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She'll media companies are determined to avoid the mistakes that were made during the twenty sixteen election, but in the process they ve ignited a different kind of firestorm. My colleague Kevin looks reports from San Francisco. It's Wednesday October. Twenty first, you know, have actually been ages. Are you on the show ages the out, and I wonder whose fault that is you don't call you'd all right? It's I thought we had something. I think that you didn't intersect with the news. That's true, but here you are intersecting, there's been a lot going on so Kevin my

is. It. The big social media companies which you have been covering for a really long time, have been preparing theory diligently very carefully there expansively for the twenty election and for the possibility of a major moment of misinformation for some kind of act of Interference, given how much they fail to do that back in twenty sixty, and so I want you can summarize what the preparations that they have been doing have look like. So since fourteen sixteen, these three big social media companies, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube They ve spent tons of time and money investing in trying to keep foreign interference from happening on their platform. Again there been new policies, new teams, If hired tons of new people and moderators and basically their goal, is to just avoid being played again to avoid the kind of foreign interference

hemmed that they were seen as having allowed on their platforms in twenty. Sixteen were in my that beyond just being alerted us. They want to be more responsive right. They want to be less hands off. So if thing happens. The goal is not just to notice said, but to actually do something is right, exactly they want to act in a way that is consistent with their policies, but also that is fast. The gets to these problems before they spiral out of control and become huge election interference issue in its not just

But they do it also how quickly there evil to do it. So, in a sense, in the weeks leading up to the election, they are countries waiting for the first big test case for these systems. Yet, but the kind of fear that they have had is this kind of October surprise this introduction of something new, some attempt to kind of steer the narrative about the election at the last possible moment, and that came for them last week in the form of this New York Post article that peered on Wednesday morning and in a broad strokes. What was this so at a sort of broad level? What the post publishes is a story alleging that there's this laptop that was used by a Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden

Russia, candidate, that made its way to investigators and ultimately, to Rudy Giuliani the President's lawyer and that when they inspected this computer, it had emails on it that the post described as being incriminating. Now there are still lots of questions about is emails. We have not been able to verify their authenticity. We don't know who actually got access to them, And how they made their way up to Rudy Giuliani. There are still so many questions about the provenance of these materials and whether or not their real, but that's just the sort of nut shell version of what the post publishes I Wednesday morning in so what are the big so. media companies through you identified Twitter Facebook Youtube. What are they thinking in their very well?

prepared offices about this story. Well, I've spoken to some people at the companies and, basically, what they were thinking is here. We go again to them. it seemed to have a lot of the same hallmarks as the twenty. Sixteen hacking leak campaign that Russia carried out where they hacked into emu.

In boxes belonging to prominent Democrats and release those emails in a coordinated fashion to try to steer the discussion around that year's election, and so the way that these platforms think about threats like this. They basically have three options for what to do next, they can do nothing, they can let the story run its course and trust that in a people, work out the facts in that the system will work as designed. They can step in really aggressively and essentially ban the story from their platforms and say, is we're gonna? Take this down? We're not gonna, put any links to it. You're not gonna, be allowed to link to it and we're gonna lock your account. If you do linked to that sort of the nuclear option, and then there is all these decisions that they can make in the middle of that between doing nothing and taking it down, and those would include things like putting a label on it or what

The little fact check underneath it or reducing its distribution through their algorithms. Rather than banning it outright and these platforms know that they have to do something quickly and that whatever decision they make the longer, they wait the harder it's going to get to restrain or to real. In this narrative that is already starting go viral. So how did these companies react in a very short pair time? What did each of them do so? The initial reaction from these platforms is a little bit all over the place, so you to basically does nothing! It's just given what we know about it right now story is allowed on Youtube and will continue to evaluate it. Next we have Facebook and they basically come out several hours after the story is posted and they say that they are going to demote the story, basically slow. It spread in their algorithms until it can be evaluated by.

Third party fact checkers, so their basically saying we're gonna pump the brakes on the story until the people that we trust to determine whether or not these things are true or not, can look at it. So they dont blog. If you gonna, throwing a sheet over it, they're not blocking it they're, just kind of putting it on ice for the moment, and then you have twitter, which makes the most aggressive call in the early hours after the story is posted and they say that we are not even going to allow people to linked to this story, because this violates our rules against sharing private information, because there were some sort of private information contained in these emails that the post had excerpted, and that also it was a violation of their hacked materials policy whose they were basically treating this as if it were a hacker sharing some passwords that they had gotten from some data.

so Twitter is taking the kind of nuclear option as you describe it. Not only is twitter banning people from linking to this story, but its locking the accounts of the people who dueling to it, including some pretty prominent people like Cayley macadamia, the White House Press secretary and for Twitter like this, is a pretty big enforcement action and their basically taking no chances with this rice or they are choosing to do the exact thing that everyone said. Social media company did not do in TWAIN, sixteen, when infirm and began circulating of dubious origin, for example job it asked as emails. They are just clipping its wings. They are making sure it cannot be shared right and their theory on why they're doing this? Is that it's better for them to act to aggressively and let up later than to let something go and then try to catch

To it, and so given what is the reaction to this decision by these companies? So among people, including a lot of people on the left. Frankly, there was release that, after years of criticism for not having done enough to stop interference in the twenty sixteen election that they were being attentive and proactive and doing something rather than nothing, to avert a potential similar crisis this year But then this is a dark moment. There were people, many on the right. This was mass censorship on a scale that America has never experienced on. Two hundred and forty five years, it's both insidious and infuriating who were very offended by these decisions by the platforms, make no mistake: twitter, Facebook, they are not arbiters of truth. There all engaging in censorship, so year kept in the dark, cold, calculated political

actors, Josh Holly, the senator from Missouri one of these sort of most vocal critics of these big tat platforms came out. Republicans don't stand up and do something about this. These companies are going to run this country said that this was the dawn of a dangerous new era in american history, silencing the media direct violation of the principles of the first amendment. Ten crews, Senator from Texas also said that this was an affront to free speech, we're saying Silicon Valley, billionaires frankly drunk with power, so the entire sort of republican establishment goes nuts over this. They are calling for subpoenas against the leaders of

and Facebook, the Senate Republic, as data Ass Jack Dorsey. What is your policy? So we can decide whether or not we're gonna start regulating this. They are calling for legal protections for these platforms to be revoked. You're, not a real platform. You're just stay, no, the liberal editor and they are essentially treating these companies

as if they are themselves interfering in a U s election, by acting to prevent a possible interference. Attempts- and let me be very clear- twitter- is interfering in this election, big tech. They want to run America, we ve got to stop and we gotta do something right now who they are interfering by trying to stop interference, complicated, very yet doll thing, it's crazy and of course, finally, the president himself ways in at its like a third arm, maybe a first arm of the DMZ and a taxis companies repeats his call for the repeal of these legal protections that these companies have, but it's gonna all end up in a big

a lawsuit, and there are things that can happen that a very severe and basically says that they are trying to bring the election for Joe Biden by suppressing the story. So this is not goes smoothly. No, it's kind of a damned if you do damned if you dont situation for them where they are criticised for not doing enough to protect against election interference, but then when they try to act, to protect against potential election appearance there criticized for that too. So all this criticism, all these questions surrounding the story, really leads them to try to figure out. Like did we make the right call here, an essentially Facebook and Youtube serve stick by their decisions like Youtube, doesn't take down content. Facebook continues to kind of limit this content without blocking it entirely, but twitter starts action.

reversing its original decision. They sort of land on this position of. We think that this article is being so widely just that. We no longer think it makes sense to block links to it, but in the future we will put labels on materials that might have been So we will essentially take a middle ground position on stories like this in the future, and I think, from the plot This point of view. This story and the issues it raises were actually a little more complicated than they originally thought.

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What made this new posts story, as you just said, such a uniquely complicated situation for these big social media companies. So I think all the platforms, Facebook Youtube Twitter would agree that foreign election interference is bad, that it's part of their job and something there very committed to doing is stopping foreign interference attempts, but for an election, interference is not always very obvious. So in twenty sixteen you had patrols trolls in Saint Petersburg, who were literally buying Facebook ads in roubles, but there are much more. Not always that a government or an entity could try to influence a. U S. Election and one possibility is that they could use hacking leak, operation, and where they steal information and then distributed, but instead of going directly out with it or through organisation like Wikileaks, they could go through

major American NEWS Organisation, like the new post and these platforms, they don't find it particularly hard to take action against cyber attacks and things that are in a pretty blatantly trying to manipulate their services. But in this case it's more like trying to figure out if the New York posts can be trusted or which is a very uncomfortable position for them to be in right. because all of a sudden, a company like twitter or Facebook would suddenly being the position. Perhaps the round election of routinely deciding whose confidential sources are trustworthy, and- articles based on documents should be allowed to have their link, shared or blocked, and that could become a pretty slippery slope pretty quickly. Yeah an end after twitter made its decision to block links to your upholstery they

from a lot of journalists, not just in the U S but around the world who worried that this policy against not allowing links to hacked materials could endanger their ability to report on things involving confidential sources and whistleblowers, and that's part of the reason that They walked back their initial call right the end of the day. I think it's safe to say we don't want social media companies to be the gatekeepers of journalism. We want. Journalists to produce good journalism. That applies careful standards and thoughtful judgments toward information gets out where it comes from and I guess this is still an open question than your post may not have done that in this case there are still we don't know to be clear in our colleagues- have done so reporting and there seem to be some are red flags in the process behind this particular story: parent, the reporter.

wrote most of the story didn't want his byline attached to it. Things like that. Not a good sign, not a good sign, so very unorthodox process behind the story, but I think it does point to the fact that these platforms are reluctantly being asked to not just serve keep their platforms from being manipulator, but in cases like this to have referee journalism in a way that their very uncomfortable doing and that arguably shouldn't be their job at all, but because of the nature, of these, how can we campaigns? They sometimes have to be given? Listen to you, I'm wondering what are these social media companies and their policies on this kind of content are they making? Journalists approach this with greater rigour and perhaps with the fear that they would publish something that would be blocked or de platform.

Would that become an incentive for everyone in the news media who, of course want their content to be shared to behave better? I dont think the form set out to improve journalism? I don't think that's one of their serve goals here, but I think in this case they may actually have done reporters a favour by coming. early and aggressively to say there is something fishy about this story and their decision to act on it changed the tenor of some of the coverage that follow instead of just repeating what was in these alleged emails. The story became sort of about process. and journalists doing rigour and platform Gov and in all of these sort of meadow topics that I think also

We shed more light on what happened then, just going back through the emails and printing, the most salacious parts were in very different from what happened in twenty sixteen, and the emails stolen from a democratic party. And again we don't know if any emails were stolen from anybody in this case, but back into it, sixteen those emails were made public and you show, including the New York Times, including me as a reporter, went through them and going to read stories about them and it wasn't about where they had come from. It was about what they had revealed about the characters in the emails right, and I think that points to one of the major shifts that has happened since two thousand and sixteen it such as the platforms that have been worried about a repeat packing league operation and making plans for what they're going to do. It's also news organizations at the times like I and a group of other disinformation, reporters and researchers put together

of guidelines for how we would handle hacking leak that resembled the one we saw in twenty sixteen m. Is there anything you can say about that process?. yeah. It's it's a five step process and who we gave it a silly acronym, it's the email method, of course, others evidence, motive, activity, intent and labels, and it's just the kind of thing that we are considering internally as forever a check list for the process that we go through when something like a hacking leak does emerge Kevin. I'm curious if all the diligence from The news organisations like the times and the crack down by the big social media companies on this new posts story did it work Did it at the end of the day limit the reach of this story whose origins we

still trying to figure out and which are suspicious. Yes, and no, I think, just in pure statistical terms, like the story still travelled, vary widely. It was among the highest performing articles on social media. That day, it's been getting a wall to Wall Coverage, on Fox NEWS and from other right wing media outlets. So in that sense, if the goal was to reduce the visibility of the story, I think the answer is that no, it didn't stop this story from getting out or being discussed and may have in fact drawn more attention to it. The right it otherwise would have gotten, but I think the thing they did change is the kind of attention that being paid to the story and it represents, I think, a real break from twenty. Sixteen when the story became all about the emails all about John Podesta,

deep Sea and Hillary Clinton, when we were laid frankly to turn our attention to the bigger story behind that story, which was that Russia was trying to interfere in our election. So a bit message, and with some high profile reversals with plenty of angry partisans. and with a story that was supposed to be losing steam. That is definitely made its way around the internet. We are seeing some meaningful improvements. In this social media system over twenty sixteen yeah. I think we are- and all of this is super messy and complicated, and there will no doubt continue to be mistakes and

souls and people claiming partisan bias and threats to free speech. All that's gonna continue, and you know there are still two weeks until the election, so we don't know what could happen between now and then. But right now oh, I think the big picture is that we are all now much more aware of how we can be manipulated, whether we are executives at a social platform like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, whether it's us as journalists, at than your time, or whether, as just voters, people who consume the news and are trying to make sense of what's happening, I think

are all know much more conscious than we were in twenty. Sixteen of all of the ways that we could be manipulated or tricked or baited or taken advantage of, and I think that increased awareness that consciousness of the risks that we face is a good thing, no matter what happens with any one particular story. Thank you given dipshit thanks, we'll be right back.

When is it grilled cheese sandwich more than just a grill cheese sandwich? When you make so many of them, you achieve gooey cheesy perfection which inspires you to upgrade your tiny drab kitchen. Only you, do it alone in these moments of new found passion, the people of? U S. Bank Wanna help, no matter what your cooking up their dedicated to turn your new inspiration into your next pursuit? U S, bank, Housing lender member. If the hears what else you need tenor day on Tuesday, the? U S: Department of Justice, suit, Google, for allegedly violating antitrust law

accusing it of maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising. The Lawsy represents the most significant legal challenge to attack companies, market power in a generation, booger chief, some success in its early years, and no one could grudges that, but every I trust my file today explains it has maintained its monopoly power through exclusionary practices that are harmful to competition. The lawsuit accuses Google and its parent company of using exclusive business contracts and agreements to mark out rivals,

one such contract paid apple, billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine for iphones. As a result, the losses set both competition and innovation suffer for the Justice Department has determined that an anti trust response, if necessary, to benefit consumers. If the government that night or day- and I trust, love to enable competition, we could lose the next wave of innovation. If that happens, America's may never get to see the next Google. In a statement, Google com philosophy deeply flawed and said that rather than helping consumers. It would hurt them. That's it for the day Michael Babar, see tomorrow.

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