WEBVTT - Ep41 "Is there any such thing as true news?" (Truth Part 2: the Internet) 0:00:05.040 --> 0:00:07.840 We all know about the problems of fake news and 0:00:07.880 --> 0:00:11.119 the Internet, and many people are worried about it. But 0:00:11.440 --> 0:00:16.040 is it possible that the Internet, on balance is better 0:00:16.480 --> 0:00:20.159 for the dissemination of truth. What does this have to 0:00:20.200 --> 0:00:25.200 do with Barbar Streisand's house, or Soviet agriculture, or Kenyan 0:00:25.400 --> 0:00:34.080 elections or Twitter revolutions. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagleman. 0:00:34.760 --> 0:00:38.199 I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in 0:00:38.240 --> 0:00:42.040 these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe 0:00:42.080 --> 0:00:45.440 to understand why and how our lives look the way 0:00:45.479 --> 0:00:59.400 they do. Today's episode is about truth and misinformation and 0:00:59.440 --> 0:01:03.080 the Internet. So in the last episode I discussed the 0:01:03.120 --> 0:01:06.600 issue of truth, which has been at the center of 0:01:06.680 --> 0:01:11.240 the dialogue about politics, about social media, about journalism for 0:01:11.280 --> 0:01:15.000 many years now. And in twenty sixteen, a panel of 0:01:15.160 --> 0:01:18.319 experts was interviewed and they said one of the grand 0:01:18.480 --> 0:01:22.960 challenges was the issue of truth on the Internet. So 0:01:23.000 --> 0:01:25.279 that's what we're going to talk about today. And twenty 0:01:25.319 --> 0:01:28.360 sixteen also happened to be the year that the term 0:01:29.000 --> 0:01:34.000 post truth was officially introduced to the Oxford English Dictionary. 0:01:34.440 --> 0:01:37.800 So what does post truth mean? It was defined as 0:01:38.319 --> 0:01:44.679 quote denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential 0:01:45.160 --> 0:01:52.520 in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Now, 0:01:52.760 --> 0:01:57.240 the fact that this got enenthrined by lexicographers at no 0:01:57.400 --> 0:02:01.080 less of publication than the Oxford English Dictionary seemed to 0:02:01.160 --> 0:02:05.240 clinch the argument that this was indeed a new phenomenon. 0:02:06.240 --> 0:02:10.320 But to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history, 0:02:10.880 --> 0:02:13.120 this is a little strange. It is, to my mind, 0:02:13.480 --> 0:02:18.079 the strangest romanticization to believe, for a second, that people 0:02:18.120 --> 0:02:23.640 in earlier generations, in earlier centuries millennia, did not predicate 0:02:23.680 --> 0:02:28.239 their actions on emotion and personal belief. Now, in the 0:02:28.320 --> 0:02:32.160 last episode, I mentioned just a smattering of events that 0:02:32.240 --> 0:02:37.800 defined the twentieth century, like Nazism in Germany and communism 0:02:37.840 --> 0:02:41.760 in China and the USSR and fascism in Italy, and 0:02:41.800 --> 0:02:44.560 the massacre of the Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda 0:02:44.960 --> 0:02:47.880 and the Kame Rouge in Cambodia and the rape of 0:02:47.960 --> 0:02:51.160 Nanking by the Japanese and on and on. And the 0:02:51.240 --> 0:02:54.160 thing to notice is that this was all in the 0:02:54.240 --> 0:02:57.760 last century, mere decades ago, And this was all pre 0:02:58.360 --> 0:03:04.960 internet drop of fuel for these movements, which collectively killed 0:03:05.040 --> 0:03:09.959 probably one hundred million people. Every drop of the fuel 0:03:10.400 --> 0:03:16.520 was not driven by facts, but instead emotion and personal belief. 0:03:16.960 --> 0:03:19.680 You don't get a Hutu to pick up a machete 0:03:19.720 --> 0:03:24.200 against a Tutsi based on provable assertions. You get him 0:03:24.200 --> 0:03:28.520 all worked up over emotionality. You don't get a Chinese 0:03:28.520 --> 0:03:32.359 student to murder her professor in the Cultural Revolution with 0:03:32.400 --> 0:03:36.240 some factual argument. You do this by convincing her that 0:03:36.280 --> 0:03:38.800 this little red book is the greatest thing she can 0:03:38.840 --> 0:03:42.120 aspire to. You don't ever get a young man to 0:03:42.280 --> 0:03:46.080 murder his neighbor based on a provable scientific point, but 0:03:46.200 --> 0:03:52.640 instead by emotion. So it's not only an illusion, but 0:03:52.680 --> 0:03:57.560 it's a dellusion to believe that people used to operate 0:03:58.000 --> 0:04:02.280 on the facts. Although I'm pointing to the twentieth century 0:04:02.320 --> 0:04:05.000 to remind us that this was all happening just yesterday, 0:04:05.680 --> 0:04:08.560 we only need to take a ten thousand foot view 0:04:08.600 --> 0:04:12.680 of the centuries before to see how driven the world 0:04:12.760 --> 0:04:17.560 has always been by emotion and personal belief over facts. 0:04:18.240 --> 0:04:21.720 Just consider the European Wars of Religion, also known as 0:04:21.760 --> 0:04:25.760 the Wars of Reformation, in which through the sixteenth and 0:04:25.839 --> 0:04:31.520 seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants murdered one another. 0:04:32.080 --> 0:04:34.640 In just one piece of that war, called the Thirty 0:04:34.720 --> 0:04:39.920 Years War. It's estimated that eight million people died. Now, 0:04:40.080 --> 0:04:42.440 about two thirds of the world is not Christian, so 0:04:42.760 --> 0:04:46.440 most people can't even see the difference between Catholics and 0:04:46.480 --> 0:04:50.839 Protestants and those millions of deaths, all that human suffering. 0:04:50.839 --> 0:04:55.000 It wasn't based on facts and truth, it was based 0:04:55.040 --> 0:05:00.040 on emotion and personal belief. This is similar to the 0:05:00.120 --> 0:05:06.240 bloody geopolitically defining wars between the Shia and the Sunni Muslims. 0:05:06.279 --> 0:05:09.240 If you don't know the difference between Shia and Sunni, 0:05:09.640 --> 0:05:14.000 it stems from a debate over succession after the prophet 0:05:14.080 --> 0:05:18.040 Mohammad died. Some felt the leadership torch should pass two 0:05:18.120 --> 0:05:21.880 qualified candidates, and others thought it should only go through 0:05:21.960 --> 0:05:26.800 Mohammad's bloodline. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is Sunni, Iran 0:05:27.000 --> 0:05:30.120 is Shia, and they can't get along. And these competing 0:05:30.240 --> 0:05:34.800 views of succession have been in conflict for fourteen hundred 0:05:34.920 --> 0:05:38.719 years and provides a lot of the explosive fuel in 0:05:38.760 --> 0:05:42.799 the Middle East. You've got Syrian civil war over these lines. 0:05:42.839 --> 0:05:46.640 You've got Iraq fracturing over this divide. You've got growing 0:05:46.720 --> 0:05:50.000 fissures in a number of Gulf states. So if you 0:05:50.200 --> 0:05:53.320 happen to be taking up arms in this battle between 0:05:53.640 --> 0:05:57.120 Sunni and Shia, perhaps you come up with a story 0:05:57.200 --> 0:05:59.680 to tell yourself. This is based in fact and not 0:05:59.760 --> 0:06:03.400 base based on personal beliefs. There's a factual and correct 0:06:03.440 --> 0:06:07.360 answer to the question of succession from a prophet, and 0:06:07.520 --> 0:06:11.200 it's mysterious to you why other people can't see it 0:06:11.240 --> 0:06:14.240 as clearly as you can, and for that matter, why 0:06:14.279 --> 0:06:17.719 the overwhelming majority of the world doesn't even understand what 0:06:17.760 --> 0:06:21.640 you're arguing about. Now. I'm not intending to criticize anyone's 0:06:21.720 --> 0:06:24.359 beliefs here, but I am only intending to point out 0:06:24.680 --> 0:06:28.240 that it is hallucinatory to believe that society used to 0:06:28.320 --> 0:06:31.960 operate on facts, and then starting in twenty sixteen or so, 0:06:32.480 --> 0:06:36.760 we stopped basing our behaviors on facts and sunk into 0:06:36.760 --> 0:06:40.520 personal beliefs. This idea is so goofy. In fact, I 0:06:40.520 --> 0:06:43.200 saw the Economist tweet some years ago on how we're 0:06:43.360 --> 0:06:47.279 entering a post truth world, and a commenter to that 0:06:47.320 --> 0:06:50.359 tweet wrote, why didn't you see this coming years ago? 0:06:50.800 --> 0:06:53.840 And he cited what he thought were the obvious main causes. 0:06:53.880 --> 0:06:58.080 He said, low basic education and lousy media. So his 0:06:58.240 --> 0:07:02.320 argument was that given bad education and bad media, how 0:07:02.320 --> 0:07:06.880 could we expect otherwise but to evolve into a cauldron 0:07:07.120 --> 0:07:12.120 of disinformation. But of course, our system and reach of 0:07:12.280 --> 0:07:16.720 education is better than it has ever been in the 0:07:16.760 --> 0:07:20.600 history of the world. Around the entire globe, we've seen 0:07:21.120 --> 0:07:25.520 increased government spending on education. We've seen increased access to 0:07:25.600 --> 0:07:29.240 education for girls and women. We've seen improved quality of 0:07:29.360 --> 0:07:33.680 education everywhere. I look these stats up recently. In eighteen twenty, 0:07:34.120 --> 0:07:38.640 only seventeen percent of the population got even a basic education. 0:07:39.160 --> 0:07:42.680 That's less than one in five people. By twenty twenty 0:07:42.720 --> 0:07:45.520 the number was over eighty six percent, so it's almost 0:07:45.680 --> 0:07:49.520 nine out of ten people worldwide. This is an incredible 0:07:49.600 --> 0:07:52.600 change in two hundred years, and it just keeps going up. 0:07:53.240 --> 0:07:56.480 And this is mostly for reasons of societies realizing the 0:07:56.520 --> 0:08:02.560 importance of education, but also the helps enormously because it 0:08:02.680 --> 0:08:08.320 translates to access. So anyway education has improved. It's the 0:08:08.400 --> 0:08:11.080 number of kids in school, how long they stay in school, 0:08:11.120 --> 0:08:14.160 the quality of the schooling, all that has been going up, 0:08:14.760 --> 0:08:18.480 and this, of course is directly correlated with reduced poverty 0:08:18.880 --> 0:08:23.480 and increased economic growth for a country and increased social stability. 0:08:24.360 --> 0:08:26.680 If you're interested in these sorts of statistics, by the way, 0:08:26.720 --> 0:08:29.720 you should read The Better Angels of Our Nature by 0:08:29.760 --> 0:08:32.840 my colleague Stephen Pinker, who for some reason is one 0:08:32.880 --> 0:08:36.800 of the few people making the clear statistical argument about 0:08:36.800 --> 0:08:41.440 the massive improvements in the world. So let me return 0:08:41.440 --> 0:08:43.520 to this guy on Twitter who said we should have 0:08:43.640 --> 0:08:46.760 seen post truth coming in twenty sixteen because of our 0:08:46.880 --> 0:08:52.360 terrible education. His argument clearly means something emotional to him, 0:08:52.760 --> 0:08:55.560 but he doesn't have a leg to stand on factually. 0:08:56.000 --> 0:09:00.240 And his second point was about lousy media. Now us 0:09:00.320 --> 0:09:02.080 that in the last episode, So I'm not going to 0:09:02.080 --> 0:09:04.080 spend too much time with it here except to say 0:09:04.400 --> 0:09:09.000 that people seem to hold an illusion that media used 0:09:09.040 --> 0:09:12.120 to be very good. Even very smart people say things 0:09:12.120 --> 0:09:14.760 to me like, well, back in my day there were 0:09:14.800 --> 0:09:17.160 only two or three news stations and we got all 0:09:17.200 --> 0:09:19.920 our news in the same place. But as I argued 0:09:20.120 --> 0:09:23.400 in great detail in the last episode, the real story 0:09:23.520 --> 0:09:26.920 is much more nuanced. People have always lived in their 0:09:27.040 --> 0:09:30.880 echo chambers and gotten their opinions from their friends and 0:09:30.960 --> 0:09:35.079 their neighbors and their family and their culture. And of course, 0:09:35.120 --> 0:09:39.240 aside from the news stations, there were newspapers of every stripe, 0:09:39.280 --> 0:09:44.040 and magazines of any political orientation, and pamphlets that would 0:09:44.040 --> 0:09:47.120 show up in your mailbox that could have the most 0:09:47.240 --> 0:09:52.960 extreme views imaginable. So there's nothing new about receiving misinformation 0:09:53.280 --> 0:09:58.520 or disinformation. So remember that if we're asking the question 0:09:58.640 --> 0:10:03.440 of whether something has degree rated about truthtelling, really try 0:10:03.440 --> 0:10:07.760 to view history through this lens of the question, did 0:10:07.840 --> 0:10:11.600 people used to tell the truth more than they do now? Now, 0:10:11.640 --> 0:10:13.600 what I've set the table with so far is that 0:10:13.640 --> 0:10:17.600 there's nothing new about not telling the truth, and about 0:10:17.880 --> 0:10:21.199 swimming in the pool of our own beliefs and functioning 0:10:21.200 --> 0:10:24.400 in our own echo chambers and taking up arms against 0:10:24.400 --> 0:10:27.400 our neighbors who believe differently. But I want to be 0:10:27.520 --> 0:10:30.240 super clear about something. By me pointing out that there's 0:10:30.280 --> 0:10:33.960 nothing new about misinformation, please don't take that as me 0:10:34.080 --> 0:10:38.040 saying that we shouldn't be fighting misinformation. We should fight 0:10:38.080 --> 0:10:42.439 it tooth and nail. We should constantly improve our society 0:10:42.480 --> 0:10:46.800 that way. That is our obligation to try to maximize truthtelling. 0:10:47.559 --> 0:10:50.320 But the reason for my historical rant is that it 0:10:50.480 --> 0:10:53.720 helps us sharpen our focus on the question of this episode, 0:10:53.720 --> 0:10:57.200 which is how much does the Internet have to do 0:10:57.280 --> 0:11:00.960 with disinformation? To what degree is that the Internet's fault 0:11:01.280 --> 0:11:05.080 that we see all sorts of misinformation and disinformation that 0:11:05.240 --> 0:11:08.760 is predicated on emotional and personal belief rather than facts. 0:11:09.240 --> 0:11:14.120 Has the Internet made things worse? The main arguments I 0:11:14.160 --> 0:11:17.240 hear about how the Internet has made things worse seem 0:11:17.320 --> 0:11:20.880 to depend on issues that have always been with us. First, 0:11:20.920 --> 0:11:24.760 people complain that on the Internet, a story gets magnified 0:11:25.240 --> 0:11:28.840 based more on the reaction it provokes than its truth value. 0:11:29.520 --> 0:11:34.000 The idea is that misinformation often comes packaged with clickbaity 0:11:34.040 --> 0:11:38.880 headlines in sensational stories that are designed to grab attention. 0:11:39.440 --> 0:11:41.839 This can make it more likely that people will share 0:11:41.880 --> 0:11:45.079 misinformation even if they're not sure that it's true, or 0:11:45.120 --> 0:11:48.320 perhaps they don't even believe that it's true. But again, 0:11:48.840 --> 0:11:51.760 note that this has always been the case. That's how 0:11:52.040 --> 0:11:55.400 we get which trials in the past because it may 0:11:55.480 --> 0:11:57.120 or may not be true, but I heard so and 0:11:57.160 --> 0:12:00.520 SO say it, and it's a story too good to repeat, 0:12:00.559 --> 0:12:02.680 so I'm going to pass that on. That's how we 0:12:02.720 --> 0:12:08.000 get McCarthyism, where people are blacklisted based on accusations that 0:12:08.040 --> 0:12:11.920 they are Communist sympathizers. That's how the Soviet Union gets 0:12:11.960 --> 0:12:16.040 tens of millions of political executions because of the story 0:12:16.080 --> 0:12:18.679 that so and so is not aligned with the party. 0:12:19.240 --> 0:12:23.240 Perhaps no meaningful evidence is presented, but the accusation is 0:12:23.640 --> 0:12:28.440 clickbaity and designed to get local attention, and it does. So. 0:12:28.520 --> 0:12:30.679 Let me give a different example of how the Internet 0:12:30.880 --> 0:12:34.120 can actually make truth a little harder to see, and 0:12:34.160 --> 0:12:37.800 that has to do with the issue of sock puppeting. 0:12:38.240 --> 0:12:40.880 This is setting up, let's say, a fake account to 0:12:40.960 --> 0:12:44.400 pretend that you're on the other side of some issue. Now, 0:12:44.480 --> 0:12:46.400 usually there's not a lot that you can do with this, 0:12:46.520 --> 0:12:49.520 but sometimes it can have a big effect. For example, 0:12:50.160 --> 0:12:54.040 when the United States withdrew all its troops from Afghanistan 0:12:54.120 --> 0:12:58.920 in twenty and twenty one, the Taliban just leveraged basic 0:12:59.000 --> 0:13:04.440 social media one to secure their takeover, which is on 0:13:04.600 --> 0:13:10.360 social media. They pretended to be the Allied forces withdrawing 0:13:10.800 --> 0:13:15.000 and they gave instructions to the population like, hey, everyone 0:13:15.080 --> 0:13:17.600 should evacuate this town now there's about to be a 0:13:17.600 --> 0:13:21.320 lot of bombing. And this way, when the Taliban rolled 0:13:21.360 --> 0:13:25.000 into these towns, there were many fewer people there to 0:13:25.040 --> 0:13:28.720 stand up and provide resistance. So what the Taliban had 0:13:28.800 --> 0:13:31.319 done is called sock puppeting. In other words, they had 0:13:31.320 --> 0:13:34.320 put their hand inside of the puppet and pretended to 0:13:34.360 --> 0:13:38.960 be somebody else doing the speaking. So, not surprisingly, truth 0:13:39.040 --> 0:13:43.080 can get complex on social media because social media is 0:13:43.120 --> 0:13:45.559 not always the right tool for the job for that. 0:13:46.160 --> 0:13:49.599 So these are the general kinds of concerns that scholars 0:13:49.679 --> 0:13:53.880 have about the Internet. But I want to present an 0:13:54.000 --> 0:13:58.080 argument that has gotten essentially zero airtime, which is whether 0:13:58.120 --> 0:14:03.760 it is a possibility that the Internet has made things better? Now, 0:14:03.800 --> 0:14:06.200 how you might say, could the Internet have made truth 0:14:06.240 --> 0:14:08.960 seeking better? Well, here's how it all has to do 0:14:09.040 --> 0:14:14.120 with information flow. For an analogy, think about arteries. For 0:14:14.280 --> 0:14:18.280 maximal health, you need unobstructed blood flow in your arteries, 0:14:18.840 --> 0:14:22.880 and in exactly this way, societies need the free flow 0:14:22.960 --> 0:14:27.560 of information. Things that block that flow can be fatal 0:14:27.600 --> 0:14:30.320 to a nation. And I'm going to give you several examples. 0:14:31.240 --> 0:14:36.280 So first, political censorship. This has been a familiar specter 0:14:36.440 --> 0:14:41.560 throughout the last century, with state approved news outlets ruling 0:14:41.600 --> 0:14:45.520 the press and airwaves in places like Romania or Cuba, 0:14:45.720 --> 0:14:50.000 or China or Iraq, among lots of others. So the 0:14:50.080 --> 0:14:54.720 official newspapers of the former Soviet Union had a complete 0:14:54.880 --> 0:14:58.280 lock on the news, and foreign newspapers were allowed only 0:14:58.360 --> 0:15:01.840 if they were published by communist parties with the approval 0:15:01.960 --> 0:15:05.840 of the Soviets, and censorship did not end with news stories. 0:15:06.280 --> 0:15:10.400 Copying machines were tightly controlled by the Soviets to prevent 0:15:10.600 --> 0:15:15.440 dissemination of self published books or magazines. Even weather reports 0:15:15.600 --> 0:15:22.640 were censored. In Nikolai Chichesku's Romania, certain temperature extremes translated 0:15:22.680 --> 0:15:25.720 into time off of work, so the weather reports were 0:15:25.760 --> 0:15:29.240 doctored so that these levels were not reached, and it 0:15:29.320 --> 0:15:33.080 was the same in the Soviet Union. Stalin doctored weather 0:15:33.160 --> 0:15:37.040 forecasts if they suggested that the sun would not shine 0:15:37.200 --> 0:15:40.840 on the day of celebration for the labor movement, and 0:15:41.000 --> 0:15:46.680 censorship reaches into every aspect of nations under control of dictators. 0:15:47.480 --> 0:15:52.360 In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, maps of Baghdad were not allowed 0:15:52.400 --> 0:15:55.400 to be printed lest some enemy of the state get 0:15:55.440 --> 0:15:58.120 a hold of a map and then they could decipher 0:15:58.200 --> 0:16:02.800 the street names for easy navigation. And the weather reports 0:16:02.800 --> 0:16:07.040 there weren't just doctored they were locked away as classified information. 0:16:08.320 --> 0:16:11.880 And I'll give you another example which demonstrates how not 0:16:12.160 --> 0:16:15.480 new some of our problems are. People are worried about 0:16:15.560 --> 0:16:18.680 deep fake photographs, which I'll talk about next week. Well, 0:16:18.800 --> 0:16:22.920 the Soviets were doing this over a century ago. They 0:16:23.080 --> 0:16:27.840 had a not so secret fondness for rewriting their national 0:16:27.920 --> 0:16:32.600 story on the fly, so they routinely edited photographs to 0:16:32.720 --> 0:16:36.280 remove people who had fallen out of favor with the party. 0:16:36.320 --> 0:16:39.920 I'll give you a famous example. There's a photo which 0:16:40.160 --> 0:16:43.800 proudly captures Lenin and other Soviet leaders in Red Square 0:16:43.800 --> 0:16:47.480 and Moscow in nineteen nineteen. So you can see Lenin 0:16:47.640 --> 0:16:50.200 and standing on his left, you see Leon Trotsky, and 0:16:50.280 --> 0:16:53.600 on Lenin's right is a man named Kamenev, and there's 0:16:53.640 --> 0:16:56.800 a bearded man two rows in front of Trotsky, a 0:16:56.840 --> 0:16:59.840 Bolshevik leader from Georgia. Okay, well, if you look at 0:16:59.840 --> 0:17:03.840 a release of this photo some years later, the official 0:17:03.960 --> 0:17:07.679 Soviet version of the photo, you see that after Leon 0:17:07.800 --> 0:17:11.879 Trotsky fell from party favor, he was airbrushed out of 0:17:11.920 --> 0:17:15.520 the photo. In the revised photograph, there's just an empty 0:17:15.600 --> 0:17:18.399 space where he used to be, and kamon f on 0:17:18.440 --> 0:17:22.399 the right has disappeared as well, and the bearded Bolshevik 0:17:22.480 --> 0:17:26.520 leader never existed in the photo either. I'll put this 0:17:26.720 --> 0:17:29.359 photo the before and after version on my website so 0:17:29.440 --> 0:17:32.159 you can check it out at eagleman dot com slash podcast, 0:17:32.640 --> 0:17:36.679 and I'll also show another photograph. There's Joseph Stalin and 0:17:36.720 --> 0:17:40.280 there's a man who is left named Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov 0:17:40.440 --> 0:17:43.280 was a ruthless, awful guy. He was the head of 0:17:43.320 --> 0:17:48.440 the secret police, the NKVD, and he spent years brutally 0:17:48.960 --> 0:17:52.840 purging enemies of the state, typically without evidence and often 0:17:52.880 --> 0:17:57.240 for personal reasons. But then in nineteen forty, Yezhov earned 0:17:57.280 --> 0:17:59.600 the same treatment that he'd been handing out. He was 0:18:00.080 --> 0:18:03.160 stripped and beaten and shot in the basement of an 0:18:03.240 --> 0:18:08.600 NKVD station. So Stalin wrapped up loose ends by deleting 0:18:08.680 --> 0:18:14.040 Yezhov from history by airbrushing him out of the photo. Now, 0:18:14.080 --> 0:18:18.840 not surprisingly, governments that are infamous for blocking information flow 0:18:19.400 --> 0:18:21.440 are the same ones we think of when we hear 0:18:21.560 --> 0:18:26.640 of purges and shortages and repression and civil and political 0:18:26.720 --> 0:18:32.439 rights and isolation. Censorship rarely works well for regimes, and 0:18:32.480 --> 0:18:37.240 perhaps this is because a population that's fed doctor messages 0:18:37.320 --> 0:18:40.520 never truly falls for the trick. A friend of mine 0:18:40.560 --> 0:18:42.800 who was raised in the Soviet Union tells me that 0:18:43.040 --> 0:18:46.479 everyone held two separate things in their heads, what they 0:18:46.480 --> 0:18:48.560 were supposed to say to each other and what they 0:18:48.640 --> 0:19:08.560 actually believed. So there are lots of complaints that people 0:19:08.600 --> 0:19:11.560 have about the Internet, but the way to really understand 0:19:11.600 --> 0:19:15.800 why it's better for the truth is to deeply understand 0:19:16.200 --> 0:19:21.800 the disaster of centralized command of the truth. Censorship can 0:19:21.840 --> 0:19:25.760 involve more than books and photos, and whether the tyranny 0:19:25.800 --> 0:19:29.399 of information control can actually bring down a nation. I 0:19:29.480 --> 0:19:34.280 mentioned in the previous episode about a Soviet scientist named 0:19:34.320 --> 0:19:39.600 Trophym Lyashenko. He was an agronomist who proposed these stunning 0:19:39.640 --> 0:19:44.480 new scientific theories about how to grow wheat better and faster, 0:19:45.160 --> 0:19:48.000 and he was highly favored by Stalin and so Laishenko 0:19:48.200 --> 0:19:51.119 rose up through the ranks of power. But it turns 0:19:51.160 --> 0:19:56.200 out his theories were scientifically fraudulent, but that didn't stop 0:19:56.280 --> 0:19:59.760 him from gaining impressive influence in the party, and by 0:20:00.200 --> 0:20:04.760 the nineteen forties he steered the agricultural program for the 0:20:05.280 --> 0:20:10.400 entire USSR. Now there was a grave problem with this 0:20:10.680 --> 0:20:16.240 centralized command, which is that the USSR spanned thirteen time 0:20:16.359 --> 0:20:20.760 zones and an astounding variety of soils and climates and 0:20:20.800 --> 0:20:26.240 local knowledge, and so applied to a landscape that size, 0:20:26.400 --> 0:20:31.960 this central rule setting was disastrous for wheat production. Local 0:20:32.040 --> 0:20:35.040 farmers knew better how to care for their crops, but 0:20:35.119 --> 0:20:39.399 they were disallowed the freedom, and scientists who disagreed with 0:20:39.520 --> 0:20:44.840 Lyashenko found themselves disbarred from their positions, and several agronomists 0:20:45.000 --> 0:20:49.159 were executed. Part of the downfall of the USSR can 0:20:49.200 --> 0:20:54.479 be traced to this centralization of agricultural decisions. It ruined 0:20:54.480 --> 0:20:58.200 the economy, and it crippled confidence in the new system. 0:20:59.119 --> 0:21:02.879 So the lesson for history is that a centralized tyranny 0:21:03.640 --> 0:21:08.679 rarely works as well as local information and nested feedback loops, 0:21:09.320 --> 0:21:14.040 and this is where the Internet shines. Historically, the more 0:21:14.080 --> 0:21:18.240 successful strategy has always been to confront free speech with 0:21:18.320 --> 0:21:22.280 free speech, and the Internet allows that in a natural way. 0:21:22.359 --> 0:21:27.879 It democratizes the flow of information by giving open access 0:21:28.359 --> 0:21:31.520 to the newspapers of the world, the photographers of every nation, 0:21:32.119 --> 0:21:36.600 the bloggers of every political stripe. Now, I talked last 0:21:36.600 --> 0:21:41.200 week about how in any conflict, people will post the 0:21:41.240 --> 0:21:43.760 worst videos from the other side and try to imply 0:21:43.840 --> 0:21:47.800 that that is representative of the opposing population so they 0:21:47.800 --> 0:21:50.800 can whip up support. And that's an issue to always 0:21:50.880 --> 0:21:53.879 keep an eye on. That's a genuine problem. But even 0:21:53.920 --> 0:21:58.199 that is far better than the other problem, which is censorship. 0:21:58.600 --> 0:22:01.679 As soon as you give one side, any side, a 0:22:01.840 --> 0:22:05.359 total lockdown on the news, you have a much deeper 0:22:05.480 --> 0:22:10.160 level of problem. So coming back to a democratic Internet 0:22:10.200 --> 0:22:13.000 that has open to everyone, of course you're going to 0:22:13.040 --> 0:22:17.080 get some postings that are full of doctoring and dishonesty, 0:22:17.320 --> 0:22:21.639 while others strive for independence and impartiality. But in the 0:22:21.760 --> 0:22:25.240 end all are available for the end user to sift 0:22:25.320 --> 0:22:30.480 through for reasoned consideration. It's far better than having zero 0:22:30.680 --> 0:22:35.600 choice about the story that you're fed. And beyond news sites, 0:22:35.720 --> 0:22:42.800 the simple redundancy of information online changes the censorship equation irreversibly. 0:22:43.080 --> 0:22:48.280 So just imagine Hussein trying to eradicate maps when anyone 0:22:48.320 --> 0:22:52.600 can serve satellite photos to two meter resolution. Or imagine 0:22:52.720 --> 0:22:57.080 Chichescu trying to doctor weather reports when anyone can pull 0:22:57.160 --> 0:23:01.879 up the weather of the world. Orginej. Stalin trying to 0:23:01.960 --> 0:23:06.679 delete Trotsky from photographs when the photos are mirrored on 0:23:06.880 --> 0:23:11.240 Google images, and the Internet Archive in a thousand other sites. Now, 0:23:11.359 --> 0:23:15.639 this inability to erase information from the Internet took on 0:23:15.760 --> 0:23:20.160 a name two decades ago. It's called the Streisand Effect. 0:23:20.240 --> 0:23:23.360 This happened because in two thousand and three, a guy 0:23:23.480 --> 0:23:28.320 snapped an aerial photograph of Barbara Streisand's home in Malibu, 0:23:29.040 --> 0:23:32.120 and the guy posted the photo on his website for 0:23:32.359 --> 0:23:35.960 privacy reasons. Streisand wanted it off the net, and when 0:23:36.000 --> 0:23:39.880 he wouldn't comply, she sued him. But her actions had 0:23:39.960 --> 0:23:45.320 a drastic, unintended consequence. Until that moment, almost no one 0:23:45.359 --> 0:23:48.680 knew where her home was, and by trying to suppress 0:23:48.720 --> 0:23:53.000 the information, she promptly drove over a million visitors to 0:23:53.080 --> 0:23:58.119 his site. So observing this Streisand incident in two thousand 0:23:58.160 --> 0:24:01.760 and three, internet watchers realized they were seeing the new 0:24:01.880 --> 0:24:06.280 rules of the game in action. Trying to suppress information 0:24:06.440 --> 0:24:11.959 on the Web only magnifies it. And this new inability 0:24:12.000 --> 0:24:17.520 to hide information found perhaps its highest expression in wiki Leaks, 0:24:17.800 --> 0:24:19.960 which was launched in two thousand and six by the 0:24:20.000 --> 0:24:24.879 Australian journalist and activist Julian Assange. His mission, he said, 0:24:24.960 --> 0:24:28.800 was to open governments. The site seems like it's mostly 0:24:28.920 --> 0:24:31.680 dying now some seventeen years later. But what it did 0:24:32.400 --> 0:24:37.200 was published documents disclosed by anonymous sources, and it got 0:24:37.280 --> 0:24:41.680 to about ten million such documents. And the documents it 0:24:41.760 --> 0:24:44.600 leaked were as varied as their country is of origin. 0:24:44.680 --> 0:24:48.320 I remember when they leaked Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account. 0:24:48.320 --> 0:24:51.640 They leaked membership lists of illegal parties in the UK. 0:24:51.840 --> 0:24:57.600 They leaked internal United Nations reports and senatorial campaign documents, 0:24:57.600 --> 0:25:02.360 and oil scandals and airstrike videos. In twenty ten, WikiLeaks 0:25:02.359 --> 0:25:06.680 released eighty thousand classified documents about the war in Afghanistan, 0:25:07.160 --> 0:25:09.040 and by the end of that year it published close 0:25:09.080 --> 0:25:12.160 to four hundred thousand documents from the war in Iraq. 0:25:12.880 --> 0:25:15.040 And the thing to observe about those leaks is that 0:25:15.480 --> 0:25:21.080 they weren't impotent. Sometimes they directly fomented social change. So 0:25:21.960 --> 0:25:26.280 consider this incident in which an icelandic bank gagged the 0:25:26.400 --> 0:25:31.040 national broadcaster of Iceland from reporting on its debt default risk. 0:25:31.760 --> 0:25:36.040 A whistleblower got the info onto WikiLeaks, and Icelanders went 0:25:36.080 --> 0:25:39.560 into an uproar and that rapidly led to new legislation 0:25:39.680 --> 0:25:44.760 in their parliament ensuring media freedom. So if you care 0:25:44.800 --> 0:25:48.400 about truth. You should care about the power of the Internet, 0:25:48.680 --> 0:25:52.119 and I'll mention something else where. Getting information out leads 0:25:52.160 --> 0:25:57.400 to good things happening. So WikiLeaks published lists of blacklisted 0:25:57.440 --> 0:26:01.760 websites from the governments of Denmark and Norway, and Thailand 0:26:01.760 --> 0:26:05.440 and Australia. And in most of these cases the blacklisted 0:26:05.520 --> 0:26:09.680 sites were pornographic or violent, but it never takes long 0:26:09.800 --> 0:26:14.080 before other sites get slipped onto the list. For example, 0:26:14.640 --> 0:26:19.480 the Thailand Censorship list advertises a filter against child pornography, 0:26:19.800 --> 0:26:23.040 contained over one thousand sites that were felt to be 0:26:23.160 --> 0:26:27.880 critical of the Thai royal family, and Assaunge maintains, as 0:26:27.920 --> 0:26:33.119 many people do, that censorship approaches like Internet filtering become 0:26:33.640 --> 0:26:40.359 invariably corrupted. And another thing, the speed of information flow 0:26:40.440 --> 0:26:45.399 on the Internet allows rapid, massive democratic response. I remember 0:26:45.400 --> 0:26:47.479 in two thousand and nine, when the Internet was newer, 0:26:48.040 --> 0:26:51.719 when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced he was going 0:26:51.760 --> 0:26:54.840 to shut down Parliament until March thirtieth. And what he 0:26:54.880 --> 0:26:56.919 said is that he needed time to work on a 0:26:56.960 --> 0:27:00.280 stimulus package. But a lot of people suspected he was 0:27:00.320 --> 0:27:03.480 just trying to prevent a vote of no confidence from 0:27:03.560 --> 0:27:07.200 the opposition parties. So such a vote would force an election, 0:27:07.880 --> 0:27:11.199 which is something Harper desperately wanted to avoid. So a 0:27:11.280 --> 0:27:16.160 Canadian student, unhappy about this shutdown and has perceived reasons 0:27:16.160 --> 0:27:20.399 for it, he started a Facebook group that quickly swelled 0:27:20.800 --> 0:27:24.280 to two hundred and fourteen thousand members, and it precipitated 0:27:24.359 --> 0:27:28.840 real world rallies all across Canada with crowds of thousands. 0:27:29.400 --> 0:27:34.359 And that kind of breakneck speed of messaging equates to 0:27:34.440 --> 0:27:38.080 a departure from the days of spreading the word by 0:27:38.440 --> 0:27:43.439 pamphleting or shouting from horseback. It allows the citizenry to 0:27:43.480 --> 0:27:49.000 become a rapid response democratic organism. If a bunch of 0:27:49.040 --> 0:27:53.320 individual brains happened to share an opinion, they can combine 0:27:53.520 --> 0:27:57.480