We all know about the problems of fake news and the Internet, and many people are worried about it. But is it possible that the Internet, on balance is better for the dissemination of truth. What does this have to do with Barbar Streisand's house, or Soviet agriculture, or Kenyan elections or Twitter revolutions. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about truth and misinformation and the Internet. So in the last episode I discussed the issue of truth, which has been at the center of the dialogue about politics, about social media, about journalism for many years now. And in twenty sixteen, a panel of experts was interviewed and they said one of the grand challenges was the issue of truth on the Internet. So that's what we're going to talk about today. And twenty sixteen also happened to be the year that the term post truth was officially introduced to the Oxford English Dictionary. So what does post truth mean? It was defined as quote denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Now, the fact that this got enenthrined by lexicographers at no less of publication than the Oxford English Dictionary seemed to clinch the argument that this was indeed a new phenomenon. But to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history, this is a little strange. It is, to my mind, the strangest romanticization to believe, for a second, that people in earlier generations, in earlier centuries millennia, did not predicate their actions on emotion and personal belief. Now, in the last episode, I mentioned just a smattering of events that defined the twentieth century, like Nazism in Germany and communism in China and the USSR and fascism in Italy, and the massacre of the Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda and the Kame Rouge in Cambodia and the rape of Nanking by the Japanese and on and on. And the thing to notice is that this was all in the last century, mere decades ago, And this was all pre internet drop of fuel for these movements, which collectively killed probably one hundred million people. Every drop of the fuel was not driven by facts, but instead emotion and personal belief. You don't get a Hutu to pick up a machete against a Tutsi based on provable assertions. You get him all worked up over emotionality. You don't get a Chinese student to murder her professor in the Cultural Revolution with some factual argument. You do this by convincing her that this little red book is the greatest thing she can aspire to. You don't ever get a young man to murder his neighbor based on a provable scientific point, but instead by emotion. So it's not only an illusion, but it's a dellusion to believe that people used to operate on the facts. Although I'm pointing to the twentieth century to remind us that this was all happening just yesterday, we only need to take a ten thousand foot view of the centuries before to see how driven the world has always been by emotion and personal belief over facts. Just consider the European Wars of Religion, also known as the Wars of Reformation, in which through the sixteenth and seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants murdered one another. In just one piece of that war, called the Thirty Years War. It's estimated that eight million people died. Now, about two thirds of the world is not Christian, so most people can't even see the difference between Catholics and Protestants and those millions of deaths, all that human suffering. It wasn't based on facts and truth, it was based on emotion and personal belief. This is similar to the bloody geopolitically defining wars between the Shia and the Sunni Muslims. If you don't know the difference between Shia and Sunni, it stems from a debate over succession after the prophet Mohammad died. Some felt the leadership torch should pass two qualified candidates, and others thought it should only go through Mohammad's bloodline. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is Sunni, Iran is Shia, and they can't get along. And these competing views of succession have been in conflict for fourteen hundred years and provides a lot of the explosive fuel in the Middle East. You've got Syrian civil war over these lines. You've got Iraq fracturing over this divide. You've got growing fissures in a number of Gulf states. So if you happen to be taking up arms in this battle between Sunni and Shia, perhaps you come up with a story to tell yourself. This is based in fact and not base based on personal beliefs. There's a factual and correct answer to the question of succession from a prophet, and it's mysterious to you why other people can't see it as clearly as you can, and for that matter, why the overwhelming majority of the world doesn't even understand what you're arguing about. Now. I'm not intending to criticize anyone's beliefs here, but I am only intending to point out that it is hallucinatory to believe that society used to operate on facts, and then starting in twenty sixteen or so, we stopped basing our behaviors on facts and sunk into personal beliefs. This idea is so goofy. In fact, I saw the Economist tweet some years ago on how we're entering a post truth world, and a commenter to that tweet wrote, why didn't you see this coming years ago? And he cited what he thought were the obvious main causes. He said, low basic education and lousy media. So his argument was that given bad education and bad media, how could we expect otherwise but to evolve into a cauldron of disinformation. But of course, our system and reach of education is better than it has ever been in the history of the world. Around the entire globe, we've seen increased government spending on education. We've seen increased access to education for girls and women. We've seen improved quality of education everywhere. I look these stats up recently. In eighteen twenty, only seventeen percent of the population got even a basic education. That's less than one in five people. By twenty twenty the number was over eighty six percent, so it's almost nine out of ten people worldwide. This is an incredible change in two hundred years, and it just keeps going up. And this is mostly for reasons of societies realizing the importance of education, but also the helps enormously because it translates to access. So anyway education has improved. It's the number of kids in school, how long they stay in school, the quality of the schooling, all that has been going up, and this, of course is directly correlated with reduced poverty and increased economic growth for a country and increased social stability. If you're interested in these sorts of statistics, by the way, you should read The Better Angels of Our Nature by my colleague Stephen Pinker, who for some reason is one of the few people making the clear statistical argument about the massive improvements in the world. So let me return to this guy on Twitter who said we should have seen post truth coming in twenty sixteen because of our terrible education. His argument clearly means something emotional to him, but he doesn't have a leg to stand on factually. And his second point was about lousy media. Now us that in the last episode, So I'm not going to spend too much time with it here except to say that people seem to hold an illusion that media used to be very good. Even very smart people say things to me like, well, back in my day there were only two or three news stations and we got all our news in the same place. But as I argued in great detail in the last episode, the real story is much more nuanced. People have always lived in their echo chambers and gotten their opinions from their friends and their neighbors and their family and their culture. And of course, aside from the news stations, there were newspapers of every stripe, and magazines of any political orientation, and pamphlets that would show up in your mailbox that could have the most extreme views imaginable. So there's nothing new about receiving misinformation or disinformation. So remember that if we're asking the question of whether something has degree rated about truthtelling, really try to view history through this lens of the question, did people used to tell the truth more than they do now? Now, what I've set the table with so far is that there's nothing new about not telling the truth, and about swimming in the pool of our own beliefs and functioning in our own echo chambers and taking up arms against our neighbors who believe differently. But I want to be super clear about something. By me pointing out that there's nothing new about misinformation, please don't take that as me saying that we shouldn't be fighting misinformation. We should fight it tooth and nail. We should constantly improve our society that way. That is our obligation to try to maximize truthtelling. But the reason for my historical rant is that it helps us sharpen our focus on the question of this episode, which is how much does the Internet have to do with disinformation? To what degree is that the Internet's fault that we see all sorts of misinformation and disinformation that is predicated on emotional and personal belief rather than facts. Has the Internet made things worse? The main arguments I hear about how the Internet has made things worse seem to depend on issues that have always been with us. First, people complain that on the Internet, a story gets magnified based more on the reaction it provokes than its truth value. The idea is that misinformation often comes packaged with clickbaity headlines in sensational stories that are designed to grab attention. This can make it more likely that people will share misinformation even if they're not sure that it's true, or perhaps they don't even believe that it's true. But again, note that this has always been the case. That's how we get which trials in the past because it may or may not be true, but I heard so and SO say it, and it's a story too good to repeat, so I'm going to pass that on. That's how we get McCarthyism, where people are blacklisted based on accusations that they are Communist sympathizers. That's how the Soviet Union gets tens of millions of political executions because of the story that so and so is not aligned with the party. Perhaps no meaningful evidence is presented, but the accusation is clickbaity and designed to get local attention, and it does. So. Let me give a different example of how the Internet can actually make truth a little harder to see, and that has to do with the issue of sock puppeting. This is setting up, let's say, a fake account to pretend that you're on the other side of some issue. Now, usually there's not a lot that you can do with this, but sometimes it can have a big effect. For example, when the United States withdrew all its troops from Afghanistan in twenty and twenty one, the Taliban just leveraged basic social media one to secure their takeover, which is on social media. They pretended to be the Allied forces withdrawing and they gave instructions to the population like, hey, everyone should evacuate this town now there's about to be a lot of bombing. And this way, when the Taliban rolled into these towns, there were many fewer people there to stand up and provide resistance. So what the Taliban had done is called sock puppeting. In other words, they had put their hand inside of the puppet and pretended to be somebody else doing the speaking. So, not surprisingly, truth can get complex on social media because social media is not always the right tool for the job for that. So these are the general kinds of concerns that scholars have about the Internet. But I want to present an argument that has gotten essentially zero airtime, which is whether it is a possibility that the Internet has made things better? Now, how you might say, could the Internet have made truth seeking better? Well, here's how it all has to do with information flow. For an analogy, think about arteries. For maximal health, you need unobstructed blood flow in your arteries, and in exactly this way, societies need the free flow of information. Things that block that flow can be fatal to a nation. And I'm going to give you several examples. So first, political censorship. This has been a familiar specter throughout the last century, with state approved news outlets ruling the press and airwaves in places like Romania or Cuba, or China or Iraq, among lots of others. So the official newspapers of the former Soviet Union had a complete lock on the news, and foreign newspapers were allowed only if they were published by communist parties with the approval of the Soviets, and censorship did not end with news stories. Copying machines were tightly controlled by the Soviets to prevent dissemination of self published books or magazines. Even weather reports were censored. In Nikolai Chichesku's Romania, certain temperature extremes translated into time off of work, so the weather reports were doctored so that these levels were not reached, and it was the same in the Soviet Union. Stalin doctored weather forecasts if they suggested that the sun would not shine on the day of celebration for the labor movement, and censorship reaches into every aspect of nations under control of dictators. In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, maps of Baghdad were not allowed to be printed lest some enemy of the state get a hold of a map and then they could decipher the street names for easy navigation. And the weather reports there weren't just doctored they were locked away as classified information. And I'll give you another example which demonstrates how not new some of our problems are. People are worried about deep fake photographs, which I'll talk about next week. Well, the Soviets were doing this over a century ago. They had a not so secret fondness for rewriting their national story on the fly, so they routinely edited photographs to remove people who had fallen out of favor with the party. I'll give you a famous example. There's a photo which proudly captures Lenin and other Soviet leaders in Red Square and Moscow in nineteen nineteen. So you can see Lenin and standing on his left, you see Leon Trotsky, and on Lenin's right is a man named Kamenev, and there's a bearded man two rows in front of Trotsky, a Bolshevik leader from Georgia. Okay, well, if you look at a release of this photo some years later, the official Soviet version of the photo, you see that after Leon Trotsky fell from party favor, he was airbrushed out of the photo. In the revised photograph, there's just an empty space where he used to be, and kamon f on the right has disappeared as well, and the bearded Bolshevik leader never existed in the photo either. I'll put this photo the before and after version on my website so you can check it out at eagleman dot com slash podcast, and I'll also show another photograph. There's Joseph Stalin and there's a man who is left named Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov was a ruthless, awful guy. He was the head of the secret police, the NKVD, and he spent years brutally purging enemies of the state, typically without evidence and often for personal reasons. But then in nineteen forty, Yezhov earned the same treatment that he'd been handing out. He was stripped and beaten and shot in the basement of an NKVD station. So Stalin wrapped up loose ends by deleting Yezhov from history by airbrushing him out of the photo. Now, not surprisingly, governments that are infamous for blocking information flow are the same ones we think of when we hear of purges and shortages and repression and civil and political rights and isolation. Censorship rarely works well for regimes, and perhaps this is because a population that's fed doctor messages never truly falls for the trick. A friend of mine who was raised in the Soviet Union tells me that everyone held two separate things in their heads, what they were supposed to say to each other and what they actually believed. So there are lots of complaints that people have about the Internet, but the way to really understand why it's better for the truth is to deeply understand the disaster of centralized command of the truth. Censorship can involve more than books and photos, and whether the tyranny of information control can actually bring down a nation. I mentioned in the previous episode about a Soviet scientist named Trophym Lyashenko. He was an agronomist who proposed these stunning new scientific theories about how to grow wheat better and faster, and he was highly favored by Stalin and so Laishenko rose up through the ranks of power. But it turns out his theories were scientifically fraudulent, but that didn't stop him from gaining impressive influence in the party, and by the nineteen forties he steered the agricultural program for the entire USSR. Now there was a grave problem with this centralized command, which is that the USSR spanned thirteen time zones and an astounding variety of soils and climates and local knowledge, and so applied to a landscape that size, this central rule setting was disastrous for wheat production. Local farmers knew better how to care for their crops, but they were disallowed the freedom, and scientists who disagreed with Lyashenko found themselves disbarred from their positions, and several agronomists were executed. Part of the downfall of the USSR can be traced to this centralization of agricultural decisions. It ruined the economy, and it crippled confidence in the new system. So the lesson for history is that a centralized tyranny rarely works as well as local information and nested feedback loops, and this is where the Internet shines. Historically, the more successful strategy has always been to confront free speech with free speech, and the Internet allows that in a natural way. It democratizes the flow of information by giving open access to the newspapers of the world, the photographers of every nation, the bloggers of every political stripe. Now, I talked last week about how in any conflict, people will post the worst videos from the other side and try to imply that that is representative of the opposing population so they can whip up support. And that's an issue to always keep an eye on. That's a genuine problem. But even that is far better than the other problem, which is censorship. As soon as you give one side, any side, a total lockdown on the news, you have a much deeper level of problem. So coming back to a democratic Internet that has open to everyone, of course you're going to get some postings that are full of doctoring and dishonesty, while others strive for independence and impartiality. But in the end all are available for the end user to sift through for reasoned consideration. It's far better than having zero choice about the story that you're fed. And beyond news sites, the simple redundancy of information online changes the censorship equation irreversibly. So just imagine Hussein trying to eradicate maps when anyone can serve satellite photos to two meter resolution. Or imagine Chichescu trying to doctor weather reports when anyone can pull up the weather of the world. Orginej. Stalin trying to delete Trotsky from photographs when the photos are mirrored on Google images, and the Internet Archive in a thousand other sites. Now, this inability to erase information from the Internet took on a name two decades ago. It's called the Streisand Effect. This happened because in two thousand and three, a guy snapped an aerial photograph of Barbara Streisand's home in Malibu, and the guy posted the photo on his website for privacy reasons. Streisand wanted it off the net, and when he wouldn't comply, she sued him. But her actions had a drastic, unintended consequence. Until that moment, almost no one knew where her home was, and by trying to suppress the information, she promptly drove over a million visitors to his site. So observing this Streisand incident in two thousand and three, internet watchers realized they were seeing the new rules of the game in action. Trying to suppress information on the Web only magnifies it. And this new inability to hide information found perhaps its highest expression in wiki Leaks, which was launched in two thousand and six by the Australian journalist and activist Julian Assange. His mission, he said, was to open governments. The site seems like it's mostly dying now some seventeen years later. But what it did was published documents disclosed by anonymous sources, and it got to about ten million such documents. And the documents it leaked were as varied as their country is of origin. I remember when they leaked Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account. They leaked membership lists of illegal parties in the UK. They leaked internal United Nations reports and senatorial campaign documents, and oil scandals and airstrike videos. In twenty ten, WikiLeaks released eighty thousand classified documents about the war in Afghanistan, and by the end of that year it published close to four hundred thousand documents from the war in Iraq. And the thing to observe about those leaks is that they weren't impotent. Sometimes they directly fomented social change. So consider this incident in which an icelandic bank gagged the national broadcaster of Iceland from reporting on its debt default risk. A whistleblower got the info onto WikiLeaks, and Icelanders went into an uproar and that rapidly led to new legislation in their parliament ensuring media freedom. So if you care about truth. You should care about the power of the Internet, and I'll mention something else where. Getting information out leads to good things happening. So WikiLeaks published lists of blacklisted websites from the governments of Denmark and Norway, and Thailand and Australia. And in most of these cases the blacklisted sites were pornographic or violent, but it never takes long before other sites get slipped onto the list. For example, the Thailand Censorship list advertises a filter against child pornography, contained over one thousand sites that were felt to be critical of the Thai royal family, and Assaunge maintains, as many people do, that censorship approaches like Internet filtering become invariably corrupted. And another thing, the speed of information flow on the Internet allows rapid, massive democratic response. I remember in two thousand and nine, when the Internet was newer, when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced he was going to shut down Parliament until March thirtieth. And what he said is that he needed time to work on a stimulus package. But a lot of people suspected he was just trying to prevent a vote of no confidence from the opposition parties. So such a vote would force an election, which is something Harper desperately wanted to avoid. So a Canadian student, unhappy about this shutdown and has perceived reasons for it, he started a Facebook group that quickly swelled to two hundred and fourteen thousand members, and it precipitated real world rallies all across Canada with crowds of thousands. And that kind of breakneck speed of messaging equates to a departure from the days of spreading the word by pamphleting or shouting from horseback. It allows the citizenry to become a rapid response democratic organism. If a bunch of individual brains happened to share an opinion, they can combine rapidly to be heard. Now, obviously, that has both pros and cons, and this is one of the plays. This is where I think the advent of the Internet does lead to a quantitative and qualitative change, because it allows crowds to pull together very quickly, sometimes frighteningly so. And sometimes giant crowds prove useful for protesting something bad. Then sometimes they provide terrifying brainless muscle. But going back to the benefits of the net, one of the biggest benefits began even when the Internet was quite young. Movements sprang up to keep governments from tampering with the democratic voting process, and this holy grail of fairness got achieved via Internet movements in which citizens leveraged live online mapping to aggregate and display activities during elections. Take, for example, the crisis mapping tool ushahidi dot com, which was originally developed when violence erupted following the disputed Kenyan presidential elections of two thousand and eight. Using Ushahidi, anyone with a cell phone could send a text message to report disturbances or defamation or vote tampering, or even simply to say that everything went well there. And so by constructing a dynamic map of the trouble spots, they could attract the world's reporters to expose the fraud. And to this day, reports from Ushahidi typically feature alongside those of full time journalists. And this is all helping to ensure that an election is as free and fair as possible. And that's a big deal because many elections all around the globe continue to be famously and unabashedly fraudulent, not in the most advanced countries, but certainly in places like Afghanistan, where elections are characterized by widespread fraud of the tallies and intimidation and ballot stuffing and people paid to vote multiple times using fake or duplicate voter cards. As it turns out, a lot of voters are scared or reluctant to discuss any fraud that they witnessed, but sending a text message is easy and so mobile crowd monitoring of elections has been a growing trend around the planet. By aggregating little bits of information from the millions of folk reporters on the ground, This method keeps governments one step more transparent then they might otherwise volunteer to be in the absence of watchful eyes and far reaching voices. And there are similar trends that publicly track journalist safety, especially those who are potentially in danger from their own governments. There's a saying in journalism that if you turn on a bright light, the roaches scatter. So with these aggregation sites, each person with a cell phone contributes just a few photons and the sum is enough to light up the country. So the argument I've made is that the Internet provides the potential to enhance democracy. But it's really important that we note that this benefit is in danger in many countries. So, for example, aligned with China's Great Wall is China's Great firewall. Chinese internet filters put blanket blocks on political statements that the government does not allow, and apparently internet users are hired to post positive observations about the government on forums and chat rooms. Now, I don't know if you were following this back in two thousand and six, but at the time, the Internet was still young and companies were still struggling to figure out who was going to ascend to the top. And Google agreed to allow China to censor search traffic because this seemed like an acceptable price for Google for the opportunity to tap into a market of four hundred million Internet use So the Chinese government in China was allowed to filter the Google search results. So what does this mean? If you search from anywhere in the world for Tienemann Square protest, you get a reasonable set of search results, But if you performed the same search inside China's borders, you would get a very different set and you would not see any of the iconic photographs of that event. Well, come back to Google in a moment. But first I want to mention how easy it has always been to demonstrate the Chinese firewall. That this has changed a little bit recently. But some years ago you could go to say buyd dot com, which is the major Chinese search engine, and you type in something like the name of your local city and you get several result returned. Now you type in something like Falloon Gong, which is a spiritualist movement on the Chinese blacklist, and you get an error message reading this web page is not available. It appears that perhaps a server has gone down on by news end. What just happened? Well, when Chinese servers detect an incoming packet with a prohibited term, they return a reset message which falsely tells the request that there was an error retrieving the page. This makes it look as though the problem is related to the requested site, and the Chinese servers then put the requesting machine's IP address on a blacklist for a few moments. So if you try entering your innocuous first search again, you'll get an error message. Now because you've been temporarily blocked out of China at least as of a few years ago. You could try this on any Chinese search engine of your choice and you'd get exactly the same result. Now let's return to Google in the Chinese market. What happened at the beginning of twenty ten was that Google's servers in China were hacked and the information was taken from different accounts, and it appeared that the hackers had a special focus on the accounts of Chinese political dissidents, and Google was pretty sure the Chinese government was behind the break in. So as a result, Google changed its mind on the topic of censorship and circumvented the Great Firewall of China by rerouting through Hong Kong, and eventually China banned Google altogether. So Google ended up surrendering a large piece of the lucrative Chinese market. But this kind of move is critical if you don't want to support government censorship. And by the way, I need to make clear that internet censorship is not limited to China. Most of the countries that impinge on Internet freedom will come as no surprise, nations like Burma and Cuba and Egypt and Iran and North Korea and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Uganda and a bunch of others. But sometimes people are a little surprised to discover that some Western countries try to get in on the action here. Some years ago, in Australia, the Australian Labor Party proposed a set of laws to censor blacklisted sites at the level of the Internet service providers. They claimed the sites they wanted to censor were involved in child pornography or terrorism. But then WikiLeaks released the list of the blacklisted sites, and the list encompassed other sites as well, some of them seemingly random. The filtering legislation didn't pass in Australia, but the fact that it had some momentum reminds us to always keep an eye on this. In other words, if you care about truth on the Internet, we need to think about more than people saying stupid stuff online. The bigger worry from a historical angle is about state control of what information you can or cannot access. And this is the beauty of a technology that seeks to network everyone's brain together and democratize things and hear everyone's voice. Obviously, some of those voices will be less useful than others, and people at the political extremes will purposefully lie and make up have truth. But it is better than Stalin or Giping or Chichescu or Hitler or Polpod or Mussolini allowing you to hear only the messages that they want you to hear and nothing else. So look, whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, just think of how you would feel if Biden or Trump got to control the news entirely during his presidency and you wouldn't be allowed to see the other side. If that sounds like a nightmare to you, then you see why I am so optimistic about this technology when we have a conversation about truth. This networking technology makes it impossible to do all the things that so many countries have enjoyed doing during the twentieth century, like controlling the news and doing historical rewrites. By aggregating citizen information, you get some different problems, like a lot of noise, but noise is typically better than an iron fist. This is why the Internet is sometimes categorized as a liberation technology. And indeed citizens everywhere find ways to drill holes in the silicone curtain. For example, from inside China, lots of young people make secure connections to a proxy server, a server outside of China, and then the filtering technologies applied on Chinese servers don't apply. So daily millions of young people in China make these connections to servers in Hong Kong and they surf X or Facebook or they use Gmail from there. The most oppressive governments will probably always try to implement strict firewalls, but this will presumably lead to a black market for home brewed satellite uplinking with which to circumvent it, like Amagino line. So retaining the capacity of the Internet to allow all viewpoints, this is something that's going to require constant vigilance for a lot of places in the world. The future is going to be a zeros and one's arm race between countries and their citizens, and like any cat and mouse game, both sides are going to adopt each other's technologies. I'll give you an example of the cat and mouse game that we saw coming into focus even a decade and a half ago. So in two thousand nine, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmed Dinijad declared victory over his opponent MUSAVII, but the outcome was suspected of being rigged, and almost immediately the pronouncement was followed by protests in Tehran and in the Iran more broadly, and in cities around the world. Now, as you may remember, those protests quickly went bad. Paramilitary snipers on the rooftops opened fire on the crowds, and bodies began to collapse in the streets. But as quickly as things went bad, they went viral. So web surfers in every country watched instantly delivered photos and videos of attacks and murders, and protesters inside Iran used Twitter and other sites to aggregate crisis information and update situations and post links to freshly uploaded videos. Cyber dissidents took down Ahmed Dinijad's website with a denial of service attack, and a few days after after this had begun, and editorial in the Washington Times admiringly dubbed the events the Twitter revolution. Now in cat and mouse style, the government leveraged their tools too. Amadinijad replied not only by banning rallies, but more importantly by blocking cell phone transmissions and text messaging and shutting down the Internet for forty five minutes to set up filtering software. Iran presumably could have opted to take the whole country offline permanently during this time, but in the cat and mouse game, that option would cripple the government's crisis response communications as much as it would the protesters, so in the end, the protesters won the digital race in that round in Iran, broadcasting the post election oppression to a worldwide audience. But the cat and mouse countermeasures have gone on and on. After Masa Amini's death in Iran in twenty two, citizens took to social media to protest, but Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps blocked access to social media platforms and in fact shut off the Internet in parts of the country, and just in the past few months, WhatsApp and Instagram have been blocked in Iran due to protests against the government, and last year, Iran was ranked the second worst place in the world for Internet censorship, which by the way, includes not just social media, but also websites relating to health, sports, science, news, and so on, all of which should shake us out of our assumptions that the Internet is simply open and free and immune to a future of government intrusion and something to merely gripe about when someone posts something that we dislike. This reminds us that the Internet is a liberation technology and reminds us of the criticality of keeping the Web open and online. For those of us who happen to be lucky enough to live in non repressive countries, we should always take steps to keep it open and increase government transparency, even in the face of opportunities for misinformation and disinformation. I think the Internet tips the balance in favor of a better society. Censorship is increasingly difficult to pull off now. The stalins and touchescos and Husseins have to work a lot harder to try to keep information away from the populace. We're not going to have an all Trump or an all Biden controlled media. News gets out fast, and once it's out, it's hard to take back or rewrite it retrospectively. And because of the ability to ensure fair voting and shine a light on government misdeeds, the ability for regimes to keep a tight grip on the data available to its citizens is increasingly going to become a nightmare of the past now. Obviously, one of the major problems of the Internet, just like in all times with all news sources, is learning to not accept stories at face value. It goes without saying that a good education will teach children or adults the need to consider the source, to evaluate the evidence as best we can. Now, it's not surprising that the older generations are worried about what younger generations are stepping into with this technology. But I do think that because of all the emphasis on fake news and the imminence of deep fakes, which I'll talk about next week, I do think that the younger generations will actually be much better at filtering news. As far as I can tell, the older generations are the ones stuck with the illusion that if something is written and down it must be true, whereas younger kids are more skeptical. So when I talk with people young and old about truth on the Internet and how to evaluate the flood of information, I emphasize two points. First, to be critical of our own biases. We all have biases, and these can lead us to believe things that we shouldn't. So be aware of your own biases and try to be objective when evaluating information. And the second thing is to try to engage in dialogue with people you trust and who you think are smart and who are on the other side of an issue. Try to steal man the other side. If you haven't heard that term. This is the opposite of straw manning, which is a technique for misrepresenting an opponent's argument to make it easier to attack. Steal manning is a technique for strengthening an opponent's argument so you can better understand it. To steal man and argue in you need to identify the premises and the conclusion, and you need to work to understand the assumptions that underlie the argument. This allows you to try to understand the argument from your opponent's perspective. I'm not saying you have to come to a conclusion of agreeing with the other person, but this is an extremely valuable technique to say, Okay, I'm going to put myself in a totally different pair of shoes, or more exactly, in a different brain with a different world model, and I'm going to see what my assumptions are and different ways that I might believe this argument. Now, again, this doesn't mean that in the end you need to adopt that person's point of view, but I believe if you take on this intellectual habit, you'll find yourself a little more mature in your worldviews. You'll be slightly less able to say that you think some complex situation is actually really simple and hence less willing to dehumanize some other group of humans. So let's wrap up today's episode. As I mentioned last week, I got interested in this question because several colleagues called me in twenty twenty and asked if I would be on a grant with them to restore truth in the media and on the Internet. And I thought the idea was a little misguided because fundamentally it rested on a poor memory of what truth used to be, a retrospective romanticization. The key with the Internet is that there's good and bad, but on balance, it strikes me as clear that it comes out positively. So when a pundit asserts that the Internet is responsible, in part or and whole for our perceived decline into a post truth world, I interpret that that statement stems from ignorance about pre Internet history. As a history buff, I really asked myself what was the world like pre and post Internet? And I hope I've convinced you even a little bit. I hope I've reminded you about how much worse the world was pre Internet. And I hope I've convinced you even a little bit that the Internet may actually be the most important tool we've ever had for surfacing truth. Essentially, it's impossible now for a government to control the news that we are exposed to. Instead, a million flashlights on the ground will end up shedding light. Now, it goes without saying that when you have a million people swinging flashlights around, there's a challenge that we face, which is whose flashlight being? Do you believe? And obviously there are plenty of misinformants and disinformants, just like there have always been, But at least now we have the possibility of getting exposed to different points of view. And again I know that most people people will not look for different points of view, but happily it's generally impossible to not get hit in the face with different points of view, at least sometimes when you're surfing around and it might make you mad to see some other viewpoint and your best interpretation is that they are deceitful, lyars or misinformed. But at least that point of view enters your hopper and the possibility at least exists to incorporate it into your consideration. So as you can see, I'm generally optimistic about the Internet and the existence of this technology. But finally this all leads us to the next question, the next era of invention, which is what happens now that we have AI on the radar, And that is next week's episode. See you then go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion and I'll be making episodes in which I address those until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.

We all know about the problems of fake news and the Internet, and many people are worried about it. But is it possible that the Internet, on balance is better for the dissemination of truth. What does this have to do with Barbar Streisand's house, or Soviet agriculture, or Kenyan elections or Twitter revolutions. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about truth and misinformation and the Internet. So in the last episode I discussed the issue of truth, which has been at the center of the dialogue about politics, about social media, about journalism for many years now. And in twenty sixteen, a panel of experts was interviewed and they said one of the grand challenges was the issue of truth on the Internet. So that's what we're going to talk about today. And twenty sixteen also happened to be the year that the term post truth was officially introduced to the Oxford English Dictionary. So what does post truth mean? It was defined as quote denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Now, the fact that this got enenthrined by lexicographers at no less of publication than the Oxford English Dictionary seemed to clinch the argument that this was indeed a new phenomenon. But to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history, this is a little strange. It is, to my mind, the strangest romanticization to believe, for a second, that people in earlier generations, in earlier centuries millennia, did not predicate their actions on emotion and personal belief. Now, in the last episode, I mentioned just a smattering of events that defined the twentieth century, like Nazism in Germany and communism in China and the USSR and fascism in Italy, and the massacre of the Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda and the Kame Rouge in Cambodia and the rape of Nanking by the Japanese and on and on. And the thing to notice is that this was all in the last century, mere decades ago, And this was all pre internet drop of fuel for these movements, which collectively killed probably one hundred million people. Every drop of the fuel was not driven by facts, but instead emotion and personal belief. You don't get a Hutu to pick up a machete against a Tutsi based on provable assertions. You get him all worked up over emotionality. You don't get a Chinese student to murder her professor in the Cultural Revolution with some factual argument. You do this by convincing her that this little red book is the greatest thing she can aspire to. You don't ever get a young man to murder his neighbor based on a provable scientific point, but instead by emotion. So it's not only an illusion, but it's a dellusion to believe that people used to operate on the facts. Although I'm pointing to the twentieth century to remind us that this was all happening just yesterday, we only need to take a ten thousand foot view of the centuries before to see how driven the world has always been by emotion and personal belief over facts. Just consider the European Wars of Religion, also known as the Wars of Reformation, in which through the sixteenth and seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants murdered one another. In just one piece of that war, called the Thirty Years War. It's estimated that eight million people died. Now, about two thirds of the world is not Christian, so most people can't even see the difference between Catholics and Protestants and those millions of deaths, all that human suffering. It wasn't based on facts and truth, it was based on emotion and personal belief. This is similar to the bloody geopolitically defining wars between the Shia and the Sunni Muslims. If you don't know the difference between Shia and Sunni, it stems from a debate over succession after the prophet Mohammad died. Some felt the leadership torch should pass two qualified candidates, and others thought it should only go through Mohammad's bloodline. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is Sunni, Iran is Shia, and they can't get along. And these competing views of succession have been in conflict for fourteen hundred years and provides a lot of the explosive fuel in the Middle East. You've got Syrian civil war over these lines. You've got Iraq fracturing over this divide. You've got growing fissures in a number of Gulf states. So if you happen to be taking up arms in this battle between Sunni and Shia, perhaps you come up with a story to tell yourself. This is based in fact and not base based on personal beliefs. There's a factual and correct answer to the question of succession from a prophet, and it's mysterious to you why other people can't see it as clearly as you can, and for that matter, why the overwhelming majority of the world doesn't even understand what you're arguing about. Now. I'm not intending to criticize anyone's beliefs here, but I am only intending to point out that it is hallucinatory to believe that society used to operate on facts, and then starting in twenty sixteen or so, we stopped basing our behaviors on facts and sunk into personal beliefs. This idea is so goofy. In fact, I saw the Economist tweet some years ago on how we're entering a post truth world, and a commenter to that tweet wrote, why didn't you see this coming years ago? And he cited what he thought were the obvious main causes. He said, low basic education and lousy media. So his argument was that given bad education and bad media, how could we expect otherwise but to evolve into a cauldron of disinformation. But of course, our system and reach of education is better than it has ever been in the history of the world. Around the entire globe, we've seen increased government spending on education. We've seen increased access to education for girls and women. We've seen improved quality of education everywhere. I look these stats up recently. In eighteen twenty, only seventeen percent of the population got even a basic education. That's less than one in five people. By twenty twenty the number was over eighty six percent, so it's almost nine out of ten people worldwide. This is an incredible change in two hundred years, and it just keeps going up. And this is mostly for reasons of societies realizing the importance of education, but also the helps enormously because it translates to access. So anyway education has improved. It's the number of kids in school, how long they stay in school, the quality of the schooling, all that has been going up, and this, of course is directly correlated with reduced poverty and increased economic growth for a country and increased social stability. If you're interested in these sorts of statistics, by the way, you should read The Better Angels of Our Nature by my colleague Stephen Pinker, who for some reason is one of the few people making the clear statistical argument about the massive improvements in the world. So let me return to this guy on Twitter who said we should have seen post truth coming in twenty sixteen because of our terrible education. His argument clearly means something emotional to him, but he doesn't have a leg to stand on factually. And his second point was about lousy media. Now us that in the last episode, So I'm not going to spend too much time with it here except to say that people seem to hold an illusion that media used to be very good. Even very smart people say things to me like, well, back in my day there were only two or three news stations and we got all our news in the same place. But as I argued in great detail in the last episode, the real story is much more nuanced. People have always lived in their echo chambers and gotten their opinions from their friends and their neighbors and their family and their culture. And of course, aside from the news stations, there were newspapers of every stripe, and magazines of any political orientation, and pamphlets that would show up in your mailbox that could have the most extreme views imaginable. So there's nothing new about receiving misinformation or disinformation. So remember that if we're asking the question of whether something has degree rated about truthtelling, really try to view history through this lens of the question, did people used to tell the truth more than they do now? Now, what I've set the table with so far is that there's nothing new about not telling the truth, and about swimming in the pool of our own beliefs and functioning in our own echo chambers and taking up arms against our neighbors who believe differently. But I want to be super clear about something. By me pointing out that there's nothing new about misinformation, please don't take that as me saying that we shouldn't be fighting misinformation. We should fight it tooth and nail. We should constantly improve our society that way. That is our obligation to try to maximize truthtelling. But the reason for my historical rant is that it helps us sharpen our focus on the question of this episode, which is how much does the Internet have to do with disinformation? To what degree is that the Internet's fault that we see all sorts of misinformation and disinformation that is predicated on emotional and personal belief rather than facts. Has the Internet made things worse? The main arguments I hear about how the Internet has made things worse seem to depend on issues that have always been with us. First, people complain that on the Internet, a story gets magnified based more on the reaction it provokes than its truth value. The idea is that misinformation often comes packaged with clickbaity headlines in sensational stories that are designed to grab attention. This can make it more likely that people will share misinformation even if they're not sure that it's true, or perhaps they don't even believe that it's true. But again, note that this has always been the case. That's how we get which trials in the past because it may or may not be true, but I heard so and SO say it, and it's a story too good to repeat, so I'm going to pass that on. That's how we get McCarthyism, where people are blacklisted based on accusations that they are Communist sympathizers. That's how the Soviet Union gets tens of millions of political executions because of the story that so and so is not aligned with the party. Perhaps no meaningful evidence is presented, but the accusation is clickbaity and designed to get local attention, and it does. So. Let me give a different example of how the Internet can actually make truth a little harder to see, and that has to do with the issue of sock puppeting. This is setting up, let's say, a fake account to pretend that you're on the other side of some issue. Now, usually there's not a lot that you can do with this, but sometimes it can have a big effect. For example, when the United States withdrew all its troops from Afghanistan in twenty and twenty one, the Taliban just leveraged basic social media one to secure their takeover, which is on social media. They pretended to be the Allied forces withdrawing and they gave instructions to the population like, hey, everyone should evacuate this town now there's about to be a lot of bombing. And this way, when the Taliban rolled into these towns, there were many fewer people there to stand up and provide resistance. So what the Taliban had done is called sock puppeting. In other words, they had put their hand inside of the puppet and pretended to be somebody else doing the speaking. So, not surprisingly, truth can get complex on social media because social media is not always the right tool for the job for that. So these are the general kinds of concerns that scholars have about the Internet. But I want to present an argument that has gotten essentially zero airtime, which is whether it is a possibility that the Internet has made things better? Now, how you might say, could the Internet have made truth seeking better? Well, here's how it all has to do with information flow. For an analogy, think about arteries. For maximal health, you need unobstructed blood flow in your arteries, and in exactly this way, societies need the free flow of information. Things that block that flow can be fatal to a nation. And I'm going to give you several examples. So first, political censorship. This has been a familiar specter throughout the last century, with state approved news outlets ruling the press and airwaves in places like Romania or Cuba, or China or Iraq, among lots of others. So the official newspapers of the former Soviet Union had a complete lock on the news, and foreign newspapers were allowed only if they were published by communist parties with the approval of the Soviets, and censorship did not end with news stories. Copying machines were tightly controlled by the Soviets to prevent dissemination of self published books or magazines. Even weather reports were censored. In Nikolai Chichesku's Romania, certain temperature extremes translated into time off of work, so the weather reports were doctored so that these levels were not reached, and it was the same in the Soviet Union. Stalin doctored weather forecasts if they suggested that the sun would not shine on the day of celebration for the labor movement, and censorship reaches into every aspect of nations under control of dictators. In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, maps of Baghdad were not allowed to be printed lest some enemy of the state get a hold of a map and then they could decipher the street names for easy navigation. And the weather reports there weren't just doctored they were locked away as classified information. And I'll give you another example which demonstrates how not new some of our problems are. People are worried about deep fake photographs, which I'll talk about next week. Well, the Soviets were doing this over a century ago. They had a not so secret fondness for rewriting their national story on the fly, so they routinely edited photographs to remove people who had fallen out of favor with the party. I'll give you a famous example. There's a photo which proudly captures Lenin and other Soviet leaders in Red Square and Moscow in nineteen nineteen. So you can see Lenin and standing on his left, you see Leon Trotsky, and on Lenin's right is a man named Kamenev, and there's a bearded man two rows in front of Trotsky, a Bolshevik leader from Georgia. Okay, well, if you look at a release of this photo some years later, the official Soviet version of the photo, you see that after Leon Trotsky fell from party favor, he was airbrushed out of the photo. In the revised photograph, there's just an empty space where he used to be, and kamon f on the right has disappeared as well, and the bearded Bolshevik leader never existed in the photo either. I'll put this photo the before and after version on my website so you can check it out at eagleman dot com slash podcast, and I'll also show another photograph. There's Joseph Stalin and there's a man who is left named Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov was a ruthless, awful guy. He was the head of the secret police, the NKVD, and he spent years brutally purging enemies of the state, typically without evidence and often for personal reasons. But then in nineteen forty, Yezhov earned the same treatment that he'd been handing out. He was stripped and beaten and shot in the basement of an NKVD station. So Stalin wrapped up loose ends by deleting Yezhov from history by airbrushing him out of the photo. Now, not surprisingly, governments that are infamous for blocking information flow are the same ones we think of when we hear of purges and shortages and repression and civil and political rights and isolation. Censorship rarely works well for regimes, and perhaps this is because a population that's fed doctor messages never truly falls for the trick. A friend of mine who was raised in the Soviet Union tells me that everyone held two separate things in their heads, what they were supposed to say to each other and what they actually believed. So there are lots of complaints that people have about the Internet, but the way to really understand why it's better for the truth is to deeply understand the disaster of centralized command of the truth. Censorship can involve more than books and photos, and whether the tyranny of information control can actually bring down a nation. I mentioned in the previous episode about a Soviet scientist named Trophym Lyashenko. He was an agronomist who proposed these stunning new scientific theories about how to grow wheat better and faster, and he was highly favored by Stalin and so Laishenko rose up through the ranks of power. But it turns out his theories were scientifically fraudulent, but that didn't stop him from gaining impressive influence in the party, and by the nineteen forties he steered the agricultural program for the entire USSR. Now there was a grave problem with this centralized command, which is that the USSR spanned thirteen time zones and an astounding variety of soils and climates and local knowledge, and so applied to a landscape that size, this central rule setting was disastrous for wheat production. Local farmers knew better how to care for their crops, but they were disallowed the freedom, and scientists who disagreed with Lyashenko found themselves disbarred from their positions, and several agronomists were executed. Part of the downfall of the USSR can be traced to this centralization of agricultural decisions. It ruined the economy, and it crippled confidence in the new system. So the lesson for history is that a centralized tyranny rarely works as well as local information and nested feedback loops, and this is where the Internet shines. Historically, the more successful strategy has always been to confront free speech with free speech, and the Internet allows that in a natural way. It democratizes the flow of information by giving open access to the newspapers of the world, the photographers of every nation, the bloggers of every political stripe. Now, I talked last week about how in any conflict, people will post the worst videos from the other side and try to imply that that is representative of the opposing population so they can whip up support. And that's an issue to always keep an eye on. That's a genuine problem. But even that is far better than the other problem, which is censorship. As soon as you give one side, any side, a total lockdown on the news, you have a much deeper level of problem. So coming back to a democratic Internet that has open to everyone, of course you're going to get some postings that are full of doctoring and dishonesty, while others strive for independence and impartiality. But in the end all are available for the end user to sift through for reasoned consideration. It's far better than having zero choice about the story that you're fed. And beyond news sites, the simple redundancy of information online changes the censorship equation irreversibly. So just imagine Hussein trying to eradicate maps when anyone can serve satellite photos to two meter resolution. Or imagine Chichescu trying to doctor weather reports when anyone can pull up the weather of the world. Orginej. Stalin trying to delete Trotsky from photographs when the photos are mirrored on Google images, and the Internet Archive in a thousand other sites. Now, this inability to erase information from the Internet took on a name two decades ago. It's called the Streisand Effect. This happened because in two thousand and three, a guy snapped an aerial photograph of Barbara Streisand's home in Malibu, and the guy posted the photo on his website for privacy reasons. Streisand wanted it off the net, and when he wouldn't comply, she sued him. But her actions had a drastic, unintended consequence. Until that moment, almost no one knew where her home was, and by trying to suppress the information, she promptly drove over a million visitors to his site. So observing this Streisand incident in two thousand and three, internet watchers realized they were seeing the new rules of the game in action. Trying to suppress information on the Web only magnifies it. And this new inability to hide information found perhaps its highest expression in wiki Leaks, which was launched in two thousand and six by the Australian journalist and activist Julian Assange. His mission, he said, was to open governments. The site seems like it's mostly dying now some seventeen years later. But what it did was published documents disclosed by anonymous sources, and it got to about ten million such documents. And the documents it leaked were as varied as their country is of origin. I remember when they leaked Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account. They leaked membership lists of illegal parties in the UK. They leaked internal United Nations reports and senatorial campaign documents, and oil scandals and airstrike videos. In twenty ten, WikiLeaks released eighty thousand classified documents about the war in Afghanistan, and by the end of that year it published close to four hundred thousand documents from the war in Iraq. And the thing to observe about those leaks is that they weren't impotent. Sometimes they directly fomented social change. So consider this incident in which an icelandic bank gagged the national broadcaster of Iceland from reporting on its debt default risk. A whistleblower got the info onto WikiLeaks, and Icelanders went into an uproar and that rapidly led to new legislation in their parliament ensuring media freedom. So if you care about truth. You should care about the power of the Internet, and I'll mention something else where. Getting information out leads to good things happening. So WikiLeaks published lists of blacklisted websites from the governments of Denmark and Norway, and Thailand and Australia. And in most of these cases the blacklisted sites were pornographic or violent, but it never takes long before other sites get slipped onto the list. For example, the Thailand Censorship list advertises a filter against child pornography, contained over one thousand sites that were felt to be critical of the Thai royal family, and Assaunge maintains, as many people do, that censorship approaches like Internet filtering become invariably corrupted. And another thing, the speed of information flow on the Internet allows rapid, massive democratic response. I remember in two thousand and nine, when the Internet was newer, when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced he was going to shut down Parliament until March thirtieth. And what he said is that he needed time to work on a stimulus package. But a lot of people suspected he was just trying to prevent a vote of no confidence from the opposition parties. So such a vote would force an election, which is something Harper desperately wanted to avoid. So a Canadian student, unhappy about this shutdown and has perceived reasons for it, he started a Facebook group that quickly swelled to two hundred and fourteen thousand members, and it precipitated real world rallies all across Canada with crowds of thousands. And that kind of breakneck speed of messaging equates to a departure from the days of spreading the word by pamphleting or shouting from horseback. It allows the citizenry to become a rapid response democratic organism. If a bunch of individual brains happened to share an opinion, they can combine rapidly to be heard. Now, obviously, that has both pros and cons, and this is one of the plays. This is where I think the advent of the Internet does lead to a quantitative and qualitative change, because it allows crowds to pull together very quickly, sometimes frighteningly so. And sometimes giant crowds prove useful for protesting something bad. Then sometimes they provide terrifying brainless muscle. But going back to the benefits of the net, one of the biggest benefits began even when the Internet was quite young. Movements sprang up to keep governments from tampering with the democratic voting process, and this holy grail of fairness got achieved via Internet movements in which citizens leveraged live online mapping to aggregate and display activities during elections. Take, for example, the crisis mapping tool ushahidi dot com, which was originally developed when violence erupted following the disputed Kenyan presidential elections of two thousand and eight. Using Ushahidi, anyone with a cell phone could send a text message to report disturbances or defamation or vote tampering, or even simply to say that everything went well there. And so by constructing a dynamic map of the trouble spots, they could attract the world's reporters to expose the fraud. And to this day, reports from Ushahidi typically feature alongside those of full time journalists. And this is all helping to ensure that an election is as free and fair as possible. And that's a big deal because many elections all around the globe continue to be famously and unabashedly fraudulent, not in the most advanced countries, but certainly in places like Afghanistan, where elections are characterized by widespread fraud of the tallies and intimidation and ballot stuffing and people paid to vote multiple times using fake or duplicate voter cards. As it turns out, a lot of voters are scared or reluctant to discuss any fraud that they witnessed, but sending a text message is easy and so mobile crowd monitoring of elections has been a growing trend around the planet. By aggregating little bits of information from the millions of folk reporters on the ground, This method keeps governments one step more transparent then they might otherwise volunteer to be in the absence of watchful eyes and far reaching voices. And there are similar trends that publicly track journalist safety, especially those who are potentially in danger from their own governments. There's a saying in journalism that if you turn on a bright light, the roaches scatter. So with these aggregation sites, each person with a cell phone contributes just a few photons and the sum is enough to light up the country. So the argument I've made is that the Internet provides the potential to enhance democracy. But it's really important that we note that this benefit is in danger in many countries. So, for example, aligned with China's Great Wall is China's Great firewall. Chinese internet filters put blanket blocks on political statements that the government does not allow, and apparently internet users are hired to post positive observations about the government on forums and chat rooms. Now, I don't know if you were following this back in two thousand and six, but at the time, the Internet was still young and companies were still struggling to figure out who was going to ascend to the top. And Google agreed to allow China to censor search traffic because this seemed like an acceptable price for Google for the opportunity to tap into a market of four hundred million Internet use So the Chinese government in China was allowed to filter the Google search results. So what does this mean? If you search from anywhere in the world for Tienemann Square protest, you get a reasonable set of search results, But if you performed the same search inside China's borders, you would get a very different set and you would not see any of the iconic photographs of that event. Well, come back to Google in a moment. But first I want to mention how easy it has always been to demonstrate the Chinese firewall. That this has changed a little bit recently. But some years ago you could go to say buyd dot com, which is the major Chinese search engine, and you type in something like the name of your local city and you get several result returned. Now you type in something like Falloon Gong, which is a spiritualist movement on the Chinese blacklist, and you get an error message reading this web page is not available. It appears that perhaps a server has gone down on by news end. What just happened? Well, when Chinese servers detect an incoming packet with a prohibited term, they return a reset message which falsely tells the request that there was an error retrieving the page. This makes it look as though the problem is related to the requested site, and the Chinese servers then put the requesting machine's IP address on a blacklist for a few moments. So if you try entering your innocuous first search again, you'll get an error message. Now because you've been temporarily blocked out of China at least as of a few years ago. You could try this on any Chinese search engine of your choice and you'd get exactly the same result. Now let's return to Google in the Chinese market. What happened at the beginning of twenty ten was that Google's servers in China were hacked and the information was taken from different accounts, and it appeared that the hackers had a special focus on the accounts of Chinese political dissidents, and Google was pretty sure the Chinese government was behind the break in. So as a result, Google changed its mind on the topic of censorship and circumvented the Great Firewall of China by rerouting through Hong Kong, and eventually China banned Google altogether. So Google ended up surrendering a large piece of the lucrative Chinese market. But this kind of move is critical if you don't want to support government censorship. And by the way, I need to make clear that internet censorship is not limited to China. Most of the countries that impinge on Internet freedom will come as no surprise, nations like Burma and Cuba and Egypt and Iran and North Korea and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Uganda and a bunch of others. But sometimes people are a little surprised to discover that some Western countries try to get in on the action here. Some years ago, in Australia, the Australian Labor Party proposed a set of laws to censor blacklisted sites at the level of the Internet service providers. They claimed the sites they wanted to censor were involved in child pornography or terrorism. But then WikiLeaks released the list of the blacklisted sites, and the list encompassed other sites as well, some of them seemingly random. The filtering legislation didn't pass in Australia, but the fact that it had some momentum reminds us to always keep an eye on this. In other words, if you care about truth on the Internet, we need to think about more than people saying stupid stuff online. The bigger worry from a historical angle is about state control of what information you can or cannot access. And this is the beauty of a technology that seeks to network everyone's brain together and democratize things and hear everyone's voice. Obviously, some of those voices will be less useful than others, and people at the political extremes will purposefully lie and make up have truth. But it is better than Stalin or Giping or Chichescu or Hitler or Polpod or Mussolini allowing you to hear only the messages that they want you to hear and nothing else. So look, whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, just think of how you would feel if Biden or Trump got to control the news entirely during his presidency and you wouldn't be allowed to see the other side. If that sounds like a nightmare to you, then you see why I am so optimistic about this technology when we have a conversation about truth. This networking technology makes it impossible to do all the things that so many countries have enjoyed doing during the twentieth century, like controlling the news and doing historical rewrites. By aggregating citizen information, you get some different problems, like a lot of noise, but noise is typically better than an iron fist. This is why the Internet is sometimes categorized as a liberation technology. And indeed citizens everywhere find ways to drill holes in the silicone curtain. For example, from inside China, lots of young people make secure connections to a proxy server, a server outside of China, and then the filtering technologies applied on Chinese servers don't apply. So daily millions of young people in China make these connections to servers in Hong Kong and they surf X or Facebook or they use Gmail from there. The most oppressive governments will probably always try to implement strict firewalls, but this will presumably lead to a black market for home brewed satellite uplinking with which to circumvent it, like Amagino line. So retaining the capacity of the Internet to allow all viewpoints, this is something that's going to require constant vigilance for a lot of places in the world. The future is going to be a zeros and one's arm race between countries and their citizens, and like any cat and mouse game, both sides are going to adopt each other's technologies. I'll give you an example of the cat and mouse game that we saw coming into focus even a decade and a half ago. So in two thousand nine, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmed Dinijad declared victory over his opponent MUSAVII, but the outcome was suspected of being rigged, and almost immediately the pronouncement was followed by protests in Tehran and in the Iran more broadly, and in cities around the world. Now, as you may remember, those protests quickly went bad. Paramilitary snipers on the rooftops opened fire on the crowds, and bodies began to collapse in the streets. But as quickly as things went bad, they went viral. So web surfers in every country watched instantly delivered photos and videos of attacks and murders, and protesters inside Iran used Twitter and other sites to aggregate crisis information and update situations and post links to freshly uploaded videos. Cyber dissidents took down Ahmed Dinijad's website with a denial of service attack, and a few days after after this had begun, and editorial in the Washington Times admiringly dubbed the events the Twitter revolution. Now in cat and mouse style, the government leveraged their tools too. Amadinijad replied not only by banning rallies, but more importantly by blocking cell phone transmissions and text messaging and shutting down the Internet for forty five minutes to set up filtering software. Iran presumably could have opted to take the whole country offline permanently during this time, but in the cat and mouse game, that option would cripple the government's crisis response communications as much as it would the protesters, so in the end, the protesters won the digital race in that round in Iran, broadcasting the post election oppression to a worldwide audience. But the cat and mouse countermeasures have gone on and on. After Masa Amini's death in Iran in twenty two, citizens took to social media to protest, but Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps blocked access to social media platforms and in fact shut off the Internet in parts of the country, and just in the past few months, WhatsApp and Instagram have been blocked in Iran due to protests against the government, and last year, Iran was ranked the second worst place in the world for Internet censorship, which by the way, includes not just social media, but also websites relating to health, sports, science, news, and so on, all of which should shake us out of our assumptions that the Internet is simply open and free and immune to a future of government intrusion and something to merely gripe about when someone posts something that we dislike. This reminds us that the Internet is a liberation technology and reminds us of the criticality of keeping the Web open and online. For those of us who happen to be lucky enough to live in non repressive countries, we should always take steps to keep it open and increase government transparency, even in the face of opportunities for misinformation and disinformation. I think the Internet tips the balance in favor of a better society. Censorship is increasingly difficult to pull off now. The stalins and touchescos and Husseins have to work a lot harder to try to keep information away from the populace. We're not going to have an all Trump or an all Biden controlled media. News gets out fast, and once it's out, it's hard to take back or rewrite it retrospectively. And because of the ability to ensure fair voting and shine a light on government misdeeds, the ability for regimes to keep a tight grip on the data available to its citizens is increasingly going to become a nightmare of the past now. Obviously, one of the major problems of the Internet, just like in all times with all news sources, is learning to not accept stories at face value. It goes without saying that a good education will teach children or adults the need to consider the source, to evaluate the evidence as best we can. Now, it's not surprising that the older generations are worried about what younger generations are stepping into with this technology. But I do think that because of all the emphasis on fake news and the imminence of deep fakes, which I'll talk about next week, I do think that the younger generations will actually be much better at filtering news. As far as I can tell, the older generations are the ones stuck with the illusion that if something is written and down it must be true, whereas younger kids are more skeptical. So when I talk with people young and old about truth on the Internet and how to evaluate the flood of information, I emphasize two points. First, to be critical of our own biases. We all have biases, and these can lead us to believe things that we shouldn't. So be aware of your own biases and try to be objective when evaluating information. And the second thing is to try to engage in dialogue with people you trust and who you think are smart and who are on the other side of an issue. Try to steal man the other side. If you haven't heard that term. This is the opposite of straw manning, which is a technique for misrepresenting an opponent's argument to make it easier to attack. Steal manning is a technique for strengthening an opponent's argument so you can better understand it. To steal man and argue in you need to identify the premises and the conclusion, and you need to work to understand the assumptions that underlie the argument. This allows you to try to understand the argument from your opponent's perspective. I'm not saying you have to come to a conclusion of agreeing with the other person, but this is an extremely valuable technique to say, Okay, I'm going to put myself in a totally different pair of shoes, or more exactly, in a different brain with a different world model, and I'm going to see what my assumptions are and different ways that I might believe this argument. Now, again, this doesn't mean that in the end you need to adopt that person's point of view, but I believe if you take on this intellectual habit, you'll find yourself a little more mature in your worldviews. You'll be slightly less able to say that you think some complex situation is actually really simple and hence less willing to dehumanize some other group of humans. So let's wrap up today's episode. As I mentioned last week, I got interested in this question because several colleagues called me in twenty twenty and asked if I would be on a grant with them to restore truth in the media and on the Internet. And I thought the idea was a little misguided because fundamentally it rested on a poor memory of what truth used to be, a retrospective romanticization. The key with the Internet is that there's good and bad, but on balance, it strikes me as clear that it comes out positively. So when a pundit asserts that the Internet is responsible, in part or and whole for our perceived decline into a post truth world, I interpret that that statement stems from ignorance about pre Internet history. As a history buff, I really asked myself what was the world like pre and post Internet? And I hope I've convinced you even a little bit. I hope I've reminded you about how much worse the world was pre Internet. And I hope I've convinced you even a little bit that the Internet may actually be the most important tool we've ever had for surfacing truth. Essentially, it's impossible now for a government to control the news that we are exposed to. Instead, a million flashlights on the ground will end up shedding light. Now, it goes without saying that when you have a million people swinging flashlights around, there's a challenge that we face, which is whose flashlight being? Do you believe? And obviously there are plenty of misinformants and disinformants, just like there have always been, But at least now we have the possibility of getting exposed to different points of view. And again I know that most people people will not look for different points of view, but happily it's generally impossible to not get hit in the face with different points of view, at least sometimes when you're surfing around and it might make you mad to see some other viewpoint and your best interpretation is that they are deceitful, lyars or misinformed. But at least that point of view enters your hopper and the possibility at least exists to incorporate it into your consideration. So as you can see, I'm generally optimistic about the Internet and the existence of this technology. But finally this all leads us to the next question, the next era of invention, which is what happens now that we have AI on the radar, And that is next week's episode. See you then go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion and I'll be making episodes in which I address those until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.