Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade
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Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, we're going to talk about a topic I know well, but one I wish wasn't so relevant, political disinformation. Donald Trump's charismatic leadership is built on a foundation of half-truths, misrepresentation, lies and conspiracy theories in a word, disinformation.

From the birther conspiracy to his attempt at manufacturing a Burisma corruption scandal to the big lie and the January 6th Antifa nonsense, Trump has flooded the zone with shit, as Steve Bannon would put it, and in fact has put it. But it's not just Trump. House Republican leaders like Jim Jordan and many of the Republican rank and file play along, too.

The GOP targets researchers who study disinformation with lawsuits and congressional hearings, threatens tech companies who try to moderate their content, and they spread their own disinformation, most recently about the Baltimore Bridge collapse. So we put together a panel of three expert guests to help us wade through the muck.

Barbara McQuaid is a law professor at the University of Michigan, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, a legal analyst for NBC and MSNBC, and the author of Attacks from Within, which methodically dissects the domestic disinformation threat and proposes a raft of solutions.

Sasha Eisenberg is a journalist and author of five books, including The Victory Lab, which pulled back the curtain on political innovation in electoral campaigns, and The Engagement, a massive 928-page tome on how gay marriage became legal. His latest book, The Lie Detectives, uncovers how Democratic operatives have tried to deal with the unending barrage of disinformation.

Nita Jankiewicz is a disinformation researcher and author, the former vice president of the UK-based Center for Information Resilience, and famously was the head of President Biden's short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, which quickly came under attack from Jim Jordan and others. To be fair, it was a terrible name. She also recently wrote a joint review of Attacks from Within and The Lie Detectives for The Washington Post, and she's a perfect expert to round out this trio.

Our question today is from Nicole Perlroth, who covered cybersecurity for a decade at the New York Times before joining the advisory board at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Council on Foreign Relations Cyber Task Force. She's now a managing partner at Silver Buckshot Ventures, a VC fund that backs cyber startups. I'll talk with Barbara, Sasha, and Nina after the break. ♪

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So welcome, Barbara, Nina, and Sasha. Thanks for having me. Great to be with you, Cara. Yeah, thanks so much. So I've already talked to Barbara recently on Pivot, but I'm thrilled to have all three of you because this is a topic I like to talk about a lot. After 2016, if you asked most Democrats to play a word association game and said disinformation, they probably would have answered Russia. But

all three of you are more focused on domestic disinformation, even though foreign disinformation is still a major threat. Explain what changed in a sentence or two. Barbara, then Nina, then Sasha. Well, I think that some people learned from Russia's effectiveness in the 2016 campaign about how effective disinformation can be.

And so I think we are seeing it now more and more creeping into our politics, even in the language that we hear. Donald Trump referring to the January 6th attackers as hostages, for example, and then members of his party picking up on that. I feel like we've entered this period where tribe seems to matter more than truth. Go ahead, Dina. Yeah, I mean, I think...

Sasha?

Yeah. So, you know, the barriers to entry to be a political communicator have been significantly lowered by the Internet and all sorts of folks who wouldn't have had a way of reaching a large number of voters at one time now can. And that's not just foreign governments. That's individuals who may or may not be anonymous. That's people who are figuring out how to make money off of online.

off of misleading content. And it's created this environment where you have a very asymmetrical election dynamic where if you're running for office, your opposition isn't necessarily your opponent. It's not another party. It's not another candidate. It's somebody who's not operating under the same constraints or public accountability that we push on our political communicators.

I'd love to use the term propaganda because that's really what it is in a lot of ways, old time propaganda with new tools. But one of the things I was joking about the other day, you know, the Washington Post says democracy dies in darkness. I think it now dies in the full light of day. Like it's not even hidden in some ways. So let's set the table. Tech platforms have democratized disinformation, like you said, and anyone can spread it for free at scale and it's impossible to track, although they don't really work.

Their tracks are right there. AI can supercharge it. Trump spreads it daily and he has a formula, which is old school. I just talked to a bunch of people about historical ways that had been done in the past. And the GOP shuts down attempts to address issue by crying censorship. So as we head into November, I'd love to know your worst fears around disinformation and the election.

Let's start with you, Nina, and then Sasha and Barbara. Yeah, I think, you know, Cara, my worst fears are kind of already being realized in the fact that the GOP has so successfully redefined censorship as any sort of study of disinformation or our information environment and any sort of cooperation between researchers, tech platforms, and the government, which...

in 2018 and 2020 very successfully highlighted some of the really harmful attacks on our information environment that were going on then. So, of course, my personal experience with the GOP recently over the past two years has not been pretty. My family is still subject to threats because I deigned to take a job in the Biden administration trying to address this stuff. And I'm not the only researcher that this has happened to. And we have this litigation, you know, just completely furtherless litigation against the government, against researchers.

who are trying to shine a light on this stuff. So that has frozen cooperation, and we are heading into a really crowded information environment, which you've just described beautifully, with a lot of threats, and people are struggling to work on them. That's my worst fear. No, that will be a case in front of the Supreme Court. It has been, and it looks like they're going to lose, but they made the attempt. It's the slowing down, Sasha. Well, that's not the only... It's not the only...

case that's out there. I get that. Yeah. Although I've been noticing a lot more academics talking out. They're sick of it. They don't care anymore, essentially. Sasha? The thing I'd be most worried about right now is the effect on down-ballot races. I think the ability of any...

piece of disinformation or you know given conspiracy theory or narrative to to disrupt the presidential election or a high-profile statewide election is you know, I think it's good that people are vigilant, but I think we might we might overstate that there's so few opinions that are in in play and and

A lot of the campaigns and party apparatus are in a way that they were not in 2020 or 2018, I think, sort of prepared to deal with this tactically. Where you don't see any of that is when you get down to a county executive race or state legislative race, city council race. These are campaigns that sometimes don't have a full-time digital campaign.

Right.

algorithms to detect and respond to it with the speed that it demands. And that's where I think if something happens, something bad happens this year, it's probably going to be with a candidate we're not talking about right now. Yeah, I think you're probably right. You know, I don't know if you know this, but the New York earthquake was due to DEI, according to one of these media papers.

Anyway, Barbara? I'm most concerned about voter suppression. I think that one thing that we may be seeing, as we've seen in the past, is an effort to find groups that are demographically likely to vote for particular candidates who are targeted with false information to keep them away from the polls.

So, you know, for example, we know that Robert Mueller discovered in 2016 that there were all these fake social media accounts, including just, for example, one with a name Blacktivist, who cultivated a lot of followers posing as a black political activist and then said, as the election approached, we should all vote.

send a message to Hillary Clinton and let her know we should not be taken for granted by staying home from the polls. And so, you know, we'll never know what extent that affected voter turnout. But if even a little bit in a swing state that had a close margin of victory, that could matter. We also saw in New Hampshire during the primary fake robocalls, AI-generated voice that sounded like Joe Biden or

urging voters to stay home from the polls. Don't waste your vote. Save it for November. And of course, it was somewhat inconsequential in a primary that was uncontested. But, you know, imagine if voters got a message like that. You're polling places out because of a power outage and the election's going to be Wednesday instead or they've moved it to next week or whatever it is. All of that information could be harmful. Well, A.I.

play a significant role in the disinformation wars this election via deep fakes and otherwise because I see even more not necessarily robocalls because who knows what they do is but fake stories that could happen not just deep fakes like one of the candidates is dead on election day or that morning or something like anything like that that's somewhat believable so talk

Talk about the role of AI then. Sasha, you start because it just, to me, it's the same stuff but supercharged, obviously, and done in more creative and quick ways. Certainly, it is making the production of deepfakes. Audio is probably the biggest or most urgent problem this year because I don't think people have the normal tools and clues to find deepfakes.

imperfections the way that they do in video or still photos. But all that said, I worry about focusing too much on new technological innovations and losing sight of the underlying issues, which is that we have a public that is receptive to a lot of disinformation. We have a

voters, citizens discern what was true from what is false. And if you look at, you know, what I would think in the United States are probably the most damaging episodes of disinformation, things that are not not just one individual deep fake, for example, but things that turn into sort of totalizing conspiracy theories that dramatically shaped our politics.

You know, I think about QAnon, coronavirus-related stuff, and the 2020 election, and none of those had their roots in any sort of high-tech deception. I mean, QAnon was the most primitive...

Technologically, it was like ASCII text on a bulletin board. And, you know, it's not like anybody created vaccine skepticism because they generated, you know, deepfake randomized control trials from Pfizer. You know, all of these are instances where people told stories.

that play to existing concerns and anxieties of a significant portion of the electorate. And if we spend too much time, I think, worried about the tools that people use to produce an individual deception, we lose sight of the demand that's out there from our fellow citizens for it and their receptiveness to it.

Well, talk about that, Barbara, demand. And is AI, does AI make a difference? I do think it does supercharge it in a way that we hadn't seen or targeted. And, you know, the reason Facebook's ad businesses are roaring back is because of AI. It got blocked by traditional things around Apple, and then it's roaring back. Barbara? Yeah, you know, I saw a report that Microsoft has warned that, you know, as recently as the past couple of days, that China is using AI effectively.

to interfere in upcoming elections, not only in the United States, but in India and South Korea. And that content, and it's, you know, I think it's hard for people to even imagine what that might look like. But I think it could be anything like from the robocalls that we talked about, just keeping people away from the polls. I think even if people are disinformed about how to vote, that could make a difference, you know,

Voting rules have changed in recent years. In some states, it's become harder to vote. In other states, it's become easier to vote. But the voting rules have changed. And so what we often have, I've done some voter protection work, is there are many people who vote only in presidential elections. And so they show up in the same place they voted four years ago, only to find out that's not where you're voting this time because of redistricting or something else. Sure.

And so if you pump out information sending people to the wrong place or that you have to register by X date or that, you know, you can only vote in person or you can't vote here or you need this kind of ID, just enough to create confusion, I think, is something that could be done. So,

You could imagine some AI-generated thing that just looks like you're an election official from someone's state and you're pumping out information. Which they've done previously with flyers or something like that. Yeah, so I think it's just a new tool. But as you say, same old tricks. And especially just creating confusion around the process for voting, I think, could have a harmful effect on the upcoming election.

I think we've a little bit undersold text-based AI, text-based generative AI. So when we look at the Russian operations or Chinese operations that we've seen in the past, one of the ways that we identified them was through the idiosyncratic linguistic issues that they messed up. So they would

use an idiom incorrectly or misplace an article or not use one, right? Now you can generate that at scale in pitch perfect English with idioms, with emojis, and target it to your most vulnerable audiences. And I want to kind of foot stomp something that Sasha said before, which is that the

the most successful disinformation isn't stuff that's just cut and dry fakes. It is targeted at real vulnerabilities, real kind of grievances in society. And that's what AI is able to iterate. I'm less worried about kind of the audio and video stuff and more worried about the fact that

these text-based models, and I'm not even talking about ChatGPT or the open models that, you know, we all know. I'm talking about the ones that the Russian government and the Chinese government are creating based on, you know, the open source material that the internet provides. Which they can get. That's there, yeah, of course. They can also buy it. Exactly. Yeah, I think it's... Go ahead. Yeah, and also say that the ability of AI to just create volume quickly, you know,

can add to a flood of deceptions where it doesn't matter if any individual deception is in and of itself persuasive, but where you could create almost a whole world of interlocking accounts or storylines that all sort of either reaffirm one another or point in so many different directions that voters are just left unable to process what the underlying truth is, right? And I think that's a big...

I think, a meaningful upgrade in the capacity to use the internet for deception. To me, it's like a Xerox machine or something like that. So, Barbara, in your book, Attack from Within, you write that the current brand of disinformation in the United States is dramatically different from prior forms. And you're right, even though past presidents used disinformation to start wars, Trump is different. Talk about the unique threat he poses, besides shamelessness, which is his greatest quality, I think. Yeah, I think...

He doesn't care that he is not telling the truth. He doesn't care that he's being exposed as a liar. And as he has said, he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any voters. And that is because he has built this idea of tribe over truth, that he has used a debater's trick

of the either-or fallacy, which is there are only two choices of anything in this world. And then I am going to portray the other side as so awful, so I'm going to demonize them. I'm going to talk about how they are animals and vermin, how they are radical leftists. I'm going to make them look so undesirable that you will feel like you may not love me, but you have no choice other than

to choose me because the other side is so untenable. That is an old tactic in a way, but the way Trump has sort of revolutionized it, I guess, is this idea that truth doesn't matter, that people are choosing their tribe, their party over truth.

And, you know, you look at what Liz Cheney has gone through. This is not about conservative versus progressive politics. It really is about choosing this political tribe over, you know, it's the ends justifying the means. So what is revolutionary about what he's done, though, from your perspective? I think this idea of...

being in a post-truth world, a post-shame world, where we're caught in a lie and we don't care anymore. I think there was a time when people cared about integrity and cared about truth. And if somebody was caught in a lie, they shuffled away in shame. I mean, remember Gary Hart challenged reporters to find him in an extramarital affair, and then they did, and he had to slink away in shame. And I think that Donald Trump has...

tried to reach out to voters and persuade them that truth just doesn't matter. Truth is for suckers. And that you should choose the candidate who best represents your interests, your values, who will get you the most money, the most prosperity, and all the other stuff doesn't matter because...

You know, truth is for the naive and the suckers. And I think that's the part that is so disturbing. And the fact that people believe it. Nina, for a brief moment in time, you're executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board, which is simply the worst name I've ever heard. Not mine. A little bit of marketing could go a long way there. Yep.

you might've called it ministry of information. Um, but there's a lot of disinformation about your board and your role in it. Explain what it was supposed to do, what your role was and, and what happened to the cliff notes version. Yeah. So the disinformation governance board was an internal coordination body. Uh,

You can tell that some bureaucrats named it because they thought no one would think the name was bad. It was supposed to govern DHS's internal policies about disinformation and how it was going to deal with it. And really, if you look at the governing documents, which are available online, although no one ever reads them, it says that

The primary purpose of the board was to make sure that DHS wasn't trampling on civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, et cetera, and bring best practices to the department. Because the department did a really poor job rolling it out and was extremely untransparent about it, of course, the right and some on the very far left had a field day with it and called it exactly what you said, not even Ministry of Information, Ministry of Truth. I was the truth czar. I was on the front page of the New York Post.

You know, talked about, lied about on Fox over 400 times. I'm now suing them for defamation because the threats against me and my family continue to this day because people think I've committed treason. And I think the most disappointing thing for me was that the Biden administration just didn't stick up for it. They didn't stick up for it. They didn't stick up for me. They just rolled over. And as a result, I think part of the attacks that we're seeing today was because the Republican Party got that proof of concept back.

with the board. I was 36 weeks pregnant at the time that this was all happening. And so I said, sayonara, I'm going to go have my baby and hopefully live in peace. Of course, the attacks continued. But

But the Biden administration could have stuck up for this and said, we're going to dig in our heels. You're lying about what we're doing. Strategic silence doesn't work in this environment, which is, I think, what's novel about what Trump and the party are doing, right? Yeah, yeah. No, no. Strategic mouthery is really weird. Let me ask you, when did you not anticipate that? First of all, what would you have called it? I'm just curious if you had. We debated this internally. Anyone else can jump in. Yeah, I don't know that there is a good name for something like this. You know, advisory board?

perhaps, not governance board, certainly. I did anticipate this. In fact, my first week on the job, I said to my bosses, two of whom worked directly for the secretary, that efforts like this in Europe that didn't roll out with full transparency had gotten maligned, and we didn't want to go that direction. I wanted us to succeed, right? I thought this was an important coordination body that would increase our national security, make us safer. They said, sure. I wrote

up multiple comms plans for them and was kind of shooed away by the secretary's comms advisors who thought that they knew the information space better than the internet expert they brought on to run this thing. Yeah, bitter, not at all. But Department of Catching Lies would be what I would call it. But, well, that really wasn't the job. If you had gotten to do your job, what would you have done ideally leading up to this election? Yeah, I mean, the big thing that I saw in my 11 weeks at the department was that our

our civil servants needed to be better educated about these threats, right? These are not necessarily, they're really, really dedicated, smart people, but they're not experts about, you know, how to communicate what they're doing, whether they're at, you know, FEMA, Customs and Border Protection, or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. We needed kind of a unified policy for all those things, and all of those are in DHS, right? So it's the Secret Service and the Coast Guard.

about how to deal with these threats and also look at things like information literacy, right? The answer to disinformation, in my opinion, and in all of my work, if Fox News had cared to read it, is not about taking information offline or playing whack-a-troll. It is

about teaching people how to navigate today's information environment better. So media literacy. Yeah, I like to call it information literacy because I think it's a little broader than just the media. And sometimes people react poorly when you say, oh, you're going to tell me what to read and what not to read. No, I'm going to tell you, maybe if you're seeing something over and over on your Instagram feed, there's a reason that you're seeing it because you're being algorithmically targeted to, right? And what behavior has caused that? Who's behind that targeting? And that's what I think people need. And, you know, for DHS, when we're talking about...

the security of the homeland, as they like to call it, just communicating a little bit better, telling a better story than the people who are telling the salacious, you know, wild rumors. Clearly, DHS couldn't do that even in its own defense, so I'm not sure it would have gone overall. I'm just curious what you thought would happen there. Um...

I am not surprised. I mean, the extent to which the debate over whether disinformation is a meaningful concept has become as polarized as everything else in our politics. And I think that there's been...

you know, since the 2020 election, the first policy pronouncement that Donald Trump put out when he announced his candidacy for president in 2022 was about this topic. This has become like a core political commitment of Republicans. It's one of the few things that unites sort of traditional establishment Republicans and MAGA Republicans is suspicion of any efforts to even talk about disinformation as a category. And so I...

Maybe I thought that Nina could have lasted longer in that job. I guess a Jankowicz... You try it when you're 36 weeks pregnant and walking in heels, getting rape and death threats left and right. I understand why a Jankowicz is worth equal to seven Scaramucci's. That is what they said about me. But, you know, no, I think it's incredibly difficult for anybody anywhere in our politics or government to...

to approach this in any way. And I'm not sure any rebranding would, it might take a little bit of the heat off, but fundamentally, I think you have a half of our political system that disputes the premise. Barbara, you'd agree with this? It's absolutely the case that I think the, the,

the far right has taken the word censorship and used it as a weapon. Anything that seeks to in any way learn more about the problem of disinformation and protect us from it is branded as censorship. But I think that you've got to still have the courage to go forward with this. You know, I did a lot of work in national security when I was a prosecutor, countering violent extremism and other kinds of things.

And there was a lot of pushback against those things. But I think at some point the administration has to say, this is what we're going to do and not be so fearful. I think that everybody's just so scared of Donald Trump and his ilk that they don't have the courage to stand up and say, you know, this is wrong. We need to protect this. This is information warfare. We're being attacked from outside our country. And maybe the way to focus on it is this is an international threat to our sovereignty. And, you know, that

In the same way we defend our country with our military, this is a way to defend us from information warfare. And we need to do this to protect our country in the way that warfare is fought in the 21st century. We'll be back in a minute. I asked an expert to send me a question, and today our question comes from Nicole Perleroth. Hi, Cara. This is Nicole Perleroth, author of This Is How They Told Me the World Ends, a longtime cybersecurity journalist.

My question for your panelists today is the following. One, do you feel our system for tracking misinformation and disinformation has been neutered to the point that we'll even know if or when the upcoming election has been interfered with? And secondly, is there a way to track these threats in such a way that we can effectively protect the trackers themselves from the kinds of spurious political challenges that

and coordinated online campaigns that we've seen silence them over the past two years. Thanks so much. Sasha, why don't you take this one? Well, to the first part of Nicole's question, I think we have a lot less visibility into what's going on online now than we did, let's say, between 2016 and 2020. And I think some of that is that platforms, there's less that's sort of transparently available on platforms to researchers, and that's both academic researchers and

folks within the campaigns that I'm writing about who are trying to help campaigns make strategic and tactical decisions about this. And then the other part of it is that, you know, I think a lot of our conversation defaults to talking about social media platforms. But I think we need to think about messaging apps, which, you know, I think WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, that have become these like hybrid sort of, you know, group text through

Threads and and you know broadcast platforms and you could go especially among immigrant communities in the United States They they're often a primary source of political information and they are encrypted end-to-end by definition inaccessible to To outsiders and so, you know I write in my book I like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee now when they send a field organizer out to you know, especially to Asian

areas of Orange County or Spanish-speaking areas of southern Florida, the first thing they do before they open a field office is to ask to get invited to all the local WhatsApp groups because that's the way that you find out what the information flow is to the voters there. And there is no way for anybody to know what's going on in those closed groups unless they're part of them. Right. Let me ask the second question, Nina, how you can protect the trackers because you didn't get protected, as you were noting. Right.

Yeah. And push, pull them away from silence. Yeah. Well, first, let me just also say that I think we got to lay some culpability at the social media platforms for turning off these spigots of information. Right. And they've done so under pressure from politicians, from from other people among them, like Elon Musk. Right. And and as a result, we have complete opacity into that information environment, except through paid tools, which is really screwing with things ahead of the election. In terms of protecting the trackers, this is a very important issue.

This is something I've thought a lot about, obviously, over the last two years. I think for some folks, there has been like a First Amendment community that stood up for them. It's not come for everybody. A lot of academics, a lot of researchers at think tanks are not well equipped to do the sort of communications campaign that we need to push back against these narratives. There are so many people who I think would be outraged at this existential threat to freedom of expression and academic integrity that's going on right now, which I think is the biggest since the McCarthy era.

that they have no idea it's going on, right? So we need to put that out clearly. And I can't say much right now, but I am going to be working on that ahead of the election because I now, my legal threats have dissipated somewhat. I'm sure they're going to come back soon. But I'm tired of taking this lying down. And I think we all need to stand up as a community and really stand up for our rights to free expression. It's not the other side that are getting censored. It's the folks who are shining a light on the information environment. I always say the people who scream censorship are always the ones who never shut up.

Exactly. Barbara, let's imagine Congress are capable of passing tech regulation. You want them to disclose how they use algorithms, but algorithms are their business, is what their argument is. Can you force them to reveal their secret sauces without infringing on IP rights? You're the lawyer here. What's the solution? Because they say that's their, you know, that's their whatever secret. I think if it's harmful to the public, then yes. I think you could even ban certain algorithms, you know.

I think there are a lot of ways to regulate social media without focusing on their content, which is where the First Amendment starts to become implicated. And so, you know, these algorithms that Facebook has used that pushes content designed to generate outrage, you know, certainly that is something I think that we could ban, purposely designed to generate outrage just to keep us on the platforms longer so they can sell their advertising rates at a higher rate.

the idea that they've got bots online. I think we could require the elimination of bots, which are, you know, designed, trained trolls to argue with us if they see the word MAGA, you know, tell us, no, you're not, I'm not, you are, I know you are, but what am I? You know,

So just designed to do that and to amplify some of this false content so that messages look far more popular than they really are. I think that's something we can do. And then the other thing I would really like to see is the way they are scraping our personal data and selling it to advertisers and to political consultants.

That's what enables them to micro-target us, you know, to get to the groups that Sasha's talking about where there isn't even visibility into the messages that are going into certain groups because the rest of us don't even see it because it is so micro-targeted. So I think... There's a legislation in the Hill right now that has elements of that by Senator Cantwell and others. Yeah, so I think if we did those three things, I think we could go a long way toward mitigating some of the problems we're seeing with disinformation. Of course, it's a moving target. There'll be more, but I think we need to keep chasing it.

One of the things I love in Barb's book, a novel solution that I've never heard anybody else propose before, is having tokens, essentially, that people can trade in for access to paywalled websites. I think that's a way to solve kind of the public media access to information issue that is really novel. It

It allows editorial integrity to persist but gets people access to more good, hopefully good information. I love that. We'll get to more solutions at the end. But, Sasha, you said the tech companies only cared about content moderation when they were trying to fend off regulation, which, of course, they were doing. And now they're worried about being attacked, you know, in a Big Brother-like censorship regime, paint them as that.

When did that flip happen? And I think they've always been worried about free talk about free speech in my experience, but they seem to abandon content moderation in all forms as much as they can avoid it because it's such a pain to do. Yeah. Talk about this. No, I think they have business reasons. I think they have sort of ideological reasons. It's expensive. It doesn't win you a lot of fans in the particular, but there was a period, I think, in 2018 and 19 where Facebook started

in the aftermath of the sort of Cambridge Analytica scandal, wanted to make a big show about sort of good citizenship, about political communication on their platform, and not just in the U.S., globally. And that dissipated, uh...

post-2020. I think that what we've seen is that the shift that we were talking about, that Nina was a victim of, the sort of view of this as by itself something that advances Democratic interests at the expense of conservative voices, has happened in the last few years. I think often this leads to a sort of declension narrative, the assumption that the platforms will only get more and more hands off on doing content moderation work. I would sort of be alert to the possibility that

This can be cyclical and push back in the other direction. I actually don't think it would take all that much. I mean, I think we sort of have the environment we're going to have through through November of this year, certainly. But I don't think it would take all that much in a change in power and in one or both of the houses in Congress, in some events geopolitically or in the U.S. that make change.

in the same way that after 2008 and the Arab Spring, social platforms wanted to be seen as places where civic participation happened. I think we can imagine a charismatic candidacy of some kind or a change in their business models that make them more interested in getting political advertising, which many of the social platforms have been happy to shrug off. But if they might start to see it as a meaningful cost of winning back political advertising, which is going to be, you know, over $10 billion of money

potential revenue this year and see that as something that goads them into at least returning to a posture of not being actively disdainful of this. Yeah, I call it tainted meats. Maybe this meat is tainted. Maybe this one isn't. I don't know. Just good luck with it. But Nina, you talked about the flood of disinformation and your piece in Foreign Affairs. YouTube no longer takes down claims that the 2020 election was stolen. They've just gotten exhausted, I think. And the federal agency's

Can't cooperate right yet until the Supreme Court decision is in, and there's lots of lawsuits, but that one will matter a great deal once they declare that. There's going to always be a tension between the First Amendment, which I believe no tech executive has ever actually read, even though it's first and short, and our desire to protect our democracy from disinformation. What do you think the right balance between where the federal government should be, what do you think the Supreme Court's going to decide here?

Well, it seems to me that in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court is going to go the way of truth, right? This was a lawsuit that not only was, I think, riddled with inaccuracies as a diplomatic way to put it. It was just based on lies, in my opinion. I think there is a conversation to be had.

about what the appropriate limits are between government and tech cooperation. It just needs to be based in facts. And the first thing for those to get those facts, for me, is basic oversight and transparency legislation that's cropping up all over the world and the United States is lagging far, far behind on, right? If something's broken, if we have...

You know, airplanes falling out of the sky. We do investigations about what's going on with those companies. And right now, we don't even have that modicum of a basis of truth. All the information that we know is from whistleblowers or people who have been fired or from researchers like me, in some cases, who don't adhere to terms of service to gather the information.

the data that they're gathering, right? And it's a very small sliver of it. And I think we need to see the whole picture about how they're making content moderation decisions, how, you know, the algorithmic biases work, like Barb was talking about. We're not having that conversation. And not only is that affecting democracy in the United States, but it's affecting

But because most of these companies are based here in the U.S., it's affecting democracies around the world. I think that's a huge dereliction of duty. So, Barbara, speaking of that, you know, let's talk about some of those solutions. The Times recently had a piece on the use of defamation lawsuits to fight back against disinformation. Is defamation a good way to do this from your perspective? Defamation is an option, and it's actually been gratifying to see some of these defamation suits be successful. The Dominion

case against Fox News. We've seen Rudy Giuliani being held accountable by Shea Moss and Ruby Freeman, Donald Trump, of course, with E. Jean Carroll. But it's not an easy solution. You know, if you sue somebody for defamation, you put your whole life on display for the world. You have to sit through deputies

depositions where they're going to ask because you have to prove that your reputation has been harmed. And so that means your reputation is there as a blank slate for everyone. And so it's very difficult. It's intrusive. It's invasive. It's costly. And so it's not a great solution for many people. I think one of the other challenges with defamation is that a lot of times we don't know who the perpetrator is. You know, if Donald Trump says something on Fox News, you know who it is you want to sue. If it's just some, you know, Patriot Girl 62 online, you don't know who the

perpetrator is. And so it's difficult to hold that person accountable. I think that we are going to have a reckoning with how we think of social media platforms, because at the moment they kind of want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they say that, uh, under section two 30 of the telecommunications decency act of 1996, they say, we are not a publisher. We are simply putting out a platform there for publishers to come on and publish whatever it is they want. We're just providing, you know, the, the town square. Uh,

But when it comes to the cases against the Net Choice cases against Texas and Florida, they say we should be permitted to make our own editorial decisions. We have the same editorial discretion as The New York Times and all other publishers. Well, which is it? Are you a publisher or are you not a publisher? They're a publisher. And I think we need to...

Yeah, I think we kind of need to figure that out. And right now they enjoy this immunity. I don't know if we need to remove all immunity, but I think we could hold them accountable for certain things like... Editorial decisions.

I think that it's a little bit of a square peg in a round hole. We haven't quite figured out how to treat social media in the First Amendment landscape yet. But I think we'll get there. And I think that they may be their own animal where they get some protections in some spheres and not protection, especially when it comes to receiving payment for their content. If they're receiving payment, then maybe they should be responsible legally for what they post. Right. And Nina, how do you feel about your lawsuit? Well, right.

Right now, we're waiting for the judge in the federal court of Delaware to rule on Fox's motion to dismiss. And so we've been in stasis for a couple months. But I think, you know, we've stated a claim, and that's all you need to do to clear a motion to dismiss in a defamation suit. I think it is clear, based on Fox's track record, that actual malice is there. I don't think they would have kept coming back to, at the time, a 33-year-old pregnant woman over and over if it weren't profitable for them. And also,

They knew I was receiving death threats. They somehow got access to some of my Facebook posts at the time. Somebody leaked one of those, and they laughed about it. You know? I mean, I think that shows what they're up to. And I feel like when we're talking about, you know, Dominion or cases like Smartmatic...

U.S. law, defamation law, really preferences or privileges companies, but there aren't a lot of instances of individuals taking on a corporation of this size, and I think they need to be held accountable. Well, they've lost quite a bit. Sasha, let me ask you this. You explain how the Democratic Party in your book swore off disinformation after Reid Hoffman, who I just spoke with today, actually. He's a billionaire Democratic donor. He got bad press for funding some dirty tricks in the Senate race between Roy Moore and Doug Jones.

How do they look at it? Should we jump in the water with the Republicans or not? So you can find all sorts of Democratic political professionals who will say, why aren't we fighting with fire with fire? I guess you can mix your water and fire metaphors here. But none of them really are willing to say it out loud with their name attached. And it's partially because this would have been a very open discussion among Republicans.

folks on the American left, starting after 2016, about what was on the table to navigate this new information environment, basically got shut down when it came out in late 2018 that some of Hoffman's money had gone to these two projects in Alabama. And he drew a moral line. And at that point, I don't think there was anything approaching consensus on the sort of propriety of

disinformation factories for Democrats to use to win elections. But at that point, basically everybody on the American left was either getting money from Reid Hoffman or wanted to get money from Reid Hoffman. And when he said, I don't want to be, there's a lot of money and he's been, you know, he sort of made potentially the mistake of, of,

talking about in high-minded ways about Trump's anti-democratic tactics. And so there were very, I think, real accusations of hypocrisy that were mounted when his money went to that stuff. I think that I would be surprised if we get to November of this year and we do not see for the first time since 2017, as best I know, a significant effort funded by folks on the left to, you

To try to to play this game, too. I think that people recognize the stakes are pretty high this year. Yes. Based on just talking to. Yeah, I would say yes. And we should say that the that the line there's a line about disinformation. There are also other lines. I think Democrats sort of respect that, you know.

You hear debates among Democrats. Flat out lying. Yeah, flat out lying, but also things that could be seen as anti-democratic but would advance their interests. So like, what if you did targeted digital ads that showed Donald Trump saying, don't vote early, it's not trustworthy, your vote doesn't count, and put it in front of low propensity Republican voters who listen to him. There are a lot of Democrats who will talk about that, but very few who have been willing to go forward with it. And I suspect that

they'll sort of tear open a lot of tactics this year that they had put aside for a little while.

Okay, final questions for each of you. I'm going to start with you, Barbara. Your book has a lot of recommendations, some like getting rid of being anonymous online, which I find problematic. Others telling us to choose truth over tribe, which is hard to implement. Give me very quickly your single most actionable recommendation. I think regulation of social media to recognize

regulate algorithms, eliminate bots, provide disclosure of paid ads, the source of paid ads. I think if we could do those three things, we could go a long way toward reducing some of the disinformation we see online. And for Sasha, for you, you have aligned to the Biden's brain trust. What's the campaign's plans for fighting the flood of disinformation coming from Trump, his allies, and the GOP? To see it, as they say, as a supply-side problem and not a demand-side problem.

not to play whack-a-mole with whatever the bit of content or deepfake or whatever that's trending today.

but to do research to understand what the sort of underlying concerns or anxieties of the small share of voters who are actually persuadable in this election have about Biden, about Kamala Harris, about issues, and use their messaging to address that without responding to the disinformation in a way that could amplify it or draw attention to it. Right, right. Is it working, do you think? Generally, I think that they are thinking about this the right way.

And I think it's one reason you see a lot of there are a lot of folks on the left who spend a lot of time saying, why aren't they answering this or that today? And if they're not, it's probably because either they have decided that this or that is not as Rob Flaherty, who was the digital director and on the 2020 campaign in the White House, described it to me as wasn't market moving disinformation. The research suggested actually wasn't. There's a lot that goes on online that is Trump supporters creating disinformation.

Right. Ignore all their stupid...

Boob jokes of Elon Musk. That's what I say. Let's just move on. Nina, you get the last question. Let's imagine Biden wins in November. What's the single most important thing he should do to combat disinformation during his first hundred days? Hmm.

I feel like a lot of that ship has sailed, but I think we can take a page from some of our allies in Europe who have recognized this from the very tops of their governments as the strategic threat that it is. And given taskers to every agency about what they're going to do and how they're going to do it, making sure that there is somebody coordinating all of that within the NSC, I think that is going to move policy forward and have that person coordinate with Congress. And you might just have...

some real actionable policy moving in the United States. But even if Biden wins, I'm not sure we're going to see that just because of how polarized this topic has become, unfortunately. Well, on that happy note, I really appreciate it. Thank you, all three of you. Thank you, Sasha. Thank you, Nina. Thank you, Barbara. Thank you. Thank you, Cara. Great to be with you all.

Today's show was produced by Naeem Araza, Christian Castro Rossell, Kateri Yochum, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Mary Mathis, Andrea Lopez Cruzado, and Kate Gallagher. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics.

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