You can program bots to look like people
on social media and so computational
propaganda studies the ways that
thousands of bots manipulating real
people can be used to game political
thought.
[Music]
I'd like to welcome Sam Woolley from the
Institute of the Future.
We're here at
the AI Summit with our AI interview
series.
Sam, you're the director of the
digital intelligence lab at Institute
for the Future.
Tell me a little bit
about it.
Sure.
Yeah.
Institute for the
Future is an interesting entity.
It is a
50-year-old thinktank as of this
year.
We're not in the business of
prediction by any means.
We're in the
business of foresight.
And, so what we do
is we were based in Palo Alto in the
heart of Silicon Valley and we track
signals about technology in order to say
what we think is a logical next step.
We
do a lot of different types of research -
everything from hard science to social
science to ethnography and everything
kind of in between to inform what we
call a four-side insight action model.
And we got to do a lot of interesting
work and travel around the world to work
with interesting clients helping them
plan for their strategy for the future.
That's fantastic.
Super fun.
Yeah.
It's really interesting.
So, I did a
little bit of research on you and found
the term computational propaganda.
Like
what is that it sounds juicy.
Yeah.
Computational propaganda is the usage of
automation, parts of AI and algorithms,
to manipulate public opinion.
So think
back to the 2016 election and what we
all know now about Russian interference
in the U.S. election.
One of the
mechanisms that was used over social
media to try to manipulate voters and to
manipulate the American public were
BOTS.
And BOTS are basically automated
programs that function to do a task
online.
They've existed forever but
you can program BOTS to look like people
on social media.
And so computational
propaganda studies the ways that
thousands of bots manipulating real
people can be used to
gain political thought.
In
fact, a lot of the bots that are used are
quite rudimentary.
Their intention or the
intention of the people that build and
deploy them for political purposes isn't
actually often to try to convince me or
you or anyone else in the crowd that
that a particular idea is good or real
or even to spread disinformation a lot
of the time like fake news.
It's actually
to try to get the Twitter algorithm the
trending algorithm on Twitter or the
newsfeed on Facebook to pick up a topic
as as viable.
So if BOTS
retweet a hashtag tens of
thousands of times, oftentimes that
hashtag will show up in the trends list
on Twitter.
Right.
So real people will
click on it because it's kind of curated
through Twitter or Facebook.
So right now
in the digital intelligence lab, is it
all computational propaganda or are there
other things that you guys are
working on and what is the thing that
like you can't wait to tell people about
when you're at a cocktail party like
this one.
The biggest research project
right now is on the 2018 midterms and
we're calling it The Human Effects of
Computational Propaganda and so rather
than doing studies that are focused upon
like you know what the effect might be
on the vote or what the effect might be
broadly speaking over social media, like
10,000 BOTS tweeted during the
presidential debate and they were way
more in favor of one candidate than the
other.
Right now what we're doing is
working with social groups and what
we're realizing is that it's oftentimes
the most marginalized groups that are
most affected by these types of
problematic strategies.
And so we're
trying to humanize it a bit and we're
finding some really interesting things
and we're also figuring out some avenues
for solutions for policy fixes and
we're sharing all of these at some
events in DC and one in the valley at
the end of October.
So.
It's exciting.
Yeah.
It's exciting.
As you are
talking I'm thinking well how are you
distributing your findings right and
you're likely distributing along the
same courses and in the same channels
that you're studying.
Do you guys have
you know a unique distribution strategy
to like try to try to get people to pay
attention?
In the past we partnered up
with a media organization so that they
write an article, not like a press
release, but we'll give them a bunch of
the substance and they'll go do their
own work and simultaneously we'll release
our long report while they'll release
kind of the TLDR version - Like for
you know popular consumption I would say
a bit more rather than policymaker
consumption or research consumption.
All
of our work is public facing so it's
unique in the sense that when we produce
these reports we think of them more as
white papers.
Our last report was called
State-Sponsored Trolling and it studied
the way that governments use automation
and AI tools to target their own
citizens during elections and security
crises and we co release that with a
report from Bloomberg News and Bloomberg
did a really fantastic spread with like
animation and stuff and some maps and so
we'll probably do something similar for
this one.