Information & Ethics committee  I think it's very difficult to guard against that kind of attack. Here's where the state of the art is now. Essentially it's a collaboration among security services, outside researchers, and companies to try to detect in advance the coordinated activity of disinformation operat

Information & Ethics committee  Our goal here is not the elimination of bias or sensationalism or nonsense in the media system. They will always be there and the media have always been all those things. Our goal here is to contain those things such that most of the people most of the time are shaping their poli

Information & Ethics committee  We have a couple of different models to look at. I will profile the German model and tell you where I think it went right and where it went wrong. The Germans set a bar, I think, of a million domestic subscribers to the service, which basically meant three companies—Google, Face

Information & Ethics committee  In theory, on paper, there's no reason you couldn't do it that way. In practice, the administration of that technical system is non-trivial and requires access to those companies' infrastructures, which they are not likely to want to provide. I think it's certainly something tha

Information & Ethics committee  I can jump in on that. There are four things you can do right now before the end of the year to prepare for 2019. One, aggressive political ad transparency should be applied by law on all of the platform companies. Two, increase the amount of money and coordination of those who

Information & Ethics committee  I think transparency is only one piece of the puzzle. I'm a big believer in the decentralization of the communications system. It's a good thing that we have more voices, more journalists, more reporting. The fact that it is no longer a viable business is a big problem, and we n

Information & Ethics committee  I think it's transparency in the algorithm, an increase in quality journalism, and digital literacy. Without all three of them, you're not going to move the needle substantially.

Information & Ethics committee  To me, the takeaway from the Cambridge Analytica episode is not that Cambridge Analytica had some special sauce of psychographic manipulation; it's that they were basically using the same tools of microtargeting that Facebook makes available to everybody. They overstated that dra

Information & Ethics committee  I want to point to two interesting provisions in Europe's General Data Protection Regulation. We are not sure yet how they are going to be adjudicated and applied in the market. One of those provisions says the user should have more control over the consent they give to differen

Information & Ethics committee  To me, the problem is both. I'll answer—

Information & Ethics committee  Chair, I have something I want to say on this.

Information & Ethics committee  I apologize.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  That database already exists if you're an American Facebook user.