00:07 Paul Brandus: the familiar sound of hamburgers on the grill. But long before that meat is purchased by you or a restaurant, it is inspected to ensure that it is safe to consume. For this, we can thank meat inspectors from the USDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There are similar standards with regard to the air we breathe, the water we drink, and so forth. But when it comes to something else we consume on a daily basis, there are few, if any, such regulations that something else is information. If we have, and we accept, minimum safety standards for some things we ingest, again food, water and air, should there be similar safety standards for the content we consume? Content that is false, after all, can be damaging. There is another word for this false content, of course, disinformation. I'm Paul Brandus, and that's the name of this award-winning podcast series, Disinformation. As usual, I'll be joined by Meredith Wilson, Chief Executive Officer of Emergent Risk International, a global risk advisory firm. She'll offer her insights into this crucial topic. Question, which one of these voices is real?
01:30 clip audio: Hey, I'm Sander and today I'm really excited to explore with you the possibilities of synthetic. No, you're not Sander. I don't think you're going to be exploring any opportunities here.

01:39 Paul Brandus: Can't tell? Let's listen a bit more.

01:42 clip audio: Well, I look like you. I can speak like you and I can probably even write better than you. So maybe just let me take this one. No, you're not going to be taking this one. I'm going to be taking this one, but maybe next time. Okay.

01:54 Paul Brandus: But there was also a video, and frankly it was impossible to discern the real sander from the artificial one. We are in a new and dangerous era. Content that is generated artificially, like that, is often called synthetic media. That's a fancy phrase, let's just cut to the chase here and use a more relatable term like fake, phony, made up. Deepfakes is another good word that has entered the lexicon. Well, fasten your seatbelts because this kind of content, some say, is about to swap the Internet. A recent study by the European Law Enforcement Group Europol says that by 2026, just two years from now, as much as 90% of online content could be artificially generated. 90%! Let that sink in for a second. Let me provide some context here. Deepfake technology, powerful, cheaper, and easier to use by the day, can be used to produce content that looks real, sounds real, and can show people saying or doing things that they never said or did, or even create people that never existed in the first place. It's hardly difficult to imagine how this could impact every strata of our society, politics, economics, law enforcement, everything up to and including war and peace. Now to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, this is a man-made problem, therefore it can be solved by man, or can it? Meredith Wilson, the CEO of Emergent Risk International, says this analogy of safety regulations around things we consume, food, air, and water, is reasonable but limited. She says that's because information is far more subjective and therefore far more difficult to regulate.

03:54 Meredith Wilson: I think it is a reasonable analogy. I think it's also almost an intractable problem because of It's the same reason that guns are an intractable problem. It's the same reason that there are four or five of these sort of gaps, if you will, across our regulatory landscape. When you think about information, you think about freedom of speech, and you think about the Constitution, and you think about democratic openness principles. And so what happens is At first, you think, OK, we can control the bad speech. We can control the hate speech. But then you realize that that person over there thinks that what you think is perfectly fine content is hate speech. Maybe they disagree with you on abortion, or maybe they disagree with you on guns, or maybe they disagree with you about the way that you talk about things. Maybe you use more extreme language, and you don't see that as a problem, but they do. And suddenly, you have the slippery slope of controlling what people are saying. So I think where that comes into play with regulating information is who gets to be that person, who gets to be the arbiter of what is true and what's not true.

05:20 Paul Brandus: That's the central problem right there, the seemingly intractable problem. In a country of 330 million people, how do you agree on standards upon which to make content safe or safer to consume? Perhaps a story about a famous Supreme Court case might be illustrative of this dilemma. The case was Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1964. The issue, whether an Ohio movie theater could show a film, that state authorities considered obscene. It went all the way to the High Court, which ruled 7 to 2, that the movie in question was not obscene and was thus constitutionally protected. But even among the seven justices in the majority, there were four different opinions as to what constituted obscenity, including the utterly memorable line from Justice Potter Stewart, who said that offering an intelligent description of obscenity was probably beyond him, but he added, quote, but I know it when I see it. That long ago story is illustrative of the challenge we face today. forming some sort of consensus on what is or is not true, what is or is not disinformation, is a towering problem. To paraphrase Justice Stewart, you may think you know it when you see it, but someone else may have a very different point of view. Again, more from Meredith Wilson.

06:49 Meredith Wilson: What is the set of facts that we're going to agree on? This wasn't always a problem in America, but with the advent of the Internet, this has become a problem because people have decided that they have different views of what is right and wrong, what is factual and what is not factual. And that puts us in a really difficult place, but it also makes it really hard to regulate.

07:13 Paul Brandus: That being said, some of the most important voices in the country see the value in making at least some sort of effort.

07:21 Elon Musk (clip): It's important for us to have a referee, just as you have a referee in a sports game, or all sports games, and that the games are better for it to ensure that the players obey the rules, play fairly. I think it is important for similar reasons to have a regulator, which you can think of as a referee, to ensure that companies take actions that are safe and in the interest of the general public.

07:46 Paul Brandus: that of course, Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, he testified recently on Capitol Hill about the need for federal regulators to, as he said, referee disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, which as I've mentioned, are increasingly driving what we see on the internet.

08:06 Elon Musk (clip): while regulators are not perfect, there's no regulatory agency that I'm aware of that I think we should, at the federal level at least, that we should delete.

08:15 Paul Brandus: That being said, Musk, who you just heard say that technology refs are needed, has taken a dim view of some who are attempting to monitor the social media space where his company X operates. He has called fact checkers, quote, some of the biggest liars and called for one such company, NewsGuard, to be disbanded after it criticized X and its policies for enabling what NewsGuard calls disinformation about the war between Israel and Hamas. And just last week, the news agency Reuters reported that social media researchers have canceled, suspended, or changed scores of studies of X because of what it called actions taken by Musk that limit access by those researchers to X's user data. In other words, it is now harder for independent researchers to study tweets, their origin, and so forth. Of course, X is hardly the only social media platform to come under increasing scrutiny over the war. Take TikTok for example. TikTok calls itself a joyful place where all your daydreams come true. That benign image, however, is not shared by some. A California venture capitalist, Jeff Morris, thinks that bots are driving content about the war in a lopsided way. At a Republican presidential debate last week, the platform was ripped by candidates, many of whom say TikTok should be banned in the United States. A top lobbyist for TikTok here in Washington is Trent Lott, the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader. He tells me he disagrees with Morris' claim, the 10-to-1 hashtag ratio, and adds that TikTok has, quote, bent over backwards to be fair. It's worth noting, incidentally, that platforms like X and TikTok are now major sources of news for millions of Americans. A Pew Research study says that 1 in 7 adults use X as a news source, while 1 in 10 use TikTok, a figure Pew says which has tripled in just three years. The top social media platforms for news, by the way, are Facebook and YouTube at 31% and 25% respectively. Speaking of venture capital, by the way, it seems a lot of money is being plowed into startups that are focusing on disrupting myths and disinformation. We'll talk with one of them after this short break.

10:56 ad read: This series on disinformation is a co-production of Evergreen Podcasts and Emergent Risk International, a global risk advisory firm. Emergent Risk International. We build intelligent solutions that find opportunities in a world of risk.

11:21 Paul Brandus: Welcome back. Here's a familiar voice.

11:24 Fake Gayle King (clip): Ladies, honestly, I didn't expect my weight loss to spark so many questions.

11:28 Paul Brandus: Sounds like Gayle King of CBS News. Just one problem, it's really not her. It's from a synthetic video, fake, phony, of her peddling a weight loss program on Instagram. It sure does look and sound like Ms. King. Social media companies that are often associated, for better or worse, with myths and disinformation, were once upon a time funded by angel and venture capital investors. Instagram, for example, got started with a quarter million dollar check back in 2010. It's a wonderful app, but as the phony Gayle King video shows, Instagram, which is now owned by Meta, has a problem. So here's a question, could Angel and VC investors also fund startups to somehow thwart disinformation? Matt Abrams thinks so. He's an Oregon-based venture capitalist who frames his investment thesis in terms of what he calls IQT information, integrity, quality, and transparency. In other words, like I said at the top of this episode, making your content safer to consume.

12:37 Fake Gayle King (clip): I think that capital is like water and electricity. It goes to the lowest and easiest path of least resistance. And the easiest path of least resistance over the last 20 years has been the attention economy, surveillance economy, incentive structures and models. And this is where the capital ecosystem has a tremendous opportunity and responsibility to actually be investing now in solutions which I frame in terms of this IQT, solutions which are strengthening our information integrity, our quality, our transparency. where they will provide, in my mind, both better long-term economic returns, as well as short-term returns, and better economic resiliency.

13:26 Paul Brandus: Investors in startups, or any asset class really, often have a herd mentality. They see where others are putting their money and follow suit.

13:36 Fake Gayle King (clip): So investors go to where the herd go. You would think that the venture market in particular is much more lenient into the risk, but it is a herd mentality perspective. And this is where we need to change that trajectory as to there are tremendous opportunities to make a lot of profit for doing things in the right ways and the right reason. of investing in solutions which are strengthening our information ecosystem.

14:07 Paul Brandus: Other investors, stiff opportunity as well. The tech site Crunchbase reports that hundreds of millions of dollars have poured into startups over the past few years. One of the biggest is New York-based Flashpoint, which says it, quote, combines data insights and automation to identify risks and stop threats for cyber fraud and physical security teams. Another is San Francisco-based Primer. Both companies have secured what's called Series D funding, which in layman's terms means they're attracting big bucks and are nearing the point where they could go public. This all sounds interesting, but as Abrams points out, one of the things that has allowed myths and disinformation to flourish is something that could be beyond the realm of technology. And that is the very basic matter of trust. Trust in government is low. Trust in media is low. What do you do about that?

15:07 Fake Gayle King (clip): This is where I want to emphasize, without trust, and this is historically what we've had to contend with previously, so this isn't anything new. We're seeing a frame of trust right now, and AI is simply accelerating that. in the sense that people don't have the understanding of what's the provenance of the information, where does it originate from, how is it manipulated across the information supply chain, who paid for it, what's the money behind it. So this is where it gets to, there's a tremendous opportunity to then be able to say, hey, I want to invest in the solutions that enable this future that we want to see, whether it's on the consumer side or on the enterprise side. On the consumer side, I want to be able to, whether personally, how do I have just default filters, if you will, just show me the quality information. I can filter out four or five star quality hotels and restaurants today. We can't do that with our personal information. And likewise, on the enterprise side, it's a similar challenge. Where does this information originate from? How is it manipulated? And what is the quality and integrity of that information at which we make business decisions or government decisions, et cetera.

16:23 Paul Brandus: Let me play again one of the key things Matt said.

16:27 Fake Gayle King (clip): I can filter out four or five star quality hotels and restaurants today. We can't do that with our personal information.

16:33 Paul Brandus: It's certainly an interesting idea and, again, not unlike that hamburger on the grill, we have quality standards, safety standards around things we consume. The food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink. Is it possible, is it feasible to do the same with the information we consume? Thanks to venture capitalist Matt Abrams, our sound designer and editor Noah Fouts, audio engineer Nathan Corson, executive producers Michael D'Eloia and Gerardo Orlando. And on behalf of Meredith Wilson, I'm Paul Brandes. Thanks so much for listening.