January 8, 2024 • 49 mins
What is the future of misinformation on the internet? Is it possible that the invention of the internet has improved access to truth? What does any of this have to do with the Oxford English Dictionary, Soviet agriculture, liberation technology, Kenyan elections, Barbra Streisand's house, and Twitter revolutions? Join Eagleman for a surprising foray into the thorny forest of truth in the age of the internet.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
We all know about the problems of fake news and
the Internet, and many people are worried about it. But
is it possible that the Internet, on balance is better
for the dissemination of truth. What does this have to
do with Barbar Streisand's house, or Soviet agriculture, or Kenyan
(00:25):
elections or Twitter revolutions. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagleman.
I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in
these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe
to understand why and how our lives look the way
(00:45):
they do. Today's episode is about truth and misinformation and
the Internet. So in the last episode I discussed the
issue of truth, which has been at the center of
(01:06):
the dialogue about politics, about social media, about journalism for
many years now. And in twenty sixteen, a panel of
experts was interviewed and they said one of the grand
challenges was the issue of truth on the Internet. So
that's what we're going to talk about today. And twenty
sixteen also happened to be the year that the term
(01:29):
post truth was officially introduced to the Oxford English Dictionary.
So what does post truth mean? It was defined as
quote denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential
in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Now,
(01:52):
the fact that this got enenthrined by lexicographers at no
less of publication than the Oxford English Dictionary seemed to
clinch the argument that this was indeed a new phenomenon.
But to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history,
this is a little strange. It is, to my mind,
(02:13):
the strangest romanticization to believe, for a second, that people
in earlier generations, in earlier centuries millennia, did not predicate
their actions on emotion and personal belief. Now, in the
last episode, I mentioned just a smattering of events that
defined the twentieth century, like Nazism in Germany and communism
(02:37):
in China and the USSR and fascism in Italy, and
the massacre of the Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda
and the Kame Rouge in Cambodia and the rape of
Nanking by the Japanese and on and on. And the
thing to notice is that this was all in the
last century, mere decades ago, And this was all pre
(02:58):
internet drop of fuel for these movements, which collectively killed
probably one hundred million people. Every drop of the fuel
was not driven by facts, but instead emotion and personal belief.
You don't get a Hutu to pick up a machete
(03:19):
against a Tutsi based on provable assertions. You get him
all worked up over emotionality. You don't get a Chinese
student to murder her professor in the Cultural Revolution with
some factual argument. You do this by convincing her that
this little red book is the greatest thing she can
aspire to. You don't ever get a young man to
(03:42):
murder his neighbor based on a provable scientific point, but
instead by emotion. So it's not only an illusion, but
it's a dellusion to believe that people used to operate
on the facts. Although I'm pointing to the twentieth century
(04:02):
to remind us that this was all happening just yesterday,
we only need to take a ten thousand foot view
of the centuries before to see how driven the world
has always been by emotion and personal belief over facts.
Just consider the European Wars of Religion, also known as
the Wars of Reformation, in which through the sixteenth and
(04:25):
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants murdered one another.
In just one piece of that war, called the Thirty
Years War. It's estimated that eight million people died. Now,
about two thirds of the world is not Christian, so
most people can't even see the difference between Catholics and
(04:46):
Protestants and those millions of deaths, all that human suffering.
It wasn't based on facts and truth, it was based
on emotion and personal belief. This is similar to the
bloody geopolitically defining wars between the Shia and the Sunni Muslims.
If you don't know the difference between Shia and Sunni,
(05:09):
it stems from a debate over succession after the prophet
Mohammad died. Some felt the leadership torch should pass two
qualified candidates, and others thought it should only go through
Mohammad's bloodline. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is Sunni, Iran
is Shia, and they can't get along. And these competing
(05:30):
views of succession have been in conflict for fourteen hundred
years and provides a lot of the explosive fuel in
the Middle East. You've got Syrian civil war over these lines.
You've got Iraq fracturing over this divide. You've got growing
fissures in a number of Gulf states. So if you
happen to be taking up arms in this battle between
(05:53):
Sunni and Shia, perhaps you come up with a story
to tell yourself. This is based in fact and not
base based on personal beliefs. There's a factual and correct
answer to the question of succession from a prophet, and
it's mysterious to you why other people can't see it
as clearly as you can, and for that matter, why
(06:14):
the overwhelming majority of the world doesn't even understand what
you're arguing about. Now. I'm not intending to criticize anyone's
beliefs here, but I am only intending to point out
that it is hallucinatory to believe that society used to
operate on facts, and then starting in twenty sixteen or so,
we stopped basing our behaviors on facts and sunk into
(06:36):
personal beliefs. This idea is so goofy. In fact, I
saw the Economist tweet some years ago on how we're
entering a post truth world, and a commenter to that
tweet wrote, why didn't you see this coming years ago?
And he cited what he thought were the obvious main causes.
He said, low basic education and lousy media. So his
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argument was that given bad education and bad media, how
could we expect otherwise but to evolve into a cauldron
of disinformation. But of course, our system and reach of
education is better than it has ever been in the
history of the world. Around the entire globe, we've seen
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increased government spending on education. We've seen increased access to
education for girls and women. We've seen improved quality of
education everywhere. I look these stats up recently. In eighteen twenty,
only seventeen percent of the population got even a basic education.
That's less than one in five people. By twenty twenty
(07:42):
the number was over eighty six percent, so it's almost
nine out of ten people worldwide. This is an incredible
change in two hundred years, and it just keeps going up.
And this is mostly for reasons of societies realizing the
importance of education, but also the helps enormously because it
translates to access. So anyway education has improved. It's the
(08:08):
number of kids in school, how long they stay in school,
the quality of the schooling, all that has been going up,
and this, of course is directly correlated with reduced poverty
and increased economic growth for a country and increased social stability.
If you're interested in these sorts of statistics, by the way,
you should read The Better Angels of Our Nature by
(08:29):
my colleague Stephen Pinker, who for some reason is one
of the few people making the clear statistical argument about
the massive improvements in the world. So let me return
to this guy on Twitter who said we should have
seen post truth coming in twenty sixteen because of our
terrible education. His argument clearly means something emotional to him,
(08:52):
but he doesn't have a leg to stand on factually.
And his second point was about lousy media. Now us
that in the last episode, So I'm not going to
spend too much time with it here except to say
that people seem to hold an illusion that media used
to be very good. Even very smart people say things
to me like, well, back in my day there were
(09:14):
only two or three news stations and we got all
our news in the same place. But as I argued
in great detail in the last episode, the real story
is much more nuanced. People have always lived in their
echo chambers and gotten their opinions from their friends and
their neighbors and their family and their culture. And of course,
(09:35):
aside from the news stations, there were newspapers of every stripe,
and magazines of any political orientation, and pamphlets that would
show up in your mailbox that could have the most
extreme views imaginable. So there's nothing new about receiving misinformation
or disinformation. So remember that if we're asking the question
(09:58):
of whether something has degree rated about truthtelling, really try
to view history through this lens of the question, did
people used to tell the truth more than they do now? Now,
what I've set the table with so far is that
there's nothing new about not telling the truth, and about
swimming in the pool of our own beliefs and functioning
(10:21):
in our own echo chambers and taking up arms against
our neighbors who believe differently. But I want to be
super clear about something. By me pointing out that there's
nothing new about misinformation, please don't take that as me
saying that we shouldn't be fighting misinformation. We should fight
it tooth and nail. We should constantly improve our society
(10:42):
that way. That is our obligation to try to maximize truthtelling.
But the reason for my historical rant is that it
helps us sharpen our focus on the question of this episode,
which is how much does the Internet have to do
with disinformation? To what degree is that the Internet's fault
that we see all sorts of misinformation and disinformation that
(11:05):
is predicated on emotional and personal belief rather than facts.
Has the Internet made things worse? The main arguments I
hear about how the Internet has made things worse seem
to depend on issues that have always been with us. First,
people complain that on the Internet, a story gets magnified
based more on the reaction it provokes than its truth value.
(11:29):
The idea is that misinformation often comes packaged with clickbaity
headlines in sensational stories that are designed to grab attention.
This can make it more likely that people will share
misinformation even if they're not sure that it's true, or
perhaps they don't even believe that it's true. But again,
note that this has always been the case. That's how
(11:52):
we get which trials in the past because it may
or may not be true, but I heard so and
SO say it, and it's a story too good to repeat,
so I'm going to pass that on. That's how we
get McCarthyism, where people are blacklisted based on accusations that
they are Communist sympathizers. That's how the Soviet Union gets
tens of millions of political executions because of the story
(12:16):
that so and so is not aligned with the party.
Perhaps no meaningful evidence is presented, but the accusation is
clickbaity and designed to get local attention, and it does. So.
Let me give a different example of how the Internet
can actually make truth a little harder to see, and
that has to do with the issue of sock puppeting.
(12:38):
This is setting up, let's say, a fake account to
pretend that you're on the other side of some issue. Now,
usually there's not a lot that you can do with this,
but sometimes it can have a big effect. For example,
when the United States withdrew all its troops from Afghanistan
in twenty and twenty one, the Taliban just leveraged basic
(12:59):
social media one to secure their takeover, which is on
social media. They pretended to be the Allied forces withdrawing
and they gave instructions to the population like, hey, everyone
should evacuate this town now there's about to be a
lot of bombing. And this way, when the Taliban rolled
(13:21):
into these towns, there were many fewer people there to
stand up and provide resistance. So what the Taliban had
done is called sock puppeting. In other words, they had
put their hand inside of the puppet and pretended to
be somebody else doing the speaking. So, not surprisingly, truth
can get complex on social media because social media is
(13:43):
not always the right tool for the job for that.
So these are the general kinds of concerns that scholars
have about the Internet. But I want to present an
argument that has gotten essentially zero airtime, which is whether
it is a possibility that the Internet has made things better? Now,
(14:03):
how you might say, could the Internet have made truth
seeking better? Well, here's how it all has to do
with information flow. For an analogy, think about arteries. For
maximal health, you need unobstructed blood flow in your arteries,
and in exactly this way, societies need the free flow
of information. Things that block that flow can be fatal
(14:27):
to a nation. And I'm going to give you several examples.
So first, political censorship. This has been a familiar specter
throughout the last century, with state approved news outlets ruling
the press and airwaves in places like Romania or Cuba,
or China or Iraq, among lots of others. So the
(14:50):
official newspapers of the former Soviet Union had a complete
lock on the news, and foreign newspapers were allowed only
if they were published by communist parties with the approval
of the Soviets, and censorship did not end with news stories.
Copying machines were tightly controlled by the Soviets to prevent
(15:10):
dissemination of self published books or magazines. Even weather reports
were censored. In Nikolai Chichesku's Romania, certain temperature extremes translated
into time off of work, so the weather reports were
doctored so that these levels were not reached, and it
was the same in the Soviet Union. Stalin doctored weather
(15:33):
forecasts if they suggested that the sun would not shine
on the day of celebration for the labor movement, and
censorship reaches into every aspect of nations under control of dictators.
In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, maps of Baghdad were not allowed
to be printed lest some enemy of the state get
(15:55):
a hold of a map and then they could decipher
the street names for easy navigation. And the weather reports
there weren't just doctored they were locked away as classified information.
And I'll give you another example which demonstrates how not
new some of our problems are. People are worried about
(16:15):
deep fake photographs, which I'll talk about next week. Well,
the Soviets were doing this over a century ago. They
had a not so secret fondness for rewriting their national
story on the fly, so they routinely edited photographs to
remove people who had fallen out of favor with the party.
(16:36):
I'll give you a famous example. There's a photo which
proudly captures Lenin and other Soviet leaders in Red Square
and Moscow in nineteen nineteen. So you can see Lenin
and standing on his left, you see Leon Trotsky, and
on Lenin's right is a man named Kamenev, and there's
a bearded man two rows in front of Trotsky, a
(16:56):
Bolshevik leader from Georgia. Okay, well, if you look at
a release of this photo some years later, the official
Soviet version of the photo, you see that after Leon
Trotsky fell from party favor, he was airbrushed out of
the photo. In the revised photograph, there's just an empty
space where he used to be, and kamon f on
(17:18):
the right has disappeared as well, and the bearded Bolshevik
leader never existed in the photo either. I'll put this
photo the before and after version on my website so
you can check it out at eagleman dot com slash podcast,
and I'll also show another photograph. There's Joseph Stalin and
there's a man who is left named Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov
(17:40):
was a ruthless, awful guy. He was the head of
the secret police, the NKVD, and he spent years brutally
purging enemies of the state, typically without evidence and often
for personal reasons. But then in nineteen forty, Yezhov earned
the same treatment that he'd been handing out. He was
stripped and beaten and shot in the basement of an
(18:03):
NKVD station. So Stalin wrapped up loose ends by deleting
Yezhov from history by airbrushing him out of the photo. Now,
not surprisingly, governments that are infamous for blocking information flow
are the same ones we think of when we hear
of purges and shortages and repression and civil and political
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rights and isolation. Censorship rarely works well for regimes, and
perhaps this is because a population that's fed doctor messages
never truly falls for the trick. A friend of mine
who was raised in the Soviet Union tells me that
everyone held two separate things in their heads, what they
were supposed to say to each other and what they
(18:48):
actually believed. So there are lots of complaints that people
have about the Internet, but the way to really understand
(19:11):
why it's better for the truth is to deeply understand
the disaster of centralized command of the truth. Censorship can
involve more than books and photos, and whether the tyranny
of information control can actually bring down a nation. I
mentioned in the previous episode about a Soviet scientist named
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Trophym Lyashenko. He was an agronomist who proposed these stunning
new scientific theories about how to grow wheat better and faster,
and he was highly favored by Stalin and so Laishenko
rose up through the ranks of power. But it turns
out his theories were scientifically fraudulent, but that didn't stop
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him from gaining impressive influence in the party, and by
the nineteen forties he steered the agricultural program for the
entire USSR. Now there was a grave problem with this
centralized command, which is that the USSR spanned thirteen time
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zones and an astounding variety of soils and climates and
local knowledge, and so applied to a landscape that size,
this central rule setting was disastrous for wheat production. Local
farmers knew better how to care for their crops, but
they were disallowed the freedom, and scientists who disagreed with
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Lyashenko found themselves disbarred from their positions, and several agronomists
were executed. Part of the downfall of the USSR can
be traced to this centralization of agricultural decisions. It ruined
the economy, and it crippled confidence in the new system.
So the lesson for history is that a centralized tyranny
(21:03):
rarely works as well as local information and nested feedback loops,
and this is where the Internet shines. Historically, the more
successful strategy has always been to confront free speech with
free speech, and the Internet allows that in a natural way.
It democratizes the flow of information by giving open access
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to the newspapers of the world, the photographers of every nation,
the bloggers of every political stripe. Now, I talked last
week about how in any conflict, people will post the
worst videos from the other side and try to imply
that that is representative of the opposing population so they
can whip up support. And that's an issue to always
(21:50):
keep an eye on. That's a genuine problem. But even
that is far better than the other problem, which is censorship.
As soon as you give one side, any side, a
total lockdown on the news, you have a much deeper
level of problem. So coming back to a democratic Internet
that has open to everyone, of course you're going to
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get some postings that are full of doctoring and dishonesty,
while others strive for independence and impartiality. But in the
end all are available for the end user to sift
through for reasoned consideration. It's far better than having zero
choice about the story that you're fed. And beyond news sites,
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the simple redundancy of information online changes the censorship equation irreversibly.
So just imagine Hussein trying to eradicate maps when anyone
can serve satellite photos to two meter resolution. Or imagine
Chichescu trying to doctor weather reports when anyone can pull
(22:57):
up the weather of the world. Orginej. Stalin trying to
delete Trotsky from photographs when the photos are mirrored on
Google images, and the Internet Archive in a thousand other sites. Now,
this inability to erase information from the Internet took on
a name two decades ago. It's called the Streisand Effect.
(23:20):
This happened because in two thousand and three, a guy
snapped an aerial photograph of Barbara Streisand's home in Malibu,
and the guy posted the photo on his website for
privacy reasons. Streisand wanted it off the net, and when
he wouldn't comply, she sued him. But her actions had
a drastic, unintended consequence. Until that moment, almost no one
(23:45):
knew where her home was, and by trying to suppress
the information, she promptly drove over a million visitors to
his site. So observing this Streisand incident in two thousand
and three, internet watchers realized they were seeing the new
rules of the game in action. Trying to suppress information
(24:06):
on the Web only magnifies it. And this new inability
to hide information found perhaps its highest expression in wiki Leaks,
which was launched in two thousand and six by the
Australian journalist and activist Julian Assange. His mission, he said,
was to open governments. The site seems like it's mostly
(24:28):
dying now some seventeen years later. But what it did
was published documents disclosed by anonymous sources, and it got
to about ten million such documents. And the documents it
leaked were as varied as their country is of origin.
I remember when they leaked Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account.
They leaked membership lists of illegal parties in the UK.
(24:51):
They leaked internal United Nations reports and senatorial campaign documents,
and oil scandals and airstrike videos. In twenty ten, WikiLeaks
released eighty thousand classified documents about the war in Afghanistan,
and by the end of that year it published close
to four hundred thousand documents from the war in Iraq.
(25:12):
And the thing to observe about those leaks is that
they weren't impotent. Sometimes they directly fomented social change. So
consider this incident in which an icelandic bank gagged the
national broadcaster of Iceland from reporting on its debt default risk.
A whistleblower got the info onto WikiLeaks, and Icelanders went
(25:36):
into an uproar and that rapidly led to new legislation
in their parliament ensuring media freedom. So if you care
about truth. You should care about the power of the Internet,
and I'll mention something else where. Getting information out leads
to good things happening. So WikiLeaks published lists of blacklisted
(25:57):
websites from the governments of Denmark and Norway, and Thailand
and Australia. And in most of these cases the blacklisted
sites were pornographic or violent, but it never takes long
before other sites get slipped onto the list. For example,
the Thailand Censorship list advertises a filter against child pornography,
(26:19):
contained over one thousand sites that were felt to be
critical of the Thai royal family, and Assaunge maintains, as
many people do, that censorship approaches like Internet filtering become
invariably corrupted. And another thing, the speed of information flow
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on the Internet allows rapid, massive democratic response. I remember
in two thousand and nine, when the Internet was newer,
when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced he was going
to shut down Parliament until March thirtieth. And what he
said is that he needed time to work on a
stimulus package. But a lot of people suspected he was
just trying to prevent a vote of no confidence from
(27:03):
the opposition parties. So such a vote would force an election,
which is something Harper desperately wanted to avoid. So a
Canadian student, unhappy about this shutdown and has perceived reasons
for it, he started a Facebook group that quickly swelled
to two hundred and fourteen thousand members, and it precipitated
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real world rallies all across Canada with crowds of thousands.
And that kind of breakneck speed of messaging equates to
a departure from the days of spreading the word by
pamphleting or shouting from horseback. It allows the citizenry to
become a rapid response democratic organism. If a bunch of
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individual brains happened to share an opinion, they can combine
rapidly to be heard. Now, obviously, that has both pros
and cons, and this is one of the plays. This
is where I think the advent of the Internet does
lead to a quantitative and qualitative change, because it allows
crowds to pull together very quickly, sometimes frighteningly so. And
(28:12):
sometimes giant crowds prove useful for protesting something bad. Then
sometimes they provide terrifying brainless muscle. But going back to
the benefits of the net, one of the biggest benefits
began even when the Internet was quite young. Movements sprang
up to keep governments from tampering with the democratic voting process,
(28:35):
and this holy grail of fairness got achieved via Internet
movements in which citizens leveraged live online mapping to aggregate
and display activities during elections. Take, for example, the crisis
mapping tool ushahidi dot com, which was originally developed when
(28:55):
violence erupted following the disputed Kenyan presidential elections of two
thousand and eight. Using Ushahidi, anyone with a cell phone
could send a text message to report disturbances or defamation
or vote tampering, or even simply to say that everything
went well there. And so by constructing a dynamic map
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of the trouble spots, they could attract the world's reporters
to expose the fraud. And to this day, reports from
Ushahidi typically feature alongside those of full time journalists. And
this is all helping to ensure that an election is
as free and fair as possible. And that's a big
(29:38):
deal because many elections all around the globe continue to
be famously and unabashedly fraudulent, not in the most advanced countries,
but certainly in places like Afghanistan, where elections are characterized
by widespread fraud of the tallies and intimidation and ballot
stuffing and people paid to vote multiple times using fake
(30:00):
or duplicate voter cards. As it turns out, a lot
of voters are scared or reluctant to discuss any fraud
that they witnessed, but sending a text message is easy
and so mobile crowd monitoring of elections has been a
growing trend around the planet. By aggregating little bits of
(30:21):
information from the millions of folk reporters on the ground,
This method keeps governments one step more transparent then they
might otherwise volunteer to be in the absence of watchful
eyes and far reaching voices. And there are similar trends
that publicly track journalist safety, especially those who are potentially
(30:42):
in danger from their own governments. There's a saying in
journalism that if you turn on a bright light, the
roaches scatter. So with these aggregation sites, each person with
a cell phone contributes just a few photons and the
sum is enough to light up the country. So the
argument I've made is that the Internet provides the potential
(31:05):
to enhance democracy. But it's really important that we note
that this benefit is in danger in many countries. So,
for example, aligned with China's Great Wall is China's Great firewall.
Chinese internet filters put blanket blocks on political statements that
the government does not allow, and apparently internet users are
(31:29):
hired to post positive observations about the government on forums
and chat rooms. Now, I don't know if you were
following this back in two thousand and six, but at
the time, the Internet was still young and companies were
still struggling to figure out who was going to ascend
to the top. And Google agreed to allow China to
(31:49):
censor search traffic because this seemed like an acceptable price
for Google for the opportunity to tap into a market
of four hundred million Internet use So the Chinese government
in China was allowed to filter the Google search results.
So what does this mean? If you search from anywhere
in the world for Tienemann Square protest, you get a
(32:12):
reasonable set of search results, But if you performed the
same search inside China's borders, you would get a very
different set and you would not see any of the
iconic photographs of that event. Well, come back to Google
(32:42):
in a moment. But first I want to mention how
easy it has always been to demonstrate the Chinese firewall.
That this has changed a little bit recently. But some
years ago you could go to say buyd dot com,
which is the major Chinese search engine, and you type
in something like the name of your local city and
you get several result returned. Now you type in something
like Falloon Gong, which is a spiritualist movement on the
(33:06):
Chinese blacklist, and you get an error message reading this
web page is not available. It appears that perhaps a
server has gone down on by news end. What just happened? Well,
when Chinese servers detect an incoming packet with a prohibited term,
they return a reset message which falsely tells the request
(33:29):
that there was an error retrieving the page. This makes
it look as though the problem is related to the
requested site, and the Chinese servers then put the requesting
machine's IP address on a blacklist for a few moments.
So if you try entering your innocuous first search again,
you'll get an error message. Now because you've been temporarily
(33:51):
blocked out of China at least as of a few
years ago. You could try this on any Chinese search
engine of your choice and you'd get exactly the same result.
Now let's return to Google in the Chinese market. What
happened at the beginning of twenty ten was that Google's
servers in China were hacked and the information was taken
from different accounts, and it appeared that the hackers had
(34:14):
a special focus on the accounts of Chinese political dissidents,
and Google was pretty sure the Chinese government was behind
the break in. So as a result, Google changed its
mind on the topic of censorship and circumvented the Great
Firewall of China by rerouting through Hong Kong, and eventually
(34:35):
China banned Google altogether. So Google ended up surrendering a
large piece of the lucrative Chinese market. But this kind
of move is critical if you don't want to support
government censorship. And by the way, I need to make
clear that internet censorship is not limited to China. Most
(34:56):
of the countries that impinge on Internet freedom will come
as no surprise, nations like Burma and Cuba and Egypt
and Iran and North Korea and Saudi Arabia and Syria
and Uganda and a bunch of others. But sometimes people
are a little surprised to discover that some Western countries
try to get in on the action here. Some years ago,
(35:18):
in Australia, the Australian Labor Party proposed a set of
laws to censor blacklisted sites at the level of the
Internet service providers. They claimed the sites they wanted to
censor were involved in child pornography or terrorism. But then
WikiLeaks released the list of the blacklisted sites, and the
(35:39):
list encompassed other sites as well, some of them seemingly random.
The filtering legislation didn't pass in Australia, but the fact
that it had some momentum reminds us to always keep
an eye on this. In other words, if you care
about truth on the Internet, we need to think about
more than people saying stupid stuff online. The bigger worry
(36:03):
from a historical angle is about state control of what
information you can or cannot access. And this is the
beauty of a technology that seeks to network everyone's brain
together and democratize things and hear everyone's voice. Obviously, some
(36:23):
of those voices will be less useful than others, and
people at the political extremes will purposefully lie and make
up have truth. But it is better than Stalin or
Giping or Chichescu or Hitler or Polpod or Mussolini allowing
you to hear only the messages that they want you
to hear and nothing else. So look, whatever side of
(36:46):
the political spectrum you're on, just think of how you
would feel if Biden or Trump got to control the
news entirely during his presidency and you wouldn't be allowed
to see the other side. If that sounds like a
nightmare to you, then you see why I am so
optimistic about this technology when we have a conversation about truth.
(37:12):
This networking technology makes it impossible to do all the
things that so many countries have enjoyed doing during the
twentieth century, like controlling the news and doing historical rewrites.
By aggregating citizen information, you get some different problems, like
a lot of noise, but noise is typically better than
(37:33):
an iron fist. This is why the Internet is sometimes
categorized as a liberation technology. And indeed citizens everywhere find
ways to drill holes in the silicone curtain. For example,
from inside China, lots of young people make secure connections
(37:53):
to a proxy server, a server outside of China, and
then the filtering technologies applied on Chinese servers don't apply.
So daily millions of young people in China make these
connections to servers in Hong Kong and they surf X
or Facebook or they use Gmail from there. The most
(38:13):
oppressive governments will probably always try to implement strict firewalls,
but this will presumably lead to a black market for
home brewed satellite uplinking with which to circumvent it, like
Amagino line. So retaining the capacity of the Internet to
allow all viewpoints, this is something that's going to require
(38:36):
constant vigilance for a lot of places in the world.
The future is going to be a zeros and one's
arm race between countries and their citizens, and like any
cat and mouse game, both sides are going to adopt
each other's technologies. I'll give you an example of the
cat and mouse game that we saw coming into focus
(38:57):
even a decade and a half ago. So in two
thousand nine, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmed Dinijad declared victory
over his opponent MUSAVII, but the outcome was suspected of
being rigged, and almost immediately the pronouncement was followed by
protests in Tehran and in the Iran more broadly, and
in cities around the world. Now, as you may remember,
(39:19):
those protests quickly went bad. Paramilitary snipers on the rooftops
opened fire on the crowds, and bodies began to collapse
in the streets. But as quickly as things went bad,
they went viral. So web surfers in every country watched
instantly delivered photos and videos of attacks and murders, and
(39:42):
protesters inside Iran used Twitter and other sites to aggregate
crisis information and update situations and post links to freshly
uploaded videos. Cyber dissidents took down Ahmed Dinijad's website with
a denial of service attack, and a few days after
after this had begun, and editorial in the Washington Times
(40:03):
admiringly dubbed the events the Twitter revolution. Now in cat
and mouse style, the government leveraged their tools too. Amadinijad
replied not only by banning rallies, but more importantly by
blocking cell phone transmissions and text messaging and shutting down
the Internet for forty five minutes to set up filtering software.
(40:26):
Iran presumably could have opted to take the whole country
offline permanently during this time, but in the cat and
mouse game, that option would cripple the government's crisis response
communications as much as it would the protesters, so in
the end, the protesters won the digital race in that
round in Iran, broadcasting the post election oppression to a
(40:50):
worldwide audience. But the cat and mouse countermeasures have gone
on and on. After Masa Amini's death in Iran in
twenty two, citizens took to social media to protest, but
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps blocked access to social media
platforms and in fact shut off the Internet in parts
(41:11):
of the country, and just in the past few months,
WhatsApp and Instagram have been blocked in Iran due to
protests against the government, and last year, Iran was ranked
the second worst place in the world for Internet censorship,
which by the way, includes not just social media, but
also websites relating to health, sports, science, news, and so on,
(41:34):
all of which should shake us out of our assumptions
that the Internet is simply open and free and immune
to a future of government intrusion and something to merely
gripe about when someone posts something that we dislike. This
reminds us that the Internet is a liberation technology and
(41:56):
reminds us of the criticality of keeping the Web open
and online. For those of us who happen to be
lucky enough to live in non repressive countries, we should
always take steps to keep it open and increase government transparency,
even in the face of opportunities for misinformation and disinformation.
(42:16):
I think the Internet tips the balance in favor of
a better society. Censorship is increasingly difficult to pull off now.
The stalins and touchescos and Husseins have to work a
lot harder to try to keep information away from the populace.
(42:37):
We're not going to have an all Trump or an
all Biden controlled media. News gets out fast, and once
it's out, it's hard to take back or rewrite it retrospectively.
And because of the ability to ensure fair voting and
shine a light on government misdeeds, the ability for regimes
(42:59):
to keep a tight grip on the data available to
its citizens is increasingly going to become a nightmare of
the past now. Obviously, one of the major problems of
the Internet, just like in all times with all news sources,
is learning to not accept stories at face value. It
(43:19):
goes without saying that a good education will teach children
or adults the need to consider the source, to evaluate
the evidence as best we can. Now, it's not surprising
that the older generations are worried about what younger generations
are stepping into with this technology. But I do think
(43:41):
that because of all the emphasis on fake news and
the imminence of deep fakes, which I'll talk about next week,
I do think that the younger generations will actually be
much better at filtering news. As far as I can tell,
the older generations are the ones stuck with the illusion
that if something is written and down it must be true,
(44:01):
whereas younger kids are more skeptical. So when I talk
with people young and old about truth on the Internet
and how to evaluate the flood of information, I emphasize
two points. First, to be critical of our own biases.
We all have biases, and these can lead us to
believe things that we shouldn't. So be aware of your
(44:23):
own biases and try to be objective when evaluating information.
And the second thing is to try to engage in
dialogue with people you trust and who you think are
smart and who are on the other side of an issue.
Try to steal man the other side. If you haven't
heard that term. This is the opposite of straw manning,
(44:45):
which is a technique for misrepresenting an opponent's argument to
make it easier to attack. Steal manning is a technique
for strengthening an opponent's argument so you can better understand it.
To steal man and argue in you need to identify
the premises and the conclusion, and you need to work
(45:06):
to understand the assumptions that underlie the argument. This allows
you to try to understand the argument from your opponent's perspective.
I'm not saying you have to come to a conclusion
of agreeing with the other person, but this is an
extremely valuable technique to say, Okay, I'm going to put
myself in a totally different pair of shoes, or more exactly,
(45:27):
in a different brain with a different world model, and
I'm going to see what my assumptions are and different
ways that I might believe this argument. Now, again, this
doesn't mean that in the end you need to adopt
that person's point of view, but I believe if you
take on this intellectual habit, you'll find yourself a little
more mature in your worldviews. You'll be slightly less able
(45:51):
to say that you think some complex situation is actually
really simple and hence less willing to dehumanize some other
group of humans. So let's wrap up today's episode. As
I mentioned last week, I got interested in this question
because several colleagues called me in twenty twenty and asked
if I would be on a grant with them to
(46:13):
restore truth in the media and on the Internet. And
I thought the idea was a little misguided because fundamentally
it rested on a poor memory of what truth used
to be, a retrospective romanticization. The key with the Internet
is that there's good and bad, but on balance, it
(46:34):
strikes me as clear that it comes out positively. So
when a pundit asserts that the Internet is responsible, in
part or and whole for our perceived decline into a
post truth world, I interpret that that statement stems from
ignorance about pre Internet history. As a history buff, I
(46:56):
really asked myself what was the world like pre and
post Internet? And I hope I've convinced you even a
little bit. I hope I've reminded you about how much
worse the world was pre Internet. And I hope I've
convinced you even a little bit that the Internet may
actually be the most important tool we've ever had for
(47:18):
surfacing truth. Essentially, it's impossible now for a government to
control the news that we are exposed to. Instead, a
million flashlights on the ground will end up shedding light. Now,
it goes without saying that when you have a million
people swinging flashlights around, there's a challenge that we face,
(47:40):
which is whose flashlight being? Do you believe? And obviously
there are plenty of misinformants and disinformants, just like there
have always been, But at least now we have the
possibility of getting exposed to different points of view. And
again I know that most people people will not look
(48:01):
for different points of view, but happily it's generally impossible
to not get hit in the face with different points
of view, at least sometimes when you're surfing around and
it might make you mad to see some other viewpoint
and your best interpretation is that they are deceitful, lyars
or misinformed. But at least that point of view enters
(48:23):
your hopper and the possibility at least exists to incorporate
it into your consideration. So as you can see, I'm
generally optimistic about the Internet and the existence of this technology.
But finally this all leads us to the next question,
the next era of invention, which is what happens now
(48:45):
that we have AI on the radar, And that is
next week's episode. See you then go to eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com
(49:05):
with questions or discussion and I'll be making episodes in
which I address those until next time. I'm David Eagleman
and this is Inner Cosmos.
We all know about the problems of fake news and
the Internet, and many people are worried about it. But
is it possible that the Internet, on balance is better
for the dissemination of truth. What does this have to
do with Barbar Streisand's house, or Soviet agriculture, or Kenyan
(00:25):
elections or Twitter revolutions. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagleman.
I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in
these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe
to understand why and how our lives look the way
(00:45):
they do. Today's episode is about truth and misinformation and
the Internet. So in the last episode I discussed the
issue of truth, which has been at the center of
(01:06):
the dialogue about politics, about social media, about journalism for
many years now. And in twenty sixteen, a panel of
experts was interviewed and they said one of the grand
challenges was the issue of truth on the Internet. So
that's what we're going to talk about today. And twenty
sixteen also happened to be the year that the term
(01:29):
post truth was officially introduced to the Oxford English Dictionary.
So what does post truth mean? It was defined as
quote denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential
in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Now,
(01:52):
the fact that this got enenthrined by lexicographers at no
less of publication than the Oxford English Dictionary seemed to
clinch the argument that this was indeed a new phenomenon.
But to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history,
this is a little strange. It is, to my mind,
(02:13):
the strangest romanticization to believe, for a second, that people
in earlier generations, in earlier centuries millennia, did not predicate
their actions on emotion and personal belief. Now, in the
last episode, I mentioned just a smattering of events that
defined the twentieth century, like Nazism in Germany and communism
(02:37):
in China and the USSR and fascism in Italy, and
the massacre of the Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda
and the Kame Rouge in Cambodia and the rape of
Nanking by the Japanese and on and on. And the
thing to notice is that this was all in the
last century, mere decades ago, And this was all pre
(02:58):
internet drop of fuel for these movements, which collectively killed
probably one hundred million people. Every drop of the fuel
was not driven by facts, but instead emotion and personal belief.
You don't get a Hutu to pick up a machete
(03:19):
against a Tutsi based on provable assertions. You get him
all worked up over emotionality. You don't get a Chinese
student to murder her professor in the Cultural Revolution with
some factual argument. You do this by convincing her that
this little red book is the greatest thing she can
aspire to. You don't ever get a young man to
(03:42):
murder his neighbor based on a provable scientific point, but
instead by emotion. So it's not only an illusion, but
it's a dellusion to believe that people used to operate
on the facts. Although I'm pointing to the twentieth century
(04:02):
to remind us that this was all happening just yesterday,
we only need to take a ten thousand foot view
of the centuries before to see how driven the world
has always been by emotion and personal belief over facts.
Just consider the European Wars of Religion, also known as
the Wars of Reformation, in which through the sixteenth and
(04:25):
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants murdered one another.
In just one piece of that war, called the Thirty
Years War. It's estimated that eight million people died. Now,
about two thirds of the world is not Christian, so
most people can't even see the difference between Catholics and
(04:46):
Protestants and those millions of deaths, all that human suffering.
It wasn't based on facts and truth, it was based
on emotion and personal belief. This is similar to the
bloody geopolitically defining wars between the Shia and the Sunni Muslims.
If you don't know the difference between Shia and Sunni,
(05:09):
it stems from a debate over succession after the prophet
Mohammad died. Some felt the leadership torch should pass two
qualified candidates, and others thought it should only go through
Mohammad's bloodline. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is Sunni, Iran
is Shia, and they can't get along. And these competing
(05:30):
views of succession have been in conflict for fourteen hundred
years and provides a lot of the explosive fuel in
the Middle East. You've got Syrian civil war over these lines.
You've got Iraq fracturing over this divide. You've got growing
fissures in a number of Gulf states. So if you
happen to be taking up arms in this battle between
(05:53):
Sunni and Shia, perhaps you come up with a story
to tell yourself. This is based in fact and not
base based on personal beliefs. There's a factual and correct
answer to the question of succession from a prophet, and
it's mysterious to you why other people can't see it
as clearly as you can, and for that matter, why
(06:14):
the overwhelming majority of the world doesn't even understand what
you're arguing about. Now. I'm not intending to criticize anyone's
beliefs here, but I am only intending to point out
that it is hallucinatory to believe that society used to
operate on facts, and then starting in twenty sixteen or so,
we stopped basing our behaviors on facts and sunk into
(06:36):
personal beliefs. This idea is so goofy. In fact, I
saw the Economist tweet some years ago on how we're
entering a post truth world, and a commenter to that
tweet wrote, why didn't you see this coming years ago?
And he cited what he thought were the obvious main causes.
He said, low basic education and lousy media. So his
(06:58):
argument was that given bad education and bad media, how
could we expect otherwise but to evolve into a cauldron
of disinformation. But of course, our system and reach of
education is better than it has ever been in the
history of the world. Around the entire globe, we've seen
(07:21):
increased government spending on education. We've seen increased access to
education for girls and women. We've seen improved quality of
education everywhere. I look these stats up recently. In eighteen twenty,
only seventeen percent of the population got even a basic education.
That's less than one in five people. By twenty twenty
(07:42):
the number was over eighty six percent, so it's almost
nine out of ten people worldwide. This is an incredible
change in two hundred years, and it just keeps going up.
And this is mostly for reasons of societies realizing the
importance of education, but also the helps enormously because it
translates to access. So anyway education has improved. It's the
(08:08):
number of kids in school, how long they stay in school,
the quality of the schooling, all that has been going up,
and this, of course is directly correlated with reduced poverty
and increased economic growth for a country and increased social stability.
If you're interested in these sorts of statistics, by the way,
you should read The Better Angels of Our Nature by
(08:29):
my colleague Stephen Pinker, who for some reason is one
of the few people making the clear statistical argument about
the massive improvements in the world. So let me return
to this guy on Twitter who said we should have
seen post truth coming in twenty sixteen because of our
terrible education. His argument clearly means something emotional to him,
(08:52):
but he doesn't have a leg to stand on factually.
And his second point was about lousy media. Now us
that in the last episode, So I'm not going to
spend too much time with it here except to say
that people seem to hold an illusion that media used
to be very good. Even very smart people say things
to me like, well, back in my day there were
(09:14):
only two or three news stations and we got all
our news in the same place. But as I argued
in great detail in the last episode, the real story
is much more nuanced. People have always lived in their
echo chambers and gotten their opinions from their friends and
their neighbors and their family and their culture. And of course,
(09:35):
aside from the news stations, there were newspapers of every stripe,
and magazines of any political orientation, and pamphlets that would
show up in your mailbox that could have the most
extreme views imaginable. So there's nothing new about receiving misinformation
or disinformation. So remember that if we're asking the question
(09:58):
of whether something has degree rated about truthtelling, really try
to view history through this lens of the question, did
people used to tell the truth more than they do now? Now,
what I've set the table with so far is that
there's nothing new about not telling the truth, and about
swimming in the pool of our own beliefs and functioning
(10:21):
in our own echo chambers and taking up arms against
our neighbors who believe differently. But I want to be
super clear about something. By me pointing out that there's
nothing new about misinformation, please don't take that as me
saying that we shouldn't be fighting misinformation. We should fight
it tooth and nail. We should constantly improve our society
(10:42):
that way. That is our obligation to try to maximize truthtelling.
But the reason for my historical rant is that it
helps us sharpen our focus on the question of this episode,
which is how much does the Internet have to do
with disinformation? To what degree is that the Internet's fault
that we see all sorts of misinformation and disinformation that
(11:05):
is predicated on emotional and personal belief rather than facts.
Has the Internet made things worse? The main arguments I
hear about how the Internet has made things worse seem
to depend on issues that have always been with us. First,
people complain that on the Internet, a story gets magnified
based more on the reaction it provokes than its truth value.
(11:29):
The idea is that misinformation often comes packaged with clickbaity
headlines in sensational stories that are designed to grab attention.
This can make it more likely that people will share
misinformation even if they're not sure that it's true, or
perhaps they don't even believe that it's true. But again,
note that this has always been the case. That's how
(11:52):
we get which trials in the past because it may
or may not be true, but I heard so and
SO say it, and it's a story too good to repeat,
so I'm going to pass that on. That's how we
get McCarthyism, where people are blacklisted based on accusations that
they are Communist sympathizers. That's how the Soviet Union gets
tens of millions of political executions because of the story
(12:16):
that so and so is not aligned with the party.
Perhaps no meaningful evidence is presented, but the accusation is
clickbaity and designed to get local attention, and it does. So.
Let me give a different example of how the Internet
can actually make truth a little harder to see, and
that has to do with the issue of sock puppeting.
(12:38):
This is setting up, let's say, a fake account to
pretend that you're on the other side of some issue. Now,
usually there's not a lot that you can do with this,
but sometimes it can have a big effect. For example,
when the United States withdrew all its troops from Afghanistan
in twenty and twenty one, the Taliban just leveraged basic
(12:59):
social media one to secure their takeover, which is on
social media. They pretended to be the Allied forces withdrawing
and they gave instructions to the population like, hey, everyone
should evacuate this town now there's about to be a
lot of bombing. And this way, when the Taliban rolled
(13:21):
into these towns, there were many fewer people there to
stand up and provide resistance. So what the Taliban had
done is called sock puppeting. In other words, they had
put their hand inside of the puppet and pretended to
be somebody else doing the speaking. So, not surprisingly, truth
can get complex on social media because social media is
(13:43):
not always the right tool for the job for that.
So these are the general kinds of concerns that scholars
have about the Internet. But I want to present an
argument that has gotten essentially zero airtime, which is whether
it is a possibility that the Internet has made things better? Now,
(14:03):
how you might say, could the Internet have made truth
seeking better? Well, here's how it all has to do
with information flow. For an analogy, think about arteries. For
maximal health, you need unobstructed blood flow in your arteries,
and in exactly this way, societies need the free flow
of information. Things that block that flow can be fatal
(14:27):
to a nation. And I'm going to give you several examples.
So first, political censorship. This has been a familiar specter
throughout the last century, with state approved news outlets ruling
the press and airwaves in places like Romania or Cuba,
or China or Iraq, among lots of others. So the
(14:50):
official newspapers of the former Soviet Union had a complete
lock on the news, and foreign newspapers were allowed only
if they were published by communist parties with the approval
of the Soviets, and censorship did not end with news stories.
Copying machines were tightly controlled by the Soviets to prevent
(15:10):
dissemination of self published books or magazines. Even weather reports
were censored. In Nikolai Chichesku's Romania, certain temperature extremes translated
into time off of work, so the weather reports were
doctored so that these levels were not reached, and it
was the same in the Soviet Union. Stalin doctored weather
(15:33):
forecasts if they suggested that the sun would not shine
on the day of celebration for the labor movement, and
censorship reaches into every aspect of nations under control of dictators.
In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, maps of Baghdad were not allowed
to be printed lest some enemy of the state get
(15:55):
a hold of a map and then they could decipher
the street names for easy navigation. And the weather reports
there weren't just doctored they were locked away as classified information.
And I'll give you another example which demonstrates how not
new some of our problems are. People are worried about
(16:15):
deep fake photographs, which I'll talk about next week. Well,
the Soviets were doing this over a century ago. They
had a not so secret fondness for rewriting their national
story on the fly, so they routinely edited photographs to
remove people who had fallen out of favor with the party.
(16:36):
I'll give you a famous example. There's a photo which
proudly captures Lenin and other Soviet leaders in Red Square
and Moscow in nineteen nineteen. So you can see Lenin
and standing on his left, you see Leon Trotsky, and
on Lenin's right is a man named Kamenev, and there's
a bearded man two rows in front of Trotsky, a
(16:56):
Bolshevik leader from Georgia. Okay, well, if you look at
a release of this photo some years later, the official
Soviet version of the photo, you see that after Leon
Trotsky fell from party favor, he was airbrushed out of
the photo. In the revised photograph, there's just an empty
space where he used to be, and kamon f on
(17:18):
the right has disappeared as well, and the bearded Bolshevik
leader never existed in the photo either. I'll put this
photo the before and after version on my website so
you can check it out at eagleman dot com slash podcast,
and I'll also show another photograph. There's Joseph Stalin and
there's a man who is left named Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov
(17:40):
was a ruthless, awful guy. He was the head of
the secret police, the NKVD, and he spent years brutally
purging enemies of the state, typically without evidence and often
for personal reasons. But then in nineteen forty, Yezhov earned
the same treatment that he'd been handing out. He was
stripped and beaten and shot in the basement of an
(18:03):
NKVD station. So Stalin wrapped up loose ends by deleting
Yezhov from history by airbrushing him out of the photo. Now,
not surprisingly, governments that are infamous for blocking information flow
are the same ones we think of when we hear
of purges and shortages and repression and civil and political
(18:26):
rights and isolation. Censorship rarely works well for regimes, and
perhaps this is because a population that's fed doctor messages
never truly falls for the trick. A friend of mine
who was raised in the Soviet Union tells me that
everyone held two separate things in their heads, what they
were supposed to say to each other and what they
(18:48):
actually believed. So there are lots of complaints that people
have about the Internet, but the way to really understand
(19:11):
why it's better for the truth is to deeply understand
the disaster of centralized command of the truth. Censorship can
involve more than books and photos, and whether the tyranny
of information control can actually bring down a nation. I
mentioned in the previous episode about a Soviet scientist named
(19:34):
Trophym Lyashenko. He was an agronomist who proposed these stunning
new scientific theories about how to grow wheat better and faster,
and he was highly favored by Stalin and so Laishenko
rose up through the ranks of power. But it turns
out his theories were scientifically fraudulent, but that didn't stop
(19:56):
him from gaining impressive influence in the party, and by
the nineteen forties he steered the agricultural program for the
entire USSR. Now there was a grave problem with this
centralized command, which is that the USSR spanned thirteen time
(20:16):
zones and an astounding variety of soils and climates and
local knowledge, and so applied to a landscape that size,
this central rule setting was disastrous for wheat production. Local
farmers knew better how to care for their crops, but
they were disallowed the freedom, and scientists who disagreed with
(20:39):
Lyashenko found themselves disbarred from their positions, and several agronomists
were executed. Part of the downfall of the USSR can
be traced to this centralization of agricultural decisions. It ruined
the economy, and it crippled confidence in the new system.
So the lesson for history is that a centralized tyranny
(21:03):
rarely works as well as local information and nested feedback loops,
and this is where the Internet shines. Historically, the more
successful strategy has always been to confront free speech with
free speech, and the Internet allows that in a natural way.
It democratizes the flow of information by giving open access
(21:28):
to the newspapers of the world, the photographers of every nation,
the bloggers of every political stripe. Now, I talked last
week about how in any conflict, people will post the
worst videos from the other side and try to imply
that that is representative of the opposing population so they
can whip up support. And that's an issue to always
(21:50):
keep an eye on. That's a genuine problem. But even
that is far better than the other problem, which is censorship.
As soon as you give one side, any side, a
total lockdown on the news, you have a much deeper
level of problem. So coming back to a democratic Internet
that has open to everyone, of course you're going to
(22:13):
get some postings that are full of doctoring and dishonesty,
while others strive for independence and impartiality. But in the
end all are available for the end user to sift
through for reasoned consideration. It's far better than having zero
choice about the story that you're fed. And beyond news sites,
(22:35):
the simple redundancy of information online changes the censorship equation irreversibly.
So just imagine Hussein trying to eradicate maps when anyone
can serve satellite photos to two meter resolution. Or imagine
Chichescu trying to doctor weather reports when anyone can pull
(22:57):
up the weather of the world. Orginej. Stalin trying to
delete Trotsky from photographs when the photos are mirrored on
Google images, and the Internet Archive in a thousand other sites. Now,
this inability to erase information from the Internet took on
a name two decades ago. It's called the Streisand Effect.
(23:20):
This happened because in two thousand and three, a guy
snapped an aerial photograph of Barbara Streisand's home in Malibu,
and the guy posted the photo on his website for
privacy reasons. Streisand wanted it off the net, and when
he wouldn't comply, she sued him. But her actions had
a drastic, unintended consequence. Until that moment, almost no one
(23:45):
knew where her home was, and by trying to suppress
the information, she promptly drove over a million visitors to
his site. So observing this Streisand incident in two thousand
and three, internet watchers realized they were seeing the new
rules of the game in action. Trying to suppress information
(24:06):
on the Web only magnifies it. And this new inability
to hide information found perhaps its highest expression in wiki Leaks,
which was launched in two thousand and six by the
Australian journalist and activist Julian Assange. His mission, he said,
was to open governments. The site seems like it's mostly
(24:28):
dying now some seventeen years later. But what it did
was published documents disclosed by anonymous sources, and it got
to about ten million such documents. And the documents it
leaked were as varied as their country is of origin.
I remember when they leaked Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account.
They leaked membership lists of illegal parties in the UK.
(24:51):
They leaked internal United Nations reports and senatorial campaign documents,
and oil scandals and airstrike videos. In twenty ten, WikiLeaks
released eighty thousand classified documents about the war in Afghanistan,
and by the end of that year it published close
to four hundred thousand documents from the war in Iraq.
(25:12):
And the thing to observe about those leaks is that
they weren't impotent. Sometimes they directly fomented social change. So
consider this incident in which an icelandic bank gagged the
national broadcaster of Iceland from reporting on its debt default risk.
A whistleblower got the info onto WikiLeaks, and Icelanders went
(25:36):
into an uproar and that rapidly led to new legislation
in their parliament ensuring media freedom. So if you care
about truth. You should care about the power of the Internet,
and I'll mention something else where. Getting information out leads
to good things happening. So WikiLeaks published lists of blacklisted
(25:57):
websites from the governments of Denmark and Norway, and Thailand
and Australia. And in most of these cases the blacklisted
sites were pornographic or violent, but it never takes long
before other sites get slipped onto the list. For example,
the Thailand Censorship list advertises a filter against child pornography,
(26:19):
contained over one thousand sites that were felt to be
critical of the Thai royal family, and Assaunge maintains, as
many people do, that censorship approaches like Internet filtering become
invariably corrupted. And another thing, the speed of information flow
(26:40):
on the Internet allows rapid, massive democratic response. I remember
in two thousand and nine, when the Internet was newer,
when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced he was going
to shut down Parliament until March thirtieth. And what he
said is that he needed time to work on a
stimulus package. But a lot of people suspected he was
just trying to prevent a vote of no confidence from
(27:03):
the opposition parties. So such a vote would force an election,
which is something Harper desperately wanted to avoid. So a
Canadian student, unhappy about this shutdown and has perceived reasons
for it, he started a Facebook group that quickly swelled
to two hundred and fourteen thousand members, and it precipitated
(27:24):
real world rallies all across Canada with crowds of thousands.
And that kind of breakneck speed of messaging equates to
a departure from the days of spreading the word by
pamphleting or shouting from horseback. It allows the citizenry to
become a rapid response democratic organism. If a bunch of
(27:49):
individual brains happened to share an opinion, they can combine
rapidly to be heard. Now, obviously, that has both pros
and cons, and this is one of the plays. This
is where I think the advent of the Internet does
lead to a quantitative and qualitative change, because it allows
crowds to pull together very quickly, sometimes frighteningly so. And
(28:12):
sometimes giant crowds prove useful for protesting something bad. Then
sometimes they provide terrifying brainless muscle. But going back to
the benefits of the net, one of the biggest benefits
began even when the Internet was quite young. Movements sprang
up to keep governments from tampering with the democratic voting process,
(28:35):
and this holy grail of fairness got achieved via Internet
movements in which citizens leveraged live online mapping to aggregate
and display activities during elections. Take, for example, the crisis
mapping tool ushahidi dot com, which was originally developed when
(28:55):
violence erupted following the disputed Kenyan presidential elections of two
thousand and eight. Using Ushahidi, anyone with a cell phone
could send a text message to report disturbances or defamation
or vote tampering, or even simply to say that everything
went well there. And so by constructing a dynamic map
(29:16):
of the trouble spots, they could attract the world's reporters
to expose the fraud. And to this day, reports from
Ushahidi typically feature alongside those of full time journalists. And
this is all helping to ensure that an election is
as free and fair as possible. And that's a big
(29:38):
deal because many elections all around the globe continue to
be famously and unabashedly fraudulent, not in the most advanced countries,
but certainly in places like Afghanistan, where elections are characterized
by widespread fraud of the tallies and intimidation and ballot
stuffing and people paid to vote multiple times using fake
(30:00):
or duplicate voter cards. As it turns out, a lot
of voters are scared or reluctant to discuss any fraud
that they witnessed, but sending a text message is easy
and so mobile crowd monitoring of elections has been a
growing trend around the planet. By aggregating little bits of
(30:21):
information from the millions of folk reporters on the ground,
This method keeps governments one step more transparent then they
might otherwise volunteer to be in the absence of watchful
eyes and far reaching voices. And there are similar trends
that publicly track journalist safety, especially those who are potentially
(30:42):
in danger from their own governments. There's a saying in
journalism that if you turn on a bright light, the
roaches scatter. So with these aggregation sites, each person with
a cell phone contributes just a few photons and the
sum is enough to light up the country. So the
argument I've made is that the Internet provides the potential
(31:05):
to enhance democracy. But it's really important that we note
that this benefit is in danger in many countries. So,
for example, aligned with China's Great Wall is China's Great firewall.
Chinese internet filters put blanket blocks on political statements that
the government does not allow, and apparently internet users are
(31:29):
hired to post positive observations about the government on forums
and chat rooms. Now, I don't know if you were
following this back in two thousand and six, but at
the time, the Internet was still young and companies were
still struggling to figure out who was going to ascend
to the top. And Google agreed to allow China to
(31:49):
censor search traffic because this seemed like an acceptable price
for Google for the opportunity to tap into a market
of four hundred million Internet use So the Chinese government
in China was allowed to filter the Google search results.
So what does this mean? If you search from anywhere
in the world for Tienemann Square protest, you get a
(32:12):
reasonable set of search results, But if you performed the
same search inside China's borders, you would get a very
different set and you would not see any of the
iconic photographs of that event. Well, come back to Google
(32:42):
in a moment. But first I want to mention how
easy it has always been to demonstrate the Chinese firewall.
That this has changed a little bit recently. But some
years ago you could go to say buyd dot com,
which is the major Chinese search engine, and you type
in something like the name of your local city and
you get several result returned. Now you type in something
like Falloon Gong, which is a spiritualist movement on the
(33:06):
Chinese blacklist, and you get an error message reading this
web page is not available. It appears that perhaps a
server has gone down on by news end. What just happened? Well,
when Chinese servers detect an incoming packet with a prohibited term,
they return a reset message which falsely tells the request
(33:29):
that there was an error retrieving the page. This makes
it look as though the problem is related to the
requested site, and the Chinese servers then put the requesting
machine's IP address on a blacklist for a few moments.
So if you try entering your innocuous first search again,
you'll get an error message. Now because you've been temporarily
(33:51):
blocked out of China at least as of a few
years ago. You could try this on any Chinese search
engine of your choice and you'd get exactly the same result.
Now let's return to Google in the Chinese market. What
happened at the beginning of twenty ten was that Google's
servers in China were hacked and the information was taken
from different accounts, and it appeared that the hackers had
(34:14):
a special focus on the accounts of Chinese political dissidents,
and Google was pretty sure the Chinese government was behind
the break in. So as a result, Google changed its
mind on the topic of censorship and circumvented the Great
Firewall of China by rerouting through Hong Kong, and eventually
(34:35):
China banned Google altogether. So Google ended up surrendering a
large piece of the lucrative Chinese market. But this kind
of move is critical if you don't want to support
government censorship. And by the way, I need to make
clear that internet censorship is not limited to China. Most
(34:56):
of the countries that impinge on Internet freedom will come
as no surprise, nations like Burma and Cuba and Egypt
and Iran and North Korea and Saudi Arabia and Syria
and Uganda and a bunch of others. But sometimes people
are a little surprised to discover that some Western countries
try to get in on the action here. Some years ago,
(35:18):
in Australia, the Australian Labor Party proposed a set of
laws to censor blacklisted sites at the level of the
Internet service providers. They claimed the sites they wanted to
censor were involved in child pornography or terrorism. But then
WikiLeaks released the list of the blacklisted sites, and the
(35:39):
list encompassed other sites as well, some of them seemingly random.
The filtering legislation didn't pass in Australia, but the fact
that it had some momentum reminds us to always keep
an eye on this. In other words, if you care
about truth on the Internet, we need to think about
more than people saying stupid stuff online. The bigger worry
(36:03):
from a historical angle is about state control of what
information you can or cannot access. And this is the
beauty of a technology that seeks to network everyone's brain
together and democratize things and hear everyone's voice. Obviously, some
(36:23):
of those voices will be less useful than others, and
people at the political extremes will purposefully lie and make
up have truth. But it is better than Stalin or
Giping or Chichescu or Hitler or Polpod or Mussolini allowing
you to hear only the messages that they want you
to hear and nothing else. So look, whatever side of
(36:46):
the political spectrum you're on, just think of how you
would feel if Biden or Trump got to control the
news entirely during his presidency and you wouldn't be allowed
to see the other side. If that sounds like a
nightmare to you, then you see why I am so
optimistic about this technology when we have a conversation about truth.
(37:12):
This networking technology makes it impossible to do all the
things that so many countries have enjoyed doing during the
twentieth century, like controlling the news and doing historical rewrites.
By aggregating citizen information, you get some different problems, like
a lot of noise, but noise is typically better than
(37:33):
an iron fist. This is why the Internet is sometimes
categorized as a liberation technology. And indeed citizens everywhere find
ways to drill holes in the silicone curtain. For example,
from inside China, lots of young people make secure connections
(37:53):
to a proxy server, a server outside of China, and
then the filtering technologies applied on Chinese servers don't apply.
So daily millions of young people in China make these
connections to servers in Hong Kong and they surf X
or Facebook or they use Gmail from there. The most
(38:13):
oppressive governments will probably always try to implement strict firewalls,
but this will presumably lead to a black market for
home brewed satellite uplinking with which to circumvent it, like
Amagino line. So retaining the capacity of the Internet to
allow all viewpoints, this is something that's going to require
(38:36):
constant vigilance for a lot of places in the world.
The future is going to be a zeros and one's
arm race between countries and their citizens, and like any
cat and mouse game, both sides are going to adopt
each other's technologies. I'll give you an example of the
cat and mouse game that we saw coming into focus
(38:57):
even a decade and a half ago. So in two
thousand nine, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmed Dinijad declared victory
over his opponent MUSAVII, but the outcome was suspected of
being rigged, and almost immediately the pronouncement was followed by
protests in Tehran and in the Iran more broadly, and
in cities around the world. Now, as you may remember,
(39:19):
those protests quickly went bad. Paramilitary snipers on the rooftops
opened fire on the crowds, and bodies began to collapse
in the streets. But as quickly as things went bad,
they went viral. So web surfers in every country watched
instantly delivered photos and videos of attacks and murders, and
(39:42):
protesters inside Iran used Twitter and other sites to aggregate
crisis information and update situations and post links to freshly
uploaded videos. Cyber dissidents took down Ahmed Dinijad's website with
a denial of service attack, and a few days after
after this had begun, and editorial in the Washington Times
(40:03):
admiringly dubbed the events the Twitter revolution. Now in cat
and mouse style, the government leveraged their tools too. Amadinijad
replied not only by banning rallies, but more importantly by
blocking cell phone transmissions and text messaging and shutting down
the Internet for forty five minutes to set up filtering software.
(40:26):
Iran presumably could have opted to take the whole country
offline permanently during this time, but in the cat and
mouse game, that option would cripple the government's crisis response
communications as much as it would the protesters, so in
the end, the protesters won the digital race in that
round in Iran, broadcasting the post election oppression to a
(40:50):
worldwide audience. But the cat and mouse countermeasures have gone
on and on. After Masa Amini's death in Iran in
twenty two, citizens took to social media to protest, but
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps blocked access to social media
platforms and in fact shut off the Internet in parts
(41:11):
of the country, and just in the past few months,
WhatsApp and Instagram have been blocked in Iran due to
protests against the government, and last year, Iran was ranked
the second worst place in the world for Internet censorship,
which by the way, includes not just social media, but
also websites relating to health, sports, science, news, and so on,
(41:34):
all of which should shake us out of our assumptions
that the Internet is simply open and free and immune
to a future of government intrusion and something to merely
gripe about when someone posts something that we dislike. This
reminds us that the Internet is a liberation technology and
(41:56):
reminds us of the criticality of keeping the Web open
and online. For those of us who happen to be
lucky enough to live in non repressive countries, we should
always take steps to keep it open and increase government transparency,
even in the face of opportunities for misinformation and disinformation.
(42:16):
I think the Internet tips the balance in favor of
a better society. Censorship is increasingly difficult to pull off now.
The stalins and touchescos and Husseins have to work a
lot harder to try to keep information away from the populace.
(42:37):
We're not going to have an all Trump or an
all Biden controlled media. News gets out fast, and once
it's out, it's hard to take back or rewrite it retrospectively.
And because of the ability to ensure fair voting and
shine a light on government misdeeds, the ability for regimes
(42:59):
to keep a tight grip on the data available to
its citizens is increasingly going to become a nightmare of
the past now. Obviously, one of the major problems of
the Internet, just like in all times with all news sources,
is learning to not accept stories at face value. It
(43:19):
goes without saying that a good education will teach children
or adults the need to consider the source, to evaluate
the evidence as best we can. Now, it's not surprising
that the older generations are worried about what younger generations
are stepping into with this technology. But I do think
(43:41):
that because of all the emphasis on fake news and
the imminence of deep fakes, which I'll talk about next week,
I do think that the younger generations will actually be
much better at filtering news. As far as I can tell,
the older generations are the ones stuck with the illusion
that if something is written and down it must be true,
(44:01):
whereas younger kids are more skeptical. So when I talk
with people young and old about truth on the Internet
and how to evaluate the flood of information, I emphasize
two points. First, to be critical of our own biases.
We all have biases, and these can lead us to
believe things that we shouldn't. So be aware of your
(44:23):
own biases and try to be objective when evaluating information.
And the second thing is to try to engage in
dialogue with people you trust and who you think are
smart and who are on the other side of an issue.
Try to steal man the other side. If you haven't
heard that term. This is the opposite of straw manning,
(44:45):
which is a technique for misrepresenting an opponent's argument to
make it easier to attack. Steal manning is a technique
for strengthening an opponent's argument so you can better understand it.
To steal man and argue in you need to identify
the premises and the conclusion, and you need to work
(45:06):
to understand the assumptions that underlie the argument. This allows
you to try to understand the argument from your opponent's perspective.
I'm not saying you have to come to a conclusion
of agreeing with the other person, but this is an
extremely valuable technique to say, Okay, I'm going to put
myself in a totally different pair of shoes, or more exactly,
(45:27):
in a different brain with a different world model, and
I'm going to see what my assumptions are and different
ways that I might believe this argument. Now, again, this
doesn't mean that in the end you need to adopt
that person's point of view, but I believe if you
take on this intellectual habit, you'll find yourself a little
more mature in your worldviews. You'll be slightly less able
(45:51):
to say that you think some complex situation is actually
really simple and hence less willing to dehumanize some other
group of humans. So let's wrap up today's episode. As
I mentioned last week, I got interested in this question
because several colleagues called me in twenty twenty and asked
if I would be on a grant with them to
(46:13):
restore truth in the media and on the Internet. And
I thought the idea was a little misguided because fundamentally
it rested on a poor memory of what truth used
to be, a retrospective romanticization. The key with the Internet
is that there's good and bad, but on balance, it
(46:34):
strikes me as clear that it comes out positively. So
when a pundit asserts that the Internet is responsible, in
part or and whole for our perceived decline into a
post truth world, I interpret that that statement stems from
ignorance about pre Internet history. As a history buff, I
(46:56):
really asked myself what was the world like pre and
post Internet? And I hope I've convinced you even a
little bit. I hope I've reminded you about how much
worse the world was pre Internet. And I hope I've
convinced you even a little bit that the Internet may
actually be the most important tool we've ever had for
(47:18):
surfacing truth. Essentially, it's impossible now for a government to
control the news that we are exposed to. Instead, a
million flashlights on the ground will end up shedding light. Now,
it goes without saying that when you have a million
people swinging flashlights around, there's a challenge that we face,
(47:40):
which is whose flashlight being? Do you believe? And obviously
there are plenty of misinformants and disinformants, just like there
have always been, But at least now we have the
possibility of getting exposed to different points of view. And
again I know that most people people will not look
(48:01):
for different points of view, but happily it's generally impossible
to not get hit in the face with different points
of view, at least sometimes when you're surfing around and
it might make you mad to see some other viewpoint
and your best interpretation is that they are deceitful, lyars
or misinformed. But at least that point of view enters
(48:23):
your hopper and the possibility at least exists to incorporate
it into your consideration. So as you can see, I'm
generally optimistic about the Internet and the existence of this technology.
But finally this all leads us to the next question,
the next era of invention, which is what happens now
(48:45):
that we have AI on the radar, And that is
next week's episode. See you then go to eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com
(49:05):
with questions or discussion and I'll be making episodes in
which I address those until next time. I'm David Eagleman
and this is Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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