continue to engage on cyber security issues. this is a no brainer to me. you haven't done it or you haven't heard it, please develop a relationship with your local fbi office if you have not already. the time to do that is on the front end before something happens as opposed to after something bad happens. the fbi will do everything we can to share all of the relevant information that we can share with you. we frequently push out what we call flash reports which allow us to share threat indicators, tactics and mal wear signatures to potential victims. we will provide threat briefings on request or otherwise to help companies learn from previous attacks and in the event you provide us with information, we will provide you with feedback and analysis on what you have given us. so the bottom line is we need your help to allow us to better address these threats. we know the private sector owns almost all of the infrastructure. it is the primary target. all of the information and

evidence that we would need to move forward resides on your networks and servers. but unfortunately more often than not law enforcement is not notified when an intrusion occurs. the estimates are about 20% are reported so there's another 80% that's out there. we understand that there are a multitude of reasons why a company would not want to report an intrusion to law enforcement. but we've got to figure out a way to get past that and work together. we need to make it routine for companies to turn to law enforcement for help. why? well, first and foremost, we need to find out who's behind the attack to prevent them from doing it again. that may not be a company's first concern which is typically to get back to business as normal, but if we don't find those responsible, like i said, they will continue to attack. speed matters. the faster you turn to law enforcement, the faster we can identify leads and figure out who attacked you and get you on the right course.

we understand the fbi understands your concerns about competitive advantage in the marketplace. loss of investor confidence, public perception and reputation, disrupting your operations, dealing with regulatory aem regulatory agencies and potential liability. but the bottom line is you will be treated as a victim. we will minimize the disruption to you and your employees. we will protect your privacy. we will not share data about your employees or operations. we will do our best to provide clear rules regarding the information you share with us, what happens to it and how it can be used and we will share as much information as quickly as we can. let me just wrap up real quickly. i think i'm doing okay on time here. thank you again very much for the opportunity to be here today. i applaud the efforts of the automotive industry to recognize and mitigate the risks associated.

more is coming and i look forward to continuing to work with you on these issues. i'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have before lunch. >>. >> we're leaving this now for the cato institute discussion about the discussion about freedom of speech. live coverage now on c-span3.

hello. good evening everyone. thanks for coming out to the cato institute in washington, d.c. my name is cat. i'm cato digital out reach manager. you are at cato digital. an ongoing series on the intersection of tech, social media and the ideas of liberty. tonight we're going to be talking about ongoing attacks on freedom of speech and the freedom of press and what we can do to combat those attacks. our hash tag for tonight is as always cato digital n. t. in the spirit of free exchange, i encourage you all to use it liberally on twitter and

instagram to share your thoughts, reflections, favorite quotes from the panel tonight. those of you who are watching on c-span or one of our online channels can also use it to tweet in questions which i will be look for on my phone throughout the panel. the freedom of speech and the freedom of press are at the core of a free society. unfortunately, we're increasingly discovering that far too many people might say that they support them but when in actuality they don't support the policies that safeguard any of the above. on the campaign trail we saw both from hillary clinton and donald trump calls to close sections of the internet in order to combat isis and support for flag -- for bans on flag burning, a constitutionally protected right. last week even donald trump doubled down on his -- on his dislike of flag burners with an

incendiary tweet calling for all americans who would burn the flag to lose their citizenships. he's also called for tougher libel laws that would crack down on media companies that publish embarrassing or unflatting information about individuals and has said that the freedom of the press gets in the way of the war on terror. meanwhile on the campaign trail, we saw students calling the police to report hate speech because of seeing trump 2016 written in chalk on their campuses. we saw employees of facebook petitioning mark zucker burks urg to ban donald trump and the campaign trail alleged that twitter had blocked much of its advertising on the platform because of ily logical reasons. post 2016 election, pundits on both the left and the right blame social media for the

increasing polarization of the voting public and both google and facebook have announced initiatives to crack down on fake news on their websites despite controversy over what that fake news actually is. our guests tonight are two stall warts in the fight for free speech and the freedom of press. flemming rose and the 2016 winner of the milton freedman award for advancing liberty. he is the author of the "tyranni of silence" that is now out in paper wok. those of you in the audience will get an opportunity get a copy signed after this presentation. most of you probably know nick gillespie. editor in chief of reason.com. you find him online at

twitter@nick gillespie. >> my hours are usually between 2:30 and 3:30 in the morning if you're looking for something to do. i want to get those trump tweets out there, retweet them immediately. >> flemming, your life changed on september 19th, 2005. can you tell us why. >> not right away, but september 19th, 2005, was the day that the so hi called the prophet mohammad were published. nothing happened on the day of the publication. i just received one phone call from a newspaper who had be at the mosque and complained and said he would not sell the newspaper anymore. you get those calls every now and then. so it took a while until i

understood that this may change my life. >> right. and why did you publish those cartoons? >> well, the cartoons didn't come out as blue. they were published as part of a debate about self-sensorship and violence regarding islam in denmark and europe. there were several cases pointing to the issue of self-sensorship and intimidation. a dutch filmmaker was being kill in amsterdam in 2004. there was in debate, is there self-sensor ship or not or is it based in the imagination of those who sensor themselves. to find out i invited cartoonists in den mark to draw

the profit as they see them. i received some from 25 active members of the association of -- >> some of those people did express they would want to publish anonymously. >> well, yes. one of the reasons why we published was that it always started with a children's book about the life of the prophet and the illustrate or who did those illustrations insisted on anonymity which is a form of sensorship. you do not want to appear under your own name out of the fear for the consequences. >> it's the case that mo hammad, a dominant train of thought that you should not figure the prophet, correct?

>> he said afterwards that there is no basis in the text, in the text for the -- the particulars for banning images of the prophet. you had images of the prophet. but recently that's true it's been banned. but you have throughout islamic history, you have -- you see them where you in fact have a 13th century image of the prophet. so it's not true that, you know, it's -- it is drew that depictions of living things is not quite common. if you go into a mosque if you go to a church, you will see --

>> this is a good reason to avoid both, right? >> there was a violent reaction after these cartoons came out. multiple embassies around the world were set on fire. i think over 139 people were killed in protests. >> probably more. >> right. yes. do you regret publishing the cartoons? >> no, i don't regret publishing these cartoons. i mean, they were in line with my fundamental approach to journalism. it says that if there is -- if you hear about a story, if you hear about an issue, you want to find out if it's true or not. right? that's what you do as a journalist. we just chose an untraditionalal way. instead of just asking people, we invited people working with images as their medium to show in practice what -- how they

view this issue. but of course i don't believe that a cartoon is worth a single human life. >> yeah. >> the challenge for any editor and journalist is what do you do when there are people out there who believe that it's okay to kill because of a cartoon. >> but you yourself would put on al qaeda's hit list alongside the now late editor, and your own newspaper, despite supporting you publicly, did give you very restrictive list of rules on how you were allowed to engage zblchlt qui. >> quite late in the game in 2011 after i published this book in denmark in 2010. it was in a situation of emergency i would say. i mean, there were between five and ten foiled attacks or plans to attack the newspaper. so it was a very unusual

situation. that's why i accepted, you know, this in 2011. but a year later when i was told this will be in effect as long as you're employed by this company, i was not allowed to speak and write about religious issues. i was not allowed to speak and write about the cartoon crisis. i was not allowed to speak and write about the organization of islamic conference or collaboration, international organization. i said, you know, i disagree strongly and i will take the consequences if i am not able to live with this at some point. >> it was emblem attic of the same chilling of speech. >> it was a huge victory for the jihadists. i'm not on speaking terms with, you know, colleagues and friends whom i've known for 25 years.

the top management at the newspaper, they tried to silence me. in the end i broke with them and i left the newspaper. we don't talk anymore. so i mean, friendships were ruined. fundamental journalistic principles were violated. that's a huge victory for the jihadists or the historian a few years ago. >> nick, in 2015 you faced similar pressure to value security over liberty. >> yeah. >> tell us a little bit about that. >> let me just thank you for having me and it's a real honor and a privilege for me to be on a stage with somebody like flemming who is -- and i hope you all appreciate both what he said when he said no cartoon is worth a human life. somebody who reads editorial cartoons almost everybody day

and even publishes them on a weekly basis, i agree with him completely and also the principles for which he really made a bold statement is really just fantastic. i would like to give him a round of applause for standing up for that. as cat was saying, as a bed rock principle of a free society of an open society, of a truly liberal society, free speech, free expression, i think free assembly as well, these are all int intertwined. i feel bad to be on the same stage as somebody who's in the name of a foundational civilizational value, i publish a bunch of cartoons and then inseason jihadists who purport the group they represent, tried to kill me and people around the globe and caused all kinds of

mayhem. my contribution to free speech is much smaller. it may be more common for more of you. essentially last year if all of you know or have heard of the silk road website which was a dark web or deep website where people could buy and sell anything they wanted basically using bit coin. they were anonymous users. it was used to traffic in a lot of drugs. the person who is ultimately convicted of founding and running the site, he went on a long trial. he essentially got a life sentence which he's appealing now from a judge in new york. >> with no chance of parole. >> that's right. yeah. he's, you know, he's going to be locked up for the rest of his life almost certainly. he is appealing it. but when the -- he -- when the judge handed down her sentence, katherine forest, the judge in the southern district of the federal court of new york, she spent a long time har ranging

him about his libertarian believes and who did he think he was that people should be able to come and freely trade whatever they wanted, what kind of bastard are you? i'm exaggerating a little bit. i wrote up a post about the outco outcome of the trial which i think was wrong and the judge went off on a tangent. she wasn't talking about the law. she was mad that this guy would have done this. and then in response to that a couple of our commenters, we have an unmoderated comment section. it's increasingly rare to have any comments on websites for reasons that i think will become clear over the conversation tonight. but a couple of them made literally six people made comments that were making fun of the judge, a couple made jokes that were threats based on fargo, the movie fargo.

there's a scene where a guy gets fed into a wood chipper. they made references to that. they made references when the revolution comes and they round up judges, they should put one behind another so you save bullets, things like this. a week or so after that we got a subpoena asking for all of the information that we had on our commenters which was not all that much because we don't actually -- we ask people if they want to comment they need to supply a valid e-mail address and then there's a variety of other information they mayor o may not give. because the federal prosecutor was -- had standing grand jury that was related to this silk road trial and they said that these were threats against the life of a federal judge, a very serious charge and they wanted that and we were faced with the question of whether or not we go public with that subpoena or not. do we tell the people or do we

just comply with the subpoena. and we ended up doing based on legal counsel, we let the people who were the subject of the subpoena, the six commenters, we got in touch with them and find out if they were going to try to quash the subpoena. then we got a gag order the day after because our lawyer said to the federal prosecutor who had gotten in touch with us, well, we told the people, you know, who were named in the subpoena about this and we're waiting to see if they're going to quash it. they said you can't do that, you're under a gag order which means you can't even say to people if they ask you are you under a gag order, you just got to be like, you know, i mean, you're not allowed to say anything. the federal prosecutor had fu e fucked up and then they issued a gag order.

one of the commenters leaked the subpoena to kim white who is a criminal defense attorney in california. runs a great legal blog. he wrote a story about that th and then he called me up for a comment to ask whether or not we were in fact under a gag order. i was like i really have no comment, which is effectively the same as saying yeah, we're under a gag order. >> and so that was a chilling effect on our speech. we ended up protesting. we spent thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars and of man hours dealing with this. and that's, you know, in a way it's interesting you called it the assassins veto. it's certainly that. we had a chilling effect from the federal government essentially saying you have a right to free speech but we're going to make you work for it and pay for it. plus the chilling effect on the commenters. the happiening in that story was because of what ken white's great coverage, and this just fantastic piece of article, look

it up on the blog, we generated a huge amount of sympathy from different groups. it turns out the federal government has tens of thousands of requests. there's no way of really kind of cataloguing and calculating how many they asked for information from places like youtube, from places like facebook, twitter, tens of thousands, other press organizations for information on readers and commenters. and often times with the gag order so nobody really knows how many times this is happening and how often. >> and you were in a unique position here. you were the writer of the original piece that the commenters had commented on. but you were also the editor in chief of a very libertarian publication. do you think you that could have expected another media source to respond in the same way? >> yeah, that's a good question. the way that most media sources,

and this goes to it's a more subtle erosion of the i deal of free speech and free exexpression and open and unfettered exchange of ideas. what most sites have done, many publications have done, there's two responses generally. one is that they will use a service like disqus, which is a commenting plug in for a variety of website content management systems so that the comments are actually technically published by a wholly different organization than the site that they're on. and it gives you a certain amount of distance from that. or you just get rid of comments all together which is more and more common where people just don't have comment section anymore. and the internet and the world wide web, which i guess is just call the web now, excuse me for being old, but in the early '90s, one of the dreams, and

it's delivered on a lot of this, not completely, was wow, we could have real conversations that it wasn't just waiting a couple of weeks for "the new york times" to public 100-word letter from somebody bitching and mooning about something. but you could have real discussions. the public square could be everywhere and always and always had more room for comments to something where things have really become shut down in many significant ways. >> so nick, you defended essentially the freedom of speech of people who were making death threats, although there's a lot of question of how serious those. flemming, you actually received death threats for supporting freedom of speech. what is the difference there? should the people making those death threats get freedom of speech as well? >> i think if you look at the american situation, and the

first amendment, death threats in order to be illegal need to be followed by more or less immediate action. in europe it's a little bit more complicated. in europe people may be convicted for speech like this. but i'm more in favor of the american approach that there need to be a clear and present danger. >> right. >> even though you may not think it's funny for the judge. but -- >> man making fargo jokes is a bit different than someone who's just murdered someone for saying something. >> of course. >> you reference the murder of theo van gogh in the streets of amsterdam. he had a knife stabbed into his body who had written the scenario for the movie that he had directed for which he was killed. that's a wildly different

situation than what reason faced. there's a concept of true threat where if you just say, you know, you're blowing off steam and you're saying oh, i could kill this person or i want to kill this person. it's not a true threat because there isn't any proximity. there any necessarily any real follow through. one of the things that was hilarious and it was in the subpoena, and this was to a grand jury and we had no way of stopping this because grand juries are given latitude to get whatever information they want. there's very few limits on that which itself is a problem. but somewhat separate from the speech issue. but they were saying these people are making credible threats, real threats, true threats against the federal judge and can you getd back to the us within something like 72 hours or a week with the information about them. so it's like they were so terrified that these people were -- these commenters were going to come and kill a federal

judge that they gave us a week to comply to get the information. much of which was available and like in our profiles, one of people had a google plus page listed as their contact. so the federal government was so upset by this. but they didn't know where to turn. so they asked us to get us information in a week t.'s just ridiculous on the face. that is a real distinction. if it's a clear and present danger, if it's a call to immediate serious action, it's one thing. but otherwise, come on, speech is speech. >> right. so on that note, to get the elephant out of the room, is flag burning free speech? >> yeah, i think so. unless a person's wearing it, and then it's an assault. >> so as journalists -- >> i'm sorry, i don't know if there's any trump supporters out there. the really novel thing about the trump comments on that wasn't simply a flag burning. hillary clinton is against flag burning. all of these idiots and large

majority of people in congress i think are against flag burning. he actually said that you should not only go to jail but you should be stripped of our citizenship which is truly kind of stunning. that is a particularly interesting kind of meme or idea that goes through a lot of trump talk. some people are citizens. some people can't be citizens. or you could be a citizen but we're going to get rid of you. as a matter of law, there's no possibility of that happening. it's disturbing to see him constantly reach in that direction. >> so as journalists, do you think that president trump will be a credible threat to free speech? >> we'll have to wait and see. i mean, i'm not an expert on u.s. elections. i wrote a book while the election was going so i didn't follow it so closely. i notice the other way that floyd abrams, a great first

amendment lawyer in the u.s., said to the hollywood reporter that donald trump represents the greatest threat to the first amendment since the alien sedition act from 1798. and he contemplated that the u.s. media organization may consider suing trump for libel to fight him, you know, with his own weapons. >> the weapon he wants to weaponize more. >> so to teach him a lesson. i think it was more like a creative input. he just said we have to think about how to manage this situation. i mean, i think the, coming fwoback to what you said about citizenship, that on the one hand, trump is politically incorrect, yeah? he says things that usually

would be socially -- maybe that's one of the reasons why he has so much support. but at the same time, he's very thin skinned when people criticize him. and i see him as a pop lift. we also have these populists in europe. a keynote is this lack of -- that we represent the people, we are against the leads or the foreigners those who do not belong. i think that is a key challenge in this current debate about free speech. be it donald trump. be it islamists. be it rising populists in europe. it's all about the lack of the ability to manage diversity or manage or cope with ideas and speech that they dislike. and that has been reinforced by

the digital revolution, by migration. every society is getting more and more diverse in terms of religion. i think that is a staying challenge independent of trump or not. and it's's b a big issue in eur and i think it will also be a big issue here and other parts of the world as we move forward. the world is not going to grow less diverse. we have more and more people living in cities. the difference between cities and country side, you have virtual and physical neighbors that you didn't used to live next door to and it raises what i believe is the key question here, the question of tolerance. and the distorted understanding of tolerance that is being moved

around. to me, tolerance is basically a judicial political frame for managing disagreement. you don't try to ban and you don't try to use violence to silence things that you hate. to many people it means either, you know, turn the other cheek, that you are intolerant if you say something outrageous. so in order to manage this new diversity, we have to get back and reinvent the notion of tolerance. >> what is means to be tolerant. >> yeah. in a diverse society. because trump has trouble managing diversity. america has trouble -- political parties have troubles on college campuses they're not able to manage diversity. so we have to get back to these

key building bricks of the enlightenment to be able to find a way to live in peace together in this new era without compromising fundamental liberties like freedom of expression or freedom of religion and freedom of assembly. >> freedom of movement. one of the things you touchdown on is you're tuking about an enlightenment i deal, it needs to be redefended. the enlightenment has become a dirty word in academic circles. the dark enlightenment. if you follow the frankfort school or other scholars, it ends in the mass order in auschwitzt.'s about factory murder. we need to defend the enlightenment and the idea of globalism, which trump says and the people who support him, hillary was a globalist.

obama is a globalist. somebody who deported more american -- not more americans, but more illegal immigrants than anybody else is a globalist somehow? but i think we need to take a stand for globalization in a positive way and make it a positive ideal and it's based on this idea of freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience. this is where a dynamic economy, dynamic world, fairer world, a better world, more prosperous world comes from. it is better that we trade with china than that we fight with china or we isolate china. it is better that we trade with mexico and that the nafta agreement created a free trade zone in north america where there are effectively no tariffs anywhere. we need to go back and kind of defend that. to go to the question of trump and free speech really quickly, he has his own idea. if he could, he would shut down everybody and every news

organization and every, you know, random person. and i do recommend you follow his twitter account. at one point he said he was in the green room at fox news, juan williams, one of the liberals at fox news, took some selfies with him and he tweeted something along the lines of juan williams took selfies with me, then slammed me on tv. what a bad man. and this is a guy who is going to be the president of the united states. he's that pissy about every interaction. we need to hold him accountable and make fun of him. if he had his way, he would be terrible. >> cartoons. >> yes, let's use cartoons. have donald trump with a bomb in his hair rather than his beard. but he also as a matter of policy, for instance, donald trump, and this just shows what politicians want, remember, it's all unintended consequences. we believe we know the law of inintended consequences.

it's true for politicians as l. we might want to shut down "the new york times," but he's also going to probably appoint an fcc that will get rid of stupid new tral tee laws that hillary clinton was in favor of that would totally discriminate and change kind of the jurunderlyin framework and internet data get sent around . oh might end up having a more positive effect and opening up the very framework by which we are more free to speak in more different context that we might not even be able to imagine yet. >> just one follow-up on diversity. i basically agree with you, but i think we need to acknowledge that diversity is very difficult and can be very painful. for many years it's because it's

been very popular to celebrate diversity, kind of not correct to acknowledge that it is -- it's not easy. it's painful t.. it's difficult. it creates confrontation. celebrate diversity by itself, it's just the fact that you have to cope with it. it's not that the more diverse it is the better it is. that's two different types of sizes. and we have to be honest that it's not easy. and we see that all around the world right now. >> i want to go off thf idof tha of diversity. we were discussing earlier before we started this discussion here, the early internet or the early social internet when people first started engaging to give people an opportunity to find so many

more sub cultures and groups and ideas that they didn't really have access to previously. in those ways it had become much more diverse. it had this diversifying impact previously we didn't have that. post 2016 election in particular we're having a lot of people blaming the polarization of the voting public on the fact that we have things like algo rhythms that serve us the content that it knows we're going to like. the fact that people push to unfollow anyone who says things that they think are uncomfortable and friend them. if you say something a certain way, i'm not going to -- i'm going to block you, i'm going to do that. then they turn around and say how could donald trump have won, no one i know supports him. what's the play here? are the people the problem? do the people need to be trying to -- >> i think the children are the problem. we keep looking to them as the

solution, but they're really the problem. they're the ones. that's how we know the schools are no good because they're not learning anything. it's their problem. i would argue -- i agree that there's no question that social media, new media or however we want to talk about it, the internet is being blamed for polarization. the fact of the matter is i am enamored of a political scientist who is now associated with the hoover institution who has talked about this going back at least 15 or 20 years about polarization in american politics. the real problem isn't that americans aren't polarized. basically 60% of americans easily think that illegal immigrants should be given a pathway to citizenship. 60% or more of americans think that abortion laws should kind of stay where they are now and have been since roe versus wade.

60% believe that pot should be legalized. nobody cares about guy marriage anymore. this used to be a hot button issue t. issue. there's massive majorities on many issues that divide us. the real problem is in politics, in part son politics, we can't express those opinions because the nominating processes by which candidates are selected are governed by extremists in both the republican and democratic party. you can see this where there are no sen tris republicans. it predates the rise of the web. it's the political system that's the problem. it's also helps explain, and i'm actually bullish on this election, because again and again, and this is something matt welch, and we talked about this in our book, going back to 1970, fewer and fewer people identify as republican and democratic. fewer and fewer identify as

liberal or conservatives. great post using gallop survey to show that actually libertarians are the single largest kind of ideological block, socially liberal and fiscally conservative. we can pick bones with that type of stuff. but it's basically the political system we have does not allow us to express our agreement on many important issues. and we are vacating that political system. fewer people want to be republican. fewer people want to be democratic. >> we saw that with the election. >> it's kind of a great outcome. one. who candidate who is historically disliked. one won the popular vote. neither of them could get 50%. they suck and we know it. we're leaving that behind. we're migrating somewhere else.

hopefully it's a world beyond politics. we need to keep an eye on politics and keep it small in our lives. this is progress that we have an election where nobody won clearly and nobody got 50%. and i'm hoping in 2020, especially if joe biden runs, we might be seeing major parties pulling in the single digits. if somebody knows where gary johnson is hiding out, i think the third time might be the charm for him. >> on social media and what you said about -- >> diversity of ideas. >> and exactly. i think that is a huge challenge. because we have this ten ddencyo look for material and stuff which we agree and that does not challenge us. so you have these echo chambers

and communities that don't know what's going on in other communities. i don't think that polarization by itself is a problem. sometimes it's great to have polarization and good things come out of it. because you have a heated argument. but i think in terms of knowledge production, i think it's very -- it's very beneficial to be exposed to point of views with which we should disagree or even hate or dislike whch dislike. when it comes to moderation, you have the social psychology test that shows if you put people of the same opinion in the room and talk about the issue in which they agree when they come out, they would be more radicals. and the same with people of the opposite point of view. but if you put people from both groups in the same room, they will tend to, you know, to moderate the opinions.

and also from knowledge production, i think it's healthy to talk to people with whom you disagree. or to figure out what you what you disagree about and you can refine your argument and not just torture people with whom you agree on everything. i think social media reinforces, unfortunately, that -- >> i'm not fully convinced that we're more polarized than ever in our daily lives or we're sorting as much as some people say, so that you know, that everybody just lives around people who are exactly like them or think like them. but taking -- there is no question that that kind of self selection or confirmation is problematic. to go back to the enlightenment question, i love the phrase, knowledge production, it's really key. that is what universities, i think should be for. they're not for teaching students they're for knowledge

and debate, i think societies produce a lot of knowledge do better. going back to the even lightenment question. what are the institutions that we need, do you think that we need to build up so that we take that seriously and that we're teaching our children, okay, look mommy and daddy have all the answers and we have to force it down the throat of the people that don't agree with us. how do -- what are the institutions that would build up that kind of enlightenment belief, in tolerance, pluralism and conflict, and emotionally as opposed to violently. >> i think the school. i mean, the schools, where you bring up kids and you teach them the benefit of being exposed to things that makes you uncomfortable because in stintive reaction will be i don't like this. and i mean, i have a grandson

who is very am bill lant in playing soccer and i take him to soccer every saturday morning. >> so you want it to be a soccer star, but you never were able to, so now you are -- >> that's true. but so he is am bif lent. after a long period of time he starts to enjoy it and so i think we have to teach our kids this knowledge production process and tolerance that, it's okay that you don't like what, you know, the other guy says, but it may be beneficial to you to listen and engage in a conversation and -- but the trend is that we have to protect

our children. >> right. >> because there are so many bad things out there so we don't expose them to things that makes them uncomfortable. >> including in the schools. >> and this brings me back to the concept of tolerance. so you have to -- you have to teach tolerance this way, that it's good to be exposed t things that you dislike. >> on the same track of exposing people to ideas, prior to the election here in the u.s., there's big controversy that had conservatives up in arms saying that facebook was sensoring them based upon the trending news stories mechanism and how stories were being selected for that. now, after the election, we're hearing a lot about fake news and why isn't facebook doing more in order to figure -- in order to make sure that certain stories are being told and other ones aren't. is this a partisan divide we're seeing or is there something else at play here? >> well, i think in the fake

news story, the one thing that clinton supporters -- not even necessarily i think hillary clinton supporters, but people who preferred her to win over donald trump, and particularly the more died in the democratic party -- or members are, they are, i think the less they're likely to say, okay, she lost not because of voter suppression, she lost because -- you know, they don't want to blame her for the loss, because that doesn't compute to them. but she just did not bring out the people she needed to bring out to vote. people were talking about she was going to have a more diverse coalition of different interest groups than obama. she didn't. as a matter of fact, she ended up basically polling, you know, what polls expected her to, she -- you know was within a couple points of beating trump but she didn't pull people out. it was her fault that she lost. but people are searching, her

partisans are searching for reasons to explain her inexplicable loss, which is kind of understandable when you look at the number of votes that were cast and the lack of evnthusias, that dogged her, to a point where bernie sanders is a joke, i mean, he is a joke as a candidate, and he had no good ideas. i mean this is a guy who is the final -- the danish model. >> the final season, the bonus season of "that 70s show," this is a guy who hasn't had a new thought in 40 years, and trump barely won. i'm not saying it's a legitimate win, it's a totally legitimate win. but the fact that because a lot of his people are like foaming at the mouth and you know, if you ever go on twitter and make a joke -- you can't even make a joke at democratics' expense with donald trump in it because

the other day donald trump was in cincinnati and during all the cable shows were showing the people in the stadium he was at, it was a totally white audience and i tweeted, i haven't seen an audience this white since prairie home companion came to cincinnati. the white mob at npr, i'm getting tweets saying why are you bringing race into everything. they're a thin-skinned bunch. there aren't that many of them actually. there were enough to get him in the white house, good for them, wonderful. we can work with that. as libertarians because we're coming at -- we have a future oriented philosophy, we're interested in technology, we're interested in true diverse it, diversity of different people's, of different foods of different genders, different ideas. i mean, we're the future. this is going to be a very good time for us as long as we don't

get caught up in trying to be, you know, republicans or democrats in any kind of dunderheaded way. >> one additional point. you know, every time you have a discussion about fairness of fake reporting or impolite speech or whatever it is, the usual suspect is always free speech. let's ban something, then everything will get better. it's the easy way out for politicians and for you know, group with a specific agenda. it doesn't help. that's not the way to do it. and i think in this old discussion about facebook and social media, we shouldn't forget, even though i'm not a socialist, we shouldn't forget they have businesses, they are here to make money and not to create knowledge production or

challenge people. they have to make them comfortable. so we shouldn't fool ourselves about you know, what facebook and google are doing. >> and if i can just to follow up on that, we had been talking about this a bit before, that is something else, you know, that i think trump is really bringing to the fore. he is not a milton freedman capitalist, not like john macky of whole foods, who are committed libertarians, they're committed businessmen as well and that is important, but google and facebook have already shown that they're more than willing to accommodate autocratic regimes, authoritarian regimes, that's their right and everything, but we should not fool ourselves that you know, they will respond to what the market demands, ultimately, and at this point, the market in politics can be pretty close. we need to create, i guess, you know, to go back to that

question of building up this market for enlightenment ideas, the plurallism, diversity of lifestyle, we need to make that clear choice, so google can say we want more discussion, more diversity, more conflict that is mediated in a positive thoughtful way, rather than speech codes -- you were saying that you know, because facebook and google aren't getting on their knees fast enough, the eu is saying we'll follow up with legislation, which will be a thousand times worse. but you know, this is a fight that will be fought until we die. >> right. >> so what he is talking about is a conduct that was signed by facebook, google, twitter and youtube earlier this year with the european commission in order

to fight hate speech. the problem in that code of conduct is there is no clear definition of what hate speech is, and they are obliged to remove hate speech content within 24 hours. >> yes. >> and the european commission so far is quite dissatisfied and they've threatened companies to pass laws so it is not just a code of conduct if they don't move faster on these notifications, i think they received 600 notifications within six months or -- >> right. and certainly twitter and facebook have both cracked down significantly in their own tos and their manager yal practices on what they will allow you to say or do or what they'll do if you are an individual who is managing a page, for instance. you have to delete those comments or else your page will get punished for it. >> on twitter a month or two ago

deleted a bunch of alt-right accounts. again, twitter, it's a private enterprise, it's their sand box, they can kick anybody out they want. but it's fundamentally stupid. because you know, the way that i think you manage that kind of issue is by -- i mean, they kick these people out even as they were expanding the tools by which you could block or suppress people you don't want to hear from. which again is both great and there are problems there. i mean, we need to be critical in nuance in our understanding of that. but you know, this -- you know, again, we need to be in favor of more speech is always better than less speech even if it's really stupid speech. and we can ignore it or engage it. but you know, there are problems. the upside of that is that twitter, as a media has been flat, it -- instagram and snapchat actually have more daily users, nobody wants to buy

twitter. >> that's actually, twitter is interesting, because we were talking about this market mechanism and they have all this legal represent percussions, they're being looing at the stock price tanking at at time when people were saying they're the platform for white supremacists. >> it's also partly because they're getting antsy about cutting more people off who are white supremacists or alt-righters or whatever, and they suspended the account of glen reynolds, the pundit who is a legal blogger, one of the main guys on the internet really, like, that was nuts. i think the -- to the extent that the platform is flattening and the stock market price is tanking it's more because they're seen as being more 2 pc, not that they're pc enough or suddenly a hot bed for some kind

of tribute band or something. >> right. so on that note, what is the line when we're talking about government restrictions versus private company restrictions on free expression, you know, we're libertarians, we tend to believe that private companies should be able to run their businesses they want to, it's freedom of association, but the same time we're talking about how closely intertwined all of this is. >> i think you have to make that distinction and if you don't like the restrictions that a private company imposes, then you can leave and don't work there and don't buy the product or whatever it is. but i think -- i think media, if they insist that they are, you know -- is the fourth estate that has a right and obligation

to control you know, the judiciary, the executive and legal powers, then they need to be transparent and you know, self critical and look inward to an extent that other businesses don't necessarily have to. they can just make decisions because they are here to make money and that's fine. but if you insist on that kind of semi power status, then i think it goes with certain obligations as well, also when it comes to free speech. >> the united states is odd and you know, and unique and maybe exceptional in the language of the first amendment. which took a while, you know, to get -- to come into being. but congress should make no law, we know that -- it's not at all opaque. government doesn't have any role in regulating speech.

private businesses -- and this is an interesting question about transparency, because part of the argument about facebook question were they using algorithm i ams to kind of trash or keep conservative news down in the election, it's unclear. and i don't even think they know necessarily fully what was going on. >> a lot is done by little robots. >> it's not clear what any of that means. it's also like a lot of the news stories, sorry but breitbart.com is a powerful importanforce in it's not a news site, as an opinion site and there is nothing wrong with that. it's not news, it shouldn't be treated the same way and an algorithm is something else. by the same token, i agree completely, you should recognize, i don't have any control over facebook, that is different than say a publication like reason. we're transparent in what we publish and why we publish it.

when we control it completely and we should, readers can read it or not. they can comment or not, as long as the federal government isn't on our ass about it. facebook pretend ds to be this platform, it's a little different. it's not a publication and they need to be more transparent, they have a right to do whatever they want, but then they will either reap the rewards or suffer the consequences, if their wauld garden, every flower looks the same in the walled garden, they're trying to keep people in facebook so you never want to leave or you never have to leave. if it starts looking like a really dull subdivision or you know, fake cityscape. >> they're already facing this problem, they're not getting the attrition and they have -- >> so they're going to have to be more diverse and have to put in the west world vision of this, they're going to have to put in that sam a rye module, so

people can check out that part of the park and not just the wild west. >> so i'm sure everyone in the audience has a lot of questions, we'll get to those. but before i have one more for you. based upon the fact that both hillary clinton and donald trump had called for closing down parts of the web, we talked about the silk -- >> within 24 hours of each other, by the way. >> precisely. >> every time you are no there is a difference between the republican and democrat party, something like that happens. >> little reminder. we talked about, you know, your article was about the silk road which was on the web accessible -- and other things like that. is there ever a justification for the government to shut down parts of the internet such as the deep web or particular websites or message boards or things like that, if so, what would be it?

>> it's going on in europe everyday right now when it comes to jihadists and denmark's parliament just passed a law where it becomes a criminal offense to share extremist content. so if you are a scholar and you study isis and you want to share the topic, which is the magazine of isis, you may end up in prison. i think that is very, very problematic. >> we've had -- people get punished here as well, for instance, the dallas police department after the shooting that happened earlier this year arrested several people who had tweeted saying that it was good that cops died in dallas. >> that's very offensive, but i don't think it's a criminal offense. you should react, you should, you know, yell at these people and denounce them, but i don't

think you should criminal lies that kind of speech. >> there are web sites that are criminal enterprises, there are fraudulent web sites that rip people off. i think something like child pornography, the child pornography, the production of it, is the -- it's kind of evidence of a crime, taking place. so the production of it, web sites that produce it, yeah, they could be shut down. among consenting adults, no, but the justice department actually does that. from time to time. which i think is stupid. so i think there are clear cases that are extremely rare and limited and kind of self evident in a way. yeah, where the government can shut down certain web sites. i don't think the government can shut down parts of the internet. they can make it more difficult to operate. they can make it a tax in terms of your time or in terms of the

possible outcome. but they really don't have that. and that one was of the things that was strange about donald trump, i hope will be a successful president. he says things about the regulation, he mentioned the f.c.c., so far he is good on school choice, give more people school choice, i'm for that. he also, you know, he doesn't grasp a lot of the details. and when he talked about shutting down that internet, he said i'm going to talk to bill gates and it's kind of like, you are already -- bill gates had his lunch eaten by the internet. that was microsoft's downfall of migrating to the internet. i'm not expecting a lot of visionary leadership on his part. but to the strength of this, he can't shut it down and most governments can't. >> you cut off one head it comes up somewhere else. do we have any questions from the audience?

i ask you keep them short and i will keep them back so the folks on the live stream can hear them. >> carl -- >> we have a mike coming down, actually, so -- >> thank you. high carl. i was a 911 responder as a special agent of the u.s. custom agent office of internal affairs, i went to november of that year to ground zero and helped sift through the rubble, the third building that collapsed that day. there is a tyranny of silence in the media about that. >> are you a truth about building 7. >> i'm a criminal investigator who went through the rubble. >> the world trade center, the collapse that was an inside job? >> i -- the term inside job is foolish language. i believe in -- >> what was your question? >> i was interrupted, pardon me. this fall i hand-delivered to every member of congress a 48 page document by the

organization ae 911 truth.org. it is a scientific evidence in all three world trade center towers. >> what is the question? >> president trump has indicated there will be a reinvestigation of 911, he acknowledged that two airplanes can't cause three skyscrapers to collapse within the space of 8 hours. so what do you think, are we going to actually -- i have copies for each of you -- >> i will say for myself, i won't speak for you. the airplanes that flew into the world trade center, twin towers are what caused that to collapse. when you have that kind of event happening other parts of the world trade center are likely to collapse as well. so i don't -- yeah, yeah, yeah. i'm deep on whether or not jet fuel can burn structural steel, thanks. >> i'm not sure that is a free speech question. >> i like that trump said we

issue can boeing's contract for air force one that is over due and overbudget, this i think would be a waste of taxpayer money. >> question back there. >> i'm a civil sen journalist and most of my stuff is free which a lot of people don't like because i'm competing with them. my basic question is this, the terror threat, the jihady terror threat we've been hearing particularly from isis seems to be trying to make ordinary civilians in western countries in the united states into targets as if they were combatants, as if they were on the hook for anything we do. in other words, create a state of war in the united states. does that justify more sensorship or more control of the internet or emergency powers, that could be particularly relevant in the way i operate.

it's something i'm very concerned about. >> okay. >> could that really be used as justification, because individual citizens are being made target which is unprecedented. >> if we're in a state of war, a perpetual state of war, should currents made online be treated as if they're being made during war powers. >> this is an argument against per pet tall states of wars, wars that don't have clear objectives or end point where we don't even know if we won, those are bad wars to wage, whether to pot, poverty or radical jihad. i would leave it more to the person who is the actual object both of governmental sensorship and personal attacks to -- i don't know. >> i didn't understand the question. >> so i think he is asking if we -- if there are constantly

wars going on, a constant state of war, does that change how people should be sen sourd online, journalists should be sensored. >> the historical evidence speaks to the fact that in times of war, governments tend to overreact. and it's very easy to you know, to turn up the heat on free speech and sensorship, it's very difficult to. >> reverse it. >> so i think experience tells us that the tendency is that governments do overreact and because in a state of war, you know, you want to identify enemies, you are -- of speech is filed over and quite often afterwards when people look at that they say why did we have to

ban that kind of speech. it's a natural reaction, but you have to be on guard. people tend to overreact and you saw that on 911. if you saw it, look at the kind of laws that were passed and the kind of powers that were given to the executive, how can that happen in a liberal democracy. >> to tie it into fake news versus real news and on going arguments about journalism and to the particular question of individual citizen journalists, i don't know any journalists, they're citizens of some country, we're all citizen journalists, there is a constant push among a professional class to say we need to certify who is a real journalist and who isn't, do bloggers get the sasame constitutional protection as someone at "the new york times," of course they do. there is no distinction to be drawn from that. one of the ways we need to talk

about this over reaction is shield laws where you hide your sources because you work for "the times" or something. this is a way of licensing and regulating the press and you know, one of the great things about america is we dealt with that in the colonial era, essentially and we shouldn't go down that road again. >> definitely. i would like to ask this question from julia, is the production of knowledge under threat with the rise of social media. >> we'll have to wait and see. but what i said, you know, this reinforcement of confirmation bias goes against the knowledge production. and is kind of built into the business model of facebook and other social media. but i don't think you have -- you know, you control that as a clear-cut conclusion. we'll have to work on it.

>> one of the things, too, that i think is good about -- yeah, knowledge production is something we should always be guarding, you know, in favor, like we should be making it easier. i think a lot about the libertarian leaning republican congressman from michigan, he talked about when he was at university michigan law school, which by the way is a well regarded law school of a terrible football school, but he was told by somebody, he always thought of himself as a conservative republican, because that's the family he grew up in and somebody said no you are a libertarian and he went home and googled libertarian and he recognized who he was. so in that sense, i think social media, i think the internet more broadly, i think this whole idea of social media is more a marketing term than a lived reality, necessarily. but it's definitely true, you can live in a better, more well furnished bubble than ever

before but you can also find more weird -- all over the place than ever before. and we were talking about this, if you are in my age, i'm in my early 50s and i wanted to get reason magazine or a publication, i would mail away and it would take months and they wouldn't get it right or it wouldn't show up. it was hard. it's so much easier as a millennial to get more information at your fingertips about something, you are watching history channel and you are -- you have your laptop or tablet out and you are wikipediaing stuff as the show is on, it's a much richer environment for that kind of interesting. >> more access. i can see it for myself, too. i discovered the cato institution as a teenager, and i found out i was a libertarian and started reading about it. >> to follow a point on knowledge production and the threat to knowledge production. i think the problem the value

the culture in society put in emotions, if you feel something, it's right. and it's very difficult to argue with somebody who insists you know, that is what i feel. and i think social media will, you know, liking and sharing instead of making more elaborate arguments for one position or another also feeds this status of emotions. and i think that is undermining knowledge production. because you can -- i mean that is what is going on on campuses, if you say i'm offended. it's a way of saying, please shut up. and it's a very powerful argument and it feels very intimidate, because you don't want to offend other people, you want to be nice. >> and in some schools it's actually --

>> the difference between denmark and my home state of new jersey, nobody wants to be nice in new jersey, but i think you are -- the emphasis on feelings and on emotional responses is strong. i think it's always been that way. i say this to somebody who edited the print magazine and works for an organization called reason, i wanted -- when i became editor i said can i change the name to limits to reason, that is more in keeping with my sense of things. but i agree, it's hard, but it's also -- you know, again, we have more platforms by which to host debates and conversations and being persuasive. if i can put on my classical movement hat, one of the things we need to think about, especially in an era where the old dogmas are dying, young people are looking, young people, old people are looking for something new. we also need to think about being persuasive, not simply

expressive and saying the perfect libertarian solution and priet sidewalks and private air, if you come on my property i will shoot you whatever, but we're also trying to persuade people by endenied erring the way people are living because it's prosperous and fair and moral. that is something i know i slip into every once in a while, especially you know, the small wee hour twitter moments, you know. you want to be persuasive, not simply expressive. >> on that note, i have another question here from twitter. asking how can we differ shat free speech from public in decency is it dangerous to let judges make this distinction? >> just a short point. i think -- i think we shouldn't -- we should leave as

little as possible up to judges. and you know, there is an inclination. >> you will not say they should be put into wood chippers or anything, right, if so i'm under a court order to kind of pretend i can't hear. >> no. i think too many politicians and the public, every time you are confronted with a new problem or with a challenge, you know, let's pass a law to fight this problem, and i think we need to be more you know, moderate about that. but one man's hate speech is another man's poetry and it's the same with decency and obscenity. i mean, you used a certain word talking here, you don't think it's you know, in decent, but there may be people out in public -- >> sometime sure there are and i

will hear from them. >> that's a man of taste and -- >> it's been my life's dream to work blue on c span so i may have accomplished that. object sen ti by the way is a made up fake category. there is no such thing as obj t obscenity as a legal, constitutional principle. thankfully we're moving away from that. if you don't like somebody's speech, block them, move out of ear shot, don't turn to that channel, don't read that book, don't read that website. and i think it's, you know, a real positive evolution that most of you probably don't even have never heard the phrase banned in boston, you know, which was a thing, because boston would ban all sorts of stuff and it's like, it's really hard to do that. and i think that is good. public in decency is a little bit different because in public spaces there is a lower you know, you have the more public of spaces, meaning that it's in

full view and that you can infringe on other people's equal rights, there is a lower standard of self expression. >> isn't the internet very public, if there is a public space. >> other than the porn adds that fill my web box or browser without me ever going there once. i don't know many web sites i'm forced to go to. i mean it's really all a poll mechanism. i'm firing up my browser, the browser isn't firing me up, you know. >> fred from the daily ripple. today we watched the president-elect money i hoanipu stock of a major corporation with a tweet. is there a -- some sort of freedom of speech that eliminates the president from using that to profit from that.

if he knows, look, i don't like this company, i'm going to buy short on them and then i'm going to say a tweet on it, and manipulate the stocks, i mean, he has robert merser, hedge fund manager behind him and all these other bankers that would be able to benefit from that. is there an infringement of speech by telling the president he is -- can't do that legally? >> that's -- i -- i don't know. you know, one thing i will say, i'm much more troubled by the president-elect's actions towards carrier and a couple of other companies supposedly he is going to bail out or make stay in the united states in indiana, there is a ball bearing company whose name i am for getting right now. with boeing, you know, on a certain level, and this is an unprince belled answer. they have gotten enough sub did i dees in a wide variety of

state, local and -- they can -- for a plane that they're overbudget on delivering. i do think you know, what we're seeing here actually with a president who is as kind of unbounded as trump, we're going to see some interesting kind of situations that we really couldn't have thought about before. and so i don't have a clear answer to that. but you know, boeing stock price is a small order issue for me compared to kind of national protectionist economic policy more broadly. that i think is going to have more problems for us in the future. >> all right. i think we have room for one final question from the audience. >> bill with future 500, i teach at a business school i noticed over the last year that i think and i think you would probably agree that there is tremendously more support on campus by

students for free and open speech and even uncomfortable speech than there is for bans or restrictions or safe spaces and so on and yet we do as faculty have some guidelines that have been provided to us to you know limit to that kind of speech. given that the combative forces are always going to attract more media attention and seem to have more dominant support than they actually do, what are folks in the free market community doing to really actively take advantage of this opportunity on campuses and bring more people into this movement right now when they are really ready, a lot of students see the problem, they see it everyday, they want to be organized, but it's not going to -- it's not going to just happen through, sorry to say, free media coverage. it's just not sexy.

what is -- what are people who care about this issue doing to attract people who don't necessarily find themselves in that box on the quiz to join and begin to learn what freedom and free markets and speech are all about? >> i don't know, i don't have an answer. facebook and twitter. i don't know. >> i think that there is a number of things that are being done and you know, an outfit like kay doe and some of the groups that have come out of indicate toe, including students for liberty which was founded by cato intern who first worked at reason by the way i just want to put that out there, young americans for liberty, there are a growing number of campus groups that bring people to campuses that actually stage events and lectures and panels and what not, at universities,

which i think is a good place to start. when you look at something like the foundation for economic foundation fee which i think lays claim to being the oldest libertarian organization, they're rejuvenated, they're reaching more students in high school probably than ever before reason is talking to millennials and younger people in terms of both the way that we talk about the future, the way that we talk about topics that relate to things like privacy, security, free speech, gender, like acceptance of more than a binary choice in jend genders as we shouldn't accept a binary politics, i think that is one way to do it. and i think this -- to go to that question of knowledge production, we need to be producing the public intellectuals, libertarians need to be producing public intellectuals who are writing work that engages a multiage

generational public with the ideas of freedom and liberty and showing the positive outcomes of giving people freedom. >> i fully agree. and i think the language that we're using is the language of this group. >> i think there is some truth to that. >> you need to go to the 21st century. the word liberty is now bound with presumptions and republicanism, i think it turns students off or closes the door before it gets there. >> a couple years ago, reason did this big poll of millennials and it was done by overseen by -- working at the cato institute. one of the things we found in that it was something like 42% of people 18-29 had positive views of socialism, it's like holy cow this is a lost generation. then we followed up -- the follow up question is what does socialism mean and they had no

idea. so we were letting language that was imprecise get in the way. then we asked in a parallel question, do you think -- is it better to have a government managed economy or should free markets govern the economy and evening was in favor of free market. so it's a constant search to find what is that language that unlocks the next generation. and polls those of us who are older who remember the cold war fleming and i were talking about this, you know, we, in america, we have a foreign policy that is still stuck in a cold war mentality, and we're fighting, you know, radical islam as if it's the soviet union circa 1960. the cold war wasn't as clear-cut as we thought it was and trying to transpose that matrix, decision matrix onto something today is totally wrong and the same thing happens with our movement. we need to constantly be refreshing our terms, our understanding, what is important

to people today is not what was important to barry goldwater in 1964 and we need to understand that and act on that for sure. >> and the terms people use are completely different. >> yeah. but i would say if liberty is a republican word then -- i mean i spoke about tolerance. to most people, tolerance is in fact a positive word. it has positive connotation, so i mean, that is a way to start. the connection between free speech and tolerance is, you know, if you break that, you don't have neither tolerance nor free speech. so -- >> so with that, i would like to ask both of you, in just one or two sentences, what do you really want people to get out of this discussion today, what is the most important thing that they can go home with?

>> i think i'm going to repeat myself. i think the world is getting you know, increasingly more diverse. and in order to be able to live together in this increasingly diverse world, tolerance is in fact a key concept. not in the way it's being taught and talked about in everyday life, it means you should shut off and not say offensive things, but the ability to live with things that you hate without banning them or using intimidation, threats or violence to shut them up. i think this will just move further and further up the agenda, more and more people are living in cities they'll be confronted with this every day. and unfortunately too many

politicians believe that you know, the more diversity we have in terms of culture and religion, the less we need in terms of speech. i think it's counterintuitive. it goes with the territory, if you will more diversity of culture, you also need to welcome more diversity of speech in order to provide space to every individual in a society and that implies of course, that now one has a right not to be offended. that is also one of the things that we have to teach our children, coming back to my grandson and his soccer posit. n >> what position does he play. >> he is only 4 years old so. >> i'm looking in preparation for this, i printed out a -- i write for the "daily beast" a year ago i read a piece for them that was titled or they titled

how the feds asked me to rat out come mentors. that happened under the obama regime. it's going to happen as frequently if not more frequently under a trump regime. we need to fight that always and everywhere and it's going to happen, you know, on facebook. it's going to happen in the corporate space, cultural space -- the other thing i will say as kind of an add on is that if we all broadly believe in classical liberal goals of enlightenment goals, libertarian goals, really think about being persuasive rather than being right in every conversation. i'm the worst offender at this. what we're trying to do is build a world that is better than the one we inherited. i think it is getting better and the way we will make it better still is by getting more people to want to hang out with us, not by saying oh, yeah you are you know -- your culture is so

great, it's like as good as mine where we let people decide who they want to be, it's not being that kind of tolerant, that kind of mindless celebration of diversity. it's actually saying, look, you know, we can go to -- i don't know how many are of you are in d.c., we can live in a world that is like the sociallist safeway on 17th street where -- it's much better than ten years ago, we can live in a crappy supermarket world like that or go to whole foods, which world do you want to be in. one is inviting, vibrant, one is different, one is constantly changing and mor -- we can go someplay where there is only one kind of eggplant and we need to be persuasive, not simply right in every conversation when we talk about freedom and liberty. >> we want to live in a world with many types of eggplants. >> i realized i signaled my

alqaeda masters, now in a land of emojis, that means something different and i apologize cspan. >> thank all of you for coming out. and those who tuned in on cspan or one of our online channels. i hope you all enjoyed this discussion today and will continue it out in the winter garden for our reception. flemming rose has gratuitously offered to be signing copies of his books, if you would like a copy feel free to pick up. it's just come out in paper back, very recently. so it's very convenient. and please feel free to sign up for the mailing list to get here about future cato digitals.

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>> if you missed any of this program and would like to see this and other programs from the c span networks visit cspan.org. >> follow the transition of government on cspan as president-elect donald trump selects his cabinet and the republicans and democrats prepare for the next congress, we'll take you to key events as they happen, without interruption. watch live on cspan, or listen on our free cspan radio app. >> now, a look at campaign 2016 and foreign efforts to spread fake news during the election cycle. we spoke to clint wats of the foreign policy research initiative today on washington journal. it's 40 minutes. >> joining us now clinton watts the foreign policy research

institute, he's the robert fox fellow there we're here to talk about the russia's role in the spreading of what is known as fake news, mr. watts good morning. >> thank you. >> before we start could you tell us a little about your organization, how it's funded and you know, the position it takes, especially when it comes to russia. >> right. so foreign policy research institute is a think tank base, small, based in philadelphia, funded by donors, we're independent, i wouldn't say we have any political position per se, there is a lot of different views amongst the fellows and we don't agree all the time for sure. >> the topic though then comes to russia and the idea of fake news. what brought this to your attention and to the research that you did on the topic? >> we didn't go looking for russia or fake news, the way we came into it was myself, my colleagues, we were watching isis, we predominantly worked on counterterrorism and tracking isis. but any time we wrote about that content or those issues, we would see the sort of

counterattacks, information counterattacks coming up, which were very pro assad and pro putin. when you watch those over time we were surprised they shifted towards a lot of different issues that were russian and also to u.s. issues that's how we moved on to it a little over two years ago. >> what did you find? >> the basis of what they were trying to do essentially was to promote, number one, russian backed positions, they were also trying toing target certain audiences in different countries, you've seen it in western europe, brexit would be a big example in europe, and also in the u.s., can they actually locate an audience in the u.s. and influence them towards their position. and they do that in a variety of different ways, one is very overt, sort of propaganda that they push that supports their positions the others is counter, weak even democracy. not about one issue per se or another. anything that erodes trust in

government stiegss or public figures they'll focus on any of these issues, wherever they find success they will try to breed more success. >> in delivering that message give us an example what that being looed like, when it came to the u.s. elections or influencing u.s. policy. >> the one we started off sort of openly publishing about was a fake attack. a lot of soldiers being deployed in turkey and part of it was a story released on rt.com and sputnik news.com that says the base is being overrun in what looked like a benghazi tile attack. and they pushed that out from their very overt outlets, rt and sputnik and pushed it into environments where it gets amply nationwide. this is where they usual social media to broaden the audience and make them appear to be an american audience trying to build organic support. the second part is trying to put

it into main stream media. you will see them say why isn't the main stream media talking about this. the goal is to get it trending on social media such that main stream outlets in the u.s. have to investigate it or respond to it. once that prop gates it's hard to refute that, even with facts. so we watched it, it was actually a failed attempt, over about 78 minutes we monitored thousands of counts and we could pick out the audience this he with are trying to engage with, using automation, using real known accounts that appear what we call gray, and even covert accounts which were designed to very much influence certain segments of the electorate. >> we'll continue on with the discussion. russian's role in spreading fake news. (202)748-1000 for democrats, republicans, independent end ends,(202)748-8002 post on our twitter feed at c span wy and

facebook.com/c span. >> give us a snapshot of the target audiences. >> they will use any audience they think might be disrupting the populous. some of the first ones we saw they were focusing on in the u.s. were white supremacist audiences or anti government audiences, they would try and promote anything that said the government is part of a con percy to take away your guns or hold you down, take away your rights, marshall laws those short of themes, going into the end of 2015 it took a very different tone around the u.s. election. so any issue basically involving hillary clinton would be something that they would run an attack line on and they would actually promote other candidates in the case of our election, it was trump. >> go ahead. >> so they'll play off any of those candidates, but the goal ultimately is just the decent inside the public. so any candidate, they might shift or pivot based on the time frame. it's not necessarily specific to

one, although the vast majority this time was president-elect trump. >> so was it generally positive towards the president-elect, generally negative toward hillary clinton, vice versa. >> that's exactly right. it was generally positive towards president-elect trump. it was highly negative towards secretary clinton. and so any of those attack lines would be reinforced with hacked material. so any of these data disclosures that come out, the dnc hacks, other hacks of people's personal e-mails, colynn 30e we will, podesta e-mails, would be used as many nation to -- one candidate versus another. and clinton suffered the most from it, but other candidates were attacked, too. one of the time periods we find interesting was during super tuesday time period in march of 2016, there was a huge volume of content that was very pro trump, so while most of the media is focused on clinton versus trump in the presidential election, what i think would be worth investigating and looking back at is how that promotion

affected other republican gop candidates and that promotion really helped one candidate versus another. >> how do we know that rush was behind it. >> the number one thing, they don't hide it. there is a belief in the media discussion this is covert, it's actually not. they have two, what we call white outlets, overt channels, rt.com and sputnik news. and they put out these themes, which generally fall in four lines, political, economic social orca lamb tuesday, issues about nuclear missiles being stolen. a fear inducing one or climate change. and that will run these propaganda lines and in these content, if would be roughly 70% true information and 20% what we call manipulated truth, some sort of truth combined with false and then about 10% would be false news. so the report we wrote up initially was a false news story, we then tracked the entities, there have been others

that have tried to track the actual false or fake news and propaganda, that is problematic, there is a lot of fake news out there, it doesn't all come from russia, my research team track the entities and organizations pushing that content. we then go from what is overt to who else is using that same content and talking about it, what do they say. there are lots of proxy groups very pro russia that are out there. one called trolls for trump. that was the name of the group. so it's not hidden, per se, but then we watch those accounts that are around it, those networks. >> this is from trolls for trump saying the ultimate objective is to dim in ig and tarn i can democracy, unfortunately that efforts is going well indeed. -- government is not -- it's moscow -- it's strategy is not new either soviet active measures called for using the force of politics rather than the politics to erode american

democracy within. what is new is the methods used. >> this is not a new technique, this is an old play book with new methods. social media allows them from afar to do what they could never have done in the wold car, targtd a audience, deliver a content that appeals to them, and then they can actually provide fake messages if they want to to a very targeted group. we look at it in terms of okay, maybe it's trying to form decent between competing parties, road trusts and institutions, the worse case is what we have seen this week, someone might mobilize violence around a news story. it's a powerful information weapon where a country oversees or even a terrorist group can design content in a way you are mobilizing people toward violence. >> our guest to take questions on his research, particularly looking at this topic, dem

demes(202)748-4000 and independent ends -- start with jd in arkansas. democrats line, go ahead. you're on with our guest. >> gentlemen, we already have influences from russia. we have an elect president that has business dealings and nonsecured line servers to speak with pew ton and whoever else. who knows what's going on. now with mass communication, we're really getting it from so many different directions. i don't want to go back to where we were with the last two gentlemen. as far acid sevens united and get kid of the electoral college. >> okay, caller.

i am going to leave it there. >> in terms of attributions to the trump campaign, i don't know. it doesn't seem like he was directly controlled by the russians, but he was part of the election. so opportunity was there and he took advantage of news sometimes that turned out to be false and there were a couple occasions that either his campaign manager or he used something that was false or pushed by russian propaganda efforts. the more interesting thing we need to look at is in terms of russia and their campaign, it is not an information warrant, it is a term i had heard on radio was a war on information. which is we create such a space where it is so difficult for you to understand or pick out truth from friction, that you have no basis by which to make your judgments. and if you don't trust your government and you don't trust the people around you, you don't trust political parties, everything has been eroded, you don't trust the media and therefore you fall on to

yourself. you become confused to a point where you don't act. and in the russian space that provides them open door for their foreign policy, to pursue their interests, whether corporate criminal or government and they can be aggressive. so it creates a malaise, essentially where the american pub tick doesn't want to get behind my issue because they don't know who to trust. >> here is mark. go ahead. >> how are you. you know, there is different programs on rt. and one of them is tom hartman. he is with free speech tv, too. and i'm wondering which programs are actually really putting out false information because i don't really believe tom markman is. i think he's trying to be

upfront and honest about what his views are. thank you. >> i don't have the whole men knew of rt programs. what i would say is that, yes, there is lots of true information on these news sites as well. you can't run a news site that draws a significant audience without the preponderance of the evidence. i think that the notion of false propaganda or false news stories coming from russia particularly is about strategic placement, that you can't run fake news 100% of the time. if you want to use a strajic information weapon and put fake news into a foreign pop you lus, it has to be in a strajic time. it's blended in with true and manipulated true information. it's not specifically an entire campaign of false information.

>> are there cowords to look out for or certain website addresses that kind of indicate, hey, this could be not legit news? >> no. i think it's more of the treatments they are talking about. it's problematic this idea out there, which is lets police fake news. what says what's news and fake? but there were lots of people putting out fake news. so i think more for these government backed outlets, russia being one and there are other ones out there, it is more to look at what is the theme that they're trying to push and what are the facts behind that. and in the manipulated stories, for example, it ends in a question. it's not an actual title for a news article that's a statement. it's always this going on. it's a grain of truth with conspiracy embedded in it. but it's seasoned throughout their newscast. it is not necessarily 100% that

way. >> from conway, massachusetts, david, go ahead. >> good morning. could you please discuss the increase in fake news since the communication fact of 96 that took all of our independent investigators off the case and put them all into corporations, a few of them, to be specific, and how that's affected the total increase in fake news. because we don't have independent reporters all over the world looking at things and we're now condensed to just a couple of media outlets. thank you. >> so i don't know in terms of that communication act. what i would tell you the difference is the way people acquire information today. going back to 1996, which you might see as people predominantly consumed all of their information from six or seven news channels and one or

two, maybe three newspapers, even in the on line space. and if you remember when the internet first came about, the story was it would provide a lot of alternative perspectives and strengthen the truth. there would be so many opinions out there that you could get different perspectives. but what we're actually seeing is people seek out information that suits their beliefs. and that's where this sort of becomes dangerous and why fake news is so powerful, because you can take an audience and rather than going to mainstream media outlets that have an editorial process, you can go to these niche websites that feed you information that suits your needs, your wants and your political opinions. and it screens out everything else. this creates a hardening of your views. so if you look actually in the social media landscape, that was supposed to be another tool that was designed to bring people together to discuss a variety of different positions, as social media has grown, so have the

polls between all of these issues. so rather than there being discussion across and between, it is reinforcing discussion with people inside these parties, whatever it might be. could be your family group. and you see more isolation of information. so social media trends and feeds, they identify things that you like to read and to get you coming back to those platforms, they will provide you more information that they know that you like to read. it is kind of like advertising. this causes your beliefs to become reinforced, such that you believe in an information bubble, almost like a cloud of information that supports your views, which may or may not be accurate. so i think that's kind of more audience seg mentation and solution than it is about any regulatory act today. >> what about social media companies. >> they are in a weird tangle right now. one, their goal is to bring people to their platform to

share information. the more shares that's going on, the better they do. they also don't want to be seen as people policing information and thoughts. so it's a very difficult position to be in. but what they can do and look at doing is focussing on those that put out fake news strictly for financial goals. so there are four different types of groups that are putting out fake news. you would have a russian propaganda effort, let's say. but you are also going to have political groups putting out news. you are going to have prank sters doing it for satire purposes and then you will have those doing it for clicks on advertising. so they will write fake news stories that they know a lot of people will click on. this runs up their advertising revenues. that's something the social media companies can clean up quickly. dave is up next. and in florida. dave, you're next. >> hey, good morning.

thanks for everything that y'all are doing. i was wondering if you can comment on how much fake news was revolving around hillary's e-mails and the fbi's comments about their e-mails and pictures and what have you, how that kind of fit in there, too. >> yes. so that was a tremendous information campaign over the last six months. both the e-mails in terms of, you know, what's in e-mails, manipulated truth, as well as stories about this is what was said in the e-mails, when you actually looked at the data it was not actually said in any of those e-mails. there would be fake stories essentially put out by that. and it erodes both popular subpoena sport for a candidate but erodes people wanting to participate in a democracy. if you don't have belief -- some

were true stories about government e-mails. some for fake. you won't show up to vote. you may not want to do jury duty. you may think it's all a fraud or a scam. and that really was the issue they were trying to drive throughout any e-mail leak was not only should you not vote for hillary clinton, but the government is corrupt. you can't trust the government. whether that was actually true or not is debatable, because even if you go into the e-mails, most of them were common communications, much like you would expect in any sort of on organization. but it was a main trust. the e-mails were the information ammunition for that propaganda machine. >> jason is in alabama, democrats line. you're next. good morning. >> good morning. i just want to ask about all them protesters crying. was that fake news when they was crying after hillary lost