make trouble when it comes to our elections. So
disinformation is used for voter suppression when you tell people
the wrong date uh day, the wrong place, or the
wrong manner in which they can vote, in order to
(04:47):
confuse them or cause them to miss their chance to
cast a ballot. Misinformation is similarly false information, but it
isn't necessarily intended to cause harm. You can think about
it kind of like accidental disinformation. The rules can actually
vary pretty significantly state to state. So some of the
misinformation around voter suppression that we see online has to
(05:11):
do with people incorrectly assuming a one size fits all
approach to something like mail and balloting um and instead
can create confusion and can actually cause people to um
understand something wrong or to choose not to make use
of a safe, secure and available option for them to vote. Now,
the very last type, the third type of information disorder
(05:34):
is called malinformation, and this is the one that not
a lot of people necessarily know about. So malinformation is
sort of defined by true information that's used to cause
harm of a group. So one example could be leaking
private information about someone in order to embarrass them, or
helping other people to abuse them. That could be private communications,
(05:57):
it could be personal information. What NOM and Causes doing
to stop cyber suppression works on two levels. The first,
as Jesse mentioned earlier, is flooding the Internet with those
trusted sources of information. The second level is removing as
many instances of disinformation as possible. We're working with the
(06:17):
social media companies to make sure they strengthen their terms
of service, while we're working as well with disinformation experts
and big data experts to analyze the overall social media
conversation and flag disinformation and bad actors to the companies themselves.
And then we've also recruited hundreds of social media monitoring volunteers,
(06:40):
nonpartisan volunteers that are active on social media, who we've
given advanced training on how to identify and flag incidences
of cyber suppression, so we document it, analyze it, and
then we take action on it. Volunteers are actually extremely
important because there are some places that the big data
and social media experts can't see because their private social
(07:03):
networking locations. So a great example is a private Facebook
group or next door the neighborhood platform social media platform
where you have to verify your address and then you're
placed within a neighborhood and only the people in your
neighborhood can see your content. So volunteers who are active
in their communities on social media are the only way
(07:25):
we're able to monitor and help document and remove disinformation
as it comes to voting in elections on those platforms.
Combating cyber suppression also means looking into a crystal ball
of sorts to stop the lies before they take root
and spread. By reviewing our database of disinformation, we can
(07:46):
understand what are some of the most pernicious narratives that
could impact voters, and we're creating effective responses to that,
either by pre bunking that with the correct information that
helps protect people from believing something that's not true, or
helping people understand what is true and why they may
(08:07):
have received some disinformation about something that comes to voting.
One of the challenges of playing whack a mole when
it comes to disinformation is one how the platforms read
their own policies can be really different than how the
voting rights advocates and voters themselves can be affected by it.
And some of that has to do with geography, right
Like when we post content on social media, usually we
(08:29):
don't specify specific geography we're talking about, and the voting
and elections rules often very state by state. But the
platforms aren't necessarily able or willing to educate their moderators
and to make clear enough rules to help prevent disinformation.
That has to do with some of these cases that
(08:50):
can vary from place to place. That's I don't think
it's an excuse. We're talking about our democracy, the most
fundamental part of what keeps our country running and gives
all citizens and all voters the ability of making decisions
for our country. It's really not an excuse that it's complicated.
These are super smart, super wealthy, super accomplished individuals that
(09:13):
run a highly highly successful company. I believe, I truly
believed that they could figure this out. If they applied themselves. So,
how do we hold social media networks accountable? Put Mark
Zuckerberg's feet to the flame that's coming up right after this,
(09:38):
Mr Suckerberg, is Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum? Senator?
We consider ourselves to be a platform for all ideas.
In April of two thousand eighteen, Mark Zuckerberg appeared before
the Senate's Commerce and Judiciary Committees to discuss Russian disinformation
on Facebook and a massive data breach. Let me ask
(09:59):
the question to in does Facebook consider itself to be
a neutral public forum? And representatives of your company have
given conflicting answers on this? Uh, Senator, Here's how we
think about this. I don't believe that there are certain
content that clearly we do not allow. That data breach
happened four years before Zuckerberg was in the hot seat.
Facebook rolled out a new tool today that will start
(10:22):
notifying users if you are among the eight seven million
people whose personal data may have been harvested by political
consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. In two thousand fourteen, a British
voter profiling company called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge an Cambridge Analytica
Cambridge Analytica. A company called Cambridge Analytica harvested private information
(10:44):
from the Facebook profiles of more than fifty million users
without their permission. That private information was primarily used for
political advertising in the two thousand sixteen presidential election, and
it was one of the largest leaks in Facebook's history.
That massive story, which was a two thousand nineteen Pulitzer
(11:07):
Prize finalists Hi Carol, but just the right time then
was exposed by British investigative journalist Carol Cadwalader. It's not
just a company which has all this power, It's an
empire which is ruled by the boy king, Mark Zuckberg.
(11:27):
I invited Carol to come onto the podcast to find
out how much this ubiquitous social media platform is destroying
our democracy and what, if anything, we can all do
about it. The thing I find most terrifying about Facebook
is this realization that there is just simply no body
(11:48):
on Earth that can hold this company to account. It
really is bigger than governments and law enforcement agencies and regulators.
Decisions are made by per sinalities. There are no checks
and balances at all on that power, and in that way,
it is the nearest comparison is to North Korea. Facebook's
(12:12):
family of apps, including Instagram and What's App, has more
than two point nine billion global users every month, which
is nearly two fifths of the world's population. But the
danger of that kind of power is that it's not obvious.
In fact, for Carol, it took those years of reporting
and a few key moments to be able to see
(12:34):
the wolf hiding in the hoodie. The Federal Trade Commission
has voted to find Facebook nearly five billion dollars from
mishandling users personal information. One of the key moments was
when Facebook was fined five billion dollars for the data
abew scandal with Cambridge Analytica. And this was a record fine.
(12:57):
You know, it's the biggest ever by the ft see
and Facebook share price actually went up on that day
because it was it just wasn't that bad. I mean,
five billion dollars really is nothing to accompany the size
and scale of Facebook. And then the other moment was
for me was when Mark Zuckerberg he kept on refusing
(13:19):
to come to Britain to answer questions to our parliament
about what happened in the Brexit referendum. Mark Zuckerberg will
not appear in front of Parliament in the UK after
he declined the invitation from the chair of the Digital, Culture,
Media and Sports Committee, Damien Collins. It's this sort of
extraordinary moment of really thinking about what that kind of
(13:41):
power means in the world. And I think, you know,
I think people in America are just sort of waking
up to a bit of that really starkly in terms
of the next few weeks in the election. Let's talk
about disinformation during the election. How prevalent is it and
how worrisome is it. I think it's incredibly worrisome. The
(14:02):
way to think of it is it is this sort
of toxic pollution. It is a sort of oil slick
almost which was sort of spread through the entire information space.
Lies and misinformation is spread at speed and scale because
the algorithm favors it. A British news organization did a
(14:22):
series of reports in September which were really interesting around
the topic of voter suppression, and which is because they
got hold of the r n c's entire voting database
from two thousand and sixteen and they discovered, you know,
in the voter files people have been marked for deterrents
and that was voters who were targeted with suppression ads
(14:48):
who they were trying to stop turning out to vote,
and they discovered it was black and minority voters who
were disproportionately targeted for deterrent using Facebook's tools. And you know,
this mass of data, including stolen Facebook data, to to
(15:10):
to target them. And there's something really, really really disturbing
about that. You know, it's the machinery of fascism, the
idea that this American company is being used to touch
to racially profile people and then target them with the
(15:33):
intention of trying to stop them turn out to vote.
I mean, it's just it is the stuff of dystopia.
Facebook is being used to subvert democracy. Coming up, how
Carol is subverting the subverter h m HM. For years,
(16:03):
Carol Cadwalader reported on the ways Facebook funneled racism and
unchecked disinformation into millions of users feeds, manipulating the world's
most powerful democracy. During the two thousand and sixteen presidential election.
This time around, Carol wasn't about to stand by and
watch Facebook interfere and yet another presidential race. It's an
(16:26):
emergency intervention. It's borne out of this recognition that there
is no way of holding it to account, and that
it essentially is a dangerous weapon that is um about
to be is already being deployed in an incredibly consequential election.
(16:47):
And from this realization that there is no way of
of making Facebook do the right thing, there is no
actual mechanism or lever to do this, so we had
to just try and invent our own, she gathered together
a coalition of academics, legal experts, and civil rights leaders
to act as a check against Facebook's unbalanced power. The
(17:09):
group calls itself the Real Facebook Oversight Board. Facebook was
terribly proud of the fact that it had this idea
for setting up its so called oversight board, and originally
Mark Zuckerberg. You know, it was three years ago they
started talking about it, and it still hasn't appeared. So
it's it may they say, it may be up and
(17:32):
running before the election. But even if it is, it
doesn't really matter because all it is looking at in
the initial stages is it's a kind of supreme court
for Facebook is the idea. But all it's going to
be able to rule on initially is if somebody's had
their post taken down, they can appeal and the Oversight
(17:53):
Board can make a decision on whether it should go
back up again. And when you think of the sort
of the number of harms that Facebook is doing in
the danger it represents, that is like, honestly the least
of them. The group kick things off on September with
a live press conference hosted where else on Facebook? Is
(18:13):
this sort of a guerrilla act of subversion. Basically, it's
kind of like punk. It's sort of punk theater. This
is a live press conference. You'll first be hearing from
six board members. And the amazing thing is that these
really brilliant academics and civil rights leaders got the idea
(18:34):
immediately and sort of like jumped at the prospect of
it and have really thrown themselves into it. With that,
I would like to introduce Shoshanna Zuba, author of the
Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and Professor Emerita Harvard Business for Shoshanna,
Thank you Kyle. Our group has come together for one purpose.
(18:55):
We demand comprehensive action to ensure that they Strock cannot
be weaponized to undermine the vote and with it, American democracy.
What are you doing with the real Facebook Oversight Board?
What are your goals so for the first press conference
that we did. You know, those there's a lot of
(19:18):
people on the board with a lot of diverse opinions,
but we tried to see what consensus there was around
a couple of kind of minimum asks, and we did,
actually you reach consensus essentially one of them. Facebook has
now done. So its first task was around anything to
delegitimize the election during that crucial period between closer poles
(19:41):
and tour before a winner is announced. And now Facebook
has announced that it's not allowing political ads to it
for what it's saying, I think it's for a week
after the election, but it's made this thing about any
ads which de legitimize the election, you know, declare victory prematurely.
It's it's banning those. But the other key demand is
around organic content, which is so because that is we
(20:04):
know it's going to be like the real problem during
that period. So we are asking for a anything which
is calling victory premature, lee casting doubt about the validity
of the election, misreporting, voter fraud, etcetera. That we're saying
that those should be clearly labeled. And then the other
(20:27):
key demand is just that there are just asking for
Facebook to enforce its own policies. So Facebook has policies
around incitement to violence, for example, it just doesn't enforce them.
And one of the people it doesn't enforce that policy
on is the President of the United States. It's an
awesome idea, but realistically, Carol, I mean, is it? Is
(20:50):
it somewhat impotent? I mean, what can this real oversight
board do? Yes, I mean that is the point there.
It is impotent because we are all impotent because we
don't have the power. Facebook has the power, and there is,
as I say, nothing on earth that can change that. However,
(21:11):
the only thing that Facebook ever, ever, ever, ever ever
responds to is public pressure. It is pressure from the
American press and the American people. So, um, the only
thing we can do is create a noise and to
(21:31):
try and amplify the voices of people who need to
be heard from. And you know what, to be honest
with you, one of my thoughts about it was, if
the worst does happen, and terrible things do happen, and
Facebook doesn't take the steps to prevent them, and it
deliberately enables the inciting of violence, etcetera, etcetera, there is
(21:56):
going to be a framework in place of people who
are able to mobilize and to be a counter voice
to Facebook, because you know, it has all of the
money and all of the lobbyists and all of the
spokespeople and all of the PR firms and all of
the contact, so it gets its message out very powerfully
across the media. And parts of this is about is
(22:18):
sort of an organized response to have these other voices
who can explain the harms and why it is so
important that action is taken there and that their voices
are heard in the media. So it's you know, it's
a fool's errand I'm sure, but at the same time,
it just felt that because we could try, we had
to try. One of the things we all have to
(22:40):
do is understand that we absolutely have a role to
play in this. Not just a journalist, I'm a citizen,
and it's like we do have to really understand that
we have to step up if we don't want to
see our countries sort of descend into authoritarian chaos. Then
it really is as up for us as individuals to
(23:04):
um to realize that the only way that any of
this is going to stop, the only way we're going
to help hold these companies to account is. You know,
it's got to come from us as individuals. We've got
to find ways to work together. And there is power,
(23:24):
you know, which can come from a united band of
people who are do stand up to power. I mean
that's been so that story has been so powerfully told
with Black Lives Matter, and I think that hopefully a
lot more people realize that actually you do need to
(23:45):
sort of stand up and be counted and to be
trying in whatever way you can to hold the line truths, facts,
evidence based reporting, rule of law institutions. These things are
so important and we have to realize their value and
defend them in whatever means possible. Really, Facebook has made
(24:09):
some attempts to monitor the content on its platform. Recently,
the company announced it would ban anything that denies or
distorts the Holocaust, as well as q and On, an
organization that promotes and perpetuates outrageous conspiracy theories. They are
now making some decisions on you know, like the Q
(24:29):
and on stuff. Although there is you know, that doesn't
go far enough. I'm optimistic that the challenges that our
democracy face today can be overcome because we've overcome harder
challenges in the past. For Jesse Littlewood Hope Springs Eternal.
(24:51):
We are faced with a whole suite of challenges to
voters and to the belief in the integrity of our democracy.
But we've confronted even tougher problems in the past, and
while not perfect, our democracy was improved and expanded through
those other challenges. So I think we have a resilient
system and a pretty resilient population. It's a path that
(25:13):
is a hard one, and we are currently headed in
the wrong direction when it comes to rebuilding trust and
civic participation. But if you talk to young people today
who are civically engaged, they're involved in the fight for
to stop climate change no I know, know know, or
(25:40):
they're involved in advocacy around gun control or the way
that we should be approaching those subjects. Every day shot
all right, every day prob my name is VA and
here with the bad. They're involved across the board on
a whole different set of civic issues. So there's an
opportunity to rebuild a sense of civic engagement, and voting
(26:05):
is one of those ways. I think it's a problem
when people in the voting community say that that's the
only way you should get involved. It certainly is an
important one, but it's not the only thing that is
going to help get us out of it. Participation is
the secret. I don't believe we're going to be able
to litigate, lobby, or legislate our way out of a
diminished civic society. It's going to take active participation on
(26:28):
behalf of individuals to be able to improve the condition
of our democracy. Next week on turnout, we're the moral
compass of the country. Why kids these days maybe the
real democracy heroes. There's a visionary power that young people
(26:49):
hold and that is something that we need to continue
to follow. Young people, not a certain generation, are the
moral compass of the country. Hey, listeners, Before we wrap up,
I want to share some of those websites again. If
you want to report the disinformation you see on the Internet,
go to common Cause dot org slash disinfo. To keep
(27:10):
up with the Real Facebook Oversight board, visit Real Facebook
Oversight dot org. And for all you need to know
about how and where to vote in your state, go
to vote dot org. And finally, for the latest election coverage,
make sure to sign up for my morning newsletter wake
Up Call. Just go to Katie Currek dot com for
that Turnout is a production of I Heart Media and
(27:33):
Katie Curreic Media. The executive producers are Katie Curic and
Courtney Littz. Supervising producers Lauren Hansen. Associate producers Derek Clements,
Eliza Costas and Emily Pento. Editing by Derrick Clements and
Lauren Hansen, Mixing by Derrick Clements. Our researcher is Gabriel
Loser and special thanks to my right hand woman Adriana Fasio.
(27:57):
You can follow me at all my election cut ridge
at Katie Courrect So until next week, I'm Katie Curric.
This is Turnout. Thanks so much for listening. H
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!