A Panel Discussion With Berit Anderson,the Honorable Valeriy Chaly, and Steve Shillingford
About Berit Anderson
About The Hon. Valeriy Chaly
About Steve Shillingford
About Ed Butler
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Publisher’s Note: This week, we are offering members the best discussion I’ve seen on one of the most important topics in the world: how do we recognize, and defeat, those practicing information warfare against democracies? What percentage of posters on a major trending Twitter story (or Instagram, or Facebook) are bots? How do we recognize them, and how do we train ourselves – and our children – to ignore them? How do we get rid of them altogether?
Berit Anderson broke the story on Cambridge Analytica and Russian manipulation, and continues to speak around the world on this subject. Steve Shillingford works to understand and defeat these global attacks on the truth in real time. Ukrainian Ambassador Valeriy Chaly represents the nation used by Russia as its test bed before moving new info-weapons on to the US and elsewhere. And Ed Butler, senior broadcast journalist at the BBC and our longtime media partner at FiRe, provides the grounding and intelligent guidance that this almost-unbelievable-but-true story requires.
Altogether, this becomes a Must Read for anyone interested in post-Internet society. – mra
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The Future of Identity & Online Privacy
As the drumbeat of the Mueller investigation continues and mid-terms roar nearer, one significant fact has mostly escaped national attention: information warfare didn’t stop with the 2016 US election. Online, behind the scenes, a network of actors is using bots, big data, and algorithmic targeting to manipulate the perceptions and purchasing habits of everyday people, weaponizing cultural narratives around race, immigration, and expression and catching Fortune 500 companies – and their stock prices – in their crosshairs.
Berit Anderson, FiRe Programs Director, CEO of Scout.ai, and Co-Founder of Guardians.ai; The Honorable Valeriy Chaly, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine to the USA;
and Steve Shillingford, Founder & CEO, Anonyome Labs
Moderated by Ed Butler, Senior Broadcast Journalist, BBC
FiRe 2018 Conference
Thursday, October 11, 2018 ( Stein Eriksen Deer Valley ( Park City, Utah
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Ed Butler: This is a big one. This is not a conversation that we’ve actually pre-chatted to each other about.
Berit Anderson: Well, we did, a little bit …
Butler: Oh, you did. Oh, okay; fine. Berit, off you go.
Tell me, seriously: You and I had a conversation a year ago about, obviously, the rise of … This was all before the Cambridge Analytica scandal fully exploded, I would say, at that time, and it was incredibly illuminating back then. And I felt like new ground for me was certainly being forged when we had that conversation here.
We’ve moved on another year, and the scale of the challenge that we’re facing, perhaps just in terms of the social-media platforms – and we can go much wider than that, and I’m sure we will today, but – where have we got to in this conversation? I don’t know if there’s an easy way of summarizing that.
