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BuzzFeed Writer: Why Can’t Google, Facebook Get a Grip on Fake News?

February 24, 2018
 Staff

WRITER

What’s going on?

Humans haven’t been replaced by machines yet in at least one area: spotting news hoaxes. BuzzFeed senior writer Charlie Warzel joined Glenn and Stu today to talk about the tech world’s fake news problem and urge lawmakers to sit up and take notice of developing technology before it gets completely out of hand.

Give me the quick version:

After the tragic shooting in Florida last week, journalists and researchers noticed dozens of hoaxes that were going viral; impersonations of journalists; and posts and videos that claimed the victims were actors. All of those things violate the rules for platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Parkland marked the third time in four months that these tech companies had slipped up by allowing total misinformation about tragedies to be shared freely on their platforms, BuzzFeed reported. Why can’t they seem to do better?

Politicians need to wake up.

As technology advances, it’s getting more and more difficult to know what’s real and what’s fake. Warzel urged lawmakers to put in “safeguards” now before obscure Reddit threads become mainstream misinformation. How will we trust our eyes and ears when video and audio can be easily faked?

This article provided courtesy of TheBlaze.

GLENN: Every once in a while, we need to take a step back. Everybody right now is screaming, fake news, fake news. Both sides are doing it, and in some ways, both sides are right.

We're getting to a place that soon, you're not going to be able to believe your eyes and ears. And people don't really realize this. There's a guy named Aviv Ovadya. He predicted the fake news explosion. And now he's saying, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's just the beginning. That's nothing compared to what's on the recent or -- or near horizon.

STU: Yeah. Infopocalypse, potentially. And there's a great story about this in Buzzfeed from Charlie Warzel. It's a story about what's coming next.

Charlie Warzel is a reporter for Buzzfeed. Also writes something -- one of my favorite things to read, which because it's about Infowars and sort of that conspiracy media. And it's -- his last name is Warzel. It's called InfoWarzel, which is the greatest name of all time. It's a newsletter, and it's really worth your attention as well. He joins us now from Montana, Charlie, is that where you are?

CHARLIE: That's right. Missoula, Montana. Thanks for having me.

GLENN: You bet.

So, Charlie, I can't seem to get people to really get their arms around the idea that soon, we're not going to even know what reality is, and we don't -- we won't care.

JORDAN: Well, it's -- it's complicated, to some extent. But the best way that I can describe it is that these sort of hall of mirrors that we're sort of experiencing online right now. As you guys were saying earlier, everyone is sort of calling fake news with -- with sort of bad actors, acting in bad faith, putting out, you know, propaganda and content that's designed to manipulate. That isn't true.

All those things that we see, you know, in our Facebook feeds, in Twitter right now.

It's all going to potentially get far worse because the technology is going to allow it to come from people that perhaps we know.

So the -- you know, the -- the fake news that you're seeing, the misinformation, the propaganda, it could start coming from, you know, a loved one. You know, you could start getting emails from them, telling you things that didn't happen that were generated algorithmically. So it's not really that something new is going to happen. It's that everything happening right now, all this unrest, discord, confusion, and difficulty, sort of parsing reality, is going to become so much more sophisticated because of technology, that hasn't even been invented yet.

GLENN: What do you mean that you're going to get -- that you'll get something from your loved ones?

CHARLIE: Sure. So Aviv, the researcher who I spoke with, alongside many others who are doing, you know, really great work, sort of understanding how these platforms work. And the technology that's on the horizon. Aviv has this -- this term. And it's called laser fishing. So regular fishing, or spearphishing is when you maybe get a link from something -- an email address that is a couple characters off from somebody you know. And it's saying, hey, click this link. And then that link asks you for, you know, your password information. It's sort of a classic hacker trick. It's pretty low-tech.

This would sort of be something that would happen. Laser fishing is using AI and sort of this artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand things about you, understand the people that you talk to.

The conversation you have across social media with other people. Mine all that information. And then use it to manipulate you. So instead of getting an email from someone who -- who sounds like they could be somebody you own, the email is going to come from ostensibly someone you know, and it's going to have information that's pertinent to you. Information that you were perhaps expecting to hear from. So you're so much more likely to believe this information. And then offer things up.

You know, there's a lot of people -- Nigerian princes on the internet who are asking for money. But what if that person is your brother. And your brother says that he had a car accident. And he's stuck and needs to repair his car. Because you were having a conversation about, you know, cars and money or something like that along the line.

So this is -- being able to manipulate people, at the click of a mouse or a button, in this -- in this artificial intelligence way. And I think that -- I think that we're -- we're falling for the low-tech, low-fi stuff right now. So it's going to be hard to imagine, you know, how we can get up to speed on the other stuff.

STU: And the future of this, Charlie, goes even further than just say an email. It could be even audio or video coming from the people that you know convincing you to do something that winds up completely burning you.

CHARLIE: Absolutely. And I think you can see this not just in people asking for money, or you know, asking you for information. But this can be -- this can be used to manipulate government and diplomacy.

GLENN: Uh-huh.

CHARLIE: It's not hard to envision -- and many people sort of have already been talking about this. But it's not hard to envision any lawmaker has hundreds of hours of footage on themselves, either audio or video on the internet. The machine learning programs can take that. Can absorb it. And then what they can -- what they can do with that is -- is produce very hard -- hard to verify and real-looking video of people saying anything.

So, you know, you could have a video of Donald Trump potentially down the line, really antagonizing in -- in an aggressive way, North Korea.

And the stakes of that get higher and higher as the reaction times are -- are shorter. And people have to respond.

So you could really escalate, you know, political and -- and, you know, diplomatic tensions using this kind of technology.

GLENN: So I was talking about this, at the beginning of the year. And I laid out just some crazy predictions. And one of them was, if be the not this election of 2018, by 2020, this will be used in an effective way. And we may not know about it until after the election. But we are that close to this kind of stuff being used. Would you agree with that?

CHARLIE: Well, I think with the artificial intelligence stuff, with the video and audio manipulation, we may be a little further down the line from that. Because the real worry is not just some incredibly sophisticated programmer or one-off type person is going to be able to use this, who has, you know, access -- proprietary technology.

The real thing is when it becomes democratized, when you can manipulate -- when anyone with two or three hours of research on the internet, can do this.

And that, I think we're a little bit further off, but not too far. There are some -- some forums.

There's a forum on the site Reddit, which is called deepfakes. And it is where people are manipulating video right now.

Some of it is awful. Some of it is pornographic and very disturbing. But others are just -- you can go and look for yourself, are funny. People putting Nicholas Cage's face on Arnold Schwarzenegger.

GLENN: I don't know why Nicholas Cage is this guy. But his face is almost on everybody.

(laughter)

CHARLIE: He's an internet sensation.

GLENN: Yeah, he is.

CHARLIE: But, you know, it speaks to -- when people are kind of playing around with this, having fun with it, doing it in their spare time because it's entertaining, that is sort of a harbinger of something that is sort of scary, which you could in two or three hours, figure out how to do this yourself.

I think we're a little further than -- I think 2020, who knows. But it's definitely coming.

GLENN: I hope you're right.

Tell me a little bit about what Aviv talks about and describes as reality apathy.

CHARLIE: Sure.

It's basically the combination of all of this that we're talking about. Which is these sophisticated technological tools to sort of distort what's real and what's not. To the point where you become overwhelmed by the idea of all -- say you're being laser fished by, you know, 20 people. And when you go online and try to click a news link, you're not sure where the source is coming from, whether it's something you can trust, whether it's something you're not.

You're just besieged by what you believe is misinformation, but you can't even tell. So you start to disengage.

You know, if your inbox is something where you don't know what you're getting, what's real or what's not, you're going to maybe give up. And that is sort of -- that works also with -- with diplomacy. If people start, you know, spoofing calls to Congress, to lobby their lawmakers about some political issue, if that happens in a -- in a spoofing way so much that people can't get through on the lines, they're going to stop participating in -- in democracy, in that particular way. They might, you know, stop going online and sharing their own opinions or feel unsafe. They might just say, you know what, the news, it's just not worth it for me. That's scary.

GLENN: But going the other way as well, if you see a bunch of stuff that is fake and you don't know what to believe, somebody in power could actually be doing some really bad stuff. And nobody would know. Nobody would pay attention. They would say, well, that's just fake. Because that's what the politician would say.

CHARLIE: Yeah, an informed citizenry is a cornerstone of democracy.

GLENN: So how do we inform ourselves, going forward? Who is standing against this? How do we protect -- I mean, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. What do we do?

CHARLIE: Well, I think -- this is why I wanted to highlight Aviv's work. And, you know, I -- he's becoming labeled as sort of the person who called the misinformation fake news crisis before it became a thing. He's one of many. There are -- there are, you know, dozens of researchers like this, who are lobbying tech companies, thinking about this, on sort of the vanguard of this movement.

And I think journalists, news organizations, highlighting these people's work, giving them a platform to talk about this, is the first step. The second step is really, you know, putting pressure on these technology companies. And not just Facebook or Google or Twitter. But, you know, the hardware makers. People like Adobe, who -- people like potentially Apple. Companies that are starting -- that are going to be making this audio visual technology. And making them sort of understand that innovation is okay.

But we have to learn our lessons from, you know, this whole fake news situation that we're dealing with right now. And build this technology responsibly, with all of these sort of externalities baked in, and understand what we can -- that these things can be abused. So let's put in the safeguards now, instead of later.

STU: I think you could see tech companies at times, be a little bit absorbed by self-interest. But they're not nefarious actors, right?

My -- my issue with this, when I try to find optimism in the future here, Charlie, is eventually state actors. Hacker groups. Someone with actual nefarious intent, that you can't go and lobby and you don't have people with ethics trying to deal with are going to get control of this stuff and do things that are going to be really harmful and maybe irreversible.

CHARLIE: I think that is potentially true. I mean, all of this -- it's difficult. Because we're in speculation territory. It's difficult as a journalist, writing about this about going too far. You know, scaring people too much. But, I mean, I think what this -- what the last 18 months of sort of information crisis world that we're in, should be teaching us right now. Is that this is everyone's problem. Law makers, you know, need to get smart on this stuff quick. They need to, you know, be putting pressure on --

GLENN: Not going to happen.

CHARLIE: And I think they need to spend time, you know, really understanding this technology --

GLENN: Yes.

CHARLIE: -- themselves. And getting the government ready. There's not a lot of task forces here, to combat computational propaganda or misinformation.

GLENN: Charlie, look how we're dealing with Russia. Everybody is talking about, oh, well, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton. Russia. Look at what Russia is doing. We can get to the rest of that and, you know, if somebody did something, they should go to jail. But we're missing the point, that Russia has come in and -- and announced, in advance, what they were going to do. And they did it.

CHARLIE: I think that what -- state-sponsored actors, all of this -- it's clearly manipulatable by them. And I think that we -- I think that that's certainly one -- one piece of the puzzle. I think that -- I think that this technology, we've spent so long thinking that this technology is a -- a universal positive. That there's no negative externalities to connecting the world.

And I think that that is, you know -- that's a naive look at this. And I think that we need to sort of change the way that we message about this technology, that it's just as much a force for -- for evil, potentially. As it is a force for good. And for, you know, the free circulation of information. So I think some of it just has to do with our mindset with this. This is -- you know, a new innovation is not good just by definition.

GLENN: Right.

CHARLIE: You have to earn that.

GLENN: Charlie, I had been concerned about this for a very long time. I was really glad to see your article and the fact that it was on Buzzfeed and people are reading it. And I'd love to stay in touch with you and have you on the program again, as we follow this story. Thank you very much, Charlie.

CHARLIE: Thanks for having me.

(music)

STU: Leave you with one last quote from Aviv Ovadya, the expert Charlie talked to: Alarmism can be good. You should be alarmist about this stuff. We are so screwed, it's beyond what most of us can imagine.

I mean, jeez. It's scary. Charlie Warzel tweeted from @worldofStu. But he's @CWarzel on Twitter. You can get his work on Buzzfeed. It's really interesting stuff. He dives into a lot of weird worlds. And it's really compelling.

Biden backs yet another criminal justice policy with disastrous consequences

The number of people serving life sentences now exceeds the entire prison population in 1970, according to newly-released data from the Sentencing Project. The continued growth of life sentences is largely the result of "tough on crime" policies pushed by legislators in the 1990s, including presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Biden has since apologized for backing those types of policies, but it seems he has yet to learn his lesson. Indeed, Biden is backing yet another criminal justice policy with disastrous consequences—mandatory drug treatment for all drug offenders.

Proponents of this policy argue that forced drug treatment will reduce drug usage and recidivism and save lives. But the evidence simply isn't on their side. Mandatory treatment isn't just patently unethical, it's also ineffective—and dangerous.

Many well-meaning people view mandatory treatment as a positive alternative to incarceration. But there's a reason that mandatory treatment is also known as "compulsory confinement." As author Maya Schenwar asks in The Guardian, "If shepherding live human bodies off to prison to isolate and manipulate them without their permission isn't ethical, why is shipping those bodies off to compulsory rehab an acceptable alternative?" Compulsory treatment isn't an alternative to incarceration. It is incarceration.

Compulsory treatment is also arguably a breach of international human rights agreements and ethical standards. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have made it clear that the standards of ethical treatment also apply to the treatment of drug dependence—standards that include the right to autonomy and self-determination. Indeed, according to UNODC, "people who use or are dependent on drugs do not automatically lack the capacity to consent to treatment...consent of the patient should be obtained before any treatment intervention." Forced treatment violates a person's right to be free from non-consensual medical treatment.

It's a useless endeavor, anyway, because studies have shown that it doesn't improve outcomes in reducing drug use and criminal recidivism. A review of nine studies, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, failed to find sufficient evidence that compulsory drug treatment approaches are effective. The results didn't suggest improved outcomes in reducing drug use among drug-dependent individuals enrolled in compulsory treatment. However, some studies did suggest potential harm.

According to one study, 33% of compulsorily-treated participants were reincarcerated, compared to a mere 5% of the non-treatment sample population. Moreover, rates of post-release illicit drug use were higher among those who received compulsory treatment. Even worse, a 2016 report from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health found that people who received involuntary treatment were more than twice as likely to die of an opioid-related overdose than those with a history of only voluntary treatment.

These findings echo studies published in medical journals like Addiction and BMJ. A study in Addiction found that involuntary drug treatment was a risk factor for a non-fatal drug overdose. Similarly, a study in BMJ found that patients who successfully completed inpatient detoxification were more likely than other patients to die within a year. The high rate of overdose deaths by people previously involuntarily treated is likely because most people who are taken involuntarily aren't ready to stop using drugs, authors of the Addiction study reported. That makes sense. People who aren't ready to get clean will likely use again when they are released. For them, the only post-treatment difference will be lower tolerance, thanks to forced detoxification and abstinence. Indeed, a loss of tolerance, combined with the lack of a desire to stop using drugs, likely puts compulsorily-treated patients at a higher risk of overdose.

The UNODC agrees. In their words, compulsory treatment is "expensive, not cost-effective, and neither benefits the individual nor the community." So, then, why would we even try?

Biden is right to look for ways to combat addiction and drug crime outside of the criminal justice system. But forced drug treatment for all drug offenders is a flawed, unethical policy, with deadly consequences. If the goal is to help people and reduce harm, then there are plenty of ways to get there. Mandatory treatment isn't one of them.

Lindsay Marie is a policy analyst for the Lone Star Policy Institute, an independent think tank that promotes freedom and prosperity for all Texans. You can follow her on Twitter @LindsayMarieLP.

BOMBSHELL: 'It wasn't just Hunter,' Rudy Giuliani says Joe Biden was target of Ukraine corruption investigation — and he has the evidence to prove it

President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani joined Glenn Beck on Tuesday's radio program discuss the Senate's ongoing investigation into former vice president Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, and reveal new bombshell documents he's currently releasing.

Giuliani told Glenn he has evidence of "very, very serious crime at the highest levels of government," that the "corrupt media" is doing everything in their power to discredit.

He also dropped some major, previously unreported news: not only was Hunter Biden under investigation in 2016, when then-Vice President Biden "forced" the firing of Ukraine's prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, but so was the vice president himself.

"Shokin can prove he was investigating Biden and his son. And I now have the prosecutorial documents that show, all during that period of time, not only was Hunter Biden under investigation -- Joe Biden was under investigation," Giuliani explained. "It wasn't just Hunter."

Watch this clip to get a rundown of everything Giuliani has uncovered so far.

Use code GLENN to save $10 on one year of BlazeTV.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.

Revealing Bernie’s dark side — one 1980s quote at a time

For most Americans, the 1980s was marked by big hair, epic lightsaber battles, and school-skipping Ferris Bueller dancing his way into the hearts of millions.

But for Bernie Sanders — who, by the way, was at that time the oldest-looking 40-year-old in human history — the 1980s was a period of important personal milestones.

Prior to his successful 1980 campaign to become mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders was mostly known around the Green Mountain State as a crazy, wildly idealistic socialist. (Think Karl Marx meets Don Quixote.) But everything started to change for Sanders when he became famous—or, in the eyes of many, notorious—for being "America's socialist mayor."

As mayor, Sanders' radical ideas were finally given the attention he had always craved but couldn't manage to capture. This makes this period of his career particularly interesting to study. Unlike today, the Bernie Sanders of the 1980s wasn't concerned with winning over an entire nation — just the wave of far-left New York City exiles that flooded Vermont in the 1960s and 1970s — and he was much more willing to openly align himself with local and national socialist and communist parties.


www.youtube.com


Over the past few weeks, I have been reading news reports of Sanders recorded in the 1980s — because, you know, that's how guys like me spend their Saturday nights — and what I've found is pretty remarkable.

For starters, Sanders had (during the height of the Soviet Union) a very cozy relationship with people who openly advocated for Marxism and communism. He was an elector for the Socialist Workers Party and promoted the party's presidential candidates in 1980 and 1984.

To say the Socialist Workers Party was radical would be a tremendous understatement. It was widely known SWP was a communist organization mostly dedicated to the teachings of Marx and Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution.

Among other radical things I've discovered in interviews Sanders conducted with the SWP's newspaper — appropriately named The Militant (seriously, you can't make this stuff up) — is a statement by Sanders published in June 1981 suggesting that some police departments "are dominated by fascists and Nazis," a comment that is just now being rediscovered for the first time in decades.

In 1980, Sanders lauded the Socialist Workers Party's "continued defense of the Cuban revolution." And later in the 1980s, Sanders reportedly endorsed a collection of speeches by the socialist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, even though there had been widespread media reports of the Sandinistas' many human rights violations prior to Sanders' endorsement, including "restrictions on free movement; torture; denial of due process; lack of freedom of thought, conscience and religion; denial of the right of association and of free labor unions."

Sanders also traveled to Nicaragua and met with socialist President Daniel Ortega. He later called the trip a "profoundly emotional experience."

Sanders also traveled to Nicaragua and met with socialist President Daniel Ortega. He later called the trip a "profoundly emotional experience."

Comrade Bernie's disturbing Marxist past, which is far more extensive than what can be covered in this short article, shouldn't be treated as a mere historical footnote. It clearly illustrates that Sanders' brand of "democratic socialism" is much more than a $15 minimum wage and calls for single-payer health care. It's full of Marxist philosophy, radical revolutionary thinking, anti-police rhetoric, and even support for authoritarian governments.

Millions of Americans have been tricked into thinking Sanders isn't the radical communist the historical record — and even Sanders' own words — clearly show that he is. But the deeper I have dug into Comrade Bernie's past, the more evident it has become that his thinking is much darker and more dangerous and twisted than many of his followers ever imagined.

Tomorrow night, don't miss Glenn Beck's special exposing the radicals who are running Bernie Sanders' campaign. From top to bottom, his campaign is staffed with hard-left extremists who are eager to burn down the system. The threat to our constitution is very real from Bernie's team, and it's unlike anything we've ever seen before in a U.S. election. Join Glenn on Wednesday, at 9 PM Eastern on BlazeTV's YouTube page, and on BlazeTV.com. And just in case you miss it live, the only way to catch all of Glenn's specials on-demand is by subscribing to Blaze TV.

Justin Haskins (Jhaskins@heartland.org) is editorial director of The Heartland Institute and editor-in-chief of StoppingSocialism.com.

Candace Owens blasts leftist cancel culture: 'Godless', 'societal atom bomb'

Candace Owens, BLEXIT founder and author of the upcoming book, "Blackout," joined Glenn Beck on Friday's GlennTV for an exclusive interview. available only to BlazeTV subscribers.

Candace dropped a few truth-bombs about the progressive movement and what's happening to the Democratic Party. She said people are practically running away from the left due to their incessant push to dig up dirt on anybody who disagrees with their radical ideology. She explained how -- like China and its "social credit score" -- the left is shaping America into its own nightmarish episode of "Black Mirror."

"This game of making sure that everyone is politically correct is a societal atom bomb. There are no survivors. There's no one that is perfect," Candace said. "The idea that humanity can be perfect is Godless. If you accept that there is something greater than us, then you accept that we a flawed. To be human is to be flawed."

Enjoy this clip from the full episode below:

youtu.be


BlazeTV subscribers can watch the full interview on BlazeTV.com. Use code GLENN to save $10 off one year of your subscription.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.