The Problem of Misinformation | Nico Perrino

my access to information about how to live in this world as a fundamental human right that the government has no right to violate welcome to bankas where today we explore the frontier of the problem of misinformation this is Ryan Sean Adams I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless the question today is misinformation a problem that governments really have to address they certainly seem to think so they certainly seem to think so a few

current events that uh raised eyebrows on uh the bankless podcast here people getting arrested in the UK for social media posts like what's going on there Brazil Banning X and the Kur fuffle with Elon Musk California speech bills requiring the labeling of satire that's here in the United States pavl durov arrested this is adjacently related but for not producing chat logs for various governments around the world could other Tech CEO get arrested for breaches of

misinformation laws all of this today prompted the conversation with Nico Pino he's our guest and he argues that the misinformation problem is massively overstated and if our governments aren't careful they're all going to speedrun us into totalitarian surveillance States through speech regulation I think David and I tend to agree with him you can listen and decide for yourselves I think the big takeaway I have from Nico from this podcast is the idea that when there are massive techn olcal shifts in society Society tends to think that this

is unprecedented times we've never seen this before all rules need to be thrown out the door and you know we just need to figure out things in this present moment uh when in reality you know times do rhyme we have seen this before uh this is not unpre unprecedented uh situations and actually first principles are first principles for a reason they are Timeless uh and I think that is kind of the position I think that you and I probably have of there are there's ancient wisdom

that we've learned there are things that we know are unequivocally good free speech is unequivocally good uh and let's not be so Hasty to throw away things that we've learned in the past just because we think AI is materially different um and I thought that perspective was pretty useful uh along with all the other perspectives that n Nico brings to this podcast today before we get into the episode with niiko actually we have a favor to ask you bankless listener if you think that we deserve a festar review on whatever podcast player that you are listening to this on Spotify Apple wherever uh we

would appreciate that five-star review we don't really typically ask for these often but uh we haven't done one in a while we try really hard if you guys agree uh please give us that five star review now let's go ahead and get right into the episode with NCO bankless Nation pleased to introduce you to Nico Pino he's a prominent advocate for free speech and individual rights of course things that we regard quite highly on Bank list he's currently serving at fire which you guys know is the foundation for individual rights and expression that's the f i he's also the Creator and host of a podcast that just talks about

Free Speech it's called so to speak the Free Speech podcast we got a fellow podcaster here allinone package Nico welcome to bankless it's good to be here Ryan David all right so a topic that's been on our mind Nico that we want to like tap your brain into here and just like have a conversation about it there's this drum beat I think right now almost like a mimetic drum beat let's say in Western Al democracies and it goes something like this uh social media misinformation is bad AI is going to

make it worse the market has no way of solving this so we need misinformation laws to stop it or we'll fracture into chaos and elect strongman authoritarians and descend into madness I I think it's a pretty broadly accepted meme I guess I want at the highest level your take on what is wrong with this meme well you someone has to decide what is Miss and disinformation right so you need to have essentially established some sort of

Ministry of Truth to determine what is true and false and we all read or at least I hope we've all read uh George Orwell's 1984 the main character in that book Winston Smith worked at the ministry of truth of oceanana and his job was to essentially review the news and ensure that it followed the party line and where there were inconvenient facts excise them from the news and from The Narrative so I don't know how you get to a place where you have a

government Ministry of truth that everyone accepts and then we build consensus that way people are concerned about Miss and disinformation there was a study done by the world economic Forum of 1500 experts and they were asking these experts what the biggest Global risk is and the first thing that they listed was Miss and disinformation this is above cyber insecurities societal polarization extreme weather risk risks um Miss and disinformation was the thing that they

were most concerned about and there's pretty broad support within America for policing Miss and disinformation 55% of American adults believe that the government should restrict false information online that's up from 39% and they say specifically the government should restrict it the government that's up from 39% in 2018 and there are 65% of Americans who believe that tech companies should restrict false information online up from 56% in 2018 so you see this trend

whereby Americans are increasingly concerned about Miss and disinformation online but if you ask them about the types of misinformation Americans are most concerned about the number one leader is politicians spreading misinformation how ironic 51% say that's the most concerning form of misinformation above social media companies failing to stop misinformation that's at 35% so you have 16% Delta there so politicians still lie the most that's at least consistent and and we

know that right the weapons of mass destruction right uh the CIA torture so we've we've seen politicians spreading misinformation throughout American history so what do you do about misinformation Americans and experts are concerned about it right well you could have the government step in like that seems to be the natural solution but Americans also don't trust the government to police misinformation indeed they think they the biggest spreader of misinformation and then you all you could have tech companies do it I guess but would you trust them to do it correctly so this is always the question when you're debating free

speech topics is who decides who is that angel out there with whom you would entrust the authority to decide for you what speech you can hear for you what music you can listen to for you what movies you can watch uh there's not anybody in the world with whom I would trust that responsibility so it's better to let me just access the information and decide for myself and I think that's how most people approach the issue it's always the other guy who's easily duped it's never myself right it's never it's never me who's duped I really want to drill into this point uh Nico you

brought up 1984 uh and that's a very like common thing to uh use as an analogy as like a illustrative um idea when we are talking about free speech and I think everyone on this on this listening to this podcast will be like oh yeah like Ministry of Truth like automatically bad uh but I really want to double tap on that because you know the 1984 book which is so famous really uh painted that in a in a terrible light but you know what if that is actually the best solution maybe it's like just like democracy it's just the the least

worst solution that we have right and so I think that people understand as a meme that 1984 is bad a Ministry of Truth is bad uh but that's because that's kind of just built in culture into our reaction to these words Ministry of Truth like I really just want to double down on like how do we actually know that this is actually just a negative outcome that we should avoid like their governments organize other things governments don't aren't a complete failure across everything that they do uh why why is this one different yeah well the appeals

to 1984 can become a cliche in my world so point taken on that front so there are a number of ways you can approach this and I think the first is to just ask ourselves whether misinformation is more prevalent now than it has been in the past I mean you need to accept that premise right in order to move on to the next question is that is then what do we do about it so the average United States internet user spends less than 10 minutes a day consuming news online and misinformation according to a

2021 study represents 0.15% of The American's media diet so it's minuscule now that assumes that you can actually identify what is Miss and disinformation which is hard itself right not everything is black and white but if that's the amount of information that Americans are consuming then you have to ask yourself is that a problem and is it worse than it has been historically I'm not sure it is uh Americans throughout history have been easily duped particularly at moments of

technological Revolution so as Society was becoming more literate for example people were easily duped by anything that was put in writing there's that famous anecdote where when people were put in front of a television screen or a movie screen for the first time and saw a train barreling toward them they jumped out of their seats because they thought there was an actual train barreling toward them you have Orson wells's uh radio broadcast War of the Worlds in 1938 that created a panic in the streets of New York uh that internet

right we had a famous Time Magazine cover where you had a child in front of uh television scream and the headline was just cyber porn and it discussed all the sort of parade of horribles that were going to come with an unfettered and open internet I think what you're ultimately going to need and Society is going to need to develop is a sort of media literacy um an understanding that um not everything that you read on the Internet

is is true and that you are going to need to determine for yourself where you go and find find your truth the problem is right when you take that next step you determine that this is a problem take for granted it is a problem how do you actually solve it I think there are some uh technological solutions and some companies that are doing some interesting things like X's Community notes right which even applies to Elon Musk I've seen it on a couple of his Tweets in the past but when you get into the government you have a really you

have to be really confident uh that this is this is a problem because look at authoritarian dictatorships throughout history right Hitler censored because of what he called Jewish lies and Marxist propaganda uh you have Kim jong-in uh Kim Jong-un and um xiin ping in China for example who are who are censoring based on what they say are false International narratives uh that undermine Society society's um consensus and ability to move forward you see it

all the country or all across the world with uh Vladimir Putin for example after the invasion of Ukraine um so this could this was this is a tool if you give the government the power to censor misinformation that will be wielded by those in power against political dissidents and those who descent from uh society's broader perspectives so there's two interesting points there one one is just like um questioning the premise that we have more information now than we've had previously and I think that's an interesting premise to

to sort of question maybe we'll dig into that later but you like one point that uh I might make too is that maybe we don't have more misinformation but it sort of feels like we have more fracturing and information sources so it's very interesting in the early 2000s with the you know weapons of mass destruction thing right that turned out to be misinformation but we had societal consensus that that was reality and Truth almost because we didn't have Fringe social media internet platforms

saying like are you sure they have wmbs and here's a paper that I read and like they may not have it so maybe what we're struggling with is not so much misinformation but a um difficulty into coming to consensus on what reality is and it might be that all of these information sources are actually healthy because we sort of question the mainstream narrative or the government narrative in a way that we didn't previously I'm kind of unresolved uh you like on that in in my own mind but but

the broader point that you're making I think your thesis here is basically that when it comes to government regulation some sort of Ministry of Truth the The Cure is worse than the disease here so maybe there is some misinformation problem out there that's been Amplified by the internet but if you're going to solve that with the government look at all of the ways we've seen throughout history of how it can and inevitably will go wrong I think that's the broad point that you're making yeah that is the broad point I'm making but I take the consensus Point seriously there was

a recent video going around X I think it got something like 35 million impressions of John kery speaking at some world economic Forum event and he was asked about Miss and disinformation and the challenges with governing in the social media age and he said it's harder to build consensus today than it has been in the past when you had something like you know four or five television stations and you a couple of national newspapers and authoritarian countries can move faster than governing democracies because they can build

consensus easier right they do it at the point of a gun here we have to do it at The Ballot Box and he suggested in the latter part of that clip that you know the way to win is to win at The Ballot Box and some people interpret that to mean amending the First Amendment to the United States Constitution ni I saw that clip too I like um so so let's maybe start by steelmanning the case that people make for misinformation why why don't we just play that clip let's play it now sure and I think the the dislike of and anguish over social media is just

growing and growing and growing uh and it's part of our problem particularly in democracies uh in terms of building consensus around any issue it's really hard to govern today you can't you know you know there's no the referees we used to have to determine what's a fact and what isn't a fact that kind of you know been eviscerated to a certain degree and um people go and then people self- select where they go for their news or for their information and then you just

get into a vicious cycle so it's really really hard much harder to build consensus today than at any time in the 45 50 years I've been involved in this and and you know there's a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities uh in order to guarantee that you're going to have you know some accountability on facts ET but look if people go to only one source and the source they go to is sick and uh you know has an agenda and

they're putting out disinformation uh our first amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just you know hammer it out of existence so what you need what we need is to is to win the ground win the right to govern by hopefully having you know winning enough votes that you're free to be able to to implement change uh now obviously there are some people in our country who are prepared to implement change in other ways and

question really if democracy can survive unregulated media I think democracies are de are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges that we are facing and to me that is part of what this race this this election is all about will we break the fever in the United States wow so that was John KY uh speak on a panel at the the world economic Forum the WF which is

interesting and and some phrases that I caught Nico I'd like to your commentary and what you think he was saying there because that could be interpreted multiple ways and there were parts that were very explicit there were parts that were vague but he's saying it's hard to govern right now I think all politicians is sort of feel that uh there's the referees aren't here to kind build consensus right we don't have the the media Truth uh the consensus machines that we used to have people don't trust uh the media and like you know they're fracturing in terms of their information sources so the question he said is how to curb these entities it's a little

scary how to curb these entities and the first amendment is a block to curbing these uh entities it's interesting because like I and I know you do hold the first amendment in very high esteem we wouldn't say it's it's a block we'd say it's a guarantee that we actually uh able to preserve a free society and he said that those that win the right to govern might be able to implement change so some vague statements there I mean to me that kind of like my interpretation is that kind of points towards hey if we win if our side wins then we're going to

have to do things you know to curb misinformation in some ways whether through executive order through legislation Etc but we'll run into some blocks with the First Amendment we'll just have to navigate that and we can because we have won the right to govern so we'll have some power here but how do you interpret it I'm not sure Christopher Hitchens has the saying uh Christopher Hitchens like great Christopher Hitchin once said that um one of the worst tactics in public argumentation is to assume that your opponent's worst possible motive is

their only possible motive to assume that their worst possible motive is their only possible motive so I always try and be charitable when I'm interpreting what people say especially when it's unclear for me it was a roar shock test on X right you had a certain segment politically aligned presumably with krye who interpreted him as saying you need to be build governing coalitions Through The Ballot Box you need to appeal to a wide swath of people uh not just to your political poll and then you had the other segment saying not inclined to interpret him Charly um that you need

that what he's asking for is a constitutional amendment to curb the First Amendment because he's totally right about the First Amendment the First Amendment doesn't have any categorical exceptions yeah to uh false information in fact there was a case in 2011 called United States versus Alvarez that involved the Stoler Stolen Valor Act which essentially said you can't lie about um winning military medals and there was this man Alvarez who lied about winning the Medal of Honor uh America's highest uh military honor wow

and uh the Supreme Court said it's you know the law is unconstitutional you you have the right to lie you have the right to lie and First Amendment protected right to lie that you won a medal of honor yes yes so he he um Justice Kennedy in the his plurality decision wrote permitting the government to decree the speech to be a criminal offense whether shouted from the rooftops or made in barely audible whisper would endorse government authority to compile a list of subjects about which false statements are punishable that governmental power has

no clear limiting principle our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need oceana's Ministry of Truth here we go back to that socially yeah but but he's right it was a block right the first amendment in this case was a block on you know the government saying you can't you know pretend or lie about being a uh winner of some of our most prestigious military you guys know that um I've actually won a medal of honor you're wearing it right now in

fact wearing it right now true story true story but I I do Wonder though whether the crisis of Truth really stems from our fractured media environment or from the institutions that we ENT entrusted with the power to sort truth from falsity failing us you just think back to covid for example right and there was a huge discussion around the science some of the things we thought uh were true in

20120 turned out to not be true in 2024 whether it's masking or or children in schools or whether the virus leaked from a lab or from a wet market and tech companies and the government to a certain extent policed this information and I tend to see free speech as a way of developing trust not deteriorating trust because think think about it like um a criminal trial for example you can trust the outcome of that trial if you

saw the trial itself as Fair it's not a Star Chamber it's not a show trial and you can think about that in the same way with our public debate if the public debate you feel like is fair you can trust the outcome of that public debate whether it be you know public policy or policy implemented by tech companies but what people saw during covid and and during other periods is that censorship happened and people weren't able to uh try and poke holes in the scientific consensus and therefore they just didn't trust the outcome and then then it

deteriorated the institutions I mean there's an element of they tried to do the wmd thing of the early 2000s with kind of like the co covid information where all of traditional institutional media also backed by the government said this is the actual truth here and now they couldn't do that as effectively in you know 2020 2021 because we had the internet because we had social media because we had this fracturing of Truth so you're you're sort of making the case that like maybe the problem isn't um

like the fracturing media maybe the problem is that our referees as John KY said are actually bad ref referees and like you can't get away with that any longer did you guys ever see that documentary by Andrew Kahan uh this place rules it's an HBO documentary I didn't know but I'm I'm a big fan he's the all gas no breaks guy right uh I believe so he he became famous by making social media videos interviewing um people who aren't traditionally interviewed you know sort of people at the margin of societ yeah and so he created this documentary about January

6th and kind of the events leading up to it and surrounding it and there was this amazing quote that he kind of interjected into the documentary where he said when you take someone who talks about a deep state conspiracy to silence him and his followers and then you silence him and his followers it only really adds to his credibility uh so you know the long the shter when you're dealing with people who believe there's a conspiracy to shut them up don't try and shut them up right it just sort of uh supercharges this lack of trust that exists within that Community but there's that weird molok

trap uh mulok I don't know if you're familiar with this idea of Mok NOCO it's AIP that we use on Bank list a lot it's it just kind of means like um c a trap of coordination failures uh where the you you could make any conspiracy about anything that you want so long as it also has this underpinning of oh and also the government wants to wants to hide this and like it doesn't you can all you can you can make a conspiracy about anything it's like the government doesn't want you to know about this and then as and it kind of turns into a

selfing I mean for instance David Hoffman does have a honor that the government does not want anyone to know about they've been trying to silence this UN Bank for a very long time we're just coming out with this in today's podcast well you do need a sort of scientific method where the whereby the claims are falsifiable right and if you're essentially positing a theory that's impossible to falsify then we should look at that with extreme skepticism yeah this was is interesting um a interview that we recently did with

with somebody that Dave and I respect a lot and from his previous um books in literature uh you've all know Harari and he he's got this book called Nexus and an underpinning of the book is basically like um social media was sort of our first act in in AI these AI algorithms essentially engagement AI that sort of thing and our our next ACT is is going to be all of this Amplified and it's resulted in a massive chaotic uh misinformation disinformation problem maybe point taken to some degree but his solution to that was was uh basically

government it was basically government regulation which is the thing that gets pointed to but but can we go back for for a second actually just like continue to steal man the case before we sort of uh apply it to to the some of the events taken taking place because there are some out there Nico who would say look um misinformation is not a problem at all like there's no such thing as like say Russian bot Farms you know uh instilling propaga Anda like that doesn't that that's not a real Force that's something that like ex political

party would say um you know they would just downplay misinformation so much uh that they would deny its existence let's say and I want to kind of like Steelman the case because this is sort of the youal know Harari case he's basically like algorithms are optimizing for engagement that's kind of what they do they're paid to to suck out your like your eyeballs and so they're not optimized in a in a capitalist Tech economy for truth seeking or for self-correction the kind of the virtues

we said they're they're not optimized for the scientific method they're just optimized to give you kind of like the Tabloid thing that you know it triggers triggers the dopamine that's going to be outraged and stuff like that and so that's how misinformation kind of like propagates and then we have these chaos agents maybe foreign actors we can't tell online on any of the social media platforms who's a human and who's a who's a bot so we have all of this interference by um like Bots maybe some of these are foreign adversaries for instance and then we have like extreme ownership bias so like now we have like

if the platform is somebody more uh right leaning uh like X and Elon Musk right he's going to trigger the algorithm to amplify his ideology and if it's more left leaning maybe something like threads or some of the you know Reddit for for example then they're going to amplify kind of like um you know something that's more left leaning and then you also have audience capture where you're stuck in these silos of just people want to consume the information that uh fits with their existing ideology right and so you know

you go to the you go to Fox News or you go to you know MSNBC dep depending on your political uh affiliation and then we have this other effect of the internet which is like The Fringe is now able to find one another right so like in the early days if you're consuming media from kind of like your Regional newspaper right it's going to be your Fringe ideas are going to be kind of diluted by the populace around you but now you can go into like a telegram group and find all of The Fringe crazies that subscribe to your belief system and and communicate with them and you know

spread your ideology and like these are basically problems they would say steel maning the case that are unique that did not exist in you know the first part of the the the 20th century and these are internet problems Amplified by by social media do you acknowledge that these kind of problems exist and are the roots of what we're dealing with from a misinformation side to a certain extent right it's it's it's difficult right when you say that the outcome of

accepting that premise is that the government needs to be involved and regulate it and like I just will never accept that outcome or that solution right but what if you look at the premise I I guess I would just need to see more evidence that Miss and disinformation is the problem like what are the best examples we have of Miss and disinformation creating societal Discord or are the problems of Miss and disinformation so diffuse because it's created by Bots and it shapes cultural narratives that you could just never really identify if Miss and disinformation is creating a a problem

within Society it's creating that polarization but then you get into the falsification problem right so people cite as examples of Miss and disinformation that example where you had the Q andon conspiracy theorists arrive at Comet Pizza in Washington DC with a gun in in 2016 uh people talk about the election in 2020 as well you have the Russian bot Farms but it's unclear what effect that actually had so like where is the Miss and disinformation creating these problems that are so acute and so challenging

that we then need to go to the government to help determine what is true and false and then censor accordingly so I I don't know I mean what do you guys think are the best examples of Miss and disinformation best examples of Miss and disinformation um I was thinking about it before I came out here and I I I mean I just really a hard time thinking of the examples there are probably I could spend a few minutes in kind of research like the best examples that the whole entire world knows about like examples of this I think in the in the crypto World however we are in this like

constant battle for attention everywhere like projects need attention meme coins need attention uh like everyone is vying for attention on Twitter on X and this has turned into like this just massive darwinian competition space for attention at all costs and there are some projects that are super honorable and legit and in the crypto space there are many many projects that like the incentivization here just like collapses down to just like the worst possible behaviors uh and you get the full kind

of spectrum and I think so I think in the crypto space their media uh media illiteracy is actually pretty strong because if you are media illiterate like you end up buying a scam like really quickly yeah the the way the way I would phrase this like there's there's lots of different um citations we could you kind of make I guess maybe maybe maybe the co example is a a good example but that kind of came from M mainstream is more like disproven by the internet which is probably a you know a counter evidence to this success story but but I think um

I would tell you that from my perspective it just seems so difficult to find out what's true today like we are sort of thrown into headlong into kind of like the consensus finding meat grinder online so that I it's very difficult for me to tell what's true and what's not at least in the moment I feel very alone when I navigate the internet and it's up to me to just like determine what is true and I'm in chat rooms with like-minded friends who have