State of the Net 2018

Every day we’re learning more about nation-state attempts to tamper with democratic elections in the U.S., in Germany, in Africa and across the globe. Trust is the bedrock of any well-functioning democracy. Yet revelations over the last several months show that nation-states are using the Internet to undermine that trust. Our panel will look at what we know about how the Internet is being used to disrupt democratic elections and what can be done about it.

During a recent Homeland Security Committee hearing Chairman Ron Johnson asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to describe a sort wizards' brew” of cyber security threats. Wray painted a picture of "a blurring between different kinds of threats," from nation state actors working with hackers-for-hire enlisting troll farms and autonomous bots. That’s all on top of increases in traditional economic cyber schemes from ransomware to Equifax, and everything in between. The motivations for the myriad high profile hacks recently are mostly varied and in some cases unknown. Worse, the tools and capabilities used in these attacks are vastly more sophisticated, some of which are NSA tools released into the wild. And soon some techniques may take the form of artificial intelligence attacks. The problem has become so complex and urgent that Microsoft President Brad Smith has called for a “Digital Geneva Convention” to start grapple with these issues. Our expert panel will explore dig deep into the Wizards' Brew to better illuminate the new threat matrices and what’s being done to counter them.

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.