We hear terms such as misinformation, disinformation,
campaigns of influence designed to manipulate
us.
That's our topic on CXOTalk.
Sara-Jayne Terp, tell us about your work and
tell us the things you're involved with.
I'm a data scientist.
I've been working on misinformation/disinformation
for the past few years.
Before that, actually for many years, I've
worked on how algorithms affect human beings,
specifically autonomy theory robotics.
All my work at the moment is misinformation.
It's just my life.
[Laughter] I work half of my time on misinformation
that's financially motivated, so tracking
down pages that are fake news sites and related
sites.
The rest of my time, I work on large-scale
misinformation.
Our second guest is Pablo Breuer.
Please, tell us about your work and your affiliation.
Currently, I am the Military Director for
the Donovan Group, which is U.S. Special Operations,
Command, Future Studies, and Think Tank where
I think about all of the things that nobody
else is thinking about so that we can plan
for them in the future.
One of those things is the prevalence of misinformation,
and so I've been working with S.J. for the
last nine months or so on trying to solve
this problem.
Our third guest, guest cohost and subject
matter expert, is Dr. David Bray.
He's a well-known figure here on CXOTalk.
David, welcome back to CXOTalk.
Thank you, Michael.
It's great to be here and great to be with
S.J. and Pablo and to learn from their wisdom
and expertise.
When we talk about disinformation and misinformation,
what are we talking about?
Set the stage for us.
Yeah.
Yeah, there are a lot of arguments about the
ontology of disinformation versus misinformation.
What we've defined it as is the deliberate
promotion of false, misleading, or misattributed
information in either content or context.
That actually matters a lot.
People think of misinformation as just being
fake news, as being maybe putting out text
that's completely wrong.
Most misinformation is actually true but set
in the wrong context where that context might
be who you think it's coming from, when it's
coming from, where it's coming from.
It's those trails and those contexts become
incredibly important both for production and
for tracking.
Pablo, to you.
No, no.
That's absolutely right.
In order for misinformation to work, it's
got to be 95%, or better, true.
The reason is that if it's totally false or
mostly false, it's very easy to identify as
false, and so it's got to be mostly true and
just false enough that you're likely to believe
it.
Yeah, I mean you're not trying to get people
to believe lies most of the time.
Most of the time, you're trying to change
their belief sets.
In fact, really, deeper than that, you're
trying to change, to shift their internal
narrative slightly or at least use their internal
narratives.
To pull on that, because that's fascinating,
S.J. and Pablo, you're saying really what
it is, is taking things out of context with
the goal of not necessarily deliberately putting
false information out there but taking things
out of context in a way of shaping what people
rethink.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the
narratives are there?
It's also about the way that they feel.
One great example is, a lot of people say
Black Lives Matter, but Black Lives Matter
is an actual group.
It's a real group, but some of the fake black
activism happened back in 2016, so there are
genuine problems.
A lot of the work done was to exacerbate the
emotions around those problems, to exacerbate
the splits in society.
As an aggressor, you're trying to weaken an
opponent where that opponent could be a nation-state.
It quite often is a nation-state, but these
days could be a company also.
Pablo, again, let's play tennis.
Mostly what these narratives try to is take
advantage of the listeners' or the viewers'
cognitive and social biases.
You already have to be predisposed in some
way to believe the narrative that you're being
presented.
Otherwise, you end up with cognitive dissonance
and you actually reject the message.
You have to be predisposed in some way.
Now, one of the points that you made was about
completely false information.
As we get to deep fakes and fake videos and
fake audio, which are, at least on the surface,
indistinguishable from the real thing, it'll
be interesting to see how far that gets pushed.
That’s' certainly a great concern.
It's one thing when you're reading static
text or when you're looking at a static picture
and maybe the narrative that you're being
presented about that picture is different
than the narrative from which it was originally
told.
It's quite another thing when what your eyes
see and what your ears hear can no longer
be believed.
When we say narrative, there are some confusions
around that, so I guess we have to clear that
one up fairly early.
Narratives, in the frame that we talk about,
mostly when we're talking about misinformation
together, that's the set of stories that are
your baseline for your culture.
That might be the baseline for your culture
as an American, a baseline for your culture
as whatever American you happen to be, like
Irish American or Italian American.
Name your set, except British American.
We don't seem to exist.
[Laughter]
For example, we're geeks.
Geeks have a baseline set of stories.
The layer on which a lot of the incidents,
a lot of the attacks happen is in shifting
those stories, is in using those stories,
using those narratives, those base layers,
and using stories and memes to push out those,
to attack those.
I have heard the term "Cyber Kill Chain."
We are the people who came up with this idea
of mapping the Cyber Kill Chain to misinformation
and it works quite well.
Pablo, all yours.
Sure.
The concept of a kill chain, and it's unfortunate
that it's got the word "kill" in there because
that's not necessarily accurate.
We can call it an influence chain.
That works.
Yeah, so the concept is that, in order to
accomplish misinformation, there are certain
actions that you must take.
If you envision this as a chain, if any one
of those links is either skipped or broken,
the attempt at misinformation fails completely.
What S.J. and I and the rest of the MisinfoSec
Working Group did is we took a look at how
similar problems had been viewed in the past.
One of those was cyber warfare, and so Lockheed
Martin had written this Cyber Kill Chain.
There'd been others that had been using it.
Then Mitre had developed the attack framework,
which is the kill chain plus associated techniques,
tactics, and procedures to accomplish each
link in the chain.
We went, "Hey, this is great.
This actually works," and so we developed
AMITT, which is our framework for adversarial
misinformation and influence tactics and techniques.
We've defined all of the necessary tasks to
complete misinformation and we started cataloging
real-world incidents, what the techniques
are to accomplish each of those tasks.
When we're talking about a chain, we talk
about it in terms of the stages that you would
need to go through.
For example, we have planning stages.
We have content stages.
We have a people stage for things like creating
the fake personas you would need and/or recruiting
the real humans you would need to create a
full influence campaign, so misinformation
campaign.
This is a lovely sort of horizontal versus
vertical.
This is when I wave my hands around because
I would love to show you the diagrams.
Do we see times when misinformation is being
directed to all sides?
It's not just trying to sway one way but,
in fact, try to create polarizing wedges or
social wedges from multiple dimensions and
actually get groups that naturally may not
necessarily like each other but are not really
that vehemently in disagreement become actually
more vehemently disagreed and actually have
emotions on a high?
Is that what they're trying to do?
All the time.
This is the point.
This is just one form of a misinformation
campaign.
There are many other types, but this is one
that's being well used against the U.S.
Some of it has gotten physical.
There have been a few times.
Amusingly, the pro- and anti-Beyoncé campaigns
after the Super Bowl incident where the opposing
groups have been given fake meets, physical
protest calls, and turned up in the street
opposite each other, we think that was the
Russians playing, you know, testing stuff,
but this isn't just people shouting on the
Internet.
The potential is much, much higher and wider.
Generally speaking, though, we talk about
five overarching strategies for misinformation
and we call those the five Ds.
One of those that, David, you alluded to is
the divide where you take a population and
you bifurcate that population so that they're
on opposing sides of the same issue.
You get them fighting with each other.
Therefore, they're not paying attention to
anything outside of their own population.
We certainly saw that or attempts to do that,
during the 2016 presidential election.
Other strategies are distort, which just takes
a narrative and distorts the actual facts.
The Russians might say, "We're not invading
Ukraine.
We're liberating ethnic Russians."
Another one is to dismiss, so that's the typical
dismiss your accusation and make your own
counteraccusations.
China, certainly, every time they're accused
of stealing intellectual property or engaging
in cyber warfare, their standard narrative
is to say, "We don't do that.
However, we're often the victims of U.S. aggression
in cyberspace."
Distract is another one of those strategies.
Distract actually tries to ignore the current
narrative and start a completely different
narrative.
A recent example of that is the MH17 shootdown.
The Russians never directly addressed whether
or not that was a Russian missile.
Instead, they asked the question about why
is a commercial airliner flying through an
active combat zone.
Then the last one is dismay, which is an ad
hominem attack.
These are attacks that are so outlandish that,
even by responding to them and saying that
they're outlandish, you lend them credence.
Probably the best-known one of those is the
Pizzagate during the last election.
Those are the typical tactics: distort, dismiss,
distract, divide, and dismay.
Any of those tactics can either be used to
coalesce people to get a narrative going or
to bifurcate people to get them waring with
each other so that you can do other things.
Yeah, those are the five Ds, so Ben Nimmo
came up with the original four Ds and we added
"divide" into there.
Originally, they were talking about Russian
against U.S., but as you're listening to Pablo,
this is all over the world now.
Pretty much everybody who can stand up a misinformation
campaign is doing it and pretty much everybody
who could be subject to it is seeing it in
their feeds.
I guess gets to the question, why now?
Is this just because the Internet is more
widespread globally or have these things been
going on since the printing press, the radio,
and television and it's now just that anyone
can actually be a producer of misinformation?
If you look historically, the ability to reach
a mass audience was limited to a select few.
Originally, when you talked about handwriting
scrolls, the church and governments were the
only ones that were literate and had the manpower
and the finances to be able to do those things.
Then you move forward to movable type and,
again, it was expensive, and so very few people
could transmit.
You could reach a wider audience because literacy
became more prevalent and anybody could receive
these as long as you were within physical
distance.
Now, certainly, one of the things that we
also see occurring throughout history is that
the purveyors of this kind of technology never
envisioned how it could go awry.
As the Catholic kind of allowed for the Gutenberg
press and printed the Gutenberg Bibles, they
certainly didn't envision Martin Luther mass
printing his 95 theses and nailing them to
church doors.
Then you fast forward to radio and telegraph,
and it's the same thing.
Very few people have access to the studios
to transmit.
You get more and more people that have access
to receive the transmission and it becomes
the de facto new standard and, certainly,
nobody envisioned that an entertainment show
War of the Worlds would be mistaken for actual
news.
Then you go to television and we are where
we are with television.
But, in the 1980s, if you were an American,
you got your news from ABC, CBS, and NBC.
When you went to talk to your neighbor, you
could agree or disagree with the news.
However, you at least saw the same news.
Each of those phases of this evolution of
information would allow the limited few, i.e.
the President of the United States who could
talk to ABC, CBS, and NBC and say, "Hey, look.
I want to talk to the whole U.S. populous,"
to reach wider and wider audiences.
Now, what happened with the Internet is, we've
now democratized who can reach mass audiences,
so anybody can hop on social media.
We now live in a world where an entertainer
like Katie Perry can reach twice as many people
as the President of the United States via
social media and there are no gatekeepers
anymore.
We've now completed the circle.
We've gone from very few can reach a mass
audience to anybody can reach a mass audience.
This is also the dark side of the Internet,
the dark side of big data, if you will.
Yeah, back in the old days, we're talking
about ten years ago, we talked about the three
Vs: volume, variety, and velocity.
There's a lot more of it, it's a lot faster,
and it's across an awful lot of different
platforms.
Misinformation carries in the same places
as well.
It's just an awful lot easier.
I'm a data scientist.
It's very easy to set up something that broadcasts
across to a lot of people very fast.
We have an interesting and important question
from Twitter.
Sal Rasa asks, "What can people do?
How can people understand what's happening
around them with this stuff?"
There's a whole set of things.
Part of the reason we built things like AMITT,
we broke down the misinformation campaign,
so misinformation incidents into techniques
were so we could look at each technique, look
at each stage, and say, "What can we do against
these techniques, against these stages?"
There is this idea of left of boom when we're
talking about stage-based models.
Left of boom is before.
It's an old term from--
Bomb.
Bomb disposal.
Thank you.
[Laughter] Where the stuff that happens before
the thing goes off versus stuff that happens
after the thing goes off.
In this case, the thing going off is the misinformation
reaching the public.
Most of the time, if it's reached the public,
it's getting late.
We'd really like to deal with it before that.
We're working on processes to do that.
If it's got to you, be critical.
Be critical of what you're reading.
Be critical of what you're sharing.
If it looks too good or too exciting to be
true, check it.
Look at the providence on it.
Look at the date on it.
I still get friends sharing stuff that's two,
three years old because it's really exciting
or really hits them in the feels.
It hits everybody.
I work with this all the time and I too have
shared misinformation and been called out
by my friends who are wonderful and useful,
which is why we need to do left of boom.
Think about what you're reading.
There are some very good explainers out there.
There's a lovely one by the State Department
that talks about the pineapple pizza, how
people are being divided over whether they
put pineapple on pizza or not and some of
the tactics to see.
There are things that you can do just as a
consumer of media and there are things that
you can do as a purveyor of media and platforms.
As an average consumer, as S.J. mentioned,
not only be critical but most of us tend to
follow news sources that follow our own biases.
You should also go back and listen to the
news sources that absolutely enrage you, get
possibly the other side, and then make a more
informed decision because, realistically,
the truth is somewhere in the middle.
The way that misinformation often works and,
S.J. again alluded to this is, it tries to
provoke an emotional reaction.
We're all familiar with clickbait.
We're all familiar with these fantastic headlines.
Then you click and you find out there's not
quite as much meat there as we expected from
the headline.
If you're finding yourself having an emotional
reaction, that's the time to take a deep breath
and really examine what you're reading.
Oftentimes, these stories say, "Well, party
A said B and party B reported C," and so,
hey, go back and make sure that that's actually
what was reported.
One of the other things that you can do is
try as much as possible--and this is hard--to
verify the provenance of the information.
If the information is coming from a legitimate
news source, and I leave it to the consumer
to decide what that is, it's probably going
to be verified more by actual journalists
than somebody that's putting out an editorial
blog.
These are things to keep in mind is, consider
the source; consider where the original material
came from.
Think about if you want to look at the People-Centered
Internet.
There are other groups as well that are trying
to do demonstration projects that show more
resilient community approaches to this and
other events.
Try and play a role in encouraging what President
Lincoln said, which is, "I do not like that
person.
I must get to know them better."
The same thing could be applied to either
people or ideas.
If you see an idea that makes you feel like
you don't like it, take the time to at least
get to know the other side, articulate it
enough that you can understand where it's
coming from.
Are there centers of concentration today for
organized disinformation and misinformation
campaigns?
In other words, where is it coming from today?
Well, there are the classics, the Internet
Research Agency in Russia, but there are also
some emerging industries.
For instance, we're starting to see what's
I guess misinformation farms starting to happen
in places like the Philippines.
We're seeing companies starting to look at
misinformation as a service.
There are different types of misinformation.
For example, China does these amazing charm
campaigns.
The information is about the omission of Tiananmen
Square, the presentation of the nation in
a good light.
I'm going to put out that, in their framework,
they have this great analogy of a triangle.
If you imagine a triangle, a tip on the top,
the base is wide, oftentimes those that are
trying to do misinformation or share or promote
misinformation or disinformation, they start
with a campaign plan and then initiatives
that flow from that campaign plan.
Then there are actually the narratives they're
trying to change or shape.
Then, finally, the artifacts of that.
They can see everything that's happening and
they understand the grand campaign.
The challenge of the people that are trying
to defend or create communities that are more
resilient to misinformation and having it
been thrown their way, they start with the
artifacts first, and so they're trying to
piece together what's happening and, oftentimes,
it's not until long after you even go further
up the chain and see the narratives, you see
the initiatives and, if you're lucky, maybe
actually get to the source of the campaign.
It's what makes, much like in the cyber realm,
the counter-misinformation realm, the advantages
currently go to the offending side.
The challenge for the defenders is piecing
it together fast enough and, as S.J. and Pablo
said, getting left of that boom, left of that
event fast enough so that you have an effective
response.
Part of the problem there is, when you get
to the Internet, it's just the vast amount
of information.
I love the infographic Internet Minute comes
out every year or two and they show you how
much information traverses the Internet in
a minute.
It's millions of hours of YouTube videos and
it's hundreds of millions of tweets and Facebook
likes.
The first problem is, how do you look at all
of that information?
Then the next one is, how much of it is false
or misleading?
Then why is it misleading?
Is there an intent there?
Did somebody make a simple mistake?
I could quote you all sorts of statistics,
but I'd be lying about those statistics and
I don't want to contribute to the misinformation.
The intent goes a long way.
Sometimes people just make mistakes and there's
no intent there.
Discerning that and finding out where that
information came from and what the intent
was is a hard problem.
It really requires not just a technical look,
but a sociological look at this.
This is not a technology problem.
This is a sociology problem that is enabled
by technology.
This is a sociotechnical system.
Part of what that requires is it looks at,
from various different fields, from policy
fields, from journalistic fields, technical
fields, social fields, and economic fields.
Part of the problem is we've all been looking
at this problem differently.
We've all been using very different languages
and so that's also part of the reason that
we wrote this AMEC framework to have a lingua
franca, if you would, where different groups
with different backgrounds can talk about
the same problems in a way that all of the
other groups can understand it.
This is not going to be a silver bullet problem.
This is going to be a thousand bullet problem.
That explains why it's so complex to get rid
of.
I want to ask S.J. just to elaborate on something
you said earlier about the Chinese charm campaigns.
I'm quite interested in that because I was
actually touched by that personally.
It was quite fascinating, so can you just
elaborate a little bit on that?
There's just work on all channels.
I mean I tend to be careful talking about
what I'm tracking, so attribution is really
hard.
Generally, if we're talking about who did
this, we can only ever put a probability that
somebody did this; a probability that their
nation-state was involved in this.
We can say things like, there's a high probability
Iran did this, or there's a high probability
that China has done this based on the way
that it's done, on the intent that we believe
is in it.
Yeah, China has done a lot of work in lots
of different ways.
Is this being done more for their own population
or external?
Oh, okay.
What are the reasons why?
Some are on their own population.
Some are on external population.
We tend to see more of the external population
misinformation, well, disinformation than
we see the internals.
Here's an important point is that different
audiences are going to require different methods
of delivery and different messages.
That's because they've got these preexisting
social and cognitive biases.
Certainly, if you talk to the average Chinese
citizen, they absolutely believe that the
great firewall of China is not there for censorship.
They believe that it's there because the People's
Republic of China and the Chinese Communist
Party want to protect their citizenry and
they absolutely believe that's a good thing.
If the U.S. government tried to sell that
narrative, we would absolutely lose our minds
and say, "No, no, no.
This is a violation of our first amendment
rights."
The ingroup and outgroup messaging have to
be often different.
Certainly, there is a lot of internal messaging
that China does with its own people.
Certainly, there is a lot of external messaging
they do to the greater world.
Part of this is just standard diplomacy and
information has always been kind of one of
these instruments of national power, but there
is no doubt that China has stated that they
want to be the preeminent world superpower
and part of that is, "Hey, we want this Belt
and Road Initiative.
Here's why it's great for you."
Part of this, it's kind of funny.
If this were a company, we would call it advertising.
Because it's being done by a country or because
it's being done by a corporation, we may call
it something else.
False advertising in some cases, though.
I have a question for you too, though.
Going further, though, is this to demonstrate
that representative forms of government can't
work to make us fight amongst each other?
Is there money in it?
I mean is it just simply to have influence
on the world stage using this as a tool of
national power?
All of the above.
Do you all worry?
Since you're researchers in this space, are
you concerned that they're ever going to come
after you or other researchers in this space?
How do you make sure it doesn't get focused,
the laser beam, on us?
Well, there is a reason I don't have a home
address.
[Laughter]
Okay.
I think part of this is, we've created a discipline
and communities.
That there are a lot of people working in
this field now means that the risk is spread,
which is useful.
Mm-hmm.
Yes, initially, there was concern.
It was very comforting to go and hang out
with the Special Forces for a while.
That kind of helped a lot.
Thanks, Pablo.
[Laughter]
Why?
Why was that helpful to spend time with Special
Forces and what was the nature of that hanging
out and interaction?
I wear two hats and I mentioned the one hat,
Military Director of the Donovan Group, which
is that future studies and thinktank.
In my other hat, I'm what they call an innovation
officer.
I'm one of two innovation officers at SOFWERX,
which is a completely unclassified 501(c)(3)
nonprofit that's funded by U.S. Special Operations
Command.
That's so that we can get after nontraditional
problems and nontraditional tactics and work
with nontraditional partners.
That allows us to get into one room.
S.J. is a data scientist, maybe somebody from
one of the social media companies, maybe a
few Special Forces operators, and some folks
from the Department of Homeland Security talk
in a non-attribution, open environment in
an unclassified way so that we can collaborate
better, more freely, and really start to change
the way that we address some of these issues
without worrying so much about--pardon the
expression--the cultural China.
Now, am I worried about being targeted with
misinformation?
I think we should all be worried about being
targeted by misinformation.
If you're on social media or if you're surfing
the Internet, you are constantly bombarded
by messaging.
Unlike on radio and television, these ads
don't have to identify themselves as ads.
If they're political ads, they don't have
to identify who the special interest group
is that funded them.
Perhaps, it's time to reevaluate some of those
things.
Am I concerned personally about being attacked?
I don't think my ego is quite that big yet,
but I don't think I'm going to be going to
Beijing any time soon.
If I do, I don't think I'm going to be taking
any of my personal electronics.
The other question is, what gives you hope?
Is this going to be a problem that we can
figure out new solutions to?
Is this something where maybe new human methods?
What gives you hope?
InfoSec gives me hope that another community
has seen a similar-sized problem and dealt
with it, created an entire ecosystem around
dealing with it.
It's not perfect, but there is a path that's
already trodden.
We've already picked up a lot of their methods,
so they've given us an acceleration on this.
Also, humans; humans are resilient.
We will adapt to this.
We have adapted to Internet worms.
We adapted to spam.
We'll adapt to this as well.
How is this different, misinformation/disinformation
different from InfoSec, Information Security?
I think the layman tends to lump it all together
as bad stuff happening on computers.
The endpoints are humans.
Most InfoSec, the things being attacked are
your computers, so you're shutting down computer
networks.
You're shutting down individual computers.
You're infecting or you're getting information
off computers.
At this point, the things you are shutting
down are human networks.
You're poisoning human networks.
You're affecting individual humans.
It's carried on the Internet, but it's very
much about the wetware, about the people.
There is a long tradition of humans being
part of the attacks in InfoSec, of social
engineering.
You will attack the humans to get at the systems.
Now, this is attacking the systems to get
at the humans.
Recently, I was quite cheered to see.
We were at the ISAO meetings recently when
the Cognitive Security ISAO got announced.
To see that the three layers now are physical
security, cybersecurity, and cognitive security.
We're now part of the layers that need to
be protected.
The answer is yes and no all at the same time.
What do we do about this?
We agree it's a bad problem.
How do we solve it?
How do we fix it?
There are a couple of things that we can do.
This ties into, "What gives you hope?"
When S.J. and I first started talking about
this about a year ago, nobody was talking
about it.
There were still arguments going on about
whether or not there were misinformation campaigns.
Now, everybody is talking about it.
You see it covered on the news, regardless
of which news channel that you're watching.
You hear it being talked about on radio stations.
We're talking about it here on podcasts.
That's hopeful.
Now that we've got a bit of a framework that
multiple disciplines can use, Department of
Homeland Security has helped stand up this
Information Sharing and Analysis Organization
or ISAO.
There's a recognition that there's more to
ones and zeros.
That there is a social aspect to this.
We've received very positive responses.
We've gone around and talked about this thing
is going on.
There's been really very little pushback and
there's been no pushback on, we really need
to address it.
There are some things we can do as a technician.
If you're developing a platform, think about,
how could this platform be abused?
We want to give everybody a voice, but how
do we guard the whole against the one or two
bad actors?
If you're a consumer, how do I make sure that
I get a varied viewpoint and I don't close
myself off?
How do I engage in civil discourse, which
is something that we've gotten further and
further away from?
We can do these things.
Having policy people and government talk about
it.
Having technical people talk about it.
Having nonprofits talk about it is all helpful.
I think there's been a recognition by journalists
that, in the drive for more clicks and more
advertising dollars, the producers are driving
the news as opposed to the journalists driving
the news.
I know I've had discussions with journalists
about this.
There is great concern.
I think we're going to take a round turn on
that shortly.
There is something all of us can do to make
this better.
Yeah.
We take some of the money out of it so we
don't get those amplifiers for money.
The MisinfoSec Working Group, the next part
of their work is now on counters.
We're starting to collect where countermeasures
have happened, whether some of them have worked.
We're starting to look at both those stages
and the techniques within them to see how
each of those could be counted individually.
This is similar work to the stuff that was
done in InfoSec on counters to common techniques
there.
We just keep going.
We just keep moving forward on this.
Where does the funding come from to solve
these problems?
We're self-funded on this, but yes.
David?
You hit the nail on the head and I would say
there is a nonprofit called the People-Centered
Internet Coalition that we are trying to galvanize
different players from the for-profit sector,
from the private sector, from nonprofits,
from governments around the world because
you're absolutely right that this is going
to be a hard challenge if it's not got some
fuel to make it happen.
What both S.J. and Pablo were saying to me,
I think it's a lot like how epidemiology became
a field.
When the first epidemiologist ever, John Snow,
turned off the pump because that was a source
of cholera, he didn't even know what bacteria
were.
We didn't even have cell theory, but they
knew enough from what they were seeing that
that was a source of the problem.
Then the science evolved into having the framework
much like how Pablo and S.J. have put that
forward.
Now they're actually becoming more rigorous
in thinking about what counters work so that
can actually become evidence-based scientific
field, but that's going to require fuel.
The good news is, we now at least have a common
vocabulary whereas, a year or two ago, we
didn't have a common vocabulary.
That itself was sometimes used to take things
out of context.
You're seeing it right now, and C-suite executives
should help play a role in the creation of
this new field much like how cybersecurity
has been trying to mature over the last 25
years.
What should this field be called?
What's the term?
We've called it MisinfoSec but, also, cognitive
security covers a lot of the thing that needs
to be protected, so you want to have a positive
thing you want to protect word rather than
misinformation, this thing you want to get
rid of, because there'll be another thing.
Is cognitive security the same as misinformation?
No.
Cognitive security is the thing you want to
have.
You want to protect that cognitive layer.
Basically, it's about pollution.
Misinformation/disinformation is a form of
pollution across the Internet.
Just because we're going to get comments about
this, my position on this is clear, has always
been clear.
We don't want to remove people's voices.
What we're trying to remove are artificial
megaphones.
A question from Twitter: What's the difference
between misinformation and disinformation?
That's an epistemic argument we'll never dig
out of the hole.
It's going to be how it's perpetrated, how
it's transmitted, and who is doing it.
Misinformation is usually changing the context
or content.
Disinformation is completely made-up facts,
generally speaking.
Okay.
Zachary Jeans asks a great question.
Thank you, Zachary Jeans.
"What conferences or meetups do you recommend
around this subject?"
MisinfoCon is a series of conferences around
this.
There was a World Wide Web conference really
that had a side conference on it.
There is a list.
If you look on the MisinfoCon website, I think
the list is held there of all the conferences
connected to misinformation.
MisinfoSec, we're talking about a conference.
Just watch that slot.
I really hope that we start having the media
conferences, the journalistic conferences,
and the policy conferences start talking about
this.
I think most industries should be talking
about this in some form or fashion.
How is this different from various journalistic
organizations and academic institutions with
journalism centers?
How is what they're doing differently from
what you're doing because it seems very similar
to me?
I would say the difference is, whereas journalists,
especially post WWII United States, we're
trying to make sure stories were objective
and had perspectives from all sides.
I don't think there was ever an intent that
there were actual actors trying to manipulate
things out of context to misuse these social
media platforms and other outlets to create
polarizing social wedges.
What's different now is, clearly, as the Internet
has become more available to people and the
more immediate reach that has surpassed what
television can do now with the Internet, it's
about trying to both change the thousands
of narratives as opposed to three or four
news channels that are out there to shape
what you think and then try to involve you
as a human to amplify what might be things
out of context to create polarizing wedges
even further.
This is something that can't be solved by
any one sector.
It's going to require nonprofits.
It's going to require governments.
It's going to require for-profits.
It's going to require journalists.
It's going to require all of us.
Of course, the challenge is how to do that
at scale, given that all of us are already
busy to begin with, in a way that's manageable
for open societies.
That is at scale in real-time as well, so
it's this idea of real-time response.
Journalists tend to do either pieces on something
or they're looking after their stories.
David, there are many organizations, journalistic
organizations, academic institutes.
Craig Newmark, who we both know, is funding
great efforts around journalistic and information
integrity.
I'll just call it generally fake news, even
though I realize it's not the right term.
How are those efforts different from what
S.J. and Pablo are working on?
It's a diversity of people coming together,
as you saw.
S.J. is a data scientist.
Pablo is with the Donovan Group and SOFWERX.
We've got Vint Cerf at the PCI as one of the
co-creators of the Internet.
The difference being is, we are trying to
bring together a diversity perspective, which
first requires a common vocabulary.
Not to say that those efforts aren't needed.
Those are great.
But it's really that big umbrella in which
you have different groups and different perspectives
because this is going to require almost a
whole of society response.
It's also the InfoSec perspective but, more
importantly than that, it's that most efforts
are right of boom at the moment.
We're looking left of boom as well.
Right, or before the misinformation is out
there as opposed to clean up afterward.
Yes.
Yeah.
Back to the funding question, S.J., you mentioned
that you are self-funded.
The question is, why?
With all of this topic so much in the news,
it affects the government on such a national
level, why are you self-funded?
There's an independence so we can move fast
but, also, getting funding that quickly for
something that different.
Originally, the ideal of MisinfoSec was just
so different to what anybody else was doing.
It just wasn't going to get it in time.
We wanted to build this as quickly as we could.
We've just started a new company, CogSecTech
(phonetic, 00:41:50), to build out from that
on consultancy, so we may not be self-funded
forever, but it mattered.
There are other sectors that are funding this.
The original discussion about this was funded
by the Donovan Group.
Yeah.
We had a radical speaker series in December
of last year.
You can find all of those talks including
S.J.'s on YouTube by looking for SOFWERX.
Facebook has just announced a new prize challenge
where they will create deep fakes and ask
people to look at them.
DARPA has numerous challenges concerning misinformation
and deep fakes.
We're just now starting to see that there
are other funding sources out there.
The problem is that nobody really saw this
as a problem a year ago.
We did get a little bit of money from Craig
Newmark, the Newmark Foundation for MisinfoSec
Working Group.
We need to mention that too.
Thank you.
Thank you, Craig.
Yeah, so we're just now starting to recognize
the role.
As a society, we are starting to recognize
that this is a problem and so you're starting
to see government, industry, and educational
institutes get interested.
Hopefully, what we do correctly is share resources,
share findings, and share research so that
we can optimize the funds that are available
to address this issue.
If I could just real quick amplify that, it
is exactly as you said.
Now, clearly what's different from a year
ago is there is at least a dozen, if not more,
flowers blooming in this space.
But if we really want to be a force multiplier,
there needs to be communication across these
different efforts.
As they said, Michael, the challenge in the
past was just having a common vocabulary to
describe the problem you were facing, much
less convince funders that you actually had
a way to tackle it because people don't usually
want to spend money unless they are convinced,
they're going to get a return on what they're
funding.
I think now that we've begun to work, their
framework, one, is amazing.
Two, we have a common vocabulary.
Three, now that there are all these different
efforts that are blooming, what we really
need to make sure is, are there ways of peer
review and peer sharing of knowledge so that
we can be cumulative in our lessons learned
as opposed to each doing things without any
cumulative advance together.
I would like to thank Sara-Jayne Terp, Pablo
Breuer, and Dr. David Bray.
Thank you all for taking time to be here.
It's a very fascinating and important discussion,
so thanks, everybody.
Thank you, Michael.
Thank you.
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