at the end of the twentieth century silicon valley industry titans like steve jobs and bill gates made a promise that would forever alter how we perceive the world it spans the globe like a superhighway it is called internet and suddenly are part of a new mash of people archives ideas the personal computer and the internet ushered humanity into the information age laying the groundwork for unlimited innovation at

the dawn of the twenty first century there would be a new revolution a new generation of young geniuses made a new promise beyond our wildest dream use the idea that we take all the world's information and make. everyone limitless information artificial intelligence machines that would know what we wanted and would tend to our every need the technology would be beyond our imagination it's almost like magic yet the concept would be as simple as a single word search. this was the beginning of google and less than a decade later facebook they would make a new promise to humanity what i think so interesting about google and facebook is they were founded at american universities stanford university you had two students larry page and sergey brin decide they wanted to create the ultimate search engine . for the internet across the country you had in the case of facebook mark

zuckerberg who was a student at harvard decided he wanted to create a social media platform basically to meet girls and to make friends and hence we got facebook you never think that you could build this company or anything like that right because i didn't just college students write an average building stuff because we thought it was cool it was all about the promise it was all about the shiny future was all about the free flow of information but there was also a certain idealism behind it i think that a company like google we have the potential to make very big differences made big positive differences in the world and i think we also have an obligation as a consequence of that facebook and google started with a great idea and great ideals unfortunately there was also a very dark side the goal though which was it should make it our life where it is but certainly there is a real community that existed realized. google

handles sixty five percent of all internet search in the u.s. and even more overseas. in the early days google was just a search engine all the search engine was initially was an index to what's on the internet the internet was pretty small back then they had a better index than other indexes they were around theirs was not the first search engine page famously said that the point of google to get people on to google and off of google out into the open web as quickly as possible and largely they were really successful about that the success of google led to in many ways the success of the open web in this explosive growth in startups and innovation during that period google had developed this incredible technology called page rank unveiling what was known in the back row about algorithm and it was. it's leaps and bounds

ahead of services like yahoo altavista and quickly became the clear winner in the space just from a technology basis and what page does is it spiders around the internet instead of being a directory service like yahoo was it's taking pictures of web pages and analyzing the links between the web pages and using them to make some assumptions about relevance and so if you're looking for some history of abraham lincoln and there's a bunch of links to process the web pointing to a particular site that must mean that this page is the quote unquote most relevant . now they had to figure out how do we make money off this we've got an index how do we make money well they figure out how to do that it's pretty simple all you do is track people searches your search history has a very very informative that's going to tell someone immediately whether you're republican or democrat whether you like one breakfast cereal versus another that's going to tell you whether you're gay or straight it's going to tell you thousands

of things about a person over time because they can see what websites you're going to and where do they go did they go to porn site they go to a shopping site did they do web site looking up how to make bombs this information essentially are building blocks they are constructing a profile of you and that profile is real it's detailed it's granular and it never goes away you go has more than doubled its propaganda last year selling internet advertising with microsoft and yahoo gunning for its search engine users' fortunes can quickly change. this was really the first large scale mechanism for targeted advertising for example i want to sell umbrellas well who can tell you exactly you know who is looking for umbrellas because they have your search history they know so they could hook up the umbrella makers with people's. ching for

umbrellas basically send you have targeted ads and that is where google gets more than a ninety percent of its revenue. if you look at how they structured the company it was structured so that the founders of the company would always have controlling shares and would always determine the direction in the future of the company anybody else who bought into the company was simply along for the ride in terms of making money so there was this idealism that they said motivated them and their corporate motto was. don't be evil. when the don't be evil slogan came up it was during a meeting i think in two thousand and three if i recall right people are trying to say what are google's values and one of the engineers who was invited to this meeting said we could just sum it all up by just saying don't be evil what's so interesting about this term that they were not going to be evil is they never defined what evil was a neighbor even give us a sense of what it meant but people latched onto it and sort of adopted it and

trusted it because of course nobody wants to be associated with an evil company so people gave the term evil their own meaning even their home page indicates to you that you're not being manipulated and they sort of broadcast to you the idea that this was a clean simple reliable or nest interface and that the company that produced it wasn't overtly nefarious in its operations so there were no ads on the whole on the front page for example which was a big deal and so everybody in that initial phase of excitement of course was more concerned about exploring the possibilities of the technology then concerned about the potential costs of the technology it was always kind of a generous thing we're going to give you these great tools or not give you these things that you can use. and then google search this is so google was saying no actually we're going to keep your data and we're going to organize a society we know how to improve an optimized world. there are

a couple trends i think lead google off of its path of being the the place that just match people with the best information on the web and led them off into the internet and that was the birth of smartphones steve jobs unveiled the i phone in the rise of facebook and this notion that time spent on a site where users doing lots and lots of time on facebook became really important metrics that advertisers are paying attention to and so google's response was basically to deviate from that original eat those in becoming a place were they were trying to keep people on google so they very rapidly started to branch out into other areas they were getting a lot of information from people using the search engine but if people went directly to a website. that's bad because now google doesn't know that so they developed a browser which is now the most widely used to browse around the world chrome by

getting people to use chrome they were able now to collect information about every single web site you visited whether or not you were using their search engine but the course even that's not enough right because people do a lot of things now on their mobile devices on their computers without using their browser you want to know what people are doing even when they're not on line so google developed an operating system which is called android which mobile devices is the dominant operating system and android records what we are doing even when we are not on the line as soon as you connect to the internet android uploads to google a complete history of where you've been that day among many other things it's a progression of surveillance that google has been engaged in since the beginning. when google develops another tool for us to use and they're doing it not to make our lives easier they're doing it to get another source of him. from ation about us

these are all free services but obviously they're not because huge complicated machines aren't free your interaction with them is governed so that it will generate revenue. and that's what google docs is and that's what new maps is in literally now more than one hundred different platforms that google controls companies that use the surveillance business model the two biggest being google and facebook don't sell you anything. they sell you we are the product that will google will tell you is we're very transparent there's a user agreement everybody knows that if you're going to search on google and we're going to give you access to this free information we need to get paid so we're going to take your data the problem is most people don't believe or don't want to believe that that data is going to be used to manipulate you.

americans all of its own. senses and the notion that somebody playing games that the margins of the election could dictate even influenced the outcome is frankly frankly absurd if we would have been fair russia was the stage soon as a stage has been fall or back in influencing the domestic politics of other countries. than russia. tethers financials i don't buy i've caught up with teachers. face almost five. assessment by x. in the future. my son

doing drugs my nephew was still in drugs my sister just with doing drugs it was like an epidemic of drug abuse america's public enemy number one in the united states is. sort of going after the users in the prison population who are we started treating sick people people who are addicted to these drugs like criminals while i was on the hill. with the war on drugs. there are countless numbers of people who are in prison for. this for minor minor offenders in the drug trade it's a lot watching your children grow up and miss you in waves and say by daddy as you're walking out of it this is just it doesn't get easier.

the commonality between facebook and google even though they're different platforms is math they're driven by math and the ability to collect data you sign on you make a profile about yourself by answering some questions and then some information such as your concentration or major at school. contact information about phone numbers instant messaging screen anything you want to tell interests what books to a movie and most importantly who your friends are the founders of these companies were essentially mathematicians who understood that by collecting this information you not only could monetize it and sell it to advertisers but you could actually control and steer people or nudge people in the direction that you wanted them to go. to them basically comes up with how certain things should react so for example you give it some inputs be it in the case of google you would enter in a query a search phrase and. uncertain math will make decisions on what information should

be presented to you algorithms are used throughout the whole entire process in everyday life everything from search engines to how cars drive the variables you decide and when you have a human factor deciding what the variables are it's going to affect the outcome i want you to imagine walking into a room. control room with a bunch of people or hundred people hunched over a desk with little dials and that that control room will shape the thoughts and feelings of a billion people. this might sound like science fiction. but this actually exists right now today our ethical presuppositions are built into the software but are unethical presuppositions are built into the software as well so whatever it is that motivates google are going to be built right into the automated process is that sift our data i used to be in one of those controllers i was

a design at the cystic google where i studied how do you ethically fear people's thoughts because what we don't talk about is a handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today what google is essentially is a gigantic compression algorithm and what compression algorithm does is look at a very complex environment and simplifies it and that's what you want when you put a term into a search engine you want all the possibilities sifted so that you find the one that you can take action on essentially and so google simplifies the world and presents the simplification to you which is also what your perceptual systems do and so basically we're building a giant perceptual machine that's an intermediary between us in the complex world the problem with out is that whatever the assumptions are that google operates under are going to be the filter. that determine how the world is simplified and

presented. so when you want to find something a term a kerstin do you google egg it really fast no doubt about that are you getting to that answer to your question the algorithm that they use to show a search results it was written for the precise purpose of doing two things which make it inherently biased and those two things are number one filtering that is to say the algorithm has to look at all the different web pages it has in its index and it's got billions of them and it's going to make a selection lets say i type in what's the best dog food it has to look up all the dog foods it has in its database and all the websites associated with those dog foods that's the filtering but then it's got to put them into an order and that's the ordering so the filtering is biased because why did it pick those websites instead of the other fourteen billion and then the ordering is biased because why

did it put purina first and some other companies second it would be use less for us unless it was biased that's precisely what we what we wanted to be biased so the problem comes in obviously when we're not talking about dog foods but we're talking about things like elections. running for president. because if we're asking questions about issues like immigration or about candidates well again that algorithm is going to do those two things it's going to do the filtering so it's going to do some selecting from among billions of web pages and then it's going to put them into an order it will always favor one dog food over another. one on one music service over another one comparative shopping service over another. and one candidate over another the

search algorithm is made up of several hundred signals that we try to put together to serve the best results for each user just last year we launched a work under changes to a relative at them so by some counts we change over to out of it i'm almost every day almost twice so we're now it's possible that they're using unbiased algorithms but they're not using unbiased algorithms to do things like search for an acceptable content on twitter on you tube and on facebook those aren't unbiased at all they're built specifically to filter out whatever's bad. what happens is the best technical people with the biggest computers with the best benefits to those computers become more empowered than the others and a great example of that is a company like google which for the most part is just scraping the same internet the same did any of us can access and yet is able to build this huge business of directing what links we see in front of us which is an incredible influence on the world by having the bigger computers the better scientists and more access.

we feel like we are on the cutting edge of what societies grappling with that any given time where do you draw the line of freedom of speech and so on the question precisely is what's good and bad according to whose judgement and that's especially relevant given that these systems serve a filtering purpose there are denying or allowing us access to information before we see and think so we don't even know what's going on behind the scenes the people who are designing these systems are building a gigantic unconscious mind that will filter the world for us and it's increasingly going to be tuned to our desires in a manner that will benefit the purposes of the people who are building the machine . what these algorithms basically do is they create bubbles for ourselves because the algorithm learns this is what peter schweitzer is interested in and what do. it

gives me when i go online it gives me more of myself i mean it's narraway in your vision and it's finally my vision it's leading me to a view of the world and it may not be facebook's view of the world but it's the view of the world that will make facebook the most money they're attempting to addict us and they're addicting us on the basis of data the problem with that is that you only see what you already know and that's not a good thing because you also need to see what you don't know because otherwise you can learn. facebook this morning is defending itself against accusations of political bias an article posted monday on a tech news site gizmodo said facebook workers suppress conservative leaning news stories in its trending section and that creates a terrible dynamic when it comes to the consumption of information and news because it leads us to only see the world in a very very small and narrow way it makes us easier to control and easier to be manipulated. the.

i think what's so troubling about google and facebook is you don't know what you don't know and while the internet provides a lot of openness in the sense that you have access to all this information the fact of the matter is you have basically two gatekeepers facebook and google which control what we have access to news organizations have to be prepared that their home pages are less important people are using they're using facebook. they're using twitter as their own those. are their portals world of information google and facebook started out as the internet companies and it has changed they morphed into media companies they've morphed into telecommunications providers and at least in the u.s. media companies are regulated newspapers are regulated telecommunications providers are regulated internet companies social media companies like google and. or not so

if the roles have changed studies show now that individuals expect the news to find them. and we turn to them and the number one thing that we threw out with our company with that money and aren't interested in it they are that doesn't make anything and every month to be informed that their baby and you need to create a different format if it and their lives. are so much. effect is misinformation and it's packaged very well and it looks the same when you. page we can lose. so much of what we've gained in terms of the kind of democratic to see them as a market economy. both google and facebook announced they are updating their company policies to ban fake news sites from using their advertising networks both tech giants have come under scrutiny in recent weeks for presenting fake news during a presidential election all fake news is not even really

a description of anything anymore it's a weapon it gets tossed around if there is a real news story that somebody doesn't like they just dismiss it as fake news it's kind of a way of trying to get it to go away and it's being misused is being used as a way to dismiss actual factual evidence that something is happening right now in the news you'll see a lot of concern with so fake news stories there are three reasons why we should not worry about fake news stories fake news is come headed to you can place your fake news stories about me and i can place my fake news stories about you is completely competitive there are always been fake news stories there always been big t.v. commercials and big billboards that his always existed and always will second is that you can see them they're visible you can actually see them with your eyeballs because you can see them that means you can weigh in. on them you also know that

there's a human element because usually there's a name of an author on the fake news stories you know you can decide just to ignore them. generally speaking most news stories but like most advertisements are not actually read by anyone so you put them in front of someone's eyeballs and people just kind of skip right over them the third reason why fake news stories are not really an issues is because of something called confirmation bias we pay attention to and actually believe things if they support what we already believe so if you see a fake news story that says hillary clinton is the devil but you love hillary clinton you're not going to buy it you're going to say that's ridiculous on the other hand if you happen to think hillary clinton is the devil you're going to go yes i knew that so you don't really change people's opinions with fake news stories you know you you support believes that people are ready have the real problem is these new

forms of influence that number one are not competitive number two people can't see and number three are not subject to confirmation bias if you can't see something confirmation bias can't kick in so we're in a world right now in which our opinions beliefs attitudes voting preferences purchases are all being pushed one way or another every single day by forces that we cannot see. the real problem of manipulation of news and information is secret it's what google and facebook are doing on a regular basis by suppressing stories like steering us towards other stories rather than the stories we're actually seeking and that's the real manipulation that's going on they can use is the shiny object they want us to shake that really isn't relevant to the problems we're facing today we use google so extensively. the

average person does you know multiple queries per day and some more than others and over time you don't realize that it's impacting you and we already know that people are not necessarily fact checking on their own they they rely on the media company say rely on mainstream media they rely on companies like google to give them answers about the world without necessarily looking at is that true facebook has become the number one source of news for americans will she would if they were biasing the news toward one cause or another one candidate or another would we have any way of knowing their course not. for good only if it also is the rule book. for the. simpers you did.

know you were among the group of us from the. movie did well yeah except you're then he says the pull. the the security. oh. well sancho. we're going to do the. most. and this was the last stop that the push and i would.

be neat politically falls needs to come. from. but ideally. been. giving political guidance to the process so basically what i'm waiting for an alter politically. ideally. from the moment you feel. this is a period of sort of little. it's just pushed but it. really did it was and i go to the. look. losing is it's a feeling. of a good enough that all you want to go to the brim that i'm interested in said.

enough well it was put through a list a. kind of what used to which i don't get down on but i come. here to you. your money you know you do you. know led you some i looked up a mood subash i did in the clue which are called. ah .

the big. three of trying to save face and to avoid looking ridiculous they sentenced to two eight six months just to show she is guilty of something president putin's eighteen month jail sentence handed to maria boots and for a feeling to register as a foreign agent as an attempt by washington to save face we've spoken to her lawyer . not of maria maria's activities in the us were illegal. in and of themselves but she got caught up in this and she rushes hysteria. also ahead on the program this hour french media outlets joining forces to condemn the country's intelligence service for summoning journalists.