State of the Net 2018

In December 2016 a North Carolina man, Edgar Welch, drove 350 miles from his home to a neighborhood pizza place in Washington, DC with his AR-15 assault rifle to “self-investigate” a bogus election-related Internet story involving the democratic presidential candidate. Traditional media had discredited the fake news story countless times. Welch was arrested after firing shots in the pizza place. Mercifully, no one was injured.  Internet policy veterans have seen a lot develop in the space in the last 25 years. They’ve been shocked, disgusted, and often perplexed by the information circulated online. Yet many have taken solace in the belief that the antidote to bad or bogus speech is even more speech by more trusted speakers. We believed that more speech would inexorably lead to a hegemony of trusted, credible, and truthful content on the Internet.  We’ve heard from many Internet policy veterans that the pizza shooting catalyzed some soul searching about what the Internet had become and whether even more speech would level the equation. Since then we’ve learned more and more about the information that was flowing virally around the Internet during the election. What sources of information and which speakers can be trusted? We have had to create a new lexicon to understand the state of speech on the Net: Fake news, troll-farms, disinformation, nation-state sponsored advertising, post-fact society, data injection attacks, narrative-laundering, networked propaganda, to name a few.
Now the rush to find solutions has begun, and it’s not yet clear whether solutions will be easy to come by. Pizza place shooter Edgar Welch was stark illustration that fake news can manifest itself directly as mortal danger in the nation’s capital. But the fact that Welch went to “self-investigate” veracity of the false story is even more disturbing. He didn’t fully trust the erroneous conspiracy story, evidenced by his later admission that the “Intel wasn’t 100%.” Yet, he also did not trust traditional media stories debunking the story.
We’ve reached a crisis of trust in our society’s sources of information just as the lines between traditional media and Internet media have all but vanished. Recent congressional hearings have revealed that determined actors can further erode trust in information and institutions.
At the same time, more powerful platforms designed to help us sort through information may have inadvertently empowered us to view only information that we prefer or that reinforces our own biases. A sort of societal tribalism is emerging, leading to increased polarization.
Solutions to these problems are far more complex than most are willing to believe. As prominent researcher danah boyd rightly pointed out in a blog piece, “[Edgar Welch] was doing was something that we’ve taught people to do — question the information they’re receiving and find out the truth for themselves.”
Our panel will explore these questions and what we can do about it.