Suddenly, everybody was an author.
Everybody could publish.
Everybody could write.
The men who had controlled
access to information
were now irrelevant,
and the establishment was crushed
in a flood tide of new publications.
New ideas multiplied and so did conflicts.
Violence followed and
led to 100 years of war.
No, I am not talking about the invention
of blogging or social media.
I am talking about the
invention of the printing press
and the radical 15th-century technology
that destabilized the church
and undermined monarchies and
brought us the Reformation.
As people don't necessarily remember,
it also brought us religious wars.
As I said, 100 years of them.
But if my description of the 15th century
did sound an awful lot
like the 21st century,
that's not an accident,
for we are living through
an equally transformative
and equally revolutionary moment,
even if we don't always acknowledge it.
Why are so many elections
in so many democracies
taking such surprising turns?
Why are nationalists and xenophobes
suddenly gaining support in countries
with really profoundly different economics
and different histories,
from Poland and the Philippines
to Britain and the U.S.?
Well, here's my guess.
Just as the printing
press broke the monopoly
of the monks and priests who controlled
the written word in the 15th century,
the internet and social media have,
within the space of a few short years,
broken the monopoly of
what we used to call
the mainstream media,
and in doing so,
have undermined the democratic
political institutions
to which it was connected.
But look around the democratic world.
Everywhere, large newspapers
and powerful broadcasters
are disappearing,
and these old-fashioned news organizations
might've been flawed,
but many of them had as
their founding principle
at least a theoretical
commitment to objectivity.
You know, at least in principle
they were supposed to do fact checking,
and at least in theory
they were supposed to be
working on behalf of the
general public interest.
They served as a filter,
eliminating egregious conspiracy theories,
and in democracies,
they also created the possibility
of a single national conversation,
one public debate.
In many democracies,
there is now no common debate,
let alone a common narrative.
People don't have the same facts,
and they don't agree about
what happened yesterday.
How can you have a political
debate about something
if you don't even agree on what the debate
is supposed to be about?
Social media, of course,
contributes to this phenomenon
and has accelerated it by allowing people
to select the news and
opinion that they hear,
whether it's factual or not,
and the tendency to seek
out comforting narratives
has created homogenous clusters online.
They get called echo
chambers or filter bubbles.
People now get their news
from their close-knit,
ideologically similar friends,
and most members of an echo chamber
share the same prevailing worldview
and they interpret news
through this common lens.
This phenomenon contributes to this growth
of hyperpartisanship and
intense polarization,
and it also contributes to the distrust
of normal politics and normal politicians
and political institutions,
even in democracies.
As a result, there are some democracies
in which there is now
really no national debate,
no central debate at all.
And instead, in the internet,
where readers and writers
feel distant from one another
and from the issues they describe,
has become the perfect medium for irony
and parody and cynical jokes.
No, it's not an accident that a plethora
of ironic, parodic, and
joke political candidates
are suddenly winning elections,
again, in a huge variety of countries,
wide variety, from Iceland,
you know, Italy, you know, Serbia.
Some of them are harmless.
Some of them are not.
But one thing has become clear,
and that is that a
generation of young people
now treats elections as an opportunity
to show their disdain for democracy
by voting for people
who don't even pretend
to have coherent political views.
This is unsurprising,
since voting is really
not that much different
from liking something online,
except that it requires
slightly more effort.
More worrying is that this
new information network
is uniquely conducive to
the spread of false rumors,
whether they're natural or
imposed from the outside.
American and French voters
have recently become aware
that the Russian
government organizes leaks
inside democracies and then
launches trolling campaigns
that make use of
supposedly secret material,
however banal, spinning it then
into elaborate conspiracy
theories and stories.
But Russia has actually
been using these tactics
to great effect in
Central and Eastern Europe
for many years.
Just to name a few,
governments in Hungary
and Slovakia and Poland,
just to begin with,
have been overthrown
thanks to secret tapes
or leaks with Russian or
Secret Service origins.
And this hasn't ended.
This is not over.
German officials who I
spoke with a few months ago
are now preparing themselves
for heavy Russian interference
in the upcoming German elections as well.
Everybody knows this is coming,
just as they did in France.
But now the question is,
who's in charge of stopping it?
Who is supposed to fight
back against manipulation?
You know, for that matter,
whose job is it to bridge
these partisan divides?
And here we come to the black hole
at the heart of the problem,
because the answer is there's no one.
No one is responsible.
Democratic governments
don't censor the internet,
and we wouldn't want them to.
They aren't in the habit of funding
or backing independent media,
and if they were,
it would cease to be independent.
The militaries of France and Germany
or the United States,
they're not set up to
fight information wars.
They're not gonna get involved
in social media battles
inside their own countries.
NATO, you know, NATO can control tanks,
but it's not gonna wade
into social media wars,
even when they have very clear
national security connotations.
And even counterintelligence services,
and I've talked to some of them,
are queasy about this.
They don't want to take
part in political debates
inside their own democracies.
It isn't their job to
penetrate echo chambers
or to counter conspiracy theories
or even to work on how to bring back trust
to democratic institutions
that have been undermined
by this culture of parody,
let alone to reinvigorate
democratic newspapers.
Not their job.
And although they'll tell you they can
and although I know there are
people who hope they will,
I don't think tech
companies are gonna be able
to solve this problem either.
There's never going to be
a single technical gadget
or program that will
measure truth, you know.
There aren't any
investments that are going
to persuade people to read quality media
if it no longer exists.
Censorship, frankly,
from Google or Facebook,
isn't going to be in the long term
any more acceptable or
successful or useful
than censorship from a government either.
But if public institutions can't do it
and military institutions can't do it
and tech companies can't do it,
then who can?
And the answer,
and I had a chance to
think about this again
listening to the previous three speakers,
and looking out at this audience,
I think I see the answer as well,
for the answer is you.
You know, you and the
people who you work with,
the people who still have faith
in democratic institutions,
people who want them to succeed,
people who want to live in just societies
run according to the rule of law.
You know, people who are
fighting against dictatorships
in illiberal states where men in charge
decide what is true and what is not.
You are going to find the solution
to this extraordinary earthquake,
one that we're just
beginning to understand,
this new information revolution,
and you will create the
antibodies to fake news,
and I think you're going to do it
in a lot less than 100 years.
You know, you and the
people who you work with
are going to invent
the new forms of media,
the new forms of media that will capture
the hearts and minds of voters
and not just their attention.
You'll create the disinformation trackers
and the fake news monitors
that will help people understand
what they are reading and hearing
and transmit it to them in a way
they understand and empathize with.
And you will find ways to
teach children and adults
to be literate in the 21st century,
helping them learn to
distinguish propaganda
from real stories on the internet.
And you will help politicians and judges
and civil servants learn
to use these new tools
to make their work more
transparent and accountable,
and you're going to find ways to protect
their privacy at the same time, too.
This is now part of the definition
of what it means to be a civic activist.
When you transmit your
messages now to the world,
you have to keep this in mind.
You're not just transmitting an idea.
You're working against
dishonesty and against truth,
and you have to make that
part of your program.
But I do think you'll do it.
You'll find ways to
penetrate echo chambers
and reach people who are so distrustful
that they've come to believe
in preposterous conspiracy theories.
You'll touch people who seem hardened
to the needs of their fellow citizens
and you'll move people who are
in the thrall of extremist
or xenophobic ideologies.
I know that you'll do all these
things 'cause you're here,
you made the effort to come here,
and because you care enough
about democracy to be here
and because you know that
at this moment in time,
even the most stable democracies,
even the United States
and even Western Europe
are challenged by lies as never before,
and the fight against disinformation
and the fight to restore
public sanity to public debates
has to begin with civic activism,
and so therefore it begins in this room.
And I can't wait to find
out how you're gonna do it.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
