with tuesd's elections looming, immiation once again takes center stage while two high profile state measures on the gas tax and rent control face dim prospects. and how much responsibility should social media companies bear for anti-semitic content? and jose antonio vargas shares his aemoir on lyi hiding. newsroo to kqed we begin with a high stakes midterm elections. in the final days before voters head to the polls, president trump has made a number of immigration pronouncements in an effort to appeal to his base. they include a proposed end to

birright citizenship and h targeted the caravan of central american migrants suggesting federal agents can fire at them if they toss objects at theme while, new polls show proposition 6th repeal of the tate gas tax is trailing among voters. it's same for proposition ten, which would give cities the ability to expand rent control. part of our ongoing election coverageed i am joiby california politics and government team. scott shafer, always good to see you guys. d scotocrats are hoping, as you know, to flip those seven gop seats in california that they have been trying to target in their quest to win 23 seats to retakentrol of the house. how is the current messaging from president trump and the whithouse on immigration affecting those key races, and does it vary depending whetheri

a central valley race or orange county race? >> there are so many cross currents happening right now. you mentioned the birthright thing with immigr ts, the caravan. a week ago there was the shooting in pittsburgh at the synagogue. the pipe bomber. it's hard to isolate one thing and say what impact is it having. we are showing a lot of voter interest. the secretary of state came out with final registration numbers for california and 78% of eligible voters are registered it hasn't bee that high for a non-presidential election since 1950. there is a lotf interest. i think democrats have been vo focused on not getting distrac ed by trump andying to stay on message of health care, the republican tax bill, k jobs, thand of thing. i think if trump suck seeceeds will up the turnout of republicans. >>lit's t as trump is going around the country to key states, he is not coming california. i think that might be partly for

his own reasons. also i don't think if every district it's a good idea tose next to the president. if you h have age latino population, those immigration messages don't play well. orange county is a mix of people. so i think for republicans in california, there has been this tightrope to w this entire campaign where they want to appeal and sort of ally themselves with the president in some ways. in this harsh immigration rhetoric, it may not play as well in california. >> i think certainly you can see by how the president is moving in these final days of he campaign. he is focused on senate races. that is where he is spending his time. he is notoming to california, spending timen suburban districts. i would say for democrats they are focused on health care. i think there is a big difference when you go to a place like orange county where they are behind in registration and need to sell a centrist mesage. the central valley they have a

registration advantage and it's really about turnout. >> teak speaking of the central valley, the nation's most expensive congressionye race thisr, because the election day is just on tuesday, is here in ad so blue state in the central valley. the incouple ent devin nunes, the republican share of the house intelligence committe the chie defender of president trump he is t incumbent, his challenge is a fresno prosecutor. how muchpeoney is being on this race and why is it so expensive? >> it's onic because this is the least likely to flip of a lot ofis theseicts. it's not actually one that i think democrats saw long ago as an opportunity but what's happened is that nunes has really under his fundraising game. y couple ofars ago he raised $1 million, didn't really have an opponent. heasaised $11 million.

it's not in california. it's on the d.c. circuit. lobbyists, sort of big conservative donors. on t other side andrew janse, a prosecutor. i think it's an uphill battle. he raised $8 million himself. what's happened is we have seen i think a conversation happening in theve central valley with the sort of registration favorability to nunes ythat we haven't seen in fresno. they for the first time in years deny enforcing him. >> the democrats would love to flip although i 3may be a reach. i was in sonoma and i s and u jans signs. a lot of the money is coming from the bay ar because, you know, the central valley is not a wealthy area. there is not a bunch of big donors or wealthy people. it's a very poor area. so, yeah, i think there is a lot of excitement. it's a seyat like to flip if they could, democrats. but they know it's a reach.

>> and nunes has been re-elected times. >> yeah. and he has endorsed by the fresno bee until now. there is a war going on sort of like an echo of what trump says about the media. he had a 40-page mailer focused on "the fresno bee." >> and in these congressional e ces like in places l central valley are voters more focused on local issues or are they more concernedabout what's coming out of the white house? >> it's always the national issues. you see this every midterm it ultimately is a reflection and referendum on the president and what's happening in washington as much as republicans tried to make this abssut locals. they know how unpopular donald trump is in many swing in california. they want to talk about the gas tax, things happening at the lv and lo issues. i think people, trump is on everyone's mind, on the mind of voters. so i think for democrats they succeed when they turn the issues backto the patient and

health care. >> let's talk about the propositions. we have two very high-profile ballot propositions. one of them is proposition 6, the gas tax repeal. in a new poll out this week from uc berley's institute of governmental studies shows it's 56% of likely voters are opposed. getting rid of this gas tax was supposed to be a rallying cry for the gop. what happened? i>> this happened june when josh newman, the freshman senator from fullerton,u orange y, who voted for the gas tax was the target of a recall and he was recalled. and that took away the two-thirds majority the republicans had ithe senate. john cox has put in a bunch of money to get it on the ballot. reallyhe money has dried up. there is a huge amount of money on the other side because you ha labor, chamber of commerce, contractors, local officials have all teamed up say we don't want to have this transportation m>>ey taken away. that made this campaign interesting to me. before this measure qualified

for the ballot, $3.8 million spent by supporters. after that 1.5 million. so it's almost as if the ompaign petered off. they wanted it the ballot not ndly for turnout but to give republican ates something else to talk about other than donald trump. >> there we -- republican wouldn't be in the top two of the governor's race. now there is one. >> mimi walters, now a congresswoman, in a tight race, she is not going to be putting the money behind a gas tax repeal she was six or ten months ago. >> the measure that would allow cities to expand rent control and a whopping 60% of the voters surveyed said n imean, then a different poll by the public policy institute of d california s renters are rejecting this measure. why is that?>> ven more fascinating when recent polling showed that people support the idea of rent control but don't support proposition 10. number one, the no side spent three times more the yes side. i think that plays a huge role what you talk aboutve

isements, getting the message out there. the ballot language is confusing. it's talking about repeal and not, you know, expansion of rent control. think some people may say, am i voting to repeal rent? contr all of those add into the fact that, ah, every poll is not doing well. >> prop c, the local measure in francisco. salesforce ceo supports itr twit ceo jeff dorsey opposes. you have this battle of the tech tians going on. where will this end up? his is theeless measure. >> yeah, taxing these big companies to pay for homess services. it looks like it will get more than 50% and win. the question is will it be challenged in court. the fault line have opened up among the tech community and democrats. nancy pelosi, dianne feinstein are for it. mayor london breed is against it. an interesting battle and one that will not end next tuesday. >> you are goingo continue to be busy.

you will all be covering it, i know, and we will see all of back here next week for a full roundup of the election outcomes and their impacts in california. u very much. and just a reminder. this coming tuesday jin us on the radio and online for full election day coverage. hate speech on social media. a deadly synagoe shooting in pittsburgh last weekend and a series of pipe bombs mailed to prominent democrats, these incidents are intensifying scrutiny of the role that social media plays in inciting violence. the pittsburgh shooter posted anti-semitic comments on gab.com. that site is offline for now. despite efforts to remove he speech, facebook, twitter, instagram and whatsapp remain fertile ground for hateful speech. here are "new york times"c ology report mike isaac and editor casey newton.

welcome. mike, i know that you have been reporting on how hate prolifer rates online. you think graham is an example. when youearched for anti-semitic content on insuegram after the synag shootk, what did you find? > the surprising thing i gue about the moments directly after the shooting is we didn't have to look that hard to find anti-semitic content on instagram. all we did, my colleagues and i started type in fairly nonoffensive words like, you know, we wrote jews or judaism or sort of anything related to the events of -- over the last weekend, and one of the first hashtags that came up was hashtag jews did 9/11 which is, now, insane and completely not related to the events that went on. >> claiming jews were behind the september 11th attacks? >> exactly. d the problem for instagram is that this stuff, every time a

major news eventhappens or in this case a tragedy, people who are trying to troll these platforms can just start flooding the zone with a bunch of super messed upnt t, basically, and it's hard for them to figure out how to catch itat immey. >> it was intense because you found nearly 12,000 posts with that hashtag, jews did 9/11. i know that the impact of hate and misinformation online is hoping globally as well. how did social media affect the recent presidential elections in brazil? >> sure. so in brazil we saw a situation that many are compared to one that we saw i america n that long ago where social media sort conveyed this sense of perpetual outrage and panic and made the country really vulnerable to a more r right authoritarian time who says, don't worry, i wi make it better. in brazil on whatsapp people were able to use part of the app

arwhich lets people fo sort of memes, texts. they can go a real long way and be used to promote misinsermation. becathe app is encrypted we have a hard time seeing inside ve see what people are saying. >> we h seen instances in myanmar, for example, where facebook was used to whip up anxiety about the rohingya minority, about child kidnaps that led mobs to murder people. there are several glaring instances out there. so in this case, in these case whose job shouldto it be rein these lies and conspiracy theories? media? the government? social media companies themselves? it's a real -- i am sure you hear this all the time. it's a real hard tension between thhidea that weld be able to community indicate privately with onenother or worry about free speech being tamped down by governments or companies or the press or whatever, right?

like part of at least an american democracy is to be able do say what you want. but the that this free speech can have real world consequences and in some cas like actually deadly consequences. and i think right now we are grappling with how to construct these services in a way that doesn't amplify things inan lik oversized manner and really sort of show that influence in a different way >> you know, i think everyone probably has a role to play here. there is a role for the vernment in doing some kind of regulation. there is a role for the press to identify some of these phenomena as they are doubling up. i think that the social media companies themselves have a special responsibility to do something. they decided to grow into these places. they decided to open ip sho myanmar and start selling ads there and start generaheng revenuee. they didn't have a plan for how they were going to moderate the content on the platform. what they are doing now is sending out a bunch ofcljanitor ton it up. so far the results are pretty

mixed. >> what are they doing? you refer to them as janitors. facebook, for example, touted it's higher than 10,000 people to activeook for all of this stuff. how is that working? i see it -- i mean, i don't know what you think. i see it as a band-aid on a bullet wound, honestly. you can hire thousands of people to try clean up different things that are going around, but, you know, facebk has 2 billion people using it a month, at least 1 billion every day. told billions of pieces of content circulating on there. there is no w that tens of thousands of people are going to catch this. their big thing is a.i. >> artificial intelligence? >> yes. what they say is that they can sort of use these tools that are inessentially just sca for patterns and all of the texts and videos that people are huploading and say looks like hate speech, that looks like an incitement of to violence. they say oeyer time ill be able to dramatically reduce the

amount of hate speech on the platform. i believe them. that is an effective tool. they are having some success with it. the issue has tended to be that the problem isbigger than their efforts to contain it so far. >> and there is also the additional problem of bots. that is something that is taking off on its own. you know, human users still account for much of the hate speech on, you know, on social media, but there are all these automated bots out there. i was reading about an anti-defamation league study that says anti-semitismnd hate imes surged in the u.s. over the past two years. 30% of the accounts tweeting against jews on twitter are from bots. >> yeah. it is a really state of affairs, frankly. twitter has known about this bot issue for a long time. now, what they would say is that they want to permit people to create these kind of bots because bots can also be used for good. there is a bot that is popular

among political reporters that tells them when a member of the trump family has followed a new account followed a tweet. that could give you insight into what the trufrmmps are thinking about. then you let everyone have access t tools, some people will build really b ones. >> and one person can spend a couple hundred dollars and buy thousands of bots to flood twitter with anti-setic content. one guy with a little bit of money can have a biggerfl nce than they should be on the platform. >> today as we were recording, bots blief helped contribute to the trend "kill the jews" trend. it was a top trend otter. there was an anti-semitic incident in new york. there were mainstream outlets reporting about it. it turned out that that particular phrase haven't been used in the incident. by that point it was too late and many, many people saw this

as the tend. >> what should the government's role be. there is a federal law that protects these companies from being helduntable for what people post on their sites and their platforms. that took affect m than two decades ago. that was when facebook, people were just telling them about what happened in their day. youtube had cute cat videos. we are no lnger in that territory. so should those regulations change? >> i thi we're starting to see the heat f intensifyingom congress right now. you know, there is senator mark warner ofvirginia has introduced the honest ads act, which sort of provides more transparency into the types of political ads people can buy on facebook, so you can actually see who is doing the advertising and if it's from someone who is trying to manipulate people in a different country or mething li that. so there is more, i think they are reining it in.

they don't want to tamp down on speechnd behe arbiters of speech. it's a push and pull. >> a complicated debate for sure. mike isaac with "the new york times" and casey newton wh the verge, pleasure to have you here. >> thank you. moving now to a personal take o immigration. in 2011 jose antonio vargas, whose journalism career included a stint at "the washington post," reveals he was living in the u.s. illegally. since then he has become perhaps the most well knowned undocume imgra imgran grant -- immigrant. he has a new memoir, dear america, noetsds tes of an undocumented citizen. thwelcome. >>k you for having me. >> it's been seven years since you announced you were ndocumented in a "new york times" magazine essay.

you have produced documentaries, produce been in several interviews. why did you decide to write a book? >> according to the u.n. there are 285 mi world.grants in the i wanted to understand what is he human right of people to move what does that look like? and then the election of donald trump happened and i was living in downtown l.a. and the building manager, i was living there for like two years at that point, texted me a few days after the election and said, where we're not sure we can protect you if i.c.e. showed up in the apartment. you may want to move out. so thenhat's when had to kind of face the reality that i have been he 25ears. i can get detained and deported at any point. >> that must have been a tough message to absorb? >> yes, it was. but it kind of forced me do something that i never want to do, which i think i don't want to do, which is like mental health, right? how do you actually feel what this is?

i have been so busy running away from it, i think, and juggli so many things. >> and hiding? >> so, you know, the book, as you know, is structured lying, passing, and hiding. the book is really about what the psychological toll is of being in this country as a quote/unquo quote/unquote illegalilian according to president trump. >> your mom put you on a plane from the philippines heading to the u.s. t live with your grandparents when you were 12. you didn't know yu were undocumented until you were 16 until you tried to get a driver's license. you write about your deep alienation from your grandparents. you write, quote, the america they dreepd for me was not the america i was creatingor myself. >> i had to try to understand why they did what they did. when i was a kid, when i was 16 i didn't understand it. they smuggled me here. they paid somody $4,500.

>> so my grandfather thought, i come here, i work at the flea market as a janitor and i marry a woman who is a u.s. citizen and poof, right? their thking was i would work an under the table job. i would live this under the table oufe. >> andid not want that? >> i didn't want it because i -t i thou wanted to exist. i didn't want to just be invisible, right. and i think for me that was the number one the moment i found out i was here illegally, i didn't want to surrender to what that was. >> you existed for a long time as a journast. you won awards along the way. there are some undocumented immigrants who are resentful of the america you have created for yourself. you write about activists who want to know where were you, er jose, when we on the front lines fighting for immigrant rights? where were you? >> i was lyi, passing, and hiding. i was too busy trying to create

this successful version of what i was supposed to be. i had internalized i was supposed to earn something, right? i was very honest in the book about that.en even w an activist said to me, you know, you can't represent us. you are not even mexican, right? this issue has been so married to latinos and specifically mexicans. look, like i -- this book for me was a way of really exploring what all these issues are and where all the hurt is. >> and you are very critical. you blame the media, ftoo, some of the hurt and some of the misperceptions. you are citical about how mainstream media has covered immigration. where do you mhink theia has failed? >> i think i'm critical because journalism is sacred to me. it was the first thing i ever thought of myself. ed >> you wo for "the washington post." >> i worked at the chronicle a few blocks that way, right. sot journalism is import to me. what we do is important to me. i think the fact that ween in al -- there are some

exceptions -- have failed to connect the dots between the 11 million undocumented immigrants like me in this country andco h that iected to the 43 milhim grant population in america. this is not about immigration reform. it's about changing america. >> and with president trump in office and worh more rng on issues like the border wall and family separation issue with central american refugees do you see improvement in the coverage? >> absolutely. it's kind ofembarrassing, frankly, that it took trump for most of our colleagues the media to finally wake up that? a human rights crisis. whaton trump has and is doing is a cuminutatiomination of all policies that democrats and republicans have been a part of. this has been a bipartisan it's not just trump. >> do you worry about being deported? you could be any time. >> you know, that's the interesting thing. i lived in fear of that four 14

years, from 16 to the age ofas0. the seven years, being this public thing i thatam, that hasn't really been myre worry. i'y for it. i've been ready seven years ago. so i'm not -- that's not the fear. the fear is am m i living life as i ly and as honestly can. >> have you thought about what you will do if you are deported? >> yeah. i haven't seen my mom for 25 years since she is in the philippines two more years for her to come here legally. she has been waiting in line.'d so see her. you know, thankfully, i am a writer and a filmmaker and i can write and make films anywhere. but look, i think i decided to stay. so if the government decides to deport me, it will be. a fig >> why do you think they haven't deported you? >> i have no yoidea. >>are not hard to find. >> i am at starbucks usually. they will find me the. u know, after i came out seven years ago, a few months later when i havet heard anything from the government i actually

called the government myself. i write that in the book. i called i.c.e. myself. said, high, i'm jose antonio vargas. i haven't heard from you. what do you plan do with me? >> and the woman was like, no en co >> really? >> she knew who i was, she said. she was ouwondering, why are calling us? i haven't heard from you. as a journalist, we have to follow up the story. so i come out. obama atn the time was depor 400,000 immigrants. why wasn't i one of them. >> how is your concept of being citizen change since you came out as an undocumented person? >> so i am not citizen because i as not bor this country. the accident of birth. i am not cit i am not.e legally i would argue there is a different kind of citizenship that undocumented immigrants nd it's e to, citizenship of participation. i actually think it's miraculous that undocumented immigrants get up every day, go to work, send their kids to school and provide for their families even under this administratio >> and pataxes.

>> pay taxes. parts of their communities, i think that's mereere ac lis /* /* miraculous. >> it's "dear america: notes of an undocumented citizen." thank you for being here. >> thank you for having me. >> that wi do it for us. as always, you can find more coverage at kqed.org/newsroom. thank you for joining us.

robert: countdown to the mids. i'm robert costa, welcome to "washington week president trump: these illegal caravans will not be allowed to the united states. they should turn back now because they're wasting their time. robert: on the eve ofhe midterm elections president trump hammers a hard line on immigration. democrats looking to take back power are campaigning on kitchen tables, issue with the party's biggest name on the trail. the s tuesday might be most important election of our lifetime.ti poans will always say that. but this time it's actually true. rort: plus -- a mass shooting inside a putsburg synagogue l community and country shaken