Speaker 1: We all know about the problems of fake news and
Speaker 1: the Internet, and many people are worried about it. But
Speaker 1: is it possible that the Internet, on balance is better
Speaker 1: for the dissemination of truth. What does this have to
Speaker 1: do with Barbar Streisand's house, or Soviet agriculture, or Kenyan
Speaker 1: elections or Twitter revolutions. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagleman.
Speaker 1: I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in
Speaker 1: these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe
Speaker 1: to understand why and how our lives look the way
Speaker 1: they do. Today's episode is about truth and misinformation and
Speaker 1: the Internet. So in the last episode I discussed the
Speaker 1: issue of truth, which has been at the center of
Speaker 1: the dialogue about politics, about social media, about journalism for
Speaker 1: many years now. And in twenty sixteen, a panel of
Speaker 1: experts was interviewed and they said one of the grand
Speaker 1: challenges was the issue of truth on the Internet. So
Speaker 1: that's what we're going to talk about today. And twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen also happened to be the year that the term
Speaker 1: post truth was officially introduced to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Speaker 1: So what does post truth mean? It was defined as
Speaker 1: quote denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential
Speaker 1: in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Now,
Speaker 1: the fact that this got enenthrined by lexicographers at no
Speaker 1: less of publication than the Oxford English Dictionary seemed to
Speaker 1: clinch the argument that this was indeed a new phenomenon.
Speaker 1: But to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history,
Speaker 1: this is a little strange. It is, to my mind,
Speaker 1: the strangest romanticization to believe, for a second, that people
Speaker 1: in earlier generations, in earlier centuries millennia, did not predicate
Speaker 1: their actions on emotion and personal belief. Now, in the
Speaker 1: last episode, I mentioned just a smattering of events that
Speaker 1: defined the twentieth century, like Nazism in Germany and communism
Speaker 1: in China and the USSR and fascism in Italy, and
Speaker 1: the massacre of the Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda
Speaker 1: and the Kame Rouge in Cambodia and the rape of
Speaker 1: Nanking by the Japanese and on and on. And the
Speaker 1: thing to notice is that this was all in the
Speaker 1: last century, mere decades ago, And this was all pre
Speaker 1: internet drop of fuel for these movements, which collectively killed
Speaker 1: probably one hundred million people. Every drop of the fuel
Speaker 1: was not driven by facts, but instead emotion and personal belief.
Speaker 1: You don't get a Hutu to pick up a machete
Speaker 1: against a Tutsi based on provable assertions. You get him
Speaker 1: all worked up over emotionality. You don't get a Chinese
Speaker 1: student to murder her professor in the Cultural Revolution with
Speaker 1: some factual argument. You do this by convincing her that
Speaker 1: this little red book is the greatest thing she can
Speaker 1: aspire to. You don't ever get a young man to
Speaker 1: murder his neighbor based on a provable scientific point, but
Speaker 1: instead by emotion. So it's not only an illusion, but
Speaker 1: it's a dellusion to believe that people used to operate
Speaker 1: on the facts. Although I'm pointing to the twentieth century
Speaker 1: to remind us that this was all happening just yesterday,
Speaker 1: we only need to take a ten thousand foot view
Speaker 1: of the centuries before to see how driven the world
Speaker 1: has always been by emotion and personal belief over facts.
Speaker 1: Just consider the European Wars of Religion, also known as
Speaker 1: the Wars of Reformation, in which through the sixteenth and
Speaker 1: seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants murdered one another.
Speaker 1: In just one piece of that war, called the Thirty
Speaker 1: Years War. It's estimated that eight million people died. Now,
Speaker 1: about two thirds of the world is not Christian, so
Speaker 1: most people can't even see the difference between Catholics and
Speaker 1: Protestants and those millions of deaths, all that human suffering.
Speaker 1: It wasn't based on facts and truth, it was based
Speaker 1: on emotion and personal belief. This is similar to the
Speaker 1: bloody geopolitically defining wars between the Shia and the Sunni Muslims.
Speaker 1: If you don't know the difference between Shia and Sunni,
Speaker 1: it stems from a debate over succession after the prophet
Speaker 1: Mohammad died. Some felt the leadership torch should pass two
Speaker 1: qualified candidates, and others thought it should only go through
Speaker 1: Mohammad's bloodline. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is Sunni, Iran
Speaker 1: is Shia, and they can't get along. And these competing
Speaker 1: views of succession have been in conflict for fourteen hundred
Speaker 1: years and provides a lot of the explosive fuel in
Speaker 1: the Middle East. You've got Syrian civil war over these lines.
Speaker 1: You've got Iraq fracturing over this divide. You've got growing
Speaker 1: fissures in a number of Gulf states. So if you
Speaker 1: happen to be taking up arms in this battle between
Speaker 1: Sunni and Shia, perhaps you come up with a story
Speaker 1: to tell yourself. This is based in fact and not
Speaker 1: base based on personal beliefs. There's a factual and correct
Speaker 1: answer to the question of succession from a prophet, and
Speaker 1: it's mysterious to you why other people can't see it
Speaker 1: as clearly as you can, and for that matter, why
Speaker 1: the overwhelming majority of the world doesn't even understand what
Speaker 1: you're arguing about. Now. I'm not intending to criticize anyone's
Speaker 1: beliefs here, but I am only intending to point out
Speaker 1: that it is hallucinatory to believe that society used to
Speaker 1: operate on facts, and then starting in twenty sixteen or so,
Speaker 1: we stopped basing our behaviors on facts and sunk into
Speaker 1: personal beliefs. This idea is so goofy. In fact, I
Speaker 1: saw the Economist tweet some years ago on how we're
Speaker 1: entering a post truth world, and a commenter to that
Speaker 1: tweet wrote, why didn't you see this coming years ago?
Speaker 1: And he cited what he thought were the obvious main causes.
Speaker 1: He said, low basic education and lousy media. So his
Speaker 1: argument was that given bad education and bad media, how
Speaker 1: could we expect otherwise but to evolve into a cauldron
Speaker 1: of disinformation. But of course, our system and reach of
Speaker 1: education is better than it has ever been in the
Speaker 1: history of the world. Around the entire globe, we've seen
Speaker 1: increased government spending on education. We've seen increased access to
Speaker 1: education for girls and women. We've seen improved quality of
Speaker 1: education everywhere. I look these stats up recently. In eighteen twenty,
Speaker 1: only seventeen percent of the population got even a basic education.
Speaker 1: That's less than one in five people. By twenty twenty
Speaker 1: the number was over eighty six percent, so it's almost
Speaker 1: nine out of ten people worldwide. This is an incredible
Speaker 1: change in two hundred years, and it just keeps going up.
Speaker 1: And this is mostly for reasons of societies realizing the
Speaker 1: importance of education, but also the helps enormously because it
Speaker 1: translates to access. So anyway education has improved. It's the
Speaker 1: number of kids in school, how long they stay in school,
Speaker 1: the quality of the schooling, all that has been going up,
Speaker 1: and this, of course is directly correlated with reduced poverty
Speaker 1: and increased economic growth for a country and increased social stability.
Speaker 1: If you're interested in these sorts of statistics, by the way,
Speaker 1: you should read The Better Angels of Our Nature by
Speaker 1: my colleague Stephen Pinker, who for some reason is one
Speaker 1: of the few people making the clear statistical argument about
Speaker 1: the massive improvements in the world. So let me return
Speaker 1: to this guy on Twitter who said we should have
Speaker 1: seen post truth coming in twenty sixteen because of our
Speaker 1: terrible education. His argument clearly means something emotional to him,
Speaker 1: but he doesn't have a leg to stand on factually.
Speaker 1: And his second point was about lousy media. Now us
Speaker 1: that in the last episode, So I'm not going to
Speaker 1: spend too much time with it here except to say
Speaker 1: that people seem to hold an illusion that media used
Speaker 1: to be very good. Even very smart people say things
Speaker 1: to me like, well, back in my day there were
Speaker 1: only two or three news stations and we got all
Speaker 1: our news in the same place. But as I argued
Speaker 1: in great detail in the last episode, the real story
Speaker 1: is much more nuanced. People have always lived in their
Speaker 1: echo chambers and gotten their opinions from their friends and
Speaker 1: their neighbors and their family and their culture. And of course,
Speaker 1: aside from the news stations, there were newspapers of every stripe,
Speaker 1: and magazines of any political orientation, and pamphlets that would
Speaker 1: show up in your mailbox that could have the most
Speaker 1: extreme views imaginable. So there's nothing new about receiving misinformation
Speaker 1: or disinformation. So remember that if we're asking the question
Speaker 1: of whether something has degree rated about truthtelling, really try
Speaker 1: to view history through this lens of the question, did
Speaker 1: people used to tell the truth more than they do now? Now,
Speaker 1: what I've set the table with so far is that
Speaker 1: there's nothing new about not telling the truth, and about
Speaker 1: swimming in the pool of our own beliefs and functioning
Speaker 1: in our own echo chambers and taking up arms against
Speaker 1: our neighbors who believe differently. But I want to be
Speaker 1: super clear about something. By me pointing out that there's
Speaker 1: nothing new about misinformation, please don't take that as me
Speaker 1: saying that we shouldn't be fighting misinformation. We should fight
Speaker 1: it tooth and nail. We should constantly improve our society
Speaker 1: that way. That is our obligation to try to maximize truthtelling.
Speaker 1: But the reason for my historical rant is that it
Speaker 1: helps us sharpen our focus on the question of this episode,
Speaker 1: which is how much does the Internet have to do
Speaker 1: with disinformation? To what degree is that the Internet's fault
Speaker 1: that we see all sorts of misinformation and disinformation that
Speaker 1: is predicated on emotional and personal belief rather than facts.
Speaker 1: Has the Internet made things worse? The main arguments I
Speaker 1: hear about how the Internet has made things worse seem
Speaker 1: to depend on issues that have always been with us. First,
Speaker 1: people complain that on the Internet, a story gets magnified
Speaker 1: based more on the reaction it provokes than its truth value.
Speaker 1: The idea is that misinformation often comes packaged with clickbaity
Speaker 1: headlines in sensational stories that are designed to grab attention.
Speaker 1: This can make it more likely that people will share
Speaker 1: misinformation even if they're not sure that it's true, or
Speaker 1: perhaps they don't even believe that it's true. But again,
Speaker 1: note that this has always been the case. That's how
Speaker 1: we get which trials in the past because it may
Speaker 1: or may not be true, but I heard so and
Speaker 1: SO say it, and it's a story too good to repeat,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to pass that on. That's how we
Speaker 1: get McCarthyism, where people are blacklisted based on accusations that
Speaker 1: they are Communist sympathizers. That's how the Soviet Union gets
Speaker 1: tens of millions of political executions because of the story
Speaker 1: that so and so is not aligned with the party.
Speaker 1: Perhaps no meaningful evidence is presented, but the accusation is
Speaker 1: clickbaity and designed to get local attention, and it does. So.
Speaker 1: Let me give a different example of how the Internet
Speaker 1: can actually make truth a little harder to see, and
Speaker 1: that has to do with the issue of sock puppeting.
Speaker 1: This is setting up, let's say, a fake account to
Speaker 1: pretend that you're on the other side of some issue. Now,
Speaker 1: usually there's not a lot that you can do with this,
Speaker 1: but sometimes it can have a big effect. For example,
Speaker 1: when the United States withdrew all its troops from Afghanistan
Speaker 1: in twenty and twenty one, the Taliban just leveraged basic
Speaker 1: social media one to secure their takeover, which is on
Speaker 1: social media. They pretended to be the Allied forces withdrawing
Speaker 1: and they gave instructions to the population like, hey, everyone
Speaker 1: should evacuate this town now there's about to be a
Speaker 1: lot of bombing. And this way, when the Taliban rolled
Speaker 1: into these towns, there were many fewer people there to
Speaker 1: stand up and provide resistance. So what the Taliban had
Speaker 1: done is called sock puppeting. In other words, they had
Speaker 1: put their hand inside of the puppet and pretended to
Speaker 1: be somebody else doing the speaking. So, not surprisingly, truth
Speaker 1: can get complex on social media because social media is
Speaker 1: not always the right tool for the job for that.
Speaker 1: So these are the general kinds of concerns that scholars
Speaker 1: have about the Internet. But I want to present an
Speaker 1: argument that has gotten essentially zero airtime, which is whether
Speaker 1: it is a possibility that the Internet has made things better? Now,
Speaker 1: how you might say, could the Internet have made truth
Speaker 1: seeking better? Well, here's how it all has to do
Speaker 1: with information flow. For an analogy, think about arteries. For
Speaker 1: maximal health, you need unobstructed blood flow in your arteries,
Speaker 1: and in exactly this way, societies need the free flow
Speaker 1: of information. Things that block that flow can be fatal
Speaker 1: to a nation. And I'm going to give you several examples.
Speaker 1: So first, political censorship. This has been a familiar specter
Speaker 1: throughout the last century, with state approved news outlets ruling
Speaker 1: the press and airwaves in places like Romania or Cuba,
Speaker 1: or China or Iraq, among lots of others. So the
Speaker 1: official newspapers of the former Soviet Union had a complete
Speaker 1: lock on the news, and foreign newspapers were allowed only
Speaker 1: if they were published by communist parties with the approval
Speaker 1: of the Soviets, and censorship did not end with news stories.
Speaker 1: Copying machines were tightly controlled by the Soviets to prevent
Speaker 1: dissemination of self published books or magazines. Even weather reports
Speaker 1: were censored. In Nikolai Chichesku's Romania, certain temperature extremes translated
Speaker 1: into time off of work, so the weather reports were
Speaker 1: doctored so that these levels were not reached, and it
Speaker 1: was the same in the Soviet Union. Stalin doctored weather
Speaker 1: forecasts if they suggested that the sun would not shine
Speaker 1: on the day of celebration for the labor movement, and
Speaker 1: censorship reaches into every aspect of nations under control of dictators.
Speaker 1: In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, maps of Baghdad were not allowed
Speaker 1: to be printed lest some enemy of the state get
Speaker 1: a hold of a map and then they could decipher
Speaker 1: the street names for easy navigation. And the weather reports
Speaker 1: there weren't just doctored they were locked away as classified information.
Speaker 1: And I'll give you another example which demonstrates how not
Speaker 1: new some of our problems are. People are worried about
Speaker 1: deep fake photographs, which I'll talk about next week. Well,
Speaker 1: the Soviets were doing this over a century ago. They
Speaker 1: had a not so secret fondness for rewriting their national
Speaker 1: story on the fly, so they routinely edited photographs to
Speaker 1: remove people who had fallen out of favor with the party.
Speaker 1: I'll give you a famous example. There's a photo which
Speaker 1: proudly captures Lenin and other Soviet leaders in Red Square
Speaker 1: and Moscow in nineteen nineteen. So you can see Lenin
Speaker 1: and standing on his left, you see Leon Trotsky, and
Speaker 1: on Lenin's right is a man named Kamenev, and there's
Speaker 1: a bearded man two rows in front of Trotsky, a
Speaker 1: Bolshevik leader from Georgia. Okay, well, if you look at
Speaker 1: a release of this photo some years later, the official
Speaker 1: Soviet version of the photo, you see that after Leon
Speaker 1: Trotsky fell from party favor, he was airbrushed out of
Speaker 1: the photo. In the revised photograph, there's just an empty
Speaker 1: space where he used to be, and kamon f on
Speaker 1: the right has disappeared as well, and the bearded Bolshevik
Speaker 1: leader never existed in the photo either. I'll put this
Speaker 1: photo the before and after version on my website so
Speaker 1: you can check it out at eagleman dot com slash podcast,
Speaker 1: and I'll also show another photograph. There's Joseph Stalin and
Speaker 1: there's a man who is left named Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov
Speaker 1: was a ruthless, awful guy. He was the head of
Speaker 1: the secret police, the NKVD, and he spent years brutally
Speaker 1: purging enemies of the state, typically without evidence and often
Speaker 1: for personal reasons. But then in nineteen forty, Yezhov earned
Speaker 1: the same treatment that he'd been handing out. He was
Speaker 1: stripped and beaten and shot in the basement of an
Speaker 1: NKVD station. So Stalin wrapped up loose ends by deleting
Speaker 1: Yezhov from history by airbrushing him out of the photo. Now,
Speaker 1: not surprisingly, governments that are infamous for blocking information flow
Speaker 1: are the same ones we think of when we hear
Speaker 1: of purges and shortages and repression and civil and political
Speaker 1: rights and isolation. Censorship rarely works well for regimes, and
Speaker 1: perhaps this is because a population that's fed doctor messages
Speaker 1: never truly falls for the trick. A friend of mine
Speaker 1: who was raised in the Soviet Union tells me that
Speaker 1: everyone held two separate things in their heads, what they
Speaker 1: were supposed to say to each other and what they
Speaker 1: actually believed. So there are lots of complaints that people
Speaker 1: have about the Internet, but the way to really understand
Speaker 1: why it's better for the truth is to deeply understand
Speaker 1: the disaster of centralized command of the truth. Censorship can
Speaker 1: involve more than books and photos, and whether the tyranny
Speaker 1: of information control can actually bring down a nation. I
Speaker 1: mentioned in the previous episode about a Soviet scientist named
Speaker 1: Trophym Lyashenko. He was an agronomist who proposed these stunning
Speaker 1: new scientific theories about how to grow wheat better and faster,
Speaker 1: and he was highly favored by Stalin and so Laishenko
Speaker 1: rose up through the ranks of power. But it turns
Speaker 1: out his theories were scientifically fraudulent, but that didn't stop
Speaker 1: him from gaining impressive influence in the party, and by
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties he steered the agricultural program for the
Speaker 1: entire USSR. Now there was a grave problem with this
Speaker 1: centralized command, which is that the USSR spanned thirteen time
Speaker 1: zones and an astounding variety of soils and climates and
Speaker 1: local knowledge, and so applied to a landscape that size,
Speaker 1: this central rule setting was disastrous for wheat production. Local
Speaker 1: farmers knew better how to care for their crops, but
Speaker 1: they were disallowed the freedom, and scientists who disagreed with
Speaker 1: Lyashenko found themselves disbarred from their positions, and several agronomists
Speaker 1: were executed. Part of the downfall of the USSR can
Speaker 1: be traced to this centralization of agricultural decisions. It ruined
Speaker 1: the economy, and it crippled confidence in the new system.
Speaker 1: So the lesson for history is that a centralized tyranny
Speaker 1: rarely works as well as local information and nested feedback loops,
Speaker 1: and this is where the Internet shines. Historically, the more
Speaker 1: successful strategy has always been to confront free speech with
Speaker 1: free speech, and the Internet allows that in a natural way.
Speaker 1: It democratizes the flow of information by giving open access
Speaker 1: to the newspapers of the world, the photographers of every nation,
Speaker 1: the bloggers of every political stripe. Now, I talked last
Speaker 1: week about how in any conflict, people will post the
Speaker 1: worst videos from the other side and try to imply
Speaker 1: that that is representative of the opposing population so they
Speaker 1: can whip up support. And that's an issue to always
Speaker 1: keep an eye on. That's a genuine problem. But even
Speaker 1: that is far better than the other problem, which is censorship.
Speaker 1: As soon as you give one side, any side, a
Speaker 1: total lockdown on the news, you have a much deeper
Speaker 1: level of problem. So coming back to a democratic Internet
Speaker 1: that has open to everyone, of course you're going to
Speaker 1: get some postings that are full of doctoring and dishonesty,
Speaker 1: while others strive for independence and impartiality. But in the
Speaker 1: end all are available for the end user to sift
Speaker 1: through for reasoned consideration. It's far better than having zero
Speaker 1: choice about the story that you're fed. And beyond news sites,
Speaker 1: the simple redundancy of information online changes the censorship equation irreversibly.
Speaker 1: So just imagine Hussein trying to eradicate maps when anyone
Speaker 1: can serve satellite photos to two meter resolution. Or imagine
Speaker 1: Chichescu trying to doctor weather reports when anyone can pull
Speaker 1: up the weather of the world. Orginej. Stalin trying to
Speaker 1: delete Trotsky from photographs when the photos are mirrored on
Speaker 1: Google images, and the Internet Archive in a thousand other sites. Now,
Speaker 1: this inability to erase information from the Internet took on
Speaker 1: a name two decades ago. It's called the Streisand Effect.
Speaker 1: This happened because in two thousand and three, a guy
Speaker 1: snapped an aerial photograph of Barbara Streisand's home in Malibu,
Speaker 1: and the guy posted the photo on his website for
Speaker 1: privacy reasons. Streisand wanted it off the net, and when
Speaker 1: he wouldn't comply, she sued him. But her actions had
Speaker 1: a drastic, unintended consequence. Until that moment, almost no one
Speaker 1: knew where her home was, and by trying to suppress
Speaker 1: the information, she promptly drove over a million visitors to
Speaker 1: his site. So observing this Streisand incident in two thousand
Speaker 1: and three, internet watchers realized they were seeing the new
Speaker 1: rules of the game in action. Trying to suppress information
Speaker 1: on the Web only magnifies it. And this new inability
Speaker 1: to hide information found perhaps its highest expression in wiki Leaks,
Speaker 1: which was launched in two thousand and six by the
Speaker 1: Australian journalist and activist Julian Assange. His mission, he said,
Speaker 1: was to open governments. The site seems like it's mostly
Speaker 1: dying now some seventeen years later. But what it did
Speaker 1: was published documents disclosed by anonymous sources, and it got
Speaker 1: to about ten million such documents. And the documents it
Speaker 1: leaked were as varied as their country is of origin.
Speaker 1: I remember when they leaked Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account.
Speaker 1: They leaked membership lists of illegal parties in the UK.
Speaker 1: They leaked internal United Nations reports and senatorial campaign documents,
Speaker 1: and oil scandals and airstrike videos. In twenty ten, WikiLeaks
Speaker 1: released eighty thousand classified documents about the war in Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: and by the end of that year it published close
Speaker 1: to four hundred thousand documents from the war in Iraq.
Speaker 1: And the thing to observe about those leaks is that
Speaker 1: they weren't impotent. Sometimes they directly fomented social change. So
Speaker 1: consider this incident in which an icelandic bank gagged the
Speaker 1: national broadcaster of Iceland from reporting on its debt default risk.
Speaker 1: A whistleblower got the info onto WikiLeaks, and Icelanders went
Speaker 1: into an uproar and that rapidly led to new legislation
Speaker 1: in their parliament ensuring media freedom. So if you care
Speaker 1: about truth. You should care about the power of the Internet,
Speaker 1: and I'll mention something else where. Getting information out leads
Speaker 1: to good things happening. So WikiLeaks published lists of blacklisted
Speaker 1: websites from the governments of Denmark and Norway, and Thailand
Speaker 1: and Australia. And in most of these cases the blacklisted
Speaker 1: sites were pornographic or violent, but it never takes long
Speaker 1: before other sites get slipped onto the list. For example,
Speaker 1: the Thailand Censorship list advertises a filter against child pornography,
Speaker 1: contained over one thousand sites that were felt to be
Speaker 1: critical of the Thai royal family, and Assaunge maintains, as
Speaker 1: many people do, that censorship approaches like Internet filtering become
Speaker 1: invariably corrupted. And another thing, the speed of information flow
Speaker 1: on the Internet allows rapid, massive democratic response. I remember
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine, when the Internet was newer,
Speaker 1: when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced he was going
Speaker 1: to shut down Parliament until March thirtieth. And what he
Speaker 1: said is that he needed time to work on a
Speaker 1: stimulus package. But a lot of people suspected he was
Speaker 1: just trying to prevent a vote of no confidence from
Speaker 1: the opposition parties. So such a vote would force an election,
Speaker 1: which is something Harper desperately wanted to avoid. So a
Speaker 1: Canadian student, unhappy about this shutdown and has perceived reasons
Speaker 1: for it, he started a Facebook group that quickly swelled
Speaker 1: to two hundred and fourteen thousand members, and it precipitated
Speaker 1: real world rallies all across Canada with crowds of thousands.
Speaker 1: And that kind of breakneck speed of messaging equates to
Speaker 1: a departure from the days of spreading the word by
Speaker 1: pamphleting or shouting from horseback. It allows the citizenry to
Speaker 1: become a rapid response democratic organism. If a bunch of
Speaker 1: individual brains happened to share an opinion, they can combine
Speaker 1: rapidly to be heard. Now, obviously, that has both pros
Speaker 1: and cons, and this is one of the plays. This
Speaker 1: is where I think the advent of the Internet does
Speaker 1: lead to a quantitative and qualitative change, because it allows
Speaker 1: crowds to pull together very quickly, sometimes frighteningly so. And
Speaker 1: sometimes giant crowds prove useful for protesting something bad. Then
Speaker 1: sometimes they provide terrifying brainless muscle. But going back to
Speaker 1: the benefits of the net, one of the biggest benefits
Speaker 1: began even when the Internet was quite young. Movements sprang
Speaker 1: up to keep governments from tampering with the democratic voting process,
Speaker 1: and this holy grail of fairness got achieved via Internet
Speaker 1: movements in which citizens leveraged live online mapping to aggregate
Speaker 1: and display activities during elections. Take, for example, the crisis
Speaker 1: mapping tool ushahidi dot com, which was originally developed when
Speaker 1: violence erupted following the disputed Kenyan presidential elections of two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight. Using Ushahidi, anyone with a cell phone
Speaker 1: could send a text message to report disturbances or defamation
Speaker 1: or vote tampering, or even simply to say that everything
Speaker 1: went well there. And so by constructing a dynamic map
Speaker 1: of the trouble spots, they could attract the world's reporters
Speaker 1: to expose the fraud. And to this day, reports from
Speaker 1: Ushahidi typically feature alongside those of full time journalists. And
Speaker 1: this is all helping to ensure that an election is
Speaker 1: as free and fair as possible. And that's a big
Speaker 1: deal because many elections all around the globe continue to
Speaker 1: be famously and unabashedly fraudulent, not in the most advanced countries,
Speaker 1: but certainly in places like Afghanistan, where elections are characterized
Speaker 1: by widespread fraud of the tallies and intimidation and ballot
Speaker 1: stuffing and people paid to vote multiple times using fake
Speaker 1: or duplicate voter cards. As it turns out, a lot
Speaker 1: of voters are scared or reluctant to discuss any fraud
Speaker 1: that they witnessed, but sending a text message is easy
Speaker 1: and so mobile crowd monitoring of elections has been a
Speaker 1: growing trend around the planet. By aggregating little bits of
Speaker 1: information from the millions of folk reporters on the ground,
Speaker 1: This method keeps governments one step more transparent then they
Speaker 1: might otherwise volunteer to be in the absence of watchful
Speaker 1: eyes and far reaching voices. And there are similar trends
Speaker 1: that publicly track journalist safety, especially those who are potentially
Speaker 1: in danger from their own governments. There's a saying in
Speaker 1: journalism that if you turn on a bright light, the
Speaker 1: roaches scatter. So with these aggregation sites, each person with
Speaker 1: a cell phone contributes just a few photons and the
Speaker 1: sum is enough to light up the country. So the
Speaker 1: argument I've made is that the Internet provides the potential
Speaker 1: to enhance democracy. But it's really important that we note
Speaker 1: that this benefit is in danger in many countries. So,
Speaker 1: for example, aligned with China's Great Wall is China's Great firewall.
Speaker 1: Chinese internet filters put blanket blocks on political statements that
Speaker 1: the government does not allow, and apparently internet users are
Speaker 1: hired to post positive observations about the government on forums
Speaker 1: and chat rooms. Now, I don't know if you were
Speaker 1: following this back in two thousand and six, but at
Speaker 1: the time, the Internet was still young and companies were
Speaker 1: still struggling to figure out who was going to ascend
Speaker 1: to the top. And Google agreed to allow China to
Speaker 1: censor search traffic because this seemed like an acceptable price
Speaker 1: for Google for the opportunity to tap into a market
Speaker 1: of four hundred million Internet use So the Chinese government
Speaker 1: in China was allowed to filter the Google search results.
Speaker 1: So what does this mean? If you search from anywhere
Speaker 1: in the world for Tienemann Square protest, you get a
Speaker 1: reasonable set of search results, But if you performed the
Speaker 1: same search inside China's borders, you would get a very
Speaker 1: different set and you would not see any of the
Speaker 1: iconic photographs of that event. Well, come back to Google
Speaker 1: in a moment. But first I want to mention how
Speaker 1: easy it has always been to demonstrate the Chinese firewall.
Speaker 1: That this has changed a little bit recently. But some
Speaker 1: years ago you could go to say buyd dot com,
Speaker 1: which is the major Chinese search engine, and you type
Speaker 1: in something like the name of your local city and
Speaker 1: you get several result returned. Now you type in something
Speaker 1: like Falloon Gong, which is a spiritualist movement on the
Speaker 1: Chinese blacklist, and you get an error message reading this
Speaker 1: web page is not available. It appears that perhaps a
Speaker 1: server has gone down on by news end. What just happened? Well,
Speaker 1: when Chinese servers detect an incoming packet with a prohibited term,
Speaker 1: they return a reset message which falsely tells the request
Speaker 1: that there was an error retrieving the page. This makes
Speaker 1: it look as though the problem is related to the
Speaker 1: requested site, and the Chinese servers then put the requesting
Speaker 1: machine's IP address on a blacklist for a few moments.
Speaker 1: So if you try entering your innocuous first search again,
Speaker 1: you'll get an error message. Now because you've been temporarily
Speaker 1: blocked out of China at least as of a few
Speaker 1: years ago. You could try this on any Chinese search
Speaker 1: engine of your choice and you'd get exactly the same result.
Speaker 1: Now let's return to Google in the Chinese market. What
Speaker 1: happened at the beginning of twenty ten was that Google's
Speaker 1: servers in China were hacked and the information was taken
Speaker 1: from different accounts, and it appeared that the hackers had
Speaker 1: a special focus on the accounts of Chinese political dissidents,
Speaker 1: and Google was pretty sure the Chinese government was behind
Speaker 1: the break in. So as a result, Google changed its
Speaker 1: mind on the topic of censorship and circumvented the Great
Speaker 1: Firewall of China by rerouting through Hong Kong, and eventually
Speaker 1: China banned Google altogether. So Google ended up surrendering a
Speaker 1: large piece of the lucrative Chinese market. But this kind
Speaker 1: of move is critical if you don't want to support
Speaker 1: government censorship. And by the way, I need to make
Speaker 1: clear that internet censorship is not limited to China. Most
Speaker 1: of the countries that impinge on Internet freedom will come
Speaker 1: as no surprise, nations like Burma and Cuba and Egypt
Speaker 1: and Iran and North Korea and Saudi Arabia and Syria
Speaker 1: and Uganda and a bunch of others. But sometimes people
Speaker 1: are a little surprised to discover that some Western countries
Speaker 1: try to get in on the action here. Some years ago,
Speaker 1: in Australia, the Australian Labor Party proposed a set of
Speaker 1: laws to censor blacklisted sites at the level of the
Speaker 1: Internet service providers. They claimed the sites they wanted to
Speaker 1: censor were involved in child pornography or terrorism. But then
Speaker 1: WikiLeaks released the list of the blacklisted sites, and the
Speaker 1: list encompassed other sites as well, some of them seemingly random.
Speaker 1: The filtering legislation didn't pass in Australia, but the fact
Speaker 1: that it had some momentum reminds us to always keep
Speaker 1: an eye on this. In other words, if you care
Speaker 1: about truth on the Internet, we need to think about
Speaker 1: more than people saying stupid stuff online. The bigger worry
Speaker 1: from a historical angle is about state control of what
Speaker 1: information you can or cannot access. And this is the
Speaker 1: beauty of a technology that seeks to network everyone's brain
Speaker 1: together and democratize things and hear everyone's voice. Obviously, some
Speaker 1: of those voices will be less useful than others, and
Speaker 1: people at the political extremes will purposefully lie and make
Speaker 1: up have truth. But it is better than Stalin or
Speaker 1: Giping or Chichescu or Hitler or Polpod or Mussolini allowing
Speaker 1: you to hear only the messages that they want you
Speaker 1: to hear and nothing else. So look, whatever side of
Speaker 1: the political spectrum you're on, just think of how you
Speaker 1: would feel if Biden or Trump got to control the
Speaker 1: news entirely during his presidency and you wouldn't be allowed
Speaker 1: to see the other side. If that sounds like a
Speaker 1: nightmare to you, then you see why I am so
Speaker 1: optimistic about this technology when we have a conversation about truth.
Speaker 1: This networking technology makes it impossible to do all the
Speaker 1: things that so many countries have enjoyed doing during the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, like controlling the news and doing historical rewrites.
Speaker 1: By aggregating citizen information, you get some different problems, like
Speaker 1: a lot of noise, but noise is typically better than
Speaker 1: an iron fist. This is why the Internet is sometimes
Speaker 1: categorized as a liberation technology. And indeed citizens everywhere find
Speaker 1: ways to drill holes in the silicone curtain. For example,
Speaker 1: from inside China, lots of young people make secure connections
Speaker 1: to a proxy server, a server outside of China, and
Speaker 1: then the filtering technologies applied on Chinese servers don't apply.
Speaker 1: So daily millions of young people in China make these
Speaker 1: connections to servers in Hong Kong and they surf X
Speaker 1: or Facebook or they use Gmail from there. The most
Speaker 1: oppressive governments will probably always try to implement strict firewalls,
Speaker 1: but this will presumably lead to a black market for
Speaker 1: home brewed satellite uplinking with which to circumvent it, like
Speaker 1: Amagino line. So retaining the capacity of the Internet to
Speaker 1: allow all viewpoints, this is something that's going to require
Speaker 1: constant vigilance for a lot of places in the world.
Speaker 1: The future is going to be a zeros and one's
Speaker 1: arm race between countries and their citizens, and like any
Speaker 1: cat and mouse game, both sides are going to adopt
Speaker 1: each other's technologies. I'll give you an example of the
Speaker 1: cat and mouse game that we saw coming into focus
Speaker 1: even a decade and a half ago. So in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmed Dinijad declared victory
Speaker 1: over his opponent MUSAVII, but the outcome was suspected of
Speaker 1: being rigged, and almost immediately the pronouncement was followed by
Speaker 1: protests in Tehran and in the Iran more broadly, and
Speaker 1: in cities around the world. Now, as you may remember,
Speaker 1: those protests quickly went bad. Paramilitary snipers on the rooftops
Speaker 1: opened fire on the crowds, and bodies began to collapse
Speaker 1: in the streets. But as quickly as things went bad,
Speaker 1: they went viral. So web surfers in every country watched
Speaker 1: instantly delivered photos and videos of attacks and murders, and
Speaker 1: protesters inside Iran used Twitter and other sites to aggregate
Speaker 1: crisis information and update situations and post links to freshly
Speaker 1: uploaded videos. Cyber dissidents took down Ahmed Dinijad's website with
Speaker 1: a denial of service attack, and a few days after
Speaker 1: after this had begun, and editorial in the Washington Times
Speaker 1: admiringly dubbed the events the Twitter revolution. Now in cat
Speaker 1: and mouse style, the government leveraged their tools too. Amadinijad
Speaker 1: replied not only by banning rallies, but more importantly by
Speaker 1: blocking cell phone transmissions and text messaging and shutting down
Speaker 1: the Internet for forty five minutes to set up filtering software.
Speaker 1: Iran presumably could have opted to take the whole country
Speaker 1: offline permanently during this time, but in the cat and
Speaker 1: mouse game, that option would cripple the government's crisis response
Speaker 1: communications as much as it would the protesters, so in
Speaker 1: the end, the protesters won the digital race in that
Speaker 1: round in Iran, broadcasting the post election oppression to a
Speaker 1: worldwide audience. But the cat and mouse countermeasures have gone
Speaker 1: on and on. After Masa Amini's death in Iran in
Speaker 1: twenty two, citizens took to social media to protest, but
Speaker 1: Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps blocked access to social media
Speaker 1: platforms and in fact shut off the Internet in parts
Speaker 1: of the country, and just in the past few months,
Speaker 1: WhatsApp and Instagram have been blocked in Iran due to
Speaker 1: protests against the government, and last year, Iran was ranked
Speaker 1: the second worst place in the world for Internet censorship,
Speaker 1: which by the way, includes not just social media, but
Speaker 1: also websites relating to health, sports, science, news, and so on,
Speaker 1: all of which should shake us out of our assumptions
Speaker 1: that the Internet is simply open and free and immune
Speaker 1: to a future of government intrusion and something to merely
Speaker 1: gripe about when someone posts something that we dislike. This
Speaker 1: reminds us that the Internet is a liberation technology and
Speaker 1: reminds us of the criticality of keeping the Web open
Speaker 1: and online. For those of us who happen to be
Speaker 1: lucky enough to live in non repressive countries, we should
Speaker 1: always take steps to keep it open and increase government transparency,
Speaker 1: even in the face of opportunities for misinformation and disinformation.
Speaker 1: I think the Internet tips the balance in favor of
Speaker 1: a better society. Censorship is increasingly difficult to pull off now.
Speaker 1: The stalins and touchescos and Husseins have to work a
Speaker 1: lot harder to try to keep information away from the populace.
Speaker 1: We're not going to have an all Trump or an
Speaker 1: all Biden controlled media. News gets out fast, and once
Speaker 1: it's out, it's hard to take back or rewrite it retrospectively.
Speaker 1: And because of the ability to ensure fair voting and
Speaker 1: shine a light on government misdeeds, the ability for regimes
Speaker 1: to keep a tight grip on the data available to
Speaker 1: its citizens is increasingly going to become a nightmare of
Speaker 1: the past now. Obviously, one of the major problems of
Speaker 1: the Internet, just like in all times with all news sources,
Speaker 1: is learning to not accept stories at face value. It
Speaker 1: goes without saying that a good education will teach children
Speaker 1: or adults the need to consider the source, to evaluate
Speaker 1: the evidence as best we can. Now, it's not surprising
Speaker 1: that the older generations are worried about what younger generations
Speaker 1: are stepping into with this technology. But I do think
Speaker 1: that because of all the emphasis on fake news and
Speaker 1: the imminence of deep fakes, which I'll talk about next week,
Speaker 1: I do think that the younger generations will actually be
Speaker 1: much better at filtering news. As far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: the older generations are the ones stuck with the illusion
Speaker 1: that if something is written and down it must be true,
Speaker 1: whereas younger kids are more skeptical. So when I talk
Speaker 1: with people young and old about truth on the Internet
Speaker 1: and how to evaluate the flood of information, I emphasize
Speaker 1: two points. First, to be critical of our own biases.
Speaker 1: We all have biases, and these can lead us to
Speaker 1: believe things that we shouldn't. So be aware of your
Speaker 1: own biases and try to be objective when evaluating information.
Speaker 1: And the second thing is to try to engage in
Speaker 1: dialogue with people you trust and who you think are
Speaker 1: smart and who are on the other side of an issue.
Speaker 1: Try to steal man the other side. If you haven't
Speaker 1: heard that term. This is the opposite of straw manning,
Speaker 1: which is a technique for misrepresenting an opponent's argument to
Speaker 1: make it easier to attack. Steal manning is a technique
Speaker 1: for strengthening an opponent's argument so you can better understand it.
Speaker 1: To steal man and argue in you need to identify
Speaker 1: the premises and the conclusion, and you need to work
Speaker 1: to understand the assumptions that underlie the argument. This allows
Speaker 1: you to try to understand the argument from your opponent's perspective.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying you have to come to a conclusion
Speaker 1: of agreeing with the other person, but this is an
Speaker 1: extremely valuable technique to say, Okay, I'm going to put
Speaker 1: myself in a totally different pair of shoes, or more exactly,
Speaker 1: in a different brain with a different world model, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to see what my assumptions are and different
Speaker 1: ways that I might believe this argument. Now, again, this
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that in the end you need to adopt
Speaker 1: that person's point of view, but I believe if you
Speaker 1: take on this intellectual habit, you'll find yourself a little
Speaker 1: more mature in your worldviews. You'll be slightly less able
Speaker 1: to say that you think some complex situation is actually
Speaker 1: really simple and hence less willing to dehumanize some other
Speaker 1: group of humans. So let's wrap up today's episode. As
Speaker 1: I mentioned last week, I got interested in this question
Speaker 1: because several colleagues called me in twenty twenty and asked
Speaker 1: if I would be on a grant with them to
Speaker 1: restore truth in the media and on the Internet. And
Speaker 1: I thought the idea was a little misguided because fundamentally
Speaker 1: it rested on a poor memory of what truth used
Speaker 1: to be, a retrospective romanticization. The key with the Internet
Speaker 1: is that there's good and bad, but on balance, it
Speaker 1: strikes me as clear that it comes out positively. So
Speaker 1: when a pundit asserts that the Internet is responsible, in
Speaker 1: part or and whole for our perceived decline into a
Speaker 1: post truth world, I interpret that that statement stems from
Speaker 1: ignorance about pre Internet history. As a history buff, I
Speaker 1: really asked myself what was the world like pre and
Speaker 1: post Internet? And I hope I've convinced you even a
Speaker 1: little bit. I hope I've reminded you about how much
Speaker 1: worse the world was pre Internet. And I hope I've
Speaker 1: convinced you even a little bit that the Internet may
Speaker 1: actually be the most important tool we've ever had for
Speaker 1: surfacing truth. Essentially, it's impossible now for a government to
Speaker 1: control the news that we are exposed to. Instead, a
Speaker 1: million flashlights on the ground will end up shedding light. Now,
Speaker 1: it goes without saying that when you have a million
Speaker 1: people swinging flashlights around, there's a challenge that we face,
Speaker 1: which is whose flashlight being? Do you believe? And obviously
Speaker 1: there are plenty of misinformants and disinformants, just like there
Speaker 1: have always been, But at least now we have the
Speaker 1: possibility of getting exposed to different points of view. And
Speaker 1: again I know that most people people will not look
Speaker 1: for different points of view, but happily it's generally impossible
Speaker 1: to not get hit in the face with different points
Speaker 1: of view, at least sometimes when you're surfing around and
Speaker 1: it might make you mad to see some other viewpoint
Speaker 1: and your best interpretation is that they are deceitful, lyars
Speaker 1: or misinformed. But at least that point of view enters
Speaker 1: your hopper and the possibility at least exists to incorporate
Speaker 1: it into your consideration. So as you can see, I'm
Speaker 1: generally optimistic about the Internet and the existence of this technology.
Speaker 1: But finally this all leads us to the next question,
Speaker 1: the next era of invention, which is what happens now
Speaker 1: that we have AI on the radar, And that is
Speaker 1: next week's episode. See you then go to eagleman dot
Speaker 1: com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Speaker 1: Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com
Speaker 1: with questions or discussion and I'll be making episodes in
Speaker 1: which I address those until next time. I'm David Eagleman
Speaker 1: and this is Inner Cosmos.