ums, right? How do we think about that as a story that is really relevant to how you vote, how you think, that I think is something that we're working on all the time. How do we take the spark of what you wanna do and make sure you have a full journalistic training experience? I think anything you wanna do that involves getting different people to the table, you have to be intentional about it. So there have to be inroads made to try to bring folks who have the more conservative background who come from rural areas or whatever it is to bring them in and involve them and engage them and try to get them interested in journalism. And I will say, the premise of we're doing better when it comes to diversity, I do think we're doing better, but I do think that that bar was low. We're improving, but the bar was low. And also with the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action last year, it's really changing a lot of the ways the journalism schools I work with operate and think. I just went through some applications for a whole side project thing that we do. And last year when I went through those applications from professors, administrators, et cetera, almost all of them talked about diversity. This year probably about 20% of them talked about diversity. It's changed the way people are thinking and I think it's because the incentive to bring diversity to the table is not there at every university now because of the Supreme Court ruling and sort of the way that's being interpreted at the state level. That's a great point. And how are schools adjusting and responding to maintain diversity with that? It's different at every school. Every state's interpreting things differently. Every school's interpreting things differently. So some places have said we can't mention diversity in any way, in any scholarships, in any job applications, in anything. And that may mean that in practice they operate exactly the same way they do right now and the scholarship still goes to diverse students to help diversify the industry. But what message is that sending to people who are students of color and are considering journalism if they're not sort of specifically being recruited and trying to say like, we want you here. We want you at the table. And then on the sort of like more conservative, I mean we are really supportive of the educators especially in conservative communities. We know they face pushback. We know there's self-censorship or they feel pushback. But if we focus on the core of what journalism is is like this is our community. We are looking into the issues that our community cares about. We're looking for solutions. We're highlighting what great people in our community are doing. You slowly start to build understanding that this is not like done by people who are out to get you. This is done by students. I remember walking with a student who was from a small town in Kentucky and he came to Washington D.C. for our academy. And we were out in the field with our T-shirts and he said, this is so wild cause people are coming up to me and they're saying like, what are you doing? And he's like, oh I'm working on a project with PBS and they're like, that's so great. Go, go, go. At home, he's been told like, why would you wanna work for the enemy? But slowly, he's doing the work and he's got a great program in his school and my hope is that you would change those parents' minds or change just the understanding of why journalists do what they do. And it's to really help the community. I've had professors say that as well that students will sometimes confide that their families think that they've kind of betrayed them by becoming journalists, does that ever come up for you? It does come up, but I think the biggest concern I get from students and from parents is really about the longevity of a career in this space. I mean, I think many parents just want their young people to have a successful career and know they're gonna be able to support themselves. The biggest gap that I see honestly here in the state of Texas that we haven't, we've been struggling to fill is in Spanish language journalism. Where I consistently meet parents who speak Spanish at home, the students are not comfortable enough with their own Spanish to take Spanish language reporting, to really do the intense, they might really have what we would call Spanglish. So they feel comfortable using it with mom and grandma but they don't feel comfortable using it in the classroom or for reporting. And when you think about some of the reporting gaps at the border and in West Texas, I think that's an area that I'd like to see the University of Texas really succeed but I think that's a challenge. I think some young people feel comfortable with vernacular Spanish but not the kind of Spanish you would need to be a Spanish language reporter. Now you work in high schools and I guess some of your programs are in high schools too. So let's go one step younger. You made a comment earlier that you thought that journalism, what you do in journalism education is very valuable even if they don't become journalists. What did you mean? Yeah, well we actually did a study early on in the program where they did a pre and a post test as one does and they saw a real growth and critical thinking as you were talking about. Confidence, being able to go out into a community to interview a stranger, interview an adult, prepare teamwork. We see that they are more civically engaged. They're following the news. We saw like a shift in what they understood about what the news was and where they got their news. So for us it's really about whatever you're going to do whether it's gonna be business or arts. I remember early on we had a student who said I was gonna go to med school but like I've discovered journalism and so now I'm just gonna go into journalism and I was like, okay. And he did for a while, he did some journalism then he was a medical scribe. Now he's in the medical field and he said I'm a better doctor. I'm a better, listen differently. I hear my patient's story and it really helps me understand how I can help them. So really we see these skills as like critical life and citizenry skills. Like how do you look at your community and identify the people who are making it better and how do you support them or how do you tell their stories and what does the telling of stories due to the community's image of itself and its ability to change and its ability to work together to solve things. You mentioned empathy. Yeah, you mentioned empathy as something they learned which of course I so want that to be true. Well a lot of our teachers, yeah I mean the teachers themselves and that's why the teachers are so important to this program, they really see themselves as teaching empathy. I mean when you are doing an interview, when you're preparing and you're learning about someone and then you're there present in the interview and you're listening and you're asking follow up questions and then you're thinking about the story that you're doing and some of these go back to even, Jim Lara always talk about, I respect the person I'm doing the story about, I respect the audience, they are as smart and caring as I am and I'm just gonna assume that about the people I'm doing the story with and when you see a student, they understand that. I mean they understand also the skills that you learn when you actually do it and you actually prepare for an interview and you do it and you listen and you're able to tell stories that wouldn't otherwise be told and then to see them on the news hour or local news organizations and you see that power and so there's that connection of the empathy to be able to tell that story and to listen to someone and do honor to their story and then the power to be able to bring that person's story to an audience and be able to shine a light on it that otherwise wouldn't be shown. I wanna go back up for a second to the salary question which I know is very like nitty gritty and not very aspirational but it keeps nagging at me a little bit in the sense of it could sometimes feel like we're just crushing it with all these great new ideas and new programs and new models but at the end of the day we might not be able to keep people in this profession if the salaries aren't higher maybe it's all the same business model questions that we've talked about earlier in the day but do you all have any ideas on how to get the salaries up or what we should do about that problem? I mean that's a huge question and I think it is the fundamental question we've been talking about all day is the business model. I think that there's always gonna be attrition we're always gonna lose people and we've had a lot of conversations internally at our end of like well that is an acceptable rate of attrition I mean I don't know I mean it used to be a lot of times journalists when they got eight, 10 years of experience they would leave the industry when they had kids and started to be more busy with their family life and now we're seeing I don't know if you're seeing this but I'm seeing students jumping after two years and they're out of the industry and to me that's a loss it's way earlier in their career than it was before and I think that's a loss but the biggest thing when we had the internal conversation is the regrettable attrition is those superstars who are great storytellers, great journalists who are passionate about it and they still leave and I've come across those students out there who should have been journalism rock stars but they're out in two or three or four years because salaries are too low the hours that they're expected to work do not align with what they're interested in they're not giving opportunities to challenge themselves or to fulfill themselves no one goes into journalism school and says they want to be a journalist because they want to do night cops they want to make their community a better place they want to do investigative stories they want to do a really incredible storytelling and if you don't get to do that for two or three years I think that this generation is less willing to sit in a job and paying their dues for 10 years than say people were 20 years ago and so they're gonna find something else my hope is that they'd come back though I mean you can leave, go do other things maybe enter fields that have more you can make more money but if you have that love of journalism and you wanna see it succeed I've seen some of our alumni start media organizations and some of it's just first getting clients and then starting it but they want to in the end be impactful journalists they wanna do those stories so we're just getting started and I'm really excited to see what they're able to do because they want that too and they're the ones who are gonna be able to I think feel that out for their generation I think from a college perspective one thing we think about a lot we talk about low salaries in journalism as I mentioned in my introduction we also have the radio, television, film department that's also an area where your first job is not likely to pay much money you're likely to work on a set and to be an assistant so I think one of the challenges is how do we get career earlier in their college experience so they're getting the internships in the space earlier so their first job out is actually not the very entry level job I think that's one and the second piece is also validating the expanse of places where you can do journalism now it might not be a brand name that your parents recognize and there's outstanding examples here in Austin the 19th would be one of them you know that there are wonderful places that are paying fair salaries where students can do outstanding work and I think validating that it doesn't mean you have to go into PR but there is journalism happening in places that aren't just the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News so I think validating the expanse of those careers also becomes important this might actually be an area where public policy is gonna be important like the employment tax credit that passed the House of Representatives I know a lot of the publications were gonna use that to try to raise the entry level wages I wanted to Leah you have an alum in the audience somewhere to talk about this pathway yeah so Tyler is in his first year at UT and he came through the Student Reporting Labs program he was a podcast host for On Our Minds podcast and we were hoping we could pass the microphone and he could just give the audience a sense of what it means to do some journalism in high school and take that all the way to UT and have it be a part of his journey hello can everyone hear me yeah thank you for having me I just wanted to talk a little bit about like kind of my experience with journalism and everything I remember that when we were planning for high school our classes in high school I remember that journalism was one of the first classes I signed up for and in my four year plan I signed up to do a news hour all throughout high school I mean not news hour sorry newspaper all throughout high school and I thought that would be my elective throughout but I remember the first day in my journalism class was the last day that I saw my journalism teacher and after that like he quit the same day I'm not sure what happened exactly or anything like that but I just remember like there was an excitement and there was like an energy about journalism that day that kind of never returned to my school and it was very disappointing to be so excited about being able to do stories in my community and stuff like that that didn't really return and so we tried to get a newspaper started at our school and it really didn't work out for whatever reason but I think that it was important that I kind of had that experience because it made me realize that not everything is gonna be perfect not everything is going to be like an easy path I guess and through some way I found out about working with student reporting labs and it really gave me an opportunity to have experiences that I probably never would have had otherwise being able to be a part of a podcast that really talked about teen mental health and getting to work with so many amazing and talented young people that were really passionate about things that affected our generation and everything and then on top of that I got to be a Gwenn Eiffel fellow for the news hour which is another amazing experience where I got to cover issues relating to affirmative action which the decision when I did the story had just come out and even being at a school like UT which shout out UT I love it here but even being at a school like UT and being able to write for a paper like the Daily Text and I've gotten opportunities to interview people like Bon Jovi and I'm really interested in entertainment and media journalism and stuff like that but having those opportunities at schools that provide these kind of resources or whatever it is really important because now it encourages me to keep going and there's stuff out there that I can do and there's ways that I can contribute to my community that I might not, if I didn't have that experience of going through an experience where the journalism program was kind of shut down at our school if I didn't kind of push through and see what other opportunities do they have I might not be here today writing and going to UT so thank you, I appreciate it. In the last minute and a half or so I wonder if you could each just have a closing thought that is usually we start next week and then we end on a negative and end on a high note. I'd like to end on a down note. No, I'd like you to think about for the people in this audience who are involved in creating the models or funding the models, what is the thing that they need to know? What are the things that have to happen for the next generation to be able to succeed? I'm gonna end on a happy note. If I were a funder in this space I'd been on the talent of this generation. It's about investing in the people and the business models are complicated but if you have a conversation with people as talented and as passionate as this generation find the people who inspire you to put your money where it belongs whether that's as a subscriber paying for the news that you use or if you're an investor or you have philanthropy dollars in this space invest in the talent. I completely agree. I think that this generation they're gonna be the ones who figure it out and what's great is so many more experiments we haven't really touched upon this are finding ways to use journalism students who are in college right now to cover not just their campus but their community. Covering, I think it's something like 27 state houses have student journalists from colleges covering those state houses where state house reporting has been decimated. So not only bet on the talent and the innovation and the creativity of this generation but also how can we foster that right now while they're in college? And be intentional about it. I mean there are ways to build connections between high school programs and local news organizations were working with documenters figuring out a way that they can hire high schoolers to go cover school board meetings and pay them really important. And I think that high school journalism can expand the capacity of local news organizations if done in an intentional way and sort of a building out that network that local network that includes young people because when they are involved in the coverage when they are a part when they see themselves represented and see their issues, they become audience members. And so you need to, if those local news organizations are gonna survive long term, I think they need to build those connections early so that they're also building their audience and also building the community that's gonna support them long term. So you're building the demand as well as the supply. Exactly. Okay, good, well that is, I'm glad you forced us to end a happy note. Thank you very much everyone and thank you to the panel. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Vivian Schiller, Vice President and Executive Director of Aspen Digital. Thank you. So you heard a little bit earlier this afternoon from Sonal Shaw talking about the state of local news. And then you heard a little bit later from Brian Stelter talking about the state of national news. And right now I'm gonna just talk for a few minutes about the state of digital media. The story of digital media sort of follows the trajectory of a tale as old as time. It's a story of hope followed by disillusionment. And then in theory the last stage is redemption although I'm not sure what the redemption yet. So let me go back to the hope for a couple of minutes. So you may recall or some of you may recall or maybe some of you or if your students are too young that back in the mid to late aughts and the early part of the 2010s, the world was a pretty exciting place when it came to digital media. Google really did bring the world's information to our fingertips. We connected with old friends and from high school or from other parts of our life on Facebook. We had access to so many incredible videos on YouTube. And when it comes to news, it was revolutionary. You may remember that the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011, the miracle on the Hudson, that ways that we had access to information because people on the ground with access to these mobile devices, these powerful computers in our hands were able to report just regular people on what they were seeing, what they were experiencing. It was sort of the promise of citizen journalism. We learned actually as it turns out about the capture of Osama bin Laden by a guy a few, you know, a quarter of a mile away saying I'm hearing chapters overhead. This is very strange. I'm in this, I've got the name of the town. You know, what's going on? It really was the democratization of information or so we thought. Fast forward just a few years and we get to the disillusionment phase when everything began to change slowly, slowly and then all at once. So what is it that went wrong exactly? Well, I would put it in three categories. First of all, people, people is what went wrong. You had foreign actors who game the system. The internet research agency in St. Petersburg who were able to use these powerful social media platforms to try to manipulate public opinion in the United States in the run up to the 2016 elections. We had domestic folks who were targets who then willfully spread those and other kinds of myths and disinformation. You know, whether it's about elections, whether it was about COVID, whether it was, you know, the reasons that the bridge felt, the crash happened at the bridge in Baltimore last week. And then you have the profiteers. They had no ideology other than just making a few quick bucks and they were able to game these platforms to bring money to themselves through various means. So that was one category of problem. The second category of problem was the tech companies and the platforms themselves. Whether or not they did not anticipate what could have happened with these platforms or whether they knew that their platforms could be gamed and didn't care, we do not know and we may never know. But we started to see that social media platforms became basically a big game of whack-a-mole. Basically in the run up starting in like 2014, 2015 and continuing to this day. Then after 2020, a lot of the social media platforms decided threw up their hands and said, enough. We're not gonna try to moderate necessarily moderate content on our platforms anymore. It's too expensive. It's too politically fraught. Too many people hate us no matter what decision we make. Too many subpoenas coming from this Congress. They're like, we're out. We're just gonna leave it alone. And of course you have Elon Musk who bought Twitter. Never perfect, but always an incredibly valuable tool. Basically just turning that into a dumpster fire that it is today. And then the third category of what went wrong is the decline of local news which we've been talking about so much about today. I don't need to repeat it, but it has played into that void, has filled in so much of this kind of noise that we hear from platforms. I mean news organizations sometimes did it to themselves. They were chasing in some cases, those of us in news, we all laugh at the line about the pivot to video which was supposed to save journalism. Of course it didn't because as soon as Facebook change or strategy, the whole thing went down in flames. But the money that supported journalism went to the platforms. A lot of it for good reasons. Advertisers, it was much more efficient for how they reach people. And also the world has become such a polarized place that many just do not trust any news. Again, we've been talking about that all afternoon. And now here we are, and this is gonna be a bit of a segue into the panel that I'm gonna be part of that's coming up next, into the AI world. And what is that going to do to this already very fraught digital information ecosystem? My message to you, and I may repeat this again on the panel with the right opportunities, don't be afraid, there's been a lot of coverage about the big spectacular deep fake of Trump doing something or Biden doing something that may happen, I don't think that's a big worry. Those will be debunked so quickly that those are not gonna get a chance to get much traction. What I'm much more worried about when it comes to content that is manipulated via artificial intelligence is the things that you can't see, that the media can't see, that the public can't see and debunk. It's coming in on WhatsApp. It's coming in on Facebook Messenger, Telegram. All of the peer-to-peer, which are not always peer-to-peer, you can distribute those. WhatsApp goes out to very, very large groups. The kind of content that you can't see that can be very damaging. And very targeted information that can be what AI enables is a speed and scale and a degree of targeting never before possible. So if before you needed the Internet Research Agency funded by the Kremlin and St. Petersburg to pull this off, now you don't. And now we're back to the proverbial guy in his pajamas of his parents' house who can make the same effort at the same scale to cause a lot of trouble. But if there's one thing that worries me most, it is something, it is a phrase that was coined actually by two people, one of them a UT researcher named Bobby Chesney and another academic, Danielle Citron, and it is the Liar's Dividend. The Liar's Dividend describes the phenomenon of what happens when we hear, we are so, we are hearing from so many different places how we can't trust information that AI can manipulate video, which it can. It can manipulate audio, which it can. It can manipulate images, which it can. That instead of trying to find out, is this real or is it not real, going to trusted sources? What do we do? We stop believing in anything at all. And this is the Liar's Dividend. It is out of the playbook of autocrats and would be autocrats going back for millennia. Now enabled by AI. I was thinking for those of you that were here last night and you heard Woodward and Bernstein, Carl Bernstein made a comment that public opinion changed when people were finally able to hear Richard Nixon's tapes. Think about what would happen today if those tapes were released. Fake news, this is AI manipulated audio. That wasn't me and you know what? A lot of people would be like, yeah, I don't know that I can believe that. So that's the world we live in. Oh yeah, I was supposed to talk about redemption. I don't know whether I have the redemption yet, but if there is redemption to be had, it is in the promise and the growth which so many people here in this session, you heard it in the first panel, have the promise of local news. Local news is there is no silver bullet to all of these problems, but if there's any salvation to be had, it is in local news and the growth of local news, people of the community in the community communing with the people who are their neighbors, providing them the information that they need, listening to them and building that trust. We know that leads to civic engagement. We know how important it is. We must all support efforts, whether it is press forward or any of the other efforts you heard from Sarah Beth Berman, the American Journalism Project or the work that Elizabeth Hanson Shapiro was doing. We all really need to support that. It is the only real way out. And with that, we are gonna move into our AI and elections panel. I am happy to introduce my fellow panelists, Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, Open AI's Becky Waite and our moderator, Dr. Talia Schrad. So much for that. Such a pleasure to be here today to chat about digital media and the 2024 election. We have a hot topic here. Just a small topic. And just to offer some introductory remarks, we're in a remarkable setting right now in 2024. We have elections in over 60 countries plus the European Union, representing just under half of the world's population, which is just mind blowing to think about. We've seen AI already used in elections. We have the AI-generated robocall impersonating President Biden that sought to discourage voters in New Hampshire's primary. We have audio clips of Savlakiya's liberal party leader discussing vote rigging. We have a video of an opposition leader in the conservative, Muslim majority nation of Bangladesh wearing a bikini. There are so many things to talk about and so many possible uses of AI as we look to the election here. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So I want to just get started. We're delighted here to be joined by Becky, who is Becky Waite, who's the head of global response at Open AI. And Becky, I wanna just dive right in. So Open AI released details about its approach to the 2024 elections earlier this year. And they noted that the rule that they have is that people cannot use Open AI tools for campaigning or for influencing voters. Can you talk to me about enforcing rules like that on a global scale? It seems almost unfathomable. Tell us about it. Yes, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me and for this LBJ having this forum and discussion in this milestone election year. It is more important than ever to have these sorts of conversations that bring together, particularly folks across government, civil society and industry to have these important discussions. I spent a lot of the last six months speaking with policymakers and civil society around the globe to really understand what is top of mind for them going into this election year. And while we are very excited about the significant benefits of this technology, we also are clear-eyed about its potential risks. And through those discussions, through that dialogue, we've developed a preparedness framework that really focuses on three efforts. First is the policies, making sure that we have the right policies in place. Second is preventing abuse. And third is elevating appropriate information and transparency in our tools. So I'll take those each in turn. First, as you mentioned, our policy lines, we noted that we don't allow political campaigning and discouraging participation with our tools. We wanted to have a set of policies that were a little bit more conservative this go around given that we haven't seen generative AI in the election space before. We wanted to make sure that we were really taking a conservative approach out of an abundance of caution. Second is preventing abuse, and this is really getting into the enforcement piece. So we think about safety through the entire lifecycle of our tools. It's not at a single point.  You want to put a number of different nets so that you catch as many fishes as possible along the way. And we think about safety in the same way. We have interventions across the entire lifecycle of our tools to make sure that we're enforcing on different harms. One example of an intervention that we might have is something called reinforcement learning with human feedback. So I don't know how many people here have used any of our tools or generative AI in general, but one thing that we have in our chatbot tool, our large language model, is this reinforcement learning where it's sort of at the very front end of how we think about safety. It's a fancy way of saying that we ask a question of the model, we generate a bunch of responses, and we tell the model which one is best. And by doing that, we can steer the model over and over to something that is safer, more reliable, and more helpful. So that's how we reduce the likelihood that it's going to produce these harmful responses. Finally, the last piece of this is really around transparency. So in our model, we also look to elevate appropriate sources and cite where information is coming from, where appropriate. So I guess final thought before handing it over to someone else on the panel is it's ever more important that we have these sorts of conversations and that we're collaborating not just across industry, but also within industry. So we're really excited about some of the work that we're doing with our social media companies and others where generative information might be actually distributed, making sure that we have those close connections going into the election season. And speaking about close connections, OpenAI has a partnership with the National Association of Secretaries of State and what an honor for us to have the president of this organization with us, Secretary Scott Schwab. Thank you so much for being here. Let's get started about thinking about Kansas. So when you think about Kansas, what AI or foreign influence threats were you most? So okay, this is where we come from looking at, there's this, and Jen Easterly and I wrote an article about this, there's a difference between the campaign side and the election side. And often people co-mingle them. So as a secretary, if you get that fake Biden phone call, I'm not concerned about that because that's campaign side. We'll let our ethics commission deal with that and our Bureau of Investigation and whatnot. But on the campaign side, this is where it can get to be really a concern. And I hate to use these examples because then when you use the examples, you give people ideas. If Johnson County is a wealthy suburban county outside the Kansas City Metro plaques, I get the honor to live there. I love it. But it's a very swing, it's a purple county. So imagine if somebody generated a video that was shared on social that said, hey, due to bomb threats, all Johnson County polling places will be closed on election day. Imagine the chaos. It was if someone used my image and likeness created it. And we already know that sometimes news is so quick. Hey, we got to get this out there. Now I'm out there saying that's not me. Now the news is trying to say, well, what's real? And then when it's all sorted out, there was no bomb threat, it was fake.  You can't undo that. And so those are the concerns. I really like what Minnesota is doing as it relates to AI. If you generate an AI image or video or a voice and it doesn't have a disclaimer saying that it's AI and you're using it to influence a campaign or an election, it's a crime. And so they carved out so you can do satire and whatnot, you know, the whole Saturday Night Live exemption. But those are the things on the election side that really can become terrifying. Because now you're not misrepresenting a candidate, right? They can undo that. But when you put, there's two great motivators for humans to make decisions, hope and fear, right? And fear is a lot stronger and it's a lot easier. And so if you cause voters to have fear to not vote, how does that truly influence the election? And that's outside the campaign side. So as secretaries, that's the conversation we're having. Disturbing scenario. Again, you don't want to use the example because now somebody's on the internet and say, oh wow, I got an idea. And those are the concerns we come up with. But we have people here who maybe are the ones, maybe we have a student in the audience saying, I have an idea about how to deter that or how to deal with it. So you can go to sos.ks.gov and help us. There we go. Let's dig with you for another minute here. So you authored an article in Foreign Affairs earlier this year where you said that generative AI companies in particular can help by developing and making available tools for identifying AI-generated content and by ensuring that their capabilities are designed, developed, and deployed with security as the top priority to prevent them from being misused by nefarious actors. How well do you think that generative AI companies are doing? Well, I just encourage you like the example she just gave how they're creating safety nets. And you don't know until ever know. When we hear the phrase and in the article, it's got to be, safety's got to be your top priority. OK, when Boeing has a door come off an airplane, what's the first thing they say? Post facto, well safety is our top priority. OK, I get it, but this still happens. A lot of times you don't know what the holes are until after it happens. So we don't know how they're doing. We can come through November of this year. And Cisco, I'm curious about your opinion, because you're more of a swing state than Kansas. There's a pretty good idea of which direction Kansas is going to go. But there's concerns that we won't know until after the election what could have happened. My bigger fear is not this presidential election. It's going to be the one in four years, because it'll be more developed. And then nobody knows how to truly weaponize AI right now. But in four years, I'm pretty sure they will. I mean, in 2020, our biggest concern was misinformation, and we got hit with a pandemic. The great philosopher Yogi Berra once said, the problem with trying to predict the future is it keeps changing. And that's what happened to us in 2020. And now, in 2020, we didn't deal with AI. And now it's coming at us like a freight train. We will know about it in 2024. We just don't know how creative people have come to be able to deploy it. Yeah, really interesting. And Becky, I know in some of the conversations we had before you also mentioned, like the things that are going to develop between now and 2024, we really need to look at that on the horizon. Secretary Aguilar, I want to bring you into this conversation as well. So in January, you said that addressing AI threats to electoral integrity is going to have to be a partnership between the federal government, private sector, and local governments. And I'm hoping you can give us a progress report on how much progress has been made in helping state and local governments understand the threats and how to approach them. I'd say there's no progress. And it's really, really frustrating, especially when a high-level federal official arrives in your state. And the first thing they ask you is, what are you doing about AI? And you look at them and you go, you want my state to step up, put the resources behind something that is receiving billions of dollars of investment. You're the federal government. You have access to researchers. You have access to information I could only dream about. I'm trying to figure out how to get 17 counties across our battleground state to be able to use legacy systems that exist to transfer on to a statewide system. And you're asking me to be the leader on AI? It's pretty unfortunate. It's pretty unfair. Not a good progress report there. Okay, well, hopefully someone is wrong. I don't get to sit around every day and think my job is not to be strategic on these types of things. This is a thing that is impacting the rest of our country. It's not just an issue in Nevada, but for me to have somebody ask me how I'm approaching AI, I think it's pretty unfortunate, especially when the federal government has not had a hearing on funding. Everything in the election space from the federal side is reactive. There is no strategic plan. There is no sustainable strategic funding in elections. Even though it's deemed critical infrastructure, nobody's saying, what is it we're gonna do? Everything we're doing is reactive. Sorry to be the downer, but it's just, I can tell you a lot of great things we're doing in Nevada when it comes to election and voter engagement. But when it comes to this issue, this is one that's catching all of us. Yeah, yeah. And I think that everything is evolving so quickly that we're all thinking about what could be, because we don't know yet. But when you talk about don't know, we will catch the issues of the impersonator. What really scares me is that an opportunity to participate in the AI Democracy Project with Dr. Alondra Nelson from the Institute of Events Study, which is a fascinating organization. And proof news. They brought a few of us election leaders into a room. We tested several of the chatbots. And the information that was coming out about Nevada specifically was wrong. And when you talk about these issues, and we don't know when somebody's getting this bad information. And we know it's a younger voter that's gonna go to AI and use it to ask the questions to become educated. If somebody's turning 18 and they say, how do I register to vote? And the chatbot tells them, you have to register three weeks before the election, which is not true in Nevada. Nevada, we have same day voter registration. This young person is just gonna walk away and continue with their day. We just lost a voter. And that's what really scares me. And I will have no idea that happened because the information being given is wrong and it's false. And the fact that we can say that in the United States where there's lots of available information that models can be trained upon. But then we think at global scale, which Vivian, I know you at Aspen, you've been doing a lot of work thinking about this and hosting a lot of public conversations and discussions about AI and elections. How does the threat and the strategies to counter possible threats change when we think about this globally? Yeah, well, as you said in the opening, this is a record year for national elections. So we've been able to see, and you mentioned some of these in your Open2, as we count down to the people voting for the national, in the fall, we've been able to sort of track what we've seen happening in other national elections in the United States. And can we point to anything that said, this changed the vote? We don't know. I think Secretary Shraab had it right, which is we're not really gonna know the impact on anything of 2024 until we're able to study it afterwards if we can study it, if we can get access to the data, which is a whole other issue and another panel that we should have. But we have seen in every single national election AI used along the lines of some of the examples that you gave about vote rigging or a leading candidate in a very Muslim country, a picture of her in a bikini which can just sink your candidacy in a heartbeat with that emotional response. And it's terrifying. And the messaging, again, it's the stuff you can't see. It's the WhatsApp messages. It's the telegram messages. That's where this kind of information, misinformation, false images, false audio can travel. And the ability to generate this kind of content, highly targeted, customized, personalized to your district at scale is unprecedented. And just so frightening to think about that, we're gonna continue on this frightening theme for a second because Becky, I wanna ask you something because you live in the world of open AI. You live in the world of AI and thinking about what the challenges might be. You do it at a global level. And I think from, it would be really fascinating for all of us to think about from your vantage point, what really is the worst case scenario in this upcoming election and what can be done to try to circumvent that. I think piggybacking off of what Secretary Schwab said earlier and what you mentioned in your opening remarks. The harm that we have seen to date is really around deep fakes that we've actually seen play out at a global scale in these elections. And frankly, that we've heard over and over and over again in our conversations with policymakers in civil society that this is the thing that they're most concerned about. I think the technology today is not yet at a place where some of these more large scale risks and concerns could take place, but there are audio visual models available, audio, images and video that could be leveraged and that out of context information or misinformation could result in some really scary outcomes. What we're doing, we only have an image model currently available. We don't have a commercially available audio or video product, but for images, we have a mitigation in place at the front end where you can't create an image of a real person. So if you ask the model to create an image of an elected official, a secretary of state and an election official, otherwise it won't create that, it will refuse. That said, we know that images that are seemingly innocuous could be taken out of context and that can be equally harmful. And so I think one of the things that you mentioned in your article earlier is really around provenance. So understanding the origin of these audio visual models and their output is a huge part of the work that we're doing internally to give a little bit more context on what that looks like. There's something called C2PA. It's a fancy term for just a piece of data that's attached to an image. You can think of it like a passport.  If it travels around the internet, it has this piece of data attached to it. And with that data, someone on the other end can identify where it originated, that it was produced by Dolly 3, our image generation tool, if it was produced by a different model, or if it's an authentic image, and it was perhaps an image that came from the BBC, who is another entity that has signed on to C2PA. This is by no means a perfect solution if the image is somehow modified. It can lose that data, but it's a really good step in the direction of creating an industry-wide standard where all of these different platforms can talk to each other. Our tools are not a distribution platform. People don't distribute content from our services, but they can go to a distribution service and upload it to any one of the social media. So making sure that we have common language that we can use is really important. The last thing I'll say on that is that I think it's really important that we continue as an industry to push forward the research in this area around provenance. As I said, the current technology is by no means a silver bullet. One thing that I am personally very excited about that we're working on internally is something called a classifier that effectively allows us to look at a whole bunch of images and with very high accuracy, identify which ones came from our tools. The thing that I'm excited about is that it does that even when the image has been modified in ways that you see out in the wild on the internet. So on social media, things get cropped, things get compressed, text gets laid over it, and it continues to be able to identify those images with high degrees of accuracy. That's the kind of stuff that we need in order to be much more robust to these kinds of harms. So that's sort of top of mind for 2024. I think that's great in making those sorts of things public in the way that you called for in your article, Secretary Schwab, I think is a really exciting way to think about how this could help, how things could be more productive moving forward. I want to return Vivian, you kind of started to mention that encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp are a particular issue.  Can you tell us a little bit more about what you're thinking in terms of AI and foreign influence and why things like multiple languages and maybe elaborate a bit more on Vivian's comments about WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging apps? Sure, I think knowing the large number, we have a large Latino population in Nevada. They are going to determine the outcome of some of our most critical elections. But it goes back to even AI and translation of information. Again, at the AI Democracy Project, we went through some of the translation projects and the information, the way information was translated into Spanish, the tone was very festive and very party-like. And I think when you're talking about the seriousness of elections, that's not gonna translate very well to that prospective voter. And so that's a big concern. And we also did it into Hindi. And the way Hindi was translated and translated was so strict and so critical that I think a voter would hear that and would be afraid to actually vote because it was so strict and so direct. And so the tone of translation is very, very critical, but the majority of people don't speak second languages and so they're not able to understand the impact the translation is able to have. Yeah, I think that's one thing that you think about not only the scale in terms of how quickly people could create messages using AI but also how far they could spread, give it distribution channels and then adding language to it is... The underground data that's been relied upon in AI machines is not generated by these communities either. And so there's a sense of already existing bias. And so how do you ensure that you're actually being content appropriate in those translations and that information being given? Yeah, what a good point. In thinking about how we deal with all of this, and I want to come back to you because given your background in the news from New York Times and PRNBC, The Guardian, I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit about what you think. How prepared are the news media to deal with this? What role should they have in this? Could be more prepared. At the Aspen Institute, we have a big AI and elections initiative going and our objective is just to share information across groups because I think that is the biggest gap. So we presented at the National Association of Secretaries of State about what are the risks and what are the mitigations. We have a meeting coming up in two weeks for technologists in Silicon Valley. In fact, the secretaries are gonna be there, which I'm very grateful for, to help the tech companies, those who are not as informed as Becky is, say, for example, about what the risks are to help them understand what are the challenges that those on the ground are facing so they can also come up with mitigations. And the third part of it is to make sure that the media is ready for how to cover these issues when they inevitably come up because there is, I come from news media, I am in my heart a journalist, I will always be, consider myself, my primary identity as journalist. That said, my fellow journalists don't always necessarily do the right things. I think that there is sort of a little bit of an overblown coverage of the big spectacular deep fake, which I think can actually lead people to just mistrust everything, as I mentioned on the podium earlier. And at the same time, not just being prepared for how to cover when these kind of, particularly not just the big deep fake, but the big shiny spectacular deep fake, but the kinds of things that Secretary Aguilar was talking about in terms of what's happening with language translation, whether it's get out, fair-minded, good-hearted get out the boat, or whether it's nefarious actors who are trying to dissuade those using easily accessible language tools, or what stories may be traveling across messaging apps, and really making sure that they are prepared. Really the only thing we can do, I think, for 2024, is to make sure that the public understands whenever they hear, whatever they see, whatever strange robo-call they get about bomb scares at all of the voting places, that they know where to go to check it out. So it's, what's your website again? SOS.cancis.gov. Vote.nv.gov. There you go. This is important, too, is if it doesn't say .gov, chances are it didn't come from us. CIS is really good about protecting, we get significant cyber protections by using the .gov, and there's a lot of imitators that are .org, or .co. So know where to go, and that is both that those who are in charge of election integrity, who will be the, or local election leaders in their communities, or trusted news media. I think making sure that people have those relationships so that they say, okay, I will go to trusted media outlets, please. On the trusted media thing, and I would have the great opportunity to speak with a group of teachers today, what really bothers me right now about trusted media is majority of Americans and students don't have access to that media because they're behind a paywall. And that paywall is a huge barrier to people having the opportunity to get good journalism. And I think when it comes to elections, I wish the elections information would be, the paywall would be removed because it's in the public interest to ensure people have strong information available to them. I will say a lot of the nonprofit, local media, some of whom were represented by organizations today are free and open and not behind a paywall. Thank God we have one in Nevada. We have the Nevada independence, and it's great, but again, we need to ensure they have the resources to exist to do the journalism they need. And I think this brings us to a next question here, which I'd like to ask of all of you, which is if you have the ability to enact one policy with respect to AI in elections, a realistic policy, so this is not the magic wand scenario of do no one would be deceived by misinformation. This is a realistic policy that you could enact. I'm curious to hear what it would be from each of your respective perspectives. Who wants to start? I spent 19 years in the legislature and I love the making policy, being a chairman was one of the greatest honors I ever had because you get to, and when I was a chair of financial institutions, the biggest issue was Uber because the question was who's responsible for the insurance on the vehicle, right? And if you remember back in 2016, maybe it was 2015, Uber canceled their network in Kansas and if you opened Uber, it said, please respond to Chairman Schwab about getting Uber again in Kansas. And so you clicked on it and so imagine their network, it shut down our server and our capital because they got all these emails, right? And so I took down Uber, but we struck a deal and whatnot, but so these are the things are, I believe in a free market, so there's a freedom there, right? But it does work through critical infrastructure that is subject to regulation. If you're engaged in commerce in the United States, you're subject to regulation, which is fair. I really am spending more time on that Minnesota law that's saying, no, you have to disclaim, I'm not saying you can't create it, but you have to be honest about what it is.   They can still sue and have jurisprudence across oceans, right? It's more of a challenge, but at least you set, hey, this is the standard of what we're going to do. Outside of that, how can we make laws better? Well, you're setting a great standard. Do we put that in statute?  That's a great pivot. I think from our lens, it really is about standardization. I mean, taking again, thinking about provenance, that's just one example where there has been across not just tech industry, but also the news media, some amount of standardization that has occurred organically. But I think for that to apply to other areas of this technology, there does need to be some momentum that is across not just industry, but also government. One thing that you were saying earlier is, how do the models respond consistently? One way that we can do that and that we're exploring is pulling in what we're calling democratic inputs, identifying a whole host of representative views so that we understand what model behavior should look like. But I don't think that 1000 people in Silicon Valley should be responsible for determining what that looks like. And we're trying to make good strides towards that absent standards, but I think that's really something that we need to pull together a whole bunch of minds across multiple industries to figure out and to roll out a clear consistent way to do some of these really tough things in this nascent technology. Yeah, I love that idea of the collaboration and thinking through how you would enact these provenance indicators. We have a researcher at the Center for Media Engagement that's been doing some work to try to figure out if you displayed that to people. Just the raw information of where an image came from. Will that affect whether people find it to be true or false? And she found indeed that it does have some really beneficial effects. So I think there's some optimism behind doing that sort of work, which I think is really exciting. Okay, jump in. What do you think? I'm gonna go back to my days in grammar school and say, every time you wrote a report, you had to use a primary source. And so if these chatbots and these machines were able to only use data from primary sources, those sources being.gov websites and making sure that that information is being used. Nevada passed some pretty significant voter access policies in 2021, but they're not showing up in these chatbots. They're showing old Nevada law that's been replaced. And so if we could go back to .gov, go back to statutes and use primary sources as the source of information. What do you think? I'll harken back to this Minnesota law that Secretary Schwab was referring to. We do need Congress of the United States, the Federal Congress to act and to create legislation along these lines. Again, we don't wanna ban synthetic media. That would be ridiculous, but we do want disclosure, mandatory disclosure and real penalties for those who not. And also to give the Federal Election Commission more teeth. The Federal Election Commission, most people don't realize, it's very little, they're really only about campaign finance. They don't have any other authority that the, and probably shouldn't have a lot of authority, by the way, I'm not recommending that. I think it's right that the elections are handled by the states, but when it comes to this kind of disclosure around the use of synthetic media, AI generated false content, I think there is a role. I know that there's many members of Congress of both parties that agree that this is a role that the FEC can play. Great policies. If I had that magic wand right now, I would do it. Okay, so for our last question here, I want to end with giving people a sense of where we're all coming from so that after the 2024 election, we can all reflect back on this panel and what we think. So I want to read you some headlines about AI and elections, and I want to hear from each of you in our short time left, whether you think that the fears of AI are overhyped, underhyped, or just about right. The Guardian says disinformation reimagined how AI could erode democracy in the 2024 US elections. Pointer, how generative AI could help foreign adversaries influence US elections. From foreign affairs, the coming age of AI-powered propaganda. Overhyped, underhyped, or just about right, and Vivian, I think we should start with you. I don't know what the other great philosopher, that being Taylor Swift, that say two things can be true at the same time. So it can be overhyped and underhyped at the same time. And if you think that's my answer. Do you want to just offer 30 seconds more of explanation for that response? Well, first of all, we don't know what's going to happen in 2024. I think that there is reason to be very concerned about the impact of synthetic media, AI-generated false information on the election. So it is not overhyped. We all need to be aware of that. For the reasons I was mentioned before, so that people know where to check to make sure something is true. So that's the underhyped. The overhyped is that I fear we're going to just make people stop believe, like I've said over and over again, that they will not believe anything. And that's got nothing to do with technology, tech companies, policy. That is a massive societal issue that could be incredibly damaging. Okay, we have to be quick now because our time is almost over, under, just about right. Everything as long as we're prepared to respond to it collectively. Okay. I think it's important for us to be clear-eyed about what's coming. And I don't necessarily think that all of those things are likely to happen right now with the current technology, but I do think it is very important that we are aware, that we're building awareness of what might be coming in the future, so that we are prepared. That's sort of core to the way that we deploy our models. We deploy models even that might be very stupid, so that people might be able to understand where this technology is going. And I think it's critical that folks are clear-eyed going in so that we can start building mitigations for the risks of tomorrow. First off, is a huge Chan City chiefs fan. I love Travis Kelsey. Bonus points for bringing in the Swifties, man. So as a son of a military guy, you expect the worst in hope for the best. And so both would have to be true. So we expect the worst in hope for the best. And I think Cisco would agree. We're gonna, you're gonna have a good election this year and you're gonna be able to trust the results. You just may not be able to trust the people who tell you about the results. You heard it here at check.gov. Please join me in thanking our panelists so much. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Frazier, the Honorable Richard Gaypart, Faro Pandis, Eli Frazier, and Nicole Tisdale. We're just waiting on one more here. Some Mike challenges. Well, it's a pleasure to be, well, we're waiting for Far to join us here. It's a pleasure to be with you all today, this audience. But most, for me personally, it is just a true privilege to be with this panel. An incredible group of people, many of whom I get to work with on a regular basis on the Council for Responsible Social Media. As I've sat here these last two days and listened to these conversations and grappled with the core of what we're trying to do and understand, I've come to one central question. Can our democracy survive if something isn't changed in our information environment? And of course, at the core of that is social media, which is what we're here to talk about today, technology. And it has become the dominant form of communication. It is becoming the predominant way in which people get their information and news, particularly for young people. And what has this world resulted in today? Very different conversation if we were having this conference 20 years ago. Well, what has resulted in is mass spread of false information, flooding the airwaves, creeping into our minds. It has resulted in the worst mental health crisis ever for young people, where we see two thirds of young people saying that they are anxious more than half of the time. Self-harm has increased threefold for young girls. It's remarkable what's happened to our democracy. We think about where Congressman Gephardt served in the House of Representatives. It's hard to even understand how these are the same institution. And you think about how fractious it is. We didn't have a speaker of the House for three weeks. By partisanship seems to have died. And so much more has changed in this era of social media. Not to mention that our foreign adversaries are licking their chops and using every opportunity they can to divide us further, to spread disinformation and so much more. So, I paint this picture for you all because it's a really important understanding what the center of this is, which is a broken business model that we heard a lot about last night from Kara Swisher, which is about engagement.  And through those business models, we see then powerful algorithms created to keep us in information silos or at worst radicalize people in very profound ways. And now we have to deal with generative AI and all the things that that's gonna throw into the mix of this cycle. So now I just painted a very dreary picture for you all, but I promise you, this is the optimistic panel. We are here to tell you there is real genuine hope because we can and I'm seeing signs every day of the possibilities for change. And so with that, I'm gonna turn now to our distinguished panel and start with the issue of kids. Many of you may have seen in January, the CEOs of many of the big tech companies came to Washington and were dressed down universally across the aisle, so much so that Mark Zuckerberg was compelled to apologize to grieving parents in the room. It was a rare moment of bipartisanship, a glimmer of hope that there is possibility to do stuff with both parties. And that is best demonstrated by the Kids Online Safety Act, which now has 67 co-sponsors in the Senate. It was just introduced in the house this week, something we've been working on very intensely. And while all of us care about the future of our kids and the health of their mental state and so much more, this has profound effects and impacts for democracy and what we're all talking about as well. So my question, and we'll start with Congressman Gephardt, is outside of the immediate impact on our children and their safety. Why is COSA so critical for our broader tech reform efforts? And how could this have a bigger impact on the information environment and our democracy? We need a win. We have not had a win since the beginning of social media. They run the show. They've got all the money. We've not had a win. We believe that COSA can be passed this year and sent to the president. CRSM is a totally bipartisan organization. We've got 40 or 50 members, very diverse, from all different vectors of this problem. And we are working top down. A lot of the groups that are great, that are here, are working bottom up to fix this problem. You need both top down and bottom up. And we go up on the hill and we talk to Republican members, Democratic members, and I have never been more optimistic than I am today that we're gonna get legislation done this year as the beginning of dealing with this problem. Anyone else wanna chime in on the importance of kids online safety and how this could weigh into the broader impact of the information environment? One of the things I would say, having worked on the issue of young people getting radicalized for the last 20 plus years since 9-11, is that we've learned a lot about the process of radicalization and how ideas can be weaponized. We have, across the board, both from conservative and liberal entities, universities, as well as think tanks and nonprofit organizations, done a lot of thinking around what we can be doing to be able to protect young people. What was just said about we need to win is extremely important because there's been so much failure along the way. We have failed our children, we have failed the future of the American leadership, whether or not they are going into the public sector or the private sector, we're looking at generations of young people for whom these ideas are really compelling and if we don't do more today to be able to build a safety net for our future generations of Americans, what are we doing? So I couldn't agree more on the issue of we need a win but I will also say that win can be backed up by data that we didn't have 20 years ago and we have today. Any other comments on that? Yeah, I really appreciate the optimism and I think it speaks to, you know, there's kind of been a learned helplessness about this problem that we can't do anything about it and I think that's pernicious and it's starting to change and the conference has democracy in the title but digitally we live essentially in these kind of autocracies. We operate in corporate environments that people have no say in, they have no rights in and I think shaking that off and starting to think about how do we as citizens govern our information environment is a really critical step that we need to kind of take and so this is a start to that. It's all good, jump in please. I'll just add to everything that everyone is saying but also I want our optimism to be empowering. I always tell people these social media companies owe us, y'all. We use their platforms, they make money off of us, they operate in an open society, all of that is the foundation of a democracy and so while I'm very optimistic, I'm also really forceful about this is no longer we're asking you, we are demanding accountability, we are demanding transparency, we are demanding that these social media companies do their part to uphold democracy and I'm very forceful and passionate about that because I think that's also included in how we get the win. We stop asking and we start demanding. Well, we'll get more clouds. Let's go now to national security and we're fortunate to have a couple real national security experts here with us on stage. So Russia, China, Iran and others regularly interfere in our elections, polarize us further, spread false information through disinformation campaigns and much more. The House recently passed a bill to essentially ban TikTok. If taken up by the Senate and President Biden has said he will sign this bill into law. And the reason for this is because there's concerns about data, the CCP's access to sensitive American data and the ability to manipulate the algorithm to move public opinion in a certain way that is advantageous to the Chinese Communist Party and not to American policy. So Farah, starting with you, does this approach make sense and expanding that out further? What else can Congress and the US government do to most effectively protect US national security both when it comes to foreign platforms like TikTok and our own companies domestically? I think it's a really critical question that you're asking and I wanna scope back just a bit before I get into the nitty gritty of what we can do in terms of solutions because solutions are available and affordable right now. That's the headline. But let's take a step back and really think about what human assets we have. Outside of time, which is in fact the most precious asset that we have, our own human data and information is the next in line. And what we are talking about today in the world that we have constructed and it's not just America, it's around the world, is that that data has been used and it's part of our daily life.  But for the average American, they aren't waking up every day wondering what Russia and China and other non-state actors like an ISIS or a Hamas or a neo-Nazi group might be thinking. For those of us who have been doing foreign policy, we think about those alongside what's happening domestically. And that domestic piece for me is the part that I think is most compelling because we are not living in the 1950s. We're in 2024 where international and domestic have merged. What happens in one part of the world affects another. I remember very strongly when I was working in the Bush administration during 9-11, you guys will remember perhaps the Danish cartoon crisis where something that happened in Copenhagen affected lives in Kabul. We weren't ready as America to understand, we didn't know what viral meant. We didn't understand that something that had moved along in Europe could make our troops vulnerable. People lost their lives all over the world because of that cartoon. And we began to understand that in fact these ideas and the ricocheting effect of how these things get spread, this was way back in 2006, 2007, when we didn't have Twitter or X or whatever it's called and other social platforms, even the most basic things. So for me as I think about this and as somebody who has spent my career thinking about the ideas about hate and extremism and how bad actors use these platforms, I think about my own country and I think about what do Americans need to understand about things that are being shown on YouTube or conversations that are happening on Discord or conversations that are happening on Twitch, if you don't know what Twitch is, take a look and why that matters to their daily life because their information and your ability to behave as Americans can be manipulated by states and non-states. The way we are as Americans will change because there are adversaries that want that to happen. If we begin to understand that we shouldn't be duped and if we begin to understand that we have an opportunity today to take everything that we've learned about all of the things that we know and to build fortifications so that we're not duped, that we're protecting American societies, that we understand very critically that there is not this moment where we put our hands up and think, oh my goodness, it's too hard, we're boiling the ocean. No, we're not boiling the ocean. We are taking a very confident and very focused approach to how we build resilience and that resilience can happen. The way I describe it to people is there are nano-interventions, there are micro-interventions, there are macro-interventions and there are mega-interventions. And it is not just government that needs to make laws or policy makers that need to move. It's also regular citizens who think about their own fortification of their communities and what we stand for as Americans. So for me, the national security points, yes, of course we are worried about a China taking advantage of an American society. Of course we care that a platform like TikTok can mobilize a change in American behavior. Of course we care that there's propaganda that's being put forward by Russia that's making us think differently and act differently. But we should also care that the very nature of who we are as Americans are changing because people who are not Americans are deciding that that's what they want to do. So the way in which we approach this, the solution side, one piece of this, of course is the TikTok component. But it's much bigger than that. It is a holistic assessment of who we are, what we stand for, and what guardrails we wanna put on society so that we're not duped. Thanks Farah. Nicole, you've spent time in the White House and Congress working on these issues directly. Tell us your perspective. What can we do and what are the biggest threats that you're concerned about at this moment? Yeah, I mean just to echo Farah's point, I wanna say this and I'm comfortable because I'm from Mississippi and I'm in front of a Texas crowd, but y'all, two things can be true. We are all getting these questions about what about the TikTok ban? What about the TikTok ban? You can support, which I support the TikTok ban and decentralizing who owns TikTok and who has the ability to demand the data of the people who are on the platform. And it's not enough. And that's what I tell people. This false equivalent that people are giving you that you can only have one, that's not true. We can do hard things. Yes, it's going to be hard to decentralize TikTok and hold American social media companies responsible, but we can do that. And so when I think about from a national security standpoint, one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about this is because Farah's point is right. It's not just the people's Republic of China. It's not just Iran, it's not just Russia, but these influence campaigns, and I'm very cognizant to not call them disinformation because all of the information is not false or misleading, which is what disinformation is. Some of the best influence campaigns are because they are spreading kernels of truth. They are saying things that are not totally false. They're not totally misleading.  When I hear people say it's disinformation to say that some people don't want you to vote, I look around and I see what's happening to black voters, Hispanic voters and indigenous voters. It is not false or misleading to say that some people don't want us to vote. The source matters. If Russia is saying that they don't want you to vote, the American politicians don't want you to vote, I know what happens in Russia. I know that people vote out of fear of being killed. I know that people vote out of fear of being jail. It matters to me when Russia is spreading influence operations and spreading information because the source matters.  It matters that that is coming out of China. That is a country that also doesn't care. The difference between what when Russia says it, when China says it, and when it happens in the United States is we live in a democracy and so there is an option, there is a process, there is due process for change. I tell people I'm not happy with what the Supreme Court did as it relates to women's rights, but there was a process. We are in a place now where Congress can come in and act in that process and change. You don't have that in Russia. You don't have that in China. Whatever they say is the law or is the rule that is the rule. And I think getting people to be empowered to understand sources matter. Also our communities are not in a place where we can't understand that. I think everybody, that was a very quick summation of kind of what happens in Russia and China, but I see people nodding so I know people understand that. You have to be able to, from a national security standpoint, put this stuff in context for people so that they understand we can't have this on our social media platforms. Going back to the beginning, these companies have a level of responsibility that we are just enforcing. And if you are gonna operate, if you're gonna have us on your platforms for good, then you also have to acknowledge when your platform is being used for bad. So I'm gonna pivot us now to another creative and really optimistic possibility. Elizabeth Warren, Lindsey Graham. Don't have much in common, pretty much don't agree on anything. But yet last year they came together and proposed to the creation of a new digital regulatory agency to oversee technology and social media. Similar to the FDA or FAA. And you all think about this example that was brought up last night, but I think it's the most clarifying. When one issue happened on Alaska Airlines flight, one issue, no one's hurt, but it's one serious issue. Hundreds of planes are down for months, billions of dollars in lost revenue for companies, lasting implications for Boeing. But yet when products, products are wreaking havoc on social media causing immense harm in so many ways that we've talked about, there is no body that oversees that dedicated just to that cause to say, we're gonna take down this product and we're gonna test this product before it goes to market. So my question, I'm gonna start with Eli. Do you think that some sort of structural change like this agency is necessary to really get, bring oversight and fix the technology sector? And beyond this proposal, are there any other structural solutions that you would propose? Yeah, so I think you make a great point, which is like we have federal bodies that regulate toasters and kids toys and just about anything you can think of, but we don't have a body that is holistically responsible for regulating the place where I have young kids and it's like this is a big part of the environment that unfortunately they are gonna be growing up into. We don't have anyone who's at the wheel of the ship there. So yes. But I think I wanna kind of stretch the conversation a little bit because I think these questions of regulation are kind of absolutely end in the sense that if we were talking about public education and we were only talking about regulating private schools, that wouldn't be a full conversation about how you secure education for a population. And if we were talking about making sure that everyone had access to information in libraries, regulating bookstores wouldn't get you to the goal. So I really think we need to be thinking in that way about our digital spaces. And our friend Ethan Zuckerman, who's a scholar of information, has a great story about Ben Franklin and the post office. So Ben Franklin's mostly known for keys and lightning, but the post office was really like a critical visionary invention in early America that subsidized the ability of people to very easily trade information. And so many people worked for the post office that you can really describe America in the early days, and this is his words, as like a post office with a small military. That was what we were. And that was critical. When you talk about DeTochville going around America and seeing this kind of civic society that was emerging, it was because we had invested in an infrastructure, a public infrastructure for information exchange that bound us together and that encoded our democratic values from the beginning. We've done that many times over history. We've done that with libraries. We've done that with public parks. It's one of the things that makes America kind of amazing is that we've had this continual public innovation and how we organize ourselves and our information. But I feel like we've lost that muscle or that reflex that we're ceding all of this ground to how can we tweak the algorithm in Facebook and make it a little bit better or make it a little less worse? And so I run an organization called New Public, the focus of which is really thinking about sort of not everything in digital space needs to be publicly driven, publicly public infrastructure. But there are places, just like you can have bookstores and libraries, there are places where we need to build things around public values. And Kara Swisher said last night, that this is a business problem, she's right.  And if we don't build the kind of civic institutions that do that, we're not gonna get where we wanna go. So to answer your question, I think absolutely we need to rein in the excesses and the damages and the harms of the existing platforms. But we also need to be thinking about how we create, what is the equivalent of that kind of postal service for the digital age? What's the equivalent of the libraries and parks? And how do we build those kinds of institutions as well? And I think that's an enormously important policy project for the 21st century. Absolutely. Congressman Gephardt, let's bring you in here again, whether any comments on the digital agency or the structural changes that we need to see to really make a difference. I totally agree with what was just said. And I started with it, we need top-down work to get guardrails in these platforms. But we, the people, have to build things bottom-up as we always have, as we always have. That's what makes this country so fantastic is that the people do things. I think the digital agency is a real help and I hope we can get something done on it. Let me give you my wish list for legislation that I hope we can get done in the next year or two. Number one is COSA. We gotta take care of the kids, that's the first problem.  And a lot of people out there don't know the dangers that come from the way social media operates. One of the mothers told me her story. She said, my son was 14, he came to me one day with his phone and said, look at this, this is funny. And she said, what is it? He said, it's the choke challenge. She said, that sounds dangerous, don't get involved in that. And he said, oh, I never would. I just thought it was funny. A few days later, she finds him hanging from his belt in the garage, dead. Why did that happen? Well, the media platforms, if I'm a youngster and I go on and I'm asking questions about eating disorders or being depressed or cutting myself, the algorithms drag me into these challenges. And I'm told there are like 15 different challenges that all lead to the same result. I mean, this is, and the people that run these platforms know what they're doing. This is immoral behavior, I'm sorry. So, we need COSA, we need privacy legislation because the base property that they use to make their money is us, we're the product. They know everything about you if you're on the platform. Everything, so they know to boost to you information to keep your attention on the platform so they make more money. So, privacy legislation would help with national security. It would help with everything we're talking about. The third thing is section 230. And I don't wanna go too long on this but I voted for section 230. In 1994, whatever. And if you'd like to hear all my bad votes, I could spend all night. That was a bad vote. But at the time, the platforms came to us and said, you gotta make us immune from harm that would be caused by what's on our platform. If you don't, you'll never have an internet economy. These companies were little bitty companies then, right?  We don't put any content on, the people put it on. So, let them be sued but don't sue us. Since then, they've become the most intelligent pipe in human history. They know everything about me so they're boosting to me information 24-7, 365 to keep me angry and upset so they keep my attention. So we need that piece of legislation as well. Maybe we can't rescind it, maybe we can amend it to make it safer so that they have to have accountability for the harm that they are affirmatively creating. One of our mothers tried to sue the platforms because of the harm that came from her son killing himself and the suit was thrown out because of section 230. Immediately, fourth, the digital agency. If you want my wish list for top down, those are the four things and we're gonna work our heads off to get those four done. Thanks for that. Yeah. And for those who are not aware, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act essentially gives social media platforms a lot of technology companies blanket immunity from lawsuits for the harms they cause. Far, you wanna jump in? Could I say a couple of things? Just in response to the two wonderful comments that have just been made, I wanna pick up on this idea of who we are as Americans and who we've always been. And I see a lack of imagination on these issues and it surprises me because we don't have a lack of imagination in America. We figure out how to do things as Americans. And for some reason, this is too hard, right? And I look at the what we have decided is important to society. The decisions that we are making as society about ourselves and I shake my head because we see what's coming, we see the train that's coming, yet we aren't change, we're not doing anything to change behavior. What was just said about top down and bottom up, absolutely 100%, but it's also circular, right? We've gotta look around and say, where are the places with creativity and imagination that we haven't thought about before? So the digital agency is one exceptional and really smart idea. But there are lots of smaller things that will nudge people in a direction that will change behavior and we've done that in America. We did that when AIDS came in the 1980s and we never could say we couldn't talk about safe sex. We couldn't even say the word condom out loud. We couldn't talk about all these things and we thought, how will we ever get Americans to change their behavior? Well, guess what? Years later, we have figured this out. There was a time in America where to say to America, if a European looked at an American and said, they will never recycle, they will never change their behaviors. Americans are not like that, they're so wasteful, they don't do what we do. Well, over time we've taught communities how to put plastic in this place and paper in another. So these kinds of behavioral changes can happen. The nudges that happen both from the private sector and from the public sector can develop itself in such a way that these protections that we are talking about, the safety components, but also the society components are there for the taking. And for me, as I think about what you've just said about who we are as we the people, we the people ought to be better at going forward in the way that we know we have done for this magnificent country and think creatively about how to do this in a smart, effective and trial little, not be so sure that we're gonna fail. I think that's part of the reason why we've hit so many roadblocks. Nobody wants to take the ownership over this. They don't wanna have it be a disaster. We've got to experiment the way we would in other fields. We the people ought to be better, I love that. So Nicole, one of the pieces on Congressman Deppart's wish list was data privacy. I'd love for you to share with this audience here something that's happened very recently with respect to data privacy and anything else you'd like to add to the wish list of what else we could do to fix this legislatively. Sure, so there's been a really important privacy bill that has been in Congress. On the house side, we had really good movement, bipartisan support, and it got held up in the Senate. I'm trying not to use the members names because I don't actually think it's important about who was supporting it and who was moving it. What has happened as of Friday is there is an agreement to get text done with the commitment to move it forward. And what I want people to pull from that is there's a commitment to do something. And so as we're talking about the different legislative proposals, but also just some of the history of like societal changes in our country, it all comes from us doing something. And so the privacy community, we're very excited about the possibility that there is going to be agreed upon legislation that will actually get a vote in the house and the Senate. And I think as you're hearing about a lot of the proposals of how do we hold the social media platforms accountable, the most important thing to remember is we have to take a vote. So when you talk about voting on section 230 in 1994, I just think that is too long for us to have a piece of legislation and not amend it, not reform it, not change it, not just vote on it again. We don't see that in any other industry and we don't see that with any other laws. We're talking about the post office. I know people have strong thoughts and opinions about the post office. But you know what? The post office gets reauthorized. We vote on that, Congress votes on that consistently. And as the needs of the people who use the Postal Service change, the laws change with it. Everything in our democracy, in our legislative process requires us to go back and make sure that these laws are still pertinent for the time that we are here. It's insanity that this law was passed in 1994 and it's hands off. I was 10 years old in 1994. We didn't have internet access in my home in 1994. It is fair to go back in and say we need to look at this. Just today, there's a really big surveillance bill that failed in the House vote today. It was passed originally after 9-11 at a time where we were really worried about kind of homegrown terrorism and like trying to make sure that we didn't have another 9-11. That is a really big piece of legislation and we knew that it was imported and Congress said every five years we're gonna bring this up for a vote. And every five years people debate over it, people fight over it, I hated the vote to be honest when I was working in Congress because it requires so much. And you have members of Congress that are on different sides. It doesn't matter what party they're in. That bill failed today because they are going to continue to debate on it. They're gonna deliberate on it. The Senate has an option if they wanna pass it, they can do it. But it's happening. It's action and I think that's the most frustrating thing about Section 230 or any kind of reform with the social media companies, we won't take the vote. And I know there are a lot of grassroots people that are here and you're trying to, I would say you don't have to figure out where the commas go and where the periods go and which proposal you like. Demand that a vote be taken on laws and provisions that were set up when these companies just didn't have access like they do and they weren't so much of our life. Thanks, I completely agree with you, Nicole. So I wanna finish off with another Eli Evil teaser to other things besides legislation. There's a lot happening at the federal level which you're hearing about or optimism. There's a lot of stuff having to state but there's a lot of stuff you alluded to that people can do. This problem started in the private sector. Private sector, entrepreneurs and individuals like those watching those here in the audience can do something. So please, I'd love you to go back into this Eli and expand upon what we can do as individuals to help protect our democracy. Yeah, well, I think this in some ways links not only parts of this conversation together but also parts of the conversation throughout the day which is, you know, Robert Putnam wrote a great book recently called The Upswing which tracks sort of this extraordinary birth and new civic institutions in the early 1900s and these innovations as Congressman Gephard says do often start bottom up. And I'm particularly taken with the story about sort of public high school which was something that totally crazy idea for a while. A couple of schools in, I think it was Iowa, you know, started experimenting with it. And within 20 years you had it as a kind of universal public good. The place where I'm really focused and which really again speaks to some of the focus on local journalism and local news that we've had earlier is that where we're seeing kind of some emergent good patches of social conversation, social media is in these kind of very local contexts which are not always kind of driven by large platform mechanics, are not always often have like people involved and actually actively pulling them together and are doing some of the jobs that are missing in the news deserts. And so I think there's an extraordinary opportunity to think about if we were kind of to take apart what news media and what other civic institutions did in the 20th century and rebuild it for the 21st, what does that look like? And I don't think any of us totally knows yet but I think that's a really exciting project of invention that a lot of people, we're seeing tons of people experiment with this right now in Vermont and then Detroit and then Brooklyn and all sorts of places around the country. People are experimenting with like, how do we build this in a way that doesn't lead to the awful incentives that Congressman Gephard talked about? So I think that's really like, that's an exciting thing about this moment. There's a lot of destruction, there's a lot of harm but there's also a real opportunity to think about what's the kinds of civic institutions we wanna build and how do we do that not just through policy and through government but kind of build a new kind of civil society that's gonna see us through this new digital era. I think that's the opportunity that we're all here together to explore. On that note, thank you so much. This panel is an incredible conversation. I hope you all have left feeling more optimistic than you came in about the possibilities but thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our afternoon program. Thank you for coming.