RAND Experts Discuss Surge in Misinformation Amid Israel-Hamas War

Transcript

Narrator

This audio presentation is from the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.

Jeffrey Hiday

Good afternoon. Welcome to this media call. I'm Jeff Hiday, director of media relations at RAND. We are discussing the information warfare that is taking place alongside the physical battles of Israel-Gaza. Joined by Ray Block, our Michael D. Rich, distinguished chair for Countering Truth Decay, who is also a professor...professor at Penn State. And by three senior behavioral scientists at RAND, all of whom study misinformation and disinformation. Todd Helmus, Bill Marcellino, Miriam Matthews. We also have a fifth RAND expert on the line, a kind of guest panelist who is not necessarily disinformation specialist, panelist or specialist, but he is a Middle East defense expert. That's Rafi Cohen. He's and he's here just in case we could use him. We are recording this call. We will post it on the Web. I'll need a quick discussion just to get us started and then we will open the floor to questions. This call is not about litigating every or even any of the many, many claims that we're - the counterclaims that we are seeing about the Gaza situation, but let's start with one that's been on the front pages now for a couple of news cycles, and that's the explosion at the Ali Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Miriam, could you kick us off and talk about how that news is being used by different sides of the issue?

Miriam Matthews

Sure. So I think what we can say is that Hamas had a first mover advantage for this, that they came out with a story quickly that Israel was to be blamed for for the explosion where the - for the hospital. It took Israel a bit of time to respond. There was a delay in their response. And so by the time that Israel was able to respond, the information that Hamas had put out about Israel being responsible for it had already been spread. So it already had the opportunity to be persuasive from a kind of psychological perspective that came out as to what people - the immediate message that they were looking for, that's the information that they got first. And then it wasn't until later that Israel was able to to say, oh, no, we didn't do it, this is actually - this is actually what caused it. But at that time, that message had already - had already gone around the world, had already had its effect. And so we know then, that that makes it much harder to...to combat that.

Jeffrey Hiday

Is there something about the current environment, but albeit be it speed of news, the proliferation of different sources of news, and rumor that is affecting things?

Miriam Matthews

Yes, I know that we also have others that can speak to this as well. But we do know that there are a lot of different sources. So it can come from various...various social media channels, various individuals on social media. It can come from sources that are assumed to be legitimate by individuals. They look like they're coming from legitimate news sources. It's it's rapid, it's continuous, it's coming from a whole host of different individuals and that...that makes it harder for folks to...to really be able to sift through all of this information and determine what is the most valid or what doesn't seem to add up, what doesn't seem to have enough facts that are supporting it and instead it's just - there's so many different things that they can't take the time to evaluate everything.

Todd Helmus

Right. Can I add something into this?

Jeffrey Hiday

Todd, please?

Todd Helmus

I'm not sure Israel helped themselves in their response. My understanding, according to a wire report, their first response to this was to release a video showing the rocket exploding over Gaza, suggesting that this came from that side of the fight. However, The New York Times quickly found out that that video had the wrong timestamp. The timestamp was actually one hour before the the rocket attack. So putting out that essentially false information, whether or not it was intended or not, could have been an honest mistake. Maybe not. But not only does Hamas get the first mover advantage, but Israel sort of shot themselves in the foot with their response.

Jeffrey Hiday

Ray or Bill want to weigh in here. Bill...

William Marcellino

Yeah. So just from a from a military perspective - so thinking about information is a warfighting function, right? There is this real tension between agility and timeliness, but also accuracy and control. So the more you decentralize local actors to respond on social media or to respond, if in the admission environment, you have the chance to take the initiative. Like what Miriam was saying about Hamas. But, when you decentralize control and authority and you let anyone who's a sort of like on your side do information work, if you get it wrong, like Todd was talking about, it can have really big impacts on your credibility. So it's just it's interesting. One of the things I'm noticing here is that you're taking the risk of being inaccurate. But, maybe for Hamas, that's like a good risk to take, to be to be the most agile, to be first, and to be sort of like quick on the draw. Over.

Jeff Hiday

You know..wait..you know - it might..just to back up a minute on on information warfare. Could we just establish some terminology here? When we...when we had a quick discussion yesterday, we talked about the different ways that misinformation and disinformation, the terms, misinformation and disinformation are used. How are they different from or related to information ops to propaganda?

Miriam Matthews

I'll start and then I'm going to and then I think Todd and Bill will have some excellent comments as well. So I think: One, all these different terms, people have lots of different ideas that they put behind them, different definitions that they're using. And so you might say disinformation and assume that everybody's using your definition and they're absolutely not. I think generally disinformation is thought to be intentional...intentional lies, something that people know that is information is not true, but they're spreading it anyway. And then there are all kinds of other different, different ways to you might you might put information forth it's true, but it's in the wrong context. That could possibly be the case or it might not be the case for the missile going over, for example. So there are all kinds of different ways to either outright lie or to misinform. Do we know that that is absolutely what is happening in in the case of Gaza or Israel? We don't really know if people are intentionally putting out information that is false or even if somebody is that it is these large masses of individuals are...are kind of intentionally putting out lies and false information or if they really do believe that it's true. But now I'll pass this over to Bill and Todd.

William Marcellino

Todd, you might remember we had coffee and we were talking about this while drinking coffee. Like the idea that the distinction can sometimes get blurred. Like, it's hard to know whether or not the untruths are purposeful or not. And I keep going back to this idea that, like they are often talked about as types of them. They're often talked about as if they're types, like there's either 'dis' or 'mis' information, but it might be useful to think about it as being along a continuum of it, where misinformation is low intention, falsehoods and disinformation on that scale would be high intentioned falsehoods.

Todd Helmus

Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. And I sort of I also think of it as a distinction without a distinction because yes, that knowingly put out false information on this, but once they put it out in the infosphere, then, you know, people who are more or less well intentioned, maybe not so well intentioned, but not trying to lie will share it and then it becomes misinformation. And oftentimes it's really hard to distinguish between whether or not someone intentionally tries to sow false information. So, you know, initial or initial, a lot of the initial reports that are coming out about that bombing probably are, you know, are not necessarily people trying to push out false information. They're trying to make their best guess based on who they like and what their ideas are and how it fits, how the bombing fits into a broader narrative about, you know, the civilian casualties that are happening in Gaza. So, yeah, that's...that's it's a useful academic framework. and I think in reality, it's not so useful.

Ray Block

Yeah. If I can piggyback back at this okay?

Jeff Hiday

Yeah.

Ray Block

The distinct between "mis" and "dis" information where, like, you use intention as a way of thinking about it or not. Right? I often find myself thinking about the distinction between propaganda and non propaganda by using the perspective of the goal or the purpose for it. And the end game of propaganda might be to mobilize groups of people to feeling a certain way or acting in a certain way or whatever. Right? And I feel like it's important when I think about propaganda, like you don't necessarily have to have falsehoods. For propaganda to work if the information itself has an endgame to it, and propaganda to me implies that there is a goal attached to the delivery and the consumption of whatever that information is.

Jeff Hiday

You mentioned delivery. I presume the primary way we're talking about spreading "dis" or "mis" information is through social media. Are there other important ways that we ought to be thinking or should we just be focused on social media?

Ray Block

I mean, I'm being non-expert Americanist over here, and I'm just thinking about how topics like these become political topics for politicians and for people who follow politicians. And so insofar as politicians make use of social media, it's important to think about what politicians are saying about these issues. I think it's also important to think about how these conversations and campaigns speak to or not, issues of the day. And this is one of those issues of the day that you can see political rhetoric being built around.

Todd Helmus

Bill. I know Bill has some stuff to say on that.

William Marcellino

Well, to go back to this idea of "mis" "dis" - so that's like sort of focused on informational items, right? Like as the 'you have analysis' - like a story, a picture, a video, whatever it is. And that's useful. It can also be useful to think about sort of aggregates and corded efforts. So we might talk about a piece of information being misused information, but we also like to talk about influence efforts or operations and information operations or efforts. And those are more like coordinated, coordinated activities. And again, like, look, these all of these terms get defined in different ways. The U.S. military has like doctrine, but it's constantly not being used. And like it's because change all the time, like we don't have it. We're really bad at like defining our terms and finding a common set of terms in this. But what I would say is there's probably something special when a group of actors for an institution or for entity work together to try and tell a story or sell a narrative and that idea of an influence effort - and I've also heard it too, like information is broader. So, if I want to try and get a story out by most of me doing things like a connect operation, so, putting a story out and then publicizing a, you know, say, a kinetic effect or a military operation, that's like an information effort. Whereas like from just trying to like, get people to believe my story or, you know, get my narrative out there, maybe more like an influence effort. But I think it's also useful to go back and forth between this idea of sort of campaigns or efforts and individual pieces that are consumed. Over.

Todd Helmus

Well, I have to take you back. I mean, it goes back to your question about where is this stuff coming from and when we, I think, as Americans think of social media, we're thinking people are on Facebook or Twitter or that there is a campaign run by the Russians putting content out on Twitter. But, you know, Telegram is playing a big role in this. A lot of the chatter, a lot of the propaganda coming out of out of Gaza is coming out on...on...on Telegram. There are - and there's no moderation on Telegram. So content that gets created there is finding its way quickly to Twitter and Facebook and then influencing Americans to that..that pathway.

Miriam Matthews

And I think we can assume so. I think what well, what one of the basics that we're assuming is that both sides are trying to have influence. Both sides are doing, trying to persuade both within the area, larger world, to their side. And some of the...exactly how they're doing it, we can..we know some of the messages that are coming out. And that's that's part of what we're getting at, I think what we're all speaking to. Ok, so what is happening? How is this happening? Do we know that it's intentional across the board for some kind of...some kind of information efforts and those sorts of things? So I think both sides are trying to potentially influence region, the larger world to their side so that the whatever aggression that they are demonstrating, that they're trying to justify that based on their own, based on what they're saying is their own their own victimization.

Todd Helmus

And I think...I think this plays into the very, really unique nature of this conflict and the stakes that are involved in this. I mean, I mean, you know for many attack in Israel is referred to as sort of Israel's 9-11. I think we as Americans can can sympathize what that feels like. And...and so that has driven, I think, Israel to have what I think is their policy goal of, quote unquote, eliminating Hamas. Now for them to eliminate Hamas, you know, terrorist organizations have been eliminated before. You got to kill a lot of people to do that. And that's what happened, for example, in Sri Lanka and other places. And the civilian - in so when obviously Hamas sees this as a existential fight for themselves. And then you play on top of that how we previous incursions into Gaza played out. Well, initially, I mean, shooting from the hip here, but initial support for Israel for the operation. But as civilian casualties mount, sympathies increasingly turned toward the Palestinians. And so, the degree to which the international community sympathizes with civilian casualties is going to play a big role in the ability of Israel to have strategic success here, and the ability of Hamas to counter that success. So the stakes are super high. And we know that when the stakes are high, even in America here with partisanship, the more partisan people are, the more they like to believe false stuff, the more likely to share false stuff. And now that's on steroids.

William Marcellino

So I think Todd just raised an important part, which is we've been talking mostly about the dissemination and production side, the supply side of this. But the consumption side is really important. Human beings are groupish. We are - tend to be - have more trust and more empathy towards those inside the group. We tend to be more suspicious and have distrust and antipathy towards people who are seen as outsiders of the group that leads to this bias and, you know, people will mostly be consuming stories about this conflict, Ukraine, whatever, using their priors. Right. If you're sympathetic to Israel, you want to see things, you want to you want to believe what you want to be the truth already. Who are the good guys? Same if you support - you're worried about Palestinians and that kind of stuff. So, that's an issue. And there's already a crisis of trust right now. You know, in...in media, we had this existing long term human condition where we're extremely biased around group membership. And I don't know that I haven't seen the evidence yet, but given the recent level of maturity for generative AI, for for LLMs to act as agents that seem realistic like people, and given the ease of running text to image models on consumer hardware. Right. So the Mac or Windows machine, you can make almost any image you want and there's going to be no checks on it. Right? If you want to use things like Dolly or Mid Journey, there are a lot of states was built to it, but if you're even a little bit computer savvy right now, you could create agents that will act like people on the Internet. You can create pretty amazing pictures. So it would not surprise me if in this highly polarized world where there is a real distrust in the truth and a real trust in my truth, that generative AI may be a part of this and help fuel this fire. Over.

Jeff Hiday

Rafi Cohen would you like to come on screen?

Raphael Cohen

Yeah sure, so, yeah. No. So I'll just like to pick up on something that Todd said. You know, look, looking forward a little bit into this conflict, how the misinformation fight is going to play out. And I think you can safely predict that there'll be more misinformation as this conflict goes on. Forget about disinformation for a moment, but just as should Israel go into ground combat, the combat conditions are going to be a whole lot more chaotic. So, you know, if we think about the fight over, you know, who did what around the hospital, you know, we spend a lot of time analyzing one blast photo. It once you go into a full on ground offensive, that's no longer going to be possible. And so there's going to be a lot of more information coming out and a lot more chance for bad information to come out, even if it's not actually controlled by one of the other side to try to spin it. The other second fact you hear is people are going to begin getting tired. That's going to be on the IDF side. It's going to be on the Hamas side, too. You know, all the public figures...

Jeff Hiday

Tired in what way Rafi? I mean, physically or...

Raphael Cohen

Just physically tired. I mean, like everyone you know, everyone in the IDF side and my guess is on the Hamas side, although I haven't talked to them personally, I'm going to be working really long days. But, no!

Todd Helmus

No, the cycle is going to be more than 8 hours a day.

Raphael Cohen

No right. I mean so what's going to happen is people are going to make more mistakes and so you're going to get more bad reporting simply by the nature of the battlefield, even absent some of these other broader, you know, spin factors, which I think Bill and Todd and Miriam have all rightly pointed out, are important for long term success for one side or the other.

Jeff Hiday

Patrick, you can come on. Ray, do you want to jump in now or give over to Patrick Tucker?

Ray Block

You got it, Patrick.

Jeff Hiday

Go right ahead.

Patrick Tucker

Unmuted. All right. I had a question and I wonder if everybody will or Todd or Miriam are going to want to take a stab at it. But according to Matt Cassel from from Vice News, and I think this sort of aligns with what I've kind of just seen, Israel is barring foreign journalists from entering Gaza. There are a lot of people on the ground in Gaza. I know from my own reporting that Hamas is - like 2019 was - there were a lot of allegations that if you were in Gaza and you were a Palestinian and Hamas didn't like your reporting, it was not unusual for them to go to your house and pick you up and rough you up, to put it politely, and then tell you how you might change your tone. So having said that, this decision by Israel, if it's first, can have you heard anything along those lines that they are barring for foreign journalists from entering Gaza? And if that's the case, how does the lack of on the ground, international foreign correspondents affect this? Is Israel shooting itself again in the foot through this decision to basically let Hamas run the on the ground news operation in Gaza - to the extent that that's what's happening, and if you can speak to the extent that that's happening with any threat now, that'd be the awesome, too. That's just what Matt Cassel advises. That said, I haven't seen anyone from the New York Times on the ground in Gaza or CNN or any place like that. They're all they're all in Israel on the border to avoid and to get in.

William Marcellino

So I...go ahead Todd.

Todd Helmus

No, no, Bill.

William Marcellino

I did see The Washington Post piece about how journalists couldn't get into Gaza and were staying. So I think I'm aware I didn't hear from Vice, but I saw it reported in The Washington Post. And, you know, I am not in a position to predict specific outcomes from this. But what I could go to is there's a reason when the U.S., you know, went into the Middle East, they invited both times journalists to embed with units to tell their side of the story from their perspective. And, you maybe journalists are more wise to that tactic now. But when you're embedded with a unit, when you're around people, it is really natural to bond with them, to see things from their perspective. So to the degree that report from The Washington Post is accurate, obviously if reporters are in place and only on one side and sort of hearing one version even if they're trying to be, you know, independent, they're human beings. Over.

Todd Helmus

Well, first, I'll say that in addressing myths and disinformation, the most important commodity is trust. And if you don't have trust and constituencies you're trying to reach and you can't you can't address mistruths. It's almost impossible because no one's going to believe you. So, so from that perspective, it's bad. However, it's going to be, it's it's going to be a god awful mess in there. And, you know, there's no way Israel can conduct this operation without killing civilians. Whether they try it depends on how hard they try not to. And I don't know how they're going to try not to. My guess is they can't try too hard because to achieve their stated political objectives, they're going to have to go rough and ready, I imagine, in there. And Hamas is, of course, using civilians as targets. So, you know, it will be a complicated story in the best circumstances. And, you know, I could imagine making a decision, would you want that story told or not told? Or do you want to, like, work really hard to shape it in your own way and hope people believe it?

Miriam Matthews

Right. I think, well, we don't know first hand account that this is what's happening that Israel is preventing journalists from doing this. So what I'll say...okay, let's...so that's what you're saying. So if that were the case and we are not saying that is the case, but if that were the case, then what might some of the implications be? So, of course, it is that, you know, journalists who are who are knowledgeable in and going about and trying to find the facts and present that information to larger audiences, that they won't be in the case to do that, they won't have the opportunity to do that. So then what does that mean? Well, it does, it means that maybe there's information that's not going out. It also means that maybe there are journalists that are not getting killed and that, that there are journalists that are not being taken hostage. So there are lots of different reasons why this might happen. I don't think that we can assume malintent right off the bat and said, maybe it is, I don't know...maybe there's something to it. Maybe there is. Maybe it is an attempt to control the messaging. That is one option. Another option is that it as, I think everybody has said, or at least I know Todd has said that, civilians will be killed. It will be, it is - it will be messy. It is going to be a very scary, dangerous situation. Is that one that you want to be that you want to have journalists going into and you don't have any control over what happens.

Todd Helmus

Yeah. So just like a quick follow up, if I could. It's very hard to say, given the chaos of that environment and how quickly Hamas is able to move to messaging, they have a higher tolerance for saying something that then they might have to retract, compared to the Israeli military and certainly compared to the United States, which is why you see this kind of incrementalism on behalf of Israel in the US. Given that, is it fair to say that in a chaotic environment where there aren't reputable international on the ground sources, that the time advantage would move to Hamas in terms of messaging given their higher tolerance for distributing disinformation?

Miriam Matthews

So I think we've had to - so I think we all have, I think we've all spoken to this in different contexts, and yes, getting information out faster is it's definitely more persuasive. It is problematic if that information is known to be false or it's coming from actors that are known to willingly put out false information. So we have seen this before, in the Russian context, we know that they're willing to put out a lot of information; not that...not that focused on consistency, not that focus on accuracy, but there can be advantages to that and there can be some real disadvantages to that as well when you know it's coming from this actor that isn't that focused on..on the truth or on providing reasonable information, then then you stop, you stop really trusting them. And then that has to become a whole...a whole different kind of scenario in terms of their ability to persuade and what they're putting out and who they say it's coming from. So for Hamas, is that like...is that even something that they're considering right now? I don't know. I don't know if anybody else wants to speak to that. But I do think them getting the information out quickly will be important. Will it? If it's known that whatever it is that they're putting out, maybe there's a 50/50 chance of accuracy that's going to be detrimental. If it's not known, and that's going to be a problem in a, in a, in a war and a chaotic environment, establishing the truth is going to be very hard. I think we can all probably agree with that. So exactly what is happening real time will be very challenging.

Todd Helmus

So mistruths are going to be just quickly...mistruths are going to hurt - false and inaccurate information, it's going to hurt Israel a lot more than Hamas. I don't think a lot of people expect Hamas to be some great arbiter of truth in this world. Right. I mean, whether they even if they knew really 10 seconds after the attack that it was their own missile. They're still going to say it's the Israelis and everyone knows that. Whereas the Israelis, there's some assumption that there's going to be some truth. They're a Western..not in the West, but there is certainly a Westernesque country and we have higher expectations for them. And so anything that deviates from that is going to hurt them more.

William Marcellino

And I would point out that, privileging like truth and accuracy, clarity may be culturally variable, right? That what might be important to Americans or some Westerner is like getting the facts straight and if you look at like how the U.S. military does information work and public affairs telling, they're telling it the right way being truthful and trustworthy is hugely important. Some audiences may not care about that. Give you an example. You know, I-SAF was always trying to get facts straight, whereas, you know, the Taliban always retracted. Yesterday, the Crusade invaders did X. It didn't matter whether the number of people who got killed or didn't got killed, that was unimportant. What was important is characterizing I-SAF as crusader invaders. So I think that for many of the audiences involved in this, what matters is talking about values, talking about who's a good guy and a bad guy, and that like facts, you know, accuracy could be utter or to be the lowest level of importance. Over.

Ray Block

Thank you. William makes the point much better than I did. And I was thinking like, how are consumers digesting the information about what's going on in these conflicts? And a lot of consumers are getting information that feels like individual stories about what's happening rather than what I'm going to call detailed contextual stories about what contributed to the conflicts in the first place. And that might be a very uniquely American news thing. I'm not sure.

Patrick Tucker

Thank you. Thank you, everybody.

Jeff Hiday

Thanks, Patrick. Other questions. From the media? I'm going to. It's not, I'm going to follow up with one. On the one hand, we've talked about the importance of trust, but on the other hand, I'm hearing a lot of what might be cynicism, which is that trust is almost not playing a role. We're getting to be heading toward a world in which nothing can be trusted. And if that happens, then what do we do?

William Marcellino

So. So yeah, that's been kind of a drumbeat I've been putting out for a while, like for most of this year, right? Like, I can't say we're going to be in a post-truth world, but we're going to be very if we're not now, very soon, we'll be in a post sensory trustworthiness world, right? Where like any media sound, you know, audio, video, pictures, any kind of like text, those things will be likely for a while indistinguishable from human interactions. Right. Like, I mean, I have a I have a MacBook Pro with a M2 on it, like not particularly beefy machine, but I can run multiple agents, you know, like fake people on that. And they sound like real people. Like I gave them like Ted's.. Ted's from Lima, Ohio, and his wife is a is..a...is a primary school teacher. And they talk like that. They work like that. They can make another set of models, can make pictures for them. And by the way, I'm not using this for an informational test right now. Right? Yeah. This is all just test stuff, right? Nothing in this to be deployed. Yeah, but but I mean, like, if a guy like me can do that on his own as a hobby on the side, I guarantee you other actors can now or soon. China's actually said they have the intention, at least the PLA to do this. So I don't know what it looks like when human beings who have counted on sensory information, what they see here, touch, taste, smell. That's been the way we've known reality for our species existence. What happens when literally everything you see on...that's digital could be synthetic? I don't know what it looks like exactly, but that certainly sounds like a watershed change in how we trust or don't trust information. [Unintelligible]

Jeffrey Hiday

Yeah, well done, Bill. Is anyone have an antidote to this or some sign?

Miriam Matthews

I think. Well, I'm not. I suppose I'm not hopeful. Maybe. Maybe Todd or Ray can be helpful. So I'm going to be unhelpful and be kind of pessimistic in that. So part of this, usually the assumption is if you just educate people, oh, they want to be educated, they want to be they want to be trained on what is now what is that the myths or the disinformation or what are the false images that have been modified or created. And we I, I, I think as as Bill has mentioned as well, what we seem to see is that people want to believe what they want to believe that they think and there's research on this actually, that that they think that they are able to really clearly evaluate, objectively evaluate the information and come to a firm conclusion. And everybody else is an idiot in this realm. But in reality, that's not the case. We all have our own biases. We all have our own limitations. And so then it's not just it's not just that you can put forth any material and expect that people think that they need it or that they're going to want it, or that it's even going to be good material. So, so we can't just assume that education is the way that is, that the kind of education is the way to go and that that's going to prevent any of these, these interpretations of information that they're getting, that these these images, these false identities that are coming out. We can't assume that we can just easily educate that away or that we'll fix it relatively easily. So that's I guess that's why I say that's unhopeful. But I'm sure that there are other ways. I just I don't know what those are yet. So we have to work on that. Go ahead Todd.

Todd Helmus

Well, I'll just say my antidote. It's not there's no there's no antidote. There's no single solution. However, I think authenticity initiatives will play a big role in this to the extent that it's going to be possible to develop a watermarking system that can detect this content. And that's not a foolproof measure because University of Maryland just came out with a paper that showed that they can game, that they can hack watermarks, remove watermarks on deepfake content and add watermarks to non-degree content. And of course watermarks are like some visually sealable patterns in the pixels and of sorts that can be machine read and can then be...help lable the content. But that's one that's one potential solution. And the other solution, of course, is content, authenticity, initiative that can identify...that can create...that basically has a method for tracking who...how a photograph or a video was shot, who shot it when they show what edits were made to it, and then provide a stamp of approval to the end user that shows that this is indeed authentic content.

Jeff Hiday

So who's providing this stamp of approval?

Todd Helmus

It's called the Content Authenticity Initiative. It's a consortium of Truepick, Adobe, New York Times and others. So in the future, New York Times...The New York Times online will...I mean, you can see that, okay, well, they change the color to make the sky bluer, but they didn't, you know, add any other images to it. So those are sort of two key initiatives. Go ahead.

Jeff Hiday

No, just this is a point that Robin raised in the chat, which is whether the importance or lack of importance of fact checking writ large.

Todd Helmus

Whether the labels are important, labels are important. If you can label the content for what it is. Our own study research has shown that if we label Russian propaganda as Russian propaganda, that automatically undercuts the emotional and perception impact of that content. So that would be really key. So if you can imagine a Deepfake video coming out showing President Biden or future President Trump doing X or Y, you, the label will tell you if it's a deepfake or not. You might not believe the label, but that but, but you're already taking sort of a degree of the variance out of the picture by having a certain percent of the population believe that label. Now, there might be problems in the future when people can sort of fake these labels, but so, so yeah, in fact checking does help. The effect sizes are moderate effect sizes in the value effect checks. So for example, when Facebook adds a, you know, a note of observation about content that might be false, like maybe about conspiracy theory, that does help it helps less for highly partizan audiences, but it does help a little bit. I'll just say, my broadly, I think I think there's a sense that populations will adapt. I think right now we know if you read something from somebody, you've no idea who wrote something, you're like, 'Well, I don't know who wrote that, so I'm not sure I'll believe it.' Right? And right now, we really believe in photographs. So no one questions the photograph. But in the future, I imagine people will be like, 'Well, I don't know whose photograph that was, so I'm not sure I'll believe it.' Now, not everybody will, but I think society in general, there'll be some adaptation to this.

Miriam Matthews

I guess I would also come back with a counter that we we also know that even if you don't know who this person is, but if you know a little bit about them and this kind of ties into what Bill has been speaking to, if you assume that they have characteristics like you that they are from a place that you're from, or that they have the same hobbies that you have or whatever, then you're more likely to believe them. And that's where the, but then they can make a fake identity in then that can be persuasive to people.

Todd Helmus

Yeah, it's going to be it shit show. I think the question is how big a shit show it's going to be.

Jeff Hiday

Bill sort of got the sympathetic characters going. So try not to export.

Todd Helmus

This bill is already running a bot network on Twitter. So there you go.

William Marcellino

I mean, those are...in all seriousness, I think the...the one to be be quite up to is that we're used to thinking of exquisite fake content. Here's a video of Joe Biden doing X. Here's a picture of a massacre somewhere. The a different way is: here are thousands of very prosaic, exquisite pictures of me and my family having lunch and the guy down the street doing whatever. Only they're all fake. And so, like the messenger rather than these few exquisite hard to detect fake messages, instead, the idea of lots and lots of messengers who can astroturf you because Miriam was saying, like, look at have a bunch of people that are kind of like you talk like you act like you. If everyone in the community is saying, 'hey, you know, look, I care about X, but you can't support this, it seems okay, I won't, I won't. Also, it's really hard to against, to go against what the group is saying. And it might now be really easy for many, many synthetic actors to give a fake appearance to Astroturf at scale that, hey, here's what the community thinks and go along with it.

Ray Block

You know, I like the fact that we're talking about what I'm going to call 'groupness'. In other words, the idea that information is social, the way in which it's spread is social, and we have to be sensitive to those social dynamics. When we brainstorm whatever we're going to do, to combat this stuff.

Todd Helmus

Yeah, the socialists are going to play a big role in Hamas/Israel conflict. I always think of like Facebook groups and think about the Facebook groups that that drove a lot of folks to attack the Capitol on January 6. You post, you post content and you get rewarded when you post something the group likes. And you reward others who post content that you like. And so there's that social reward that happens with with sharing almost any type of information. Social reward and social punishment that happens with sharing almost any type of information. But it really incentivizes sharing types of disinformation because disinformation is exciting, it's emotional, it is shocking, it's unusual and all that. It can really, I think, increase the degree of social reward.

William Marcellino

You know, I know we've been talking a lot about sort of like dis/misinformation, social media, you know, writ large. And I know maybe the media call many of you are focused on this specific conflict and this sort of informational conflict. I would say one thing is that just like there have been signature battles or wars in interstitial periods where technology has been changing and you can see the future in that particular battle or a particular war like, 'Oh, this is how warfare is changing'. I think this is going to give us lessons learned. Ukraine has been doing some of it, and we have some recent research published on this. Originally, The Nightingale and the Bear, published from from RAND, from Melissa Demus and Khrystyna Holynska. But like, who is winning that informational war? I think the tactics we're going to see from Hamas and from the IDF on this are going to really help give us an indication of where information warfare is going in this current age.

Jeffrey Hiday

And, Bill, you're, you are alluding to information sphere being a sphere of warfare. I presume.

William Marcellino

I mean, it's not only, but yeah, I think of this as a war-fighting function, as a means of power. So, yes. And that saying that the first casualty of war is the truth?

Todd Helmus

Sure. Yeah. Sounds all right.

Miriam Matthews

Sounds good.

Jeffrey Hiday

And Miriam, I can't recall if you mentioned this up top, but we've also talked about the firehood of falsehoods, which we have used in the in the Russian context. But is that a fair moniker in this context as well?

Miriam Matthews

Well, let's see. So I think it is it could potentially be. So do...Can we say that all or most of the information that's coming out on the on the gods inside if we focus on that for now, that...that is but, it is intentionally misleading, that it is absolutely false that we can say that there are elements that speak to what Russia has done. It is rapid, it's continuous. It's coming from multiple sources. I don't know about I don't know yet about their commitment to consistency. I can't speak to that. Yeah, I'm not sure. But there are definite, I think it is fair to make a comparison at some of the some of the things that are happening in this current context and what we have seen come from the Russian government. I wouldn't, I couldn't speak to like, oh, they are definitely using that. They're learning from that or just that's kind of that's what they've stumbled upon, is trying to get the information out quickly, whatever that information is and...and trying to take control of the narrative. And I think as we've spoken to before, and the US has this problem, where there's a real commitment to trying to communicate information that we know to be true. And in order to determine that, it often takes a bit of time and, and, and then we are far, far behind the messaging, far behind that kind of having an influence. Because if we've taken too long to...to address whatever it is that has happened, I think that we see that as well happening with Israel. They're taking a long time to respond to things, probably in part to try and make sure that they are communicating the truth. Is that always the case? I don't I couldn't speak to that. But that does seem to be the case, at least, for example, for some of the events that have happened and for being able to address what happened with the hospital. Again, kind of tying that back, if we go back to the beginning of this whole conversation, though, they can't just say we we didn't do it because then that's not enough. That doesn't create enough a narrative or a story, because then the response is, well, then who did? And if you don't know who did, then maybe you're just. Yeah, exactly. Maybe you're just lying. Maybe you're just you weren'...that's not persuasive enough. So that's I think that's those are some of the comparisons I can make with the firehouse of falsehood. I can't say that they're learning from Russia. I can say that they are using some similar tactics and similar or for similar intent.

Todd Helmus

I mean, I think it's interesting because you talk about the Russian. Russia, for example, does not have a commitment to consistency. Don't put out facts 180 degrees or statements hundred degrees out from each other to create this sort of sense that nothing is knowable.

Miriam Matthews

Exactly. Yes.

Todd Helmus

My guess is that that won't happen here. At least I wouldn't recommend it to either one. I was a strategic communications consultant. I think Hamas is going to hammer away at civilian casualties. That is going to be their way out of this conflict, is to convince the international community that Israel is committing atrocities against Palestinian people. And Israel, I think, is going to need to hammer away at the the threat, the...the 911-esque threat that they face in their country and their need to respond and root out Hamas and that, you know, and that Hamas is responsible for that. So we'll see how it plays out. But I think the more that these two actors can commit to a consistent message and get that message out, the better each will clear.

Jeff Hiday

Last call for questions. I think we are about ready to wrap this call, but otherwise just give that a quick count. Okay, let's let's call it. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Thanks, Todd. Ray, Bill, Miriam. Thanks also Rafi, who made a cameo appearance. We will post this call to the web ASAP. We have recorded if anyone wants to reach out to any of the panelists or our experts, they can either reach out directly if they can find their emails online. Otherwise, you can send a note to media@RAND.org and we will help make the connection ourselves. Thank you everyone for joining and have a nice day.

Narrator

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