Online Disinformation Could Spark Real World Wars | Joe Rogan and Renée DiResta

Because I have tried over the years, whether it's conspiracy theorists, communities or terrorists or Russia, Iran, the state-sponsored actors, the domestic ideologues, I have tried to always say like, here is the specific kind of forensic analysis of this particular operation, and then here is what we can maybe take from it and make changes. We've seen some of that begin to take shape, and so I feel grateful to have had the opportunity to work towards connecting those dots and work towards having this conversation, meaning helping people understand what's going on. I think I am not, I am most concerned about the, as this gets increasingly easy to do through things like chat bots, you know, now there's these, you've seen the website, thispersondoesnotexist.com. So it's, there's a technology called, it's a machine learning technique, Generative Adversarial Networks, and they, it's these, basically they're in this particular application working to create pictures of people, faces of people. And so this website is, when you go to it, it pulls up a, yeah, there you go. So this person does not actually exist. That's a fake human? Yeah, and so these are all, These are computer generated images? These are computer generated, yep. Oh, god. So you can see created by Gans, it says it down at the bottom there. So these are not real people. And so we have increasingly sophisticated chat technology, we have increasingly sophisticated, you're not going to detect that image somewhere else. That old trick of right click and look and see if you're talking to someone with a stock photo, that goes right out the window with stuff like this gets easier and easier to do. Well then deep faking, right? Yeah, the deep fakes on the video front. I think that it does change, I think we haven't quite adapted to what is it like to live in a world where so much of the internet is fake. And I do think, per your point about identity, that there will be groups of people that self-select into communities where identity is mandatory, where this is who you are and you have some sort of verification versus people who choose to live in the world of drink from the fire hose, take it all in and try to filter it out yourself. So we look at these evolving technologies and I don't necessarily feel particularly optimistic in the short term. I think that ultimately it does, like we change as a society to a large extent in response to this. We think about, there are going to be some fixes that the platforms are going to be able to undertake. We're going to get better at detecting this stuff, maybe the adversary will evolve, hopefully we get better at detecting it as it evolves. But I think we fundamentally ultimately change. People become more aware that this is a thing. They are more skeptical, that does change our ways of interacting with each other. But I feel like that is going to be the direction that this goes. The more like, the thing that keeps me up at night would be more the ease of turning this from a social media problem into like a real world war problem. Meaning, as an example, back in 2014, one of the first things the Internet Research Agency did September 11th, 2014, they created a hoax saying that ISIS had attacked a chemical plant down in Louisiana. It's called the Columbia Chemical Plant hoaxes, I think. There's a Wikipedia article about it now. But what happened was they created a collection of websites. They created fake CNN mockups, Twitter accounts, text messages that went to local people, radio station columns, you name it, everything to create the impression that a chemical factory had just exploded in Louisiana. And there was some attribution to ISIS. And this was done on September 11th. So this is the kind of thing where this actually did go viral. Like I remember this happening, not as a social media researcher, I just remember it actually being pushed into my social media feed. So you have these, and we didn't know that it was the Internet Research Agency for year and a half after. But this is the kind of thing where you look at parts of the world that aren't the US, like the recent drama between India and Pakistan. And you can see how these kinds of things can go horribly, horribly wrong. If the wrong person is convinced that something has happened, or if there's a, you know, or if this leads to a riot, or if this leads to real world action, I think that's one of the main fears as this gets better and better, the video fakes get better.