Podcast Državljan D

Sacha Altay is a post-doctoral fellow working on misinformation, trust, and social media in the Digital Democracy Lab at the University of Zurich. We sat down with him to discuss the perception of disinformation, the failed attempts of self- and co-regulatory frameworks that try to limit the its spread and the way we should be addressing this problem. Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D Welcome everybody. It’s the 25th of June 2024, but you’re listening to this podcast episode of Domen Savič / Citizen D podcast on the 15th of July same year. With us today is Sacha Altay, postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford within the Reuters Institute working on misinformation, trust and social media. So of course we’re going to talk about football. That’s a little opening joke. So welcome, Sasha. Thank you for being with us. 00:00:38 Sacha Altay Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m not with the Reuters Institute anymore, now I am at the University of Zurich. I was, you know, in Oxford last year. 00:00:45 Domen Savič / Citizen D OK, excellent, things change so fast. And speaking of you working in the field of psychology and disinformation and trust in social media and so forth. It seems that our world nowadays seems to run on disinformation in various areas. You have disinformation in politics and economy and environment and public health. There are numerous attempts in the EU, in the US, all around the world to sort of level out the playing field for the media consumer, you have regulatory attempts, self-regulatory protocols, increased efforts in education. My opening question to you would be how did we get here? Was it always like this or did something change in the recent past so that disinformation became so prevalent and so influential in so many areas of our lives? 00:01:49 Sacha Altay So, I’m going to answer this question first by talking about how people talk about it rather than whether there is more disinformation or misinformation today than before. Just how do people talk about it and whether people talk about it more today than before? And I think it’s pretty clear when you look at the scientific literature or the number of news articles published or Google searches, that people are more interested in myths and disinformation or conspiracy theories now than before. And by now, I mean broadly, after the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit in the UK. After these two major events, interest in misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theory really spiked both in the news headlines, in intellectuals’ circles, as well as in scientific research. And I think clearly the COVID-19 pandemic, where the director of the World Health Organization, said that, you know, there was an infodemic, like a lot of misinformation about COVID-19 etc. So, I think interest also piped during that time and more recently very recently with the release, or at least the democratization of the ChatGPT and worries about the power of generative AI. There have been new fears again about the impact that generative AI may have on elections. For instance, during the 2024 elections that are being held almost everywhere around the world. So, I think, yeah, clearly people are more worried about it. Recently at the World Economic Forum, for instance, missing misinformation was considered the number one risk in the next two years for democracies in front of climate change in front of war in front of any other risk. So clearly people, scientists and leaders are very worried about it, and I think it’s unprecedent. But of course, we don’t have very good data. About 100 years ago, we were also extremely worried about this stuff. I doubt it, but if it’s possible, we don’t have very good data on it. But let’s say at least that yeah, now we are very worried about it, more than in the past as we can document it. 00:04:13 Domen Savič / Citizen D Would you say that these threats or the perception of threats of this and misinformation are credible? So, is it really that big of a problem then, like the media and the politicians and everybody I guess is saying? 00:04:28 Sacha Altay Yeah, because I’ve talked about perceptions. Now let’s look at the evidence. Let’s say that before 2016 there was some work on it, but the work was quite limited compared to today, and I think that since 2016 there has been a lot of great empirical work to look at. The prevalence and impact of miss or disinformation, and most of this work, at least in Western democracies, like the US or Western, Europe has shown that mis- and disinformation is very, very small. It’s consumed by a very small number of people who have pre-existing attitudes that basically predispose them to consume and accept the messages in the mist and disinformation. So, in the US, for instance, we know that it’s mostly, I don’t know, for Trump supporters that are consuming mostly for-Trump misinformation, and you can say the same for the other. It’s the same the other way around, so that’s what we know because we know that the average news consumer doesn’t consume or even stumble upon much misinformation. So that’s that has been well established. And regarding the impact, it’s a bit trickier, but all the attempts we’ve done suggest that the effect is small and smaller than most other things like even just following the news like of course, when you follow the news, you get more informed about what happens in the world. But you also may develop some biased perceptions of the world because of course, the news doesn’t cover everything perfectly and they are not completely neutral etcetera. So let’s say that the impact of mis- and dis-information is very small compared to just media bias effects and of course a lot of people just don’t consume the news and just not very interested in the news or politics and so are just broadly, uninformed about many of these things, and this has a much stronger impact than misinformation could ever be. 00:06:24 Domen Savič / Citizen D So, it sounds like we don’t have a problem there. 00:06:30 Sacha Altay I mean the way I see it is that we have problems. For instance, I don’t know, we have people who deny that climate change is happening and that it’s human cause. And I think it’s a problem that people disagree with, that it’s a scientific fact that has been established people disagree with. It’s a problem. And these people will also say that they believe in misinformation, etc. And so, I think often people jump to the conclusion that “people who vote for populist leaders also believe in fake news”. It must be because of false news that they vote for populist leaders or like the same for Brexit, for Trump, etc. All these people, they say they believe in fosters. And so, I think we tend to attribute this bad stuff to false information, and I think false information is most often a symptom of other problems. For instance, we know that at the country level in countries with more corruption like I don’t know, countries in the Middle East compared to northern Europe, countries in the Middle East are more corrupted than countries in northern Europe like Denmark and belief in conspiracy theories is much higher in like the Middle East than in Denmark, for instance. And that’s because it makes sense to believe that elites are corrupt or competing against people in corrupt countries. So, there is some rationality to it. And we also know that people who distrust institutions for various reasons, some good, some of the, the less good, are more likely to believe in misinformation, conspiracy theories… literally because they are looking for information that goes against the establishments against institutions, and sometimes people are warranted to do so. But let’s say that in Western democracies, where elites are often right, it leads to bad, bad outcomes. 00:08:15 Domen Savič / Citizen D So, you would say that that this whole, let’s say one of the main reasons or important reasons for the prevalence of let’s say belief in disinformation is actually decrease in trust towards let’s say public institutions, governments, mass media outlets and so forth. 00:08:37 Sacha Altay I think it depends. I think, I don’t know, for instance, in times of war, I don’t know if you look at Russian propaganda, some of the best predictors of believing in Russian propaganda is identifying strongly as Russia. And I don’t know, believing in the Great Russia narrative, for instance, that you want a great Russia. So, you’re going to buy the Russian propaganda. But if you’re Ukrainian and have a Ukrainian identity, you’re not going to believe any of the of the Russian propaganda. So, in that case, it’s mostly about identity and I think most of the time identity plays a very important role. People believe stuff that aligns with identity, people and various identities. You can have political identity, national identities, many kinds of identities. But yeah, as you mentioned, I think at least for conspiracy theories, they are often constructed really in opposition to events that are covered in mainstream news. And they very rarely come up with their own stuff. Most often they just look at what’s happening in the news, and they say that’s false. It’s actually something else that’s happening. But what they mostly do is they wait for mainstream news to do something, and then they say, oh, it’s actually the opposite. And so, I think in that case, for conspiracy theories trust in institutions is, yeah, a very strong picture. But if you look at other stuff, like for instance naturopathy or alternative medicines, then it’s mostly distrust of health institutions, not political institutions for instance. But yeah, trust is key to understanding belief in misinformation. 00:10:11 Domen Savič / Citizen D Do you have any thoughts on the general distrust phenomenon? If you look at the way or if you look at all the areas that disinformation is rampant in, it’s basically you know, we don’t trust literally anything, right. We don’t trust the as we said, the governments, we don’t trust the media, we don’t trust the researchers in the field of yeah, environment and other issues. So why is this mistrust so prevalent? 00:10:46 Sacha Altay I don’t know. I think it’s complex. It depends on the context. I think one potential explanation is that it’s hard for us to evaluate how trustworthy many institutions are, even evaluating how competent some people are. For instance, when I tell people that they do behavioral sciences, a lot of people don’t even know that it exists. Basically, you can study human behavior in a scientific way because for them science is mostly about, I don’t know, biology, geology, physics. And so, I think now the division of cognitive labor, like how experts, people can be, is extremely high in today’s society. So, I think we have trouble understanding, you know, how experts. Some people are on vaccines, on GMOs, on nuclear energy or stuff like that, and that it really goes beyond our own experience and that basically with our own eyes. Or our own brain, our own experience, we cannot come up with conclusions to write about this and we need to trust other people. But then we need signs that we can trust them, and often we don’t see these people, they don’t talk to us. They are far away. They may be anonymous. They may have weird names. And so, we I think it’s hard to trust people that far away and so that may be one reason but honestly, its they are there are many different reasons. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the authorities in many countries did not communicate well about guidelines about scientific evidence, and so it forced the distrust. They also had some measures that were very restrictive and then not restrictive, and all that a lot of people didn’t like that, and it affects trust, so there are there are many ways to lose trust and one thing is that it’s easier to lose trust than to gain it. So that’s why also institutions etcetera need to be careful because they can very easily lose people’s trust. 00:12:45 Domen Savič / Citizen D So, what does that tell us about, let’s say the countering of disinformation pandemic or infodemic. So, are these attempts of, let’s say, regulation, co-regulation, fact checkers, everything that’s been going on since, let’s say, yeah, since the election of Trump… are these countermeasures sort of focusing on the right problem? Are they addressing the issue or are they mostly greenwashing? Greenwashing in the simplest of terms, saying “Ohh, you know, people are dumb because they believe disinformation, and now we just have to give them knowledge or science and everything will be OK.” 00:13:33 Sacha Altay I mean, I think these people mean well most of the time and in my opinion, I think many of these measures like fact checking labels etc… They mostly target the symptoms, and they can help a little bit. I mean I’d rather have sack checks than have no fact checks. I think it’s a good thing that they are fact checkers, it’s just that we need to not lose track of the bigger picture and remember that fact checks are effective at correcting misperceptions, but they are they are not effective at changing people’s minds about who to vote, how they feel about some politicians and so that that that’s a problem like you can fact check as many as Trump’s statement as you’d like, people are still gonna vote for Trump if they have some pre-existing values, attitudes and reasons to vote for Trump, and we need to understand why some people are attracted to populist leaders to, I don’t know, people who prone anti vaccine stuff. We need to understand the reasons why that’s the case and so that that way I’m just worried sometimes when leaders think that, yeah, if we address the disinformation problem, the deeper problem are going to go away, like populism is going to go away with fact checking. I mean, no other thing is really defending that. But I think we need to keep track of that there are some deeper factors that affect this, and we need to target them. Some of them may be, yeah, lack of trust or polarization, just how people feel about political opponents, etc. And then of course, there are some even deeper factors that I mentioned. Corruption, inequalities, poverties. There is stuff like that that do affect belief in misinformation. And of course, I’ve been advocating to target this because if we reduce inequality or if we reduce poverty, it will have all the benefits, then reducing misinformation. 00:15:27 Domen Savič / Citizen D But that’s hard, right? 00:15:30 Sacha Altay Yes, of course. But I think it’s something we need to be clear about is that there is no easy solution. There is no technological fix that will solve these problems. There is no magic solution or whatever, like it’s a tough problem because social political problems are often very complex and populism, anti-science attitudes et cetera are not going to go away with fact checking or media literacy. 00:15:54 Domen Savič / Citizen D But so. So, we’ve just had the EU election, right. And did you feel… I’m coming from Slovenia, you’re now based in Switzerland. Did you feel the debates, the discussions before the election sort of highlighted these issues that are that are that are underlying the disinformation pandemic? Did you have the feel of political representatives really knowing what’s going on in regard to as, as we said before, crisis, lack of trust in in several different areas for them to sort of change the way we’re addressing this issue as we move yeah, into a new European Commission mandate? 00:16:42 Sacha Altay I’m not sure. I’m not sure, to be honest, I’ve not followed it very closely, but I’ve seen a lot of technological solutions being proposed. I mean, I’m not thinking about the elections right now, but stuff like adding labels on social media to say that it will hurt your mental health or holding tech companies accountable and it’s good to hold them accountable. But I think a lot of solutions are a bit too focused on technological fixes and not enough on the functioning of democracies, institutions and deeper factors, but often as politicians, it’s easier to blame Mark Zuckerberg or big tech and say that you’re going to go against big tech than to say that the problem is politicians lying or pushing lies or instrumentalizing some facts or political. 00:17:35 Sacha Altay I think it’s easier for them to blame big tech than themselves and the system, so no, I’m not sure there has been really a wake up call. 00:17:50 Domen Savič / Citizen D And what are your thoughts on on exactly this issue of this techno deterministic solutionism, that tech is is the problem, but at the same time, it’s also the the grand solution to to every problem that that we have what what is fueling this idea or this way of of proposing solutions in in in this area? 00:18:17 Sacha Altay I mean, I’m not totally sure I’m more and more interested in in this area and the more I read about it, the more I realize that we have always done that as humans to blame new technologies for so many problems, like we’ve blame writing for losing our memory. Like if we if we write, we don’t need our memory anymore with blame books for disconnecting us from reality, we blame every new technology for many reasons that now we would consider very silly. But at the time we took it, at least some people took it seriously and pushed it. But no, I’m fascinated by why we do so. In France, for instance, at the last year’s election, the extreme right party did well and a lot of commentators they’re saying that it’s because of TikTok. It’s these stupid kids basically on TikTok being influenced by a young leader and of course it’s a very simplistic explanation that contradicts most of what we know about the effects of mass communication and how people use new technologies and how people decide for who to vote. But for some reason these are very, very attractive and we tend to always blame the same people. It’s like young people who have this weird new information technology, tick tock or whatever and that may explain why they are different from us and do stuff that we don’t understand. So, I’m not sure why there is this focus on technology… there are many theories. Some say that yeah, it’s intentional. It’s like politicians, for instance, pushing these narratives so that we don’t blame them, but I think also these explanations tend to be quite intuitive, like a lot of people don’t really know what TikTok is. They think it’s just young people who dance. And if suddenly you have politics, then people may be influenced by it. Because in psychology there’s this well-established finding that we tend to overestimate how much people are influenced by bad media effects like advertisement, propaganda, etcetera? We tend to say no, I’m not so much influenced by it, but other people, and especially by political opponents, are extremely influenced by it. So, I think, yeah, we have this tendency to think that. So, these explanations are very, very intuitive and most people of course are not super interested in the truth. So, for them the job is done. You know, why did Trump get elected? Well, because they watch Fox News and they are a bit stupid, and they’re not very well educated and then they hope this is the end of the explanation. And so, the problem is Fox News and of course Fox News maybe a bit problematic, but removing Fox News will not remove populism. I think it’s also a bit of laziness to some extent. 00:20:55 Domen Savič / Citizen D Hmm. So, addressing this issue moving forward, then we can also talk about not just the co-regulatory practices or the regulatory practices, self-regulation, whatever, but also about media literacy, about training, about changing the way people interact with media outlets or with the social media and other informational faucets so. So how would how would you what needs to be done or what would you do to sort of change, change the tie the tide of this, yeah, of this stalemate where you always have, you know, fact checkers playing whack a mole with, with the disinformation spreaders. 00:21:44 Sacha Altay I’m not sure. It’s also why a lot of people don’t like my work is that I also don’t have solutions to to offer because the problem is very complex and I’m just advocating for realization that the problem is complex, then the solutions that a lot of people are offering that are very, very small set and are not going to save the world. But at least when it comes to media literacy, I think a lot of the media literacy programs, they assume that people are gullible and too trusting, whereas we know that a lot of people are either just completely uninterested in the news and avoid it altogether, or do not trust the news and start from basically cynicism instead of gullibility. And so, I think it would be perhaps more interesting to try to foster interest and trust in reliable information, not necessarily the news, but also some news influences, Wikipedia or high-quality sources of information in general, rather than to alert people about misinformation like they did during the COVID-19 instead of saying there is misinformation everywhere, be careful, say look there is reliable information and you can find it here and you can trust us for these reasons and we are being transparent and we are being accountable etc. So yeah, I’ve been advocating for that for this shift in focus. But again, I don’t think it’s going to necessarily have huge effects. It’s just a small, small change intervention that already has small effects. 00:23:21 Domen Savič / Citizen D So, is there a cause and effect of these underlying reasons that are that are then birthing the era of disinformation? Would you say, if you look back at, let’s say historical developments moving, past Trump, but by going further down the line? What caused this or what are some of the happenings that pushed us into the situation that we that we have today? 00:23:55 Sacha Altay I mean, I’m not sure, to be honest, I’m not exactly sure it’s often very complex and I’m not an expert in the rise of populism in the US or the rise of anti EU sentiment in in the UK. It’s some people are experts in this domain and I don’t think they have clear answers. So no, to be honest, I don’t know. It’s just complex. I just know that information and information practices often downstream of attitudes and values and political identities and stuff like that and so, they rarely play an important causal role. They are most often there to, like, rationalize people’s attitudes and behaviors. But no, I’m not sure why populist leaders are rising in the world, and why Trump got elected, and why the Brexit happened. It’s complex, I’m not sure. 00:24:53 Domen Savič / Citizen D Do you think it has something to do with role separation? So this is partially my theory, or this is something that I subscribe to, looking at this field from, let’s say the disinformation researcher, but also from someone who’s focusing on media literacy and is interacting with people on on this issue. Coming from Slovenia, let’s say from the Balkan region, Central Europe, whatever it is, it almost seems like that that on one side nobody wants to talk about political engagement or the role of a citizen, because this has some bad connotation moving backwards to Yugoslavia or the east versus West. But at the same time, everybody’s emphasizing this individual role of a consumer that you are in charge of everything. You vote with your wallet basically, and you’re the one who’s making things happen, right. And then at the same time, every time something, let’s say, bad happens, everybody’s escaping the responsibility or part of their part of responsibility of certain issues, be it surveillance, be it disinformation, be it anything or everything else that’s happening around us. 00:26:20 Sacha Altay I mean, I’m not sure, to be honest. Because you’re saying that there’s been a shift in seeing consumers, the information consumer…yeah, I’m not so sure. 0:26:40 Domen Savič / Citizen D It’s just, thinking about it, seeing how how people on one side they recognize that the problem, let’s say of disinformation or issues related to this information s very broad and very composed out of different outlets and at the same time they want, as you said, this techno deterministic solution. Just push of a button and and everything will go away, right? And then maybe if we if we move on to let’s say the relationship between politics, between party politics or governments and disinformation, would you say there is a link between those two? Or should we focus or should we talk about this information in connection with, let’s say, political agendas and other? Yeah, other yeah, with things related to politics. Or is this completely separated? Are these two issues completely apart? 00:27:50 Sacha Altay No, no, of course they are very much related in the case of disinformation. So like false or misleading information spread with the intent to cause harm. Very often it’s spread by government or like foreign governments, for instance, doing like information operations and so they are clearly political. Like, I don’t know, increasing polarization within the society, reducing support for some states, or increasing support for some other states. So there are some clear political actors behind disinformation campaigns, that that’s for sure. In the case of misinformation, not all misinformation is related to politics. But let’s say that scholars have focused more on political misinformation than other types of misinformation. For some reason, it’s not totally clear why some people think it’s more impactful, even though others have agreed. I have argued that health misinformation is also probably problematic, and that we should focus a bit more, but yeah, a lot of misinformation, at least misinformation that matters, and that people see and that has the potential to be impactful is spread by politicians because they do have a wide coverage, and sometimes they even do so in the media. When Trump was in power in the US and he clearly spread a lot of falsehood through mainstream media because he’s the president and the news have they have to cover him and sometimes he tells lies and that was a difficult situation, but of course, in general politicians instrumentalized facts or spread lies to gain supporters to political gains in general. So, and of course, not all politicians do that, but many people have agreed that when politicians do it, it’s more problematic than when a random user with 300 followers does it because of course the impact is not the same, and because politics can have an impact even if people don’t really believe it. For instance, if Republicans in the US say that they are against masks, then Republicans in the US can use a mask as an identity factor. They can say, oh, I’m not wearing masks so that I identify as a as a Republican and then it becomes this bookmarker, this party line and then people wear, not wear masks, just to identify like that. Even if they don’t really, even if they have nothing against masks. So that’s problematic. 00:30:30 Domen Savič / Citizen D And focusing on, you’ve mentioned it a few times, the role of mass media, right? So, on one hand you have the theory of media watch, public watchdogs of the fourth estate. On the other hand, you’ve just mentioned that you have them as megaphones that are amplifying, let’s say the dis- or misinformation conspiracy theories. How do you see the role of mass media in all of this? Are they friends or enemies of the people? 00:31:02 Sacha Altay I mean, first I’d like to say that the news media plays a very important role still, despite the rise in social media, despite the advent of like the Web 2.0 and everyone being able to be a content creator, etc. We know that when people consume news, they still are mostly turn to mainstream media so they still play a very important role and then the question is, are they friends or enemy? I think it depends on the context and the country. I’d say that in Western democracies where there is a strong public media ecosystem that’s free and has money to do good work in the UK with the BBC, for instance. Then I think they have a good media ecosystem and that the news is mostly friend, even though for instance in the UK there are also a lot of tabloids that probably don’t help people being informed that much if not create a bit biased perception. But overall on average, let’s say that in countries like the UK, the news is a friend in the sense that on average they help people being more informed about what’s happening in the world and perhaps make more informed decisions and be better citizens. But then in other countries, I don’t know, like of course, obviously like China for instance. Many news outlets are controlled more or less by the state and are not totally free to do what they want or like in Russia, or to some extent in in India. In these countries it’s not totally clear whether the news is a friend or an enemy. Because if you’re if your friend of the government and the government is a is a dictator dictatorship, then of course you’re not serving the people, but you’re just serving the the the regime. And in countries like the US, for instance, where they don’t have a strong public service media on average, let’s say it’s all right following the news in the US is better than totally not following it, but it’s also less good than than I think in other countries like like the UK or France. So it depends. And of course there are some good news outlets. There are some bad ones and and and of course they it’s hard for user outlet to give a completely perfect representation of reality and cover topics fairly and satisfy all audiences. And so I think they have, they have a lot of work to do and then they should do it better, but I think a lot of them are trying. Trust in the news has been declining at least a little bit in the in the last 10 years, but more the the largest drop has been in interest in the news, where people just are less and less interested everywhere in in the news and participation with the news. So just like talking about the news sharing news online etc. I have done some work on it and it’s declining in many countries, so people are just turning away from the news, but hopefully we can create a new form of news that attracts people and that interest people. And I think there are a lot of benefits or at least potential gains in like news influencer like on TikTok. In France, for instance, we have Hugo decrypt, the news influencers that do a very good job at summarizing what’s going on. And they also have deeper explainers and I think it better fits how new, how young people consume news and information in general online, so the news also needs to adapt to its audience and be better to gain trust. 00:34:33 Domen Savič / Citizen D Just to follow up… What do you think are some of the reasons the people stop engaging with with mass media or with, with, with news outlets? Is there something like you can or we can point a figure at and say, OK, it’s this, it’s this or it’s just yeah, a complex situation that you can’t really describe? 00:34:55 Sacha Altay There’s a lot of work on that and there are some clear reasons that come up all the time. One of them is that the news is too negative and it brings down people’s mood. It happened, for instance, in COVID-19. A lot of people consume more news, but at the same time, the news was mostly negative. And so, lots of people turned away from the news because it was too negative. And in general, that’s something people who start avoiding the news or who avoid the news mentioned. That’s one of the main things. A lot of people also feel just overwhelmed by the amount of news that there is and they think there is too much they cannot follow everything. That’s also the reason… I forgot the other reasons I think they are slightly less important. I think negativity in the news is one, but at the same time, we know that negative news is also more interesting. So you know, it’s also there are some positive news outlets, but the positive news outlets are not very successful. And I think it shows that people are actually not very interested in positive news. They they say they want it, but I mean a lot of people say they want stuff, but then when you give it to them, they they don’t like it. And of course, we are interested in the trains that are late and not the trains that are on time so it’s difficult. There’s no easy solution I think to remedy this problem. But I do think that maybe the news sometimes covers negative events too much and doesn’t give the broad picture enough, like even about stuff like poverty, hunger around the world. Most people think that, yeah, poverty is increasing, that hunger is increasing and that’s totally false, like extreme poverty has been reducing a lot in in the last 50 years. Same for hunger and many of the of the world’s problems are actually getting better. Many people don’t know that, and I think maybe the news just needs to also give the big picture a little bit more. But again, I don’t know, it’s complex. 00:37:00 Domen Savič / Citizen D And wrapping up. Are there some, let’s say low hanging fruits in this fight against disinformation about media perception, about reality perception that that you are, let’s say, paying attention to when you’re looking at it? Are there some things that should be happening or will happen that will make you say OK we did something right or this is something that that was worth pursuing or that is worth pursuing if we want to wake up one day in, to put it very stereotypically, in a brave new world – in a positive way? 00:37:49 Sacha Altay I’m not sure, but to be honest, some example I see are like really Hugo decrypt in France, this French influencer I think is doing a lot of good to interest people in the news that are usually not interested, and I see a lot of value in that, probably more than fact checking. I’d say that just the work of Hugo decrypt reduces misperceptions in French more than all fact checking in France just because a lot of people who would not have consumed news now consume news because of him and are aware of a lot of stuff and get some context on events, etcetera. And so, I think this is going in the right direction and it makes me optimistic. I also very much trust the European Union to do some work to hold big tech accountable. Of course, I don’t think big Tech is the cause of all our problem, but I do think that we need to hold them accountable. And they are so powerful that at the country level in Europe, we cannot do much against them. But united with Europe, I think we can increase, for instance, the sharing the data or there are a lot of stuff that we can push these big companies to do, that would help us better understand the ecosystem. Because one thing I haven’t said is that we don’t know much about the descriptively about the disinformation ecosystem in general in most countries, we know a lot about the US and some Western democracies, but because we don’t have good access to data, we don’t know much and a lot of people are jumping to conclusions proposing solutions, et cetera, but might take has mostly been guys we don’t know much yet and in most countries that matters and even countries like India, we don’t know much about the new ecosystem. We don’t know much about what’s going on with the WhatsApp group and in these countries and now we are proposing solutions based on, I think, a biased understanding of information, ecosystems and so, I believe the European Union could help us have a better overview of information ecosystems, but I think, yeah, that’s mostly what makes me hopeful. But when I’ve seen discourse and news coverage during the European elections, I’ve not seen much misinformation. I’ve not seen much AI generated misinformation. So, I think it’s pretty good news and it was the same in many other countries, even like India or many countries like there. There was of course some false information as usual but there was no massive information operation that worked and influenced people. So, it also makes me pretty hopeful that, at least for now, I think things are going fine. Of course, we need to make it better, but it’s not like here. 00:40:45 Domen Savič / Citizen D Excellent. We’ll end up on a on a positive note. Thank you Sasha for dropping by, for sharing your thoughts on the issue. We are off the next month, so see you all again in September. And yes, thank you again Sasha for for dropping by. 00:41:02 Sacha Altay Thank you very much for having me. Citizen D advice: Instead of information on disinformation, breed trust in the legacy media Focus on social issues that are the basis for effective disinformation Reform the media industry to adapt to new way of communicating the news More information: Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation – article Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges – article News Can Help! The Impact of News Media and Digital Platforms on Awareness of and Belief in Misinformation – article Not Born Yesterday – book About the podcast: Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

We sat down with Nina Jankowicz, an American researcher and writer, currently working as the Vice President at the UK-based Centre for Information Resilience, to talk about fight against disinformation and online harassment, the role of different actors in this area and the differences between EU and USA in this field. Nina is the author of How to Lose the Information War, on Russian use of disinformation as geopolitical strategy, and How to Be a Woman Online, a handbook for fighting against online harassment of women. She briefly served as executive director of the newly created United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s Disinformation Governance Board, resigning from the position amid the dissolution of the board by DHS in May 2022. Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D OK, welcome everybody. It’s the 12th of April 2024, but you’re listening to this episode of Citizen D Podcast on the 15th of May 2024. With us today is Nina Jankowicz, an American researcher and writer currently working as the vice president at the UK Based Center for Information Resilience. She’s the author of how to lose an information war on Russian use of this information as geopolitical strategy and how to be a woman online, a handbook for fighting against online harassment of women. She briefly served as an executive director for the newly created United States Department of Homeland Security disinformation Governance board resigning from the position amid the dissolution of the board in May 2020. Welcome, Nina. First of all, thank you for joining us. It’s really a pleasure. 00:00:56 Nina Jankowicz Thanks for having me on Citizen D, yeah, I’m excited to be here. 00:01:00 Domen Savič / Citizen D Excellent. First let’s start at the beginning, right. This information government board, your brief tenure, the critique which you wrote for Foreign Policy where you highlighted the issue of political say squabbles that are limiting the fight against this information. Uh, it seems that no matter where you go in the US, in the UK, it’s always the same, right? Every time somebody tries to do something in terms of regulating the disinformation, fake news, propaganda and other issues, the backlash, it’s always, you know, they’re going to take our freedoms, we have to defend democracy, free speech and everything else. Would you say that this is something that just needs to be taken into the account or is there a correct approach to these types of regulatory bodies where people actually feel that the body will have an actual benefit on the entire of society, not just the political parties or sides or whatever. 00:02:08 Nina Jankowicz Sure. So let me start with kind of a little description of what the board actually was and what people say it was. For the listeners that may not be familiar, so prior to joining DHS, I’ll say a little bit about myself too. I had been an expert on disinformation and analyst, focusing particularly on Russia and Eastern Europe, but increasingly especially during the pandemic in the lead up to the January 6th insurrection, looking at some of the domestic disinformation that we had seen so that’s my background. I had testified before Congress for both Republicans and Democrats. I had worked with members of Congress across the aisle as I was a fellow at the Wilson Center and I had done a lot of work kind of supporting policymakers all around the world and trying to put forward solutions to disinformation that upheld democracy right that made sure that our democratic freedoms were protected. I came to the job optimistic because I didn’t really expect to get a political appointment from the Biden administration, and so when they came and said, you know, will you serve your country? I said, of course, this is in my area of expertise. It seems like there’s actually room to do something here, so let’s get something done. And I’m bringing with me everything I’ve learned in my research, including a lot of policy analysis of the things that had been tried in Central and Eastern Europe that that may or may not have worked right, which is what I write about in my first book. The Disinformation Governance Board was meant to be an internal coordination body bringing together all of the different components as we call them of the Department of Homeland Security, which have very disparate missions. It’s a huge organization, and in some ways of Frankenstein, right? It includes everything from our emergency and disaster management agency, FEMA, to our Customs and Border protection to TSA, the guys that make you take your shoes off at the airport to our cyber security and Infrastructure Security Agency, SISA, which actually dealt with election security and kind of beefing up local and state election partners ahead of elections and potential incursions by the Russians or the Chinese, so a lot of different missions and the idea was to bring everybody together, make sure that we had a shared definition of disinformation, make sure that in the work that each agency or component was doing, that it was upholding civil rights, civil liberties and the right to privacy which Americans of course hold dear. That was the brief that I was given that I was going to bring these people together. I was going to assess what was going on in the agency and make recommendations for the board to adopt or not adopt. And we would go forward and make policy as a policy making body. How was to in the policy part of DHS, right, the policy shop, as we say. When the board was announced, I had been working at DHS for about 8 weeks at that point, at the very beginning of my tenure, I said to my bosses, I think it’s important that we announced this and that we announced it transparently. There had been incidents for similar agents announced that they there were I wouldn’t even call it backlash, there were rumors there were lies about them. I’m thinking in particular of the Czech Center against terrorism and hybrid threats when they were announced, there was a lot of excitement among disinformation researchers and, you know, people in the national security space. And then people on kind of who were skeptical of the government in in the Czech Republic really didn’t like the idea of this center against terrorism and hybrid threats, which in part was dealing with disinformation. And that was because they communicated poorly about it. They weren’t going to be doing any fact checking, they were very narrowly focused on the mission of the Ministry of Interior and, you know, threats related to terrorism. But they didn’t communicate that very, very well and I write about that in my book. So I said to my bosses we need to make sure we communicate well, that did not happen. You know, I wasn’t actually a very high-ranking person within DHS, I wasn’t confirmed by the Senate. There were, you know, a lot of people who outranked me there. And my job is to give them advice. And I gave lots of advice about different approaches to communication that I thought we should take. And they were all kind of rejected in favor of an approach that was announced to the board but didn’t give a lot of detail about it and the problem with that was that we left a vacuum for the adversaries, both political adversaries. But I will also say Russia wrote about this to fill in the blank and what they filled in the blank with was wise. They said that this information governance Board was going to govern what was true and false on the Internet, which was not true. They said that I was going to have the power to send men with guns to the homes of Americans with whom I disagreed – also not true. I was not a law enforcement official. I had no budget. I had no operational authority. That operational authority lied with all lay with all the components, but even they were not going to send men with guns to the homes of Americans with whom they disagree. That was just preposterous. And also, in that vacuum, because there was so little information about the board it was ironic, of course, having written about online abuse and studied online abuse that I would then be subjected to a very widespread hate and harassment campaign that looked it. I mean, my family was doxxed, our personal information was released on the Internet at the time I was pregnant, people were saying horrible things about my reproductive status, my baby, my husband, whatever. There other members of my family were targeted. There was wide skepticism about my personal life, I got death threats and all sorts of other nasty, unsavory, violent threats. And also, it’s not the same, like the violent stuff is worse, of course, but people just lied about me, they lied about all sorts things they said that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian disinformation operation. I actually never said anything like that. I urged people to be skeptical about the laptop given when it was released and who was shopping it around. Rudy Giuliani. He does not exactly have a very good track record of telling the truth. Right. And I said, listen, we don’t know what this is. It can’t be independently verified right now, treated as a Trump campaign product, and somehow that has been construed to say that I believe that it’s Russian disinformation that’s been repeated over and over. They said that I believed in the Russia gate conspiracy theories, if you read my book I kind of say we don’t really have the evidence that says that Russia, Russia was colluding with Trump, but we do have evidence that Russia tried to interfere in our election, right, that’s open-source evidence, we know about that. So, my opinions, my thoughts were totally misconstrued. I was painted as a young woke liberal woman who was coming away to take your coming into governments, take your rights. And so, to this day, people believe that I committed treason against the United States because I was attempting to violate the 1st amendment and take that away from my fellow citizens. And I’m sure my grandfather is rolling over in his grave. So, my grandfather was 10 years old when he was deported to a gulag by the Soviet Union, made his way through Central Asia and ended up in the UK in the early 50s and immigrated to the United States. Kind of looking for the American dream. So that is very much an experience that I carry with me and that is in my DNA, and for somebody to say that I wanted to take away Americans fundamental rights and freedoms is just so anathema to me. And of course, what happened with this in the end I was pregnant at the time I decided to resign because the department really didn’t have my back. They were not pushing back vociferously on these lies. They thought that strategic silence was the right thing to do, that like this would blow over. I kept being told that it would blow over the next weekend or the weekend after and as we waited and time grew and, you know, issued a fact sheet that wasn’t very good. They had, you know, people give various statements to the media. But I wasn’t allowed to speak for myself. And it was my record and my family that was being disparaged and endangered. So I decided to leave. They had asked me to stay on as a policy advisor and I just decided it wasn’t worth it, then they disbanded the board after I left later that summer. And you know, I was at home with my baby trying not to think about anything. This is a really frustrating and sad moment for me, and I think it’s one that’s important for your audience to understand as well as much as there has been political backlash against some of the counter disinformation in attempts in Europe, there’s never been anything like what we’re seeing in the States right now. And it’s not just about me, it has now expanded from the disinformation Governance Board and me in 2022 where kind of the Democrats presented the board as a fait accompli to the Republicans and said, OK, you win. We’re not going to fight you at all and that’s kind of an admission of guilt, right? It looks like one, even though nothing there was no wrongdoing and then. Having had that proof of concept, the Republicans went further and said look at all the rest of this censorship happening, and they basically redefined the term of censorship as any person studying the information environment. They’re a censor. Any cooperation or communication between an academic or somebody at a think tank and a social media platform or the government that’s also censorship, right? That’s the claim right now. And I think that that is a completely false definition of censorship. Censorship has a clear definition of what that looks in the American context. But B, it is it is doing the opposite effect of what it says it is. It’s not defending people’s fundamental rights and freedoms, it is having a chilling effect. I’m the researchers who are doing this work and just trying to stand up for democracy. So that’s where we are right now in the states. It’s not a not a pretty picture and to me, it represents the most fundamental threat to academic integrity and freedom of expression since the McCarthy era. 00:12:01 Domen Savič / Citizen D Why do you think looking back on your involvement with the DHS, the backlash, the response because it sounds like the arguments you wrote about in your op-eds and everything everywhere else. They sound like there is a little black book on how to discredit people, right? And anybody can rent it out in a library, read the paragraphs, and then use it in in different contexts in the US and EU all around the world, right? So why do you think this is such a transferable procedure? So why do you think the same things people are using to you know, media assassinate type person or gather up gather up like reasoning for personal attacks. Why do you think this works like literally anywhere in the world? 0:13:05 Nina Jankowicz A good question. I mean, I think ultimately, whether it’s online or in a newspaper, or just gossiping with coworkers around the water cooler, right, people are interested in personal stories, and the more salacious, the better. And so, you know, claiming that I’m this crazy woke, you know, feminazi, working in the DHS, that’s a good narrative, and it makes money for people. It makes money for people. I know because it’s been repeated over and over and over again. Whenever anybody has a chance to just mention me, that’s how they describe me. Right? So, it clearly is resonating with people. And I think also there’s been a normalization, at least in the United States and our politics of these sorts of personal attacks since Donald Trump’s presidency. We have seen that sort of personalization not just happen within him and his office, but also being normalized in the Republican Party to some extent. I wouldn’t say all Republicans do this, but people there are certainly people within the party who have enormous influence who act this way. And it’s interesting because they do it bombastically in public, but when you get them behind closed doors, they don’t act that way and so you know that it is – it is something that is done for show. It is something that is an act and it’s really depressing to me. And I have actually said directly to members of Congress who have attacked me in this extremely personalized way and put me and my family in danger that I thought they were engaging in a dereliction of duty as elected officials. They have an important role to play in setting the tone of discourse in our country and by acting the way that they do, they are telegraphing to their constituents that that is OK and generally some of the constituents, not all, but some will go farther. They will say worse things they will, you know, send violent threats. They might show up to people’s houses. They might engage in violence like, that’s not beyond the pale. We’ve seen that already in the United States over the past four years. And so I really think we need to call that out and make sure that people recognize how strange that is. I remember there was a conversation with a governor and I forget which governor; it was a state governor here in the States and he was asked about the gendered and misogynistic attacks on Nikki Haley, who was running for president for the Republican Party nomination at the time. He said that’s just politics and actually if you look at other countries, other developed democracies, it’s not as accepted in other places, it still happens. Yeah, there are still misogynistic comments, but they are not the norm. And I think we really need to get back to that. And of course, the Internet getting back to the global nature of all of this. Internet really supercharges that ability to be mean and personalized, and downright violent, right? There’s no consequences for any of this stuff. 00:16:25 Domen Savič / Citizen D So, so would you say, you know looking at potential, I’m not going to say remedies because that would be too optimistic, but the right way to sort of address these issues, right? So we’ve had like spanning from let’s say the first election of Donald Trump, the Golden Age of, this information writing and fact checking and active citizenship we’ve had nothing but failures up to up to today, right? Nothing that we’ve advised on in 2015, worked. In fact, if you compare, the first notes about, you know, the media is lying to you, you have to check everything, everything is disinformation and propaganda. I think it’s sort of… like to me, it seemed that the biggest blowback came during the pandemic crisis, right? I usually joke in a very sarcastic way about this and say that the best fact checkers or the best people that really took fact checking to heart were the antivaxx community during pandemic, because they said nothing is true, everything is a lie, we have to figure out everything on our own, right? So moving forward, are there some lessons, not to be learned, but are there some lessons we can take as a basis to sort of reformat the discussion the framework in which we are addressing the fight against this information, a fight against propaganda. 00:18:03 Nina Jankowicz Yeah, I’ve always been. I don’t want to say skeptical of fact checking. I think it has a time and a place and serves useful purposes, but I think we need to be very clear about its limits, so a fact check, a reactive fact check of a piece of disinformation or misinformation is not going to necessarily reach the people who already believe the mistruth, right. In fact, it often causes them to double down on that mistruth and so I am much more in favor of investing in information literacy and people react poorly, especially in the states. That’s beginning to be another kind of divining or lightning rod issue here because they think that means that people are gonna be told, OK, this media outlet is trustworthy and this one is biased, this one just publishes false news. And that’s actually not what media literacy is. It’s giving people the tools that they need to navigate today’s information environment and while I don’t want to put all of the emphasis on people, right, I think there needs to be other parts of the solution. I do think that if people understand how social media platforms work, why they’re being shown certain content, if I’m looking for a new pair of shoes and then suddenly I’m getting Instagram ads about different pairs of shoes that are, you know, that have the characteristics of the ones that I’ve been looking for, like there’s a reason it might not be the best shoe for me, it’s just that they’ve got a very good online advertising team and similarly, you know, knowing that the platforms are targeting you based on your interests and the things that you’ve engaged. Before I wrote a piece in 2020, about how it’s so easy to go from in our context, we had a big movement to reopen businesses in about, let’s say, April or May of 2020. And even if you just have that as a purely economic argument, if you knew like, if you didn’t believe in any COVID misinformation, you didn’t think vaccines, you know had 5G we didn’t have vaccines back then but you know all these crazy conspiracy theories? Yeah if you didn’t believe in all of that, but you just wanted to reopen your business, it was a couple of steps removed from joining a a reopening Facebook Group to going into like crazy conspiracy theories about heavy metals and like the vaccine was a conspiracy to get people to become sheep. And it was just a few steps removed and that’s the sort of thing that I think people need to be… they need to understand. So I’ve always advocated that governments, in addition to taking kind of the national security precautions that they all should take in addition to making sure that they’ve got like one belly button of policy coordination within their government so that that can all go out to different ministries or agencies that they that they need to be investing in information literacy as well. And it wouldn’t be prescriptive… it wouldn’t say Fox News bad, New York Times good, it would say you know today’s information environment is very polluted and we all need to kind of recognize that navigating it is difficult and here are some tools to do that. So that’s part of it. I think the other thing that we have seen from the countries that have actually been successful at this is that they have publicly prioritized that disinformation is a problem, like they’ve publicly declared that. So if you look at Sweden and Finland and the psychological defense that they do with their populations or Ukraine, obviously Ukraine is in war, so it’s an extraordinary situation. But, you know, people recognize that this information is being used to undermine them and undermine their efforts as they try to resist this enemy. And so that’s part of it. And then also, and this is something that governments struggle a little bit more with, again creating that policy center somewhere at the heart of government with full political buy in from the very top of an administration and something that’s going to stay from administration to administration that can’t quickly be undone by political upheavals, is incredibly important and no president since 2016, while Trump didn’t prioritize it and Biden didn’t figure out a way to do it right. I think DHS what I was supposed to do was a smaller version of this within the department itself, and it failed miserably. And now, as a result, a lot of the counter disinformation work that the US government is doing has been rolled back. So, it’s difficult and you have to telegraph it the right way, you have to be very transparent about what you’re doing and say we’re not doing any fact checking. You know, we’re going to be putting good information out there. We’re looking at what’s happening online, and we’re going to provide Americans with information about how to get to the polls, how to vote, where to find their voting place. You know, we see a lot of misinformation and disinformation about that sort of stuff that that might be all it means, but you need to be transparent about it and for some reason the US government couldn’t figure out how to do that. I will say one final thought, which is that when the Salisbury poisoning happened in the UK in 2018, that was, in my opinion, a very good example of how to be transparent, how to declassify information quickly? How to work across government from very different parts of government, from the police to the foreign and Commonwealth Office to the people who dealt with chemical weapons to get information out to the public quickly and I think we could all learn a lot from that. I know there are probably still people who believe the Salisbury operation was a conspiracy or a plant by MI5 or whatever, but I think the majority of the world and certainly the majority of Brits believe the truth, which is that Russia did this on purpose as retribution against Scripal. 00:23:47 Domen Savič / Citizen D So, my next question would be like the difference or looking at the different, let’s say sources of this information, right. So, you have these let’s say let’s call them like homegrown disinformation outlets that are operating within a certain interior politics or party politics, within a specific geographical area like a country or a region and then you have these, you already mentioned them, foreign ops, influencing or trying to lower the attention of the enemy, of the foreign countries. Would you say that dealing with these different types, so to say of disinformation could be the same or is there like a huge difference between addressing these two issues. Because we’ve been, like the pandemic was sort of like a highlight of everything mashed together, from local disinformation outlets that were basically just monetizing the pandemics informational black hole, then you had the Russian foreign operations that were trying to sort of, yeah, dissolve or inject sort of incoherence and stuff. 00:25:03 Nina Jankowicz Yeah, it’s difficult to draw the line right. I think everyone wants there to be a very clear line between what our foreign adversaries are doing and what’s going on at home, and this is something that’s been incredibly misunderstood by almost everyone from the press to policymakers since the very beginning of the kind of current era of interest in disinformation and I talk about in my book how the most successful disinformation is the disinformation that manipulates pre-existing grievances in society. So, if you have again to use a US example, if you’ve got people who believe Texas should secede from the rest of the United States, that’s a really easy grievance to identify and manipulate. If you are Russia and you might identify some local actors who believe that, like you know, local civil society groups or a local media outlet that that takes that kind of position for themselves as an editorial position and you can work with them. And that’s when you get information laundering. Right, so we see narratives or pieces of, quote UN quote, intelligence introduced to local actors and then they are able to spread it without kind of the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians, showing their hands that aha, this is a foreign actor and it’s so it gives them a layer of insulation, plausible deniability. And it also makes it harder for at least in the American context because of our free speech laws, which I agree with, just to put that out there so no one can slice this and say that I didn’t say that it makes it much harder to respond, because if you’ve got somebody who fervently believes something, they have a right to say it right.   So how do you respond to it then? And that’s where you get into kind of the idea of counter speech. You know, somebody putting out that information and hoping that the story that they tell is more compelling than the lie. So, it’s really difficult and I guess the other thing that I would say is that the nations that have been good at this and I think the UK is another good example again and also probably the Nords and the Balts. They have an actor agnostic approach, right? It doesn’t matter if it’s coming from Russia or coming from inside the house. It means that you know they’re going to respond to disinformation that affects public safety, public health or democracy in the same way, but and I think that’s the right approach, I don’t think that in any of these cases, well if it’s a, it’s if if it’s a fake Russian account, by all means take it off, take it off of Twitter. But we need to be sure of that or Facebook or TikTok or whatever. I don’t think that you know, I have in fact if you go back to my very first New York Times op-ed in 2017, September 2017, I say that playing whack a troll is not the right approach to countering disinformation, we need to do better strategic communications. We need to tell better stories. We need to, you know, prioritize this as a policy area and talk about it transparently, not playing whack control, not removing those accounts. And unfortunately, you know, I think as you and I have talked about, that’s where we’ve ended up that people still think that the response to disinformation is censorship, that the response to disinformation is removing stuff online. And that is just not true. 00:28:21 Domen Savič / Citizen D And how would you compare like the current, let’s say regulatory uptick in in the EU that is sort of, you know, I mean they’re on the way out. You know, elections are coming in two months, but they’re still trying to sort of push out a lot of regulatory frameworks that address, you know, financing of the media transparency of the operations, the role of digital intermediaries… They’ve had some success in terms of addressing or highlighting these issues, California and other states in the US started, you know, writing their own versions of, let’s say, the same regulatory frameworks. Do you think this is part of the solution or is it just like a PR stunt for the politicians to sort of show off and say yes, we’re doing something? 00:29:17 Nina Jankowicz DSA and related pieces of legislation are good. I don’t know if they’re gonna work. I think we have to wait and see to, you know, see if the implementation is as good as the idea. But I think we need to start somewhere and particularly with the transparency and oversight question that one, I think is the most critical. So, when people ask me what I would do to regulate social media, I tell them that we can’t even have a conversation until we’re all using the same set of facts and right now, that’s true, right? And researchers, I don’t have to tell your audience, I’m sure, but researchers access to data on social media platforms has been almost entirely cut off or monetized to the point where they can’t get access to it. So, what we’re dealing with now is basically hearsay. It’s like when Elon Musk decides he wants to release snippets of conversations without their full context to pre-selected journalists. That’s part of what we get or whistleblowers or stuff that’s been gotten through. You know, these congressional investigations that are going on here again released in a retaliatory or untransparent manner. And what I think the DSA can solve and other regulatory regimes, including the E Safety Commissioner in Australia, who has the power to essentially, ask questions of social media platforms based on safety related issues that allows us a shared set of facts. It means that we will know how the platforms are dealing with content moderation questions. We will know how they’re dealing with foreign interference questions. We will know in in issues where people feel aggrieved that their content was removed or demoted or they have their account shut down. We will know why that happened. And until this point we’ve not had anything that has allowed us to do that. We could make inferences even when we had access to more data, but we would. We would only have kind of what the data showed and the inferences that we could make and then what the platform said. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, right? So, I’m excited about that part of it. I think there’s still a lot of work to be done thinking about the way that our information environment today has effects on public safety and the online safety bill in the UK makes some attempts to square that circle, but it also has a couple of concerning elements to it, including the requirement to break encryption, things like Signal, who have been really pushing back on that and I think rightly, but on the other hand, it also, you know, I think makes it legal deep fake porn and other types of harassment that are based on protected characteristic. So, it’s a difficult dance to do, but I think that that is going to be the longer term harm that we have to kind of iterate on and see as things are developing, what’s going on the transparency issue. And if we solve that and we make sure that there is a non-partisan intermediary body overseeing that data and distributing it to researchers and journalists, frankly, then then we’ll have a conversation. We’ll have the basis on which we can have that conversation and make it more productive. 00:32:32 Domen Savič / Citizen D And what would be the result of this conversation? You often hear about transparency that is the cornerstone against fight against disinformation, but then they never mention the next steps, in terms of, OK, we have transparency, we know what’s going on behind the curtain. What’s next? 00:32:59 Nina Jankowicz Yeah. I mean, I think then we have some sort of intermediary regulator who can respond to exigent threats on the platforms and either give guidance or set regulations for what they must do if a certain thing happens. So, I like to compare it to the airline industry. I like to actualize what goes on the Internet, because I think a lot of people still believe that there is a firm line between the online and the offline worlds and that just isn’t true anymore. So, Boeing obviously has been having a lot of problems over the past couple of years recently here in the States ad door blew off an airplane and immediately we had an investigation by the FAA into Boeing and what was going on there. I think we need regulation similarly for technology platforms that have such an immense influence on our lives and have so much of our personal data as well, right? We need to make sure that they’re safeguarding that appropriately, and that if they are not safeguarding it appropriately, if they are not, you know, investing enough in making sure that child sexual abuse material or terrorist content, or if we ever get there, you know, other online harms that deal with adults and everyday people. Deep fake pornography is one example, right? If they’re not doing their due diligence and expending a certain level of effort, then they get fined or then they have some sort of penalty. That’s what happens in every under every other industry, from finance to cars to airplanes to food. And to think that we are giving over so much again of our personal information to these companies for access to something that we use in our daily lives to connect with people, to do business, to, to stay in touch with families, and there is nobody, nobody who’s watching what they’re doing. I mean, it’s shocking. It’s shocking. So, I think that would be the logical next step. But again, we need that shared set of facts to start from a common ground there, because otherwise we’re just going to get hoodwinked by political actors and private companies who are trying to make a buck. 00:35:00 Domen Savič / Citizen D It seems to me like this is the perfect topic or this subject of regulating, let’s say intermediaries or online platforms. It’s like the perfect storm situation where everybody can or anybody can add to its own two cents. The political actors are trying to sort of lessen the encryption, as you’ve mentioned, and trying to sort of convince us that you know, terrorism will be gone if they just have access to everything. Then you have the private sector that is just “No, no, no. Just leave us alone. We will handle this perfectly on our own because we are the only ones who know what to do.” So, who do you think of all these actors should, let’s say, start the conversation about transparency and about next steps like you’ve mentioned political actors, you know, we’ve talked about the market forces… who should be the like the instigator of this conversation? 00:36:05 Nina Jankowicz I think it’s got to be researchers. I don’t. I don’t think either. Nobody, nobody is unbiased enough of the political actors and the and the private companies to really drive the conversation, and it’s the researchers who have worked with the data. It’s the researchers who have uncovered some of the harms online, and it’s the researchers who want to be able to continue to do some so without this exorbitant cost? And I think they they’re starting to do that. The problem is that with due respect to my beloved colleagues in academia, academia moves very slowly. It’s really difficult to get consensus on things because everybody has very strongly held opinions based in their own research and their own experiences and they don’t communicate very well. So, I think most academics would agree with that, so you know, I think there’s a lot of work to be done to make those points to the public as well. And I’m doing some work with some academics to start to do that in the future. But it is difficult. It’s a really difficult battle because everyone turns off their brains as soon as you start thinking about something technical, but I think again, that’s where the analogy to the airline or the food industry or whatever comes in very handy, because I think everyone hopefully agrees now that what happens online does not stay online and that means that it needs to be regulated. 00:37:27 Domen Savič / Citizen D Yeah. And speaking about regulation, just one more topic before we wrap up… your latest book talks about online harassment, it describes your experience, it talks about other women’s and other types of harassment online. What’s your take on the current, let’s say regulatory situation in that area? Is this similar to this information or fight against this information? Is it something completely different? I’m guessing harassment is as old as this information operations if not older so? How do we address this issue moving forward, especially now that we are, you know, walking, maybe even sleepwalking in in the era of generative AI, deep fakes, and everything else that just you know, turns the volume up to 11 in terms of harassing. 00:38:23 Nina Jankowicz I mean, I could have spent an entire hour on that question alone, but I’ll try to be quick. I mean, I think the state of online harassment and online harms online safety, especially in the United States, but really, most places around the world is primitive at best, the state of regulation and in most cases, I think really discounts the harm, particularly that women and minorities face when they encounter online harassment, right? The intent of this harassment, whether we’re talking about just, you know, trolling someone or deep fake pornography or violent threats, is to silence them. So, it is a speech issue. And yet, when people turn 18, especially when women turn 18, right, we have a lot of conversation in, in the online harm space about girls and I had a student at Oxford asked me once, why is it that when girls turn 18, we no longer care about them and I think that’s a really, really good and trenchant question. They’re not minors anymore. Sure, but are we asking just by raising our voices to receive rape threats, to be targeted in this way, to have to fear for our lives when we’re walking around, you know, outside? I mean, I have a cyber stalker who I had to get a protective order against, I had a bad experience with law enforcement when I did that. The detective who handled my case basically said, well, he lives in New York. Why do you think he’s gonna show up here in your home in Virginia? And I’m like, because he has my address and he has a habit of showing up at people’s homes and places of employment and events that they’re at. And I have a baby, and I don’t want him to, you know or see my baby or be in proximity to him. There are many law enforcement agencies that react similarly. So, I think I think we need much more help there. The fact that deep tech pornography has not been criminalized or even civil penalty instituted at the federal level in the United States is shocking to me. When the harm is so, so, so clear. And it has become so easy to create stuff like this and you asked if this is a similar question to disinformation or not. I mean, I think the response that I hear from skeptics is that this is just, you know, you should have to deal with it. You should just buck up and deal with it. Often, that’s white men who say that. They just don’t get the same sorts of harassment that their female counterparts do. There’s a lot of data on that. And so, what do I think needs to happen? I mean it’s tricky, right? Because it runs into speech questions. But I think in regulating the platforms we might be able to find a happy medium there. Obviously like these, these platforms have terms of service that they are meant to implement that already say that you’re not allowed to harass somebody based on protected characteristics like gender, age, religion, ethnicity. The problem is they don’t enforce them, so perhaps there’s an enforcement mechanism that says if you don’t enforce your own terms of service, you are not upholding your duty of care to your users and that’s a market problem, right? That’s kind of a consumer protection problem. There’s a lot of different ways to do it, but I think until people recognize the harm that online harms do cause that it’s not just sticks and stones, but there is a real physical threat that that comes from a lot of this stuff, then we’re going to be going around in circles. But I am hopeful. Danielle Citron, who’s a privacy scholar, a former MacArthur fellow, she has two great books. One of them is hate crimes in cyberspace and the other is her newer one is called the fight for privacy, and she mentions how in the 70s, of course, it was legal, perfectly legal and normal to get sexually harassed at work. And women came together and we banned it against that, and now it is very much not legal. Right. And you can you can have harassment claims against your bosses, your coworkers, for creating an unsafe work environment. We just need to bring America, bring the world up to speed. That that’s not OK online either because it is a speech issue, like I said, coming back around to it, it means that people, women, marginalized communities are silencing themselves because they are afraid of these horrible things that might happen to them online if they do speak out, so that’s where we are. I’m hopeful that we can change it for right now, situation is not very good. 00:42:51 Domen Savič / Citizen D And just one more question before we wrap up. Like there is a, there is a ton of political movement in the US and the European Union, EU, US election is coming up the EU election is coming up. Do you see this these topics well addressed or during the election cycle? I sometimes think it’s a generational issue, like the older people, let’s say above 50, they just don’t have, as you said, the same experience or it almost looks like they don’t live in in the same world. So, is this a generational issue? Do you see like working in this field working with younger or young people? Do you see a change of narrative and perceptions of these issues as people go, you know, are younger and are more involved in these types of situations? 00:43:59 Nina Jankowicz Yeah, I think so. I think younger people understand the harms that the Internet can cause more, more acutely than people, a couple of generations ahead of them. But I’ve also had some really enlightening and encouraging conversations with people who are many years my senior, so I wouldn’t entirely write them off, though I do think we’ll see more and more legislation coming from kind of younger MP’s, younger members of Congress as we start to address these issues. 00:44:33 Domen Savič / Citizen D Thanks so much Nina, for dropping by. This has been really informative and really great. Best of luck to you in your future endeavors. And yes, fingers crossed me move, you know upwards, not yeah, downwards. 00:44:48 Nina Jankowicz Yes, I agree. I’ll be watching the elections in the EU and I wish you all the same as well. Bye bye.   Citizen D advice: Rethink the connection between disinformation and political parties Develop new approaches to financial ties of disinformation research Empower disinformation researchers with political support More information: New Group Joins the Political Fight Over Disinformation Online – article How disinformation fuels violence — and makes our politics worse – article ‘A surreal experience’: Former Biden ‘disinfo’ chief details harassment – article About the podcast: Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

Alja Isakovič, razvijalka programske opreme in uporabniških procesov, se v zadnjem času posveča izzivom etičnega razvoja informacijske tehnologije in tehnološkemu okoljskemu odtisu ter poudarja aktivacijo posameznika in povezovanju v skupine za doseganje družbeno relevantnih ciljev. V pogovoru se dotakneva tem vključevanja žensk v razvoj informacijske družbe, problemu tehnoloških revolucij, ki jedo svoje otroke, načneva pa tudi probleme gradnikov umetne inteligence, o pomanjkanju volje in moči posameznika ter lokalni aktivaciji ter razlogih za optimizem na temu področju. Premišljujeva tudi o prihodnosti, evropskih volitvah ter politični komponenti tehnoloških tem, ki bi morale priti na tapeto novih odločevalcev. Državljan D svetuje: Potrebujemo več razprave o politični komponenti razvoja informacijske družbe Pomembno vlogo igrajo razvijalci in programerji, ki lahko spremenijo dejanske poslovne prakse Vedno bolj pomembno je povezovanje večih različnih panog Dodatne informacije: The Cult of AI: razmislek o kultu umetne inteligence in povezano Can Myth Teach Us Anything About the Race to Build Artificial General Intelligence? With Josh Schrei o skoraj religioznih motivih tistih, ki zagovarjajo razvoj umetne inteligence za vsako ceno These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI: o raziskovalkah, ki že leta opozarjajo o negativnih vplivih umetne inteligence in ceni, ki jo za to plačujejo v svoji karieri AI is dangerous, but not for the reasons you think: pregled trenutnih negativnih vplivov umetne inteligence, z okoljskim vidikom na čelu A polar bear cub is harmed every time you use ChatGPT: moj uvod v problematiko okoljskega vpliva umetne inteligence AI Countergovernance: primeri, kako se lahko s skupnimi močmi upremo Black Mirror vizijam prihodnosti Pathfinders Newmoonsletter: Tethix mesečnik, ki vsak mlaj posaja navdih za drugačne tehnološke prihodnosti O podcastu: Podcast Državljan D je podcast za produktivno preživljanje časa, v katerem igramo vlogo državljana. Državljan D v pogovorih s strokovnjaki določenega področja informira in aktivira. Da se. Gremo naprej!

Za začetek leta se z Urško Henigman, novinarko uredništva izobraževalnega, otroškega in mladinskega ter dokumentarno-feljtonskega programa na prvem programu nacionalnega radija pogovarjamo o medijski reprezentaciji spolnih praks v Sloveniji, ujetosti spolnosti med politiko, mediji in družbo ter o uredniških premislekih pri oblikovanju s spolnostjo povezanih medijskih vsebin. Pogovor teče o zgodovini medijske reprezentacije spolnosti v Sloveniji, težavah z iz tujine plačanih aktivistov, ki spolnost spreminjajo v temo strankarske politike, o vsebinskih premislekih in potrebah občinstva na tem področju. Kaj vse je spolnost, kako nastajajo s spolnostjo povezane medijske vsebine, kako pomemben je senzibiliziran novinar in zakaj je takih vsebin še vedno premalo? Državljan D svetuje: Spolnost je politična tema, o kateri je potrebno govoriti tudi skozi medije Politično uokvirjanje spolnosti je delo interesnih skupin Človekove pravice niso predmet večine, ki bi rada omejevala manjšino Dodatne informacije: Evolucija užitka – podcast Slovar spolne vzgoje – serija Na pravi strani – podcast Glasovi svetov – oddaja Prvič – nova serija O podcastu: Podcast Državljan D je podcast za produktivno preživljanje časa, v katerem igramo vlogo državljana. Državljan D v pogovorih s strokovnjaki določenega področja informira in aktivira. Da se. Gremo naprej!

We sat down with Sarah Lamdan, Professor of Law with a Master’s Degree in Library Science and Legal Information Management. Professor Lamdan works with immigration groups on government surveillance issues, with library advocacy organizations on open access and researcher privacy projects, and with open government advocates on federal records preservation and access initiatives. She recently wrote a book called Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information that is focusing on the issues of internet feudalism, data monopolies and solutions to these issues. You guessed it – this will be the topic of our conversation. Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:10 Domen Savič / Citizen D Welcome everybody. It is the 25th of September 2023, but you are listening to this podcast of Citizen D on the 15th of November 2023. With us today is Sarah Lamdan, professor of law with a master’s degree in library science and legal information management. Professor Lamdan works with immigration groups on government surveillance issues, library advocacy organizations on Open Access and research and privacy projects, and with open government advocates on federal records preservation and access initiatives. She recently authored a book called Data Cartels, the companies that control and monopolize our information and you guessed it, this will be the topic of our conversation, Professor lent and welcome. Welcome to the show. 00:00:56 Sarah Lamdan Hi, it’s great to be here. 00:00:59 Domen Savič / Citizen D It’s such an interesting read and it’s such a great topic to discuss because you start with the issue of open data, of data cartels, of companies that control and monopolize our information from a very, I should even say, personal experience. So I would like to know, to get us going, what was the reason you developed an interest in this topic and how did you go about how did you go about researching it. 00:01:28 Sarah Lamdan Those are two really good questions. So to answer the first question, I kind of fell into this topic by chance. In a way, I’m kind of the ideal person to write about it, cause I didn’t come in with any sort of agenda. I was a law professor and also I’m a librarian, so I deal a lot with information access and informational resources. And I actually saw in the news that a lot of our research providers in the United States were vying to work with our Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency, so ICE. And I’m not sure how it’s viewed across the world, but in the United States, especially in 2017, when I first started digging into this issue, ICE was problematic. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in the United States was known as committing human rights abuses. Basically, separating families at the border, putting children in cage like enclosures and just doing all sorts of really icky gross things. So working with ICE wasn’t positive, right? It wasn’t about helping immigration agency reunite families or help people ascertain citizenship, it was really about human rights issues. So I became very interested in why our research providers were working with ICE and what they were giving ICE and I started asking, you know, I started asking our research vendors at the school that I worked what is your company doing with ice? And I asked in my professional organization, the American Association of Law Libraries what exactly is Lexus, our main research provider and Westlaw, our main research provider. How exactly are their companies working with ICE? And instead of getting the answers, I got kind of censored, the American Association of Law Libraries wouldn’t allow me to ask that question on their web pages and at my law school, my vendors became very agitated when I asked them about about their work with ICE. I wasn’t getting answers and that’s really what started the research process behind data cartels and kind of all the research I’ve uncovered then. And really what came after that even-though I’m an academic, the research process for digging up those connections that I described in the book, it was almost journalistic. It was almost more of an investigative reporting type of research where I was trying to look at corporate filings and advertising and what work that other journalists had done to connect the dots between our research products and government data brokering and surveillance, which is what I uncovered ultimately. 00:04:44 Domen Savič / Citizen D Do you have any reasons… you mentioned in the book and you just mentioned the journalistic way of researching the topic, it seems that on one side there’s let’s say a fair amount of information on these systems in the public, you just have to find a way to get it, at the same time or on the opposite side people, as you’ve mentioned just now, are very are being very obtuse about it in terms of, you know, they’re not giving you answers and stuff. How do you reason those two extremes? Why do you think there’s such a such a code of silence related to to these systems in, in, in academia and in a broader society? 00:05:31 Sarah Lamdan That’s a good question. So I think most of it is obtuse for kind of public relations reasons. I don’t think that Reed Elsevier, Lexus Nexis or Thomson Reuters or any of the other entities that are doing government surveillance… I don’t think… let me turn the negative into a positive. I do think that these companies recognize that the public generally doesn’t like to be surveilled by the government and that the work it’s doing with government agencies probably doesn’t have a good public relations base. It doesn’t look good. So the companies themselves are purposely obtuse about the work that they’re doing with the government, in fact. I work with a bunch of organizations that do legal work around these issues, and they’ve actually in the United States found that American agencies actually have non-disclosure provisions in their contracts with Lexis Nexis that prohibit government agencies from discussing their contracts so they recognize it. They they know that the public doesn’t think it’s great that they’re working with ICE or that they’re sharing information with the FBI or the, you know, or other government agencies. It doesn’t look good and I think one of the reasons in academia that we feel a lot of discomfort around this topic… I think there are two reasons. I think the first is that we recognize how much we depend on Elsevier in science, direct and you know all of the other products that these companies provide us, we need them, right? We need to have good working relationships with Elsevier in order to get contracts in order to make sure that our academics get their work in the right journals, right? So it’s important for us and for all librarians and for our administrative staff and to work with these. And also the other reason. The other reason is that we don’t know a lot about what is going on in these companies, right. And more information about that is starting is to come out. And when it does, people like me or brands or everybody else who kind of does work in this area, we tend to get a lot of push-back from the companies. We get nasty letters from them in the mail. They call our deans and our and people in our academic institutions to to tell them that we are spreading rumors or false information. So it can be kind of scary for an academic who stand up to these companies without a lot of backing from their institutions or their professional groups. 00:08:37 Domen Savič / Citizen D So in your book and in the debate around data cartels.. you have, let’s call them two sides, right? You have government agencies, government institutions, public institutions that are buying or that are using these data sets that are working with these private companies, essentially, that are putting together these data sets. So who do you think started this, should we say the ball rolling? Is it the government coming to individual or independent companies, saying OK, we need that. Can you provide that or was it the other way around? Was it the public private companies putting together these data sets and asking or, you know, pitching this to the government saying “I’m sure you could find a way to use this?” 00:09:32 Sarah Lamdan That’s also a good question. I’m going to say that after every question cause they’re all good questions, but the that question just got an entire book answering it, so one of my favorite journalists who writes about data analytics companies, his name is Mackenzie Funk, his book is coming out, I think in the next few weeks. It’s called the Hank Show and it’s actually about the man who created these data analytics systems and it’s it’s a really fascinating story, I urge everybody to go out and get The Hank show, it is from Saint Martin’s press, it’s coming out I believe at the end of this month or maybe next month, so keep your eye out for it. But in the book he describes how the data analytics systems were created actually in the private sector. They were created in Florida by this man, jh created a company called Citizen and Citizen became Matrix and after September 11th, the man who created these systems, named Hank Asher, actually decided to market terrorism prediction products or products that would predict who is more likely of committing a “terrorist act”, he took that product to the White House, to the government and sold it to them so I think that that is kind of the system that these companies have been working on ever since. They create these predictive policing systems, these predictive fraud systems, these predictive you know, they predict all sorts of different things, who might default on a loan, who might be a bad tenant, who might be a good employee, right, who might be an insurance risk. So they they create all these systems and then they market them to health insurance providers, to auto insurance providers, to ICE, to the FBI, to, you know, any government agency, Social Security, Administration, IRS. All of these are examples of agencies that use predictive systems that that companies like these built. So I think that these systems are created in the private sector and then marketed to the public sector as easy solutions, and then they’re very appetizing to a public sector that can use algorithmic solutions and hiring more investigators and hiring more people, which is more expensive, more time, you know, it takes more time for a human to do investigatory work than for an IRS agent to just press a button and pull up a hot list of, you know, the 10 most likely fraudsters or what have you. Fraudsters is an adjective that Lexis/Nexis uses, so I like to use because I think it’s just like… they they find fraudsters. But the government finds it appealing to use these, you know, easy algorithmic digital seemingly miraculous solutions instead of hiring more agents and, you know, doing more expensive things and more time consuming things. 00:12:53 Domen Savič / Citizen D If we go step back and we leave the issue of the government buying these systems, how will the government effectually regulate them? That’s that’s a spoiler for later on but let’s start at the beginning. So why are data cartels bad for consumers or in citizens cause cause usually when you ask the government or you ask these companies, they go exactly the way you went. So they’re talking about, you know, effectiveness improving the work process, the finding, you know, a needle in a haystack. So they don’t talk about about the negative things while your book is basically just, you know negative and I would like to know why. Why is there such a discrepancy and what are some of the bad consequences that that derive from from the these these data cartels that are that are all over the place. 00:13:53 Sarah Lamdan Right. Yeah. It’s funny. People assume that I’m, you know, a Luddite or that I hate technology based on the things I describe in Data cartels. But I don’t. I I wish that these products were as efficient and miraculous as they reported. Unfortunately in their current form they are not and that’s kind of that’s what I described in my book. So a lot of the problems are problems around, you know, algorithmic bias and biased data sets, but I’m not an algorithm expert. I’m not a technologist. I’m a librarian, so I always direct people to other authors and other books about algorithmic integrity and algorithmic biases. You could read any work by Ruha Benjamin, by Safiya Umoja Noble, Kathy O’Neill… there’s a lot of really great work out there and research out there that describes why it is problematic for government entities to rely on algorithmic solutions for ranking people and sorting how risky people are, right? And there are also a lot of books out there about the problems with our data sets, you know, like Victoria Eubanks wrote a book called, I think it’s called Algorithms of inequality… I’m looking back at my bookshelf trying to find it, but about you know how law enforcement data sets tend to disproportionately have certain types of demographic data in them and certain communities are over-represented in in law enforcement data sets, right? So both algorithms and data sets tend to be biased. What my book focuses on and what I feel safe discussing as a librarian without falling into unknown territory for myself is the fact that there are a few companies that have swallowed up and now control a lot of our informational resources right? So what I focus on is why it is harmful that Lexis/Nexis for example which is part of the company, Reed Elsevier, Lexis/Nexis. Why this one company or how this one company came to dominate so many of our informational markets and why that’s a problem. And I use Reed Elsevier, Lexis/Nexis, as my example not to pick on the company, but because they are so uniquely massive. So usually if I’m doing a presentation I have this slide where I show that Reed Elsevier Lexis/Nexis in the United States dominates the legal information market, right? In the United States if you want to do legal information research, research or you want to look at legal information you have to subscribe to either Thompson orders Westlaw or Lexis/Nexis Lexus research platform. Those are the only two really only two competitive games in town. Those are the gold standard of legal research in the United States. If you’re an academic and you either want to publish or do research, you have to have access to Elsevier and you have to have access to Elsevier Science direct platform, right? And if you want to assess how you’re doing as a researcher, how impactful you are as a researcher, you have to use Elsevier Scopus or you know your data somehow has to feed through Elsevier academic data analytics systems or you have to use Clarivate, which is the really the only major competitor to Elsevier in the academic data analytics sector, Lexis/Nexis, boasts the one of the largest news archives in the world, so media and news information is another market where Lexis/Nexis Reed dominates. Financial information, so information called for from public sector like SEC fillings, financial fillings that companies are required to submit to the government and also news about financial institutions… Lexis/Nexis has kind of a…is part of an oligopoly of companies that that control that information. And I feel like I’m forgetting one of the markets here…oh, and also this is the most creepy one, right? It turns out that Lexis/Nexis is also one of the biggest personal information providers, one of the biggest personal information holders and personal information data brokers in the world. Right, so they have all of our personal data too, and what the company does is it doesn’t just stay in those unique sectors. Academic information, legal information, financial information, personal data. Lexis/Nexis has found a way in multiple ways to use all of those different datasets and combine them to make new informational assets, to make new “data analytics products” that mix and match those types of data – our personal data with data about our academic success, our personal data with news information, our personal data with legal information and all of that data is kind of mixed and mashed and “crunched”. It’s put through data analytics systems, machine learning systems, you know various algorithms to create new unique information types that then Lexis/Nexis can sell for even more money, right? That’s where our predictive policing products come, our predictive insurance products, our legal analytics and academic analytics products come from. 00:19:51 Domen Savič / Citizen D, Hmm. But, you know, speaking as a devil’s advocate, I would go and say, you know, if you did nothing wrong, if you have nothing to hide, then these data sets that are then brought up by ICE, by police, by other other agencies, they don’t concern you, right? So what’s wrong with police having all of this data at their fingertips to sort of, you know, fight crime and other illegal activities? 00:20:23 Sarah Lamdan Absolutely. That’s a really good question, right? And I think in an ideal world where there is no algorithmic or data error or bias, I think that that’s a really good question to ask. Like how how amazing would it be to have a digital data fueled product that would make policing perfect, and that would maybe eliminate bias in academia by really using proven data to to determine which types of research are the most important and which types of research should be funded, and then in a perfect world, these products might really be miraculous, right? In fact, one of the things that Mackenzie Funk heard about in the beginning of the Hank Show is how Hank Ashers matrix product actually identified 5 of the people who planned the September 11th attacks before law enforcement even knew who they were. That’s miraculous, that is amazing in a moment where there has been some sort of horrible crime committed, to know immediately who committed the crime. Fantastic. The problem, unfortunately, is in our current system, we still have the problems that that the algorithmic bias problems and the data bias problems that Virginia Eubanks and Safiya Umoja Noble and Ruhab Benjamin and all of the other kind of critics of our current AI systems have unearthed those problems. Whether we want to acknowledge them or not, they are present, right now, our algorithms are imperfect. We don’t exactly know how they work and we do know that they tend to be biased and we actually… one of the things that my book focuses on a lot because although I’m not, like I said, I’m not an algorithmic expert, I do know a lot about, you know, information assets and information. A lot of the information that Lexis/Nexis and companies like Lexis/Nexis use, are erroneous right now, right. One of the articles that I point to a lot, is an expose in Newsweek called, I think it’s something about how Lexis/Nexis, how, when Lexis/Nexis makes a mistake, it hurts you … and the article is basically a bunch of interviews with people who have been harmed because Lexis/Nexis has incorrect data about them in their systems. There is an example of a woman who gets locked out of her own bank account because her sister is having credit problems, but in Lexis/Nexis’s data set her sister’s data is combined with her data, and so she gets locked out of her bank account. There’s a story of a man who has the same name as a completely different person, the other person has insurance issues, this man doesn’t, but because this man’s data is conflated with that other man’s in Lexis/Nexis, he can’t get auto insurance. So you run into problems like this again and again and again, and the more when an insurance company uses the wrong data about your or it has erroneous data about you. That’s annoying, right? You can’t get the insurance you want. But when your landlord, when your when your landlords tenant screening product, this is Lexis/Nexis, you might not be able to get housing, right. There’s a whole expose in the I think it’s the Texas Observer about how people get blacklisted getting apartment from getting a roof over their head because Lexis/Nexis has erroneous data about them, right? And then that becomes even more harmful when law enforcement uses that data, right, you can get arrested because your name is the same as somebody else’s name, right? Or because Lexis/Nexis another person drivers license conflated with yours in their system and that becomes really problematic so until we can ensure that the data about us is correct in these systems and that the algorithms aren’t biased in these systems I still have a lot of concern about us using these systems. 00:24:47 Domen Savič / Citizen D Yeah, and do you see that happening in the future? Like when you usually debate around these topics and you have like representatives from an industry or decision makers, they usually go “Well yeah you know, no system is perfect. These are glitches. We’re ironing them out.” Do you see that happening or do you see us as a species, to be a bit dramatic, coming into a situation where we have, you know, the perfect data set, the perfect algorithm, the perfect automated decision making system and the perfect result in the end? 00:25:23 Sarah Lamdan That’s a good question and I mean, I will… I wanna before I even answer that hypothetical, I will also point out, like humans are innately biased, right? The reason that there’s so much data bias in law enforcement data is because for you know, for over a century, our law enforcement agency has been doing things that are are racist and otherwise, you know biased and prejudice, right? So humans have their own… I don’t, I don’t want to pretend that like the perfect system is already in place and that is the human system. There are problems with the human systems as well, so I just wanted to put that in the world, because that’s an important thing to recognize. Our systems are also problematic and I do mean, yes, if we treated data systems with the care that they warrant, with the care that they deserve, I do, I could envision a future where we have these systems in place and they aren’t biased, but I think a couple things that we’re missing right now that we’d have to put into place are… OK, so one of the main things we would have to put into place, it is more transparency. Right now I can’t see what my data dossier looks like in Lexis/Nexis, even if because I live in New York State. So even if New York State and my local law enforcement agency is using Lexis/Nexis to determine whether I might commit a crime or whether I have committed a crime, I can’t see what data they’re using about me. I can’t know if it’s correct or if it’s erroneous and I can’t correct it right? Like I can’t say “Ohh I never lived in that address” or “Actually that wasn’t me who was at that place at that night” or “I don’t drive that car”. I can’t say those things, I have no power, so I think in order to move to a place where maybe we could use these systems and we could use them well and we could use them effectively, things would have to be a lot more transparent for consumers and for the public, we’d have to be able to view our own dossiers, and we’d have to be able to correct them, right? We’d have to be able to ensure and feel comfortable that when NYPD or you know any other law enforcement or other type of agency was using the data. I want to feel comfortable knowing that what they were using about me was information that I feel OK sharing and that I know is correct. I think that would have to happen, and that’s a big undertaking. I don’t think it’s impossible, and I don’t even necessarily think that it’s a bad idea, but right now, that type of transparency and that type of corrective measure isn’t in place so that I think first and foremost, those are two really basic things that would have to happen. 00:28:28 Domen Savič / Citizen D Would you say lack of transparency is also one of or maybe the reason that data cartels are so hard to regulate… you can’t even see them or you can’t even see what you’re regulating. And this is something that, yeah, impacts the regulatory frameworks or would you say something else is going on that these data systems are being almost, you know, untouched and free to do what they do? 00:28:59 Sarah Lamdan Yeah, I think you’re… I think what you’re getting at is absolutely correct. The lack of transparency is a huge problem, right? Lack of transparency to the public to even know that the government is using these types of systems or know that their insurance agent or their landlord or any other entity that’s making decisions about their lives. Usually the public doesn’t even know that these algorithmic systems are being used behind the scenes, right? You don’t know when you get hired that your job application was run through some sort of employment screening system that was algorithmically powered, right? So that type of transparency is absent. And on a deeper level, we don’t, let’s say you do know, let’s say you do get. You live in a place where you’re required to get a notice that your job application has been run through one of these systems, you don’t know what the data about you that they ran through the system includes. You know what the data inside the system that your applications being checked against includes and this is key. You don’t know what the algorithm is assessing and you don’t know how the algorithm is working to make that assessment. The major problem with that is these algorithms that are being developed at Lexis/Nexis and at other types of of data analytics firms. We don’t know how the algorithms work and most of the people who design the algorithms don’t know how they work because the algorithms work so quickly and do so many things with so many data sets that algorithmic transparency is not only unavailable, it might be impossible in the current system, right there are. There are a lot of entities and advocates that that are trying to demand algorithmic transparency, which is an important and noble aspiration, but a lot of times, even the people who developed the algorithm in like a Lexis/Nexis or an Experian or other system…they don’t know how the algorithm they developed works, so how are we supposed to understand? How it works? 00:31:10 Domen Savič / Citizen D You mentioned that in in the conclusion of your book and I love it because it’s such a refreshing take that differs very much if you compare it to these calls to, you know, active citizen that that just needs to be educated about certain topics, saying everything will be alright, because we’ll know what’s going on and we’ll know which buttons to push to to get what we want. And you basically called for the right blend of of governance, oversight and support to resolve the issues of of privatized data collections and treating the essential information as a public resource. So if we take a walk down the memory lane and look at the history of the net. How feasible do you think it is your call that’s A… and B, where did we go so wrong that we ended up in this privatized two companies in the world type of digital sphere that started off as a part of the expression, like a like a hippie commune, right? 00:32:22 Sarah Lamdan OK, I’ll admit that I tend to gravitate towards the hippie commune ideal so… Yeah. OK. First and foremost, yeah, I think right now we are in kind of a hyper capitalist system when it comes to tech especially, and I’m not sure if that’s because it’s so kind of Silicon Valley based and that’s very like American and we just love our Uber capitalists, you know. I want to call it fantasy, but really we are playing it out in reality so our Uber capitalist tech reality. And yes, I’ll admit… I do put my ideals, kind of over the other extreme, but really what I… in my ideal… It’s not about choosing between capitalism and like some sort of hippie Co-op for data, but it’s about putting the onus where it belongs. I think the problem with our current hyper capitalist system is that what we’ve let the companies do is make consumers think that it’s their fault and that it’s their problem to solve like “Ohh, I’m sorry, do you feel like data companies are too invasive? You need to change the privacy settings on your phone. Or you need to not use social media. We put it all on the individual to try to keep their data out of these systems, or even to request their own data dossiers. Right? Like now, our kind of new ideal is passing these laws that allow individuals to get their own data dossiers. Like, what’s the benefit of that? Let’s say I live in California. Yeah, well, I’m legally entitled to my own data dossier, so I live in California. I request my own data dossier from Lexis/Nexis. Great. Now I have a PDF full of data about myself. Some of it is right. Some of it is wrong. That doesn’t really empower me to do much right. I could try to call all the companies that I think have wrong incorrect data about me and beg them to fix it, but that that would take hundreds of hours that I do not have right. So right now, even in our current best scenario legal framework, where we can see our own data dossiers, the responsibilities placed on individuals and then individuals have very little power. I am urging us to rethink this system so that instead of the onus being on the individuals that way it is now on the companies, the companies who create these systems should be responsible for making sure the data is correct, giving members of the public easy recourse to correct their data or to erase their data, right? That should be the responsibility of the companies who are making billions of dollars building these systems. And really those companies are the only entities that have the real power to make our digital lives better. So what I’m trying to do in a way that I’m not sure anybody could succeed. That is, I’m trying to take that boulder of responsibility and just like, dump it across the ground from individuals back to the powerful companies that could actually make the data world better because like I said, I’m not a complete Luddite. It’s not even a question of whether these companies should have a right to exist. They exist. This is reality. This is the system. Some of the ideas that the companies have are very, very cool how can they execute those ideas in a way that doesn’t harm us or put us at risk. 00:36:23 Domen Savič / Citizen D Before we wrap up, I just want to mention something. You apologized sort of in advance several times saying that you don’t hate technology. I have a same same feeling working on issues like like privacy and security and open access… you always have this need of apologizing in advance if you’re not totally on board with you know the complete version of surveillance surveillance capitalism. And I wonder, do you think the issue starts at just basic language structures around these issues, like saying OK, “I’m not sure this is the best way to go” equals you know, “We need to tear everything down and just, you know, build those to the to the ground”. So. So do you think we’re sort of like cultivated in this this techno solutionistic approach that basically prevents any normal discussion happening… not, you know, not to start with with solutions, but just, you know, have an honest conversations about these issues.   00:37:39 Sarah Lamdan Absolutely, I think that the discussion around these issues is so polarized that if you say anything less than “Ohh I love you!” or “I love TikTok. It’s favorite thing the whole world!”… If you say anything less than that then you hate technology and you want to throw your computer in the river, right. And I think we really haven’t been able to have nuanced discussions about practical solutions. I’m not sure why that is, I do know that since my book has been published, people who don’t like what I have to say and people who don’t agree with what I have to say, which is completely fair and I expect like. Yes, please, let’s have these discussions. But people who don’t like it really do paint me as somebody who just hates technology or hates data analytics and it’s a shame, because I think that that really diminishes the ability to have real fruitful discussions, right. And I do wonder if that’s because of the way it’s being framed commercially and politically because one of the things that happens is whenever the government, any government works to incrementally place responsibilities on the companies that develop these types of tools, whenever, especially you know in the US or in the EU when we look to clamp down on the data collection that, like a Facebook or a, you know, Lexis/Nexis is doing… there are lobbyists who visit the politicians office and say “This would destroy the Internet, we can’t do this!” and now also pundits who come out on the Internet and on talk shows and say you know “These people just wanna ruin the Internet”, or “They don’t care about law enforcement”, right? But I think it’s possible to care about law enforcement or to not be an absolute, just about law enforcement but to be concerned about law enforcement using, you know facial recognition apps or predictive policing apps. I feel like sometimes it becomes kind of a scare tactic used by tech companies to make critics look silly, non professional, you know. So it diminishes detractors and critics and it also kind of silences people by making them think that if they critique tech platforms, tech companies, then they might destroy them or ruin something that they like or that they enjoy. Because I do think there’s a way for us to say, buy something on Amazon and get the helpful “More like this” option because I’ll admit… if I read a book and I enjoy it, I want to see more books like that book. That is a really cool tool and that’s a data-driven tool, data-driven by my data, the data of other readers and users. Yeah, that’s a data-driven tool, but is there a way that we can implement that and also protect my data privacy and be transparent about how those recommendations are being developed right? But I think that that would put a lot more expense and work in Amazon’s products, right. They have to do a lot more work and engage in a lot more transparency and I think that a lot of companies don’t want to pay those extra costs and don’t want to do that extra work. So it’s a push and pull game where tech companies have a PR advantage and they can make us look like we are foolish or that we’re not real experts or that we don’t really have real solutions. 00:41:56 Domen Savič / Citizen D And just one more question before we wrap up… Let’s compare notes on the countering tactics or on the tactics countering that narrative, what do you think works in sort of persuading people that, yes, you’re not throwing laptops into the river and smashing light bulbs and yeah, writing your stuff with ink and pen. 00:42:19 Sarah Lamdan Right. Yeah. No, that’s a good question. One thing that is surprising, like a few months ago, I was asked if I’d be willing to be on a panel at a conference with somebody from Lexis/Nexis. And my answer is yes, absolutely. I would be really glad and excited for the opportunity to talk about, you know what our concerns are as academics, as consumers and then you know, have that discussion about what are some real solutions like if we sat down and thought of three things that we could work on together. What would those three things be? I think that would be really, really cool. But notice, I’m a willing panelist, it’s not me who’s not willing to show up on that panel. I guess that’s what I’ll say, right? So I think just to show a continued willingness to have that discussion and also to not be cowed by push-back you get from other companies, cause I’ve got I’ve gotten push-back from representatives at Lexis/Nexis and people who work at other data analytics firms, right? They’ve panned by books, they’ve said really nasty things about my motives, right? But I’m completely willing to have a discussion about why do you feel that way? And is there a place where we agree, right? Because I do think that there are places where we agree, we just need to find those places together and that that has to be a discussion that both sides are willing to have and everybody I want to say sides but like that, everybody in the community creating this work and then using this work is willing to have. 00:44:20 Domen Savič / Citizen D Professor Landon, thank you so much for dropping by. This has been Citizen D podcast. We publish an episode every month, so see you next time. Thank you again and best of luck. 00:44:31 Sarah Lamdan Thank you.   Citizen D advice: Algorithm and data transparency is the first step towards corporate responsibility Personal responsiblity will only get you so far Technosolutionistic language is affecting the debate around the social impact of technology More information: McKenzie Funk, The Hank Show: How a House Painting, Drug Running DEA Informant Built the Machine that Rules Our Lives – book Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement – book Who’s Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportation – analysis [PDF] Alice Holbrook, When LexisNexis Makes a Mistake, You Pay For It (Newsweek Magazine, 2019) – article About the podcast: Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

  We caught up with Paris Marx, a technology writer. They have written frequently in, amongst others, NBC News, CBC News, Jacobin, Tribune, and OneZero, and speak internationally on the future of transport. They are also a PhD student at the University of Auckland and the host of the critical technology podcast ‘Tech Won’t Save Us‘. They are based in Newfoundland, Canada. Their book, “Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation” addresses the future of transportation and the questionable way Silicon Valley is “solving” this issue. We also talked about the quality tech journalism, the consumer’s optimism in the tech economy and the non-solution of e-cars. Finally, we also address the issue of policy shaping, the need to change the discourse around technology and the role of the journalists in this field. Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D Welcome everybody. It’s the 28th of June 2023, but you’re listening to this episode of Citizen D podcast on the 15th of September same year. With us today is Paris Marx, tech critic and author of the book “Road to nowhere: What Silicon Valley gets wrong about the future of transportation”. He’s also the host of the podcast “Tech won’t save us”. Welcome, Paris. 00:00:32 Paris Marx Thanks so much for having me. 00:00:34 Domen Savič / Citizen D Let’s start with your book. You talk about transportation, you talk about Elon Musk, you talk about the way Silicon Valley is trying to reshape the future of transport. And I find it interesting or fascinating for two reasons. One is that in the book you go in depth not just about the current state of the transportation industry and the situation going on in Silicon Valley, but you also start with the, let’s call it the history of transport. When the first cars came into power, so to say. And basically, you talk about the hijacking of the public sphere of the public streets that were back then divided between different, let’s call them interest groups like the pedestrians, salesman and so forth and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the following question. Can history tell us something about the current state of the future in the area of transportation? 00:01:54 Paris Marx Oh, absolutely. You know, there was one way to approach the book where, you know, all I did was look at what happened in the past 10 or 15 years. As the tech industry kind of, you know, founded Uber and released ideas for self-driving cars and hyper-loops and all these sorts of things and just assessed why they were not going to address the problems in our transportation system. But I thought, you know, one of the things that Silicon Valley does really well is it makes sure that people don’t think about the history, that they only think about the present, and in particular the future and they don’t look back at what has happened in the past, but part of the reason that these tech billionaires and these tech companies are putting out ideas for transportation in the present is that there are a lot of problems in our transportation system that come of our over reliance on cars. I would argue, you know, that is a big piece of this and so it felt wrong then to write a book about transportation and about what the tech industry is proposing for transportation and not to go back to, you know, the kind of moment when the car emerges to look at the ideas around the car then and how that played out, how the car became such a dominant part of the transportation system. Because I think that that helps to kind of demystify the system that we have right now in terms of transportation. But also to question whether you know ideas for transportation that are really based around the car, as many of Silicon Valley’s ideas are, are really going to solve these fundamental problems like, you know, the amount of people who are injured or die because of cars. The amount of time that people spend stuck in traffic, the emissions that come from cars, you know, and all of these other questions that come along with it. So those are real issues that we do need to address, but is it going to be addressed by, you know, some new technology released by some, some American tech companies, or do we need to look at a much deeper level and I think that going into the history tells us that, yes, like we need to, we need to look much deeper than just the technology that we’re flying on. 00:04:00 Domen Savič / Citizen D And if you had to answer a question about where did things start to go wrong in, in the past for, let’s say the general area of of transportation, what was key moment or what were some of the key moments that got us where we are today with cars; not enough roads, not enough infrastructure to support the transportation system that is currently in place? 00:04:35 Paris Marx Hmm, it’s a difficult question because I would say it happens over a long period of time, right? But and obviously I should also say that, I look in particular at the American context in particular because you know that you know Silicon Valley is rooted in the United States, the United States has this really long history of car dependency and kind of, you know, pushing the car as this object of of freedom and modernity and things like that. So I look a bit less at the European context in the book, though, I know that obviously the car has been very influential in shaping European transportation as well. They’re probably not to the same degree as what happened in North America, where I am based. And so I think that for me there are, you know, a number of moments that we could point to as very important moments in this kind of transformation of the transport system. You know, we can go back to when the car starts to emerge in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and, you know, I think a lot of people forget that in that moment, it wasn’t obvious that the car we were going to use to get around was going to be one within internal combustion engine that was reliant on fossil fuels. But at the time, you know, there were also electric cars in that moment and for a while it looked like they might actually be kind of, you know, the form of vehicle that became mass transportation instead of the internal combustion engine and there were even cars at the time that were powered by steam power, because that was, you know, a very common form of kind of, you know, mobility or creating energy or whatnot in that. So I think that that’s one important moment. But then I think if you kind of fast forward a few decades as the car starts to become more common in you know North American cities, but European cities as well, what you really see is kind of a conflict, right? On one hand, you have cars that are becoming more common on the street, but you also have a street car that is designed around a different way of getting around the city, right? It’s designed around people who are walking, who are taking bicycles, who are taking the streetcar, who are taking horse drawn carriages, all things that move relatively slowly within the streets of cities. And then you’re moving toward the car, which slowly kind of gets faster, can kind of maneuver more in a more agile way, I guess. And what happens is that more people start to die and be injured because of automobiles, right? In particular, children and young women. And that creates a backlash in cities in the United States through the 1910s to about the 30S and so in that moment the question is really, you know, are we going to allow this car, this, this form of transportation, to become entrenched in the city or are we going to take regulatory measures to restrict how fast cars can go to restrict, you know, how much space they can take up to restrict, you know, how much they can actually use the roads when there’s all these other people who are trying to use them as well, and what we ultimately see as, as you said, is that there’s a kind of wide range of interest groups that see that they are going to profit from the car becoming a form of mass transportation. And so they all kind of work together to make sure that regulations don’t stifle the growth of the automobile and that ultimately, in the decades that follow, whether it’s through the 1930s as the US government is trying to kind of, you know, take programs to recover from the Great Depression or in the post war period in particular. After the late 1940s, into the 1950s and 60s, as there’s a big kind of infrastructure building program. And in that moment, you know, the push is really to build a lot of suburban housing, a lot of highway infrastructure or a lot of road infrastructure. And at the same time, there’s not the kind of investment put into the rail network or into public transportation or things like that. The focus is really to get people to drive cars, to use cars and to reshape the transportation system around that. 00:08:34 Domen Savič / Citizen D And jumping ahead into, let’s say, today’s atmosphere, where are we regarding the current, let’s say state of the future of transportation, the self-driving cars, the electric cars… Things you described happening in the past I could draw some parallels with same or similar things happening in the present as well, right. So you have self-driving cars driving over people and pedestrians, you have accidents, you have projects that are trying to overcome different different snags in the transportation system and failing horrifically in some examples. Would you say that it’s all just a little bit of history repeating or that we, the industry, the policymakers learned something from looking back or trying to address the current situation? 00:09:43 Paris Marx It’s tough to say, and again I wouldn’t want to kind of generalize because I don’t know exactly what regulators across different European countries have done, but I would say that in general, while lessons were learned for a while and there were actions taken for a number of decades in order to kind of you know further restrict cars to make sure that environmental kind of expectations, you know, they’re less smog coming from cars and things like that were taken, I think that for a while we have not done enough to kind of keep up with the impact that cars have had on cities and to try to actually deal with the problems that we face. And again, this is not a universal thing. Some cities and countries have been better than others, but especially in the kind of North American context, the car really kind of took over, right? And so what we’re seeing now and what we’ve I guess been seeing in the past about 15 years is the tech industry did recognize that there was a serious problem in our transportation system again. With, you know, people dying on the roads with the amount of people stuck in traffic for long periods of time, with the emissions coming from cars with the high cost of car ownership, all these other sorts of problems, right, and they said instead of having a political conversation around how we address these problems that have arisen from kind of decades of making policy decisions to encourage people to drive. Let’s not have that conversation and instead let’s just try to come up with a new technology that is going to solve these problems, right? So ride hailing services, electric cars, self driving cars, all this kind of stuff. And you know, obviously services like Uber are available, you know, ride hailing services, they have actually had an impact on cities. But what we see in that case is that the company promised that was going to kind of have these amazing beneficial effects on cities, but the studies that were done in North America find that they actually made traffic worse. They took people away from public transit systems, they didn’t have the beneficial effects that we expected to see or at least that the company led us to believe that we would see. Again, the self driving cars they were supposed to arrive years ago, you know, all these companies kept saying that they were just a few years away in the 2010s and we still see they’re just being tested in some cities right now but they certainly haven’t taken over transportation, as the companies told us they were going to. Electric cars – I would say that is one that is really starting to take root right now and I think that that is an important piece of, you know, the transition toward reducing emissions from transportation, moving over to electric vehicles. But my concern there is that we’re not reckoning with how the electric vehicle also still has a very significant environmental footprint and I feel like a lot of our governments are moving in the direction of saying, you know, if we want to address the emissions that come from transportation, all we need to do is adopt electric cars and not do anything else. And I think that that is a real missed opportunity kind of going back to what you were saying, the comparisons to the past where there is a real push to get us to buy cars and to ensure that we’re driving a lot and that was very profitable for a number of commercial interests from automakers to oil company to developers who are building suburban infrastructure and road infrastructure and things like that. And what we see now is very much a push to say, OK, there are different paths that we can take here. If we want to address these problems and in particular the issue of contributing to climate change. But you know, a lot of governments and a lot of industries, of course, seem to be pushing us toward the direction of electric car power, which means more automotive manufacturing, which means more mining in order to get the minerals that are needed for batteries and of course more battery production. Instead of saying maybe instead of trying to just get everyone to buy an electric car, we should be investing a lot more in public transportation, in cycling infrastructure and things like that are not only, you know, more sustainable, but you know will help to address some of those other problems like traffic, like high cost of car ownership like vehicle deaths and things like. 00:13:57 Domen Savič / Citizen D Are there in your opinion any particular reasons why the political discourse or the political conversation about you know, what do we do about cars isn’t happening on a scale that maybe you and I would want it to happen, right? So you just said, you know, electric cars aren’t built for scalability, so to say, so you have the industry on one side that’s very good with lobbying efforts with pushing against the decision makers proposals that don’t include them. On the other hand, you have the problems you already mentioned about ecology, about batteries, about building parts for electric cars. So why do you think that political political discussion is still not happening despite everything that we’ve been through and despite everything that’s happening in the current moment? 00:15:03 Paris Marx I think that there are a couple of reasons for that. I think one is that our governments over the past number of decades have really lost any kind of vision for the future and what a better future could look like. And you know, I think that’s in part because of, you know, the neoliberal turn that politics have taken and largely, you know, more concretely, the idea that the government and the public sector should be doing less in society and we should be leaving more of the kind of decisions and, you know, kind of handling important infrastructures and services to the private sector. And I think that has meant that, you know, our governments have kind of taken a step back of thinking what a better life actually looks like for the people who live in our communities and our cities and our countries, and instead has has just been trying to kind of encourage private industry to come up with ways to kind of generate more economic activity. And I don’t think that is always a positive thing are always going to generate kind of widespread benefits beyond, you know, benefits for those companies and the executives that at them, and I think that the other piece of that is that when you look at the potential paths forward for transportation, right, if we were to kind of put two general paths in front of us and say one is where you know a lot of us drive electric cars, we don’t really change the kind of dependence on cars that exist in our societies right now and so we basically need to replace all the fossil fuel vehicles with electric cars and then if we look at another future where we say, OK, instead of having so many people driving cars, we put a much greater focus on investing in public transportation, in rail infrastructure, in cycling infrastructure so that people don’t need to own as many cars just in society in general. So if we look at those two different futures, we can very clearly see that the one where more people are driving electric cars is the one where there is a more obvious kind of economic activity taking place, right? You need to be building more cars which take more labor power in order to produce, you need to be mining a lot to build the big batteries that are gonna go into those vehicles. And of course, you need to produce the batteries as well, and then you’ll need to keep charging those vehicles, you’ll need to keep paying insurance on those vehicles, you’ll need to get them maintained very frequently – you know there’s a whole load of other costs that come along with it. And just because of the way that our economies are set up right now, that looks a lot more attractive kind of on the on the balance sheet or on the spreadsheet or in the GDP figures than something where we kind of reduce the amount of transactions that need to be taken for transportation and just invest in collective public solutions instead. 00:17:48 Domen Savič / Citizen D So is there a difference between the, let’s say, the scalability of car infrastructure in the US in let’s say the developed countries and in countries that are that are, let’s say going the same way like I’ll give you an example. In Slovenia the concept of the six lane motorway hasn’t really taken off yet. So we are now having these discussions in the public sphere about building and expanding the motorways. The people who are opposing this expansion are using the arguments that are also in your book, but that are also present in the global sector that is more mindful about the environment and about the ecology, while the people who are for the six lane expansions are saying “Yes, yes, we know you know all about the futility of wider roads in developed countries” and they’re naming US and yeah, I guess maybe even Germany, “But you know, our case will be different because… Something,” so how would you say or how would you counter that that narrative in in if you were engaged in let’s say the, the political discussion about 6 lane motorways in in Slovenia or countries that that are still, you know, deciding to take the first step towards the future that we already know is not effectively solving anything. 00:19:45 Paris Marx Yeah, it’s a good question and I would want to preface my answer by saying that obviously I don’t know the specifics of the situation in Slovenia, so I can’t comment specifically, right, but I would say this obviously questions of infrastructure and investment in that way, public investment, they kind of do help to determine the way that people move and the way that they transport themselves and goods and things like that into the future. One thing that I see in the example from where I am in in North America is that we used to have, you know, pretty decent train infrastructure in the province that I live you know, it wasn’t perfect or anything like that, but at least we had it and then when they built the Trans Canada Highway network, that encouraged a lot more people to start driving instead of taking the train and the train then kind of, you know, fell into disarray, into disrepair. It didn’t get the investment and, you know, the ridership that it had previously and eventually the train in my province was actually ripped up and we don’t have a train anymore and the only option is the highway. Right? And so I just give that example to say that I think that there’s an important concept in transportation that really shapes a lot of discussions around these things called induced demand, and this is the question that, you know, if you make investments in a particular form of transportation infrastructure, that is going to encourage more people to get around in that way. So if you’re building more six lane motorways that’s going to encourage more people to drive because the infrastructure is getting better for that form of transportation and I think ultimately in this moment we have kind of a debate or a question around what should that future of transportation look like and should cities and countries be kind of doubling down on automotive infrastructure in this moment, or should they be making other decisions to, you know, invest in the rail network, invest in public transportation and things like that? So I wouldn’t want to specifically, you know, make a direct comment on the Slovenian situation, because I don’t know it, but again, when I look at other countries that have been developing in recent years, like you know, say, say, China, for example, in the past number of decades, you know, they have built out a fantastic high speed rail network around their country, but a lot of their cities are also kind of flooded with cars and transportation infrastructure and they have these massive highways as well. So they’ve kind of gone in both directions, but they’re still a very strong automotive dependence and I think part of that comes from how the automobile and the car were long kind of positioned as and kind of framed as in, in marketing and advertising and things like that as a symbol of modernity, right. And if a country didn’t move in the direction of adopting cars and getting its people to buy automobiles then they weren’t actually kind of developing properly or kind of moving up the chain of element and I think that that’s really a flawed notion and something that, especially in the 21st century, that we really need to be challenging and reconsidering to think, you know, what is the form of transportation or what is kind of the network of transportation that will actually make life better for people instead of just kind of, you know, assuming that we need to go in a particular direction because, you know, kind of the United States did it first, then we’re all looking to them as an example and we need to follow along and blah, blah blah, right. And I don’t think that that has worked out particularly well for places that have followed that example. 00:23:30 Domen Savič / Citizen D And I wanna hear your thoughts on another issue that is related to this. So you already mentioned the difference or the complementary roles of the public and of the private sector in this regard and I’m assuming that the transportation or the area of transportation is mostly relying on the work done primarily by the public sector, by, you know, infrastructure building. But then you have also mentioned in your book the case of Elon Musk’s the case of hyper-loop. Is this a strong enough signal that the private sector is, let’s say, capable of of, you know, building things from the ground up, almost literally in a way that you know the private sector can decide: “OK, we’ll build an alternate transportation system from the ground up, building new effective roads”, so to say and other things that are necessary for the development of this area or is this just like a like a media trick or something that that is there to sort of entertain people, but doesn’t have any real impact or even intent to sort of changed and influence the way we we move around. 00:25:03 Paris Marx Yeah, it’s a complex question because I think if you look historically, you would certainly see that there can be a role for the private sector in transportation. You know if we look at the North American example, the building of railways, the building of streetcars and things like that were initially done by the private sector, but of course heavily subsidized by the public sector, of course, to make that happen. If we look at kind of what is happening in this moment and if we look at the ideas that are coming from the tech industry, as you say, you know they are proposing or they are kind of making us believe that these private companies from Silicon Valley or you know at least kind of following the playbook or the mindset that comes from Silicon Valley are going to up in the transportation system and fix a lot of the problems, whether it’s with Hyperloop or self driving cars or what have you, but I think that what we see time and again is that these companies love to come out and make huge promises about what their ideas and their technologies are going to mean for society and then a few years later, once you actually look at what they’ve achieved, you can see that they very rarely are able to actually follow through on all the promises that are being made. And for me, what that says is that they’re not actually solving problems in the transportation system they’re just distracting from real solutions that could address those problems and are ensuring that they stick around and that we remain kind of dependent on cars, or that our transportation system remains stagnant for much longer than it has to be and that ultimately, if we’re going to solve these problems, you know, we need the public sector to be making these investments in public transportation and cycling infrastructure, in rail infrastructure to ensure that people have other options that are not just the car in order to get around, and that those options are kind of, you know, safe, reliable, affordable, that people can actually imagine taking them. I’m sure many of your listeners will know that this can be a serious problem in North America in particular where we’ve built so much for the automobile in the past number of decades, I guess that we haven’t really kept up and public transportation is not that great of an option for people. So that is really what stands out when I think of what the tech industry has done, it’s not to revolutionize transportation, it’s not to solve real problems in transportation, it’s to distract from real solutions that we already have and that we could be implementing right now because instead they don’t really want to see the system change, but they think that if it is going to change, they would rather it be done by them so that they can start getting a cut of the profit. You know, we were talking about how all these various corporate interests have a lot of, you know, benefit immensely from the dependence on automobiles, whether it’s because people buy cars or buy gas or pay for maintenance or what have you and the tech industry doesn’t really want to change that. They just want to ensure that their business models are now integrated too, so that they can get a bunch of data from your car so that they can start putting subscription services in your car and things like that. It’s not really going to change very much. 00:28:28 Domen Savič / Citizen D And you’ve just mentioned it, so another reason for the current situation is also the media representation of let’s say the tech industry, and since you you host the podcast, with the title “tech won’t save us” – why would you say the journalists, the tech journalists in in general, on the global scale are always quick to or are still quick to fall for the Silicon Valley trick in in parroting their reason for their revolutionary future. We’re seeing it come time after time in many different examples and just recently, there’s been a bit of a push-back from particular tech journalists trying to be more critical about Silicon Valley’s vision of the future. So, why would you say it took the journalist sector so long to sort of gain this opposition stance towards the Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley tech industry. 00:29:49 Paris Marx Yeah, it’s a really good question and I think I would say, you know, there has always been kind of critical reporting on the tech industry, the problem is that for a long time it didn’t get much attention right? The mainstream publications and the tech publications were very overwhelmingly positive, and we have started to see that shift a little bit in the past few years, but it’s still just, you know, kind of overwhelmingly positive and repeating the types of stories and narratives that the tech industry would like. So I think that when you look at why that is, I think there are a number of reasons for it. I think on one hand, you know the people who get into reporting on technology are usually people who are interested in and like technology, right? And so there’s a bit of a built-in bias that comes with that where they do really want to see those companies succeed to follow through on the promises that they’re making. And so I think that helps to explain some of the reporting that was done on the tech industry in the past, but I think that the tech industry is also one that depends a lot on access, you know. So you know, if you think about getting access to like a Big Apple event where they’re going to unveil the new products and then you get to try them out or something like that, a lot of these companies do ensure that if you have written critically about them, you won’t get access to those opportunities, right? And so there is kind of an inbuilt incentive not to be too critical toward the companies or you’ll lose access to getting interviews with executives, getting access to those kinds of media events and product unveilings and things like that. So that is another reason for it. And I think that we need to consider that the media industry has faced a lot of challenges over the past couple of decades as the revenue model and the advertising business model that they’ve been built on has been seriously threatened, and so we’ve seen a lot of cuts to media, you know, publications closing down, journalists being laid off and just an expectation that at least for some journalists, that they need to be kind of producing more stories, which means that they have less time to actually look into issues and deeply investigate them. So it’s much easier than just to say, OK, this tech industry kind of put out a press release about, you know, these various new products that are that are coming out, so let’s kind of, you know, just write stories based on these press releases or product announcements or whatever and we can just release that, right. And there’s not a lot of knowledge about the history of these industries, the history of technology, and all these sorts of things to try to put in a bit more of a critical perspective. And you know, as you say, I think that we are starting to see that change a bit, but unfortunately a lot of the stuff is still really positive, especially when there’s a lot of hype about something new like we see right now with AI or we saw in the past few years with crypto and again that I think that’s in part because the journalists who cover the, the, the industry are scared to be wrong, are scared to say that a certain new idea or new product isn’t gonna go anywhere because it’s ridiculous and you know shouldn’t be adopted and because if they get it wrong then it might look bad on them, right? But if they hype it up and say that it might be the future, and then it is not the future. Well, I guess that doesn’t look so bad or they don’t think so at least. 00:33:11 Domen Savič / Citizen D So another question related to your part is what are some I should say, editorial guidelines when you’re trying to decide on the topic or when you’re deciding on the coverage of a particular topic, what do you look for? What do you pay attention to? 00:33:29 Paris Marx Yeah, it’s a good question and I always try to present people with a critical perspective that they might not get elsewhere and so on the show, what I do is every week I have a different kind of guest and an expert on the show in order to talk about a different aspect of the tech industry and the goal, of course, as we were talking about with kind of the general positive nature of tech coverage is to say, you know, you get that those positive stories from anywhere else. But you know, the podcast is really where you come to for a critical perspective on this industry to maybe get you to think about the companies in it and the technologies in, in a bit of a different way. And so for me, when I think about what to cover on the show and what to talk about, you know, part of it is motivated by my own interests You know, the stories that I think are interesting, the topics I think are interesting and then I want to have a conversation about and then the other bit of it is is also you know just what is kind of popular at the moment, what are people talking about, what maybe needs a bit of a pushback? So if there’s something happening in the news like recently with the Apple Vision Pro headset, we did an episode on that because it felt like it was something that was necessary to discuss, but also you know, we’re in this kind of broader hype cycle at the moment about generative AI technologies like ChatGPT and so I’ve done a number of episodes since the beginning of the year, kind of giving people a bit of a critical perspective on those technologies and on this kind of moment that we’re in with all the hype around AI, you know, to to try to ensure that people have a bit of a different perspective and idea on that and why it’s being driven right now rather than, you know, just kind of buying into what the CEO’s will want us to believe about AI. So I guess those are a few of the different things that kind of shape how we think about it. 00:35:27 Domen Savič / Citizen D It’s very interesting to compare notes or to try to think because we on this show try to do something similar for exactly the same reasons. Try to offer some type of counter narrative or maybe even open up a discussion on certain issues that are very streamlined, if you’re reading the local general press, but since we’re coming to the end of the episode, I just have one more topic to discuss with you. So we usually give a few advice to the listeners in terms of what are some of the counter tactics on the personal, on political on, on regional, on yeah, family level, even when we’re talking or when we’re discussing, let’s say, the future of transport and the current developments in the field, is there something that that can be done from from a personal perspective or is everything based just on hopefully good political decision making that that won’t take too many pages out of the out of the Silicon Valley playbook? 00:36:36 Paris Marx Yeah, I definitely think that there are things that people can do as individuals, you know, kind of, especially when that means kind of doing things collectively as well, right. So I think that as individuals, we need to be able to look at these technologies and what’s coming from the tech industry and to really question these narratives. Makes sense, right? And I think ultimately that means when we see these stories about technology in the industry, we ask who really benefits if this is kind of the future that is being sold to us. If this is the future that actually arrives, and I think that very clearly, if we look below the PR and the marketing that comes from these things we can see that, you know, in many cases these futures are not actually going to be beneficial for the vast majority of regular people in society and are just going to keep kind of the wealth flowing up to these billionaires and whatnot, I also find it’s great to kind of just have conversations with people that I know about technology. You know, if you say that your listeners are a bit more critical on these things and you know maybe have a bit of a different perspective than what would just be regularly in the media you know my family members and my friends are always asking me about technology. When they see things and what my opinion is on it, because they know that I have a bit of a different opinion and so we always discuss those things and you know, I find that those conversations are really fruitful, right. And I think that the final thing I would say on that point is that, you know, we can’t just rely on the political system in order to kind of make these changes while we would certainly want to see the political system get more critical, that does actually require the public to also be more critical as well, right? And to have kind of an active power or collective voice to be able to push the government to do something like that. But I think as well we also have the power to push back against these technologies kind of on an individual level when we’re collectively criticizing them. And I think that, you know, I point to examples like the Metaverse for example, where this was supposed to be the big future of meta and Facebook and people just thought it was a joke, and now you don’t hear very much about it. Cryptocurrency was another one that was very huge for, you know, about a year and a half and while there was a lot of hype and excitement about it, there was also a lot of very critical people who were saying, you know, don’t buy into this fantasy that we’re being sold and then we can see what happened, where the prices of these crypto tokens really collapsed and a lot of people lost a lot of money as a result. And even if you go back to the kind of early 2010s you can see Google Glass, you know, the last time Google tried to sell us a bunch of smart glasses and people immediately kind of revolted against that, and that product was shut down and just becomes, became something used in enterprise spaces but not available to the regular public. So I think that there are many different ways that we can push back on the tech industry and its visions for the future. 00:39:39 Domen Savič / Citizen D I just have one more question, I was half laughing when you were talking about your family asking you for advice. Do you ever give them advice from my own experience as well, is there a situation or was there a situation when you were positive about tech and the tech industry, or are you always, like me saying: “You don’t need that”, “This is crap,”… you know, you’re probably better off without it, no matter what the topic of the discussion really is? 00:40:22 Paris Marx It’s an interesting question, right, because I would say I used to be very positive about tech and very excited about tech. You know, I used to be an Apple fanboy back in the day. I was the kind of person who always got really excited about new Apple products and, you know, especially in, you know, the first decade of the 2000s. In the early 2010s I kind of believed a lot of stuff that came out of the tech industry and was very excited about what it might mean. And I think that a lot of that started to change in the early to mid 2010s when I really started to see on one hand the impact of the share economy and services like Uber and food delivery services and things like that and what they were doing to to workers by ensuring that they didn’t have labor rights and that their their pay was being pushed down and things like that, but the other piece of it was also, you know, your listeners might remember in the mid 2010s there was a big kind of hype around automation and AI and the idea that robots were going to take all our jobs and there were gonna be no more truck drivers or taxi drivers and robots, we’re going to make our coffees and all this kind of stuff, right? And people were wondering what jobs we were gonna do as humans and that really didn’t happen, right? We didn’t have that elimination of work that all these people in the tech industry were saying that we were gonna have and all these people in the media were saying we were going to have and what actually happened was once again, these technologies were implemented in such a way as to reduce the power of workers and to increase the power. And so that was a really kind of eye opening moment for me because I did actually believe that, you know, a bunch of jobs were going to be automated and I was concerned about what that was going to mean for people and then when I saw that didn’t happen, that made me look at these technologies and the industry itself in a very different way and to really think a lot more critically about what they were proposing and why they constantly have these different cycles where they’re pushing new technologies at us. And it’s not because they are really looking to transform society and are really looking to roll out these technologies to make everyone’s life better. It’s just because it benefits them from a financial perspective every few years, have a new, have a new technology that gets hyped up, which means a bunch of companies see their valuations rise which means that the venture capitalists who invested in them can cash out and make money back on their investments. And then it all collapses and then you know a new cycle starts again. And this is just how the industry works and so that was a really kind of eye opening moment for me. 00:43:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D A perfect a perfect ending to to this episode. Thank you so much, Paris, for the book and for your work, but also for sitting down with us and having this discussion. This was Citizen D podcast, we’ll see each other next month. Best of luck going forward and talk to you soon. 00:43:28 Paris Marx Thanks so much. Citizen D advice: Think of a car as a problem, not as a solution Reevaluate the role of tech journalism in a society Study the past to understand the future More information: Science for the People: Vehicles of Extraction – article How Corporate America Created Car Culture—And What We Can Do To Change It – article The Internet Is Broken. How Do We Fix It? – essay You’ve Got Luddites All Wrong – article   About the podcast: Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

We sat down with Philip Di Salvo, a researcher in the field of whistle-blowing, investigative journalism, internet surveillance and the relationship between journalism and hacking to address the issues related to technology regulation, keeping the artificial intelligence under human control, media framing of these topics and the possible way forward. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Media and Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. As a freelance journalist, Philip is a contributor to the Italian version of Wired where he writes about media, Internet, technology, and culture. His fields of interests include digital whistleblowing, media censorship, digital journalism, and the impact of new technologies on information. Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:10 Domen Savič / Citizen D Welcome everybody. It’s the 17th of May 2023, but you’re listening to this episode of Citizen D podcast on the 15th of June 2023. With us today is Phillip Di Salvo, a researcher in the field of whistle-blowing, investigative journalism, Internet surveillance and the relationship between journalism and hacking. Welcome. 00:00:33 Philip Di Salvo Thanks a lot for having me. It’s a pleasure to be with you today. 00:00:37 Domen Savič / Citizen D Before we start with surveillance capitalism, mass media whistle-blowers, and all of the other topics we’ll address in this episode of Citizen D podcast, I’d like to hear your opening statement about the role of of journalism in the information society and in surveillance capitalism – how do you see it differing from, let’s say the analogue offline societies we used to live in in the past? 00:01:10 Philip Di Salvo Well, I think the role of the media and the role of journalism at large in this discussion is about power. So the role of journalism in all these debates and in this overall context of digitization, datafication and the growing application of digital technologies in society is still the one of trying to re-balance power, and in this sense I don’t think it is particularly different than how it used to be before the Internet or before anything digital. So in those regards I think the role is still the one of making those in power accountable and in shedding light on how power happens on how power is applied in society. And I think the digitalization paradoxically has made the role of power even more insidious, and sometimes even more invisible. So in this sense, I believe that the role of journalism is so much more important now than it probably used to be before. 00:02:26 Domen Savič / Citizen D Now when you when you talk about power, I remember going back, let’s say twenty years in the early 2000s, we used to hear these, I’m gonna say fairy tales, about the democratic potential of technologies, about the participatory nature of the Internet, of I’ll go back and say web blogs, but other publishing platforms as well… Who has the power in today’s information society, and why do we constantly fail to deliver this notion of democratic technology that will enable everybody to have the power or to be in power? 00:03:10 Philip Di Salvo Well, if we look at what the Internet is today, I’m afraid most of those things that we used to believe in the early 2000s and even before in the 90s didn’t materialize. They didn’t materialize because the technology is somehow bad or because the technology is used in in bad ways. They didn’t materialize because of a specific economical political asset that has become mostly hegemonic on how the Internet functions today, and I know we will discuss surveillance capitalism after this in our conversation, but what we have today is the precise outcome of a series of things that have been. And I would set aside it to be as such, so the Internet didn’t evolve naturally in being such a centralized, commercialized place because it follows some natural events or it followed some natural ways or directions that were inevitable. It became this because the drivers of that asset have won, so the Internet wasn’t supposed to be necessarily a place of a deeply commercialization commercialization. It wasn’t supposed to be a place where surveillance is the dominant business model and the dominant power balance online, it did become this because commercial drivers, commercial companies and money maker players have exploited the Internet in a direction that was effective, and we cannot say that the Internet doesn’t work effectively today – it does, it definitely does, but with consequences that have become increasingly more visible and impactful on the lives of everyone who is on the Internet, and I think what we should do today in 2023 is trying to revitalize some of these discussions and trying to see what are the spaces and what are the potential alternatives to build something different. There are days where I’m particularly pessimistic, and I still think, and probably I think that this is no longer possible, so that it is almost totally utopian to imagine alternatives to the status quo we are into. But I think actually this is one of the good days, so I am a bit optimistic and I think what we need to do before we start thinking about how to do that, we need really to start thinking about how to make space for, for different ideas and then how we build them. It is a different story, and it’s even more complicated, but what we need to do from the very beginning, from scratch, is trying to make space, which means getting out of the mindset that sometimes make our imagination very difficult to even, you know, proven. Imagine something different and is a sort of realism, I would say, quoting Mark Fisher, that referred this to capitalism realism. We think there is a form of realism also when we think about how the Internet functions today, and that’s precisely what we should start to challenge, because once you open space for imagine an alternative. Then you make space for it and then you can really start a discussion which is technical, practical and political on how to build alternatives. 00:07:25 Domen Savič / Citizen D And you, you’ve mentioned that we are constantly having these debates and that you know we are basically or almost like spinning spinning in a circle related or when we are discussing the democratic potential of technologies about the openness of space and so forth. But do you feel that or do you think that with every circle around the sun when we are debating these things the circles are getting smaller and more, let’s say inevitable or more without any possible alternative outcome that will or that could, as you said, open spaces and create these alternative realities? 00:08:12 Philip Di Salvo I think we recently saw that something different is possible in Italy, my home country because, well, it has become an international case. So I’m pretty sure the listeners will be aware of it, but Italy has been the first country to try to regulate how artificial intelligence operate and that happened because the Italian Data Protection Authority opened an investigation into open AI and how ChatGPT is functioning. How ChatGPT has been developed and how data about Italians has been gathered in order to build the machine so that has been really the first attempt by a political authority of any sort to intervene in how artificial intelligence is being developed today, and that’s interesting on many levels. It’s interesting on the level of data justice because it opened a discussion about how data is being treated when it comes to the creation of artificial intelligence and at the same time, it has been a direct interval tension into how a technology and highly impactful technologies being developed today. I have nothing against open AI, I think they’re building something great. I think they’re doing excellent work, but we cannot allow to happen something that has happened with the Internet at large 10 years ago, so we cannot allow companies to drive this discussion completely. We cannot allow them to make their own rules live by them and force everybody else to adopt. Not because this is eminently wrong, but because this position doesn’t work and we have seen it with social media. We have seen it with other technologies and other actors in this discussion, so I think we have now a decade long experience in how not to drive these discussions and how not to drive these debates. So the fact that the Italian Data protection authority in Italy is not one of the countries really at the core of this, I mean it’s not the US, it’s not the UK, it’s Italy. But the fact that someone raised a hand and said well, wait a second, you’re building something interesting, no one is denying this. This is potentially great, but how are you doing it and how are you applying this to people? So I think there was an absolutely good sign and this is potentially also a sign that it is possible to have a say in this discussion. It is possible to decide what we want to do and what we don’t want to do. And if I see this also in what has happened last week with the artificial intelligence act on the European level that is, trying at least to give some limitations and some, you know, clear rules to what cannot be done with artificial intelligence. If I see these two things together, I still think probably, and this is also because this is one of the good days where I’m optimistic, that something can be done. So I think the important thing is not thinking that nothing can be done. Something can always be done, and I really think that what happened in Italy with with open AI is a sign of the way forward is a sign that States have a say in these discussions and like it or not, we have to rely on these systems. We have to rely on regulation and I think it’s it’s it’s healthy that this has happened at this moment when when ChatGPT is being developed, but it’s not dominant in a sense that you cannot live without it. So it’s very interesting that the intervention has happened now because it will be applied by others and potentially this can be a new driver of this debate and a new driver of how artificial intelligence will be developed from now on so that I think is a direction for a different imagination around around these technologies. 00:13:17 Domen Savič / Citizen D And when you were talking about, let’s say state regulation or regulatory models that are addressing not just GPT, but artificial intelligence and let’s say global technology – how do you see the difference between regulatory attempts by let’s say states or countries within the European Union, or even more precisely, on the on the West side of the European Union and some same or similar attempts that are now being in place in in let’s say more the eastern part of the world like China and others. So I have a I have an anecdote I usually bring up when when we’re discussing regulatory models and let’s say self regulation of of the industry Is that I was attending an international conference in Kotor and we were discussing this was back in 2016… And we were discussing this issue of Facebook and self-regulation versus regulation right and the members of the conference that were coming from, let’s say the more eastern part of of the Europe were absolutely shocked to suggest that the state should or could regulate this systems because back then, in those countries, Facebook was still a was still a platform of expression that wasn’t wasn’t controlled by the government, while the Members from let’s say, Italy, France, Germany, UK were absolutely, you know, focused on regulatory models, saying that you know, self regulation doesn’t work, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know what he’s doing, and you know the state should really put the put, put its foot down. So I would like to hear your thoughts on these different perceptions of of regulatory models and maybe to maybe counterpoint the current state in which these big tech giants or big tech intermediaries found themselves in, where you can see that you know they’ve lost quite a lot of goodwill that was that was present with the people, with the regulators, with, with politicians, you know, 5-10 years ago and are now basically the bad guy or the baddest, the baddest of guys in in this debate. 00:15:52 Philip Di Salvo Well, I’m not a regulation expert, but I think we can tell that self regulation doesn’t work when it’s applied to technology and we we see it clearly if we look back to anything that happened with social media in the recent years. 2016 has been an interesting year for many reasons in in politics, in international affairs and also in technology and we have seen there more clearly than in other instances how leaving companies making the rules and deciding how to walk it’s not a good way of addressing these issues so I believe there is the need of having clear rules where companies can operate as we have rules for many other fields. I mean, basically every other economic field that has rules set up has been decided by public bodies, so I think that should also be the same for technology of course, because otherwise we are simply relying on assumptions that companies are eminently good, they know what innovation is and they know how to deliver, which which I think it’s fundamentally wrong and it’s it’s visible, I would say. So yes, we need, we need rules decided by public bodies and at the same time we need clear rules for avoiding problems and we also need to avoid that… I mean, I don’t like the term, but it works in in the context of the sentence, we need to also make sure that innovation can somehow be created. So again, I think that what the European Parliament has as the leader so far when it comes to regulating artificial intelligence, it is good because it starts. From from a good principle, I mean the AI act is based on a risk scenarios approach and consequently also technologies are labeled on the basis of the risks which I think is a good way of putting on black and white what the dangers are when it comes to artificial intelligence and at the same time living space for other good things to be developed. So generally speaking, I think that’s a good that’s a good approach and I’m glad to see that Europe is going in that direction. But of course we need to see how the draft of the regulation will be then discussed and what the final outcome of it will be, but I think that’s a good approach and we we are seeing for instance a clear position against facial recognition, a clear position against the most abusive uses of artificial intelligence in public spaces, which I think it’s brilliant so far. Then we will see what the outcome is … so that will be my general comment on how regulation should be should be put in place, but at the same time, we shouldn’t forget that it’s really a case by case discussion here. And again, I’m not an expert, but I doubt that there are principles and ways of regulating technology that apply at the same time, for each and every technology we can discuss. So I think when it comes to digital technologies that have impacts in society like AI this risk based approach is definitely a good a good idea, but I cannot answer your question when it comes to other contacts because I’m not completely familiar with them. 00:20:00 Domen Savič / Citizen D But looking at looking at the role of of an individual user or of a citizen or of a consumer, right, if you take a step back and look at, let’s say the GDPR legal frame or the power or the importance of an individual user that takes care of its rights and data and yeah, other instances in in the information society. So how would you, how would you interpret or how would you explain? You know the change that has apparently the AI act doesn’t pay particular attention to the to the individual, but turns its regulatory flashlight towards technology and towards these AI systems that are that are in place. Do you see that as a learning moment for the regulators, did they realize that, you know, we cannot put too much emphasis on on the end user, but have to think more broadly, what what do you think was or how do you how do you see it those difference? 00:21:22 Philip Di Salvo Generally speaking, I think that we had for too long these discussions based on on individual decisions like around the 2013 when when the Snowden revelations were published. I remember that one of the leading frames in which the discussion was constructed was kind of pointing fingers again the users and said like, well, you have given all this information to Facebook and the others, so you cannot complain etc etc etc. We have been feeding the machine for years, but it’s an extremely limited way of of framing the discussions. I mean it’s public knowledge that while we willingly and explicitly tell social media about ourselves, it is just the tip of the iceberg of what this companies can know about us by simply getting data from data brokers or acquiring information from the offline world and merging it together with the online world. The way in which the digital economy works is way more rhythmic than how it is usually described. So yes, I post stuff on Instagram about myself, but the information that Meta can have about me comes from so many sources… it has been documented how Facebook, for instance, is capable of profiling non users of Facebook on the basis of what the company can get from from, from its own users. So I think what we came to learn about all these dynamics definitely is a sign that discussing this only on the individual level doesn’t work, and of course there are steps that each and every of us can do to mitigate the consequences of this state of things, but I think we cannot, and this goes beyond regulation. We cannot look at this only on this way. Because I think all these arguments are based on an understanding of digital technology that it’s… I think stuck in time. It’s really about how we used to think about the digital at the beginning of it… now it is so difficult because it is so powerful. It is so interconnected with basically everything we do that we need to inevitably look at it in a more systemic way. So again, I don’t know how to put this in regulatory frames, but when it comes to discussion and awareness about what is happening. I think it is important to constantly focus on these issues on a collective way and we see this clearly, for instance with, with privacy and privacy is definitely one of the most concerned issues in these discussions. But to most people, I think privacy is something obscure, is something that really Is sought as regarding their inner selves and not as a collective justice issue. So that’s why, for instance, I really like the data justice concept, which is a good way of framing these problems in terms that are, I think, less obscure and more connected to the lives of people. In practical terms, so we have social justice outside the Internet in the way in which we are treated. In a way in which we are framing the ways in which we are kind of playing a role in society or having a say in society, and that should be the same basis on the Internet as well. We should definitely look at these issues as justice issues. So to go back to my initial example when when the Data Protection authority in Italy addressed open AI and ChatGPT, I think that was a quintessential data, just this discussion and of course, it was based on on on privacy. It was based on how personal data have been used, but it’s a justice issue at large, it is about deciding what others can do with ourselves. It is about putting a limit to what companies can do with our identities, with our expressions, with what we, what we have been putting on the Internet. So far, so it is a justice issue and in such is absolutely a collective issue and I think that the evolution of these debates in the last 10 years, if I look back again on on the Snowden revelation than we are and where we are now, it has definitely evolved in a positive way. So I won’t be surprised if all we have just discussed also is implemented in our policies and regulations are now drafted. 00:27:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D Since you mentioned Snowden I’d like to move on to the next topic of the role or the journalistic, let’s say not sector, but the journalists in the surveillance capitalism and their their need to protect, their sources, their own person – identities and work, and so on. There are some instances of, let’s say, journalists being hacked, being targeted by by spyware and other types of of malware. That are, you know, sort of questioning the whole personal responsibility angle like you already mentioned, Facebook, Meta, other tech giants are are gathering information about us from many different places and they’re they’re using it themselves or they’re selling it to the highest bidder. And in that regard, this notion of, let’s say, personal responsibility of digital literacy, of digital skills, of everything that, let’s say, the European Union as well, is now pushing to the front line of this digitalization can be put under question in terms that – is this enough or are we by shifting the responsibility again to an individual user to a journalist? Are we still prolonging or enacting this total avoidance of responsibility from the industry, from actors in this field that are actually doing these, yeah, spying activities? 00:29:09 Philip Di Salvo Well, I think what is crucial here is the notion of the black box and in most instances digital technologies are black boxes in terms that they are obscure and we know very little about them and about how they, how they work – and we see these with algorithms, we see this with artificial intelligence, again we seeing it with the with the surveillance market. For instance, so when when you face something like that and this is why at the beginning I was mentioning power to be obscure in the digital digital area, you clearly see that there is a power issue there. So if something is allowed to operate without being accountable I think it’s an abuse of power in in general terms and in those regards, journalism is needed in order to shed light on on these systems and to open the black boxes, as is often said and whistle-blowers and other sources have been crucial for this, because when you don’t have access. To these systems, when you don’t have ways of gaining access, you need to rely on others who have access and decide to share information with the journalist or with the public. So when it comes to investigating technology, I think that whistle-blowers have been playing a crucial part. Especially when it comes to big tech companies, one of my recent articles is about with the blowers coming from big tech companies and the kind of invisibility they help to shed light on. But as you were mentioning—relying on whistle-blowers, if you are an investigative reporters in this context and in this digital scenario where surveillance is, is rampant, it’s it’s extremely dangerous. And because the surveillance practices that are out there for governments but increasingly also for other actors are numerous.. In 2021, the Pegasus investigation really shed light on the ultimate nightmare scenario in these discussions, because spyware and the most advanced instances of spyware technology really jeopardize any discussion around information security. Any discussion around around encryption, I don’t want to go into the technical side of things, but they basically make any effort, any technical effort in security, obsolete. If a spyware is capable of being infected on my on my device without me making any mistake simply by a remote action. So this is where we are – We are in a situation where journalists can be put under surveillance with absolutely no scrutiny, with absolutely no way of being found out. And it is also part partly connected to how the Internet functions. The Internet is full of bugs, is full of vulnerabilities. It’s full of loopholes that can be exploited by others, and the ways in which these can happen. Is frequently in the hands of those who are capable of using surveillance against actors like journalists, activists, human rights defenders, and the public, what journalists can do in this discussion is only mitigating the risks. And, of course, not every journalist is exposed to the same risks as someone doing national security level investigation, but all people, including journalists, are exposed to some of these risks – it’s just that the threat modeling is different, but in principles of the risks are the same. And this is really a scenario where the individual also really left really left alone because the surveillance market is even more insidious than other black boxes is absolutely not regulated in a proper way, and you can also shed light on one company as it happened with NSO and Pegasus. But it’s just one piece of a very broader puzzle. I think regulation on surveillance is limited and it should really be systemic and it should really—I mean that’s my view and it should really state that certain technology shouldn’t be developed in the first place because there is no way of using them without creating them and spyware is definitely in this area, and most people will argue that we need them for conducting investigations, we need them for law enforcement. And I can agree on on a certain level that this is true. I mean, they can make a difference in certain scenarios in certain investigations, but I’m inclined of being in favor of this use only if a clear regulation if a clear set of rules is there because otherwise we have seen way too much how that is a slippery slope and you start by allowing the use of these things for certain situations and then they become normalized. Just because the technology is there, so if you want to go in that direction, we would we check and somehow agree we need a broad solid clear set of rules of what cannot be done. But again here it’s where I’m particularly pessimistic. Even if you have rules, then it’s very difficult to control the market and the producers of surveillance technologies have been very effective in avoiding regulations and in finding ways of making business anyway, so we are really in an open sea where journalists and others are left, are left alone and it’s an open battles. Progress has been done, but we are still far away from a situation where we can feel we can feel safe and this cannot be solved with technology only. I mean, we cannot continue to say that journalists need to protect themselves with encryption, full stop, that that’s not enough. 00:36:13 Domen Savič / Citizen D And speaking of journalists and encryption and privacy in surveillance capitalism, there’s also one issue, and it pertains to Italy as well, So we might find some new connections – it the geopolitical debate between the Chinese tech making its way into Europe and into into the US, there’s been quite a few debates, arguments, even legal propositions on both sides of of the Atlantic Ocean. Regarding the ban of Huawei of ZT, of Hikvision, of other Chinese giants and at the same time it was underlined by the realization that you know you, you literally cannot survive without the Chinese tech being present on on different levels in in the West and in the US so on one side you have the cold hard silicon of Chinese technology being installed in The West and on the other hand, you have these legal proposals, the regulation that you know, tries to ban it or tries to stave off its influence in our parts of the world. So how do you see that developing in the in the future? And do you think banning or limiting almost creating like this alternate splinter net is an effective solution to the problem? 00:37:59 Philip Di Salvo It’s interesting question. Well, I think overall when you can refer to our technology by saying it’s Chinese or it’s Russian, and then that’s always an easy argument for pretending that the problem it’s only in China or in countries where democracy is not protected or not, or not existing and that’s a very limited We’ve seen it with with TikTok as well – I mean with the US authority that is being very concerned with TikTok because TikTok is Chinese and they don’t have the same level of preoccupation when it comes to other companies which are either US based or Western that do pretty much the same business model. One starting point of the discussion and then of course, buying surveillance technology from a surveillance state like China is concerning in double ways for the impacts that the technology can have outside of China and from the kind of economical political implications of that technology that is implemented in the systems themselves Again, I’m not entirely sure that banning completely this technologies on the basis of where they are developed is the right way because you can buy surveillance cameras from China, but you can buy them from various other countries and buy them in in Western country, you can buy them in in Israel, you can buy them from all over the world, you can buy them from Italy – Italy is an excellent producer of surveillance technologies as we know. So I don’t think we should frame the discussion only around geopolitical terms because that limits also the understanding of the implication of the world of the whole situation. I think we should really focus on the technologies themselves and the specifications that they carry and the uses that can be done. I think that is that is definitely the way the way forward and then I agree that the geopolitical traits of certain producers are more concerning than others, but when it comes to the technology itself, I don’t see that huge difference, probably in a way in which than they are applied in my home city of Como. In Italy, there has been an implementation of facial recognition systems – they were pushed by Huawei itself because they were producing the cameras and they were approaching the municipality in trying to get their attention and for the implications that facial recognition has on people. I think that if the camera is Chinese or if the camera is Italian it doesn’t really make a difference in the end, although the geopolitical implications and the political, economical elements of a Chinese surveillance cameras are clear, I think. When it comes to the adoption and the use and the harms you can create, there is not such a huge difference if the camera is Chinese or whether the camera is Italian in the end. 00:41:49 Domen Savič / Citizen D Yes, I I would agree, although and this is sort of the final topic for today the, the issue of representing or getting the political response. In particular, let’s say instances or issues within the surveillance, capitalism might be in some cases, at least in my opinion, easier if there is an almost like a nationalistic, nationalistic approach added to the issue. Right? Nobody worries about the surveillance capitalism. Everybody worries about surveillance, or politicians are usually worrying about surveillance capitalism coming from, let’s say, China or other tricky country, to say to say the least. So how would you or how do you as as a journalist when when addressing these issues in in your articles, in your investigative pieces, how do you get about tagging the relevant the relevant parties in, in, in a, in a discussion or when addressing a certain problem is there? Is there a like a blueprint or is there something that sort of helps you with overcoming the current type of the issue and then really take a deep dive into into a problem without being too, I’m going to say sensationalistic, but also without being too cheap or too superficial. 00:43:26 Philip Di Salvo Well, I think what is crucial is to always frame these discussions as things that relate to the real world, because too frequently when we discuss digital technologies or artificial intelligence and the impacts they can have, the discussion is conducted as if all these things operate outside of the world. So artificial intelligence is artificial, the Internet is digital. It doesn’t have an impact on on, on the reality it doesn’t have an impact on on society. It’s not walking among people, which is incredibly misleading, and it’s incredibly dangerous because for years it has obscured any potential critical discussion. So the strategy, I think for journalists is to always connect struggles around digital issues, which struggles with with other social or political cases that are that are happening. That’s why again data justice is such a powerful framework, is such a powerful way of addressing privacy and surveillance and algorithmic discrimination, for instance. So I think for way too long technology journalism, if you want to call it this way has been interpreted as as a technical as also our consumer electronics oriented field of reporting while it was political at the core. So I think that’s the golden rule that we should live by, and that’s that’s the approach that journalists need to have even when they address the most abstract and the most you know, distant issues that we can think of – even quantum computing is a political issue to me, algorithm profiling is a political issue, surveillance, of course, is a political issue, social media regulation is a political issue and etc. And we should also constantly look at the most direct ways in which humans are involved in this in these topics. That’s why, among all the great reporting that I’ve read about open AI, the Billy Perrigo story on the Kenyan workers employed as moderators for helping the machine to learn things and now they have been exploited and they’re horrible working conditions that have been forced. I think there was one of the most interesting and revealing pieces of reporting I’ve read about about ChatGPT because all these issues otherwise are left unreported. They’re left unnoticed and they’re easily forgotten. So I think considering technologies as political, considering the real physical world as the place where technology happens is the starting point because if you move from there you can have a real social political discussions around around these things. And secondly, look at how humans are involved, because when we talk about facial recognition, yes, we are discussing computer vision, but we are discussing discrimination that is applied to certain humans. And if we discuss artificial intelligence and how it works, we also need to take into account that humans are involved and moderators are of course, the most exposed groups out there and you can continue this way relating to every technology we are discussing. That’s also an environmental issue, for instance. So we should always look and frame these topics in this way in order to make them more connected to the lives of people and more connected to social justice, political and profoundly also human stories that are involved. 00:47:46 Domen Savič / Citizen D Perfect time to end this episode of of Citizen D. Thank you Phillip for dropping by and best of luck with your future endeavors. 00:47:55 Philip Di Salvo Thanks for all the invitation. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you today. Citizen D advice: Rethink technology through lenses of human rights Media framing of issues matters Surveillance capitalism surpasses east-west politics More information: “Leaking Black Boxes: Whistleblowing and Big Tech Invisibility” – paper “AI Errors and the Profiling of Humans: Mapping the Debate in European News Media“ – report “’We Have to act Like our Devices are Already Infected’: Investigative Journalists and Internet Surveillance” – paper Recent interview with Meredith Whittaker at the Wired festival in Italy (video – in English) – interview About the podcast: Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!