The 2020 election is fast approaching. As the race heats up, so too does the level of disinformation. In this episode, we talk with Jevin West. West is the director of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public. West and his team study misinformation. We'll discuss the misinformation surrounding mail-in voting. We'll also talk about deep fakes and the very real possibility that it may take a while to determine who won the presidential election and how bad actors might take advantage of this situation to undermine the results. Finally, we talk about the corrosive role misinformation plays in society.
The 2020 election is fast approaching. As the race heats up, so too does the level of disinformation. In this episode, we talk with Jevin West. West is the director of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public. West and his team study misinformation. We'll discuss the misinformation surrounding mail-in voting. We'll also talk about deep fakes and the very real possibility that it may take a while to determine who won the presidential election and how bad actors might take advantage of this situation to undermine the results. Finally, we talk about the corrosive role misinformation plays in society.
Jevin West:
One of the goals of disinformation campaigns is to annihilate trust. It's to erode trust in the institutions that democracies depend.
Voiceover
From UW Tacoma. This is Paw'd Defiance.
Eric:
Welcome to Paw'd Defiance where we don't lecture, but we do educate. Today on the Paw'd misinformation and the 2020 election, with the director of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, Jevon West. West and his team study misinformation, including how it spreads and its impact on society. We talk about the election, deepfakes and how to hold social media companies accountable. We'll also discuss how misinformation undermines democracy and trust both in individuals and institutions. Dr. Jevin West, thank you again for agreeing to come on Paw'd Defiance.
Jevin West:
Thanks for having me, Eric. It's always good to be on here.
Eric:
So I wanted to bring you back because we are about, as of the time of this recording, we're about 40 days away from the election and I think it's important that we talk about misinformation as we get closer to the election. And what do you think that people should be looking out for as that day approaches?
Jevin West:
I think it's crazy to think we're that close to the election and it's really starting to heat up. You'll see it, everyone's seeing more advertisements especially in some of these swing states. And we actually see it just in our research too where there's been a pickup of the kind of misinformation disinformation that we anticipated seeing before this election and pretty much any election you would imagine. But we've been focused specifically on misinformation, disinformation related to voting integrity and the election integrity issues, things like, participation interference or fraud, of course, procedural interference. So these are the kinds of things that we're looking for, but like you said, things are heating up in the election space and also in the disinformation space.
Eric:
So going off of that, are there any trends that you're seeing in terms of social media? If we look back to the 2016 election, we've since learned that they were very specific misinformation campaigns by foreign actors and sort of content firms. Are we seeing that sort of similar thing? Are there any patterns that you can discern?
Jevin West:
Yeah, I mean, we are seeing it. They're adapting, they being the kind of foreign actors and bad state actors that are involved in this. A lot of the misinformation professionals, I guess you could call them, those that make money of conspiracy theories and sowing distrust, they're adapting. They're adapting because some of the tech platforms are doing some things differently. I wouldn't say they're perfect and we're highly critical of some of the things they've been doing, but I will say that there are some changes, For example, Facebook makes it much more difficult to put political misinformation in ads. It doesn't stop people from posting it in their personal spaces, I mean, they still can get taken down if it breaks the rules of Facebook, but at least in the ad space it's at least more difficult.
Jevin West:
So if it's more difficult there, then those that want to push these narratives and propaganda are going to adjust to either different mediums or strategize in different ways. So we're seeing some of those changes. We do see a lot of misinformation around the topics you'd expect right now, given that we'll be doing a lot of mail-in voting. There's a lot of discussions online about the integrity of mail-in voting and voter registration for this mail-in voting, especially in states where this is new. And so you'll see a lot of memes and imagery of supposed mail ballots being duplicated or mailbox stuffing or mailbox dumping, all sorts of things like images of U.S. mailboxes being shipped away when in fact those are images that have been around a long time. Those are generally images where the U.S. Postal Services is fixing those mailboxes or moving them from previous time period maybe even 10 years ago. And what we see during these times, crisis times in general is that you see a resurfacing of images that existed far before this particular time period.
Jevin West:
So we're seeing a lot of that. A lot of it, the work that we're doing and I sort of kind of defer to a lot of my colleagues that are doing most of this work in the center right now is a project that we are calling the Election Integrity Project. This is... Election Integrity Partnership, I always mess up the P on that one. It's a collaborative project with Stanford University and several other organizations where we in the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington and these groups are monitoring in real time, misinformation around election integrity.
Jevin West:
So we have an entire team of students and postdocs and researchers, et cetera, that are monitoring this particular topic. And it's a nonpartisan effort where we're not focusing on misinformation that comes out of let's say Biden's camp or Trump's camp. We're leaving that to the fact checkers and to other groups and people. Were focused on misinformation, disinformation around voter integrity in particular. And so that's why most of what I know, or at least even my colleagues knowing better than I do because they do most of the monitoring day by day, the trends that they're finding tend to be these kinds of images that pass around on the internet that show a stack of ballots that landed at someone's house when in fact either maybe the image has been altered or there may be really are five people that live in a particular house. But it's these kinds of messages that we're seeing trends in. But of course there's all sorts of other kinds of misinformation disinformation out there as well.
Eric:
So you were touching on some of the things that I wanted to talk with you about. One of them being able to vote by mail. Washington state has been doing it for quite some time, but if you were to go onto social media, you would think that there's just rampant fraud with this sort of voting method. So is there a way, I mean, you were kind of talking about it in terms of visuals, is there a way for people to call BS? And I'm sort of referencing the title of your book, which is, Calling BS. Is there a way for people to be able to look at that and say, "You know what, this is nonsense."
Jevin West:
Yeah. I mean, I think if someone receives a message or sees a Facebook post from a friend that claims high voter fraud, one of the first things I would ask is where are they seeing that? Because most of the research from both left leaning and right leaning think tanks and from the government itself and from local governments has found actually very little voter fraud over the years. And that includes votes that come in through mail. And I'm not an expert in this area, in fact, we just did a panel co-sponsored with KUOW where Kate Starbird, one of my colleagues with the SS, Kim Wyman was there talking about this issue specifically in Washington. And I will say that I'm quite proud of our State of Washington and that we're really leading the charge. I mean, there are a few other states like Hawaii and Colorado and Utah, et cetera, that have been really kind of leading in this area of mail-in voting. So we're pretty well prepared and we kind of know what to look for.
Jevin West:
But when you look at the studies and again, from studies that have been done from kind of right leaning think tanks and left leaning think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, for example, they had a database of about 1200 proven instances of voter fraud, but that was from 1992. And though many of those, most of those did result in criminal convictions. But think about that when you think about the number of votes that have gone on since 1992. I mean, overall the sense I get, and this is from working with experts in this field and again, this is something that I only know from talking with my colleagues who are experts on this, there really is little evidence that exists for voter fraud, despite all the discussion around this issue.
Jevin West:
That's what's kind of crazy is that there's tons of discussion and I can see why people want to discuss it because for many states this will be new but this discussion is not something that's never come up before. Also just think about after the 2016 election, there were talks of course, from the current white house that there was 5 million or so illegal votes that really never turned up any strong evidence of voter fraud. And it doesn't happen all that often, partly because the benefits don't always out weigh the risks for individual voter fraud incidences. I mean, for example, if someone even was able to stuff 1000 ballots, that's still it's a lot of ballots and I'm not saying that we shouldn't be tracking, we absolutely should and we should prosecute for these kinds of things, but the risk is quite high for an individual to do that and a lot of times, 1000 or certainly 1 vote, 10 votes will make a difference.
Jevin West:
So it's a high risk, low reward kind of criminal activity and it has happened and could happen and we need to be very, very, very careful. But there are professors out there right now that have spent their career looking at this. I can think of, I think a person named Justin Levitt, he's a professor at Loyola Law School. He's been studying this and looking at it from the year 2000 and he's found about 45 cases of the sort of billion or whatever how many votes that have happened since then. So he's found some, but again, very, very small. And there's some states that have called out that they've had, let's say a 100,000 or 50,000 voting fraud incidents, but then when they're pushed on it and it goes into a legal court, a lot of times they're dropped because at this point there's not a lot of evidence.
Jevin West:
Now, if a lot of evidence comes from that sort of thing, then we can be more concerned, but given all the discussion around that there is up to this point little evidence of that voting fraud. But again, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be watching it, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be very careful about it. And this is, at least new for some people and there's a lot of uncertainty. Just like any topic that's uncertain, they're people and politicians and organizations will take advantage of that uncertainty. And so we just have to be aware of just the uncertainty and the stories that will likely arise from that uncertainty true or not. That's sort of inevitable. And I think that's what we can do as citizens is pay attention to that and then when someone posts that or politician says it, asks where they're finding that evidence, and then you can ask, was this a bipartisan effort, has this been corroborated, who else has done this kind of... who else has had a chance to look at it? These kinds of things. So asking questions about the actual evidence for or against us.
Eric:
Hey, everyone, I wanted to take a second to remind you that the election is Tuesday, November 3rd. If you're not registered to vote, you can visit vote.org to find the registration guidelines and deadlines in your state. Okay. Back to the show.
Eric:
This is sort of an aside, but I often think about this when I hear talk of widespread voter fraud is that in this country, we have a hard enough time getting people to vote so it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that there's people who are going to vote extra when we can't even get a very high turnout in most elections.
Jevin West:
[inaudible 00:12:54] No, most of our efforts should just be getting high turnout. That's the best thing for democracy is to get a high turnout. And I think if we put most of our efforts there, I mean, clearly we have a lot of smart people, people that are devoted to voting integrity and we need to support them in any way. But I think the other thing that we can do as citizens is really just work on getting everyone to vote. And that's good for democracy in all respects, regardless of party.
Eric:
So the center for an Informed Public recently hosted a conversation about deepfakes. Now, for folks who don't know what a deepfake is, can you talk about that and sort of ways to identify if you're looking at a deepfake.
Jevin West:
Deepfakes, the word itself sounds scary and it can be scary and we want the public to be aware of this new technology. This new technology, it gives people the ability to create videos having people say something that they never really said, and they can do this in video form, in audio form, it can actually even be done with texts now. To me that's some of the scariest stuff, just as scary as the videos themselves. And it's not that we haven't had this kind of Photoshop like technology. For a long time, we have. In fact, Photoshop we've had since the 1990s and people, when they see strange photos will say, "Now, that sounds ridiculous," or "That looks ridiculous. That must've been Photoshoped."
Jevin West:
The problem now is that the technology to do this with video at very cheap costs at large scale has made the problem bigger. And there are lots of examples out there, and we provide examples in some of our new resources that we've made available freely to the public, that you can look at some of these videos now that are considered deepfakes and you just can't tell the difference really. I mean, it's really hard unless you've seen many, many of these. And I've seen many of them and it's hard for me. And the technology allows you also to create images of humans that have never existed on this earth.
Jevin West:
So we have a project called whichfaceisreal.com. You can go play this game where we show you one real face and one false face that's not real that's just created with this deepfake kind of technology and you'll see that it's really hard to tell the difference. There are certain tricks, but the technology is only getting better. So what we want the public to know is that this technology exists, and it is a little scary to think that you can't trust your eyes when looking at a video or audio file or sometimes now almost text. And we'll get through this. We'll find ways as a society to get around this technology. We've gotten around other forms of mimicry, light technology. But the most important thing is that they at least know it.
Jevin West:
So if they see a video, they can't just take it for granted that it's real. So if it looks too bad to be true or sounds too good to be true, then they should question it and look for other sources for corroborating that information. We have this new quiz that we released in collaboration with Microsoft and USA Today and several other partners. It's called spotthedeepfake.org. You can just go to our center's website and you'll find this new quiz. You can take the quiz and one of the first videos you'll see is a video of Richard Nixon, a former president doing a press release where he says that the men didn't land on the moon it was a disaster. Of course, that never happened, but just to demonstrate how you create these videos very fast and very easily and how it's really hard to distinguish whether he said it or not.
Jevin West:
And we've seen this in movies. We've seen it with CGI tech... we've seen it, but the issue here is that anyone can create this now, very cheaply and very fast. And so we're going to see more of this disinformation and our concern, the reason why we're pushing a lot on this particular issue is that we are concerned that we'll likely see a deepfake possibly right before the election. We've seen it in other elections around the world already where a video popped up right before, some days before the election and that is scary. And here's the other thing that's even just as concerning is that even if it's not a deepfake, even if it's a real video, politicians can employ what's called the liar's dividend. And that is, they can say, "That's a deepfake. I never said that." When in fact they really did say that or did something awful that they don't want the public to know about.
Jevin West:
And so that is also just concerning. So again, the point for us in the center is just to make people aware that deepfakes or we call it also synthetic media, it's out there now. It's there and it's only getting better. And so we're going to need to use more tools to test, to assess whether something is a real legitimate video. And there's a lot of work on the technology side, including people at Microsoft and other companies and small companies and researchers figuring out how to detect these things automatically, journalists are writing stories about it to make people aware, we as researchers are out there also trying to make the public aware and showing what we have found in it. But yeah, so that's what a deep fake is and that's why we've had some of these panels and public discussions about it and why the biggest thing that people can do right now is just be aware of it.
Eric:
So let's move from one frightening topic to another. So here's a scenario that seems possible maybe more than that. So it's election night and let's say the election is either too close to call, or one candidate is announced to be the winner, but maybe it's by a very slim margin either way, the next morning we wake up and we don't know who the president is. And it seems like in that space, misinformation will abound where people will want to fill in a narrative for whatever reason they have. So if this happens, how can people sort fact from fiction when things are coming at us so quickly on a matter of such importance?
Jevin West:
It scares me, Eric. I mean, it really, it keeps me up and it should concern us. But it's one of those kinds of things that we need to pause and let the system work itself out. Because I think, I mean, and I'm not a political commentator, but I consume this kind of information and I'm a citizen of the U.S. too and care about our democracy very much.
Jevin West:
I suspect that we won't know the answer to who's president on the day of, partly because there'll be a lot more mail-in ballots and so they there will be an ability to see who received the most number of in-person votes and there could be depending on that, maybe one of the candidates will announce that they're the winner based on that. And I think because of the number of mail-in ballots for this election, and it will be more than we've ever had, of course, in a presidential election, that it will take time like it does sometimes in the State of Washington, because we have mail-in ballots and there are times we have to wait to figure out who the winner is because that process takes a little bit longer.
Jevin West:
And so at that time there's going to be uncertainty, it's going to be a new kind of thing that the American public is going to have to deal with and it's at those times of uncertainty again, where propagandists and opportunists are going to sweep in and push some narrative or provide false information just sometimes to get clicks, but also sometimes to push sentiment in one direction or the other. Crisis events, and I would consider that somewhat of a crisis event, not quite the crisis, of course like a pandemic, but it's an event of uncertainty and it's during those times when we see the most amount of rumors and misinformation and conspiracy theories of course.
Jevin West:
And so it's during those times that we all just need to pause for just a little bit, let the system work itself out. I still do have confidence in our system overall and I think we just don't need to refresh our browser every second to figure out if there's new news about it. If this scenario plays out as you've described, which again, I think is highly likely that it will, maybe it won't, maybe we'll know the day of. But if this scenario plays out, it's going to take time and as everyone knows it could land in the courts. So who knows, it could take not just a few days after that, it could take weeks, it could take months.
Jevin West:
And during that time period, I suspect given what we've seen in other kinds of crisis like events, that's when we'll see a rise of misinformation and disinformation and it's during those times that I think we can all be extra careful about not spreading things that have not been well vetted that are not from reliable sources that are not from places just trying to evoke emotions. Because emotions will be high collectively in the United States and I think we need to be extra careful if that scenario plays out and possibly if even more severe scenarios play out or even if it's a good... everything works out great in terms of the process itself. And I'm not picking one candidate or another, we're a nonpartisan center, we're just talking about maintaining a voting process that everyone can feel confident and that's going to take a little extra vigilance this particular year I think.
Eric:
I want to address the elephant in the room, which is... I've thought about this for a while now that, social media has been good in a lot of ways and also not so good in a lot of other ways. And I can't help, but thinking that humans as a species just weren't quite ready for social media and what it was capable of and what we can do with it. So with that as a frame, I wonder, is there any way we can hold social media companies that responsible. They don't actually create the content, but they provide a path for it to move around and circulate. Is there anything that can be done? Is that even something that should be worth trying or is it more sort of like a free market system where the best ideas win? How do we proceed in that regard?
Jevin West:
This, it's a great question, Eric and it's something we're talking about almost daily in the center and in the national community that does research in this area and works on policy in this area. And it's actually one of the few areas too where there's some bipartisan support to bring these social media companies to the regulatory table. I mean, honestly, we should have brought them sooner. They've been granted an immunity that most industries haven't and part of it's driven by historical reasons of how the internet just sort of evolved and the sort of borderlessness of it and sort of the culture that was built in to those early on with the internet. But I would say that, I'm sure people have if anyone has seen the social dilemma documentary that recently came out on Netflix, there's a lot of talk at least in my faculty, in our groups about that.
Jevin West:
It's things that we've been talking about certainly for a long time in the area. But the issue at stake here really is what role do the social media companies have in filtering misinformation and slowing the spread of misinformation, as you say. And as critical as I have been of them, I will grant them that this is a very difficult problem. And also, as you say, I don't think human society was ready for, or we just need more time let's say to deal with this really powerful information technology that truly is transforming the world, in some ways that are good, but I would say maybe even more things that are not good. In fact we talk about sometimes jokingly among my colleagues like Karl Bergstrom and Joe-Bak Coleman who's a postdoc in our new center that when people talk about the Fermi paradox, this is this paradox physicists have talked about and astrophysicists that, given that the earth is part of this young planetary system compared to the rest of universe, why haven't we seen other aliens? Why haven't they visited this?
Jevin West:
And part of that one explanation is that, well, there may have been other organizations or other civilizations on other planets, but they found nuclear weapons and blew up themselves, but we kind of joke and said, well, and not in a nice joking way that it wasn't nuclear weapons it was social media that essentially maybe destroyed their civilizations.
Jevin West:
And so joking aside, we have to take this serious. The role that social media is playing in individual human psyche, whether it's people's mental health, whether it's the spread of misinformation, these are serious issues. And the objective, the one big objective of these social media platforms is to glue you to the platform and they don't care what you read or whether it's something that will make you a better citizen of the world, or that you've learned something new or that you've walked away with a positive experience. As long as you're stuck to the platform and your eyeballs are more likely to see more ads to click on, that's not something that's great for society. When you're trying to optimize for user engagement and that's really all the algorithms care about as they run their millions and millions of AV experiments, every single second to dig deeper and deeper until your psyche and gazillions of other people that are using it at that time, when your only goal there is to do that then the negative things do happen and we've seen those kinds of things.
Jevin West:
And so I think there's a lot of things that need to happen. I think that the tech companies are starting to realize it, they're starting to recognize that, yes, they can have these large scale societal issues. I kind of found it ironic, four or five years ago when some of these leaders, including Zuckerberg would say on one hand that we have this technology that's going to transform the world in such great ways. It has all this great impact. But then on the other hand say, "Well, there's no way that this technology could have an impact on all these other things that we're concerned about, whether it's around the elections or other things." And so it's clear that social media is having a major role in society.
Jevin West:
And so I think society should be a part of the conversation of how it's distributed. I haven't even mentioned yet about privacy and around how individuals themselves really are the product of these things and maybe if they're the product, then maybe they should have some say in how they're being productized or whatever. So I guess... it was a long winded answer for just saying that social media is playing an incredibly big role in society. Some good, as you saying that it's brought collective action like we haven't seen, it's amplified diverse voices like we haven't seen and it has done some of the democratization of society more generally. But I feel like these other things that it's done to society and at least for me as I live and breathe, this topic of misinformation, disinformation, I'm seeing more and more the role that social media is playing and we really need to bring them to the table. And the democrats and republicans will have different reasons to bring them to the regulatory table, but I think just bringing them will be a start of a conversation that needs to happen.
Jevin West:
And also, there are even other legal reasons that most people don't recognize too that you could even bring them to the table even for monopolistic reasons too, if you look at Facebook owning most of all the other big social media companies too. Having some competition might create some new inventive and innovative business models that don't have the only objective of gluing our eyes to the screen. Because there was a point in which they could have gone different ways when they were monetizing Facebook and Twitter and other forums, but they decided looking at Google, making a load of money and providing a decent service as well to the world with search, that they were doing it through advertisements and that seemed elegant to them and I think these companies though, maybe social media shouldn't be designed in the same way because it plays a different role.
Eric:
Okay. So here is the big existential question that I want to ask and it may take a second for me to get everything out that I want to say so I apologize in advance. So in my mind, based off of some reading and some listening, I've done, to me it feels like one of the biggest threats to misinformation is what it could potentially do to a society especially a type of country like we have, right? A Republic, a democratic Republic where there's supposed to be one person, one vote, direct representation. And before social media, and maybe this was never really true, but we seemed to operate on a general sense of a collective truth or a shared reality that we all, the same set of facts existed and from that we can take different meaning from it.
Eric:
So I wonder now where even the idea of facts, what is a fact is sort of up in the air and there can only be one real true fact, but there are some are making the argument of like, "Well, maybe that's not... there's this other set of facts that are true as well." So I wonder, what is misinformation doing to this idea of collective truth, shared reality and is it possible to have a functional society with a duly elected government if there just isn't trust between individuals?
Jevin West:
So it's a really deep, interesting question, Eric, and this is one that we could talk through the entire podcast on. And it's a topic that I've been thinking about more in our weekly meetings with our postdocs and our researchers and students in the center. And I guess my quick answer is that no, you can't govern at least within a democracy framework without trust. Trust is absolutely critical. And one of the goals of disinformation campaigns is to annihilate trust. It's to erode trust in the institutions that democracies depend.
Jevin West:
Now, if you want an authoritarian government or you want a government run by a dictator then trust might not be needed in that kind of government. But I would imagine that the vast majority of Americans want a democracy and that's the issue at stake here. And I think this is why this is one of the most important questions to address in today's podcast is that, trust is absolutely critical and disinformation and misinformation, and the rise of that, whether it's dealing with health misinformation and the infodemic that we've seen worldwide around COVID, whether it's misinformation, disinformation around election related topics, around anything that we're talking about. The more and more that misinformation and disinformation is injected, this sort of noise into our information environments and this pollution, the more that trust does get eroded.
Jevin West:
And we've seen a lot of these indicators of trust going down in the research world. There's lots of researchers and organizations that have been tracking trust in various institutions for decades. And if you look at a lot of these trust indicators, most of them, the one thing they all kind of agree on, they might have some differences here and there, but for the most part, there's a downward trend in trust. Certainly in media and in government more broadly, but also in other institutions, even universities, especially when you break it down by certain geographic regions or certain demographics, that's even going down that someone who works at a university. That should be something we're very concerned about. And democracy depends on an informed citizenry. It depends on our ability to make collective decisions and if we can't trust in the system and in experts and institutions just more broadly, these key institutions then that doesn't make for a very well run democracy. It can't run without it.
Jevin West:
And so trust is something that's on attack. Facts are on attack. And certainly we can disagree about how we implement maybe the most recent tax policy, but you would hope we can at least agree on the facts, at least the numbers that we make these decisions on, whether it's about the numbers that give us something about gross domestic product or whatever it is we're talking. There are a set of facts that we do need to agree on, but even that now we can't even agree on those basic facts and that's certainly what's concerning. And when talking about trust there's this idea that was given to me by one of my postdocs, Rachel Moran, who's been thinking a lot about trust for several years. In fact, she wrote her dissertation while at the Annenberg School at USC about this, and she talks about the conservation of trust.
Jevin West:
It's similar to the conservation of mass that physicists have been talking about for a long time, which is you can't create and delete mass. You can transfer, but you can't delete or create it. And it's the same thing with trust according to Rachel, I think it's a really interesting idea that, if you are distrustful of the mainstream media, or if you're encouraged to distrust or you have maybe good reason to distrust a particular let's say, we'll use media because that's one that's usually brought up. It's not that, that trust just evaporates from the individuals that are now distrusting let's say mainstream media, it goes somewhere else. It just transfers to somewhere else. And sometimes that transfer might go to organizations or individuals on the internet that don't have the same reputation at stake, that don't have the same vetting processes, that don't have the same training, that don't have the same longevity as an organization.
Jevin West:
Now don't get me wrong. I mean, mainstream media, if that's what we're going to call, they do make mistakes. Any media, any journalist, any researcher, any doctor, any you name it, anyone who is trained in a specific area that delivers important information to society, they make mistakes and we should hold them to it and we should have processes for tracking those things and reporting the retractions if that's what they are. But to mistrust the entire system and to have distrust overall that then again, will just get shifted somewhere else. And that's why it's so dangerous to be using terms like fake news all the time. I mean, there is fake news out there. We study it. We try not to use the term. We typically use misinformation and disinformation, but that's damaging to that important element that we need in democracies, which is trust and we need to earn it in some ways too.
Jevin West:
I keep using media because that's the one that most people talk about when they're talking about erosion of trust and when they mention fake news. And media has a lot to do to gain that trust back. There's things that I think are happening are improving, but I certainly think that it's an issue we can't just let pass by, that we have to figure out how to agree on what facts are, what truths are to be able to have productive conversations in this country because we're all going to feel the negative effects of that if we can't have conversations. We can disagree, that's fine in democracy.
Jevin West:
In fact, we encourage it at the individual level in our center and in my class when I talk about calling BS and talk about spotting it and refuting it. It's fine to disagree, and it's fine to call out things that are wrong, but we want to do it in a civic way. We want to do it with empathy. We want to do it when we're very sure that we've got it right, and that we're using reliable sources. And we want to do it when we're not there just to vilify the other individual or the other organization or the other party or the other team, or the other tribe that we do it so that we all become smarter.
Jevin West:
So I think this thing with trust to go back to your original question, is it possible to govern without trust? Well, it's not possible for the government that I think we all do support this democracy experiment, that we're all part of. And so that's something that we need to have get stronger because right now trust across the board seems to be going in the wrong direction. And so it's something, hopefully we can have more discussions about before the election, after the election and after that, for sure. So that thanks for the question Eric. I think it's a really important question.
Eric:
And I appreciate your answer on so many levels, but one of the things that I particularly found striking is, I worked in journalism for awhile and I know a lot of journalists. And so it always is confusing to me when I see people who are talking about you can't trust fake news or mainstream media. I'm not even sure what that means anymore. All the journalists I know, the only thing they really have is, they're not necessarily great paying jobs, is their credibility, right?
Jevin West:
Right.
Eric:
So if that's gone, they don't have a career. They don't have a livelihood anymore. So I've never met a journalist who... and you see this accusation of like, "Well, why aren't this story being covered?" If it's about a certain political party or something. I've never met a journalist in my life who would pass up the chance to write a story that could be a game changer, could set their reputation at a high bar and open up all kinds of avenues for storytelling. That's not the nature of the profession. And I agree with you, they get it wrong. Sometimes that happens. But it is striking to think that, you'll have this big piece like in the New York Times or something and that can be written off and then someone with a 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, who's just a person and you're not sure of their expertise, but that person is thought to be like, that's the person I'm willing to put my trust in. And there's a lot of things out of whack that I just don't quite understand.
Jevin West:
I agree. And I think that's exactly right about journalists that it's not a real high paying job for most of them and they really believe in the profession. And I encourage anyone to go on sort of a drive around, I guess you could say with journalists kind of like you can do a drive around with police officers or whoever, any profession you can go in and shadow doctors. Do that with a journalist and see how they do that work. And then I encourage them, anyone to try doing journalistic work. In fact, we're doing some of these exercises with students to allow them to be investigative reporters for a day. And actually it's inspired by some work at KQED. It's the affiliate radio, NPR affiliate in San Francisco. It's a program to help students understand the tools that they need to become a citizen reporter. But also in doing that most students, at least when I talk to them, realize this is really hard work and you can do it, but to do it well...
Jevin West:
It's hard to get at the truth and it's humbling. And when you've gone through that, you start to recognize how hard it is but also the ways in which you can go about securing people's trust, laying down your path to how you came up with your evidence and to do it in an honorable way and to not double down when you're wrong. There's so much doubling down when it's wrong and there's also, like you said, there's too much trust put in a lot of individuals that gain social influence, and there's lots of ways to gain it, social influence on social media and on YouTube and all these other places on the web that... check and see what their standards are.
Jevin West:
And there's a project that we're actually releasing in a couple of weeks. It's a public service announcement campaign with several different organizations around the country that tries to help people identify the indicators of trust in journalism. So we call it the Trusted Journalism Project. This is a project led by Sally Lehman and she's a former journalist. And we'll be releasing that in the center too. It's just a bunch of videos that you just show 30 second videos and then we have a website that says, "Here are some of the things you can look for if you're looking at a new journalistic venue. Do they follow these eight trusted indicators? And if they don't, you might want to be a little concerned about getting your information from them. And we're hoping that other journalism venues actually abide by these trust indicators. So we do care about this topic and we want people to find places where they can trust information that they do represent some of the stories that they care about.
Jevin West:
And that's the other thing that I want to just to end on. Last thing is that we need to reinvigorate local journalism. I think that's one thing that could really help all these issues that we talked about today, to have people that live in our communities that report on stories that we care about. The problem is the local news industry has been decimated across the United States. There are news deserts everywhere and in order to build that trust, I think that's where we can do it is with local journalists. We just have to figure out how to pay for it and how to get people to support it, because it's incredibly important for a democracy, it's incredibly important for building trust and it's incredibly for people to have things reported on things that they care about which is really in the local world. And the national conversation's always going to be there but a lot of times it doesn't represent the local worlds, our local neighborhoods, our local stories and seeing that decimation across the United States, it's something that should be alarming to everyone.
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