each side will make a choice about whether to begin the trial in search of the truth or in the service of the presidents desire to cover up. >> do you swear that in all things pertaining to the trial of the impeachment of donald pending, youow will do impartial justice, so help you god? >> since the president was sworn into office, there was a desire to see him removed. >> the impeachment of president trump. watch unfiltered coverage of the set a trial live with same date re-airs. online on coverage c-span.org and listen on the go using the free c-span radio app. next, a forum on election

security and misinformation campaigns. agent spoke special to secretaries of state. this is 45 minutes. you fort to thank joining us here at this conference for the national association of secretaries of state and our program on election security. it is my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker. clint is a senior research fellow at george washington university. examined the rise of social media influence in his first book titled " messing with the enemy: surviving in a social media world of russians, hackers, and fake news." his research and writing focused since -- focuses on terrorism and counterterrorism. he has worked with the team to

track and model the rise of russian influence operations via social media leading to the presidential election of 2016. testifych led him to between four different committees in 2017 and 2018 regarding russia's information warfare campaign. consultant,ing a clint served as an army officer and an executive officer of , as aing terrorism center consultant of the counterterrorism division, and the national security ranch -- branch. he is an analyst supporting the intelligence committee and special operations command. his remarks today concerning election security, specifically the behavior of state and nonstate actors.

these join me in welcoming dr. clint watts. [applause] me in welcoming dr. clint watts. [applause] clint: thank you for having me today. brad talked about this topic in 2016, nobody was too interested. i'm not sure if you're aware, russia interfered in our election. talk toy, i wanted to about something other than that. i thought a good way to put contacts on it and to think about the dilemma you all face in each of these states, which has different political and social interests. you have different populations looking at different information sources. i think that is where i would like to start. orleans and i had

not been there and 25 years. -- in 25 years. that inced an audience was harry connick jr.'s stock movie had just cannot -- stopped double, because the movie had just come out. four, we set up a would have left it off. 10 years later, you would've immediately had mobile information at your fingertips. 2016,t happened today in what people believe what they saw on the internet or what they believe me -- would they believe me? posted a bunch of stories about harry connick jr.'s stunt double. talking aboutsite

how i was pretty sure harry connick jr. did not do his stunts. there, andugh out when i walk in, what happens? years withoutm information until laughing at a store in new orleans -- story in new orleans. we have gone from having so much information that we actually know less. you have invested more time going into 2020 than any election in history. we have invested a tremendous amount of technical resources. , willo matter what we do the public the convinced on election day that the vote is true, safe, and authentic? i think that is a big challenge.

so when we think about the selection, i will rewind how this goes for me. i was with a small team tracking terrorists in syria. terrorists are vain and they like to brag. every time, we would record it and try to understand the language. that is when we started coming into the disinformation space with all of these strange accounts that were made to look like and talk like american all over the united states and australia and europe. these powers wanted to convince the audience that i was an al qaeda supporter, which makes sense, as is everyone the fbi. -- from the fbi. we are all al qaeda supporters.

many of these persist today and you will even see them sometimes in our alternative news environment. from that, we saw the relentless social media turn. what was fascinating as i did not believe it would work. it seemed super dumb. if you've ever looked at a piece of misinformation you think, well, surely nobody believes that. click on theill email from the guy in nigeria who wants to give you $1 million. that in your social media environment. if you stick at it over and over , it wears down people's perceptions. it used to be hackers. now, it's if i just heckle people endlessly, they will

eventually take themselves off of social media. if i create a very attractive young lady or a hyper-partisan little figure who wants to direct message of something really important. are all of your accounts compromised the next day. 2014, i briefed for the first time here in the d.c. era -- area and it was at the end of the terrorism preview. like, we care about isis. this stuff doesn't work and nobody cares. i was skeptical, but we fast forwarded one year and we saw ach disinformation around military exercise down in texas. remembering a press conference of an army audiencery to brief an that there was not going to be martial law cleared in texas.

that special operations command was not going to invade texas. but there were people there shut up in person and looked around try to figure out where the other 200 people were who said they would be there. you are seeing information mobilize people to action. , you sawok at 2016 people mobilized for and against issues and protests orchestrated by people in russia who have never even set foot care. in the message from the organizers was to take pictures, take pictures. because on social media, i can amplify over and over. i want to move past the russian discussion. is something i'm sure you're already aware of, this is what everybody does now.

it's based on stamp. -- scale. so i wanted to talk to you about the range of waste can play out. on election night, i was not worried about russia. was that early what my colleagues and i were watching. regardless of your political stance, we don't want people showing up targeting election machine. we don't want people to lose faith in elected officials. i want to talk about how we got to this point so we can think of ways to help you. informed tobetter think about strategies to deal with this. in 2011 there was a guy who figured out when you look at google, your results were tailored to you, and he called

it a filter bubbles. typed in results, they might be looking at an issue in different ways. based ongetting a view their filters. add social media to that, and it is an information nuclear disaster. social media is about preferences, that is why we go to it. you get the information you want from people you like to hear from, and you can have it when you choose. if there is information you do not like how might you can block it out. with all the hysteria, while social media can do better, it is largely up to us to decide how we want to consume information, and to know what we are doing that is good or bad for us. it is one part algorithm and one part us.

, even withence younger audiences, iowa's remind them when you look at the phone, that world is uniquely tailored to only you, no one else sees it. it has shaped to your pri preferences. if they do not have your phone, they are seeing a different world. it is shaped by your preferences. when we talk to people, didn't you see this, can you believe what happened? there is changing receptions. everyone's perception is being changed. how did we get to the system? social media plays to three biases that they cannot unwind, we can screen. the system is made to do what? give you information that you

like from people that look and talk like you. as long as that system is in place, you cannot unwind the biases. confirmation bias is literally a like sign, i like this. here is another batch of it. i am one of those weird stockers in coffee shops who watch old people on facebook. i do not watch what they are saying that how they interact with technology. the human body is not meant to process nine memes a minute and send it to 100 people. think about the amplification of that. academics say we had the same problem when the printing press came out, no, no. there were not 3 billion printing presses shooting it out every day, every minute. the amplification is not the

equivalent of eight printing presses in new york city 100 years ago. the human body cannot process that much information. you will fall from fake news because you went from 10 stories a day to 110 stories a day. even if you make a mistake one time, you are pushing out false information, misinformation about your elections, polling sites, whatever it might be faster, and that destroys how people take in information. it annihilates their ability to process information. if you cannot make sense of the world, if you become distorted, .it results in apathy you can see internally in russia, they use that information to where it is so confusing people back away and look at memes of cats and focus

on kids. the second bias is implicit bias. throughout psychological studies, people like information that look and talk like them. your feeds are nothing more than giant collections of people saying things you like and who .alk like you dominantly they are your tribe. this is more devastating in the development a world where we have tribes, and social media reinforces tribalism and infighting. is what i call status quo bias, once you get into your tribe on social media, you do not want to say anything that makes the tribe angry. if you watch me on twitter, i will shoot out a tweet that will not be liked by my tribe so i can get the data analytics to know what they do not like.

i did this two days ago. , or, why did he say that? that is status quo bias, it changes how people interact on the platform so when something is said that you know is not true, you do not refute it, you let it go. as you let it go, the rest of the audience passively pass this on into the circle. those three biases have amazing confounding effects on our don't -- on our culture and democracy. if you want to gain power, win the crowd and you can dictate to the crowd what to think and what to do. it is an amazing ability. we have always had this to a degree, but social media allows you to optimize it because the algorithm tells you when you

were successful. how many speeches teddy roosevelt would have had to give to figure out the perfect message a century ago? . today you can do that in 24 hours and say it over and over again. the more your successful with the message, the more power you accrue and you can dictate to the crowd and use the status quo bias to influence their perception of the world. this gives power to people who do not know anything. examples, you are dealing with it with your elections, your polling places -- are the machines secure? every day on social media, do we know the vote counted in 2016? every day for four years i have gotten between 100 and 200 queries about that. yes, i think the vote was

accurately counted, and every day they asked me that question. think about how that changes and accrues power. somebody with influence, no matter what you tell them, it can be a problem. with neck scenes you get strong influencers and you are changing health policy. the big one today is coronavirus . news articles about false and manipulated information is being spread about a huge health crisis. you get an influencer pushing out repetitively, it is hard not to believe them because you want to. the cousin they are in your social media nation -- because they are in your social media nation. i asked how much time do your kids spend on phones? . averages vary from three to five hours a day, and for some

teenagers eight or more on a device, not counting television, gaming. the more time people spend in the virtual world, the less time in the physical world, the more their allegiances change. some surveys are alarming about young people open to alternative forms of government which are poorly explained and i do not think effectively researched, but they are open to that because of the degradation campaigns around democracy conducted domestic and international. taking about that over time, kids will not be overtaken by the matrix, they will enlist in the matrix, they love the matrix. even hours a day on your device is better than the real world. this dynamic is unfolding in real time but it changes allegiances and people become tied to hastags or avatars, but

they havet to thank it in our neighborhood to affect their daily life. changing that is something we have to think about. it results in the ultra-woke person who wants to stand up for every issue but never leaves the couch, which is annoying. or your angry uncle who screams that you on facebook. it creates a strange dynamic that we do not understand how we are perceived, so i joke that twitter is where you go to get by people you doe not know. that dynamic has changed where we are pushing people away to draw the attention of people who might be on the other side of the world, the country, or not even who they say they are. the third part is the death of expertise which is the most

critical part. tom nichols wrote a book about this. you as institutional leaders and defenders of voting of the processes of executing our democracy is essential that everyone has confidence in you. i do, i see what you are doing to prepare the election, but it only takes one idiot on social media to ruin your life, and it consumes so much of your time that you cannot effectively execute the duties of your job. now you're dealing with misinformation when you want to secure the election, it is a cost. everyone with an internet the believes there are smarter than everyone in the world on any topic. anyone with children in high school knows this is true. that wea tough dynamic need to restore in the coming years. when thinking about this, i want

to alert you to something else on the horizon. when i started doing this, we get activists and hackers who kick this off, they were the first to hack into critical information to exposed to the public, they could influence behavior and how people think. the second generation is extremists, they reached an entire audience around the world, and they did it by going multiplatform, multimedia, communicating in all different linkages. that is why isis overtook al qaeda, they could overtake more people. they would translate into dozens of languages. they were expanding the audiences they could reach. and manytes, russia have overtaken the system. when they saw the arab spring were social media rallies were occurring, people did not know each other, toppling dictators.

did you think authoritarians would think that social media would just be them? no way. within months, every one of these countries going back to iran after the twitter uprising in 2009, every one of them moved into this space. first, find my opponents, track them down, infiltrate groups, destroy the system with information. farm, in thetroll technical world a disinformation center. meme makers, blog posts, social media trolling and every country. the nationstates will try to affect you, they have to speak in your language. if they want to mess around in your election, they have to speak english like an american. the easiest way to spot them,

they do not know how to use spellcheck. they make mistakes grammatically. they lay the jokes out when it doesn't fit the scenario. those were early indications of foreign interference. today we have moved to the fourth generation, trolling as a service. the most groundbreaking thing is you have a wide spectrum of actors who can buy or acquire these services individually or combine them together to amplify disinformation and picked that against you -- pit that against you. everyone has its ability at their fingertips. andcan go to the dark web by social bots or hire people to troll. it is remarkable how this has gone down. next on the horizon which is just starting is essentially owning the system, and china will win.

this is a combination of censorship, social scoring, say something nice about us or you do not get points, no points, no loans or jobs. scoring systems will shake peoples behavior -- shape people's behavior. if you want to see what will be will be thethat, it nba in china in recent weeks. someone sticks up for democracy and the nba says he likes some democracy, but we like profits a little more. major social influencers are saying we need to stick out of their business, and china said this is the beginning, we will see you. wait until we get artificial intelligence, we will change your world view. you will not have any idea bad things are happening, and i will make you believe good things are

happening that never happened. they will have that ability to shape. i put that to you as you plan how to deal with these actors. in terms of sophistication, on the left side is what is important to understand, there , somegrees to influence easier than others. selling someone something, changing their views even a little bit based on how they not impossible. the next level players are setting up fake universities, fake think tanks, institutions and nonprofit to say all voting machines are weak and you cannot trust them. this is the combination of groups,s, political oligarchs, they are buying media outlets and combining these tools to shape your reality. , canis what i worry about

we fight off those who have no intent, know-how, and resources to change the reality of our democracy. the reality of our democracy is it is the best form of government on this planet, we have achieved more than any society, and places that have moved toward democracy have done better. that is truth. that is what i said, but many people would want to argue with me. we have our ups and downs, this is not the best week. in the long-term we have people from any culture or identity here today from all 50 states working together to come up with solutions to make sure people know their votes count on election day. what other country could accomplish this? no one could do this. we have to reinforce what we are doing. of the awareness is a big part of it.

fear is a weapon for our adversaries. fear that your vote did not count, that voting machines got hacked, fear that you will not get to the polling place or be on the rolls. ofn you see those responses fear and the public rising up, coronavirus is an amazing example right now, that is when you have to be out there aggressively pushing back. thingsclose with a few to think about in your roles, and let me know if i am going too long. as countries, the most important thing we can do, whether you are state, local or federal official is have a rigid pinning to the truth and be data driven. you are the holders of data, the u.s. government holds more data than any institution around the world.

there was a conspiracy yesterday that some russian spokesperson said the u.s. had used a climate weapon on moscow and that is why it was warmer. called carbon is dioxide and you can read about it at our website, nasa.gov. how can you use facts and data? we have that ability, we are one of the only countries who has that ability to pull back into data and use it. that is your strength against trolls. you know things and they do not. you have data behind you, they oftentimes have zero. you have resources, they usually have nothing. use your advantages you have to push back. the other part is anticipating reaches and smear campaigns. that is what i am trying to do, over reading of what people say.

if people talk terrible about you, they might hack you as well. who knew? that is a leading indicator. , i testifiedask me to the senate and mentioned to senator rubio, russia did not do you any favors. i read russian news and they did not like him. you can guess what they might be doing. they might be trying to hack into his systems. you can look at these measures, and it will signal what they are doing in the covert space. the other way is a capability to a smear campaign. as soon as you know you got hacked, what will you do on our on our

one, our 12 -- hour one, hour 12? this is a big weakness for us. we did not understand hacking was to get money or d fame people. how do we stay in front of that? up, they say i need to expose the truth, and a week later a bunch of documents and thank you for exposing criminal theft of dumping information. those are early warnings you can spacet in the internet that should give you a tip to prepare and plan, it is probably coming your way. for agencies, social media is not something that is good to do . i can tell you now 6:00 p.m. on friday i would stalk employees find information, amazing how many pictures of id badges and what they really feel about

when boss, out on weekends they are more relaxed. that is the stuff hackers are thinking about. we saw that consistently enjoy and 2015. understand if people have complaints, bring them forward, but how do you do your own public social media engagement question mark the classic antake agencies make is allegation comes out, they think it is dumb or silly and they wait. th tweeter the 100,000 they want to issue a response, too late, it is already out there. their response will be you are hiding something because they know the votes were hacked. respond,ponse, went to who you would respond to. the other classic mistake is a troll with two followers who has

an account for one week, you see a major institution response. no we didn't. and they go, i gained 200 you.wers, thank you can amplify your dissenters. wargame, you have to practice, you do not do it in the open, talk to your teams and your strategy as you move forward. you will know in the last 60 days going into the election, election rigging, voter fraud, machines are down, power outage, all those conspiracies will come forward because people want to win, or overseas want to mess around in your election and hurt your institutions. you have to wargame those so the public stays confident in you and not some random social media account. in terms of citizens, this is where it is that, how do we help people understand the information? i use the example, when i was a

kid you go to the grocery store and there would be a newspaper stand where an alien had landed at area 51. parents, talking to my did an alien land? no, no one reads that. all of our parents read that now on social media and send it to me. how did this happen? they are so brilliant at the grocery store, but then i get hammered by people i went to high school with by the craziest stuff i have seen in my life. if i printed this put it at the grocery store, you would not buy it, but if it is on facebook, you send it to me every day. it is about understanding where those come from. the first is the cost and benefits of social media use, is it a good or miserable experience? do you spend most of the days with the hairs on the back of your neck and you are

angry, and you had social media rage -- it is probably not worth it. you could let it go in your world would be better and you would be happier. there is no going back with young people. the idea we will give them phone breaks -- we are not. it is how do we integrate technology and people in ways where it is a blended environment and people are working together. that has happened more in the arst threeto four ye largely due to my generation and older souring them on social media behavior. they have figured this out on their own, but how do we reinforce that over time? the guy who lived across the street from me stole the wheels off my chevy nova, just misplaced anger, but was

sending me totally bogus news i knew was false, and posting russian state-sponsored propaganda saying we could not trust the fbi. i am most flew to missouri to fight him over the wheels on my car and the propaganda. how does this still happen? why does russia want to run a new site that tells you what is in america in english? they do not talk about what is happening in russia because you do not usually care. why? they want -- they do not care who wins the election, they want democracy to fall. they want americans to not believe in their elected leaders, their officials, other institutions, their democratic processes. we are very good at doing that ourselves, do not let someone else do it. know what you

consume. i try to give tips to people on social media because you are making decisions superquick. ?o you know the outlet if they are not telling you where they are located at, there is a reason for that. iny are not up to snuff terms of their editorial processes. do you know who the author is? particularly a meme. seven words that feel good are oftentimes not true. do you know where it came from? how does that information source make their money? if they do not have ads and you cannot figure out how they are paying their bills that they write 50 memes a day or 15 new stories a day, how do they do that? do you understand their motivations? listen more than you speak, read more than you write, watch more than you film. the current generation can make

more content than they can consume. they make that for themselves oftentimes. they are consummate broadcasting producing. it makes it hard for anyone to consume anything if you are producing content. the biggest thing, if i could leave one thing for you, is understand what you tend to believe. war propaganda back through time , it is biological, psychological, the thing you hear first, that which you hear the most, that which comes from a truck that source, and that which is not accompanied by a rebuttal, that is basically your social media feed. speed first. amplification i are things. do you trust them naturally? the source of the information,

not necessarily who made the where it gets muddled on social media. we already block out rebuttals to that information. most, trusted source, rebuttal. that is what you have got to do. you have got to seemed, you have got to be repetitive, though it seemed stupid but you have to keep doing it over and over. you have to be a trusted source, which means you have to be right almost 100% of the time. spacems of being in that so that people can hear you challenge them, that means that if it's happening on social media, you might need to be there on the ground. the best way is to show up at their house come at their communities. if they are broadcasting some conspiracy about your polling place, either.

-- be there. knock them down, have your data. we just think we post back or tweet a lot. nothing works better than a direct challenge to someone who is pushing this information against you. the last thing is to know when you are an expert. when it is the death of expertise, people say experience. have been, you analyzing social media for 30 years? >> they say, the sort of thing. the next thing is competency. what is their actual experience? the third part is what analysis they use to arrive. we used to think of this thing is the intelligence community where we were always evaluating

experts. that together to understand what they are putting out in terms of information. the last part is when i close with. teams with two different designed to help protect the elections in 2020. the first is at the foreign policy research institute. been able to recruit 33 interns that are students from all around the country. remotely, but we go through state-sponsored propaganda to see how they are talking about the elections and the candidates. forecast to look at how serious they are about election 2020. we are also doing how they talk about technology and electoral systems is another thing we are looking at.

out we try to push that into the social media space. the other is called the hamilton dashboard. it is built out of social media camps we have been looking at. the alliance for securing democracy created a database that runs in real-time. they have content from russia, china, and iran coming on that tells you what that new cycle is about. it is one part to tell you about vulnerabilities and a second to challenge those candidates who say there are all sorts of people messing around. they will say, i don't know, i don't see it. maybe you are going to lose just because people did not vote for you. it is two parts this time. a big issue will be studying here in the summertime.

we know disinformation will rapidly start to emerge in that space and we will use those two projects. it's pretty amazing to watch how fast young people can read news compared to me, which i enjoy. i think we will have approached 11,000 new stories. they also use it for their own college projects and papers. with that, thank you for having me today. good luck. [applause] during this election season, the candidates beyond the talking points are only revealed overtime. but since you can't be everywhere, there is c-span. our programming differs from all other coverage for one simple reason, it c-span -- it is c-span.

we have brought you unfiltered coverage everyday since 1969. in other words, your future. so this election season, go deep, direct, and unfiltered. see the biggest picture for yourself and make up your own mind. you c-span 2020 brought brought -- brought to you as a public service by your cable provider. ♪ today, on american history tv , honoring holocaust victims. >> the holocaust is not again with auschwitz nor shall it be solely defined by it. it begins with words and small then infinitely larger ones that resulted in the murder of 6 million jews. this as reverence,

but the words reaffirm our faith in a higher power. power that endows us with the ability to learn from the past and to choose good over evil. >> from the holocaust museum in washington dc, a ceremony to honor holocaust victims. tv on on american history c-span3. jane sanders is the wife of senator bernie sanders. she was joined by filmmaker michael moore for a town hall event in iowa. thetor leads going into caucus according to several polls collected by real clear politics. [applause]