00:00 Paul Brandus Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, recently sat down with the BBC for an interview. He was asked about free speech and his vision for Twitter, which he describes as a digital town square. Elon Musk, Twitter CEO In order for something to serve as a digital town square, it must serve people from all political persuasions, provided it's legal. It must, he says, accommodate all points of view. That's fair. Different ideas, different points of view should be discussed openly and robustly. There is, Musk adds, no other way.

00:45 Elon Musk Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don't like to say things you don't like.

00:52 Paul Brandus Otherwise, it's irrelevant. But what if that free speech is flat out dishonest or regarded by many people at least as crazy, like Q-Anon types, spreading conspiracy theories, for example, or hate speech? Here's what Musk said. Well, you know, who's to say that something is misinformation? Who's the arbiter of that? Who is the arbiter of that? Our country is so divided today that we have trouble agreeing on even basic facts. What is true to some could be completely false to others. What is true to some could be, in the eyes of others, completely made up, perhaps maliciously so. There's a word for this, Disinformation. I'm Paul Brandus, and that's the name of this series that's called simply Disinformation.

01:38 Meredith Wilson And I'm Meredith Wilson, founder and CEO of Emergent Risk International, and I'll be providing analysis throughout each episode.

01:52 Paul Brandus When Musk bought Twitter, there were fears that peddlers of disinformation previously banned would return and pick up right where they left off. And decide for yourself what it means that two weeks into Musk's tenure, the Twitter executive responsible for trust and safety, a man named Yoel Roth, quit. After he left, he told National Public Radio that it was painful to watch what was going on at Twitter. But Roth also put that in perspective.

02:26 Yoel Roth I'm heartbroken and devastated by what I see happening at the company and what I see happening to decades of investment by professionals into building the service into what it is. But I think we need to have two parallel conversations. We can be upset and concerned about what's happening at Twitter specifically, but we would be remiss if we only had that conversation. We should think about what the tradeoffs here are. Trying to strike a balance between three factors that are often in enormous tension with each other. Those are safety, speech and privacy.

03:09 Paul Brandus Safety, speech and privacy. Those are the big three issues. And as Roth said, they're often in conflict, sometimes favoring one can come at the expense of the other and the lines can often be blurred. Meredith Wilson is CEO of Emergent Risk International.

03:28 Meredith Wilson When you look at disinformation, the biggest problem with regulating it is that it infringes on First Amendment rights in the US. And it's this sort of constant catch 22 that we're living in where, you know, if we wanted to regulate disinformation, we would have to figure out what that line is, right? What is the what is what is the line where your ability to say what you want stops and your ability to make up things that harm people starts? Now, we have defamation laws, so there are some applications of that. But broadly, our politicians cannot agree on what we should do with disinformation.

04:18 Paul Brandus So dealing with disinformation apparently is not quite as cut and dry as you think, as Meredith says, where are the lines, at least the lines that we can agree on? Evidence of this was visible earlier this month when a federal judge in Louisiana issued an injunction restricting contact between the Biden administration and social media firms. The administration has been seeking to work with social media firms to better control what the White House thinks is false or misleading information. But the lawsuit filed by the Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri alleged that the administration was pressuring social media companies into deleting or suppressing content, content, the lawsuit said, which is free speech and thus protected under the First Amendment.

05:13 Jim Hoff We report the truth. We're committed to the truth. We correct our mistakes and we're generally correct with with what we call. And and we know that the mainstream media is feeding people a bunch of garbage.

05:28 Paul Brandus That's one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the government, Jim Hoff, a St. Louis man behind a website called The Gateway Pundit. You just heard him say that he's a truth teller, though others point out that his site, which has been around for many years, is associated with disinformation about everything from COVID vaccines to the 2020 election. It also has a page dedicated to supporting those charged in the attack on the US Capitol two years ago. It calls the insurrection, quote, the events of January 6th, 2021, unquote, and says those who have been convicted and sent to prison are victims. And I'm quoting again here of an American Gulag, unquote. Mr. Hoff declined to comment for our podcast. His platform and his deep unshakable belief that he is a conveyor of the truth is writ large, reflective of our national and binary dilemma. One side is completely convinced that it is right, that what it says is correct and that the other side is flat out wrong, if not maliciously so. On that grim note, this question, where do we go from here? That and more after this short break.

06:48 ad break 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.

07:13 Paul Brandus Welcome back. I mentioned that the Biden administration has been dealt a setback in its attempts to get social media companies to rein in what it considers disinformation. The White House press office issued a statement about this. It says, quote, The administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections, unquote. It felt that content on social media platforms ran counter to this goal, but the appeal of the injunction on those grounds was also shot down. The U.S. district judge in both instances, Terry Dowdy, is a Trump appointee. In shooting down the appeal, he writes that the defendants, the administration have no legal right to contact social media companies for, quote, the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social media platforms, unquote. Does this mean that social media companies can do whatever they want? Yes and no.

08:31 Ella Irwin Well, you know, as a general matter, social media companies do have an incentive to engage in content moderation and to protect their platforms from misinformation and disinformation because they want people to keep coming back. And the more their content is infected with misinformation, disinformation, the less likely people are to come back.

08:48 Paul Brandus Jamil Jaffer is founder and director of the National Security Institute. He also served as counsel to the assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department. He spoke on CBS.

09:02 Ella Irwin The manager you refer to, a rating and the like. The general consensus in this country has been for 200 years that the best way to come back, a speech that you don't like is not to shut that speech down, but to engage in the speech of your own. Taking on that sort of mantle, some of the social media companies, and remember, these are private platforms, so they can do whatever they want with their platforms, have decided that the primary methodology for them of addressing potentially problematic content is to allow the community there to weigh in on it, to provide additional context, provide links to what they believe might be correct information, and that that's a better way than the platform itself taking decisions to take down content. At the same time, clearly problematic content has been taken down historically for many years by these platforms as well. And so there's a little bit of a balancing act these platforms try to engage in in dealing with what they see as problematic content.

09:54 Paul Brandus But what's different now, one quarter into the 21st century, is the impact of speed technology and the sheer volume, the firehose of content on this traditional dynamic. Earlier, I mentioned Yoel Roth, a former trust and safety officer at Twitter. After he left just two weeks into Musk's tenure, he was replaced by Ella Erwin. Erwin didn't last long at Twitter either. She left after seven months. Unlike Roth, however, who was not bound by any confidentiality agreement, she was unable to discuss the internal workings at Twitter or her dealings with Musk. But she was able to share her ideas on what could be done to tamp down, not eliminate, for that's impossible, but at least tamp down false narratives posed by what she calls bad actors. She thinks the best way to deal with that is not by employing armies of fact

10:53 Ella Irwin checkers downstream, but tackle disinformation upstream where it's produced. We have to do things upstream to ensure that we know who is using the technology and the tools. And we have to be transparent about where the communication and the information is coming from so the public can make smart decisions about the information that they're receiving. A lot of the regulation that you see being proposed is still focusing very much downstream on the information that's published. And there's very little being proposed around understanding who is using the technology and the tools and ensuring there's appropriate due diligence and controls in place around the scale at which that they can use these tools. Right. And that doesn't have to apply to everyone. The reality is, as you said, most people have good intentions. Most people are not using technology and tools at the scale and with the speed that a bad actor would be attempting to use them. And so it does involve some friction. It does involve some controls, many of which are not in place today, and companies would have to implement them. But it allows us to really understand who is trying to use these tools now that separately there have to be appropriate public education campaigns. And, you know, we have to look at do we have appropriate criminal penalties in place for people who actually do engage in disinformation campaigns and harm the public? I mean, those are all really important things as well. But going upstream and actually putting some controls in place around who gets access to even send information to millions of people is really important.

12:36 Paul Brandus Why don't tech companies do more from the beginning to keep their platforms safe? Well, Irwin explains that startups have one initial focus, just getting off the ground and surviving. Any focus on the bad guys comes later. She also theorizes that when those fraudsters do show up, it's more efficient to focus only on the big fish, those with big followings who are responsible for most of the bad behavior and not the minnows, the guy with a small following.

13:08 Ella Irwin I think companies, as a general rule, follow a certain pattern when it comes to fraud and abuse. You know, first, when a company is starting out, there's a lot of fraud. They're very focused on growth. They're focused on developing products and features for good reason. Right. I mean, you have to you have to have a customer and you have to have revenue and you have to get to some level of success. And the reality is that's also when you start to attract bad actors because your product is useful and bad actors start to see how they can exploit it. I don't know many companies who at this phase suddenly decide that they need to invest heavily in sort of testing their own capabilities in a way that says, here's how they can be abused. Here's how a bad actor can exploit, find and exploit gaps that we have. Most companies will wait and take action, unfortunately, when they're now facing significant harm. Maybe it's causing revenue loss. Maybe users are complaining. Maybe it's causing reputational damage or regulatory inquiries. That's typically when a company starts to say, OK, well, we need to now start to mitigate this. And even when they start to mitigate it, they're typically not setting up a team that's going to stress test and look for gaps. They're just trying to put out. They're just trying to put out the fire. They're just trying to put out the fire. And so it's interesting because there are companies who who once they have implemented teams like that have done an amazing job at preventing issues that could have been huge issues down the line. But it's it's few and far in between.

14:54 Paul Brandus This reminds me of something called the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule. You know what that is? It's when, say, 80 percent of your problem is caused by 20 percent of its causes. It's more efficient to focus limited resources on the small number of people who are causing the most trouble. But you know how it is. In the future, some folks who could one day find their ability to spread false narratives limited might complain that this is an infringement of their First Amendment rights. This is nonsense and fundamental misinterpretation of what 1A is. The First Amendment shields us from government retribution if we criticize it or protest against it. For example, you and I can yell at the top of our lungs that Joe Biden or Donald Trump or any other official is an idiot and there's not a thing the government can do about it. But if you criticize or embarrass, say, your employer in public, that is not protected speech and you can be fired. The First Amendment has limitations. A company, be it social media or otherwise, is not obligated to have you as a customer. And the small number of people who are bad actors should not presume otherwise. Perhaps you've seen a sign outside a store. It might say no shirt, no shoes, no service. That store is saying we're not obligated to let you in or do business with you unless you meet our standards. Perhaps that same philosophy could be extended to social media. Thanks to Ella Erwin for her insights. Sound from the BBC, NPR and CBS. Our sound designer and editor, Noah Foutz, audio engineer, Nathan Corson, executive producers Michael Dealoia and Gerardo Orlando. And on behalf of Meredith Wilson, I'm Paul Brandus. Thanks so much for listening.