Influence Campaigns and Disinformation

Renée DiResta, associate research professor at Georgetown University, discusses how disinformation and digital manipulation are undermining public trust and reshaping the media landscape. The host of the webinar is Carla Anne Robbins, senior fellow at CFR and former deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times. TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Local Journalists Webinar. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. CFR is an independent, nonpartisan national membership organization, think tank, educator, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR generates policy-relevant ideas and analysis, convenes experts and policymakers, and is the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. This webinar is part of CFR’s Local Journalists Initiative, created to help you draw connections between the local issues you cover and national and international dynamics. Our programming puts you in touch with CFR resources and expertise on international issues and provides a forum for sharing best practices. We are delighted to have confirmed over seventy participants from thirty-two states and U.S. territories. We appreciate your taking the time to be with us. I want to remind everyone again this webinar is on the record, and the video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact at CFR.org/localjournalists. We are pleased to have Renee DiResta and host Carla Anne Robbins with us today to lead the conversation. Renee DiResta is an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She was previously the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy engagement for the study of adversarial abuse in current internet technologies. Her work focuses primarily on rumors and propaganda, and in understanding how narratives spread across social and media networks. Carla Anne Robbins is a senior fellow at CFR and host of the Local Journalists Webinar Series. She also serves as faculty director of the Master of International Affairs Program and clinical professor of national security studies at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. And previously she was deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times and chief diplomatic correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. I’m going to turn it over to Carla to have a conversation with Renee, and then we’ll go to all of you for your oral and written questions. We prefer you to speak them, so raise your hand and say your affiliation. And again, love to have this forum be one where we’re sharing best practices so we can inform each other’s work. OK. With that, Carla, over to you. ROBBINS: Thanks. Thanks, Irina, so much. And thanks, Renee, for joining us. This is—this is great. The work you do is extraordinary, if frightening. So, as journalists, we have been battling a hostile information environment for a long time and a steady erosion of public trust. Gallup—I don’t know if you saw this—they just released their annual measurement of trust in media, and it is once again at a new low. Twenty-eight percent of those polled said they had either a great deal or fair amount of trust in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. That’s just 28 percent. And that’s down from 31 percent last year and 40 percent five years ago. And Republicans’ confidence has dropped to single digits, to 8 percent, for the first time in the trend. And the numbers are even worse for young people. So, for someone who’s been in the news business for a very long time, that is a very frightening—I mean, frightening polling. And Gallup’s been doing this, and just if you look at the numbers and you see this drop, very—so what’s driving this, of course, is what I want to talk about to begin with. We talk about this challenge and the threats that are out there. You have written about the weaponization of rumor and elite amplification. Is this new? Is it different in recent years? And can you talk about where you see this starting? Because for the longest time we saw this as externally driven—as something the Russians were doing, something the Iranians were doing. This is domestically driven, I assume. And where do you date the beginning of this? DIRESTA: Well, so, on that front, I mean, I think you can look to things like Fox News, right. The partisan dynamics around that are not new. The marketing one outlet as trustworthy and all of the other outlets as non-trustworthy has been something that has been a marketing differentiator in the conservative media sphere for some time now. Yochai Benkler and Rob Faris wrote a book called Network Propaganda back in 2016 that looked exactly at this topic in the context of emerging media ecosystems on the internet, so not so much the influencer ecosystem—which we can talk about after—but more the what we might call, you know, new media, quaintly, a decade ago, but this idea of the small, emerging media ecosystem that really marketed itself very explicitly as being in opposition to mainstream media. That was its differentiator. That was how it framed itself, how it positioned itself. And it—and it leaned quite heavily into that for a particular partisan niche. So it’s not entirely surprising—I wish I had that up in front of me. (Laughs.) I didn’t realize that that had come out. But it’s not entirely surprising to me to hear that that has continued, because it is quite lucrative to position yourself as the one true voice, the one true outlet, and then to continue to lean into that with a particular partisan niche. We see influencers now doing this as well. That has—that began maybe five, six years ago or so, where they don’t even position themselves as media but as opposition in some ways to media, where they’re just talking to you as themselves—so a voice that is entirely not media, somebody speaking to you as somebody who is just like you, a member of a fellow shared identity, and relying on that notion of being highly trustworthy—they’re trustworthy because they are just like you, because they’re not professional media—when, of course, in reality they have the audience size of media, they monetize, they earn money from advertising, and they are potentially subject to some of the same audience capture and other dynamics that maybe lead them to shape their content in certain ways in response to financial incentives as well. ROBBINS: So can you talk more about influencers? Are you talking about people on TikTok? Are you talking about people on Spotify? Are you talking about Joe Rogan? Are you talking about more than—more than that? When I originally thought about influencers, I thought about, you know, girls teaching me how to put on makeup. DIRESTA: Well, so “influencers,” a term that refers to content creators who monetize their content usually, right? So they are earning money from the content that they make, because anybody can be a content creator now, you know. I think most people on the internet maybe are familiar with the idea of small content creators who are just regularly posting videos of themselves—as you mentioned, you know, the women who teach you to put on makeup. But some subset of them are also being sponsored by brands, maybe the makeup brands. (Laughs.) Some of them are being—are earning revenue share. So, for example, when you watch a YouTube video there is usually an ad that will play in front of a video that is monetized, and then the creator will earn some percentage of the revenue—the advertising revenue that YouTube earns. So revenue sharing is another monetization structure. It’s on all social platforms now. You can—influencers are oftentimes investing most heavily in one or two platforms. Some will be video-based. Some might be written-content-based. On even X, or Twitter, you can monetize your content now by writing good tweets—or, writing sensational tweets, maybe I should say. So there is a process that allows just sort of ordinary people who want to create content and earn money from that creation process to do so. And where it tends to intersect with media or to get out of the realm of just teaching you to put on makeup is that you do see people who are monetizing in, for example, the wellness space, you know, giving out health information; or in a political space you have political influencers who seem a little bit like pundits or commentators. So it really runs the gamut. There’s a very broad spectrum of topics, anything under the sun actually, that people can create content about and have the option to monetize that content to earn a living and to potentially earn quite a good living from it up at the upper echelons. And so that is a form of media that is sometimes not thought of as being media because it feels so personalized. ROBBINS: So has there been research—and I apologize if this has been done or you’ve done it—has there been research that looks at do these influencer(s) focus more on particular topics? Are they focused on health more than anything else? I mean, is it—did it begin with, you know, vax deniers? Or are they focused on don’t—you know, don’t support Ukraine? Or are they focused— DIRESTA: So it runs the gamut. There’s people across the—across all topics and spectrums. It didn’t start as a—I mean, I just want to be really clear that it’s not a negative thing; it’s just a way that people have engaged on the internet for a very long time. You can think about it, maybe, as, like, an outgrowth of the—you know, what’s sometimes called the mommy blogger culture in Web 1.0, where it was often women but people who were raising their children at home would write lifestyle content speaking, again, just as a person kind of mom to mom as content moved to being very video-focused—you can just kind of take out your phone, sit at your kitchen table, and produce this very highly-relatable content that, again, doesn’t feel necessarily like media. It’s not—it doesn’t have a wrapper of being the something Herald or it’s abstracted away. The person is speaking to you as themselves. It is very individual-centric. You know, very much you’re hearing from them as a person as opposed to a news-specific brand. ROBBINS: And how does that position—how does that undercut the credibility of—I hate the term “mainstream media,” but how does that undercut the credibility of those of us who do more traditional, fact-based, professional reporting? DIRESTA: Well, it doesn’t have to undercut the credibility necessarily, though, again, some of those—in the realm of the political some of those creators, some of those—you know, the influencers do position themselves as being, you know, truth tellers, or more direct, or more authentic, whereas mainstream media is positioned as being more corporate, more beholden to special interests, right? So this is something of a—again, I would argue a marketing tactic, personally. (Laughs.) That’s how I see it. That’s how I write about it, in part because the monetization is maybe a little bit different. There’s an argument that media—mainstream media might, for example, not cover pharma so directly because it might receive advertising dollars from pharmaceutical companies, whereas an influencer—and you’ll see—wellness influencers might say this quite directly—is being very hard on pharma because mainstream media won’t do that, right? And this is an argument that you’ll see presented, that influencers are more independent. On the flipside, oftentimes what influencers are producing or that type of content creator—sometimes they don’t like the term “influencer,” but we’ll just go with it for this conversation. What you’ll hear this—what you’ll hear from them oftentimes is more commentary as opposed to fact-finding. So if you want to know what is happening somewhere in the world, while there might be an influencer serving as a citizen journalist—meaning taking their phone out and actually physically showing you something that is happening in their neighborhood—oftentimes they are a degree removed and they are commentating on something that mainstream media has covered. So mainstream media and journalism is still doing that work of going out there and finding facts and doing that verification process, whereas influencer media I would say is a little bit more competitive with the commentary or opinion side of traditional media sources. ROBBINS: And that sounds organic. It sounds as if it’s—it may be good, it may be bad, it may be competing with the work that we do and driving further the mistrust in the mainstream media, intentionally or not. Do you see more of an astroturf phenomenon going on there, that it’s something that looks like it’s organic but is actually organized, that it’s being sponsored either by partisan groups, or? You know, it took us a while to figure out that the Tea Party was actually not organic, that there were—you know, that there were big money groups behind them. Do you see an astroturf phenomenon like that out there? DIRESTA: I mean, there certainly is in some capacities, but there’s also a lot of real people who are part of the influencer community. So it’s, you know— ROBBINS: I’m asking the question of are there—are there groups—are there money groups, are there partisan groups that are using this—we know about Fox News and Murdochs and whatever their political or economic interests are there. Are there, you know, particular political groups or money groups that are using these platforms or particular individuals to basically run against the mainstream press? DIRESTA: I mean, sure, there’s times when they’re—when they are, you know, doing things like undisclosed affiliate links, and things like that. There have certainly been—you know, I’m thinking of Ben Wofford wrote an article in Wired a bit ago, maybe a couple of years ago now, covering the extent to which political influencers weren’t disclosing that some of their posts were paid, that they were receiving affiliate links. Meaning—an affiliate link is when you share a URL and anytime people click on the URL or perform an action after clicking on the URL, maybe they signed a petition, maybe they purchase something, the person who shared the URL receives a percentage of the revenue, right? So that’s what an affiliate link is. For example, if I were to share an Amazon link and somebody—you know, I share that Amazon link, somebody clicks on my Amazon link, and then they go to Amazon and they buy that thing, I receive some percentage of revenue from that Amazon transaction. Is what an affiliate link is. I can either disclose that I have shared an affiliate link, or I can not. Different platforms have different rules. But the person who is doing the purchasing either knows or does not know, based on my disclosure. So that is how an affiliate link works. And there were—there are cases where political influencers will share content with affiliate links and not disclose that that is—that they are making money off of that. So there are dynamics where you do see political influencers who are not necessarily being transparent with their audiences about why they are sharing a particular petition, why they are sharing a particular website, a particular article, a webinar, for example. And so there is a monetization component that the audience might not necessarily be aware of. And that is an element that is—you know, it—I don’t know if—it’s not necessarily astroturfing in quite the same way, though, that has been a component of it at times. There’s also, of course, you know, opportunities where influencers will coordinate amongst themselves, political influencers will, who are ideologically aligned will coordinate, you know, to all share a message at the same time. Is that astroturfing? I mean, the line between astroturfing and activism is really blurry at times. And so that question of how do you ensure that disclosures are clear and required is something that we are sort of at the mercy of regulators and platforms to create ethical guidelines around. And what we have seen is that there are more ethical guidelines around the sale of material—of products, meaning the Federal Trade Commission has guidelines saying that an influencer must disclose to you if they are receiving compensation for promoting a product, but not compensation—the FEC, the Federal Election Commission, does not have similar disclosure rules necessarily for making sure that it is disclosed to you if an influencer is receiving compensation for promoting a political affiliate link. ROBBINS: So to look at, you know, the changes, what’s new about all this, it would seem to me that there are maybe two or 2.5 things in all this. One is this—what, this synthetic enhancement of rumors, AI. And we’ve all read about Sora. I don’t have a Sora link. I’m dying for one. (Laughs.) And which, of course, what—you know, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? And there’s that. There’s the disappearance of platform governance and fact checking, which is a reasonably new phenomenon. Just the platform governance issue. And then there’s the politicization of—you know, that fact checking is increasingly portrayed as censorship. So those are reasonably new phenomenon which makes our jobs infinitely harder. So I want to talk about all three of those before I throw it open. And I do really want to throw it open. So which one do you want to talk about first? DIRESTA: (Laughs.) We can go in order. Do you want to do one by one? ROBBINS: Sure. So, quote, “synthetic enhancement” of rumors. DIRESTA: So, I mean, this is something that, you know, a lot of us have written about and talked about for half a decade now. I know I have. Look, there’s two components to it. One, it makes it easier to deny the real, which I think is something that people don’t pay as much attention to, and they should. And then two, it makes it easier to believe the fake, right, to create unreality. And we’ve known this was coming for a very long time. The public is much more aware of it now. There have been a lot of educational campaigns trying to help people understand what is coming. The problem is there’s no good solution for it, because oftentimes it’s actually the somewhat mundane stuff that is what slides through more easily. There was a lot of focus on would it be deepfakes of politicians that would be the thing that would manipulate the public? And you saw this reflected even in legislation introduced by members of Congress. Senator Klobuchar introduced a few of these bills around, you know, trying to create laws about manipulative content related to politicians. We saw that in California as well. Interestingly, you know, politicians are the ones who are perhaps best suited to defend themselves—(laughs)— to say, that’s not me. This is me. This is where I was at this time. You know, there are usually more angles of videos. And I think there’s obviously the potential for faked audio. You can obviously create manipulation. It is a very real risk. But interestingly, I think that one of the points that several of us have made over the years is that it’ll actually be ordinary people who are going to be much more negatively impacted by some of these things. The likenesses of ordinary people who are going to be misused in certain ways, and placed potentially into videos that they don’t want to be in. And sometimes that is sexually exploitive content. You know, there is now at least things like the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which I know a lot of people have issues with some of the actual take it down provisions that go along with that, concerns that it will be misapplied and used to try to get platforms to censor content that it shouldn’t be applied to, but it is at least a recognition, I think, that AI-generated exploitative content in this form is something that we need to be taking very seriously. Particularly because it does impact minors as well. And so that, I think, is something that is now part of public awareness. But otherwise, you are seeing just a lot of areas in which it is manifesting in the form of spam and scams. And that is going to continue to happen. And so this question of how existing laws catch up to and are adapted to the continued prevalence of—the growing prevalence of inauthentic content is something that I think state legislatures and the federal government need to be much more proactive about thinking through. I think scams and—you know, scams in particular are really rising, and identity-based scams in particular are critical for people to understand how to think about, you know, you should have—particularly if you’re a prominent person, like a journalist or somebody where there’s a lot of audio content of you out there, even if you’re just an ordinary person with a TikTok account making a lot of audio content, there’s been a growing rise in things like identity theft and people trying to use your voice to authenticate with your bank and things like that. So just being very, very cognizant of how this is going to—actually beyond political manipulation—how this is going to have significant impacts on fraud. ROBBINS: So is there any good legislation out there? I mean, the EU tends to be ahead of us on this. The argument has been made that they’ve been, on AI at least, been ahead of us, but the technology has been so far ahead of the EU that there’s no point in codifying something because the technology is moving so quickly. Biden administration tried to do things with executive orders and at least the way the government behaved itself. The Trump administration has come in and said, not going to do anything, not to my bros. You see anything that has any value? There was talk about watermarking. Other people said it’s not possible. DIRESTA: I mean, it doesn’t work as well as people want it to. That’s the honest answer. I mean, look, I was a big supporter of watermarking. I think that platforms that produce generative content—you know, Sora and things—it makes sense for them to have it. There are also open-source models that just never will, right? And there are also—one of the real challenges is what do you want the watermark to convey? This is where there’s a thing that tends to happen, you know, like a—we call it sometimes, like, label fatigue. I don’t know if you ever been to California. You walk into basically any establishment, and I think it’s called, like, Prop 68, if I—I lived in California for ten years, I’m trying to remember the name— ROBBINS: Fetal damage, cancer causing chemicals. DIRESTA: Exactly, cancer-causing chemical. And you’re, like, whatever, you know, there’s, like, the cleaning fluid on the floor. You don’t even pay attention to it because you just, OK, yeah, whatever. Literally, every establishment in California throws this label on the wall that says there’s a cancer-causing chemical somewhere in here. It’s like the CYA approach to labeling your business, right? And one of the things that even people like me, who early on, you know, I completely admit, thought that labeling would be a beneficial thing, when we saw the platforms actually begin to roll it out, it turns out that if you use Adobe to edit one of your photos, there was the photographer who took a picture of Mount Fuji, which is real. You know, took it with his camera. And he used an Adobe product to edit the photo, you know, remove some dust, some lens flares, the sort of things that you would do in post-production. And I believe it was Threads or Instagram, one of the Meta products that did rapidly roll out labeling, labeled it “imagined with AI,” or, you know, labeled it “AI edited,” or “AI created.” Because this is a problem, right? Where is edited versus created? When you have things like in painting, where you can change a section of an image, that threshold between edited and created, you know, maybe it starts on a device and then you change nine tenths of it, right? So there’s some questions around that. And then with this particular instance, it is labeled as “AI edited,” even though it’s not edited in a deceptive way. It’s just a lens flare, right, that’s been removed. And so you have this question of, if we start putting these labels on everything, what people want them for is something that is deceptive, or something that is different, or something that has materially changed the tone or tenor of the image. Not something that has glossed it in some way. And so the labeling-like regimes, if you will, or, you know, rubrics are not quite there yet. It’s just not—we haven’t quite figured out what we want the labels to communicate. And so communicating that something is real or that something is true, these are not the same thing. Trying to highlight what is deceptive is, you know, something else entirely. And so it’s not quite clear yet what kind of—the term Google uses is “assertive provenance.” How do you assert provenance, wow do you say this came from this type of device, when you can create that label but somebody can take a screenshot of the thing, and then all of a sudden the metadata has been stripped, right? So there’s just a lot of different ways in which bad actors or offenders are going to be able to strip that out, whereas good actors will keep it in. And so this question of what is the labeling actually going to accomplish is one of the challenges that people who are in the field of thinking about provenance and labeling are really trying to work through right now. What is the best way to do this that informs the viewer of, you know, in the best way possible, without creating this kind of like Prop 68 fatigue, if you will. ROBBINS: So I want to throw it open. And I’m sure other people want to ask you the other questions that I asked. But I do want to point out that there’s the individual issue here, which is can you trust the individual photograph. And then there are the two broader questions, one which is the photograph or the story or whatever, is that could potentially, you know, set off a really bad reaction that’s, you know, the provocative that really is a screaming, you know, fire in a crowded theater. And then there’s the larger flooding the zone. And we saw the Russians do this in Ukraine with the shoot down of a plane and all that, that you get to the point in which you just don’t know what truth is. You get so overwhelmed with it. And that is, to a certain extent, what those other influencers are doing. You know, who could you possibly trust here? Everybody has their own version of reality. You have your reality. I have my reality. Why would I trust the mainstream media? That’s their reality. I will have my own reality. And that is, to me, that one of the most frightening things, which poses this question for journalists. Which is, those of us who spent our lifetime developing this craft have—in other people’s mind, have no more credibility than, you know, than a Sora video. DIRESTA: I think in the—this is one of the—one of the theories of the future, is that you will see increased trust return to mainstream media in these moments of trying to determine if a video or image is real, right? If you are an outlet that has a photographer in a war zone with a camera that has provenance tools built into it, and the tools—those sort of provenance—you know, the metadata and things are posted transparently so that users can go and look at them, that is potentially a differentiator, versus some random account—you know, some random clout-chasing influencer on X tossing something up there and saying, no, this really is. You know, I remember—just per the point about real and true, right—there’s a lot of real photos of, like wildfires that are, you know, a fire that was in—I remember wildfires in Brazil. And there’s these images of India that get attached to the—you know, to the to the tweets about Brazil, right? And so these are the things where creating that context, where you do have accounts that are seen as being more credible, like, that is an opportunity to differentiate and to sort of pull people back. And being in that—in that reliable realm, I think, is something that journalism can fill that gap. Even if, on the commentary front, people choose to look to the TikTokers and the Reels creators for their commentary, for their relatable commentary. ROBBINS: So I’m going to start calling on people if you guys don’t ask questions. I mean, I’m still asking—my other job as I’m a professor. Oh, we have a hand up. Yay. So Rob Ferrett. Oh, yay. Can you—Rob, can you identify yourself and ask your question? Q: Yeah. I’m Rob Ferrett from Wisconsin Public Radio. My question is, given some of your past work on Russian disinformation social media campaigns targeting U.S. culture and trying to heighten divisions, do you still see that happening now? Whether from Russia or other foreign actors, very deliberate disinformation campaigns? DIRESTA: Oh, of course. Yeah. I mean, there’s no reason for them to give up, right? We’ve made it easier. (Laughs.) Look, there’s a few ways in which we’ve made it easier. First and foremost is that the U.S. government under this administration, for political reasons—purely political reasons—has chosen to largely exit the space of doing detection and mitigation. I wrote about this for Lawfare in February of this year, which for some reason feels like it was two years ago, writing about the dismantling of state capacity. And it only increased after that. So and, I mean, it was for purely political reasons. And transparently BS political reasons too, right? So there was the dismantling of Foreign Influence Task Force, certain aspects of, you know, work that the FBI did, the Foreign Malign Influence Center at CIA—or, at ODNI, I should say, perhaps, where Tulsi Gabbard decided that it had something to do with, you know, Hunter Biden’s laptop. Which was complete BS. It didn’t even exist in 2020. But that’s OK, Tulsi said it did, right? You know, and we have these little propaganda campaigns where they just say that this center, or that center contributed to the theft of the 2020 election by censoring something. And that is how the justification goes through. And then we dismantle the state capacity. And ultimately, what we do is we open the door for Russia, China, and Iran to continue to run influence campaigns without anybody in the government being tasked to look at them. Meanwhile, similarly, the academic institutions that used to study these things, many of them have been defunded and dismantled, again, because entities that worked on that were similarly tagged as being somehow, you know, censorious plotters who sought to steal the 2020 election, right? So utter nonsense, but again, this is how the politicization of that work went. And so the combination of the increasing sophistication of state actors recognizing that this is table stakes and they may as well do it, combined with then the platforms themselves deciding that they may as well walk it back because it’s expensive, time consuming. And there too, they are trying to please the administration, which has made it clear that it, you know, it has just decided to launch an entire reinvestigation into the very idea of Russian interference in 2016. You know, we’re relitigating things that happened a decade ago, that transparently absolutely did happen. And yet, the politicization of that has meant that nearly every sector that was responsible for looking at it has either walked it back or dismantled capacity. ROBBINS: Or been indicted. DIRESTA: Or been indicted. Yes. (Laughs.) ROBBINS: You missed that one. DIRESTA: Right. Yes, no, I think that’s actually happening—it’s tomorrow morning, right, is the Comey indictment, yeah? So yes. Or, sorry, the sort of courthouse appearance, yeah? So here we are. ROBBINS: Jordan Coll, you have a question from PantherNOW? Q: Yeah. Funny enough, PantherNOW back in my editor-in-chief days for my undergrad. But, yeah. I always try to change it, but at the current capacity I’m at New Jersey Urban News. I cover the state of New Jersey. But yeah, thank you guys so much for— ROBBINS: You look young enough to be an undergraduate in that picture. Q: Yeah. Yeah, no, totally. Totally. I’m also a professor, you know, at the moment. So, yeah, pretty young. But, Renee, I actually do know—well, I’m sure our names have crossed, because I know Emily Bell. I took a course with her at Columbia Journalism School. And she mentioned a lot of your work. And, again, pretty neat stuff with everything with the campaigns and definitely, you know, an inspiration. And I know Emily Bell speaks highly of you. So she was a good mentor of mine. But, yeah. I wanted to—I don’t know if this is working—yeah? Is it, because I’m seeing my face? ROBBINS: Yes. Q: OK, awesome. So, yeah. So I had two questions. One, again, it deals a lot with, you know, like the sense of AI, right, and these generated robocalls, essentially, where you have, you know, Joe Biden’s voice ahead of, like, New Hampshire’s, you know, like pretty much having political consultants coming in over these fake robocalls. I wanted to ask, how do you see, you know, like, in that realm of AI sophistication when it comes to intersecting with political figures, and then the recent image—I’m forgetting the grifter. It was like a grim reaper aspect of the Washington—I believe he was, like, the economy management director. I’m totally forgetting his name. But my question is, do you see—in your respective field, do you see there’s more of this sophistication, to the point that we won’t as reporters, you know, ultimately not catch this? And, again, this is something as a professor and I deal with, but it’s will the sophistication of these robo entities, these AI entities, be more, you know? You mentioned that, you know, we’ve essentially made it easier for these folks to come in. But, yeah, I wanted to hear your insights on that. DIRESTA: So the robocall, if I’m not mistaken the gentleman who did that got charged with—I don’t want to misspeak. I want to say impersonation or something. There are certain—you know, there are certain laws that that this is going to violate. But—so there was—if I’m not mistaken, there was actually a charging in that particular case. But, yes. I mean, one of the—one of the areas where you see this happen is, like, ransom phone calls where they—you know, they pretend to have a family member, or something like that, and then they have the audio of the family member and they demand compensation. You know, they demand money. Basically, they call you up. They’ll spoof a number. It’ll look like it’s coming from a family member. They’ll pretend that they are holding that family member hostage. They have that family member say something. And that’s how the scam works. The FBI has been putting out advisories on this. It’s been going on for a little over maybe two years now. This is also manifesting in the realm of the political, where they can make plausible audio of a political candidate saying something. There are still ways to do detection. One of the challenges is the gap between when this goes out and the detection happening. In the ransom moment, the reason that they use a ransom phone call is to create urgency, right? The sense that something bad is going to happen if you don’t respond immediately. And that’s where you see a lot of the time the sort of—the way that the scams work that involve voice cloning will often involve this sense of urgency. In the realm of the political, you’ll see these things drop maybe twenty-four, forty-eight hours before an election, something very time—you know, very closely timed. There was a couple of—I’m trying to remember where it was—but there was one where there was, you know, audio of a candidate saying something compromising. And I want to—maybe Slovakia. Where it took—it happened maybe twenty-four hours before people went to polls. And then they couldn’t authenticate it until afterwards, right? So, again, they’re trying to create that urgency or to create that that sense of shifting judgment before the authentication can happen. So this is a challenge for media and for authenticators. And it is going to—you know, it is going to continue to increase. You are seeing people who are trying to come up with lightweight ways to do some authentication on device, some ways to improve that so that people are standing by ready to do it ahead of key, important elections. But that is the—that is the challenge. I mean, as you mentioned, Carla, we didn’t talk about in that list of three things, fact checkers, you know? (Laughs.) Can you trust the fact checker, right? The reframing of fact checkers as somehow, like, being censorious or being in the tank for the left or whatever, that’s another, you know, political narrative that was done and undertaken quite deliberately, quite intentionally to create distrust so that the—you know, so that if this is—you know, so that that model of distrust can be potentially leveraged, you know, in service to other things as well. ROBBINS: Steven Kramer, fifty-six, of New Orleans, was acquitted. DIRESTA: Oh, was he? He wasn’t convicted of anything? ROBBINS: He was acquitted, but he still faces a fine from the FCC. What do you think the chances he’s actually going to be fined? DIRESTA: (Laughs.) What did they charge him with? Do you have it in front of you? ROBBINS: I’ve got the AP story on my phone. Would have faced a decade in prison if convicted. Let’s see. It said he was—he was about disrupting an election. DIRESTA: OK. OK. ROBBINS: And he and his defense argued that it was just a straw poll and it wasn’t recognized by the DNC. But I think it got caught up in that whole is this, you know, first in the nation, you know, primary—that whole thing. Anyway, he was— DIRESTA: There’ll be more of these. I’m sure there’ll be— ROBBINS: He was acquitted in June, so—but I don’t see something about whether the FCC has subsequently moved on this. Diego Lopez, can you identify yourself? Hi, Diego. It’s nice to see you again. And can you ask your question, or should I read it for you? Q: Hi. Thank you very much for hosting this. Good afternoon to you guys. It’s good morning for me. This is Diego Lopez with the Cibola Citizen newspaper here in New Mexico. I’m just wondering if you could explain a little bit about what the best way to make a layperson understand the danger of this disinformation is. I think we’ve all seen these videos with Sora 2. And it is just mind blowing how realistic some of these things are. So how can we help our people to understand the danger of this disinformation? Should we be writing articles in our local newspaper? Or are there other ways that we can do this? I struggle, because we are a print-based publication. Thank you. DIRESTA: Yeah. It’s hard to illustrate how good it is when people can’t see it. I mean, you can show some of the sophistication of even the still images, maybe? Just, like, this is a still screen from a video generated with whatever the tool is. I think that it is important to help people see it. I remember doing some of the PSAs. I remember NPR doing a PSA with us when I was at Stanford Internet Observatory trying to help people understand that people were using profiles with fake faces on LinkedIn to try to make you connect, to try to scam you. I think that scams is really the thing that the average person needs to be aware of, right? The potential, you know, for understanding that. You can actually do that with still images too. These are products that don’t exist. These are people that don’t exist. They’re asking for money for charitable donations for moments that never happened. You know, I’ve seen on Facebook the AI slop of—we wrote a paper on this—of, you know, wounded children or sick pets that don’t exist, right? So, helping people understand it. Elderly people saying things like, nobody ever supported me. Nobody said happy birthday to me. These sort of sympathy ploys. Helping people understand—oh, yeah. Helping people understand the most common scams, right? The most common ways that this manifests. So the combination of, look, this is where the technology is. This is how convincing it is. This is what it can do, right? So that’s important, sort of like almost tech articles. This is what it can do. This is where it is. This is how cheap and fast it is, right? And then, these are the common ways in which these scams are being deployed. And that’s almost like the PSA-type of reporting. Here are the common scams. Here are the ways it’s being used. And then, if you want to focus on the state actor and the way it’s being deployed in the realm of the political, you know, there’s always an election somewhere, right? And you’ll usually see something. There’s usually some story from—because these things are—you know, it is human nature, I think, to try to incorporate the latest and greatest manipulation technology and service to your political movement or candidate. You will usually have some example from a new election where you can, again, relate that story and say, in this election, in fill-in-the-blank, the Czech Republic, there is this—you know, this is what just happened over there, if there is an example that is relevant. And so you can illustrate it with stories. I think really telling the story is what makes it resonate with people and stick in their mind, as opposed to something that is communicated in the abstract. If you say, like, this creates a possible risk of that, then it feels very hysterical. People don’t know what to—what to believe. You don’t want to create moral panic or create a sense of foreboding and constant fear. But talking about what it is, what’s possible, and what people are actually doing, or you’re actually seeing happen that I think is, you know, using storytelling to help inform the public. ROBBINS: Clare McGrane, can you identify yourself and ask your question? Q: Yes. Hi. I’m a podcast producer and reporter here at KUOW Public Radio in Seattle. And I have a question that’s a little kind of tangential, but is relative related to what you were discussing earlier, about, you know, content creator—like, journalists who are content creators online, or content creators kind of masquerading as journalists. I’m working on a project right now that is aimed at kind of creating a conversational show for KUOW, for the station, that fits kind of the tone of content creator journalism that you might hear on other podcasts, but is backed with data reporting and comes from our newsroom. So this is our first attempt to try and kind of meet that younger audience where they’re at, like, with the kind of content that they’re used to hearing, but being very clear about the fact that it comes from our reporting and, like, really clearly drawing the line of, this is how we found this story, this is how we investigated this story. And, Renee, I’m just curious if you have any kind of advice on how media can bridge that gap and recognize that people’s, you know, preferences and patterns for taking in information has changed, and how we can try and meet our listeners and readers in the spaces and in the ways that they would like to be spoken to these days? DIRESTA: I mean, I think that that approach of storytelling and incorporating in the multimedia or the podcast style really does resonate with people. I know NBC, when Bandy Zadrozny was over there, did some interesting work on telling the story. There’s one that sticks out in my head of one of the nurses who fainted during COVID. She was very famous case during COVID. She fainted when she was getting her shot. So it was super early on. And then the conspiracy theorists on the internet decided she had really died and been replaced by a body double. And the—and the hospital didn’t do itself any favors by literally having her at a press conference where they didn’t let her talk. They had a mask on her and they didn’t let her talk, right? So it became a bit of a nightmare. And so this was a really great way to use storytelling and a multi-part podcast to tell the story of Tiffany Dover, was her name. And so I think it was—you know, many people wrote articles about this incident. But this was a way to really tell the story. And I think eventually, in the end, she managed to kind of track her down and get her to agree to an interview to kind of tell the story in her own words about, like, what the impact had—you know, had been for her, right, for Tiffany. And so there’s a lot of ways to do this. I think people really enjoy that model. I’m thinking there was also that one of—oh, boy. What was the name of it? With Adnan Syed. What was his name? This was the one with, like, the—was he guilty of a crime? Or there’s a lot of these— ROBBINS: Serial, the original one? DIRESTA: Thank you. Yes. There we go. Like, I remember listening to— ROBBINS: Podcast of all podcasts, the mother podcast, yes. DIRESTA: Yeah. (Laughs.) Yeah, Serial, that was the name of it. OK. So there were a few of these—like these models of where they become these, like, big cultural moments, and then everybody talks about them, and there’s, like—and I think that one—gosh, I mean, there were, like, several parts to that story that I personally don’t remember because I didn’t follow it very closely personally. But I know that, you know, I remember that there were multiple parts of it. So I think that that—and then I’ve also seen—there are a lot of journalists. I’m not really a big TikTok person myself, but you do see them going and creating content. You do see reporters kind of creating content and, like, relating the contents of their story, almost in video form. I’ve started doing that every now and then on Instagram Reels with, like, essays that I write. And I’m not a journalist. I just—I write for Lawfare. And so sometimes, when I write an analysis, I’ll sit there and I’ll give a three-minute summary of it, in hopes of just reaching people who only want to get it through video. Just because I think that, like, why not? Why not try? So just different ways of exploring the medium and experimenting with it is really important. ROBBINS: Well, the New York Times is doing that. I mean, they’ve got verticals on the front—on the front every day. I mean, it’s—people seem to—it’s the summary. And it personalizes it. So— DIRESTA: Some people literally just read their Substack articles on video. Like, literally will just be reading the first couple paragraphs and then say, hey, if you want to read the rest, you know it’s over here. ROBBINS: But there’s also—there’s also people who haven’t written the stories who are reading other people’s stories, with sort of snarky commentary. So there’s that as well. Carly Winchell has a question. Which is—Carly, do you want to read your question? Q: Hi. Sure. I’m Carly Winchell. I’m with the Ark Valley Voice from Colorado. And my question was just, what kind of advice can we give to the general public about identifying, like, AI generated disinformation? DIRESTA: Oh, it’s so hard now. (Laughs.) Q: I know, right? DIRESTA: I wish I had a better answer for you, because I remember, like, we did these—that handy PSA thing I referenced with NPR was, like, here’s how you can look at the ears, and the teeth, and the hair blends into the color. And can’t really do that anymore. Now it’s more of, you know, check and see does this exist somewhere else. Did this account come out of nowhere and share this one video and, like, that’s the only thing it’s ever posted? So sort of, like, almost like source provenance, you know, where what is the account that is sharing it? The account really does matter. There’s a mnemonic that we use in disinformation research when we do our own work, which is actors, behaviors, content, right? Where when we’re looking at our own stuff content is almost, like, third. And we’re looking at the actors—you know, who is sharing this, where did it come from, are these accounts all new? It’s hard for the average person to look at that, but you can usually tell if it’s, like, one video and, like, one account that’s come out of nowhere. That kind of helps. Similarly is, you know, what is the—when you’re looking at the content, is it incredibly incendiary and inflammatory? Sometimes that is indicative of something that is more out there to get a rise, as opposed to something that is real. I think that that doesn’t mean that there aren’t, you know, sensational moments of, you know, mean people doing mean things. That happens in the world. But oftentimes taking that extra beat is—you know, to try to verify it or to see what other people are saying about it, or to see if there’s another angle of the interaction. I think a lot about that moment Covington Catholic, that happened a few years back, of the kid in the MAGA hat and the Native American elder, at that—which was not disinformation, or false—you know, or generated video. But you did see over time multiple different angles of the video, multiple different shots, multiple different cuts that kind of, when put together, told a more complete story. When you have video that’s AI generated, you’re usually just going to see it kind of one angle, one sensational moment. You know, the investment is going to be made in generating one thing. And you’re not going to have a whole lot of different perspectives or other people talking about it. So right now, it’s going to be much more of a flat sort of single-shot thing with a—sometimes, you know, different accounts will be sharing it with inflammatory commentary in the tweet, but we haven’t yet seen, to the best of my knowledge, things that appear to have been shot from multiple angles of the same fake moment. So it’s hard, though. It’s really hard. That’s why I think more saying, like, take a beat and try to see if there’s other content out there or if somebody has verified it is better than trying to say, like, count the fingers, at this point. ROBBINS: Robert Chaney from the Missoulian, I think our last question. Q: Hi, there. Thanks. The Washington Post just had a story this morning showing multiple perspective fake videos of getting arrested for a DUI and getting in an argument— DIRESTA: (Laughs.) Q: —at a restaurant, where back and forth between, like, two camera presentations. So it was pretty scary. DIRESTA: Yeah, I mean, that was—I remember when the stills came out, one of the things that I was very curious about was how long it would take for you to be able to generate multiple shots of the same person in that way. And it was—you know, the answer was, like, a couple months. So it’s not—it’s not surprising that I guess we’ve got the ability to do that now. So, oh, there you go. Q: Anyway, I am with the Mountain Journal in Montana, which is also part of the Montana Free Press. We’re both digital-only, digital-native productions. In the last election cycle, we saw both the Republican and Democratic party’s operations setting up news sites that had, you know, local news in local communities, plus stories that were generated to, you know, be on the issues of their favorite candidates showing them in their preferred light, and whatnot. And then they just sort of dried up and blew away as soon as the campaign was done. But they pop these things up, like, you know, traveling circus tents, and tried to be a legitimate part of the news world. What I’m wondering is, have you seen any seal of Good Housekeeping watermarking, type of things that say: I am a human with a newsroom with editors and checks and balances and credibility of the old institutional kind, that is worth—is getting any traction on the positive side of saying, go back to the old institutional mainstream media model? DIRESTA: That’s what—I actually think that is what is going to happen. That is my personal feeling, that you are going to see that model of, you know, verified, credible, you know, somebody who actually attests proactively to: I am human. This is who I am. This is where I am. This is what I do. This is my device. These are the photographs I’ve taken with this device. You know, really just trying to establish provenance and credibility, and to—and to proactively offer that as a differentiator. I think that that is something that is going to become more valued and people are going to look for it as this sense of unease and not being able to tell what’s real becomes more pervasive for people. I was writing this maybe in 2020—(laughs)—saying that the killer app that AI is going to unlock is really going to be this notion of, like, how do you have privacy protecting credentialing? Or how do you have credentialing where people proactively and voluntarily indicate: I am real. This is who I am. And this is my sort of, like, vetted, validated content that I am putting out as this real person in the world. And I think that that is going to be something that you’re going to start to see very soon. ROBBINS: Maybe that’s our role. So this is—Renee, I just really want to thank you. And I’m going to turn it back to Irina. And thank you, everybody, for great questions. Been an extraordinary conversation. FASKIANOS: Yes. I second that. Thanks to all of you. And thank you, Renee DiResta, and Carla Anne Robbins. We really appreciate it. We will send out a link to this webinar recording and transcript. And, as always, we encourage you to visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on international trends and how they’re affecting the U.S. And, of course, we welcome your suggestions of how we can be a resource for you. You can email us at [email protected]. So, again, thank you both. And we hope you enjoy the rest of your day. ROBBINS: Thanks, Irina. Thank you, Renee. It was great.

Panelists discuss media consumption and views on foreign policy among youth in the United States and globally. The CFR Young Professionals Briefing Series provides an opportunity for those early in their careers to engage with CFR. The briefings feature remarks by experts on critical global issues and lessons learned in their careers. These events are intended for individuals who have completed their undergraduate studies and have not yet reached the age of thirty to be eligible to apply for CFR term membership. We are pleased to extend this invitation to you through the recommendation of a CFR member. If you no longer wish to receive these invitations, please let us know by replying to this email. If you wish to attend virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register. Please note the audio, video, and transcript of this hybrid meeting will be posted on the CFR website.

Elise Labott, the 2024-25 Edward R. Murrow press fellow at CFR, discusses the shift away from traditional news sources to social media and the implications of segmenting audiences through outlets such as Bluesky and X on local communities. Bobby Allyn, technology correspondent at NPR, speaks about his experience covering Silicon Valley companies and the ways they are transforming society. The host of the webinar is Carla Anne Robbins, senior fellow at CFR and former deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times.  TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Local Journalists Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. This webinar is part of CFR’s Local Journalists Initiative, created to help you draw connections between the local issues you cover and national and international dynamics. Our programming puts you in touch with CFR resources and expertise on international issues and provides a forum for sharing best practices. We’re delighted to have participants from forty-two states and U.S. territories with us today so thank you for taking the time to be with us, especially as I know you’re probably under a deadline. I want to remind everyone that this webinar is on the record, and the video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact at CFR.org/localjournalists. We are pleased to have Elise Labott, Bobby Allyn, and host Carla Anne Robbins with us. Elise Labott is a 2024-25 Edward R. Murrow press fellow at CFR and a leading journalist specializing in U.S. foreign policy and global affairs. She has reported from more than eighty countries and is a former CNN global affairs correspondent. She’s also the author of Cosmopolitics, a Substack publication focusing on U.S. policy and international relations; and the founder and editor in chief of Zivvy News, a nonprofit digital platform that engages youth on political and global issues, civic engagement, and media literacy. Bobby Allyn is a technology correspondent at NPR. He reports on big tech, startups, social media, artificial intelligence, Silicon Valley, and other tech-related topics. He was previously a staff writer at National Public Radio, the Oregonian, and the Tennessean. And Carla Anne Robbins, our host, she is senior fellow at CFR and co-host of the CFR podcast “The World Next Week.” She also serves as faculty director of the master of international affairs program and clinical professor of national security studies at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, and previously she was deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times and chief diplomatic correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. So welcome, all. Thank you for being with us. I am going to turn the conversation now to Carla to explore new frontiers of local news. So, Carla, over to you. ROBBINS: Thank you so much, and thanks, Elise, it’s great to see you. And, Bobby, it’s lovely to meet you. I listen to you, so glad to meet you. ALLYN: Oh. Good to meet you. Thanks for having me. LABOTT: Same here. Same here. Nice to be with you and all of you. ROBBINS: My first job, I was a researcher at NPR, so. ALLYN: Oh, really? Oh, wow. ROBBINS: Yeah. So—I was Deb Amos’ researcher, just— ALLYN: That’s amazing. That’s back when we had researchers. So, wow. (Laughter.) ROBBINS: Actually, I’ve hung out with Deb many times since then but she’s never—I’m always very deferential to her. OK. So I thought we would start out with some very interesting data about social media news from Pew, one of my favorite go-to places for data. So they do regular research on—ask people about their news consumption habits so they asked people how—what are their preferred sources for news in 2024 and they said about a quarter of U.S. adults—23 percent—said they prefer news websites or apps as their sources of news. Eighteen percent said they prefer social media. But the trajectory is always very important. Polls are snapshots, and that’s up 6 percentage points since 2023. So if we’re going to start being calm about the notion that news websites are leading they’re not leading for long. Twelve percent preferred search. Five percent preferred podcasts. When they asked people where they got local news they found that they often or sometimes—70 percent of them said they got it from friends, family, and neighbors, 66 percent said they got it from local news outlets, and 54 percent said they got it often or sometimes from social media. Age, of course, predictably, had a huge impact on how people answered the question. Seventy-one percent of U.S. adults age eighteen to twenty-nine get their news about local government and politics from social media, compared with 36 percent of those sixty-five and older. And, finally, I thought this was really interesting about which platforms are most popular for sources for news. Facebook and YouTube—about a third of Americans say they regularly get their news from there. Instagram, 20 percent. TikTok, 17 percent. X, the site formerly known as Twitter, 12 percent. Reddit, 8 percent. Something called Nextdoor, which I’ve never even heard of, which is 5 percent. Snapchat, 5 percent. And once again, demographics, political affinity, and the trajectory are all incredibly important here because people who said that they went to these sites regularly and which sites they relied on more or less for news 59 percent of people who say they use X say they get their news there. Fifty-seven percent of users who go to Truth Social say they get their news there. Fifty-two percent of TikTok users say they get news there, and that’s up from 43 percent just in 2023 and 22 percent in 2020. So increasingly people are turning to TikTok for news. I don’t know if you find that comforting or not. I don’t find it especially comforting. So given all of those stats my first question, which I’m going to pitch to both of you, is why do these stats matter for us as, shall I say, legacy media people other than depressing us about the future of our business? You know, how does social media fit into the professional lives of those who do this? You know, is it because we should be covering this because everybody else is getting their information there? Should we be using social media to leverage to get our own work out? Should we be emulating it in some way? You know, why—we know they’re eating our lunch but why should we be paying attention to it? So with that, I think I’ll throw it to Bobby first. ALLYN: Yeah. I had a NPR editor who liked to say, we’re not only competing with commercial news on the radio but we’re competing with Taylor Swift too, right? It’s this idea that it’s the attention economy. If not consuming one of our stories whether on air or on the website you’re going to be doing something else. And I just think there’s this big credibility gap, right? I think increasingly young people find the most authentic way to consume news is through a content creator they already have a relationship with and trust over a legacy media organization, most of which are full of reporters who have been professionally trained to not put their personality first. And I think—I mean, I started my career—my first ten years of my career, you know, I was working for local newspapers and local radio stations, and I think there is a real opportunity to after you file your story go to TikTok and do some version of it. Hit Bluesky and X and Mastodon and all the other social media sites you could think of to do other versions of it. Now, that’s—you can see that’s sort of, like, unpaid additional labor and that’s really not fair. But, increasingly, if you do not do that somebody else will. I mean, I file stories all the time and then go on TikTok and see a twenty-two-year-old in Denver doing a video on it that went viral and it’s better than I could have done and it maybe reached a bigger audience than I would have done. And there’s no reference to my reporting and that’s fine, but the point being if we’re not doing it somebody else will and often when there’s a content creator doing a video aggregation of a story for TikTok the details are wrong or there’s causation explained where the causation didn’t exist, and it just really pollutes the news ecosystem. So especially with TikTok I really, really have been pushing my colleagues to just go and do a direct to camera two-minute explanation of breaking news when you have it because you just never know it might go viral, and if you don’t do it somebody else will. ROBBINS: So mainly what you’re saying is if you don’t do it someone else will so if we do it we at least get it right. ALLYN: Yeah. ROBBINS: But it’s also cannibalizing our work. But maybe our work has already been cannibalized. ALLYN: Yes and no. I mean, I don’t—there’s so many incentives on platform, on TikTok, so that people do not leave the platform. I don’t know that most people who are watching a TikTok of my explanation of some story would have ever gone to NPR.org or turned on the radio. Our own internal surveys have found that there’s a huge distinction between our broadcast audience and our digital audience and I’d be willing to say that that’s also true on people who primarily get their news from TikTok, and it’s really difficult on TikTok to link out to a story. So it’s just, like—I don’t know. I mean, I just think we have to be putting ourselves out there. We have to be hitting as many platforms as we can. But, again, it’s really, really dicey because the ones who are the most popular tend to have the biggest opinions and the biggest personalities and sometimes that can chafe against the standards and the practices at legacy media institutions that really want you to surface the reporting before you surface your personality, right? So I think that’s caused some internal strife at a number of news organizations. ROBBINS: I want to come back to that, but I want to go over to Elise because I want to talk about the different personalities of the different websites in a minute if we’re going to do this. But, Elise, why should we care about this? LABOTT: Well, I think, you know, Bobby hit the nail on the head in a lot of ways but I think one of the big elephants in the room—there are two elephants in the room. Actually, one of them is, you know—let’s just say Bobby works for NPR. NPR is no longer just radio. You know, it’s a twenty-four-hour digital organization, multiplatform, and I think journalists really need to think of themselves as if you’re with a newspaper, if you’re with the local TV station, you can’t think of yourselves as just that. We are all multimedia journalists now and these are the places where, you know, we’re getting our audience. And it doesn’t matter if you’re listening to the story on the radio or whether you’re, you know, as Bobby said, doing a thing on TikTok. Your audience is where you find them and sometimes we have to go where—we have to meet the audience where they are and if they’re not listening to the radio, you know, as Bobby said, maybe we can go on TikTok and get them to listen to the NPR or, you know, I really like this guy—and that goes back into the whole idea is that, you know, especially young people where I’m really focused now through Zivvy News and also through my—some research I’m doing at the Council young people are turning away from legacy media in droves because they don’t feel, like, a connection to the—these news organizations. They don’t feel that there’s enough authenticity. And so I think this is a real way to get new audiences to meet them on TikTok, trying—you know, they’re looking for personalities. They’re looking for—you know, I like to say, you know, news—they call them news influencers now. We called them newsmakers back when. Influencers aren’t—nowadays they aren’t just, like, booty dancers, you know, doing that TikTok latest craze; they’re people on TikTok that are delivering the news. Some of them are journalists and some of them aren’t. And as you said, people have the greatest—you know, some of the people that have the greatest followers have the greatest opinions. That’s true in some ways but there are others that are just, you know, going on, being their authentic self, deliver the news and particularly young people are really identifying with that. And so if we can go on and we can give—as you said, we know we’re going to do it I’d like to say with legacy media ethics and standard but animated by, you know, what’s new and what’s next. So I think it is a real opportunity to gain new followers and also meet potential followers where they are and also show a little bit more of your personality because nowadays that’s what audiences are looking for. ALLYN: And I’ll just add to that, Elise. I think you made a lot of really good points. If you’re wondering how creators on TikTok may be explaining their stories, one very common way of doing it is talking in front of the green screen feature and they put up on the green screen the article and TikTok— LABOTT: Right. ALLYN: AI can actually read the byline. So you can go onto TikTok and just type your name in and you can see how people are explaining your story. I mean, I did that. At first I was, like, oh my God. Like, there’s really, really talented people. I mean, they are—some people—some of the TikTokers are incredible entertainers, incredible performers. They don’t always get the facts right but there’s something that we can learn from them. I really think there is. ROBBINS: When we talk about what makes them good performers and whether or not that fits within—and I’m not—I mean, Elise has known me a long time. I’m not stuffy despite the place that I work. I will tell you that when I was—I was at the edit page of the Times and Twitter was really taking off I would say to people, you can’t get ahead of the edit page on Twitter. You can’t stake out an editorial position that isn’t the editorial position of the Times. I don’t think that was unreasonable of me. A lot of people hated me but that’s another story for another day. We can talk to my shrink about it. But journalism, obviously, has changed an enormous amount. There are people who complain that journalism is too editorial. Usually it’s if they don’t agree with you. OK. LABOTT: Right. Right. ROBBINS: The people on the left don’t like right opinions. People on the right don’t like left opinions. How do we—what makes the people who are performing your articles, Bobby, or performing your articles, Elise—what makes them compelling, authentic, without—you know, that you could possibly do that would still be within the standards of journalism and that would be not playing into this notion that somehow you were overly politicizing your work? LABOTT: OK. I’m going to give everybody a cautionary tale on this because it is a delicate balance. Some people on this—Carla may remember and maybe Irina does—but years ago in 2015— ROBBINS: (Laughs.) I don’t like the Carla will remember years ago conjunction. LABOTT: Well, you’ll remember—well, only because we are friends. We’ve been longtime friends so you’ll probably remember. (Laughter.) It has a lot of mythic proportions in my head, maybe not in others. I was suspended from CNN for two weeks because I tweeted something that was deemed to be editorializing. And what did I tweet? I tweeted—you know, Bobby’s shaking his head. He may remember too. It was—it was about the Muslim ban or the Syrian ban of all refugees. And I said something like—you know, this was when Twitter was just coming up and just kind of gaining traction, and they were looking for us to be a little voicier—a little bit voicier. And I said someone like, oh, I thought it was un-American. It wasn’t—it wasn’t partisan, but it was a(n) editorial position. This is un-American. The Statue of Liberty is bowing her head in shame, I think I said. Now, at the time it was a little bit provocative but it wasn’t what we’re hearing on TV today or what we’re seeing on Twitter today, and someone from the Washington Post wrote this article on how dare she, she’s editorializing, and this was, like, a cautionary tale of what not to do. And, you know, I felt at the time, like, when everything happened if I’m going to die defending defenseless serious refugees—defenseless Syrian refugees. That may be a good hill to die on but it was editorializing and I learned my lesson, and I used it as an opportunity to never do that again. (Laughter.) Whereas we saw how journalism, especially in the Trump era and with this polarization we have—any journalist can talk about whatever they want. They say whatever they want. There were no guardrails and I really think the public is responding to that—that if you’re going to go to mainstream media you’re not looking for an editorial and you’re—except if you’re looking on the editorial page. And I don’t want to hear an anchor say they’re outraged or I don’t want to hear their anchor say, I’m embarrassed to be an American. They want—they think that the bias is there and so if the bias is there why can’t I listen to the bias from someone who follows my bias? And I like that. ROBBINS: But then how do you square the circle with going back to being authentic and entertaining and getting—pay attention to you? LABOTT: Look—I mean, we’re doing it—we’re doing it right now, right? I mean, when I would go on TV and—you know, we like to say, oh, I’m not a performer but, you know, we’re performing. We’re giving our personality. You can show personality and you can show a little nod or a wink or a, you know, inflection without saying, you know, I feel this way about this person or I feel this way about this story. Look, we’re all making editorial kind of choices based on how we write and how we tell a story so that—we’re already kind of indicating, and we don’t like to admit it, Carla, but the way we tell a story is indicating our bias. We all have biases. The thing is to not, like, beat someone else over the head with it and, unfortunately, what we’re finding on, you know, a lot of these sites is that there is—it’s a free for all in terms of, like, that’s what it is. It’s people giving their opinion and if they don’t like your opinion then they don’t want to hear from you. But there is a way of, I think, showing your personality and showing, like, how unreal this story is or this is crazy or, you know, kind of using emotion and using inflection without taking a side on the story. And I think that’s the delicate balance we all, everyone on this call, is trying to feel right now, and you can’t control what someone else is going to do about your story but you can control how you do it. ALLYN: Yeah. ROBBINS: Bobby, we’ve got a question from Leoneda Inge but—who, which fits in with what I wanted you to answer as well which is what did you learn from watching the person reading it that you should be doing differently and what Leoneda is asking is, I figured out years ago if I produce a story I want it delivered at least three different ways—what ways do you recommend under deadline. So I’m going to kluge onto that my question which is if you’re going to do it three different ways you’re going to—obviously, you’re going to have to package it in three different ways, depending on the medium, and it’s—I would suspect all those three different ways are not going to be the NPR way. So— ALLYN: Yeah. I mean, especially for, you know, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, TikTok audience it’s not going to be an NPR script where there’s, you know, a twenty-five-second host intro, a question that maybe confuses half the people, and then a very formal answer. Here’s—(laughter)—here’s what’s in it. You saw that thing on the news. ROBBINS: (Inaudible)—public—(audio break). FASKIANOS: We’re trying to get Bobby back on and I’m going to turn it back—oh, here he comes. OK. So, Carla, over to you and we’re going to send out a note to our participants that we’re back on. So why don’t we continue and we’ll get everybody back on? ROBBINS: That’s great. Thank you. Bobby, you were saying? The question, of course, was multiple platforms. The question different platforms, different, you know, norms—esthetic norms for them. How do you do that and how do you still sort of maintain your standards? ALLYN: Yeah. I was just saying it wouldn’t really land if you did a standard NPR two-way, a Q&A for, you know, TikTok or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts audience because they want you to cut to the chase faster and, honestly, NPR should probably do that more often as well. (Laughter.) A lot of, you know, vertical video news videos that you’re seeing on social media it’s people very immediately just saying, you saw this thing in the news. Here’s what’s up. Here’s what it means. Here’s what I have to say. Honestly, often the writing is really sharp, it’s really compelling, and the editing is really fast, and I think everyone in broadcast news has something to learn from content creators on platforms like TikTok. And, again, when it comes to breaking news this does get a little hairy because as any reporter knows when a story is breaking and unfolding there’s a lot of key questions and areas that remain unknown, and when a sort of younger, you know, social media audience will see legacy journalists saying, we know A and B but we don’t yet know C, because of the environment that we’re all in some people automatically assume that the news is hiding something, right—that there’s a conspiracy, that there’s something happening from like, say, the masthead on down that wants a piece of information to be silenced. We all know that is not true but there are many people on social media saying that and they often have very loud megaphones and you’re up against that. So sometimes the question that I’m often asking is do I entertain that to disabuse people of that theory or is that giving it more oxygen. LABOTT: Yeah. I— ALLYN: And reasonable minds can differ on that, right? LABOTT: Yeah. I mean, I have been struggling that with myself and I say am I giving it currency, am I—by even, like, addressing some of the most ridiculous things, like—let’s go back to, like, the Pizzagate or, you know, what are those things where it’s just so utterly ridiculous and people are talking about it do I even start talking about it and say, oh, I—you know, and I find now CNN is or, you know, my former employer or others are engaging in mainstream media, like, they feel that they have to engage to be able to compete with some of the, you know, chatter on social media. Are you covering the fact that there’s a phenomenon on social media or are you actually, you know, engaging and reporting out a story that we know is not true, and I do feel like sometimes giving things currency and, like, even having to say, like, I spoke to my sources and they say that’s not true gives currency to things that, you know, maybe we do have a—if we have a responsibility to kind of, you know, be the adults in the room in terms of some of the journalism that’s going on I think that’s a good way to start is not to go down the rabbit holes of some of the conspiracy theories that are, you know, having oxygen. But, I mean, a recent one that we faced was remember with the dogs and the cats and they’re eating the dogs and they’re eating the cats, and that became such a thing that that became a news story in and of itself and I just—like, I had to disengage for a few days because I was really disturbed by this that it became, like—you know, we’ve talked about this before, I think, amongst all of us but in this age of, you know, where truth is even being questioned we’re having to engage in talking about nontruths. So it’s not just about content, which I do agree with Bobby, like, there needs to be different kinds of content for different types of platforms. You can also play with, you know, kind of graphics and Canva is a great way to, you know, inject some, you know, color and things into some of your content. You know, we could be a little bit more creative with the visuals, I think, on some of these social media platforms that we can’t do on others. But in terms of the stories that we select I think we still need to be, you know, what people look for. Then we’re just, you know, kind of what makes us different than some of these other creators that are out there if we’re not kind of animating our presence on social media with those legacy media ethics and standards. ROBBINS: Well, I want to have other people ask questions of the group. So, please, either put questions in the Q&A or raise your hands so we can have you guys join as well as talking about your experiences with this because I’m sure you guys have questions as well and answers as well to share with us. And while you do that and formulate your questions Andrew Bowen, who’s the Metro reporter at KPBS-FM in San Diego, you had a question which got wiped out when we disappeared. So can you voice your question? Because, I’m sorry, it got wiped out when we—when the gremlins took us away. Unless Andrew had to go back to work. While we wait for Andrew— Q: Yeah. Hi. Can you hear me? ROBBINS: OK, great. Yes, absolutely. Q: Yeah. I’m wondering what the—whether there’s any reason why someone—you know, a public media journalist making a video on TikTok shouldn’t include a call to donate in every single video. Because we already do this on the radio, we do it on TV, and if the news consumer is finding their way to donate to nonprofit media via TikTok instead of FM radio or linear television then what’s the difference? ALLYN: Yeah. That’s— LABOTT: Bobby, you want to take that? ALLYN: Yeah. It’s an interesting idea. I mean, fundraising is a little outside of my bailiwick but I will say on TikTok if you start hawking something the authenticity meter is going to go off pretty fast I think. Even if it’s for, you know, something that we all think is—you know, has value like public media it gets a little dicey because it just looks like we’re sort of there to sell them something, and there’s already a lot of ads on TikTok. So I really just don’t know that that would land. I’d be curious to see what the conversion rate would be. I would imagine it would be extremely low. But, I mean, why not experiment? Why not try new things? Why not try to, you know, make the case that there is value in public media? But, yeah, I don’t—I just think there’s maybe, you know, potential for that to backfire if it becomes overly sales pitchy because that’s not really the vibe of TikTok unless you’re actually looking at an ad. But this is totally outside my expertise, so I don’t know, you can listen to what I’m saying on this. (Laughs.) LABOTT: Yeah. Or another thing you could do is say, if you like this video follow me or link in bio, and then in the link in the bio that’s where you could, like, go to—like, people have a link tree now, which is like a link tree is all of the different platforms that you’re on and that’s where a lot of even creators are asking for, like, here’s my Patreon or if you want to donate. So instead of doing it in the content and being like, hey, how about a few bucks, like, you can say, if you like this follow my, you know, link and bio and that’s where you can find it. So it is good to put it there. Probably maybe not in the video. ROBBINS: Can we talk about the different—I mean, the different platforms, which are all very—you know, three platforms, potentially but many of them have different political coloration to them and we all seem to be splintering into different—into our different ecosystems themselves. Bobby, have you—or Elise, have you ever posted on Truth Social? LABOTT: Never. I don’t even read it. ALLYN: I have an account that I’ll use to confirm that something Trump, you know, supposedly wrote there—he actually wrote but I don’t really go to Truth Social. I mean, you know, X has basically become so extreme that when I occasionally lurk on X I feel like I’m getting some flavor of Truth Social. There’s been a bit of a migration from Truth Social over to X. So I think I’m definitely getting a window into that world just by going through my timeline there, and there’s just such a link penalty on X. People have noticed that—I mean, Elon even admitted it recently that if you tweet or post, I guess, we say now and have a hyperlink in your post it’s going to be—the algorithm down ranks it. So that’s why you’re seeing people write something, they put the link underneath it. But even then there’s a penalty, and the whole—I mean, the whole point—because the whole play in the world of social media is engagement so whenever you have a hyperlink that is basically asking people to leave the platform. The less time on the platform the less advertising revenue they could bring in. So I spend a lot less time on Twitter than I used to. I would say I spend now about 80 percent of my social media time in terms of looking for and sharing news on Bluesky—I really like Bluesky—maybe 10 percent on Threads and 10 percent on X. But Bluesky has been great for journalists in terms of engagement, in terms of—a bunch of news organizations have come out recently and said they’re actually getting more referral traffic from Bluesky than they are X. So I think there’s a lot of hope with Bluesky. A lot of people are excited about it. But it’s still very young, it’s still very small, but I think it has potential. LABOTT: You could offer— ROBBINS: One second, Elise. I just want to follow up with both of you about Bluesky, which is that Bluesky is where people go when they’re fed up with X. So it’s a very self-selected political audience. So, I mean, aren’t we basically just putting ourselves into a news ghetto if we’re just posting on Bluesky? ALLYN: I think that was maybe true in the beginning but Bluesky is becoming more diverse. You know, the so-called shit posters—you know, the kind of people who just post nonsense all day—are increasingly coming to Bluesky. I’m seeing more, you know, right-wing provocateurs on Bluesky. It is a lot of folks part of the so-called exodus—you know, people like you’re saying, people leaving the Elon Musk ecosystem. But increasingly it is not just one type of person. There are other social media platforms that are more ideologically striped but—I don’t know, I find that I’m getting a pretty wide range of opinions and reactions to my posts on Bluesky. I’m not using it as much as I use used to use X but, yeah. No, to your point that’s why sometimes there’s this sort of fallacy in talking about social media and that people just use one. You know, we’re just on this one place. We’re talking to people on this one platform. We’re sharing links. But what you should do is share your link everywhere you can. I mean, I have some colleagues who are now sharing all their links as their first social media site to LinkedIn because they noticed— LABOTT: Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I was going to say. ALLYN: —lots of engagement on LinkedIn. I mean, why not just share it everywhere? I mean, what’s the downside of just trying every single platform? I guess the downside is it’s just really exhausting. (Laughs.) But if you have the energy for it put your link everywhere and see what works and just constantly experiment and iterate, right? LABOTT: Yeah. I would say that I’m using LinkedIn a lot more. Can you hear me? ROBBINS: Mmm hmm. LABOTT: OK. I’m using LinkedIn a lot more and I feel like LinkedIn now—it used to be kind of about getting a job but now I think it’s a lot more of a professional—a place where professionals are discussing and people that want to have a little bit more thoughtful of an engagement are discussing on LinkedIn. So I’m using that a lot more. And then also Substack, you know, isn’t traditionally necessarily a social media platform but I have a Substack. A lot of journalists are moving to Substack to put out their content and they also have a new kind of Twitter-ish feature where it’s called Notes where you can have thoughtful discussion. So I think, you know, Bobby is right that we need to, you know, kind of move out a little bit beyond the Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok and, you know, just post everywhere you can. Usually, I just have a thing is where I’m going to post something I may tweak it a little for each different platform. I’m going to go to Twitter, LinkedIn, Threads, you know, Instagram and TikTok, you know, and, you know, Substack is my primary platform so obviously I’m going to do that. I would also love to know what everybody in the audience is using. If you want to put it in the chat what you guys are using we can—love to hear about that. ROBBINS: Thank you, Elise, for asking that question, which is what—I would love to hear this as well what people are using and I’d also love to hear— LABOTT: And why. What do they like about it. ROBBINS: Yeah, or tell us. You know, speak up. I’d love to hear from you all, and I’d also love to hear whether or not your editors, or if you are an editor, does anyone still have a conversation whether there’s a potential to monetize the use of social media or has everyone just thrown their hands up and said, forget it, we’re not going to be able to monetize this? They’re too big for us. They’ve overwhelmed us. We give up. Because you—both Elise and Bobby said in the beginning of this that somehow as you were saying about the downloading the links in X. But is there any way to create followers to get them to come back to our sites or is this really our job here is that at least we’re depolluting—we’re cleaning up the bay? We’re correcting misinformation. We’re getting more information ourselves to see what people are paying attention to. We’re using this because it’s better to depollute the ecosystem. But there’s no way we can monetize it and even though it’s basically gobbling up our space. ALLYN: Yeah. Again, when it comes to the business side of journalism it’s just really outside of my expertise. I mean, I have thoughts on that but sometimes those thoughts come against, like, institutional priorities. I mean, NPR we’re obviously public media and so because of our public—you know, public interest is supposed to drive our newsroom and, you know, we’re a nonprofit. We don’t have a pay wall. But, you know, my colleagues at other publications who do have hard pay walls because, obviously, journalism costs money they’re constantly up against this question of, do I go to all these social media apps and give a summary of all my reporting and that does actually create a bit of a cannibalization because you’re creating a disincentive for anyone to ever become a subscriber to your publication if you’re doing that for every single story. But it’s a matter of tradeoffs because not doing it means you’re missing a huge and growing audience so what do you do, right? I think one of the questions we’re kind of trying to strike at here is how do we get social media passive consumers to become active participants and people who will pay for our news product, and I think lots of people are trying to figure this out. I don’t have any perfect answers. But it’s a tricky one. It is. I mean, I know myself I’ve been in the news business my entire life, which isn’t that long. I’m thirty-seven. But it’s the only career I’ve had and I sometimes— LABOTT: Me, too. ALLYN: —I’m sent a link and I see a pay wall and I don’t pay. This is what I do for a living. So I have some sympathy with people who see a pay wall and say, well, I want to read this article but I don’t want the publication for a year. (Laughs.) So, I mean, obviously, that’s how it is for a lot of people. LABOTT: Well, yeah. I would say, I mean, it’s—you’re going to—if you’re looking for, you know, people to look for your content it’s going to be on the quality of your engagement on social media. So if people really like you on social media and they want more of you they’re going to go look for your content wherever they can find it. If your content is good people will find you. So creators are making—and by the way, you know, each individual is going to be different with each individual news organization. But people are monetizing on social media and creators are making a lot of money on social media through the platforms. And we’re—you know, someone just asked whether we’re—YouTube is—I think YouTube is a little bit more for an older audience and there’s not as much engagement as some of the others. But certainly I also, you know, put my stuff on Facebook and those—people are making money on Facebook. There’s also YouTube. So, you know, I think if you want an audience it doesn’t—there are two things. You either want an audience and you want to—and/or you want to monetize. If you just want an audience it shouldn’t matter. You’re Carla with the New York Times or Bobby with NPR or Wall Street Journal or whatever, and wherever it is—wherever they find you that’s where it is. If you want to monetize you have to give a little bit of yourself to kind of, like—you know, and in your—maybe we don’t want to say, you know, please donate to NPR but you could be, like, if you really like my work come visit me on NPR. ALLYN: But then— LABOTT: You know what I mean? And that’s an authenticity that, you know— ALLYN: There’s another tension, too, from the institutional perspective because we want legacy media, public media, to be encouraging reporters in the field to become social media personalities. but if they become too good at it they won’t need their institutions and they could probably make more money without their institution. So from the sort of management perspective do you give them a really long leash and then they say, actually I can make more money by monetizing my videos—goodbye? I don’t know. ROBBINS: I don’t think that’s happened to a lot of people. I think most people who’ve ended up on Substack have, shall we say, their newsrooms have been shrinking. ALLYN: There’s also people on Substack making many millions of dollars, so it just depends— LABOTT: Well, or they didn’t like or they didn’t—or they felt—they left mainstream media because a lot of the reasons that audiences are leaving because—you know, like I said, mainstream media has this, like, cachet but let’s not pretend that most of them aren’t as biased as the rest of them anymore. They all have an agenda and, like, some people are more—you know, some of the creators online are more honest about it. So, again, I hear from a lot of young people and, you know, I’m doing this research at the Council on this very topic. I had a focus group with a lot of young people about where you’re getting your news, social media, and they say, look, you know, I—what is—you know, the mainstream news media is biased so what does it matter if I get my content from a biased creator or a biased New York Times? Like, you know, when—again, when truth is—and facts are not really the primary driver people—these young people, a lot of them even know that some of the stuff they’re reading on social media isn’t true. They don’t care. So I think that we need to go. We need to be able to be—we can still be ourselves—accurate, informative, vetted sources. But, you know, as we’ve been talking about we can learn a lot from, you know, some of their creators and what they’re doing. ROBBINS: So John Allison from—he’s the news editor of the Tribune Review. John, you raised a question about Facebook. Would you like to talk a little bit about that or anything else about your experience with social media as an editor? Q: Unmute. Hello. ROBBINS: Hey. Q: Have I reached you? Yes. I brought up Facebook because it feels like the old folks home of social—(laughter)—media and it seems also to be hostile to media. You know, you talk about link death. You put out a news story on Facebook—very little reaction. Put a picture of my cat having a crème brulée, boom—you know, great activity. But are we just chasing one thing after another? Is it—are we just looking for the coolest place to land and is it a mug’s game or are we going to really find a real—we, I say we meaning a traditional newspaper publisher here. Are we really going to find a partner in social media or do we have to build something ourselves again? And I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m raising it. I’m not—I’m puzzled by it. ALLYN: Yeah. I think with Facebook I just know from NPR’s internal numbers on digital story traffic it long ago cratered and that was a decision, you know, made at the executive level to downrank and deprioritize news links across the board. And you know, Facebook justified that by saying this is not why people log on to their apps. They want to know what their friends and family are doing. They don’t want to learn about what’s happening in their city council or what’s happening in Washington. You can quibble with that but it had a huge effect, at least at NPR and probably other places, in terms of the amount of referral traffic that we get from Facebook. But, I mean, it’s still a platform with billions of users. It does skew a little older, John, to your point. I’m reminded of—again, I’m not sure some in this room remember this—my first newspaper job at the Tennessean I started there around 2010, 2011 and the—you know, the now famous sort of pivot to video and it’s, you know, a Gannett newspaper. We were all given these stabilizers for our iPhones and we had a mandate to do four videos a day regardless of quality, upload them to Facebook. They were terrible, right? But we had a grant at the time for Facebook and we were trying this new experiment out. But the news leadership there—I don’t think it was true of just this one newspaper—didn’t take social media seriously. I think a lot of the industry kind of dropped the ball with social media and thinking it was a fad and thinking it was cute and just having a little too much confidence in their own delivery methods and a little too much confidence in the idea that people are always going to log on to NPR.org to find out what’s happening, and look what happened, right? I mean, I think we kind—that ship has sailed a little bit. We should have been thinking about building our own digital platforms and delivery methods a long time ago and I think we’re so kind of screwed at this point, honestly. And we saw what happens when we become overly dependent on, you know, the Silicon Valley companies. They realize they can make more money elsewhere and they say, screw you. So it’s—not to be overly cynical but I think there was an opportunity a long time ago and we didn’t take social media seriously. LABOTT: I think that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and some others are doing a very good job at kind of transitioning to digital. The Washington Post, for instance, has an excellent TikTok account. I think it’s a little—you know, at first it was kind of funny. Now it’s a little gimmicky. But it’s got a million followers. And as, you know, I think, like, people know the guy—they call him the Washington Post TikTok guy. So every time they’re saying Washington Post TikTok guy the name Washington Post is coming up. Are those people going to the Washington Post? Some of them are, you know, and I think now more and more people are getting more referrals from digital than they are from, like, you know, traditional kind of marketing. But, again, I just think we need to think of ourselves as multimedia organizations and nowadays—and, I mean, the thing about X and the link kind of notwithstanding, you know, the name of our media organization is our brand but the distribution is wherever we can get it. And I think as opposed to finding new ways of, you know, distribution we need to find new ways of—our news organizations—the business model needs to change. For instance, the New York Times is making a lot more money now off games or off cooking, and kind of news is more of a public affairs function that’s subsidized by cooking or games or things like that. And so if news is, like, the kind of, you know, haute couture of publishing or broadcasting or news and information then some of these other business models are going to be what subsidizes it and there—and look, there’s a lot of money right now in local journalism to figure these things out and I think—I’ve, you know, been trying to talk to people at some of the foundations and one of the things they’re specifically looking at are business models—sustainable business models. This is what we should be thinking about right now. We shouldn’t be thinking about whether we should be on TikTok or Social or this or that platform. We should all be on all of them, if you feel comfortable. ALLYN: Yeah, I— LABOTT: But we should be thinking about what the business model is. ALLYN: Yeah. No, I agree. But what’s really in vogue now is not even social media but it’s large language models, right? Increasing—I mean, Google search is—has been declining for some time in terms of quality and overall usage, especially with young people. Lots of people now go to ChatGPT, they go to Perplexity, they go to Claude, and they say, what’s that bill that just passed, and they get bullet points, right? So we learned a lesson as a news industry that we didn’t take social media seriously. We let all of these Silicon Valley companies eat our lunch. We should be building our own large language models and the Washington Post, to their credit, unveiled one recently where it is trained on the data of all of our articles and there would be a little pop-up and you can ask it a question and it just pulls from New York Times stories, Washington Post stories, you know, NPR stories. So we know it’s valid. We know it’s vetted. Otherwise, these large language models really are the future. You’re getting analysis. You’re getting, you know, the facts. You’re getting information rapidly, right? So I really think there also needs to be an emphasis on should news organizations be building their own large language models because, as we know, AI is a huge part of the future when it comes to how people are going to be informed and how people are going to, you know, learn how to sort of navigate their world. ROBBINS: I would—we’re almost done. I would make one further argument which is this is—yes, monetizing is sort of an essential notion here. I’m not sure that smaller papers are going to be able to do that. Certainly, smaller papers can’t monetize games. Smaller papers can’t monetize cooking. Smaller papers can’t do the things that might— LABOTT: I just said it to, like, say that we need to be thinking of new— ROBBINS: Yeah. No, certainly I—but I think that this other question here about social media is can we in some way take lessons from them about their definitions of authenticity. I don’t know. I think that’s something that we have to sort of figure out that sort of balance here, particularly because of the lack of trust in institutions generally and how we find that balance and that’s really a hard thing for us. That’s one thing. And the other thing is I think that we need to consider that there is a whole world out there of conversation going on in social media that we as journalists have to cover and that goes back to your question, Elise, about the cats and the dogs. I mean, when do we get to that— LABOTT: When does it become a news story. ROBBINS: Yeah, and when do we—and also when are we missing it? Because I—certainly, if you go back to something like Trayvon Martin, I mean, the Trayvon Martin story was going on for a quite a while on social media before all the big papers and the small papers even noticed it. And I know most organizations can’t afford to have a full time reporter just monitoring and trying to make assessments like that but we are all intuitively on social media anyway and it’s our responsibility to raise this question. There’s a world boiling on out there that we’re not part of quite often—that there is a news conversation and some of it sounds wacky and some of it’s absolutely, utterly legitimate news, and because it’s couched in language that doesn’t sound like news we have a responsibility to translate that into news, and it’s not easy. LABOTT: Yeah. No, it’s not easy at all and my question to you would be on this cats and dogs thing is how do we cover that. I think the decision is—I mean, not how to— ROBBINS: J.D. Vance made it very easy for us. He started talking about it. So, you know, once a politician is talking about it— LABOTT: Well, you know, I mean, but— ROBBINS: It was Vance, wasn’t it? LABOTT: —to me the story was not whether dogs are—whether they’re eating dogs or cats. I mean, it was pretty quickly kind of debunked and then it became about the phenomenon of it, like, with this—with the story of—and I covered both this and the story I’ll get into with the killing of the health care—the United Healthcare CEO. Like, it was a legitimate story that he was killed but the conversation—and it was—and it’s a legitimate thing to talk—you know, it became, like, this whole conversation about, you know, the pitfalls of health care in this country and, you know, people were saying that he deserved it and things like that. That conversation was, I feel like, legitimate news. There was a whole other conversation on social media about how hot the shooter was and that he became this kind of big celebrity on social media. Now, that’s a conversation. I thought the phenomenon was very interesting about it but, like, how do you—that’s a conversation. Like, I think we—it is a real conundrum of what—at what point—like, what are we discussing about these big conversations that are happening. And I think it’s going to be—I think the jobs of editors on what we cover for social media is going to be one of the most important jobs as we continue to work on social media. ROBBINS: We’re running out of time but I did want to—since we did lose a little bit of time I’m going to go a tiny bit over. But I did—wanted to ask Bobby and I wanted to ask everybody else who’s with us how many of you actually covered the phenomenon of the hot shooter, you know, of how it was being experienced particularly with young people. Because I also teach and that’s the way my students were talking about it. Bobby, did you cover that? ALLYN: No. I’m on NPR’s business desk so that kind of was outside of our lane a little bit. But, I mean, sort of zooming out from that I think culture happens on the internet. As some people like to say, the internet’s going to internet, right? There’s going to be outrageous and over the top, things that go viral, the meme-ification of everything. Often this is tawdry. Often this is inappropriate. Often it causes legacy media to clutch their pearls. But look, increasingly culture happens digitally. It happens online and I think we have to grapple with that and incorporate that into our reporting but in sensitive ways, right? I mean, only focusing coverage, obviously, on people who think the shooter is hot or some of the really, you know, lurid assessments of that case is missing the story. But that’s not to say it’s not part of the story, right? It just has to be dealt with sensitively. But I don’t think we can look away from digital culture. ROBBINS: And it is not a culture separate from us and that’s sort of the challenge of it, and how we balance that is really challenging. Well, I want to thank Elise and I want to thank Bobby and I want to thank everybody else. I don’t think we’ve answered—we certainly raised—(laughs)—it’s a conversation we could come back to. Irina, I want to turn it over to you. Thank you. FASKIANOS: And I second the thanks to Elise Labott, Bobby Allyn, and Carla Anne Robbins. We will be sending out the transcript and the video. We’ll splice it together for the part that we missed for our technical glitch to you all so you can share it with your colleagues. I’m not sure whether I should share your X handles or not but I will @Elise Labott, @Bobby Allyn, and @robbinscarla, and, of course, I’m sure other social media sites, and you should subscribe to Elise’s Substack and Zivvy News. ROBBINS: I signed up to Zivvy News this week. FASKIANOS: I did, too, in advance of this. LABOTT: Thank you. Thank you. FASKIANOS: And listen to Bobby for his great reports on NPR. And as always we encourage you to visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on international trends and how they’re affecting the United States. We welcome your suggestions for speakers and future topics we should cover. You can email [email protected]. We appreciate your being with us today, for the work that you’re doing, and happy holidays, and we will reconvene in 2025. ROBBINS: Thank you, Irina. LABOTT: Thank you. ALLYN: Thanks, everyone. LABOTT: Thank you, everyone. ROBBINS: Elise, thank the—thank the Panera. (Laughter.) ALLYN: Thank you very much. LABOTT: (Laughs.) Thank you. (END)    

Panelists discuss the shifting information environment underpinning this year’s U.S. presidential election, generational differences in accessing information, the rising role of influencers, and how the campaigns’ overall strategies responded to these evolutions.  

Panelists discuss Russia's broader strategy beyond Ukraine, including efforts to expand the conflict through cyberattacks and arson across Europe, as well as possible election interference in the United States.