News: Pre-bunking, micro-dosing and liberating

Friday, August 4, 2023

Pre-bunking, micro-dosing and liberating

Aug 04, 2023

Welcome back to Global Insider’s Friday feature: The Conversation. Each week a POLITICO journalist shares an interview with a global thinker, politician, power player or personality. This week, Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent Nahal Toosi talks to the top executive at Google’s Jigsaw, a company that seeks to use technology to battle everything from autocracy to disinformation.

Follow Nahal on X | Send ideas and insights to ntoosi@politico.com

The Conversation

Yasmin Green speaks onstage during the 2020 Embrace Ambition Summit.

Yasmin Green speaks onstage during the 2020 Embrace Ambition Summit by the Tory Burch Foundation, March 5, 2020, in New York City. | Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Tory Burch Foundation

Over the past decade, the question of whether technology is a force for liberation or oppression has been answered: It’s both. The heady days of social media-organized protests in Egypt have given way to surveillance state-crackdowns. Do you blame the tech, or do you find new ways to use it?

Yasmin Green is among the people trying to answer these and related questions every day. She’s the chief executive officer of Jigsaw, a Google company whose mission includes promoting technological aid to people in authoritarian states. Jigsaw focuses on combating violent extremism, disinformation, censorship and toxicity, Green says.

I spoke with her in June at the Oslo Freedom Forum, where she was among tech gurus mingling with human rights activists. She sounded like a realist with a desire to stay optimistic, even as new challenges, such as the rise of artificial intelligence, make her work all-the-more daunting.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and space.

You lead a team that develops tech solutions to threats to open societies. Isn’t technology itself, from surveillance tools to the amount of inevitable over-reliance on various types of tech, a major threat to open societies?

The focus of Jigsaw specifically — the background being that it was the intersection of geopolitics and the internet – when we started over a decade ago, that was the tech utopian era. The expectation was that the internet was just going to democratize the world.

We had a bit more of a cynical outlook, which was, well, people in power are going to be just as excited as the masses to use technology to reinforce their goals. We often look at nation-states and extremist groups, illicit networks.

How do you see artificial intelligence factoring into your work?

AI has played a role in promoting safety online and posing a threat to people for a long time. There is this perception of crisis around AI right now, even though AI is not new.

When Open AI released ChatGPT in November, that kind of mainstream conversation about AI … for the first time you have AI that feels human to people, and there’s a real challenge in that. You can now imagine how there could be an unleashing of accounts that could be used for manipulation or covert influence.

You also have this timescale shift where we’re now no longer talking about years or a year even for new applications of this really powerful generative AI. We’re talking about weeks or months. That has created the sensation of a crisis, which is also an opportunity, because there are things that we could do to make the internet safer that have previously been too hard.

The focus and urgency that a crisis gives you could enable us, in terms of Jigsaw’s goal, to redesign the workings of the internet.

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So, like, social media regulation might actually happen?

Regulation actually has a lot of wind in its sails versus every year until now. I’m thinking more, for example, one of the things that Jigsaw’s been working on is a novel approach to countering misinformation online, which is called pre-bunking – [debunking] false claims or manipulation attempts that haven’t yet happened.

Pre-bunking has three parts to its formula: Alert people to an impending attempt to manipulate them; micro-dose them with the manipulation technique or narrative, and then, the third is to emphatically refute it. You equip people with the skills to see it and defend themselves when they encounter the information in the wild. It’s like building mental antibodies through this pre-bunking treatment.

We kind of have for the first time this consensus among a lot of behavioral and research scientists that you can do these things to get on the front foot to protect people from misinformation and manipulation. And it looks like this AI inflection point is potentially going to galvanize the deployment and scaling of these campaigns. We’ve published about this.

The thing that unites us all is we don’t like to be taken advantage of, so if you can forecast to people they’re going to be targeted, then they get their cognitive shield up.

When Russia went into Ukraine, we were talking to people, experts and government and civil society about what narratives we can expect. One of them was the weaponization of migrants as Ukrainians were fleeing.

We moved really fast and worked with partners in civil society, creatives, and also some government agencies to design these pre-bunking videos and we put them out across the internet — so YouTube, but also Facebook, Tik Tok, Twitter – to get ahead of anti-Ukrainian narratives. We tested that it did have significant uplift in people’s ability to spot scapegoating a fair number.

What country or conflict have you faced the greatest challenge and trying to use tech innovation to help open up societies and in what way?

There are two reasons why Iran is profound for me.

One is I’m Iranian, so there’s the conflation of personal and professional aspirations. But also, in the sense that censorship at the infrastructure layer of the internet is a real threat, not just to the global web, but to the welfare of people around the world. Iran is a great case in point that the internet can really be the oxygen of a resistance movement.

Both the people and that government understand that. You realize wherever the population is tech savvy, the government is tech savvy, too. The Islamic Republic of Iran is so sophisticated in their brazen use of technology to surveil and to censor, to block and to persecute people.

What is really challenging is that every time there are breakthroughs with people being provided circumvention tools – software for the people on the ground to be able to get around the block tools of the government – the government focuses all of its technology, capability and its attention on blocking that software.

It’s a really perverse dynamic in repressive countries, where something gets popular and the government wants to block it.

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You experienced that with the Iranians with this recent protest movement, and it sounds like you’re saying the government was able to repress any sort of technological effort to support the protesters.

Yeah … Everyone’s innovating all the time. It’s a marathon. The internet freedom community is singularly focused on enabling access. So the regimes have a less well-resourced, but very committed adversary in terms of people who are trying to get around that blocking.

What’s a myth you’d like to end about powerful companies like Google?

One of the things I think is an outdated analysis is this notion of echo chambers and radicalization engines, which I think may have been true in the past.

There’s been a lot of kind of rewinding, retraining and rethinking of recommendation systems that means that that’s not so much the dynamic anymore.

Maybe with more transparency that I think will come from, actually, regulation and more researchers being able to get under the hood of how these algorithms are working, they’ll be able to see that that’s not the case, because I think it’s an outdated narrative that hasn’t fully been debunked.

Thanks to editor Heidi Vogt and producer Andrew Howard.