with tuesd's elections looming, immigration once again takes center sta while two high profile state measures on the gas tax and rent contl 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. welcome to kqed newsroom. we begin with a high steces midterm ons. 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

biethright citizenship and targeted the caravan of central american migrants suggesting federal agents can fire at them if they toss objects at them. meanwhile, new polls show proposition 6th repeal of the state gas tax is trailing among voters. it's same for proposition ten, which would give cities the ability to expand rent control. as part of our ongoing election coveragen i am j by california politics and government team. scott shafer,lways good toee you guys. scott, democrats are hoping, as you know, to flip those seven gop seats in california that arey have been trying tot in their quest to win 23 seats to retake control of the house. how is the current messaging from president trump and the ite house on immigration affecting those key races, and does it vary depending whether

it's a central valley race or oran county race? there are so many cross currents happening right now. you mentionedhe birthright thing with immigrants, the caravan. a a we 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 78of eligibl voters are registered it hasn't been that high for a non-presidential ele since 1950. there is a lot of interest. i think democrats have been vou fo on not getting distracted by trump and trying to stay on message of health care, the republican tax bill, a jobs, kind 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 to california. i think that might be partly his own reasons.

every don't think if district it's a good idea to be seen next to the president. if you have a huge latino population, tho immigration messages don't play well. orange county is a mix of people. so i think for republicans in california, there has been this waghtrope to w this entire campaign where the 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 theresident is moving in these final days of the 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 lace like orange county where they are behind in registration and need t sell centrist message. theal central y they have a

registration advantage and it's really about turnout. >> teak speaking of the central valley, the nation's most expensive congressional race this year, because the election day is just on, tuesd is here in a solidly blue state in the ctral valley. the incouple ent devin nunes, the republican shareof the house intelligence committee, the chief defender of predent trump he is the incumbent, his challenge is a fresno prosecutor. how muchpeoney is being on this race and why is it so expensive? >> it's ironic because this is the least likely to faip o lot of these districts. it's not actually one that i tgnk democrats saw l ago as an opportunity. but what's happened is that nun hasally under his fundraising game. a couple of years ago he raised $1 million, didn't really have an opponent. he has raised $11 million.

it's not incalifornia. it's on the d.c. circuit. lobbyists, sort of big conservative donors. on the other sider a janse, a prosecutor. i think it's an uphill battle. he raed $8 million himself. what's happened is we have seen i think a conversation happening in eye central vaven with the sort of registration favorability to nunes ythat we haven't seen in ffresno. th the first time in years ing him. >> the democrats would love to flip although it 34may be a rea. i was in sonoma and i saw and u jans signs. a lot of the money is coming from the bayrea 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 is a lot of excitement. it's a seat they'd like to flip if they could, democrats. but they know it's a reach.

>> and nunes haseen 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 t media. he had a 40-page mailefocused on "the fresno bee." >> and in these congressional ikees like in places central valley are voters more focused on local issues or are they mor concerned about what's coming out of the white house? >> it's always the national issues. ou see this every midterm election. it ultimately is a reflection and referendum on the president and what's happening in washington as much as republicans tried to make this iout localues. they know how unpopular donald districtsn many swing in california. they want to talk about the gas tax, things happening at thecadv and issues. i think people, trump is on everyone's mind, nd the f voters. so i think for democrats they succeed when they turn the issues back to the patient and

health care. >> let's talk about the opositions. we have two very high-profile ballot eopositions. of them is proposition 6, the gas tax repe. in aew 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 c for the gop. what happened? >> this happened in june when josh newman, the freshman senator from fullerton, orange aounty, who voted for the gas tax was theet 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. really the money has dried up. othere is a huge amoun money on the other side because you have labor, chamber of commerce, contractors, local officials have all teamed up to say we don't want to have this transportation money taken away. >> that made this campaign interesting to me.h before 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 only for turnout but to give republican candidates something else to talk about other than donald trump. >> there were -- a 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 saido. imean, then a different poll by the public policy institute ofa california renters are rejecting this measure. why is that? even more fascinating when recent polling showed that people support the idea of rent control but don't support proposition 10. hamber one, the no side spent three times more the yes side. i think that plays a huge role what you talk aboutad

rtisements, 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 rentol con all of those add into the fact that, yeah, every poll is not doing well. >> prop c, the local measure in francisco. salesforce ceo supports te. tw's ceo jeff dorsey opposes. you have this battle of the tech tans going on. where will this end up? this is theomeless measure. >> yeah, taxing these big companies to pay for heless services. it looks like it will get more than 50% and win. the question is will it be challenged in court. the fault li have opened up among the tech community and democrats. nancy pelosi, dianne feinstein are for it. mayor london breed is against it. interesting battle and one that will not end next tuesday. >> you are goin to continue to be busy.

you will all be covering it, i you, and we will see all of back here next week for a full roundup of the election outcomes and their impacts in california. you very much and just a reminder. this coming tuesdayoin us on the radio and online for full election day coverage. hate speech on social media. a deadly synague 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 edia plays in inciting violence the pittsburgh shooter posted anti-semitic comments on gab.com. that site is offline for now. despite efforts to remove speech, facebook, twitter, instagram and whatsapp remain fertile ground for hateful speech. here are "new york times"te hnology 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 you searched for anti-semitic content on inogtagram after the syn shootk, what did you find? >> the surprising thing i gss 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 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. and the problem for instagram is that this stuff, every time a

major news event happens 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 upco ent, basically, and it's hard for them to figure out how to catch itdi imely. >> 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 sawotn america that long ago where social media sort of conveyed this sense of perpetual outrage and panic and made the country really vulnerable to a mofar right authoritarian time who says, don't worry,ll i w make it better. in brazil on whatsapp people were able to use part of the app

which lets people d sort of memes, texts. they can goly a re long way and be used to promote misuformation. be the app is encrypted we have a hard time seeing inside ao see what people are saying. >> we 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 should it be rein these lies and conspiracy theories? e 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 se idea that weould be able to community indicate privately with one another 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 i say what you want. but theea that this free speech can have real world consequences and in some c 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 in like oversized manner and really sort of show that influence in different w >> you know, i think everyone probably has a role to play here. there is a role for the government 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 openp up sn myanmar and start selling ads there and start gene tting revenre. 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 of janitor ean 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 ly acti look 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. au can hire thousands of people to try clean up different things that are going around, but, you know, facook has 2 billion people using it a month, at least 1 billion every day untold billions of pieces of content circulating on there. there is noay 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 essentially just sg for patterns and all of the texts and videos that people are uploading and sayat looks like hate speech, that looks like an incitement of to violence. they saythver time will be able to dramatically reduce the

amount of hate speech on t 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 is bigger 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. was reading about an anti-defamation league study that say anti-semitism and hate crimes surged inhe u.s. over the past two years. 30% of the accounts tweeting against jews on twitter are from bots. >> yeah. it is a really sad state of affairs,y. frank twitter has known about this bot issue for a long time. w, what they would say is that they want to permit people to create these kind of bots because bots can also be used 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 mps are thinking about. o en you let everyone have access tthe tools, some people will build reall bad ones. >> and one person can spend a couple hundred dollars and buy thousands of bots to flood twitter with anti-semiticnt con one guy with a little bit of money can have a bigger influence than they should be on the m.platfo >> today as we were recording, bots blief helped conibute to oe trend "kill the jews" trend. it was a top trentwitter. 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 top trend. >> what should the government's role be. there is a federal law that protects these companies from being held accountable for what people post on their sites and meir platforms. that took affectre than two decades ago. that was when facebook, people w te just tellingem about what happened in their day. youtube had cute cat videos. we are no longer in that territory. so should those regulations change? >> i think we're starting to see the heat intensifying from congress right now. you know, there is senator mark warner of virginia 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 m toipulate people in a different country or something like that. so there ismore, i think they are reining it in.

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

you have produced documentaries, produce been i several interviews. why did you decide to write a book? >> according to the u.n. there llion migrants in the world. i wanted to understand what is the human right of people to? mo what does that look like? and then the election of donald trump happened and i was living in downtown l.a. a 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 then i that's when had to kind of face the reality that i have beenere 25 years. 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 t 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, ang jugg 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. live with your grandparents when you were 12. you didn't knowou were undocumented until you were 16 until you tried 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 creati for myself. >> i had to try to understand why they did what they did. when i was kid, when i was 16 i didn't understand it. they smuggled me here. they paid somebody $4,500.

>> so myat graner thought, i come here, i work at the flea market as a janitor and i marry an wo who is a u.s. citizen and poof, right? theirthinking was i would work an under the table job. i would live thisnder the table life. >> and you did not want that? >> i didn't want it because i -- i thought i want toxist. i didn't want to just be invisible, right. and i think for me that was the number one thing. 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 joonnalist. you awards along the way. there are some undocumented immigrants who are resentful of you have created for yourself. you write about activists who want toer know were you, jo jose, when we were on the front lines fighting for immigrant rights? where were you? >> i was lying, passing, and hiding. i was too busy trying to

this successful version of what i was supposed to be. i had internalized i was supposed to earn something, righ i was very honest in the book about that. even when an activist said to me, y know, you can't represent us. you are not even mexican, rights this issue een so married to latinos and spifically 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 a very critical. you blame the media, too, for some of the hurt and some of the misperceptions. you are critical about how mainstream media has covered immigration. where do you think the media has failed? >> i think i'm critical because journalism is sacred to me. it was the first thing i ever thought of myseo. >> youed for "the washington post." >> i worked at the chronicle a few blocks that way, right. so journalism is important to me. what we do is important to i think the fact that we in general -- 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 a immigration reform. it's about changing america. >> and with president trump in office and with more reporting on t issues li border wall issue wiy separation 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. what trump has done and is doing is a cull minutatimination of a policies that demoblats and reans have been a part of. this has been a bipartisan mess. it's not just trump. >> do youg worry about be deported? you could be any time. >> you know, tat's the interesting thing. i lived in fear of that four 14

years, from 16 to the age of 30. the past seven years, being this public thing that i am, that hasn't really been my worry. i'm ready for it. i've been ready seven years agom so not -- that's not the fear. the fear is am m i living life as fully and as honestly as i can. >> have you thought about what you will do if you are deported? >> yeah. i haven't seen my mom5 for years since she is in the philippines. two more years for her to come he legally. she has been waiting in line. so i'd 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 fight. >> why do you think they haven't ported you? >> i have no idea. >> you are not hard to find. >> i am at starbucks usually. they will find me there. you know, after i came out seven years ago, few months later when i haven't heard anything ntom the government i actually

called the govern 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 comment. >> really? >> she knew who i s was, said. she was wondering, why are you calling us? i haven't hear from you. as a journalist, we have to follow up the story. so i come obama at the time was deporting 400,000 immigrants. why wasn't i one of them. >> how is your concept of being citizen c since you came out as an undocumented person? >> so i am not citizen because i was not in this country. the accident of birth. itizen because legally i am not. i would argue there is a different kind of citizenship that uocumented immigrants subscribe to, and it's citizenship ofiarticipation. ctually think it's miraculous that undocumented immigrants get up every day, go to work, send their kids to school and provide for heir families even und this administration. >> and pay taxes.

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

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