Tea.

Thanks so much, Emma. You're making me, feel bad about the fact that I rarely blog anymore. I think like a lot of people, I've, I've been sucked into, other forms of media. So, first of all, I just wanna say how thrilled I am that we've made it through twelve minutes of discussion so far, and no one said the f word. So I'm really grateful for that. But despite the fact that we will not be using the forbidden term, I'll be talking about misinformation, disinformation. This really is a talk about information quality. It is a talk about what happens when information online can lead someone to decide to, quote, unquote, self investigate, a pedophilia ring in the nonexistent basement of a nearby pizza parlor, because what we say and do online can have real consequences. And depending on who you listen to, it's possible that these consequences can include swaying elections, whether in The US, whether the referendum in The UK, whether in Brazil. And you're probably assuming that since I'm here from MIT, MIT, where my colleagues do things like invent biological limbs or invent really interesting ways to print buildings, that I have a fantastic technological solution to this problem, and I'm gonna get you all on board with it. And instead, I'm gonna use something much more powerful, which is history. So don't all cheer at once. I know that we're huge history fans here, and I I wanna be very clear. I wanna use a specific moment in journalism history, and it is probably not the one you think you're waiting for. Because I am not someone who has a lot of nostalgia for that moment between World War two and Vietnam, sort of the golden age that ends up being celebrated a a lot in institutions like this one, because I actually think that moment in journalism was, first of all, a product of a very specific economic moment in time. It's really a moment at which the advertising industry is so concentrated that we have so few voices speaking to the audience through broadcast media. They control an enormous amount of economic power, and it's a moment that was not particularly good for lots of people whose voices were not represented in the media. Yes. It was great that there was a coherent, that's the way it was. Here is the newscast. We all agree in the facts, but it was a really lousy time to be a person of color, to be queer, to be female, to be marginalized in any sort of way because you simply weren't represented in those dialogues. And what we have now in our media is a moment that is much, much more diverse. In many ways, it's much, much more empowering. It is a moment where people can try to figure out how to raise their voices, how to have influence in public dialogues. But it's also a moment that is really confusing because it's very hard to find a single narrative. And, in fact, what we have is a constant war of narratives going back and forth. And so to go back in history and help us think about this period of time, I wanna go way further back. And I wanna go back to Ben Franklin. And Franklin is the sort of guy that we enjoy at a place like MIT. Multitalented, but at the end of the day, pretty much a scientist and an engineer. You probably remember him for the the key on the kite. Actually, what he got his most scientific honor for was for the lightning rod. And by the way, there's still people researching lightning rods. There's actually a great paper that sort of demonstrates Franklin was wrong in one of his great debates. He was really fond of pointy lightning rods. People have now discovered that, like, rounded tip lightning rods do better. But literally, like, we didn't figure this out until, like, five years ago. So the guy is still part of really hot scientific debates, which is kinda cool when you think about it. But the thing is what Ben actually did day to day for the vast majority of his life, the job that he had for most of his career was as postmaster. He starts as postmaster in Philadelphia in 1737. He actually holds on to this job until 1774 when he finally is postmaster of the colonies, and he gets fired. And he gets fired in part because the British figure out that he's a dangerous revolutionary who should not be trusted. And one of the ways they figure this out is that the way that he actually sends his letters, and he sends lots of them, he has franking privileges. All he has to do is write on the envelope, free Ben Franklin, and it goes for free. And instead, for years, he writes, be free Franklin, which you think might sort of tip people off that this guy was trying to overthrow the government, but in fact, the British let him get away with it for a very, very long time. And the thing is Ben was a hustler. He is not only the postmaster, he's a publisher. And this is a really valuable pairing of things. As postmaster, there's all sorts of stuff you can do. You can send your your mail for free. You've got all sorts of patronage jobs, and he gives them to pretty much everyone in his family. But as a publisher, you have a much greater power. So one of the big things that's happening in the colonies is that people are printing newspapers, lots and lots of them. They're enormously popular, and and they're getting distributed all around the country. And the problem is if you write something that pisses off the postmaster, the postmaster does not carry your mail. And so one of the tricky things in being a publisher is you have to have a good enough relationship with your distribution provider that you can actually reach an audience. What Franklin does is something that's both very, very good for freedom of speech and very very good for his business. He says, I don't care. Say whatever you want. I will carry it all at the same rate. And this carries through. You basically end up with a neutral public sphere of print. And if you think about this, this is really different from how we generally theorize about the public sphere. People who talk about the public sphere talk about Habermas. They talk about European coffee houses where the wealthy elite come together and they converse over bad coffee, and that's how public decisions are being made. And that's not actually how it happened in our country. Our country was freaking huge even in the colonial era. We needed a very different sort of public sphere. We needed some place that using eighteenth century technology could support a conversation that included people in Boston and in Charleston, which were separated by many days travel. And what we ended up with was a surprisingly powerful and surprisingly neutral public sphere of letters. It was made out of print. It was made out of personal letters, and Franklin had a lot to do with it. But the guy who really did it is this guy, Benjamin Rush. He comes up. He's sort of a generation younger than Franklin. He's a physician. He's one of the the first major physicians in the colonies. He's also in Philadelphia. He passes the craziest law you have never heard of in 1792. It's called the Post Office Act. It's insane. It basically determines what we think of today as the free press. So the Post Office Act does a couple of things. It basically embodies something that's already in place. In the press in Britain, in France, there's this notion of caution money. You have to have money to protect yourself against future lawsuit. And what this means is that even if you have the license to run a printing press, you need to have millions of dollars to protect yourself from a future libel suit. And in The US, caution money doesn't get in. You don't have to have that requirement to have a press. But you still have to try to figure out how you can get distribution, and this is where the Post Office Act kicks in. The first thing it does is it makes personal mail really expensive. So sending a letter back and forth, that's very, very costly. It's roughly 10 times as costly as receiving a newspaper. So you end up with newspapers representing 85% of the volume and the weight of the mail, and it represents about 15% of the actual revenue of it. So this is a massive government subsidy to let us all read each other's words via newspapers. In fact, this subsidy is so serious that if you are a broke person in 1800, the way you send the letter home is you go out, you buy a newspaper, you take a pin, and you put pinpricks under each word that you wanna send home to mom. And then you send the newspaper home because the newspaper plus the newspaper postage is so much cheaper than sending a letter. So that's crazy. But the really crazy thing is the exchange copy. The exchange copy is totally insane. The exchange copy basically says if you are a newspaper, you can send newspapers for free subsidized by the post office to any other newspaper out there. And so most newspapers at this time are literally cutting and pasting. They're basically reading all the other newspapers. They're just grabbing them. Our interpretation of copyright law is pretty loose at this moment in time. So here's the thing. By 1840, the average American newspaper receives 4,300 exchange copies per year. You're running the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. You are getting a bundle of 10 newspapers every single day, and that is what you are turning into the local press that you are sort of distributing further out. This is the Internet. This is an Internet of print. It is open. It is mostly neutral. There's the whole Alien Sedition Acts. We don't really have to get into that, but this is fully US government subsidized. In fact, by 1831, three quarters of the civilians who work for the US government work for the post office. There are 400 post offices in my home state of Massachusetts. There's only 351 towns. There's 87 post offices throughout the colonies. Basically, The United States in 1830 is a large postal system with a very small army and administrative body attached to it. And the reason for this, let's be really clear, this is intentional. This is deeply conscience. What our founders are trying to do is create a space in which people scattered all over this vast land can actually have a conversation about the future of democracy. And let's also be completely honest about this. They are not actually creating an inclusive conversation. They are dealing with white landed literate men, which is a very small subset. But what ends up happening is that in creating this neutral space, other people figure out how to use it. And we start having the abolitionist press. We start having the black press. We start having the suffragette press. We start having lots of liberation movements that try to figure out how to use this. And so the point that I'm trying to make here is not that I wanna return to 1800 any more than I wanna return to 1950. They they both have very, very serious problems. Real quick problems on the press of 1800 filled with advertising. Like 90% of what's in a newspaper is advertising. You look back, a lot of these newspapers are called the advertiser. Some of the best things is is trying to see, like, what George Washington was trying to sell. It's basically Craigslist. Right? I mean, that's essentially what these things are with a small amount of content within them. Fiercely partisan. Insanely partisan. In a very literal sense, political parties in The United States emerge from newspapers rather than the other way around. It's not that it's the party press. It's the press party. You're reading Alexander Hamilton's newspaper, and then you become a federalist in the process of sort of being persuaded by it. Filled with fake news. Ben Franklin, my hero that I'm sort of doing this, Franklin decides that a great way to make money and sell newspapers is to start the slander that Indians are working with the British to scalp columnists. This is bullshit. It's not actually happening, but it's an amazing way of selling newspapers as well as supporting revolution. Sam Adams, the beer guy, notorious propagandist, actually gets the people of Massachusetts to burn down the governor's house. And you read some of the histories of the time, and they say things like jacked up on 90 proof, you know, propaganda from Sam Adams. The young man went to to to rip the whole thing down. So you don't want the eighteen hundreds press. I sure as hell don't want the nineteen fifties press. I don't want a press without women, without black people, without queer people, etcetera. My point instead is that we get to choose how our media works. We get to choose individually and collectively how our media works. And we did in the nineteen fifties as well. Right? We had a very strong firewall between the business side of the press and the investigative side of the press, which made it possible to go after targets of power, whether they were corporate power, whether they were political power. We had clumsily the fairness doctrine, which tried in a fairly heavy handed and not always successful way to ensure that we had multiple political opinions on the air. It's hard to imagine the partisan nature of broadcasting under the fairness doctrine. Maybe we're better without it, but the point is people were trying to have the press operate in a certain way. And when it didn't work the way we wanted, when Newt Minow stood up and described television as a vast wasteland, people responded by saying, yeah. He's maybe got a point there. This isn't so hot. Maybe we actually need public broadcasting as a way to respond to this. So we're in a slightly different moment at the moment, but we're at a moment where it'd be really nice to ask some questions about the media we have and whether it's the media we want. And there's something really interesting going on when the former head of user growth for Facebook tells us that he doesn't let his kids use that shit. And that's a direct quote when he talks about social media. Now, by the way, let's talk about how much bravery is involved with leaving a company with over a billion dollars in your pocket and then deciding that you're gonna talk about how your product is addictive and dangerous and then not actually going and doing anything about it. But we're now at this point where smart money seems to say social media, it's bad for our health. It's destroying journalism. It's easily manipulated whether it's by the Russians or whether it's by extremists, and, ultimately, it's bad for democracy. And I gotta tell you this. I'm a scholar, and my response to this is, is it? We actually don't know the answer to most of these questions. We're starting to have some interesting speculation about this. But I I actually work at one of the world's great research labs. The actual photo of my lab, it's my my grad student, Lamabaza, who's working on our new project on hate speech. We don't know the answers to most of these questions. We really don't. There's a lot of work being done out there right now trying to figure out whether social media is personally bad for us, whether that dopamine feedback loop, ends up being damaging in the long run. We know that professional journalism is going through a very hard time. It's not clear that the Internet is actually the sole problem. And and, by the way, this might actually be a lovely moment for journalism even if it is a lousy moment for the press as business. As far as these questions of manipulation, absolutely. Social media is highly manipulable. What we don't know is if it is manipulating us. And we also don't know whether it's good for democracy because, in fact, democracy is a pretty creative and evolving thing that manages to adapt to the highly partisan press of the eighteen hundreds, that manages to adapt to a much more centralized press of the nineteen fifties. So, literally, like, in my lab, we are spending time trying to figure out things like, are people successfully manipulating votes via social media? And how do these dynamics work? And if you wanted to counter it without countering speech and we are in really, really early stages of this. And so one of the first things I wanna say to you is that I think there's a couple of really lame responses to this current moment. And the lamest of those responses, in my opinion, is the, well, all the smart people got off of Facebook. You know? Of course, I deleted my account years ago. Screw you guys. I mean, like, look, there's 2,200,000,000 people using this platform. In much of the world, Facebook is the Internet. I've spent a decent amount of time recently in Myanmar. When the Internet came online in Myanmar, Facebook was in its ascendancy. There is no Google. Like, people don't know what it is. You wanna search for something, you search on Facebook. You're a publisher, you publish on Facebook. Whether Facebook gets this right or wrong matters enormously to people in that country. And because that tool has been used to mobilize the genocide of the Rohingya, this matters a ton. And you know what? It matters for a lot of people in this country too because it's easy for Jaren or it's easy for me to get off of Facebook, but for a lot of people, that is their interconnectivity. That is their relationship with their friends and their family. And simply telling people to shut it off and walk away and be smart about it is deeply irresponsible. The other response that I think is less lame, a little lame, is let's just get better at telling people what facts are. This doesn't work. We know this doesn't work. We've had really high quality fact checking exercises in The US press for more than a decade now. We also have probably the least fact based administration than we've ever had in history. If fact checking forced people in public office to speak in truthful ways, we would not be dealing with the situations we are now. People have great ability to choose the information that they wanna interact with. The fact that the Internet gives us greater choice is incredible power. Fact checking alone is not gonna save us. This is what we need to start doing. We actually have to ask that question that Ben Franklin and Ben Rush asked, which is what do we want media to do for us in a democracy? And people have asked this question before. There's good ways to answer this question. My buddy, Mike Schudson, teaches at the Columbia Journalism School. He wrote an essay about ten years ago. It's really worth your time. It's called six or seven things news can do for democracy. And what's interesting about it is that Mike points out things that we are used to the news doing. We're very used to this idea that the news is gonna inform us, that we might investigate stories that we otherwise don't know about, that we might contextualize the news with some analysis. But then there's other ones that are more surprising. You can use the news to provide a public forum for discussion. You can use the news to help you emphasize with people who you don't belong to their group. You can pay attention to people who've been displaced in the California fires, and you can feel empathy through good reporting. Media can mobilize you and put you in the streets. We don't do this much in The US. We generally view that as being off limits of what the news does. It's actually a much more European model, but it can do it. And one of the things that Mike suggests in all of this is maybe you can't do all these things at the same time. You may not be able to inform and investigate and analyze and mobilize in the same place. You may end up hurting your credibility on one side of it, but this is why we want a big, vast, diverse press. Now I'm really lazy. Right? I would prefer not to have to write my own essays. I'd rather just steal my friends. They're better than I am. So I wrote something this year called six or seven things social media can do for democracy, and I wanna argue the same argument. Not one platform can do all of these things. Not one platform does all of these things. But these are things you could do with social media. A lot of people are using social media for their news. It's informing people. Social media is very powerful as an amplifier. If you have a a viewpoint or perspective that isn't getting expressed in the media, social media can be a great way to get it out there. Social media can be tremendous to help you connect people who don't know each other. I am a type one insulin dependent diabetic. It's really helpful for me to find other people who are handling their disease and connect with them on a platform like Facebook. It's another reason why I'm not quitting the platform. Social media is great at mobilization. This is what happened in the Arab Spring to good and to bad ends. It's very powerful for building things like the Women's March. It is terrible on platforms like Facebook at something like deliberation, but that's because that's not what the platform's designed for. There are platforms that do a really nice job for deliberation. It was a beautiful platform called Parlio that my friend, Waelgo Niem, came up with that's much better at this. Right now, social media doesn't try to increase diversity. It says, hey, I already know Alex. I already know Susan. Now I know them online. What if social media said, hey. We don't know each other. We don't know each other. Let me introduce you. Let's make some connections. Let's find people you disagree with and interact with them online. Finally, our corporate social media doesn't do this, but we can govern these spaces. And in fact, there's some good work being done about it in certain spaces. So here, we're starting to get a vision of what we might actually want out of social media. And in a better oh, it is playing. Oh, how nice. So this is something that we developed over at the Media Lab. This is called Gobo. And this is a really simple project. It's a client that lets you look at Twitter and Facebook, and it gives you control. It gives you sliders over those sorts of algorithms that Facebook uses to control who you see and who you don't see. You wanna be seeing more women in your feed. I know that I would like to be seeing more women in your feed. You can control the gender ratio. We have a mute all men button. We have a mute brands button. We have sliders around rudeness. We have sliders around virality. The whole idea about this is that social media should be personal, but in a genuine sense. You should have control over how you want this to appear to you. And you should have the control, not Facebook, over who you'd like to be listening to and who you'd like to be paying attention to. Social media needs to be plural. The main problem with Facebook, the main problem with YouTube is that they are giant de facto monopolies. If we had a more diverse ecosystem, it would be slightly more okay that Facebook is as awful as it has been demonstrated to be lately because we would then be able to step off and go to another platform and not have to exit the space entirely. Because we shouldn't have to exit the entire space entirely. But the good news is that people are finding ways to do different social media with different purposes. I don't use Instagram for political discussion. I don't use LinkedIn for political discussion. LinkedIn turns out a lot of the time to be a surprisingly nontoxic place in part because people are mostly using it to try to find their next job, which helps restrain them from being complete and utter jerks. You can have LinkedIn has all the same tools that Facebook does. It really does. It just has really different social norms associated with it. We could build spaces that are designed to help us talk to one another. In fact, Wael Ghonim, who was one of the architects of the Arab Spring, he's literally the guy who put together the Facebook group, we are all Had Saeed, that got people out into the streets into Tahrir Square. After the revolution, after the military government took over, he said, jeez. Facebook is a terrible place to discuss the future of Egypt. I'm gonna build a better platform, and it's gonna have rules. You're gonna be polite. And if you're not polite, I'm gonna throw you off, and we're gonna invite people. And it's gonna be a much smaller conversation. It's not gonna be 2,000,000,000 people. It's gonna be a conversation of people who are leaders and working together, and it did okay. It got bought by CORE. It's a different model to figure out how we do these things. I really would love to see public media, public broadcasters think about creating public social networks with the very specific purpose of forcing us to have conversations that we aren't otherwise having. Conversations where we cope with our diversity, where we cope with our political differences, where we end up bridging between different people and different cultures. And finally, I really think we could build social media that engages in participatory governance. A lot of people trash Reddit. There's certainly a lot of terrible stuff that happens out there. There's also some of the healthiest online communities, and they're the ones that are very well and carefully moderated. Our science has 7,000 moderators trying to keep the conversation online. And you can only be a moderator if you are a scientist with a PhD, which means not me. But they actually try very, very hard to make sure that this is a real conversation about research that is grounded in public peer reviewed research, and god bless them for it. And we should have more spaces that are actively embracing that governance piece of it. And here is the thing. If we are not designing the future of social media, I will tell you who is. It's the Nazis. And it's happening because they are getting kicked off existing platforms. And these are screenshots from the last forty eight hours on Gab. I was not looking hard. Right? It really wasn't hard to find, you know, anti Islamic hate speech about not selling you this gun unless you eat bacon. This stuff is out there in plain sight, and it is being built as an alternative, quote, unquote, free speech space. Right now, much of the creativity about what the future of social media looks like is coming from the ethnonationalist right. The other group that is incredibly active in figuring out what the future of public spheres look like is the crypto right, who are basically saying everything on the blockchain will give you tokens for participation. The best thing we have as far as a public spirited vision at the moment is this idea that maybe we should regulate corporate power a little tiny bit, and that's not good enough. We actually need a public goods vision of social media. We actually need to sort of open our minds to this idea that we could create digital media spaces that we wanted to be in and that would make us healthier as a public and as a democracy. And in closing, I wanna come back to something that Ben Franklin said, which is well done is better than well said. There are a lot of people these days who are going out there and critiquing these platforms in one fashion or another. That's a great first step, but we have to build it. We actually have to commit to building new spaces that make us better as a people and let us have the conversations that we wanna have. So I just wanna thank you for listening to me. I hope we have a great conversation today. I really appreciate it. I also just because I'm an academic, I have to put in footnotes. If you want the whole argument about why the post office is the Internet of the 1800s, these two books are a really good start with it. I hope you'll check them out. Thank you so much for listening.