- A decade ago, it was fashionable to see in social media a wellspring of democratic innovation and potential.

Events of the last six years may have changed the public's perception on that score, but today's guest warns that social media platforms have much more work to do to protect democracy in the United States and around the world.

She's Katie Harbath this week on Story in the Public Square.

(soft music) Hello and welcome to Story in the Public Square where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina university.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with the "Providence Journal".

- Before we get started today, we wanna acknowledge the fact that Wayne and I are side by side again, back in the studio, after producing 92 episodes remotely over the last two years of the pandemic.

We wanna thank our great crew here at Rhode Island PBS for keeping the show going when so much of the world had shut down.

We wanna thank you too for sticking with us through fuzzy video feeds and more.

It's great to be back at home.

Now with that said, let's get back to the big stories.

This week we're joined by Katie Harbath, the former Facebook director of public policy whose concerns about big tech's role in democracy led her to leave that post last year.

Katie, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks for having me.

- Well, you know, there's a lot that we wanna talk with you about, but let's take for a moment to talk about what you did while you were at Facebook.

Give our audience a quick background.

- Absolutely, so I was at Facebook for 10 years.

I joined in February of 2011 and over the course of that time, I helped build the teams that work with politicians and governments around the world in how to use social media to connect with citizens, and I also helped to coordinate the company's work on elections through the end of 2019.

- And what were the big challenges that you faced in that timeframe?

- Oh my gosh, there were many challenges.

I mean, at the beginning, it was just trying to convince politicians and candidates to even use the platform.

I mean, 2011, it was still pretty new.

People weren't quite sure if this social media thing was just people posting pictures of what they had for lunch or if it could actually be used to engage in civic discourse.

You know, 2012, President Obama was heralded for using technology and data as part of his campaigns, and so early on, it was really just trying to kind of figure out what social media's role in general should be as part of our democracy.

And then after 2016, we really moved more into what I call this reckoning phase, where people, we had to start realizing and dealing with the negative sides of social media, about how bad actors were using to exploit it, and so my work really shifted more towards thinking about how do we make political issue ads more transparent?

How do you deal with mis- and disinformation on the platforms?

What do you do about foreign interference?

And very much all those, more those election integrity types of problems that we're still trying to deal with today.

- So you had a global responsibility and we could, if we had hours and hours, we could go country by country, but we don't have hours.

And I'll ask can you compare your work during this period in the United States versus Europe just as a, give a contrast there, how the differences and the similarities, particularly as it regards elections?

- Absolutely, so I always say the US is actually the exception versus the rule of how elections are run around the world.

Only in the US do you have the amount of money that is spent in elections, the amount of money that is spent in advertising.

Only here do you have, you know, as large of a professional political class and the role of like groups like Super PACS and other things like, such as that.

And what I really saw was after, again, particularly after President Obama's 2012 campaign, a lot of campaigns from overseas, whether it was Europe, but also Canada and Australia were really wanting to understand how they might be able to adapt some of those tactics.

However, they also had to deal with, you know, in Europe, they're much more privacy conscious.

They don't use data as much.

They have a lot more rules around what you can do there.

They don't necessarily need to do much of their own online fundraising either.

And so social media was much more used for persuasion in getting messages out to constituents, and we saw after 2012, whether it was David Cameron in the United Kingdom, Justin Trudeau in Canada, Mauricio Macri in Argentina or Narendra Modi in India were all campaigns and parties and such that were really figuring out how to embrace social media as part of their efforts.

- So you mentioned a few minutes ago the role of misinformation and disinformation, and again, we could go country by country, but focus on those topics, those two issues in the 2016 presidential election.

I mean, this has been written about frequently and often, but you really had an inside view.

Talk about that, Katie.

- Yeah, for me, you know, at first this is way too late than what it should have, but you know, "The Economist" in September of 2016 wrote a cover story about post-truth politics, and I remember thinking that that was probably gonna be a really major issue for us to have to think about for the German and French elections in 2017.

And I remember having some conversations internally and we weren't even quite sure how in the world would we even do fact checking, how would we even think about trying to help determine what is true or not given the vast number of pieces of content that are uploaded every single day?

And after President Trump won, you know, it wasn't at first about Russian interference in the election.

It was about Macedonian teenagers who were running Facebook pages and websites to make money.

They were spreading false news to try to make the money off of advertising.

And all of a sudden then in December, we very quickly pulled together working with Poynter's International Fact Checking Consortium and other things to try to start putting together the beginnings of what is today's fact checking program on the platform.

And it wasn't until the summer and fall of 2017 when not just Facebook but other platforms discovered the extent to how much the Russia Internet Research Agency had been running ads and other content on the platform that the conversation really started to shift more to how mis- and disinformation was being used by foreign adversaries.

- So it seems to me that countering this, finding the truth and coming up with policy would be a tremendous, enormous job.

I mean, how many people were involved and how'd you go about that?

I mean, this sounds like a gargantuan effort to get to where you want to be.

- It was a huge effort and there were a couple of challenges in terms of building up the capacity around this, because it wasn't just a matter of throwing more money at it, and I do give Facebook a ton of credit for the amount of resources that they put into building up the various teams, again, whether it was the threat intelligence teams, my teams, the teams working on the fact checking, et cetera, but it was hard to find people that had the right combination of talents who understood how, let's just say, foreign interference works in an offline world, but to also have the understanding of how that might work across the internet.

So there was a lot of training and capacity building that was having to take place.

You know, by 2019 for elections alone, we had about 500 full-time employees that would be working on just election related issues, and that's on top of, you know, about 30,000 total employees working on trust and safety, content moderation, things of that nature at the company.

And so Facebook was one of the ones that put the most resources out of all the tech companies into it.

And then like you said, there's challenges both of writing the actual policies, where you draw these lines, but then also the challenges of executing and enforcing that policy on the platform.

- You know, Katie, was one of my friends likes to say that if the social media platform you're using is free, then you're the product.

I wonder, for someone who's maybe not as well versed in the use of social media platforms for political persuasion and influence, why are they so effective at getting message out and in moving the deal when it comes to politics, whether it's American or elsewhere around the world?

- I think one of the main ways that you've really seen campaigns embrace the use of social media is that ability to do what's called microtargeting.

So microtargeting actually was first used in the early 2000s, where campaigns took consumer data, what cars you buy.

You know, you have those grocery store memberships that you scan your card.

You know, they get that information, they know what magazines you subscribe to, et cetera, and they would match that up with the voter file.

And they would do that to do what's called modeling and try to figure out, okay, Republican voters are more likely to watch this type of channel versus Democrats are more likely to watch this type of cable show or something like that.

And so rather than buying an ad on primetime NBC station, instead, they would save their money and run it on let's say the Hallmark Channel or something like that.

Move that into the online world, now campaigns, for instance, can buy ads just targeting New Hampshire and not have to buy the Boston media market.

So there was location-based targeting that they could do, but then they could also start to do custom messages.

Let's say you're somebody that is a parent and you have kids that are in K through 12.

They could potentially run ads to you that is talking about education versus somebody who's retired who might care more about Medicare.

And so they are really able to start to parse out by issue as well, to try to persuade people about where they stood on those issues, and then as you got closer to Election Day, then run ads to try to make sure to remind them to get out to vote.

- And can anybody run those ads?

So, I mean, I think that you mentioned the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Part of what happened in 2016 is that they were running those kinds of ads, right?

- They were, they were running those kinds of ads.

They weren't that sophisticated in their targeting in all honesty.

It was mostly state-based and maybe a few issues and things like that.

But to your question, yes, everybody can run these types of ads today.

They're used by small businesses.

They're used by big brands.

They're used by a lot of different entities to try to get their messages out and politics is one aspect of that.

- And is there anything in Facebook or other platforms?

'Cause it's not just Facebook anymore.

Is there anything that prohibits, again, foreign ad buys on social media platforms that could be used to sway an American election for somebody else's purposes?

- So before May of 2018, which is when Facebook launched its political and issue ad transparency tools, there wasn't anything preventing that.

And there's actually legitimate use cases, too.

You know, for instance, should people in Canada be able to run ads to people in the United States about a trade deal that would affect Canadians?

You know, there's different types issues like that.

But starting in May of 2018, Facebook and other tech companies started to require people to first register- Prove their identity, the person who was running the ads to prove that they lived in the country that they wanted to run the ads in and then we also required a disclaimer, so they paid for by Katie Harbath for Senate or whatever it might be.

That all started to get implemented first in the US and Brazil in the spring of 2018 and now that's expanded to all around the world.

- So do you have any sense of how many or numbers or percentages of social media who understand and know how much of their personal information is available to whomever?

A government, an advertiser or whatever.

And what you talked about earlier, it's an extraordinary amount of information.

Are people aware of this?

- So I don't have any polls off the top of my head, but in general, what you do tend to see is that people in the abstract and kind of 50,000 foot view level understand in some ways that these companies have data on them.

What is really hard for them to understand and kind of comprehend is not just only how much of that data is out there, but how to really parse it and understand what that data is being used for.

Companies like Facebook, you can go and download your data from places like Facebook to try to understand that.

I know, like at the company, when I was there, we tried to do things like a privacy checkup and try to get people to educate themselves a bit more about that data.

But in all honesty, some people, they just click through that and they're not necessarily paying as much attention, and so I think that's why you continue to see debates.

You know, there's been a lot of work done in Europe, again, around data.

There's something called the GDPR that went into effect a couple years ago, so that if people see those popups of that you accept cookies and that the website is using cookies, that actually came from European legislation, that a lot of people just implemented into other countries like the US.

Some states like California and Virginia have been passing more privacy laws to try to continue to find a way to A, not only make the tech companies be more transparent about the data they have on you, but also to try to find ways to make that more understandable by consumers.

- So privacy protection is one of the key issues of tech regulation, which is another area of your expertise.

Talk about where that stands in the United States now.

I mean, there's been legislation introduced.

David Cicilline, who happens to be a representative from our state here in Rhode Island is in the forefront of that.

Where do things stand and where do you think they're going in terms of tech regulation in general, but specifically privacy protection, which to a lot of people is a concern?

- It is a concern.

I mean, in addition to privacy, you're seeing a lot of legislation introduced around antitrust in competitive practices, and that's a lot of what Representative Cicilline has been working on.

There's also a lot in terms of trying to make the tech companies be more transparent and give more data to researchers.

There's obviously been a lot of conversation about children's safety online and how do you keep kids safe online?

Also quite a bit of legislation introduced around Section 230 and whether or not these platforms should be held liable for the content that appears on them.

You know, here in the US, despite the number of pieces of legislation, nothing has been passed.

To date, I don't particularly expect that we may get something by the time the midterms roll around, but the things about some of these legislation is that they are bipartisan and there was just reports last week that Republicans who are expected to take the House in November when they take over Congress in January of 2023, will continue to look at big tech regulation, though will likely be from a different aspect of Democrats.

My hope is at some point in time, we can find a way to get some of these pieces of legislation passed, particularly because with how much further ahead Europe and the United Kingdom is and other places around the world in terms of passing this legislation, the United States runs the risk of having other countries actually regulate our own citizens and what can be done and what they can do online and how their data can be used, because many of these companies are just gonna say, "All right, if it's done in Europe, I'm just gonna do it everywhere and not try to have this localized approach country by country."

- Katie, you spent a decade at Facebook, but you decided to leave.

What ultimately motivated you to make that move?

- So there were a lot of different factors that went into making my move, and I do wanna say first and foremost, that while I do have concerns about where social media is going overall and I'm trying to fix it, I'm really grateful to my time at Facebook.

There's amazing people that work there that continue to do really good work and I think that's important to remember, because while they have a lot of long ways to go, they have come quite a long way in pioneering some of these tools and such.

And, you know, I was a part of some of these problems.

There are decisions and things that if I could go back, I would absolutely change how we approach some of this so that we could be trying to mitigate the bad behavior earlier on than what we were.

And I really chose to leave because I felt like I wasn't able to have the impact that I had once had inside the company.

Seeing January 6th happen really made me just, I needed to go somewhere where I could have impact and I also wanted to be working on these issues not just at one company, but trying to think about them more broadly as more and more people are moving to messaging services, they're moving to apps like TikTok and Telegram and messaging services like I mentioned.

You know, down the road, we've got things like the metaverse and AR and VR and all those types of things.

And so I really just wanted to sort of expand, to get new experiences in my career while still staying at this intersection of tech and democracy.

- Well, you've talked about a coming electoral tsunami in 2024, and you obviously were in a midterm election year with Americans going to the polls later in 2022.

What are the specific concerns you have about tech and democracy right now and looking forward to 2024?

- Yeah, one of my biggest concerns is that we seem to keep rolling from crisis to crisis, which makes it really hard to do long term planning.

You know, even right now, understandably so, we're still very much focused on what is happening in Russia and Ukraine minus maybe the Supreme Court hearings that are happening here in the States.

And I worry a little bit.

We've already had the Texas primaries and we're gonna have some pretty contentious primaries, particularly on the right, happening here starting in May and there's gonna continue to be a lot of issues of candidates who may potentially still be denying, saying that 2020 was fraudulent.

What will happen if any of these primary candidates don't accept the results of their primary and wanna contest them?

What if, heaven forbid, there's violence at the polls?

These are some of the issues I expect to see the companies facing as we go into these midterms.

There's also elections around the world this year in Brazil, the Philippines.

France is coming up here in just on April 10th.

And so what I'm worried about is we always keep doing the short term thinking.

In 2020, I was looking forward to 2024 because the world tends to have a massive number of elections about every five years.

And when I was looking at the calendar, I realized that not only will we have a US presidential election in 2024, but we're gonna have elections in India, Indonesia, hopefully Ukraine, Taiwan, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the European Parliament all in the same year and we've never had that before.

And I am worried that we are gonna be fighting election integrity issues on so many different fronts that we might take our eye off the ball in other places where countries like Russia and China might be able to continue to try to interfere in democratic processes and civic life and we just won't have the resources and people power in which to fight on all of those different fronts.

- Let me just follow up on that very quickly.

Obviously there's a role for industry and for the social media platforms to play in this.

What do we need to be doing as a society, both at the policy and at the legislative level, but what also can we as individual voters and citizens do?

- I think what I would love to see individual citizens and voters do is be aware of the fact that there might be mis- and disinformation.

Be really careful before you share something on social media, whatever platform you're using.

If you're reading something, make sure that there's an author attached.

Look at the date of the article.

Look at the publication that it is coming from.

Just be a little bit more careful at not necessarily believing the first thing that you might see on these platforms and be careful about what you are sharing and believing and try to make sure you have a diverse news diet to make sure you can kind of be understanding what these stories are that are coming out, because many of these things can be fast moving, and we may not have all the information right away about what exactly is happening.

And so also be comfortable with the fact that the story may evolve and change over time as more facts are uncovered and people are trying to do that.

And so that's just I think one easy, somewhat easy thing for people to be able to do as they're seeing these stories pop up.

- There's a growing body of research involving the effect of social media, and of course that includes Facebook, it includes Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and we can go through the list on children and young people during the formative years of their lives, both socially and in terms of the development of their brains and their minds.

What advice would- And particularly the effect on girls.

What advice would you have for that population group regarding social media, and I guess also to parents and guardians of those young people and children?

- Yeah, I wanna be careful here 'cause I'm not a parent myself.

I am an aunt to two nephews and a godmother, but I don't have children of my own, but I do you think it's important for parents to talk to their children about how they use social media, about the potential dangers of that.

There's a lot of different resources online that both the companies and other organizations provide to help parents to have those types of conversations with their children about that.

I think too that trying to build digital literacy into just normal education as kids are growing up and using these platforms to help them to better understand everything from, again, their own data that these companies are getting, how to handle the different types of characters and stuff, that people they might engage on these platforms and how to be more safe on them.

And so I just think having those conversations and being aware of it is some of the most important things that parents and those that engage with young people can do.

- So this is gonna be a fun question, or I hope it's gonna be a fun question.

If the founding fathers had envisioned social media when they wrote the First Amendment, do you think they might have written it differently?

So maybe you can put your time travel hat on, go back, but I think it drives through to the heart of the issue today, which is free speech versus speech that can incite violence and do harm.

- And if you wanna to do that ala Hamilton in rhyme verse, that's great.

(laughing) - I was not told that a rap was needed.

I am not ready to do that.

You know, I don't know if they would change that much.

The biggest question, I mean, think about back to that era and like you read some of those colonial newspapers and the things that people were saying about one another.

You know, it sometimes pales in comparison to what you see on social media today.

- [Wayne] It's true, yeah.

- I think what they didn't anticipate, though, was how fast now information can be spread.

Because back then, when that was, you could do a pamphlet, you could pass that in your town, it was hard for it to spread super quickly on those types of things.

And so maybe they would've done a bit more in trying to think about the amplifica- Separating out your right to freedom of speech versus your right to have that be amplified and what that looks like.

But that's about the only place that I could see a ton of changes.

- Hey, Katie, we've got about a minute and a half left here.

When you look at the way campaigns around the world use social media today, obviously there's a continuous process of innovation that's taking place, but is there a pretty well understood playbook that consultants and campaign operatives around the world know that they're gonna be able to do X, Y or Z on social media and produce predictable outcomes?

- In some ways, yes, in some ways, no, and the reason I say that is that these platforms, how people are using them, et cetera, change so rapidly year to year.

And so they may know that they're gonna wanna use targeted advertising to, for instance, build their email list or fundraise, but the types of ways they're targeting, whether those are video ads versus text ads versus photo ads, those tend to change and evolve all the time.

And so most consultants, the only thing they can guarantee is that they're gonna have to constantly change and adapt to make sure that the tactics that they're using for campaigning continue to be relevant.

- Well, this is a hugely important issue.

Katie, thank you so much for taking some time to share it with us.

She's Katie Harbath.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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