HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.
Of bots and trolls.
When we explore the digital carcinogens that
have infected the internet ecosystem,
a wave of anti-social media,
Oxford Internet researcher Nick Monaco guided us
through the origin and use,
really misuse and abuse of these online predators.
Today we consider specifically the post-fact present.
Webs of lies spun rampantly via digital
dissemination, with Harvard University
Joan Shorenstein Fellow, Claes de Vreese,
professor and chair of political communication
at the University of Amsterdam,
and editor-in-chief of Political Communication.
Today we'll examine the crisis of misinformation,
the evolution of populist rhetoric and its
resurgence around the globe,
from the United States to major European powers.
How is the digital climate swaying public opinion,
and ultimately elections, referendums, and direct democracy?
Welcome, Professor.
DE VREESE: Thank you.
HEFFNER: It's a pleasure to have you here.
I first want to ask you, knowing the Shorenstein
reputation and the fact that you are there with a
cohort of scholars from around the world,
including your counterpart,
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an American political
communications expert, how,
how do you reflect on your time at Shorenstein this
past year of 2017.
DE VREESE: Being at the Shorenstein Center is
really a fantastic experience,
because there are these really great scholars
there but there are also really great faculty and
really great student and staff at the Shorenstein Center,
so it's been wonderful,
but this year has been particularly interesting
maybe because we are a good group of people
together who actually speak very well even
though we come at very, you know,
from very different backgrounds.
Kathleen is a U.S.-based scholar and we have Donna
Brazile and Tyler Bridges there.
It's an eclectic group of people but we have a lot
of you know, common ground also with our
entrepreneurial fellow, Wael Ghonim, who's there as well.
HEFFNER: We spoke before about how you would
differentiate the American political communications
system right now and the misinformation crisis on U.S.
soil and how you, how you compare that to the crises
in Europe or elsewhere. And I wanted you to give us,
and our viewers a global presentation of what
really is the misinformation crisis right now.
DE VREESE: So we live in an era that I think
we can characterize as an era of real sort of information pollution.
There's a lot of information out there
but it's very hard to verify all of it in a very quick
manner, and one of the things that really set the
U.S. system and U.S.
experience maybe in a separate category compared
to other western democracies are actually
factors that have both to do with the media system
and with the political system.
So it makes a very big difference for example
for how much, influence information can have in a
political system if you are looking at a
proportional representation system
or a first past the post system.
So if in the United States you win a couple
of key states with a very small majority of votes,
that's enough to put someone in the White House.
Whereas in most European countries and in most
countries with a proportional
representation system, that would maybe,
you know, give a percentage more or less to
any given party but not necessarily sway
that party into absolute power.
So that makes a very big difference for how much
impact can misinformation or information have.
There have also been, you know,
instances in the past where ads or normal news
would have these kind of influences that are big
but they just become amplified and way bigger
in a system like the U.S.
system where you elect the President in the way that
you do with the Electoral College and winning the
entire state by just a very small majority of votes.
So the electoral system is one component.
The other one is the media system.
Most European democracies have a way stronger public
broadcasting culture.
That is really one that even though they have seen
declines in the past decades of their
audiences, they've been part of generating a
culture of having public and political discussions
that is different from the system here that has
become so highly polarized in the media landscape,
and if you then add on top of that what has been
happening in the past say just ten years,
in terms of our online and our digital media
landscape, well then you have got the almost
perfect ingredients, for trying to understand why
it is that information and misinformation can have
such a big influence as it can today.
HEFFNER: You allude of course,
Professor, to the states where the Russian trolls,
the farms of trolls were hyperattentive to the
battleground states, and therefore they were
infecting social media by IP address,
going down to the county by county level.
And that made those particular voters,
Pennsylvanians, Michiganders,
more vulnerable to the misinformation.
Where did you see cases where the communications
apparatus you could say had the integrity amidst
this flood of disinformation online?
We point to elections in Germany and France in
particular, where we saw outcomes that were
different from the U.S., but how,
what is the information or disinformation state of
play in those two cases of France and Germany most recently?
DE VREESE: So one of the things I think we have
learned over the course of 2017 that it is actually
possible to generate a discussion about,
say, fake news, misinformation,
and the value of information even during
the election campaign.
So we saw in France for example,
that information came out that was relatively easy
to say this is not proper information,
this is not truthful, and that became part of the
story during the election campaign.
That is a very different experience,
than the United States experience where this
discussion has been taking place in the year after
the election rather than during the campaign,
in many of the European cultures there is maybe a
longer tradition for also allowing some kind of
interference with the information market.
So regulation in the area of news and information
is a very, very delicate topic,
and you surely don't want just anyone to regulate,
and you can ask yourself many times whether you
want the state and political power holders
to be the ones that regulate.
Having said that though, there is a tradition
for more interference in that information market in
Europe than than there has been here in the United States.
So political advertising for example in many
countries is either banned or restricted highly.
The degree to which you can spread and buy air
time for political parties is restricted,
so there are these instances in the past
and in current systems which are actually in place
that are in some ways you could say interferences
in what some have deemed to be an imperfect market.
Now the idea of an imperfect market is not a
foreign idea to the United States either.
There is you could say interference in the market
when it comes to food safety or how we run
energy networks here, so this idea of that you
might want to have at least a conversation about
how you could encourage some kind of correction to
market, and in this case we're talking about the
information market, in order to make it better
than it is if it just grows maybe organically
and without any kind of interference.
HEFFNER: That's why you're here.
That's why I invited you here,
because you have an understanding of,
you have to tiptoe around that R word, regulation.
When you think of civic parameters as a
replacement for the regulatory language that
may be a way in the U.S.
to champion the values of integrity in media to
revive those values in the online marketplace.
But I think you're so astute to point out that distinction.
Because there is a corrective course that we
have to think long and hard about here,
and at the same time, with any system,
you use the word interference,
that would immediately be rejected here because of
what it insinuates, that idea of muzzling the First
Amendment protection.
So and yet the Germans and the French are,
are living freely- DE VREESE: [LAUGHS]
HEFFNER: And, and you know, they have the protection of
free speech but it, at the same time they have a
strategic set of you use interference,
you could use regulation. But I would just say values,
communications values.
And I'm wondering if those are being fought
back against in, in France and,
and Germany or if they are holding up and saying,
you know, we are different from the American culture
in that we want to have free communications but
safe and sane and fact-based communications,
and we're gonna incentivize those values
as opposed to some of the commercial values
that have fueled the misinformation on social media.
DE VREESE: Yeah so that, that's a fantastic sort
of range of questions almost that,
that you pose here and one of the things is that this year,
2017, as oddly as it may seem when the year is
coming almost to a close, is that there is maybe a,
an opportunity actually for reappraisal of some
very fundamental journalistic values and
very fundamental appraisal again for values that have
to do with the truthfulness of information.
That is almost something that is coming out of this
round of elections and discussions that we maybe
did not see coming.
And one thing that is interesting is that the
discussion about whether or not you can regulate
in a market, which in the United States when it
comes to a media market and when it comes to the
freedom of information and freedom of speech is so
protected and there's almost this sort of
aversion of even having the discussion.
That's interesting still, if you look at other free
democracies that have had these conversations but
maybe seen through different lenses,
where some of the ideas have been well we need to
have a system in which we can protect and enable
that ability to speak out, but it's also important
that there are institutions in that
marketplace, be them through public
broadcasting funding, be it through funding to
newspapers, that will help you uphold this
possibility to have an information ecosystem
where truth and valued information is a major
part of that system.
And I think that's a conversation that is not
only ongoing still in the European situation,
but also one where if you just reflect on the past
months in the United States,
there's now almost sort of an,
the door has opened to have that conversation in
a way that wasn't maybe even possible,
just a few months ago.
HEFFNER: If our viewers haven't,
they need to check out on CSPAN,
or download on the U.S. Senate website the testimonies,
the woefully inadequate testimonies of the social media councils.
DE VREESE: Mm-hmm.
HEFFNER: It's the only industry in maybe the
history of corporate intervention where the
U.S. Congress did not demand that the CEOs themselves
appear to answer questions. And so you take the BP oil spill-
DE VREESE: Mm.
HEFFNER: Or Exxon Valdez, or the tobacco industry.
Those CEOs were lined up and the American people,
through their representatives,
were asked these, these folks were, were put under the light.
And why it was not the case with these social
media companies, I don't know if it has to do with
the exploitation or incest with Silicon Valley on
Capitol Hill, but the bottom line is that the
testimonies which you could find easily on
CSPAN, demonstrate how at least from the American
perspective, we have not gotten adequate answers
to our questions, and there is zero transparency
or accountability.
So I alert you to in the audience to Richard Burr
and Mark Warner, and their statements on the
intelligence committee when they invited the
social media folks there.
They should have been subpoenaing the,
the, the CEOs, but the, the point is that these
questions are finally being asked if not
answered and that's, that's a positive development.
DE VREESE: There's no doubt that the platforms
have a very odd position in our society today.
They have grown so incredibly fast and they
have become so powerful, so some of these bigger
corporations that run these social media
platforms are now such essential players in our
society, and it is hard to think of any other
business or any other area of our society where we
would say we would have powers that are so strong
without having a conversation about how they are regulated.
And there is no doubt that this,
the discussion about misinformation and
disinformation, and unfortunately the use of
fake news which is a, is a horrible term in, by itself.
But that that discussion over past months have
opened a door to saying well isn't there something
that you could do either from the public regulatory
point of view or maybe this is also the time of,
to enter a conversation with these platforms
themselves about opening up.
So there are a lot of things that they could do to make this,
HEFFNER: That's what I was gonna ask you.
What can the European regulators teach the
social media companies?
DE VREESE: Well, so if we start with the social
media companies themselves,
and I think we are seeing this happening right now
because they're feeling the,
say the hot breath of the regulators on their necks,
so they are starting now already to roll out
policies that are all about trying to actually
improve their product and the platform and how
discussions take place at the platform.
But that's a whole range of things that they can
actually do, transparency for one thing.
We know from other areas that transparency is a
very important condition but it's not a sufficient
condition, because even if we as a scholarly
community or as citizens in a country would have
transparency and access to what is actually going on
within the algorithmic black box,
it will still require a lot of work and a lot of
attention to figure that out.
But it is a beginning point that you open up,
that you start sharing the type of data that these
platforms are gathering.
That's the first instance that the platforms can do themselves.
They can also work together.
In other areas we have seen that,
when it comes to human trafficking,
when it comes to child pornography,
there are areas in which we consider so important
in our society that you can actually have the
industry work together and try and come up with solutions.
And I would argue that having a good information
ecosystem in a democracy is one of those areas
that is so important that we also want to encourage
the platforms and the big companies to start working together.
So there's an area of things that they can do
even without the, a situation where we are
entering into a, them being forced to do that,
and they might be well advised to take some of
those actions by themselves.
HEFFNER: Well they, they can very easily,
as Amy Klobuchar, the Senator,
has proposed, require the ad owners to transparently
advertise, disclose if it's an ad being bought by
a political action committee or a campaign,
the first second of that short YouTube or Facebook video.
This was paid by, for X.
DE VREESE: Yeah.
HEFFNER: But the problem, Claes,
is that they don't even know who's buying ads still.
And during the testimonies,
they refuse to even acknowledge how many bots
and troll farms bought ads versus how many real,
live human beings and campaigns and political
action committees bought ads.
Camilla Harris and others interrogated them pretty
ferociously on this.
And they were supposed to follow up.
They haven't followed up yet.
DE VREESE: Yeah.
You know, I, some, some message seem fairly easy
to implement and it is odd that,
that you have a system in which you force ads in some areas-
HEFFNER: [LAUGHS]
DE VREESE: To have full disclosure on who is sponsoring that ad,
and you wouldn't do that once you're on a social media platform.
HEFFNER: Well, so is that, now is that a
differentiation in that the European model,
speaking of the Dutch model or if you want to
speak to the French or German model,
they have basically extrapolated from the idea
of fairness in media and extended it to ads in the digital realm.
In other words, in this country,
the fairness doctrine is long dead.
DE VREESE: Mm.
HEFFNER: The idea that you have a balance of,
you have to have exactly the same amount of time
granted for this opinion or that opinion.
Part of that's a function as you were saying of the
polarized media environment,
but most of it is just the fact that the FCC
has been negligent for so long and completely MIA.
I mean there's basically been no communications
commission or regulatory force in this country.
So what I was interested in,
from your perspective, is how much of the French
or German or Dutch or British regulatory system
is now adapting to the new technologies?
DE VREESE: Regulatory systems have always been
a little slow when adapting to new technologies,
but there has always been this sort of interest in
the media sector as something very important
so when radio licenses were being issued or
broadcasting was being launched,
there were regulatory forces in place,
you know, at the very outset because it was seen
as something powerful.
And it is odd that we're not having the
conversations that led to some of those discussions,
in the last, when we, when we had them in the last century.
And what you are seeing now is a sort of a double
standard in the system in the United States where
indeed there are requirements about funders
of ads when it's aired on television but not when
that same ad for example would be put
on a social media platform.
So those are things you can put in place.
Whether or not the U.S., discussion on this topic
is ready to have a discussion as to whether
you want to content regulate,
now that's a complete different situation.
But there are countries that have said so in the
lead-up to an election campaign,
we consider that a relatively sacred and a
very important period of our democracy,
so for example in the British case,
where for the charter of the BBC,
the newsroom has been obliged in the content,
in the substance of its coverage to make sure
that there was equal voice to different political opinions.
Now that is an interference or a
regulation at the content level which may be hard
to see in the U.S. context.
But that's not to say that you cannot have a
conversation as to whether or not you would want or
promote these kind of values in election coverage.
You see countries in Europe where opinion polls
are being banned in the run-up to an election.
That's again a situation where you can have a
conversation, whether you consider that a worthy
and a good thing or not, but opening up for even having
these conversations, saying we're looking here
at the news and information ecology,
HEFFNER: Right.
DE VREESE: That is one of the most fundamental
features of our democracy and we cannot even have a
discussion about how it is organized, seems odd.
HEFFNER: And, odd, odd, odd,
that's what I hear from you,
but, and folks' conception of this,
it may be wrong in thinking that television
or radio is obsolete, because what is social media?
It's really just the collection of the
professional content that you would get from those
more outdated communications infrastructure.
So you know, is it, is it true or not though that
in those models and, and you can speak from,
from the perspective where you're based in Amsterdam,
but perhaps you could map it out across the European continent.
Something like Donald Trump as a phenomenon of free,
unearned media just would not have been possible.
DE VREESE: Yeah, so there are very strict
regulations also about ownership structures
and cross-media ownership structures,
in many European countries,
but one of the things that is also so characteristic
is that this interaction between what we now call
say the old media landscape and the new
social media platform landscape is so strong
because also the way that politics operate today,
it would be a misconception to say that
television for example is still not an incredibly
powerful force in politics, and in fact the interaction will,
with social media is a very interesting one
because yes, several political candidates
and the U.S. President has a lot of followers on Twitter
and there's a lot of attention to what he does
in his social media account.
However, it is the very traditional and classic
media that almost, you know,
functioned as the biggest amplifiers of the message
that he is spreading on social media,
and that attention is important to understand,
because now you're looking at two systems next
to each other where one falls into a conversation
about free speech and regulation,
and one is then a complete,
unregulated and un-transparent system,
and that's very undesirable.
And that discussion is the discussion that
you need to have moving, moving forward,
and the perception in Europe is that these two
ecosystems are very tightly related and you
need to have a conversation also about
social media and about platforms,
also, to have a, a stronger sense of where
you would find misinformation and how to combat that.
HEFFNER: I would also note that Richard Burr,
Republican, North Carolina,
very importantly identified from the
American perspective that these social media
companies had been violating the, the law.
The FEC law, which is that foreign actors
are not able to buy ads, and they were rampant during
the campaign and they continue to be unchecked
in their advocacy of Trump and his agenda.
So I mean the reality is that not only is the FCC dead,
the FEC in this country seems to be dead.
What is the Dutch perspective?
What is the Dutch outlook right now?
DE VREESE: So one of the conversations that
we have in Europe, also in the Netherlands,
is saying either these companies take action
themselves or you need to consider real regulation.
And again, regulation is a hard concept to get into
because you very easily come close to a regulation
of content which is undesired.
However, if the companies in the market itself does
not shape up, then that's one only way that you
would have to go, and again,
the companies and the platforms can do an awful
lot themselves, and one of the things that were
characteristic of 2017 was also that many of the
discussions about fake news and about
misinformation in France and in Germany was caught
way earlier and was part of the election campaign
as opposed to being a post-hoc, fact.
And that there were several thousands,
Facebook accounts being shut down over the course
of the campaign, so the, sort of the,
the rapidness with which this gets caught in the
system and that this is called to public attention
is of course also important because we also
have to look at ourselves as citizens and as
consumers of new types of information.
There's a ton of research out there that shows
that certain types of headlines and certain
types of information appeal more to us so we have a strong
sense of individual agency when we are presented
with information that looks catchy but maybe should
prompt us to think twice what type of information
this is, who the sponsor of that information is,
and whether or not this is really something that you
want to share yourself feeding into this
algorithm of social media platform where
that traction will help you or where you are in fact
then helping as a news consumer to spread
and make something even more, more prominent in a news ecosystem.
HEFFNER: Ultimately, are the European powers
challenging the anti-social media as they
did Google on anti-trust issues?
Are they as passionate in defense of facts as they
were in defense of busting the monopolies?
DE VREESE: I can only say one thing,
that is that I hope they are avid and as strong
in fighting this one as they are on fighting corporate
taxes and industrial sort of monopoly situations.
Because we're dealing with something that is so
essential here, it is essentially the very core
of how we organize our democracies,
and if they're not willing to fight equally vigilant
on that one then I think we have a very big problem.
HEFFNER: Claes, thanks so much for being with me today.
DE VREESE: Wonderful conversation, thank you.
HEFFNER: And thanks to you in the audience.
I hope you join us again next time for a thoughtful
excursion into the world of ideas.
Until then, keep an open mind.
Please visit The Open Mind website at
Thirteen.org/OpenMind to view this program online
or to access over 1,500 other interviews.
And do check us out on Twitter and Facebook
@OpenMindTV for updates on future programming.
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