committee reviews its tax reform bill. on wednesday, the senate health committee considers the nomination of president trump's pick to replace tom price is health and human services secretary. coverage at 9:30 a.m. eastern. and then the house takes of the bill to provide anti-harassment and antidiscrimination training. live coverage on c-span.org or with the free c-span radio app. >> next, a political strategist on the impact of campaign media in elections and whether technology has added to the polarization of american politics. this form was hosted by the university of southern california and los angeles. it is just over one hour. and thank yout for following through with this

event. i see several people in the from the school let and i hope you enjoy the event. we have an exciting panel today and i think we should just get started with questions. iny questions were prepared advance. i will start with some questions about news. it has only been one year since the presidential election but it seems very hard to remember a time when facebook was not synonymous with fake news. people who disseminate false news range from foreign what isda agents and your take on the effect on me outcome of the 2016 election? >> i think the impact of fake news was to allow primarily the trump voters to discount what was going on in the mainstream media. bad it was for

their candidate or how bad it was factually, it allowed them to assume it was coming from a biased point of view and therefore they ignored it. difficultas not been of american campaigns in the past. >> i have a slightly different view on fake news in the sense that i think we focus a lot on the fact that this news might have changed the results of the election. i think that is more a symptom then cause. it is a symptom of the polarization in this country. my background is in psychology and a lot of the research done is about how people believe what they want to believe. really smart people who have access to all of the news and should know better believe what they want to believe.

i think people will believe what they want to believe. social medias like gasoline on a fire. i do not think fake news is it isarily their problem, just an accelerant on the underlying problem of the divisions we see in this country. >> yes. i largely agree with you. i mean, the trump phenomenon was because people were unhappy. it may have been exacerbated and fake news mir played a role but i question the depth of the role. the amount they spend on facebook is a joke. you cannot affect change with that kind of money. it is bothersome because it can conceptually affect our election which is very holy to us. and in terms of consequences come i do not think it did much for this election. it could, there are components to that fabric but an actual reality i do not think so very much.

>> many of the questions about fake news come from the way we content ofng this questionable quality and that is because there has been a change in the control of new information. shifting from media companies to tech companies who may not have the expertise. some in congress want the government to regulate political ads on sites like facebook similarly to the way they are regulated on television. what are your thoughts on this? well, i mean, the regulation on television is pretty minimal for the most part it essentially it is the creation of a disclaimer that says who the answer paid for by. so they are paid for by a campaign. this is paid for by bob shrum for governor committee. that there is not

much regulation. theirms of candidates and ability to say whatever they want to his aunt television, it is pretty unrestricted. they are mostly immune to libel laws. so i do not think it is asking a lot for our online advertisers to have some commitment to disclosing while the ads are playing, who paid for them. similar to what we do on television. i think the reality is we did not get where we are in terms of television and disclaimers last week or the week before. it evolved over time. the other very key element in this is the airwaves, the broadcast airwaves are publicly owned and the federal communications commission they put them and

together these requirements. communicationsne is not federally regulated and i do not think there is any federallywill to regulate them nor should there be. so it is a real question of whether they are going to be self-policing in terms of what they do or is congress going to step in and we are saying that argument be joined in the last two weeks. >> i think honestly it would be really tough for the government to regulate. i think technology moves too fast for government to really meaningfully regulate. but i work in the tech industry and i talk to people at some of these companies and i have never talked to somebody at one of these companies who does not somewhat acknowledge their responsibility and what to do a better job. these companies are made of people who care, just like you

do and were surprised by things and of happened in the political world just like you are and what used to be better. not necessarily just from one direction or another but better in terms of the kind of things we all care about. say i think people are working on it. i think there a lot of smart people working on it. sometimes i liken it to nutrition. once upon a time -- you know, we have evolved to be really into sugar. to really want to eat sugar. eventually we learned that like human sugar is bad for us. of not evolved to sort pay attention to negative information and compete as groups. our information diet you now can be very unhealthy for us in a similar way. the 11:00 news. the something she do not know that might kill you if you don't watch the 11:00 -- you know, it

is sort of ingrained in us that towardediums are aligned human nature but just like in nutrition, there are ways for us as a thoughtful species to understand the, you know, the kind of things we're seeing are not good for us and for smart people to do good things. to do things about that. so people are working on these of the rhythms. in the absence of regulation, do think things will get better. thoughtfultremely and i will not say anything even remotely as thoughtful but i perspective that yes, and makes common sense. there should be some degree of transparency. but when you game that out i do not begin will have any tactical effect because his expenditure as a naive expenditure that could impact how funding gets into that. the point is you are not going to see a facebook ad or any with a disclaimer "this ad was purchased by the russian

government." it is going through a lot of hands before it gets there. speaking, practically bill, i would differ to you if you feel differently because you would actually place those things and interact with them. i just think it is extremely challenging to figure out who is placed that. the transparency is just not there. >> i think the impact on particularly independent expenditure ads and disclaimers is grossly generated by most campaign reformers because oftentimes they say "paid for for the committee for a better arld," and who is against better world, obviously. but on the other hand it does leave a paper trail you can follow to try to figure out who is behind the money. now come i think the particular issue that evolved with the russians come i think if somebody comes up to and says they want to hire you to do their polling and pays you in rubles, you're probably going to

say this is not a very good idea. >> well, they would just pay cash. absolutely right. >> i enjoyed your analogy about and maybe you've mentioned, diabetes. right? so maybe when we create something -- when the technology will create something like refined sugar it is exciting but there are consequences like the public health problem with diabetes. i feel like our community is -- like the pace of development is increasing. and so, the opportunity to regulate and to alter behaviors for these consequences, our window is shorter and shorter. so i wanted to ask bill and justin, you know, in your line of work have you noticed an acceleration or is it just par for the course, the way technology is changing both of opinion research and political

messaging in the field you work in? >> welcome i think the most profound impact of technology on the political process so far has been the huge acceleration of fundraising opportunities from small donors.

there's questions about where it is going to go, and of course, all of these things change3. there's going to be other digital breakthroughs. view that what we do in the communications world is we don't really get ready -- get rid of any old media. we just add new media on top of it. we get to be a more fragmented and more complex communications culture particularly in the advertising side. we're still advertising on tv and cable. people are still advertising on broadcast radio. then we have all these other new mediums, including online and satellite and all these things.

they are also self-selecting about where they get their news. we know there are people who are watching exclusively fox television. people watch exclusively msnbc. we will probably see the same phenomenon on podcasts. people who listen to progressive podcasts, people who listen to conservative podcasts exclusively. that is a big change is that people become so ideologically driven about where they get information from. the media mix bill was

.escribing evolves over time it is usually multiple different ways. visual doesn't own the world right now is people consume information in a variety of ways. in most markets, tv is an incredibly efficient way to spend money if you have the money. opinionall world of research, figuring out what people think and how to influence their thoughts and behaviors, digital has had a profound impact. if you're talking about a highly informed horserace and there's really only one, the presidential race, then google surveys is fantastic. it is remarkable. it is unbelievable. if you talk about anything other than that, it becomes degraded in efficacy. there are folks who are proselytizing a specific tool or method because they get enamored with that method, just like any other industry. they forget sometimes there is a

right which it for every application. there is a move to transition from telephone research -- which, if you perform it in the right way, can still be the most accurate way -- to digital online research, which can be incredibly useful for the right approach. but there are pitfalls with it. the digital aspect of that typically comes in in california from the voter file. in recent years, 50% of every new voter registration card has a valid email address. arbitrarily i am going to do 50% of this phone, and that includes cell phones, and 50% of it online, you have confined 50% of your sample to new registrants, which composes a fraction of the electorate. you've put an artificial constraint, and there is good reason to look at that and say that methodology is flawed.

it may hit the mark from time to time, but it will be wrong much more often than another methodology. on the other hand, if you are researching a small california coastal town on a ballot measure and there's 10,000 voters in that space, you can slice and dice the methodology and just make sure you are careful about the proportions and get much better, higher rate of response than you would normally. that information can't be regarded as statistically significant because the math doesn't work that way, but it is directional. the rest of the world works with directional research. when i worked on consumer-based stuff, selling to technology, i can't use something like the voter file. i have to use some construct of big data. what people forget is it is just a work around. it is good. it gets better and better come but it is nowhere near as effective or accurate as the voter rolls we have in this world of public policy.

anyway, divergent there. >> back to the media companies. companies such as google, facebook, and twitter are making the case that they are not media companies and should take a hands-off role in policing content on their platforms. i want to get your takes on whether the benefits of free speech outweigh the consequences of the spread of false information, and how platforms might want to deal with that. broad question. be a very going to complex problem for a long time. i think that there's a what thee between hearings did on facebook when they were talking about russian collusion, and i totally agree -- the impact was not that great on this election, but

the potential impact in some future election continues to grow rapidly. the foreign interference grows rapidly as it has grown in the last 20 years. it will have an impact. how the industry itself deals with these issues is going to be really difficult. to the extent and industry can have an ideology, there's is more anti-regulatory, antigovernment, libertarian in many ways than other industries, even more conservative industries. they are going to resist any kind of regulation. and congress is going to hold, particularly -- it is amazing how interested congress gets into issues about elections. have a little bit of self interest in how elections are conducted. their aggressiveness on this issue will be pretty extensive.

they will want to see some clean up your act kind of dynamic, but i think there will be resistance. we are a long way from figuring this out. >> i think i have already said that -- well, i think it is almost impossible for government to effectively regulate some of these technologies. i will give you a hopeful thing, -- and i think this may be useful for engineering students in the audience -- i think there is a movement towards the idea you don't have to measure just clicks for time on site or ad impressions, which is what a lot of these sites are designed to optimize. there are other things you can measure. there are products of their on some of these media companies that try and sense when you are

in danger of hurting yourself and try and help you with that. tore are things trying measure things that are a little bit more human, a little closer to the goals. some people say if you ever give stop allroblem like to human suffering, the easiest way is to kill all human beings. now there's no more suffering in the world. sometimes there are unintended consequences of goals we set for these algorithms. i think we are realizing those consequences. for the engineering students here, there are interesting ways to think about, how can i measure things like fulfillment, happiness? , but are fuzzy constructs if you can measure whether something is or is not a cat, you can measure some of these fuzzy constructs as well. speaking carefully, because some of the companies are

clients, i think there is a challenge within technology companies of hubris. eathenk they tend to br their own exhaust too much and be the worst corporate actors in america. for a ride hailing at, the way they approach growth was to ignore the law. the reality is, we live under a construct of laws where we have to respond to them and respect them. that particular car company, and every city to have rolled out to, they simply ignored it. and states. even with self driving cars. when they broke the law rather , theyorking with them didn't. if you can imagine an oil company or tobacco company behaving in a way that many technology companies behave, they would be crucified.

but so far that momentum is still there. i don't think there is an appetite to self-regulating. >> the company you were alluding to, including tech companies and traditional media companies, you mentioned some metrics that might provide more value to society. but i don't know if there is a connection in those metrics and what is good business for the company. problem?e -- is that a many of the media companies are more incentivized to maintain attention or even loyalty to that media source, which seems like it is not in line s thatarily with the value were proposed as alternative benefits.

ravi: that is certainly true at the micro level for individual companies. the thing that people value and the things that companies out you converge. ultimately, for example, some of these platforms are paid by advertisers. does advertisers on the platform, a lot of them are brand advertisers. they want to be associated with things that provide value. effort right now around brand safety, for example, where brands are removing their ads from places they feel are harming the consumers. responsen some ways a to everyday consumers tweeting to these brands, look, your ad is on this really offensive place.

the world doesn't get there right away, but eventually things converge towards the thing that people value are the things that businesses will optimize towards. their will be inefficiencies along the way that will be terrible, and that we terrible consequences, but i think business as a whole will eventually get to a point where they are trying to serve some of these larger goals, even if some of these companies right now, their business models are not optimized towards that. bill: i would say there is a comparison here historically ,etween television and online and it is back to the issue of how you evaluate how many people are watching and add -- watching an ad. television adopted a universal method that was monopoly by the nielsen company that has become

a standard measurement in the television industry. there's been arguments over various rating methodology and it hasn't been all happiness and sweetness, but mostly it has been universally accepted as the standard measurement. online nobody can figure out who the hell they are talking to. it is just the reality. there was an experiment that procter & gamble, arguably the largest consumer company in the world, did over the summer where argumentcally -- their based on a study done by advertising agencies in the united kingdom is that we didn't really know who we were talking to, and there were a lot of bots out there, and what is impressions mean and what are

getting towards and whatnot? procter & gamble decides to do an experiment. for one quarter they dropped all of their all nine advertising, which had been -- online advertising, which had been 20% of their advertising budget, to see what impact it would have on their sales. what they uncovered was it had zero impact on their sales. absolutely zero. study whichla did a they wanted to try to figure out, what media most influences people at the point of purchase? they found out just slightly over 50% said television. radio andns were unbelievably enough print. the high single digits was online. we are still in the infancy of this industry as an advertising platform, not as we all

experience it every day, getting online and doing all the things we do, communicating with each other, getting information and whatnot. as an advertising platform we are still in the infancy. we can't quite measure what we are getting for our bucks. on the other hand, we can't stay away from it. ,here is, as we talked about california,here -- everybody knows they've got two of the top 10 television markets in the country, los angeles and .an francisco what does that do? that makes it the most expensive place to communicate in the world. we have this political setup where the whole state votes for

everybody, so it is very expensive to communicate here. online gives people an option to do something other than male people things -- other than mail people things to talk to them. it makes it very attractive. i think the political community once online to succeed. they are just not sure what they are getting for their buck right now, which is a bad thing in a cap society -- capitalist society. krishna: another thing online allows you to do is do much more precise targeting. the next question is about that. targeted political ads on social media are unlike tv ad in that campaign opponents might not see and can't respond to information in the ads. how will this change campaign approaches going forward? bill: i think that is one of the advantages of targeting.

it is also one of the limitations. it limits the number of people you are communicating with, but you can do wonderful things online with targeting. there was a ballot measure last november where we spent a whole hell of a lot of money on texting because we want to to find a way to talk to millennials as we know they don't really watch television that much. people are going to explore all kinds of vehicles in order to talk in a targeted way. go --lly i think it will it will become more universal a media platform, and people will talk to a large number of voters online. ravi: i see lots of people using targeting to really impressive effects. a lot of the companies i've worked at, micro-targeting, niche targeting -- think about

entertainment. entertainment has historically men,marketed to younger younger women, older men, older women. fans ofle to market to "game of thrones" seems very obvious. those things are really helpful. i guess the key is some way to someday this-- could be seen as more of a service and less of a intrusion. i am reallyat genuinely happy to see, and i get ads that i am not. justin: it can be really useful, and there is a change, that kind of black box of digital spin. it used to largely be evaluated like a government program. how much money did you spend on

it, as opposed to, who did it go to? that was hard. that was the cap. there are companies that are either being purchased by our partnering with isps to track that spend so you have that incredible targeting by demographic, but you actually know who digests the information and in what way they digested. it is a little creepy, but that and it missing link, came online in the last couple of years and is getting more and more prevalent throughout different media market. it is incredibly useful for me because i can do visual ad and it is perfectly aligned to this. it takes a little time, but in one and a half weeks or so i can figure out for testing a couple of different concepts and get very accurate information in terms of who it is most affected with. in my world it is becoming more and more useful.

krishna: typically when there is messaging from one campaign with targeted approaches, there may not be a chance for opponents to respond. is this something that is likely to be exploited? do you find this problematic? don't think anything really occurs in that degree of a vacuum. i think to some effect it is visible. bill: i agree. once you are out there in the world, people are going to find out about it. if you are saying extraordinarily controversial andgs to one audience something entirely different to another audience, if you don't get caught it will be a minor miracle. final prepared question, 2018 is right around the corner and we don't yet have 'slid evidence that facebook

efforts to combat fake have been successful. will they help us make better decisions about who to vote for, or will it be worse? bill: we had an election last week, and it was remarkable, particularly virginia, which was contested. new jersey not so much. away and say come fake news had some profound impact on the election. they talked about what the two candidates were saying and how they were advertising, how they were organizing. in the postmortem it was who showed up and how they voted and all the things he does to tell us what happened after the fact. i thought it was interesting that we did not see a huge fake

dynamic at least in virginia. ravi: i would say i think it is going to get worse. it is probably going to get worse for a while. it is not because of the platforms. i the platforms are going to try to get better, and they will be largely the same or make improvements around the edges until they figure it out. but i think what is changing is that we are that much more polarized than we were five years ago. if you look at measures of political polarization, they are all getting worse and worse in very alarming ways. where i started was a lot of the problems we see around fake news are reflections of the partisanship we see, our willingness to believe things. you can look at the race in alabama right now, the kind of things people are saying about what is true and what is not true, and who you support and

what that says about your beliefs about what is true and what is not true. it is obviously a lot of motivated reasoning going on. is not just limited to people in alabama. there's research about how really smart people, the smarter you are, the better you are at justifying the thing you want to believe. you use that intelligence to figure out a way to believe what you want. i think things are going to get worse, but the hope is that there are also people putting on conversations like this, actually trying to not be so polarized, to make things better. hopefully if those efforts succeed then i think that is what will solve this, not technology. justin: the only thing i would say is that that bubble, twitter and facebook create and allow people to self identify the circle they want to be around, and that language and talk and chatter continues and continues, and obviously political circles are highly charged, that has

become exacerbated by the algorithms. i you raise your hand and say am a just and that and put on something that has a message, you're going to get more and more and more. the hamster is getting fed more and more whatever drug is going to eventually kill it. people naturally get more frustrated with that. tensions rise. think that is a real problem. i think it panders to human behavior that is not our noblest. i don't think it is the end of the world. i think we will adjust, and i think we had a point earlier about companies having a human nature at some point, they self correct. people due too. that's why companies self correct is because they are from folks. the intensity hopefully will go down, but i think next year will probably be crazy. largernd actually, your point that this is a reflection

of the larger political polarization, this is not creating the larger political polarization. when nixon wask bashing the media long before there was anything online. he was bashing dan rather daily in the white house. there has been an element of this in our politics for a long time. it is just heightened a little that you can find your own world to talk to, and you don't have to talk to the rest of the world. that is somewhat of a new phenomenon. ravi: think i was a little bit answering the question about fake news. i think fake news is a sense of alteration -- of polarization. to your point, i totally agree that the platforms are exacerbating our polarization in some ways. i think that is somewhat a

reflection of -- there is a study out that human beings are three times more likely to click on things that are negatively framed then positively framed. from getting our ancestors killed. we have evolved to pay attention to negative things. therefore algorithms optimized towards flicks and engagement optimized towards negative things. in the media environment, everyone learns, and that is the problem. it is definitely leading to the polarization we see. that, to me, i think is a problem. i work on polarization, less so on the fake news. a lot of the research we do is about how people are social and emotional first, rational second. we will always believe what we want to believe, so we have to

work more on the polarization layer then on the information. bill: you mentioned alabama. that is really an interesting case study. you have a political universe that is extremely conservative and an extremely conservative candidate is now being accused of her rent this acts -- karen acts, and onndous the news we are listening to how the community supporting judge moore is figuring out how to rationalize this in a way they can continue to vote for him. it is almost painful to listen to because the truth is, they shouldn't vote for him because he is a bad person. but they don't want to go there, so let's blame "the washington post" instead of ourselves. ravi: cognitive dissonance is

one of the most painful things you can live with. nobody wants to think about it. think of the most painful things you can think of. your son or daughter is accused of murder. , thefavorite sports team star quarterback is accused of sexual assault. the person you admire most -- it doesn't really -- if it were some you didn't care about it wouldn't matter, but it is that cognitive dissonance. it is the thing i want and the dissonance between what i want and what i believe. it is painful even to watch. bill: what is the manager of your favorite team pitches the wrong guy in the seventh game of the world series and it doesn't turn out well? justin: the rnc pulled support for him. i don't see that cognitive

dissonance continuing for much longer. au're exactly right, there is period where everyone tries to agure out -- people have surprised look on their face when they are dead. it is not really happening. they think it can't possibly be real or there's an explanation, and it becomes pretty evident pretty quickly you've got a real problem. ravi: and you have to resolve it. i'm a conservative in alabama. i want to have a conservative senator. this man has been accused of assaulting teenage girls. something has to give. you cannot sit there with those two statements forever. you either have to believe that it is fake or you have to stop supporting him and resolve it. that is what people do all the time. they believe that something is fake news or they stop

supporting the candidate. bill: or the third choice, which is that they don't participate. which may be the outcome. krishna: we have time for audience questions, about 15 minutes. anyone? mic is coming to you. >> i have a question about if there were ever be a media source that a majority of the population believes to the extent that people believed the tv news or to get for its word or took it as truth in the 1960's and 1970's, like with dan

rather. will there ever be a figure like that on national television again, worthy majority of the population believes them? i think the first answer to that is it is going to be difficult because there is an enormous amount of media fragmentation. 1960's through much of the 1970's and 1980's, you had three networks that were dominant. you had three choices, that was it. some people like cronkite. some people like to brinkley. not a lot of people like abc. but nbc and cbs were dominant. now you have so many more media outlets that people have a lot more choices. and some of them are ideological choices, some of them are stylistic. ted turner started cnn.

people laughed about it, thought it was a crazy idea. in all newsing station on cable, and it turned out to be the precursor of all that has come since. i think it is tough because of the media fragmentation. ravi: i am going to venture that yes, there will be a time. whereed at this company people vote on her favorite things. we did an analysis of red states and blue states. it showed that there's actually a lot of agreement. there's more agreement between red states and blue states than between men and women, between young people and old people, and between americans and people around the world. largely there's agreement about things that are not part of the partisanship. things that that

are less controversial, krispy k reme make doughnuts that taste good but are not good for me. it is just when they become controversial that they become part of this partisanship that it all breaks down. think sometimes we overplay the number of things that are part of this partisanship. i think there may come a time when -- you see this when war happens. people rally around the flag we stop faking about ourselves, red state and blue state. we start thinking about ourselves more holistically, where partisanship is not a thing that news is about. therefore it will revert to the things that most of us kind of agree upon. justin: the sheer volume of outlets is definitely a problem.

pre-foxdivide it into and post-fox when news became ideologically charged on both sides. people tuned in for that entertainment. centristshat, you had from non-ideological perspectives. those personalities presented a reasoned analysis of the issues. that might be analysis of both sides of the issues, multiple side, but you weren't turning -- weren't tuning in to hear yourself think, which we largely do now. i don't know if we have an appetite to go back. it is entertainment now. it is not really news. >> we are facing a be what ravi was just saying. the partisanship seems to not be partyh on opinions as

affiliation has become a very important part of who you are in what your personality is. to you see a role for media to help in undoing this? if you are consulting with facebook and they say they've gotten into trouble, what initiatives could you suggest to overcome this hyper partisanship? ravi: we are doing some recent -- some research on participle politics. something in psychology called extended contact theory. it is the idea that if i watch a football game and watch my team get into a fight on the field with members of the other team, now i want to fight with fans of the other team. watching people of your group fight the people of the other group makes you want to fight the people of the other group as well. that is kind of what our media

environment has become. we don't watch -- there's actually a lot of bipartisan bills, but because of the , they don't get as much attention as the latest insult that donald trump lobs to random persons on the other side of the aisle. the media could easily -- and i hope to show them -- if we do this research right, it will show watching people fight all the time makes you want to fight. you can publish stories all you want about people fighting across the aisle, but you should realize the impact you are having on the electorate, and you have the opportunity. and the opposite is true, watching people get along makes you want to get along. hopefully they will take us up on. bill: think there is one unusual

-- i to this: byron meant think there is one unusual thing to this whole in byron meant that to this whole -- to this whole environment. we have very severe polarization with in the parties. s on thehe never-trumper republican side that don't seem to beginning over it, and we see the bernie sanders supporters on the democratic side that don't seem to be getting over it very fast, and even the hillary people aren't getting over the campaign very fast. we now have polarization within both political parties. i think that is pretty unpredictable where that ends up. krishna: we have time for one final question. right here.

>> we mentioned how certain algorithms are set up so that you click on one ideological message and it starts recognizing and feeding you similar ideological messages on whatever platform you are on. in terms of combating extreme partisanship, with there be an advantage to working in an opposite manner so that when you have people who are on a strict news diet of either side, maybe exposure to ads of the opposing ideological party might help them at least be a little more receptive to those arguments, or maybe open up the line for debate so that that partisanship doesn't necessarily get in the way of good policy or good public policy? what advantage would you say there could be in that? justin: i only asked who is

going to pay for it. they are a company selling space. the reason why the algorithm works is because it is the same look,ing approach -- and i went online looking for a para pants and suddenly i get all these different things about pants. it is a very simple algorithm theoretically. i love your idea, but someone has got to pay the bill. ravi: there is a precedent for that kind of algorithm to be built, which is the problem of click bait. it is worked on in part because there is -- it can't all just be optimized towards clicks because eventually it will drive away users and ultimately these platforms are only useful insofar as they serve users. there is certainly precedent for companies giving up some of that attention and giving up some of the engagement in service of something that looks at least a

little closer. it is not necessarily the ultimate variable, but it is amething that is at least 80 less -- at least may be a less bad variable they are optimizing towards. showing the blog that information, i would just best showing people opposite information, i would tweak that just a little bit. they are affected by human connection, by stories. if i want to affect people's attitudes on gay marriage, i don't talk to them about marriage law, the history of marriage. i show them gay people who are relatively normal. they know them and they like them, and that affects their attitudes. if you want to affect people's attitudes, think about that. use something more emotional or social rather than something more rational.

>> i'd like to thank the panel, and i would like to thank krishna for moderating. we're going to do more and more of this as we go into the next semester and go on. most of all i would like to thank the students here at usc. , youave been active participated, you asked great questions, and we've had a terrific semester. i hope next semester lives up to it. thanks everybody, and have a good exam period. [applause] ♪ [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] c-span's "washington journal," live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up tuesday morning, the week ahead on capitol hill and the white house with bloomberg's stephen dennis and the hill's jordan fabian. and we talk about the united states nuclear arsenal. be sure to watch c-span's "washington journal," live at 7:00 a.m. tuesday morning. join the discussion. tuesday, secretary of state rex tillerson talks about u.s.-europe relations at an event hosted by the wilson center in washington. live coverage on c-span3 at 11:00 a.m. eastern. announcer: earlier today, minnesota senator al franken spoke to reporters as he returned to work for the first time since being accused of multiple incidents of sexual misconduct.