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Okay, I'm so excited for our final panel of the day.

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We have a panel full of a variety of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation specialists.

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I'd like to introduce Michael Moore, Joe Schneebs, Maya Mazurkiewicz, and our moderator, our special guest, Donnie O'Sullivan.

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Donnie, take it from here.

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Oh, hello.

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What about now?

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Yeah?

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Is that better?

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You can all hear me?

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In the back?

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All right, guys.

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Thank you for coming to this panel.

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Should I do like one of the TikTok influencers and do it like that?

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All right.

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Thanks very much for coming.

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I'm so glad to see you're all surviving DEF CON.

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I'm almost dead.

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We might just get you guys to just quickly introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about, you know, what your job has to do with the world of misinformation and disinformation.

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Let's start with you, Maya.

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Thank you so much.

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My name is Maya Mazurkiewicz.

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I'm a co-founder of Alliance for Europe, and we look at disinformation and how disinformation is changing attitudes of people and how it's affecting choices in the elections in our democracy.

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We work with a disarm framework and with the European Commission, with a number of governments as well, and partners to actually research and then look at how we can better work on the positive communication and strategic communication as well.

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I'm Joe Schneebs.

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I focus a lot more on the digital patterns and profiles that people leave behind, kind of the digital refuse or the digital off-gassing or the digital fingerprints, and how that looks to a client or an adversary.

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And we help our clients who are mostly in the government sector modify that or manipulate that to ensure that they have safety, privacy, security, data integrity, and then also understand how to think about that from a countersphere.

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And so we're seeing a lot of misinformation and disinformation in patterns, in digital data, more of the metadata side, less content.

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And sound check.

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You guys hear me okay in the back?

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All right.

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Not too much feedback.

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Awesome.

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So my name is Michael Moore.

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I'm the chief information security officer at the Arizona Secretary of State's office.

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MDM is a concern for me for two main reasons.

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One, I and my team deal with threats to election officials, right?

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And MDM is a primary generator of those threats to election officials.

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And second, you can't have democracy without elections.

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You can't have elections if people don't have confidence in the system.

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MDM is eroding that confidence and causing people to just not believe that there's a point in participating because it's just corrupted.

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Just a show of hands, of the folks here, a lot of you based outside of the U.S.

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or from outside of the U.S.

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or mostly U.S.

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crowd here?

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Mostly U.S.

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crowd.

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So you guys, I guess, all know about the kind of crisis of misinformation, disinformation is having on American democracy and on folks like Mike and his colleagues, and it's leading to violent threats against you and people not trusting the systems and everything you work so hard to do.

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Mike, can you tell us a little bit about what the is like just generally in Europe?

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Are there hotspots now where kind of what is happening here in the U.S.

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is playing out there where, you know, the kind of playbook of disinformation as it comes to distrust and elections is playing out or is it not as pronounced as what's happening here?

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It's very much pronounced.

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And, you know, I work with disinformation since 2016 and until 2015 I've been working for the previous president of Poland and we had elections in 2015 and like the reason why I got involved with disinformation was basically how I saw disinformation influence our elections and how the populistic government that we are still having has been using it in their campaign and how later looking at the patterns of Russia being involved In Europe and in Ukraine,

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because I've been working for the Polish president also at the first invasion of Russia into Ukraine back in 2014, so we've been already seeing the operation influences happening back then.

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And right now it's getting more and more profound.

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I believe that everything that we see in terms of the politics and the situation with this disinformation could have been foreseen, right?

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It's not, of course, that we have a, I don't know, like a magical thing of seeing what can happen.

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But I mean, looking at the patterns, it is obvious that people, behaviours are being changed by the communication and information.

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And if we're seeing different bad actors influencing the sphere, we also can foresee the changes in the democracy, elections and others.

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And that's what exactly is happening right now.

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Coming from Poland, bordering country with Ukraine, we see a lot of operation influence of Russia in Poland and other European countries.

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There is the caused polarisation that caused a lot of destabilisation.

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And that's also the goal of Russia and other bad actors that are influencing our information sphere.

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So I think that what we need to focus more is to see the patterns as well and cooperate across the transatlantic, but also looking at the global south, because it's not only happening in the EU, in Europe, in the United States, but already Africa or India are big battlegrounds for the information and disinformation wars.

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Yeah.

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Mike, so you work for Maricopa County Secretary of State, Secretary of State's office?

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Right.

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Formerly, I was with the Maricopa County reporter's office with the Secretary of State.

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Arizona Secretary of State, excuse me.

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Arizona, Maricopa County specifically is kind of ground zero in a lot of this.

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You were there in 2020.

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You know, quite a big bulk of the population doesn't believe that elections were free and fair in Arizona in 2020.

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Or at the very least, there's a vocal minority that believes that.

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In good clarification, and they are vocal.

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So what's the plan for 2024 to try and push back against that?

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Are you going to have another cyber ninja situation?

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Why are you going to put that evil on me?

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Okay.

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So I'm going to answer your question, but just super quick, I want to make sure we're all using the same shared vocabulary, both on the panel and in the audience.

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So MDM, right?

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Miss, we're at DEF CON.

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I want to be helpful.

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So I'm going to ask where the bathroom is.

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I say, oh, it's that way.

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Whoops.

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It's not that way.

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It was an accident.

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I could be trying to be helpful versus disinformation.

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We're at DEF CON.

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I just want to mess with somebody.

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I ask where the bathroom is.

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I tell them the wrong way.

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Malinformation, they're like, where's the bathroom?

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I've got a, you know, the map, the book that shows where everything is.

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And I've subtly changed it to show that the bathroom is in a different location, right?

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So taking an official source and effectively using disinformation on that.

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So what are we doing?

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Well, it's tough.

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So like I've mentioned in previous panels, the lies are more sexy than the truth, right?

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If you watch something like 2000 Mules, it's set to music.

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It's like watching a spy movie.

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It's very much a narrative versus almost nobody, maybe some of the folks here at DEF CON want to read the election procedures manual, right?

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It's incredibly boring.

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It's a set of rule books.

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Perhaps if you read Dungeons and Dragons, you know, Dungeon Master Guide, and that's your jam, maybe you'll read the election procedures manual.

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But Maricopa County, they have a site called justifacts.vote.

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Justifacts.vote, it redirects to the .gov site, and it goes through in debunks and pre-bunks MDM, right?

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So if there is something that is just going to die on the vine, the communications team, along with leadership, makes a decision whether or not we want to respond to something.

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The last thing you want to do is amplify a message and have it have more traction.

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And I forget who just sent it to me, but I believe it was a talk in the Misinformation Village where misinformation tends to be shared 40 times more than the truth, right?

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And it sort of makes sense because the misinformation is going to be something that is designed specifically to elicit a strong negative response, right?

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How often do you see something on the internet and you're like, I can't believe that's true.

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That makes me so mad.

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Wait a minute.

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Is it true?

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Who made this?

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Why did they make this?

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What are they trying to get me to see, think, feel?

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So hopefully that helps.

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I think we look at the problem well before somebody is focused on necessarily the way they think about voting.

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And a lot of the psychological phenomenon that we see kind of portrayed in some of the misinformation or disinformation campaigns is focused on attacking that bubble, that cohort of like-minded individuals.

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And in doing so, if everyone agrees, then nobody says anything.

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So then you feel like you're not really part of something.

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So as soon as somebody says like, hey, here's a thing, and this is a more extreme viewpoint, that cohort, that bubble just runs with that message.

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So that's why we see it get shared a lot more often.

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And we see these bubbles kind of become much more extreme than their individual parts.

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And that's where a lot of these messages and these campaigns actually like prey on those types of bubbles.

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Something else that we see as well is the space is crowded with a lot of different misinformation and disinformation messages from a lot of different parties and different sources.

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And these micro campaigns, they're very good at figuring out exactly what to say to get you to buy something.

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But to change your mind about how you're going to vote two years from now, that's a much more complex thing.

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And if you are thinking about that, you put a lot of resources into that, it can be derailed by somebody doing a micro campaign right in the middle.

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So it's a very crowded space.

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Additionally, because it's so crowded, because it's so hard to like pull apart all these pieces and say, well, who's actually saying this?

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And why are they saying this?

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What's the intent?

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And what's the attribution?

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Not a lot of people actually participate in those types of systems.

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Not a lot of people actually are able to dig through them quickly.

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And because of that, messaging campaigns are able to take viral load very quickly.

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And we just can't respond from a governmental level, like I have to go get 37 permissions to like do one thing.

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And so by that time, I've already got 17 different messages that I have to confront.

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And you know, none of them are going to get addressed.

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And so it's the responsiveness that we see as well, it's easier to generate a message, it's hard to change that message.

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Something related that deeply concerns me is I'm seeing a lot of, is it misinformation or is it disinformation?

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Even louder, I'm going to be screaming.

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Okay.

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I'm concerned that a lot of the myths and disinformation that we're seeing is coming from elected officials or candidates.

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And that attribution is, you know, is it misinformation or is it disinformation?

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Do they know what they're saying is wrong?

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Or are they doing it on purpose?

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What network of people are surrounding them telling them what they want to hear?

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Like, it's not you, you didn't lose, the system is rigged, right?

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And of course, that's addicting, I would imagine.

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I'm not as much concerned actually about the myths and disinformation issue, right?

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Because it's much more on definition.

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I'm much more concerned of what is happening and why it's happening and what it's doing to us, right?

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And to our brains.

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And like getting into more of what you said, like giving the example of Russia, they really know how to target us.

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And the way how they produce disinformation is that, first of all, they have the ministry full of people, right?

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Sitting in St.

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Petersburg and making the accounts and messages that are exactly out there to target our emotions and very deep knowledge of what is targeting us.

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And it's usually like some of the things are very common to wherever you live.

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So it's us versus them narratives.

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So whether we know someone or we don't, if we don't know someone as, for example, refugees coming over, it's much easier to attribute some negative influence over it.

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So they use this everywhere, right?

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And then we can look at it from the big picture and we can fight it from kind of like smaller ground.

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But like what they do as well, they are touching our emotions and our hearts.

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So what they very often do, they create accounts on Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, wherever there is, for example, a spiritual account or a religious account.

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And they are starting to spread factual information or information that are very much based on our beliefs.

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And based on this, when they getting the tracks and followers, they started to bring the information.

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And for example, what they've been doing, they've been having the anti-vaccine movements much before COVID-19 and amplifying the messages, supporting them.

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And by the way, we're going to do some audience Q&A.

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I don't know if we are going to have another microphone there in the middle in a bit, but I'll let you figure that out.

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So I think, you know, there's a lot of talk about everything in this space, of course, but I think what you guys hit on was, you know, there is a kind of psychological appeal to this, right?

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And I think you were kind of hitting on that.

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There's a sense of there's a sense of community there.

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And like, if you're in, if you're in on the secret, if you understand, oh, actually, no, these elections aren't fair.

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They're, you know, what the media, what everybody else is telling you is a lie.

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What the election officials are telling you is a lie.

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And here's the truth.

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There is like a, there is a, there is a, to your point, you know, if everybody's telling you you're right, there's a great sense of community there.

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And what is this?

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And I mean, I know this is a very big job in question for a Secretary of State's office.

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But, but how, how can the approach go beyond, you know, just tackling and trying to put facts out there, in terms of actually addressing this core issue that seems to be particularly pronounced in a state like Arizona, where people have this appeal, this really is appealing to a cohort of people.

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And, you know, is there something, is there, is there a different route that, that, that society can offer people to go down?

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And how do you make that appealing?

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Sure.

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And I definitely don't have the final answer, but... You don't?

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Oh, my God.

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You don't know how to solve all this?

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There's a whole MDM village, right?

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And we're doing a talk about MDM here as well, right?

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So say I do have my communications director here, right?

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Like, we're taking this very seriously.

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We're doing everything we can.

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You told me to do better.

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I'm listening to you.

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We're trying.

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There's lots of voter outreach, right?

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At the county level of the Secretary of State's office, we're trying to reach out to people across the spectrum, left and right, and all the way in between, going out to events, talking to them, creating content.

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You're not faceless.

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You know, faceless bureaucrats, faceless officials.

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And also trying to connect with community leaders.

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In particular, the veterans are the most trusted source of people, but they're also frequently targeted by MDM.

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So how do we reach out to them, answer their questions, make them feel comfortable, bring them into our facilities, give them tours, make sure that they get priority to be poll workers so they can be part of the process?

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Like I mentioned yesterday, we're seeing threats to election officials.

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If somebody's a veteran, who's threatening veterans?

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That just seems like a terrible idea.

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Maybe these people would still do it, but hopefully that would help deter that as well.

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And do you find that is that working?

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Because I mean, obviously, we've seen so many threats of violence being made against election officials, many of whom, you know, are volunteers, right?

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So by trying to go out into the community in that way, are you seeing is that changing people's minds?

212
00:16:42,840 --> 00:16:49,160
Is that changing perspectives from what you can see in any measurable way, at least anecdotally?

213
00:16:50,060 --> 00:16:52,500
I can't give you two specific examples.

214
00:16:52,720 --> 00:16:57,240
But, you know, recently, they told me about an event they were going to at a gun show.

215
00:16:57,240 --> 00:16:58,420
And I'm like, you're going to a gun show.

216
00:16:58,420 --> 00:17:00,980
That seems like that might be not the best idea.

217
00:17:00,980 --> 00:17:02,940
But we've got to go out to people.

218
00:17:02,940 --> 00:17:05,600
And, you know, nobody pulled a weapon.

219
00:17:05,700 --> 00:17:07,360
Everyone was civil in person.

220
00:17:07,360 --> 00:17:11,460
And people come to our facilities, some minds are not changed.

221
00:17:12,080 --> 00:17:14,320
But, you know, hopefully they're being shifted.

222
00:17:14,320 --> 00:17:15,600
Some people are gonna be unreachable.

223
00:17:15,600 --> 00:17:16,980
We just shift them.

224
00:17:17,000 --> 00:17:19,140
Yeah, towards a little bit more trust.

225
00:17:19,520 --> 00:17:22,420
So the bar is not to have a gun pulled on an election.

226
00:17:24,380 --> 00:17:38,040
But in terms of, you know, just back to that wider point, Joe, and you could talk more broadly about this is, is, is this idea of why is this all just so much more appealing than the truth, which can be quite boring?

227
00:17:38,240 --> 00:17:50,680
Yeah, I think, you know, really, from that individual identity, we, we psychologically really like that reward of being first or being important or having a message or having an identity.

228
00:17:50,740 --> 00:18:02,740
And a lot of these misinformation campaigns or disinformation campaigns , or however you wish to call it, and I'm in I'm in your camp, it matters little to me because whether it's second, third, fourth order effect, it's still effect that I'm that I'm interested in.

229
00:18:04,080 --> 00:18:19,260
When we, when we watch when we watch these campaigns get started, the targeting that goes on in them is is to look for these fringe elements that don't have an identity that don't have a place that are easy to latch on to that are easy to mobilize that are easy to activate.

230
00:18:19,480 --> 00:18:28,000
And then providing them that information, they essentially just provide it right back as an echo chamber to their same cohort, and people like them and people identify with them.

231
00:18:28,000 --> 00:18:29,540
And then and then that begins to grow.

232
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So it's a very organic process.

233
00:18:30,940 --> 00:18:34,820
And it requires very little if you do a lot of the targeting up front correctly.

234
00:18:34,900 --> 00:18:37,580
And that's really where we see a lot of the effect coming from.

235
00:18:37,580 --> 00:18:47,420
I mean, the violence against election officials, like, I mean, what 10 years ago, nobody would have thought to like, think even think about offering violence as a solution to this.

236
00:18:47,420 --> 00:18:55,800
But today it's offered because we have so many different identified methods in which those types of influence campaigns are being pushed and forced to create a division.

237
00:18:55,800 --> 00:18:58,160
Those are foreign and domestic.

238
00:18:58,400 --> 00:19:16,360
So my you spoke a lot about the threat of foreign disinformation, particularly, as you mentioned, coming from Russia, I mean, I think, in the US, there might have been this idea after 2016, that, you know, this was a very much a foreign interference problem,

239
00:19:16,360 --> 00:19:25,320
where, whereas I think Americans have learned has since that's a great majority of this is very much a domestic issue.

240
00:19:25,880 --> 00:19:28,520
I assume that's also the same case in Europe.

241
00:19:28,520 --> 00:19:30,400
I mean, it's not just Russia, right?

242
00:19:30,400 --> 00:19:32,600
So it's also domestic.

243
00:19:33,040 --> 00:19:41,500
And indeed, political parties are also deploying this information and building it on the same patterns, right?

244
00:19:41,500 --> 00:19:45,320
Even have something that is called authoritarian playbook.

245
00:19:45,320 --> 00:19:50,020
And it's being used by the authoritarian regimes, wherever they're coming from.

246
00:19:50,020 --> 00:19:54,460
I mean, we have the foreign actors, but we also have the domestic characters.

247
00:19:54,500 --> 00:19:56,400
And to your points, right?

248
00:19:56,400 --> 00:19:59,520
Like what we can do with it, because we can do things with it.

249
00:19:59,520 --> 00:20:04,160
It's not that we should sit in there and only say like, Oh my God, there's this information, let's run.

250
00:20:04,240 --> 00:20:14,300
I mean, we need to, we live in a space that is that during a day, we're getting as many information as our ancestors did during the whole lifetime, right?

251
00:20:14,300 --> 00:20:16,080
We are not able to fact check it.

252
00:20:16,080 --> 00:20:20,020
We are not able to kind of like protect against this information in this way.

253
00:20:20,020 --> 00:20:30,300
But like what we can support, because I very much believe that protecting or like countering disinformation is only possible with the whole society aspect.

254
00:20:30,300 --> 00:20:35,260
And we only can do it together with the governments, NGOs and others and experts.

255
00:20:35,260 --> 00:20:53,400
And we should do more of raising awareness that there is disinformation and the way how we actually look at the social media, or anything that is coming to us actually right now should be bringing the awareness if we are afraid of bringing our emotions,

256
00:20:53,400 --> 00:20:58,700
right, because that's how this disinformation is being deployed, then we should do the research.

257
00:20:58,700 --> 00:21:00,360
And that's what we're doing with a disarm.

258
00:21:00,360 --> 00:21:12,820
We're doing research and very deep research of what is happening in the internet, what operation influence narratives are being spread out there, and how they can affect our minds, right, and how they can further develop.

259
00:21:12,820 --> 00:21:16,680
So not only looking at what is already viral, but what is there before.

260
00:21:16,780 --> 00:21:21,380
And the third part is actually like a counter narratives, right?

261
00:21:21,380 --> 00:21:23,880
So that's what we're doing right now before the Polish election.

262
00:21:23,880 --> 00:21:44,320
We are building the ISAC with our different partners from the civil society and the media organizations where we're doing a research, we're seeing what is happening during campaigns, what are the emerging narratives out there, and we're giving the support to the civil society organization with the counter narratives and possible way of amplifying their message.

263
00:21:44,320 --> 00:21:49,060
Because very often we don't know how to communicate and we need to change the way we are communicating.

264
00:21:49,060 --> 00:21:59,760
We need to find these grounds of the emotions to actually give this positive, truthful, and based on our values communication to people that are out there.

265
00:21:59,980 --> 00:22:00,740
Yeah, go ahead.

266
00:22:00,800 --> 00:22:01,720
Two things on that.

267
00:22:01,720 --> 00:22:10,920
So on the education piece, what I would love to see, the reason that I recycle is because when I was a kid, I watched the cartoon, Captain Planet, right?

268
00:22:10,920 --> 00:22:12,100
Like that made it real for me.

269
00:22:12,100 --> 00:22:13,180
It gave a narrative.

270
00:22:13,280 --> 00:22:17,760
It's not that hard to try and take care of the environment, be mindful of that kind of thing.

271
00:22:17,760 --> 00:22:27,220
I'd love to see something similar for MDM and critical thinking, like just teach our kids this is what logical fallacies are and look out for people making these kind of arguments.

272
00:22:27,220 --> 00:22:29,680
What is the source, citations, etc.

273
00:22:30,140 --> 00:22:36,660
But the second thing that you touched on as well, like we can't just ignore MDM, right?

274
00:22:36,660 --> 00:22:45,260
If you have friends or family, I know this is extremely painful, but like figure out a way to talk to them and not just like, oh crazy uncle, blah, blah, blah.

275
00:22:45,740 --> 00:22:49,440
He's always posting these weird things that are not true about...

276
00:22:49,440 --> 00:22:51,000
We all have them in our lives, right?

277
00:22:51,000 --> 00:22:52,040
We all have an uncle.

278
00:22:52,040 --> 00:22:53,060
Some more than others.

279
00:22:53,060 --> 00:22:58,300
You know, in Poland, sometimes we even don't sit with the other family members voting for another party.

280
00:22:58,300 --> 00:23:00,300
So that's what's happening, right?

281
00:23:00,300 --> 00:23:01,300
We ignore it if we don't...

282
00:23:02,240 --> 00:23:02,360
Yeah , exactly .

283
00:23:02,360 --> 00:23:03,480
We can't do that.

284
00:23:04,920 --> 00:23:10,520
I think there's a piece of this too, and you mentioned it, and it's that feedback loop.

285
00:23:10,520 --> 00:23:14,160
It contrasts to kind of a China, right?

286
00:23:14,220 --> 00:23:16,180
We have, sorry, we lift that up.

287
00:23:16,180 --> 00:23:17,240
Can you hear me better now?

288
00:23:17,560 --> 00:23:19,280
Contrast this to China, right?

289
00:23:19,520 --> 00:23:21,240
They're a black hole for data.

290
00:23:21,260 --> 00:23:24,220
We don't know what a message looks like when it goes into China.

291
00:23:24,220 --> 00:23:26,980
We don't know what their perception of American politics is.

292
00:23:26,980 --> 00:23:30,700
We don't know what the average Chinese person thinks on a day-to-day basis.

293
00:23:31,120 --> 00:23:32,600
Contrast that with the US.

294
00:23:32,760 --> 00:23:40,300
I know exactly what you had to eat for breakfast because you tweeted it and then put it on Facebook and then sent a bajillion messages on it.

295
00:23:40,300 --> 00:23:46,840
We get to see that across media, and we are one of the most connected societies, and we generate so much data.

296
00:23:46,840 --> 00:23:50,360
It is easy to understand what influence looks like for us, and we get that feedback loop.

297
00:23:51,360 --> 00:23:53,480
We're missing that from a lot of other nations.

298
00:23:53,480 --> 00:23:55,500
And I mean, if you look even in Poland, right?

299
00:23:55,560 --> 00:23:59,040
The connectivity in Poland is good, but it's not like it is in the US.

300
00:23:59,060 --> 00:24:07,140
The platforms are built for that here because we generate a lot of revenue, or ad tech revenue, so providers are really interested in our money.

301
00:24:07,140 --> 00:24:08,880
So they connect us much better.

302
00:24:08,960 --> 00:24:13,260
That gives our adversaries unprecedented access to the ability to manipulate us as well.

303
00:24:13,260 --> 00:24:14,720
So it's that double-edged sword.

304
00:24:14,720 --> 00:24:24,700
So we have to think about, especially if we're going to combat this, how do we think about the feedback loops that tell us whether or not our messages are effective, and when we need to actually generate those messages.

305
00:24:24,700 --> 00:24:26,800
Because our adversaries see it very keenly.

306
00:24:26,800 --> 00:24:30,780
But it goes to the research, and what is the research is about listening.

307
00:24:30,960 --> 00:24:33,440
And we very often forget how to listen.

308
00:24:33,440 --> 00:24:36,640
Even in our conversation, like daily conversations, right?

309
00:24:36,640 --> 00:24:42,880
We're just like so focused on our positions, on our views, and we think that we know the best.

310
00:24:43,020 --> 00:24:43,800
And that's it.

311
00:24:43,800 --> 00:24:45,380
I mean, like, we don't.

312
00:24:45,380 --> 00:24:50,280
If we are generating messages, like we need to realize, and I'm doing a lot of campaigns.

313
00:24:50,280 --> 00:24:53,280
I've been doing the political campaigns since 20 years, right?

314
00:24:53,300 --> 00:24:55,460
Starting in high school, pretty much.

315
00:24:55,600 --> 00:24:58,680
And like, you don't do it to the people like you.

316
00:24:58,680 --> 00:24:59,940
You do it to other people.

317
00:24:59,940 --> 00:25:01,600
So you need to get to know them.

318
00:25:01,760 --> 00:25:03,660
And that's the research for as well.

319
00:25:03,800 --> 00:25:05,480
And it's very easy to make it.

320
00:25:05,480 --> 00:25:11,800
I know for the fact that the Polish government is using focus group pretty much for every single decision that they're making.

321
00:25:11,800 --> 00:25:15,000
And pretty much every single communication that they're spreading, right?

322
00:25:15,000 --> 00:25:17,880
So they know what to tell to people.

323
00:25:18,220 --> 00:25:20,340
And that's legal.

324
00:25:20,600 --> 00:25:21,760
That's actually good.

325
00:25:21,760 --> 00:25:23,540
Why we're not using this?

326
00:25:23,540 --> 00:25:26,100
Why we're not listening to people?

327
00:25:26,100 --> 00:25:37,720
And then like, making our minds of better communicated what we want to tell them, but in a way that they are able to listen to it.

328
00:25:38,020 --> 00:25:45,400
And back to holding the microphone like I'm a TikTok influencer doing a review of brunch in Miami or something.

329
00:25:45,540 --> 00:25:56,540
Mike, you mentioned, you know, obviously, there's candidates who are running in elections while undermining, trying to undermine the democratic process.

330
00:25:57,700 --> 00:26:01,620
You mentioned movies like 2,000 Mules.

331
00:26:02,160 --> 00:26:03,580
2,000 or 4,000?

332
00:26:03,580 --> 00:26:04,680
2,000, isn't it?

333
00:26:04,680 --> 00:26:05,260
2,000 Mules.

334
00:26:05,260 --> 00:26:06,220
Yeah.

335
00:26:06,220 --> 00:26:08,680
Two more than come out of nowhere.

336
00:26:08,680 --> 00:26:09,760
Please don't give them money.

337
00:26:09,840 --> 00:26:11,400
That's the sequel.

338
00:26:13,200 --> 00:26:22,280
Those movies, there's been a lot of messaging around telling people, it's always good to have people involved, more people involved in the democratic process.

339
00:26:22,280 --> 00:26:26,480
It's always good to have more people to go and volunteer to be election officials.

340
00:26:26,480 --> 00:26:45,040
But a lot of this messaging is to try and get people to volunteer to see these movies and then go volunteer and work as election officials, not necessarily to help out, but to try and expose some terrible thing that might not necessarily be there.

341
00:26:45,260 --> 00:26:56,300
And we have seen cases, instances where these really hardcore conspiracy theorists essentially are now working as poll workers and election officials.

342
00:26:56,540 --> 00:26:59,100
Can you talk to us a bit about that?

343
00:26:59,100 --> 00:27:05,780
I mean, I assume maybe sometimes when people are brought into the process, it might change their mind and they say, okay, what I saw in that movie is bullshit.

344
00:27:05,860 --> 00:27:08,820
But then there is a threat there also, right?

345
00:27:08,820 --> 00:27:20,200
That if you're bringing people in who might end up compromising systems or different things in terms of trying to find this to give truth to their conspiracy theory.

346
00:27:20,860 --> 00:27:21,740
Absolutely.

347
00:27:21,740 --> 00:27:30,180
And for sure, if you have any doubts about elections in your area, please volunteer and be a poll worker, but also please don't break the law and try to mess with the system.

348
00:27:30,220 --> 00:27:34,520
If we're lucky, people come in and say, absolutely not on my watch.

349
00:27:34,580 --> 00:27:35,840
There will be no cheating.

350
00:27:35,840 --> 00:27:43,100
And if I see somebody doing something squirrelly, I'm going to report it all the way down to someone may attempt to compromise something and put their phone on a scale.

351
00:27:43,120 --> 00:27:44,060
Don't do that.

352
00:27:44,060 --> 00:27:45,040
Do not do that.

353
00:27:45,040 --> 00:27:45,940
You will get caught.

354
00:27:45,940 --> 00:27:47,240
You will be arrested.

355
00:27:47,820 --> 00:27:50,740
There's multiple instances where that kind of thing has happened.

356
00:27:51,080 --> 00:28:00,440
And I want people to be skeptical about elections and not blindly trust.

357
00:28:01,580 --> 00:28:10,640
I'm not going to tell you to always trust the outcome of an election without any kind of evidence, but I also would not say don't accept evidence.

358
00:28:10,640 --> 00:28:14,940
Don't accept claims to the contrary without any sort of evidence whatsoever.

359
00:28:14,960 --> 00:28:23,960
It is very possible that there could be regional pockets where someone who is an election conspiracy theorist, has an insider threat situation, could make a compromise.

360
00:28:23,960 --> 00:28:29,760
That's why we have checks and balance to pick up this kind of thing, not just prevention, detection, and recovery.

361
00:28:29,760 --> 00:28:30,920
We have paper ballots.

362
00:28:30,920 --> 00:28:32,840
We can always recount the ballots if we need to.

363
00:28:35,160 --> 00:28:39,420
And I think we're going to try to open it up to some audience Q&A.

364
00:28:39,420 --> 00:28:40,140
I don't know if we have...

365
00:28:40,140 --> 00:28:40,880
Oh, we have a microphone.

366
00:28:40,880 --> 00:28:41,540
Very good.

367
00:28:41,960 --> 00:28:45,040
Well, let's go with this guy in the first row, because he's got his hand up.

368
00:28:46,420 --> 00:28:47,800
Wait till you get the mic there.

369
00:28:49,540 --> 00:28:50,180
Hello?

370
00:28:50,320 --> 00:28:50,760
Yes.

371
00:28:50,760 --> 00:28:51,060
Okay.

372
00:28:51,060 --> 00:29:03,780
So my question to, I guess, all of you three on the panel, I heard, I guess, mainly from you from Poland regarding your solutions, at least what your country is intending to do to address this situation.

373
00:29:03,780 --> 00:29:07,860
But I haven't heard on these other two gentlemen, and what you guys are trying to do.

374
00:29:07,860 --> 00:29:12,820
Are you guys trying to use her example to then try to do it, like, for instance, in Arizona?

375
00:29:13,060 --> 00:29:25,080
Or can you, like, just in a very succinct way, tell the audience here what you guys are doing in Arizona or within your authority to combat this situation?

376
00:29:25,960 --> 00:29:26,320
Okay.

377
00:29:26,720 --> 00:29:27,660
Mike?

378
00:29:27,660 --> 00:29:31,000
Yeah, again, specifically just to combat MDM is what your question was?

379
00:29:31,000 --> 00:29:35,960
Yeah, because you weren't specific, as specific as this lady here, what they're doing in Poland.

380
00:29:35,960 --> 00:29:39,840
So I was just curious, regarding to what you're doing in Arizona.

381
00:29:39,880 --> 00:29:40,380
Right.

382
00:29:40,440 --> 00:29:42,640
It's extremely challenging.

383
00:29:42,640 --> 00:29:50,460
And a lot of it is voter education and trying to get the truth out there, have the truth be loud, presented to people constantly, right?

384
00:29:50,460 --> 00:29:55,720
We have voter outreach programs, justifacts.vote, we create newsletter content.

385
00:29:55,800 --> 00:30:01,880
Maricopa has at Maricopa vote YouTube, where it has our election directors who go through the processes, right?

386
00:30:01,880 --> 00:30:07,640
But it's again, it's challenging to make it super engaging for people.

387
00:30:08,440 --> 00:30:19,580
There's also like, people who trust the system aren't necessarily going to look for material versus people that don't trust the system don't want to hear it from you, because they don't trust you, right?

388
00:30:19,620 --> 00:30:29,340
So they are also attempting to reach out to community leaders and answer all of their questions to try and spread from those trusted sources in those communities.

389
00:30:29,340 --> 00:30:34,800
Like, if they, if, for example, a church or a veterans group, right?

390
00:30:34,800 --> 00:30:50,680
If they're hearing people in their community have concerns, they're a subject matter expert in their community, and they can start to answer questions and connect them back to us, come out and take tours and see our facility and see, you know, the place the votes are actually counted in all the security controls that we have in place.

391
00:30:52,620 --> 00:30:53,400
Jess, sure.

392
00:30:53,400 --> 00:30:57,140
And so, so from my side, to clarify, we're in private industry.

393
00:30:57,140 --> 00:31:02,580
And so a lot of our clients are very interested in closing the information gap.

394
00:31:02,580 --> 00:31:07,500
And so what we do is we provide a lot of streams, a lot of analytic products to help them make decisions faster.

395
00:31:07,500 --> 00:31:17,920
And so, you know, you mentioned you use focus groups in a lot of the areas that we are helping our clients understand what influence looks like and how to combat influence in their, in their realms.

396
00:31:18,020 --> 00:31:19,540
It's just too slow for us.

397
00:31:19,540 --> 00:31:21,740
And so we need the data-driven models.

398
00:31:21,740 --> 00:31:25,400
And so a lot of that is where we go out and seek which types of data sets do we need?

399
00:31:25,400 --> 00:31:26,340
Where are they coming from?

400
00:31:26,340 --> 00:31:27,520
How quickly can I get them?

401
00:31:27,520 --> 00:31:28,700
Are they informative or not?

402
00:31:28,700 --> 00:31:30,580
Are they the right representative population?

403
00:31:30,940 --> 00:31:35,220
And then there's the other side where we're actually authoring messages as well and pushing those out.

404
00:31:35,220 --> 00:31:36,580
And so we have to build those channels.

405
00:31:36,580 --> 00:31:39,920
So it's, it's kind of a dual-edged sword and it really depends on the campaign.

406
00:31:39,920 --> 00:31:55,900
But everything from, you know, Afghanistan to Ukraine to Poland to even, even messages in and out of Russia, because if you think about the constituents, the voting constituents there, that's the only way that you're going to put pressure on the government to stop is make the Russian mothers mad that Russians are dying,

407
00:31:55,900 --> 00:31:56,140
right?

408
00:31:56,140 --> 00:32:02,360
I mean, that's, that's really what's going to end a war, not, hey, Putin, you did something bad, right?

409
00:32:02,360 --> 00:32:04,080
All right.

410
00:32:04,080 --> 00:32:06,220
And who's next?

411
00:32:06,260 --> 00:32:09,100
This guy, man over here in the red shirt.

412
00:32:09,100 --> 00:32:09,480
Yeah.

413
00:32:12,640 --> 00:32:14,720
One of the, hello?

414
00:32:15,260 --> 00:32:16,020
Hello.

415
00:32:16,020 --> 00:32:24,220
One of the things that struck me both about, about the past election is that of the, is the speed of misinformation.

416
00:32:24,840 --> 00:32:38,380
And it can take days with a recount, it can take days, but sometimes it takes weeks, months, and perhaps even a year as it runs through a court system before the misinformation is identified as misinformation.

417
00:32:38,840 --> 00:32:42,300
How are you going to deal with that issue?

418
00:32:42,460 --> 00:32:53,680
I'd, I'd love to know what can be put in place to kind of make the correction of mis-mal-dis-information kind of correction process faster.

419
00:32:54,000 --> 00:33:10,240
One, one final thing is, as I think about the last election, one thing that strikes me is that sometimes the careful presentation of data almost came down to relying on the brute honesty of election officials.

420
00:33:10,620 --> 00:33:23,120
And that is great, but it also scares me a little that if a few election officials chose to be dishonest, things could have gone a different direction.

421
00:33:23,120 --> 00:33:27,500
I wouldn't mind hearing any, from any of you on that.

422
00:33:28,620 --> 00:33:45,600
One of the great challenges is any of us could sit down at a, at a, you know, at a couch and have a couple drinks and come up with a hundred pieces of misinformation that take thousands of hours for an election official to actually collect the data to disprove.

423
00:33:45,600 --> 00:33:47,720
And some things are not disprovable, right?

424
00:33:47,720 --> 00:33:50,740
If they're asking you to prove a negative, okay, good luck, right?

425
00:33:50,740 --> 00:33:52,540
Prove that something didn't happen.

426
00:33:52,900 --> 00:33:54,680
So that's extremely challenging.

427
00:33:55,260 --> 00:34:07,160
And I'm going to ask this kind of following up on, on, on what this gentleman was asking, is, you know, it's, it's all fine to say that's disinformation, that's false.

428
00:34:07,420 --> 00:34:13,820
But then systems, institutions don't always necessarily instill trust, right?

429
00:34:13,820 --> 00:34:30,440
In terms of during COVID in 2020, you had a lot of the mainstream media, you had a lot, you had Facebook totally banning people talking about the lab leak theory when it comes to COVID-19.

430
00:34:30,440 --> 00:34:31,760
Facebook totally banned that.

431
00:34:31,760 --> 00:34:37,060
And a lot of it was, you know, that it's all being litigated by government pressure, pressure from elsewhere .

432
00:34:37,160 --> 00:34:45,640
They eventually had to lift that ban, because now we see that it could have potentially, the lab leak theory might have some credence to it.

433
00:34:46,620 --> 00:35:00,820
How, you know, how then, how can you tell people to trust these institutions, when sometimes these institutions, in their view, are censoring them to things that might turn out to be actually a fact?

434
00:35:01,120 --> 00:35:04,020
You know, like, for me, those are two different questions.

435
00:35:04,020 --> 00:35:07,060
And I'm gonna try to adjust to both of them, right?

436
00:35:07,060 --> 00:35:13,260
So like, first of all, if we're talking about disinformation, because disinformation is the one that is causing issues, right?

437
00:35:13,320 --> 00:35:24,360
Misinformation is pretty much each of us is spreading misinformation, or like doing it, like, I put a lot of misinformation in my life, each of you did, like, I'm an expert on it.

438
00:35:24,360 --> 00:35:29,840
But still, this information is done on purpose, and it's serving a certain purpose, right?

439
00:35:30,760 --> 00:35:37,940
But with what I said, that there is so much information in the information space, we are not able to fact check everything.

440
00:35:37,940 --> 00:35:40,060
We're just not able to fact check everything.

441
00:35:40,060 --> 00:35:50,300
So what we are doing with Disarm framework, within the Disarm Foundation and Alliance for Europe, it's like, we're supporting the researchers that are doing awesome, to give them this table, right?

442
00:35:50,300 --> 00:35:54,120
So they match the tactics and techniques of the operation influence.

443
00:35:54,120 --> 00:35:59,760
And we have another table that is telling how we can counterfeit it, right?

444
00:35:59,760 --> 00:36:10,320
So it's not always fact checking, in terms of like going outside and saying, it's not true that, because sometimes that's actually more amplifying this disinformation.

445
00:36:10,580 --> 00:36:21,380
So for example, the QAnon, right, that was a big one in the US, it wouldn't be a big one in Europe, if not Der Spiegel, and a few other media outlets talking about it out there, right?

446
00:36:21,380 --> 00:36:28,400
So sometimes if you see this, it's better to just stay still, monitor and see what is happening, right?

447
00:36:28,400 --> 00:36:30,800
And it might just not go viral in this sense.

448
00:36:30,800 --> 00:36:33,900
So different ways of actually like working on it.

449
00:36:33,900 --> 00:36:35,360
But what happened with COVID?

450
00:36:35,480 --> 00:36:37,820
It's a kind of a different way, right?

451
00:36:37,820 --> 00:36:44,220
Because we were, again, few people were saying that the pandemic gonna happen before, right?

452
00:36:44,220 --> 00:36:50,260
And I think that we also living in the country, in the world as we are living, we could have think that there will be pandemic.

453
00:36:50,580 --> 00:36:59,920
Still, if there's going to be another pandemic, the governments are not ready to deal with it, they're probably going to do exactly the same things that they've done two years ago, right?

454
00:36:59,920 --> 00:37:05,360
Like, I really believe that we need to strategize more of how we deal with the issues like this.

455
00:37:05,360 --> 00:37:06,960
But that's set aside.

456
00:37:06,960 --> 00:37:11,320
What happened with COVID was that we didn't know what's happening.

457
00:37:11,380 --> 00:37:12,680
We were in fear.

458
00:37:12,920 --> 00:37:16,320
Like someone is telling us that we're all gonna die pretty much, right?

459
00:37:16,320 --> 00:37:20,580
And nobody really gave any factual information, right?

460
00:37:20,580 --> 00:37:28,960
And there was, when you were putting in the media, like any TV, like CNN, everywhere, it was fear.

461
00:37:29,020 --> 00:37:31,840
It was just like opening this TV and you were in fear.

462
00:37:32,320 --> 00:37:34,380
And there were no factual information.

463
00:37:34,380 --> 00:37:35,600
Nobody knew what to do.

464
00:37:35,600 --> 00:37:39,060
There was nothing that was calming people in a way as well.

465
00:37:39,700 --> 00:37:43,920
And that's how these informers were getting the truck.

466
00:37:43,920 --> 00:37:49,740
Because that's like very much like our thing that we are based on.

467
00:37:49,740 --> 00:37:51,660
It's like a very primitive thing, right?

468
00:37:51,660 --> 00:37:53,500
We need to feel secure.

469
00:37:53,640 --> 00:38:01,180
If we don't feel secure, we're looking for the conspiracy theories that are giving us kind of the explanation of what is happening.

470
00:38:02,860 --> 00:38:08,880
I just want to say, you know, we're at DEF CON, right?

471
00:38:08,880 --> 00:38:15,880
You all know every system is hackable, freedom of speech is being hacked with what we're seeing right now.

472
00:38:16,000 --> 00:38:27,160
And maybe you guys like me, but I don't think any of you want me to be the one who is in charge of what you can't and can't say on the internet or kick down your door when you say something that's incorrect, right?

473
00:38:27,160 --> 00:38:36,240
So we're up against a very challenging battle of when someone says something that's a lie, they know it's a lie, it's causing public harm.

474
00:38:36,640 --> 00:38:42,860
I don't have the means to shut that down on social media, on a private platform, right?

475
00:38:42,860 --> 00:38:49,400
Like everyone is concerned about the idea of a ministry of truth, who gets to determine what's true and what's not true.

476
00:38:50,620 --> 00:38:52,080
Oh, sorry, go ahead.

477
00:38:52,080 --> 00:38:55,640
Yeah, I think there's another piece of this.

478
00:38:55,660 --> 00:39:05,180
Our adversaries who wish to feed these types of information campaigns towards us, they don't think about like, in three years, this is what this is going to do.

479
00:39:05,180 --> 00:39:09,580
They think about like, today, I'm going to say this, and it's going to create an effect.

480
00:39:09,580 --> 00:39:16,740
And it's going to echo back into my constituency, back into the country that I'm in, or the cohort that I'm in, and I get my effect out of it.

481
00:39:16,740 --> 00:39:18,700
Meanwhile, we're left to pick up all these pieces.

482
00:39:18,700 --> 00:39:24,060
And so maybe a way to think about it a little differently is to think about it a little bit like the cybersecurity game.

483
00:39:24,160 --> 00:39:34,900
Instead of spending so much time on attribution and purpose and intent, we patch the vulnerability, we build more resilient systems, we create systems that have trust and authenticity in them.

484
00:39:34,900 --> 00:39:37,800
And we don't participate in systems that don't.

485
00:39:37,800 --> 00:39:43,720
And that's the difficulty I think I see is, you know, we mentioned like, well, how do you trust these institutions that run all of our communications?

486
00:39:44,640 --> 00:39:51,280
We choose to trust them, we choose to participate, we click the EULA at the bottom and say, yes, we never read it, we never read it.

487
00:39:51,360 --> 00:39:54,240
And they then get the choice of how do I want to censor?

488
00:39:54,240 --> 00:39:55,340
How do I want to filter?

489
00:39:55,500 --> 00:40:10,300
And whether you're a believer in that we can do this ourselves by voting with our feet, or you think that there is a government institution that needs to step in and say, these are the policies and regulations that will exist in EULAs and these companies because they serve such a utility within the communications framework,

490
00:40:10,300 --> 00:40:13,500
they must respond this way or they must adhere to these policies.

491
00:40:13,500 --> 00:40:24,260
Whichever one you choose, we need something because we can't continue to operate in this like, well, I have no idea of half the messages I'm getting and I don't have time in my day to go through each individual message and cull through that.

492
00:40:24,260 --> 00:40:32,500
And if we're relying on one government institution to combat this entirety, I mean, the states can't even determine what they want to do for data privacy, let alone our federal government.

493
00:40:32,640 --> 00:40:34,020
And so these are big challenges.

494
00:40:34,020 --> 00:40:36,920
And so I think it's the systems that we need to address first.

495
00:40:36,920 --> 00:40:38,900
But definitely, can I just click on it?

496
00:40:38,900 --> 00:40:41,340
Because definitely, we need to address the system.

497
00:40:41,600 --> 00:40:43,920
And what is the first thing?

498
00:40:43,920 --> 00:40:49,900
A lot of bad actors know what they are doing, and they're actually thinking about the future because that's what they want to do, right?

499
00:40:49,900 --> 00:40:56,140
They want to destabilize our countries, they want to take over, like, have more influence and have more influence all over, right?

500
00:40:56,140 --> 00:40:58,300
So it's not that they don't know, right?

501
00:40:58,300 --> 00:41:07,700
Very often, they actually have a lot of tactics that are spreading in order to have it, and we need to strategize more as well for a long term.

502
00:41:07,700 --> 00:41:15,240
I would actually push back a little on that, because I don't think that a lot of the actors that we see have these, like, large netted multi-year campaigns.

503
00:41:15,380 --> 00:41:28,500
They're thinking about, like, if I just say that the US is, you know, generally in shambles, and their political system doesn't work, that's enough to, like, garner, you know, some faith and vote here for me as a candidate saying, we're beating the US,

504
00:41:28,500 --> 00:41:31,000
look, your nationalist pride has increased.

505
00:41:31,320 --> 00:41:35,600
On our side, though, we're seeing, like... But they are very small campaigns, right?

506
00:41:35,600 --> 00:41:37,940
And look what they all are causing.

507
00:41:37,940 --> 00:41:43,980
There are a bunch of small campaigns, and they are all causing the same issue together, right?

508
00:41:43,980 --> 00:41:48,860
So if you see Russia and China in particular, they very much, like, have a long term strategy.

509
00:41:48,860 --> 00:41:53,900
You even can see, like, how China is having the long term strategies in their government for years now.

510
00:41:54,960 --> 00:41:58,560
I look at the storming of the Capitol as an example, right?

511
00:41:59,360 --> 00:42:01,400
I don't think that was a purposeful campaign.

512
00:42:01,400 --> 00:42:04,520
Like, nobody in a foreign country sat down and said, this is what we're going to do.

513
00:42:04,520 --> 00:42:08,060
They said, let's destabilize and drive a rift.

514
00:42:08,220 --> 00:42:13,100
And a net benefit for them, second, third, fourth order effect was the Capitol was then stormed.

515
00:42:13,100 --> 00:42:20,940
And then we have a long tail of legal proceedings, of investigations, of news articles following that.

516
00:42:20,940 --> 00:42:24,600
And it was very little effort on their part, and a major impact.

517
00:42:24,600 --> 00:42:33,940
And I think that's actually what we see much more on the disinformation, misinformation campaign side, is we're seeing like this small expenditure of resource creating a large response.

518
00:42:33,940 --> 00:42:36,740
And that's actually much more effective for all these campaigns.

519
00:42:36,740 --> 00:42:40,560
I just don't see the, here's our 10 year strategy, we're going to follow this plan.

520
00:42:40,560 --> 00:42:50,920
Well, the thing is that we leave things, fortunately, in the countries with the freedom of speech, and with many freedoms.

521
00:42:51,660 --> 00:42:56,260
Russia, China, and other countries that are involved in this, they don't have this freedom.

522
00:42:56,260 --> 00:43:04,760
And they know that it's much easier to rule the citizens, and they are basically not having any freedoms.

523
00:43:04,760 --> 00:43:10,200
So they, based on this, you can assume that they rather have the strategy in this sense, right?

524
00:43:10,200 --> 00:43:12,180
And they know how to kind of handle that.

525
00:43:12,180 --> 00:43:17,760
And like, just adding on this, because I'm thinking it's what you said, we're sitting in DEF CON, right?

526
00:43:18,320 --> 00:43:22,600
And indeed, you have the power to make this change as well.

527
00:43:22,600 --> 00:43:32,440
Because when we've been doing research in Poland about the attitudes of Poles towards the European Union, we've seen one thing, there's 80% of Poles saying, yes, I'm for the European Union.

528
00:43:32,440 --> 00:43:41,440
And then you go into the internet and you do the social listening, and you see that 80% of comments are fake or negative.

529
00:43:41,540 --> 00:43:42,800
And that's the thing.

530
00:43:42,820 --> 00:43:48,140
Most of the internet is flooded by lies, disinformation, misinformation.

531
00:43:48,420 --> 00:43:53,500
And people that are on this side, believing in conspiracy theories, they're super passionate.

532
00:43:53,500 --> 00:43:59,980
While people that are kind of like on the value side, they're less passionate, because it's not that effective.

533
00:43:59,980 --> 00:44:05,960
So I would love to see as well, more affection and passion, actually to change this information space in this sense.

534
00:44:06,620 --> 00:44:07,560
Yep.

535
00:44:08,040 --> 00:44:11,020
Let's go back to our crazy uncles for a second here.

536
00:44:11,180 --> 00:44:19,720
Anecdotally, what I've found about my crazy uncles is that they tend to surround themselves with a common group of people who share in their similar beliefs.

537
00:44:20,300 --> 00:44:28,460
And no matter how much of a subject matter expert I am in some given area that they want to talk to me about, I'm not part of that group.

538
00:44:28,460 --> 00:44:33,820
Thus, my opinion and the things I try to share with them are automatically discounted, and they won't listen.

539
00:44:33,860 --> 00:44:41,840
So my question ultimately is, how do you break through to those type of people and help prevent them from further spreading the misinformation that they're already following?

540
00:44:41,840 --> 00:44:42,520
Thank you.

541
00:44:42,520 --> 00:44:44,680
So I might have a piece of that, right?

542
00:44:45,340 --> 00:44:53,120
It used to be before social media, it was very hard for people with extreme beliefs to be able to connect with each other, right?

543
00:44:53,120 --> 00:45:01,820
So man, I don't want to use reductive language, but someone in the village believes something that is obviously not true.

544
00:45:01,820 --> 00:45:08,600
But now all the villages are connected, and they can have a community where they can feed and grow, right?

545
00:45:08,600 --> 00:45:12,080
So is that person reachable?

546
00:45:12,480 --> 00:45:13,420
Maybe.

547
00:45:13,540 --> 00:45:17,620
Can you ask them, like, first, never insult someone's intelligence.

548
00:45:17,620 --> 00:45:19,600
Never be like, you're stupid, you're dumb.

549
00:45:19,600 --> 00:45:20,580
How can you believe that?

550
00:45:20,580 --> 00:45:21,660
That's ridiculous.

551
00:45:21,720 --> 00:45:25,240
Instead, hey, I'm sincerely concerned about what you're talking about.

552
00:45:25,240 --> 00:45:27,020
Can you walk me through your evidence, right?

553
00:45:27,020 --> 00:45:32,600
And maybe if you're looking at source material together, and you're like, hey, that doesn't add up.

554
00:45:32,600 --> 00:45:36,000
Maybe your premise is still correct, but let's look at the next piece.

555
00:45:36,240 --> 00:45:40,060
Maybe, maybe once you... that's not true, that's not true, that's not true.

556
00:45:40,120 --> 00:45:44,480
Maybe they'll start to backpedal, but I'm not sure.

557
00:45:44,960 --> 00:45:57,540
Yeah, I think another piece of that is, and you watched this over COVID too, we relied much more on the virtual space to connect us, which allowed us to selectively choose who entered into those spaces.

558
00:45:58,540 --> 00:46:04,420
I think the hyper-connectivity just of the virtual spaces we have available to us drives us that direction as well.

559
00:46:04,420 --> 00:46:12,000
It used to be you got together at a family reunion, or you got together with friends and family, and there was a diverse mix just naturally because of proximal contact.

560
00:46:12,000 --> 00:46:15,640
Now you can seek your cohort out across the globe.

561
00:46:15,640 --> 00:46:21,120
Like, you can find the exact person like you who has the same beliefs in Africa right now, if you wish.

562
00:46:21,120 --> 00:46:25,820
And so that helps reinforce your ideology, and it's harder for others to break into that.

563
00:46:25,820 --> 00:46:34,320
And I think that there's a responsibility that we see from the community side to ensure that we're inviting those and including groups so that we can diversify that opinion.

564
00:46:34,320 --> 00:46:44,900
We can start to break some of those like social media and cohort bubbles, because that's actually, that's one of the easiest things to target is just like, feed a message into this group and they will amplify it.

565
00:46:44,980 --> 00:46:46,700
Can I throw one more thing real quick?

566
00:46:46,700 --> 00:46:54,760
So sometimes the point isn't necessarily convincing that one uncle sometimes the point is, hey, what you're saying is not correct.

567
00:46:54,760 --> 00:47:04,240
Here's the reason why here's the sources when like racism or sexism, you know, the idea of locker talk, like, someone says something inappropriate in your presence.

568
00:47:04,240 --> 00:47:09,640
If you're not standing up to that, then other people are tacitly going along with it, right?

569
00:47:09,640 --> 00:47:13,320
You're presenting an alternative point of view that says that's not correct.

570
00:47:13,380 --> 00:47:14,600
This is the truth.

571
00:47:14,600 --> 00:47:15,280
Here's my sources.

572
00:47:15,300 --> 00:47:18,200
So you can reach other people, even if you can't reach them.

573
00:47:18,440 --> 00:47:21,660
You know how I try to, when I'm talking with people, right?

574
00:47:21,660 --> 00:47:22,700
Because that's your question, right?

575
00:47:22,700 --> 00:47:24,440
It's not, it's less of the internet.

576
00:47:24,440 --> 00:47:27,220
It's more like, okay, my aunt is telling me that.

577
00:47:28,040 --> 00:47:32,920
And sometimes it's very difficult because it's, it's pushing my emotions as well, right?

578
00:47:33,040 --> 00:47:45,260
So first of all, I need to, and I had a lot of situations like my friend was telling me like, being in Poland, having a lot of Ukrainian refugees, they were like, my friend was coming and saying like, oh, those Ukrainians are so bad because of this, this,

579
00:47:45,260 --> 00:47:45,560
this.

580
00:47:45,560 --> 00:47:49,840
And I was like, taking my emotions and trying to understand what happened.

581
00:47:49,840 --> 00:47:53,120
And what happened was that he met one person that was bad.

582
00:47:53,180 --> 00:47:56,840
So then I was like, trying to discuss that it's happening everywhere, right?

583
00:47:56,840 --> 00:48:01,900
That every single nation has good people and bad people.

584
00:48:01,900 --> 00:48:10,360
And kind of discussing in from this emotions and not also talking like over him, like saying like, it's not right, it's true.

585
00:48:10,360 --> 00:48:13,020
But we're like, where is coming from?

586
00:48:13,020 --> 00:48:15,700
And you know, like, I, I work with this.

587
00:48:15,700 --> 00:48:22,600
And I've seen, for example, that those are the narratives that are being spread, for example, by Russia, right?

588
00:48:22,600 --> 00:48:34,340
One of the most actually, the kind of the strongest messages that I've seen at the beginning of the war of the Russian invasion to Ukraine in Poland, where there was a bunch of emotions.

589
00:48:34,340 --> 00:48:39,560
I mean, we've been all like kind of helping, supporting and like being emotional.

590
00:48:39,680 --> 00:48:42,940
There was, and there was a lot of fear, bunch of fear, right?

591
00:48:42,940 --> 00:48:50,500
There were those posts, post-its that were coming all over Warsaw, saying Putin wants you to be afraid.

592
00:48:51,200 --> 00:48:54,620
And that's something that's also like very speaking to you.

593
00:48:54,620 --> 00:49:06,280
So it's sometimes it's not about responding and arguing, but rather trying to find the ground and trying to see why this person is believing in what is he or she is believing.

594
00:49:06,280 --> 00:49:09,400
It's about coming from a place of empathy and respect.

595
00:49:09,400 --> 00:49:14,120
As you say, you're not going to get anywhere if you're just telling somebody they're stupid.

596
00:49:14,120 --> 00:49:16,720
I think we have time maybe for two more questions.

597
00:49:16,940 --> 00:49:17,680
Yep.

598
00:49:17,840 --> 00:49:19,100
And we'll come over here.

599
00:49:19,480 --> 00:49:20,420
Yeah, go ahead.

600
00:49:20,980 --> 00:49:29,000
I think we all agree that this is a very difficult situation to find a solution to.

601
00:49:29,000 --> 00:49:39,580
Do you have any prime examples of what you thought was a potential good solution that has backfired and you recommend that we do not attempt to do in our lives?

602
00:49:39,660 --> 00:49:40,700
That's interesting.

603
00:49:40,700 --> 00:49:44,880
So a solution that might have been well intended, but backfired.

604
00:49:44,880 --> 00:49:45,400
Joe, you got?

605
00:49:45,400 --> 00:49:55,760
I think I think we could start very simply with just using the same platforms that we trust with our communications to help govern the truthfulness of a message.

606
00:49:55,760 --> 00:50:02,760
I think I think that's a very slippery slope because their political ideologies, their corporate ideologies, their business ideologies are wrapped around.

607
00:50:02,760 --> 00:50:04,660
I mean, it's the fox in the house.

608
00:50:04,940 --> 00:50:07,700
And so we've seen, oh, well, that's that's a false story.

609
00:50:07,700 --> 00:50:08,900
And then they remove it.

610
00:50:08,900 --> 00:50:09,760
They remove the user.

611
00:50:09,760 --> 00:50:13,160
And then later, oh, no, actually, that was there's some partial truth to that.

612
00:50:13,160 --> 00:50:14,300
And we're really sorry.

613
00:50:14,300 --> 00:50:16,900
We didn't mean to, like, promulgate or propagate that.

614
00:50:16,900 --> 00:50:32,560
So I think, again, we need to think about the regulations and the policies around how we use these kind of critical communications paths so that we do have trust and integrity and availability of information so that we can validate the authenticity rather than relying on someone else to do it,

615
00:50:32,560 --> 00:50:34,720
rather than relying on a company to do it.

616
00:50:35,280 --> 00:50:38,220
It's fact checking better than fact checking.

617
00:50:38,300 --> 00:50:47,460
So like, as I told you what happened with the QAnon, also another thing, our brain usually don't read or see no.

618
00:50:47,460 --> 00:50:52,300
So if we're doing the fact check, it's not true that we're amplifying this message as well.

619
00:50:52,300 --> 00:50:57,480
We need to be very, very careful of how we counterfeit the narratives.

620
00:50:57,480 --> 00:50:58,400
It's a difficult one.

621
00:50:58,400 --> 00:50:59,200
Yeah, Mike?

622
00:51:08,320 --> 00:51:09,920
This isn't awkward at all.

623
00:51:11,780 --> 00:51:18,700
So we've seen multiple... if you've ever met an election official, they want to talk to you.

624
00:51:18,700 --> 00:51:23,100
They want to answer your questions universally from my experience, right?

625
00:51:23,100 --> 00:51:24,900
If you have concerns, they want to talk to you about it.

626
00:51:24,900 --> 00:51:33,340
We've seen multiple instances where people are operating not in good faith, and they're doing ambush guerrilla style journalism, just looking for a soundbite, right?

627
00:51:33,340 --> 00:51:38,640
So they're trying to trick them into saying something remotely that they can misinterpret.

628
00:51:38,920 --> 00:51:43,980
So we're having to advise our elected officials when you're in person.

629
00:51:44,380 --> 00:51:46,980
For example, don't be alone, necessarily.

630
00:51:46,980 --> 00:51:49,620
If you can have someone else with you, have a buddy system.

631
00:51:49,820 --> 00:51:54,160
And that buddy can help you be like, hey, this conversation, it's going nowhere.

632
00:51:54,160 --> 00:51:55,240
It's time to disengage.

633
00:51:55,240 --> 00:51:56,320
Yes.

634
00:51:57,100 --> 00:51:59,320
This lady here has a question over on this.

635
00:51:59,320 --> 00:52:02,180
Oh, one more and then one more.

636
00:52:02,180 --> 00:52:03,380
So we'll make it quick.

637
00:52:04,140 --> 00:52:05,620
I'll try to be quick.

638
00:52:05,740 --> 00:52:07,980
Full disclosure, I work with Michael.

639
00:52:08,640 --> 00:52:27,060
Michael, I know that in Arizona, we've done a lot of... we've had a lot of discussions about sort of inoculating the public against MDM before it happens, helping them learn how to understand that, you know, MDM is out there and do their own research and things like that.

640
00:52:27,060 --> 00:52:29,080
We've also done a lot of tabletop exercises

641
00:52:32,580 --> 00:52:36,680
to kind of figure out what maybe might occur.

642
00:52:36,700 --> 00:52:38,740
So I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about that.

643
00:52:38,740 --> 00:52:52,480
But more than that, I'd love to know from the other panelists, coming at it from that angle, right, rather than catching up with the MDM after it's occurred, our preemptive strikes, what ideas do you have for that?

644
00:52:54,560 --> 00:53:06,840
I'll go ahead and start on the... what we've seen a lot of success with is, you know, we spent a lot of time in some areas, focused on crafting a message to counter a narrative, or to respond to a narrative.

645
00:53:07,020 --> 00:53:16,200
And we were always late to the game, and the information had already taken hold, it had already spread, it was now... it had now morphed into something completely different.

646
00:53:16,260 --> 00:53:18,160
And it was so hard to play catch up.

647
00:53:18,340 --> 00:53:25,240
So what we started doing was offering out kind of a preemptive offensive kind of our own information campaigns.

648
00:53:25,420 --> 00:53:39,100
And we found that as long as the information was useful and pertinent, and easy to digest, it would often supplant or at least decrease the volatility of some of that mis- or disinformation that others were receiving.

649
00:53:39,160 --> 00:53:41,020
So it is an effort.

650
00:53:41,020 --> 00:53:45,400
And if you have time to do that, and you have the resources to do that, that's a wonderful way to combat it.

651
00:53:45,400 --> 00:53:51,000
But you also have to figure out your cohort, how to target them, because some people read Fox News, some people read CNN.

652
00:53:51,340 --> 00:53:53,220
Are you hitting the right media platform?

653
00:53:53,220 --> 00:53:54,100
Are you hitting the right message?

654
00:53:54,100 --> 00:53:55,380
Are you using the right words?

655
00:53:55,380 --> 00:53:58,420
And so that takes a lot of research, a lot of purpose, a lot of intent.

656
00:53:58,420 --> 00:54:02,660
And really, like the social media companies are designed for that.

657
00:54:02,700 --> 00:54:06,760
The government is not equipped to do that very well.

658
00:54:06,760 --> 00:54:07,940
We see that often.

659
00:54:08,200 --> 00:54:21,760
Yeah, we do a very similar thing exactly, like doing a research and then like kind of building the campaign that it's based rather on the emotions and the grounds of the disinformation narrated this already there.

660
00:54:21,760 --> 00:54:29,620
But I also believe that we basically need to more invest in this positive vision building communication, right?

661
00:54:29,620 --> 00:54:36,780
Because very often, as I said, it's the grounds of disinformation, it's us versus them, it's the lack of security.

662
00:54:36,780 --> 00:54:47,280
So if we give those information kind of like giving more of the security, but of course, it can't be only communication, it needs to go with the systematic change and actually giving the security to people as well.

663
00:54:47,280 --> 00:54:49,260
That's how we can better do it, right?

664
00:54:49,260 --> 00:54:51,980
So it's like a very groundbreaking.

665
00:54:52,840 --> 00:54:54,280
So, oh, it's back.

666
00:54:54,280 --> 00:54:54,900
Awesome.

667
00:54:54,940 --> 00:55:01,760
So I assure you, me and my peers, we're doing what we can, but there are people that will not listen to us because we are government.

668
00:55:01,900 --> 00:55:03,000
We need you.

669
00:55:03,000 --> 00:55:04,340
You are the Calvary.

670
00:55:04,340 --> 00:55:06,820
For real, you have to do your part.

671
00:55:06,940 --> 00:55:13,200
Just like two talks ago with Kendall, the idea of being a citizen, it takes work.

672
00:55:13,200 --> 00:55:14,660
You need to participate.

673
00:55:14,900 --> 00:55:18,480
Next year is going to be nuts for MDM.

674
00:55:18,480 --> 00:55:20,240
There's no reason it shouldn't be.

675
00:55:20,400 --> 00:55:30,240
The advent and explosion of AI and generative language models, that's going to be used to create incredibly high quality synthetic content.

676
00:55:30,240 --> 00:55:35,680
About to hit the point where you really, really, really cannot trust anything on the internet is real.

677
00:55:35,680 --> 00:55:38,360
You're going to see videos, you're going to hear audio with voice cloning.

678
00:55:38,800 --> 00:55:48,820
If you go to, if you're familiar with twitch.tv, there's like a Trump or Biden 2024 debate that's constantly going between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

679
00:55:49,000 --> 00:55:50,740
And the voices are perfect.

680
00:55:50,740 --> 00:55:54,120
The video is not perfect yet, but there's no reason it won't be 10 times better soon.

681
00:55:54,120 --> 00:56:08,460
So you need to talk to your friends, your family, your community, show them deepfakes, show them synthetic content, and get all your friends and family to realize something is eliciting this huge emotional response in you.

682
00:56:08,460 --> 00:56:09,940
Are you sure that it's real?

683
00:56:09,940 --> 00:56:12,520
Because it very much might not be real.

684
00:56:12,540 --> 00:56:13,200
We are over time.

685
00:56:13,200 --> 00:56:20,020
Be aware with yourself, because I'm going to just tell you, we have elections in two months, and in Poland, it's already crazy with this information.

686
00:56:20,020 --> 00:56:22,380
So really coming back to yourself.

687
00:56:22,380 --> 00:56:24,260
We are over time, but very quickly.

688
00:56:24,760 --> 00:56:27,380
So my question is kind of a variant of hers.

689
00:56:27,380 --> 00:56:28,240
Can you guys hear me?

690
00:56:28,240 --> 00:56:28,800
Yeah.

691
00:56:28,820 --> 00:56:36,800
It's about how you can be proactive in fostering the kind of discussion that you guys are talking about, the empathetic, in-depth, fact-check discussion.

692
00:56:36,900 --> 00:56:41,360
It seems like the nature of online communication prevents that, right?

693
00:56:41,360 --> 00:56:42,860
Echo chambers just happen.

694
00:56:42,860 --> 00:56:44,720
I don't think anyone creates them.

695
00:56:44,840 --> 00:56:48,880
We don't want to type a paragraph and we don't want to read a paragraph from someone else.

696
00:56:48,880 --> 00:56:59,160
So do you have any thoughts on how you would design an online communication platform that would foster the kind of in-depth discussion that you guys are talking about?

697
00:56:59,800 --> 00:57:00,480
All right.

698
00:57:00,640 --> 00:57:02,120
Anybody, any ideas?

699
00:57:03,300 --> 00:57:15,840
Again, to start out, I think we have a lot of options in front of us, but we don't have the policy to govern or to guide kind of the framework necessary to create that authenticity and that assuredness that we need in those platforms.

700
00:57:15,840 --> 00:57:18,280
I think that's the biggest hurdle that we see.

701
00:57:18,280 --> 00:57:34,260
One of the things, and this gets a little bit off topic from the digital realm, but I think a lot of us are experiencing, especially in online forums, interactions where we are waiting for the other person to finish so we can make our point.

702
00:57:34,460 --> 00:57:36,840
And a lot of times we don't actually listen to one another.

703
00:57:37,020 --> 00:57:44,580
And I've had a ton of hobbies in my life and I will pick them up and put them down because I have something better to do.

704
00:57:44,580 --> 00:57:55,900
And if you think about that type of community that you can create around people who have diverse opinions from you, if you show them that you're human and not just a soundbite and that they're just waiting for their time for you to finish so they can make their point,

705
00:57:55,900 --> 00:58:00,900
that does create a little bit more context, a little bit more identity, a little bit more appreciation and compassion.

706
00:58:01,000 --> 00:58:10,200
So maybe instead of trying to make your point or change their mind, maybe it's just as simple as have a conversation, say, hi, go grab a cup of coffee.

707
00:58:10,200 --> 00:58:24,580
I know it sounds simple, but I think that's where we actually see some of the best resistance to information operations is when there is a community around one another and the society rather than around the soundbite that I need to get out.

708
00:58:24,580 --> 00:58:25,280
Fully agreed.

709
00:58:25,280 --> 00:58:27,780
Community building is very, very important.

710
00:58:27,780 --> 00:58:33,960
There's a lot of amazing examples that already happened or are happening in terms of the projects, right?

711
00:58:33,960 --> 00:58:52,960
So, for example, what different media outlets in Europe have done before the European Parliament elections in 2019, they did this project where they invited people from all over Europe, like each of the country media outlet, they invited people with the different views.

712
00:58:52,960 --> 00:58:58,440
And what they did then, they connect the couples, the couples that were the most different.

713
00:58:58,760 --> 00:59:02,780
And they made it to sit together and dialogue and discuss.

714
00:59:02,800 --> 00:59:18,260
And I would love to have a platform like this, because like what is happening indeed is because of the algorithms and all of the system that the platforms are using, the echo chambers are happening and we have more and more polarization.

715
00:59:18,260 --> 00:59:24,800
So, we need to build more of the systems where the money will be flowing into community building instead of polarization.

716
00:59:25,480 --> 00:59:28,740
All right, unless you have last word to you, Mike.

717
00:59:28,760 --> 00:59:30,100
I'll be very brief.

718
00:59:30,580 --> 00:59:40,960
You know, when you're having a conversation with someone else, neither you are probably 100% true, and the outcome that is most ideal is that you both move towards the truth closer together.

719
00:59:41,020 --> 00:59:45,400
So, jeez, I mean, if I knew exactly how to make the platform, I'd be a billionaire or...

720
00:59:45,400 --> 00:59:48,960
Well, we need to get people on this platform first.

721
00:59:48,960 --> 00:59:50,640
Thank you very much, guys, for your time.

722
00:59:50,640 --> 00:59:51,320
Thanks so much.

723
00:59:51,320 --> 00:59:52,600
Thank you so much.

724
00:59:55,960 --> 01:00:08,620
So, please join me again in thanking Dani and our panelists for closing out the Voting Village speaking track under suboptimal sound conditions.

725
01:00:08,620 --> 01:00:10,660
So, thanks so much.

726
01:00:10,660 --> 01:00:12,460
By the way, you sound great on the headphones.

727
01:00:12,460 --> 01:00:13,220
Oh, good.

728
01:00:13,220 --> 01:00:14,180
Perfect.

729
01:00:14,180 --> 01:00:15,040
Thank you.