Ai And Propaganda Nothing Is True And Everything Is Generated

TITLE: AI and Propaganda: Nothing Is True, and Everything Is Generated CHANNEL: MIT Center for International Studies (MIT CIS) DATE: 2026-05-07 ---TRANSCRIPT--- So, it is my great pleasure to welcome you to AI and propaganda. Nothing is true and everything is generated. Um, I’m Elizabeth Wood. I am the faculty director of the MIT Ukraine program and a faculty member of the history department. And I want to welcome you on behalf of the MIT Ukraine program which has been running strong since 2022 and plans to keep keep growing and and strengthening. The program tonight is co-sponsored by the MIT Ukraine program with Slana Kasinska here. The Center for International Studies thanks to Michelle English and Sarah Zakaria and the Davis Center for Russian and East European Studies at Harvard with Steve Snnika and Chris Martin. So thank you for the Davis Center for co-sponsoring this. Um I want to introduce Kalia Halina Padal Padulko and then our speaker Peter Paranov Kalina Padulko will be uh moderating and she is a multid-disciplinary research specializing in strategic communication, propaganda, disinformation and the use of AI tools. She has double PhD in computer science and political science um from National Aerospace University of Khakiv aviation institute and uh global governance from the University of Wateroo. Um she’s currently completing her fullbrite fellowship here at MIT where we’ve been lucky to have her for the whole year and where she has been teaching an amazing course on AI and propaganda um with a tiny bit of help from me but mostly all her own work.

This is this is disinformation [laughter] by the way. Anyway, we’re very lucky to have Kina here and to have her moderating this session with Peter Pomperans, whom she invited. So, Peter needs no introduction. He’s the author of three very, very important books, which I want you to all consider reading if you possibly can. The 2014 bestseller, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. the 2019 This is not propaganda adventures in the war against reality and his most recent how to win an information war which is absolutely fascinating. It’s a page it’s a it’s a real mystery and detective and page turner. He is the senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University where he co-directs the arena initiative. Um and without further ado, let’s take you two take it away. Thank you. Thank you so much. Uh I would love to start definitely with sen uh Steven and Deis Center um center for um international studies at MIT and um do we have uh do we have Michelle here? No, unfortunately. But Michelle actually was the one who helped to set up everything. And of course, I would love to thank Elizabeth and MIT Ukraine Satlana, but especially Elizabeth for being my friend and mentor and the person who actually enabled this course to happen and this event to happen too. And I would love also to thank every decent person in this room uh for standing on the right side of the history and supporting Ukraine and this defining for us time. Uh we need you unfortunately situation is critical but thank you for being with us. De Roy you you can join us here please please shout out for for Deb is one of the professors [applause] at works in our domain too. Very happy to have you here. Um so um actually as Elizabeth mentioned this event and this activity is a part of a course AI and propaganda that we are co- teaching. So technically you all are our students today. I hope you’re okay with that. Uh so um do we have actually our students? Can you can you raise a hand? Who I just want to see like how many people are skipping the main event of the course. uh uh yeah this is very huge success obviously that we teach in this course despite all the uncertainties around the course and around political situation but topic itself is very depressing like 30% of students dropped after the first class because it was so depressing and it was unbearably sad [laughter] uh so so I’m not promising you standup comedy show today um a AI helped and disinerat disinformation. You still had 20. We had 25 students. No, we have a lot of students, but like we would have more if if we showed like all this memes with the Putin on the horse and all of this fun stuff. We actually had a meme war class with ladenuk who is here a fellow at huri. Uh it was amazing class only one fun class. The rest were very depressing. So unfortunately AI doesn’t look very promising uh for our realm. Not only it helped to reduce the cost for clandestine actors to produce this information but also it helped to increase uh plausibility and scale it up. So if previously prior need 100 people for research internet research agency somewhere in Olino in St. Petersburg to uh to launch foreign interference. Now it could be just one Ivan in Moscow who who is operating AI swarm for 10,000 synthetic personas and uh and trying to convince western audiences that Ukrainians are Nazi and Ukraine need to be part of Russia. So this is scary and not promising. On on the other hand um AI also became not only tool and enabler for this operation but also a battlefield with um phenomenon such as LLM grooming. So platforms itself became uh uh enablers of propaganda. So clandescent actors are deliberately posting some information to get into training data set and then um get to your outputs of CHBD and other LLMs. On the other hand, this field is also very exciting and um a lot of theoretical problems and research conundrums are emerging as we currently talking to you right now. So this is a lot to discuss, to research and to be curious about. Um we still don’t know a lot how to respond, how to detect, how to um evaluate all of that harm, like how do we detect AI swarms? This is something very interesting to to to to um to think of. Um at the same time I also u offer lots of opportunities to use our creativity and apply uh emerging technologies for good. So to analyze uh information operation to basically support truthful counter messaging and and uh even do fancy operation inside Russia. Yeah, that’s something we’ll talk today Peter. Uh so uh I don’t want to put a lot of pressure Peter and you but I will because this is a lot to talk and we have only one hour and we’ll have Q&A session. Uh but on a personal note I would love to thank you uh for donating your time and coming to Cambridge and speak to our MIT and Harvard uh um community. Uh and uh I’m really really personally excited because you were the one who dragged me into this situation, this life situation uh because I read uh this is not propaganda long time ago and I was I became so fascinated of this topic that I cannot really sleep well because of that. So uh so thank you so much for for coming uh today and uh for this talk. Um let’s start with um uh with a basic question about AI and propaganda. Is it something drastically and profoundly new happening in the business of information manipulation with the introduction and proliferation of AI or have we already seen all of that before? How do you conceptualize that in your brilliant mind? Well, in my brilliant mind, um I mean without getting into too much of a sort of discussion about what we mean by newness so far, you know, as I think you alluded to, um you know, the fears and the anticipation around AI tends to run ahead of the reality. If we’re talking about a game changer, it was sort of the social media revolution that some people in this room are responsible for. And um that was a game changer in terms of targeting, in terms of of how we think about influence and audiences and how we think about our information environment. um right now sort of seeing the stuff coming in because I do a lot of my work in Ukraine, you know, seeing the offensive operations coming in from Russia and what they do domestically and the first sort of iterations of doing something about it. Um clearly there’s, you know, obvious issues about scale and deep fakes are getting better and all that kind of stuff. It still doesn’t feel like a complete game changer, frankly. [snorts] But the one that we’re all sort of sitting around and feeling will be when I talk to people who actually work in this field every day is this idea that we will essentially give an AI an aim. Go and demobilize Russian soldiers, a neutral aim. You know, Russia is building up a 1.5 million strong army in order to threaten NATO, in order to continue a tour in Ukraine. We can all agree it’s probably a good idea if they struggle with mobilization. That’s quite a neutral thing. So we go and give it that order and say go and create swarms and campaigns to fulfill that neutral aim and off the AI will go and it’ll end up with starting a small genocidal war in Dakistan. Um or we’ll say go and win this election for us and it’ll create hatefilled rage mobs. What I’m getting to is is that one of the big debates and why I find propaganda so interesting is about the question about whether we are good or bad creatures. So my last book, How to Win Information War, was all about a a British counterpropagandist who essentially said, “Germans love Nazism so much. You can forget about goodness, forget about better angels, forget about morality. The only thing you can do is to counter evil with a cleverer evil, with a more sophisticated evil.” And I think the game changer will be when AI starts working without our strategies. We just give it an order and then it comes up with the strategies and then we’re going to start to have to face up to ourselves. So a lot of the discussion about AI is how it’ll undermine the human. Actually, you know, from where I sit, it’s what it’s going to tell us about the human which is much more alarming. So that’ll be the big game changer. But much like on the battlefield, you know, where we’re all anticipating this moment where in kinetic war, the AIs will start to come up with their own strategies. That I think is a is a gamecher. The moment you clearly have a bunch of guys in Russia saying essentially instructing the AI to do something and it can iterate, it can refine. I don’t quite think maybe I’m wrong whether it can come up with the with the whole kind of game plan and then change it and change it and change it. But that that I think will be the big game changer. Interesting. So this is like a really scary idea with a mirror like looking into ourselves through the through AI and see all the bad in us. But what about concept of shared truth and like shared reality? This is something I feel AI undermines a lot and you have argued a lot in your book that modern propaganda doesn’t rely actually on the disinformation and on the fake that much as as for the concept to undermine truth as a like broad phenomenon. uh how do AI accelerates this process or not really like we we’ve seen that in Russia for happening for last uh dozens of years uh when people just basically deprived for any understanding what is truth and then not willing sometimes to understand that uh how AI help or not is helpful in this process. So, um, yeah, I I suppose a running theme in my books is is the biggest lie we tell ourselves is that we desire the truth. Um, there seems to be a very very strong trend for people to run away from the truth. Um, because it’s an unpleasant thing, because it tells us that we haven’t fulfilled what we wanted to fulfill, because it tells us we’re going to die. I mean, reality is fairly unpleasant. So um this is a very old debate. I mean Lipman and Dwey are having this conversation at the start of the 20th century where Litman’s like people can’t handle the truth. Media takes them away from the truth and and people want to live in pseudo realities. And media helps them do that. Media doesn’t bring you to reality, takes you away and creates pseudo realities. So in a way this is a very old debate about what we desire. But I suppose the, you know, and we’ve seen, we’ve had a long discourse around that, around social media, the way it can sort of fit around the reality that you want to be in. And there’s endless papers that come out about whether echo chambers are echoey or chambery or whether they’re filtery or bubbly. But I think we all know that they can definitely take you away from reality if you want that. Um, and I mean with AI, it’s interesting. I mean, if we’re talking about the chat GPTs, the latest research, I don’t know if it’s public, but I guess I’m making it public, um, is that people trust the the sort of the chat GPTs of this world more than humans because they’re computers and they sound objective and balanced and they sound fair and, you know, unbiased. So, there’s there’s already a kind of a trust issue there. And look, there are more I’m not a scientist. my you know I’m a my my degree is in literature and my PhD is in creative writing which isn’t even a subject. So I’m very humbled by being at MIT and I’m certainly not going to get into any sort of discussions about sort of the maths of this but if I understand rightly this phenomenon of sycopency you know you know the chat GPTs telling you what you want to hear is is a real issue. Um but um but going back to Dwey and Litman, you know, so I’m at Hopkins these days. So I’m sort of indoctrinated with the idea that John Dwey is the only good American who has who has ever lived. And um you know remember Dwiey’s response to Litman. So Litman said people can’t handle the truth. Reality is too complicated. Media takes you away from the truth. Therefore we need you know Peter Teal or some sort of elite to guide us through through this world. And and Dueie’s response is you’re right, people can’t handle the truth. They seek unreality. But we can create communities where truth emerges. There is no absolute truth we can arrive at, but we can have an environment where we’re negotiating truths and a way to research them. And of course, look, the great problem with with not just AI, but the whole kind of digital space is that we can’t research it properly. We can’t have that conversation because it’s so untransparent. Um, and so if we’re going to return to reality, I don’t think it’s going to be about returning to facts. It’s going to be about having a digital environment where we can have a transparent conversation about how we approach reality. So I think there is a push for that. I think some of the regulation in Europe might enable that. Um and I think that’s going to be the difference between a democratic digital environment and a non-democratic one because Cinping and Putin will definitely not let anybody understand how they’re manipulating AIs, how they’re manipulating algorithms, whether what you see online is real or not. And the difference between a democratic environment is that we will have access to that and we will be able to have a discussion on that. But I suppose what we’re living on in now is not an entirely democratic information environment. So do you think that segmented legislation in Europe still does make sense if we globally have this situation that we have with So one one of my favorite American uh pieces of um non-fiction of recent years is is project 2025 the heritage foundation thing. Fantastic reading. Isn’t it great? The reality was just so much worse when they got into power. It reads like this sort of romantic romantic sort of idea of of reforming America. But actually, if you go to the chapter on digital stuff, it says what we need is more transparency from a right-wing point of view because they’re saying Google is, you know, secretly leftwing or something. Um, but it’s it’s it’s actually quite good and it’s written by Brendan Carr, who goes on to be, you know, what’s his official role now? Chief propagandist. No, what is it? Yeah, whatever that that that that role. But he seems to have forgotten that for some reason. Um and his really fairly reasonable demands for algorithmic transparency, which were there. That was his idea, have suddenly disappeared now that he’s in power, which is mysterious. But what I mean to say is these ideas exist in America as well. It’s not some crazy European idea that we should have a little bit of access to understanding how our information environment is shaped. This is not some sort of radical French idea. It’s an American idea as well. Yeah, a lot of miraculous happening right now. But coming back to your point about trust in LLMs, uh if I were Russian operatives and that’s something I very often fantasize about, uh I would definitely um target LLMs uh because more and more uh psychological services are using LLMs as a like main driver as a main platforms. Uh a lot of coaching services, other stuff. So if you get there into the system, you can multiply your uh propaganda and your impact a lot. Um so Peter, how do these clandestine actors and malicious actors like Russia and others in the camp using um AI for propaganda? Well, look, there’s something new every every day. Um and I think that that sense of newness is actually really important. So the other day there was a great article in in Bloomberg about Storm 1516 which is the sort of the next generation down from Pragian’s troll farms which is sort of a splinter group from that which is using AI to create I mean it’s the usual litany of activities a bit of deep fakes uh bit of LLM poisoning um often in combined operations you know AI can be very useful for sort of like doing something very old-fashioned like gaming the Google algorith alithm. So they’re using it for different issues. The more advanced stuff that we’ve seen China use and there is some evidence that Russia is starting to use it on the front lines is sort of chat bots that target people individually know a lot about that person can build a discussion with them in order to extract intelligence in order to compromise them. So essentially doing the the work of Verbka, how do you say Verbka in recruiting? It’s more than recruiting though. It’s like wrapping somebody around your finger, but I suppose you can call it recruiting, but but a but a bot does it. Uh you know, a chatbot does it. Um so so that’s that’s kind of you know what we’re seeing at the at the front edges of things. Um, but I think what’s upsetting to me is that Russia and China to a certain extent are winning the narrative about how you can use AI. So every month there’s a new story. they’ve done this and they’ve done this and there’s a sense that they are, you know, the evil geniuses exploiting these new potentials while the most we really do on the defensive side, even though there’s some very interesting things in Ukraine, is a little bit of narrative tracking and stuff like that. So there’s a sense that the you know the people who want to use um AI and other forms of technology in their malign aims you know they’ve got institutes of knowledge, experimentation, education, political will, budgets behind them. They’re building a Manhattan project of AI manipulation while um while there’s very little from our side. Um, and I wonder whether that’s the challenge that we face. How do we start creating our own AI for democratic purposes but in a consistent way? The most interesting stuff is here. I think you know the MIT bot that that slightly reduced conspiratorial thinking was a wonderful example of of using um AI in a positive way. But these things are intermittent. They come from universities while the other side has a sort of machine pumping them out. Um, and we have to start competing. Yeah. And sometimes they are not really using very advanced algorithms. No, that’s what I mean. If you actually comput this is like basic and it’s very hit and miss. A lot of the stuff is but they’re doing it and they’re doing it and they’re doing it. They have political will and like a lot of expertise, years of expertise to to do that and they just leverage creativity and basic algorithms. So let’s talk about China more. Um unfortunately we need to talk because with all this cognitive warfare, psychological warfare expertise that Russia carried through dozens of years with the KJB and even earlier uh and all the cooperation and knowledge sharing that they have with China. Uh China was able to build on that and skyrocket basically with available technologies and innovation that they have. So who is the main evil now? Peter Who should we be scared of? Um like with all the scandal with leaked paper about golakis that’s exactly what you mentioned like they are targeting policy makers they are targeting decision makers directly and this is like more efficient than just floating the zone as Russia used to do. So what should we expect? So the most alarmed I’ve heard policy makers and technologists be in closed door meetings and this was in England where we’re just scared of everything now and we’re just like the scared country like like everything frightens us. um was a sort of like gaming through if China does have all the knowledge from Tik Tok that it might have then they could very easily contribute to you know they have a lot of leverage over over potential moments of I don’t want to say causing because we know causality is so difficult in this space but but playing a role in in violence if they really know people’s sensitivities street by street apartment by apartment and that is in the hands of state actors then you know any place in the northeast of England already bubbling over with a lot of social tension is very very vulnerable at a time when we know very little about them. So we have little we have no deterrence. Part of Britain’s muted response to Russia, we’re good on words. Actually quite muted in terms of what we do is because we feel so vulnerable in so many ways. So we’re completely vulnerable. We have very little deterrence against them. Yeah. How much knowledge do we have? We’ll come back to that. But um um knowledge if it’s in the wrong place is the same as having no knowledge. But um um so that’s and when I I remember sitting in a meeting at at at King Charles Streets around this and and there was a real sense of in the room like when you when people started thinking through it. However, there is of course a another country that has, you know, some very powerful social media companies and um which we’ve recently become aware of might be actually not the ally we thought. Um and there’s been no bigger wakeup call in this space than Elon Musk getting involved in race riots in Britain or trying to weigh in on the German elections to which we should be grateful to him, I suppose. But um who should we more most scared of? China is the one that that fills people with a sort of long-term dread. But at the moment, losing America as an ally and it becoming a potential adversary is a deeply uncomfortable thought. We’re not going to go more depressing. [laughter] topic let’s let’s switch to something like what we can use AI for good so like I mentioned a little bit we can use AI to to analyze big data to identify information operation coordinated inauthentic behavior to simulate information ecosystem try to find vulnerable spots to support truthful counter messaging um offensive operations do you want to share something from what you work on in Ukraine like some advanced techniques like what Ukraine is leveraging AI for good. So we can learn from that and like basically illuminate something positive in this talk. Look historically um and this is part of the story of both my last two books. Democracies are much slower at getting their act together in this space. Whether you want to call it cognitive security, which is the latest annoying word that the DoD came up with because they want the budgets, it’s actually you can also tell the word is always predicated on who’s got the budget. It’s sort of stratcom when it’s when it’s state department. It’s cognitive warfare when it’s DoD. You know, it moves around depending on who wants to own the money. But um whatever you want to call this, I like the oldfashioned word political warfare um because it takes me back to to to a different time. But dictatorships always have their these machines running. They don’t stop running. They’re constantly functioning because for them propaganda, control over information is critical. And so it’s working non-stop. Historically, democracies only fire up this sector when they kind of recognize they’re in a moment of existential danger. So in Britain, the creation of the political warfare executive, which is a story of my last book, is is something that comes through great turbulence during World War II. Meanwhile, you know, Gerbles has been running his prop propaganda ministry for, you know, for many years before that. you know in in the cold war you know you have very famous national security council sort of decree of what was it 1948 or 1950 I can’t remember now basically creating the USIA and creating the whole machinery and then when those wars stop democracies dismantle them so it takes democracies some time to get things going work out what their doctrine is work out what their red lines are if there’s going to be any red lines work out um how you balance pluralism and centralization. So this is not you know this is not the first time that democracies have been behind in this game. Um because Ukraine is an existential moment it is same as it is for ro you know all types of miltech. It’s where the future is being experimented with every day. So on the defensive side there’s this really good paper by some Helina Padala have you heard her? um describing the the kind of everyday miracle of of how Ukraine is created and not really created, how a sort of a group of different institutions have emerged in Ukraine that deal with um the sort of endless onslaught of of Russian propaganda. And it’s it’s a very unique community. you’ve got five or six superb AIdriven um tech companies that are spotting the emergence of narratives really just as they’re sprouting, you know, just as they’re forming sometimes. Yeah. Um they’re all in the private sector or in the civic sector. They’re communicating with two or three government institutions which are kind of like quite independent, you know, several senses of disinformation, feeding information to them, feeding information into media. Um, you have all sorts of different media whose job it is to work with vulnerable audiences. Um, I’ve done the most interesting work that I’ve done in in media over the past 12 years has been in Ukraine where you had public service media thinking about how do you do sophisticated audience analysis to reach people who might be vulnerable to propaganda. Yeah, that’s quite a breakthrough for journalists. Journalists think in very very basic audience categories. Here they were doing psychoraphics, deep focus groups, understanding their traumas, cognitive biases, prejudices, and really thinking how you communicate with them. Now that’s being replicated, not replicated, now that’s being done by some of the biggest public service media in the world. Definitely not the one here, but some of the big successful ones. And and I think that’s actually the future of journalism. But so you have journalists who are thinking about audiences. Yeah. You have private sector who are using the latest in AI to anticipate narratives. You have government agencies that have leared and earned trust um or collaborating collaborating together in this truly all of society approach. So that’s kind of on the defensive side on the reaching out uh and trying to sort of you know think in terms of counter operations into Russia and moving towards a theory of deterrence. That’s I think we’re just starting with that really. Um there are some great examples in terms of getting Russian soldiers to desert. So there’s a very famous project where Russian soldiers can can sort of call in and and they’re guided to um a place where they can sort of desert. But now that’s being done with bots. So now there’s a chat bot that a Russian soldier will engage with and it will talk them through the process. So again there you have a piece of AI being used to, you know, do its bit to slow down a genocidal war. Mhm. So that’s a good example. Beyond that, beyond that, things get very interesting because if dictatorships kind of have open access to us and they know how to influence us, you know, they know loads about us, they know how to play into our political processes and the result is pretty easy. You influence elections. How do you actually, even if you had access, what is the theory of change in a democracy? There is no election in Russia. You know, you could stir discontent or unhappiness about economics. Fine. And so, so as we think this through, then we’re going to have to think in terms of what are the asymmetric vulnerabilities of a system like that, which is a lot more complicated than how do you influence a democracy. Um, but I think it’ll come, you know, I think it’ll come out of places like this. It’ll be very very you know we have to think of the the vulnerabilities of a war machine which doesn’t change with elections but actually has very very very many conflicts and vulnerabilities built into it. There was no discussion to my knowledge about information operations that includes like offensive side. Uh and uh basically where questions about ethical implication of all of that like this is like a classic situation. We always have someone in the room who will ask is that ethical to conduct uh offensive operations inside Russia. You elaborated a little bit about that how how how we uh how we are launching this. I’m liberated from ethics. No, no, elaborate elaborate a bit on I’m liberated from ethics. That’s a wonderful thing. Uh, okay. If if you like it, I’m I’m okay with that too. About offensive operation inside Russia. Yes. So, if you can comment a bit about that because there is a huge discussion in all liberal environment even in Europe here. Is that ethical? Is that not? Uh, there is some stuff definitely happening currently as we sit right now here in this room. um why it had not been effective all these efforts of like United West if this concept still exists to to get into Russian minds and why they’re still uh reluctant to hear the narrative. So, we’re not only talking about like truthful messaging and uh sharing information about death soldiers, about uh number of war crimes conducted by Russian soldiers, but also something like pretty disruptive. Um why it’s not working for Russian society and why they are more efficient and more successful than us. So, there’s been no green lights. I mean, there was a very big debate at the start of the full-scale invasion about doing this. Um the debate was had in Washington, in Europe, in Ukraine. Um and it was a policy decision. Um there was um the Schultz Biden kind of axis said that that would be too provocative. That might feel like Putin would feel that’s an attempt at regime change and what we want to do is calm Putin down. We’ll be resolute. We’ll support Ukraine with some weapons and Putin will come around and calm down soon. And that was the theory of change. And it was like it was I wasn’t I mean the discussions were had very very actively and that was the decision that that Schultz and Biden made. Um what is the current discussion now? The current discussion is that that theory of change while understandable was and um you now the words deterrence in the cognitive space are inside the NATO doctrine. Now it’s being talked about in Europe. So we are at least now recognizing that to um whatever word you want to use this year stop contain I quite like section a leader like Putin um you need to you need to make them question their sense of control. So that discussion is now had openly. We’re not quite at the point of it turning into a strategy, but it’s become the Munich Security Conference had six, seven panels about det hybrid deterrence into Russia. So, it’s now discussed, which knowing how these things progress is is a step forward. It’s really I’m really happy to hear this progress. Um as we are getting closer to Q&A question Q&A section and uh I hope to hear questions or comments from you. Uh I would love also to ask you we have here definitely very highly engaged and goal oriented audience who cares about democracy who cares about uh future of uh and our cognitive sovereignity. Um what would be your advice to donate their skill, time and um basically uh dedication to to to help us deal with this problem and help democracies to deal with a problem a problem of cognitive warfare that are launched by our adversaries. Well, look, you know, I I assume that most of you guys are Americans, and I think you guys just need to really do need to just deal with your own country first. Um, so so and we we we we we hope to see you again soon. Um, but the fact is that technologically you are on a different you you are the most advanced. So I I really hope that you can turn things around. So that’s why I welcome the initiatives, you know, MIT and other places that that are thinking about how you use digital tools for this for the health of democracies inside democracies. And I think that’s that’s clearly the priority. But there is a geopolitical aspect to it. I think we need to both show but also sometimes explain to the publics how you can use you know, AI and digital technology for for good. Um, and look, the the the the dictatorships aren’t going to stop. They really believe in propaganda. They really believe in supremacy in this space. So, we we might not like it, but they’re just going to keep on growing and attacking and expanding. I mean people I mean you walk through Beijing and see the sort of giant or aboris of the CGTN building. I mean it’s a statement of we care about this and we’re going to take it very very seriously while we don’t we haven’t even started to really think through what our doctrine around this is going to be let alone creating the institutions and it’s going to be very different. you know, I think democracies will have a very have to have a very different approach, but at one point, um, we’re going to have to start formulating it. Um, and that starts with teaching. You know, we’re going to need Cartras. We’re going to need a generation of students who understand all the elements of this space, which means understanding something about technology, something about history, something about law, case studies of of different types of influence, and so on and so forth. So I think we’ll have to start creating masters in cognitive securities for people to understand the field. It’ll mean the creation of institutions that that focus our efforts and and a kind of making sense process so that the way we do it is different to the way the dictatorships do it. We’ve been here before. I mean this happened in the Cold War. This happened in the Second World War. The difficulty is that I don’t think everybody has quite embraced that we’re in for a century of, you know, non-stop heightened competition. Certainly in Europe, there’s still a lot of reluctance to to to own that. Um, I wholeheartedly support your idea with education. That’s why we designed a course with Elizabeth and teaching on the propaganda. Uh but if you were to clusterize three main scientific problems that could be helpful to resolve questions connected to cognitive sovereignity, cognitive security. What are these three uh scientific problems that people can potentially choose as their scientific mission? So I would love to talk to the audience about this because because um in the processes of thinking through how to set up a sort of applied cognitive research lab in Ukraine. So, I’d love to know what people are thinking about. I go back to the old chestnuts that we’ve been haven’t been able to solve for a hundred years. Um, especially in the context of Russia, I want to understand what we can learn in the sort of relationship between these meta narratives that Russia is so big on, Russian greatness, you know, these sort of models of collective narcissism which they project all the time and behavior on the ground. Yeah. So, we’re quite good already understanding what motivates an individual Russian soldier through a lot of iterations of engagement. We kind of know how to get them to fight worse. But if we’re talking about the whole of society, what would actually undermine mobilization? Is it is it just about money and self-interest or is there a relationship with with the big narratives as well which is something we’ve been trying to work out for for so long but but I think now is a really interesting time to do it. Um everybody at the moment is building synthetic audiences. That’s the sort of everyone you meet in Ukraine is building a synthetic audience of Russian soldiers just like marketing people are. I’m very interested how we get them to a point where they’re actually useful. Um I’m not entirely sure we’re there yet. Um and then I think the most interesting thing when we look at a dictatorship rather than democracy is how do we how do we understand what social problems would get the leadership to change their calculations. We’ve been trying to work out a way to understand when the Kremlin changed its calculations for four years. Um, we’ve never really thought about this bit of it. We thought about economic pressures, military pressures, and haven’t done any of those particularly well. We’ve never really thought about, okay, what are the social pressures that would make them go, okay, we need to take a step back. So understanding that relationship between social tensions and Kremlin calculations is one that we really need to understand if we’re going to have a theory of deterrence. So we’re interested in synthetic audiences in mathematical modeling Monte Carlo simulation. I can go on and on about what I’m interested in. So take a Russian factory town. Um I mean for you guys if you would love to join and contribute. Actually I’m very serious. If somebody wants to come afterwards and chat, um you asked very you dropped the most interesting question in there. What is it we know? We actually know a lot, but it’s all sitting in different places because there’s some sitting in academia, some sitting in the people who gather intelligence. There’s a huge amount sitting among people who are just scraping the Russian internet every day. um we know way more than we did in the Cold War and nobody’s putting that together into something that would really even simulate influence. So if you want to contribute to greater cause we’re here for you please uh reach us. Uh so Peter, how to win information war? This is a big question but very narrow one. What kind of education? you elaborated all over the places like educational policy uh measures, some technical measures, but what is a recipe? You want a recipe? Um so funny. So my last book was called How to Win an Information War. And obviously for me obviously it was an ironic title because the minute you make information into a war, it it it’s tragic. It’s like all wars, you know, the moment you use information to subvert, delay, distract, um, demoralize instead of to communicate, it’s tragic. You know, it’s you’ve lost the potential to communicate and you’ve replaced it with the sad necessities of of conflict. So, it’s like all war. I mean, it’s it’s tragic. Um, I suppose what we’re going to have to pull off as democracies is how do we both learn to be effective in this era of competition while simultaneously still creating, you know, a new digital agora where communication can happen? I mean, how do you do both? And again, we did it we did a bit of that in the Cold War. We did we did manage to pull off both. So that really means that that you know every step of the way you’re thinking both about how do you undermine a genocidal war and at the same time how do I use these tools to fulfill Dwiey’s vision of the great community or whatever and you have to do both at the same time all the time and that’s very challenging um because the other side don’t they’ll just use use it for destruction and we have to do both. Thank you. Thank you Peter. So [applause] uh we we are ready for your questions. Please raise your hand. Uhhuh. Uh do we have Oh, thank you so much. Two mics here. Sit and I will uh take some questions. Shall we? Sit has got the first question. I’ll have the second. Wonderful. Thank you. See, it’s the ones we find it too depressing are running away. It’s always underserved. Am I the first? Okay, great. Hello. Um, so something I’ve been thinking a lot. Could you please briefly introduce yourself? Like just brief. Yeah, and another uh very very uh important note if you can ask questions or if you have statements very short. Thank you. Okay, quick introduction. My name is Sonia. Hello. Thank you. Um, in America we have all the tech companies and we have been a democracy. And I think that makes us very naive to the potentials that these companies present. They’re like a binary switch. It could be flipped to control. Maybe already it is. I just wonder what your thoughts are there. Did you hear the question? Sorry, you cut out a little bit, but we’re not we’re naive about what? Basically, it’s a we we live in a democracy in America and uh most would you please take a mic because we have reported most of the countries that we’ve been talking about dictatorships, it’s easy to understand the pattern, but in a democracy um the people are in a different state when that binary switch uh technology begins to control and surveil and I think we may be very close to that. Um, you mentioned Elon Musk. Yeah, I’m I’m not the America expert. Um, I did I have looked at like sociology like polling and message testing about you know when Americans get annoyed about interventions from foreign countries uh from Russia and basically Americans we in the evidence that I saw had a very high tolerance of propaganda and disinformation. They just basically thought everybody did it. So it wasn’t naivity, it was kind of a tired cynicism. And so when you said, “Oh, Russia’s doing this or China’s doing this,” they were like, “And everyone does it.” Um the Americans freaked out over when you told them about sort of um attacks on like cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, which they hadn’t heard of. You only know about it if you sort of read Wired magazine. So, the fact that Russian Iranian proxies have been hacking into, you know, American uh critical infrastructure and hospitals over the last few years, which is kind of not something that the Biden administration chose to talk about publicly. Um, when you told Americans about that, like ordinary Americans, they were like, “What the That’s an act of war. We should do something.” Um, but when you said Russians are doing disinformation campaigns, they’re like, “Nah, everyone does it.” there. It’s a country with a very high tolerance of propaganda, which might be good, might be bad. It just seems to be an American thing. Other countries do, people in other countries do freak out over it. All right. So, hi, I’m Chris Martin. I’m with the Davis Center at Harvard. You mentioned several times the role that universities will play in developing the sort of more moral oriented or good side of AI and at least the preference towards that. And so, um, how do you think that, I know you just said you’re not the America expert, but Trump is obviously waging a war against higher education and it’s decreasing, uh, either either that’s decreasing or the universities themselves are decreasing American trust in university systems. Um, how might that impact or make it more difficult for solutions to come from the university sector? And similarly for the tech sector, when we see these um American oligarchs who are running these tech companies who are bending the knee to the Trump administration, um will that make it more difficult for us to sort of maybe realize a more democratically leaning AI? Well, I mean I mean the nice thing about universities is they think in terms of decades and centuries. So, you know, let alone midterms. So, so this is obviously your long-term project if you think about education, but I’ve been teaching courses on this as well at SC and at Hopkins. And last semester we had these great students. Half of them were military or or state department people who wanted to literally our course was called um geopolitical information competition or something. So really about the the geopolitical aspect and and then we asked all of them. they were all great and and at the end we asked them to design what would a kind of government institution that thought about this look like today. Um and at the end we said so what are you guys going to go and do um and they were like you know different forms of ducking and weaving for the next two years. So it’s just at that level of people who might be doing this they don’t know where to go right now. Um so but universities can think long term and I do think there’s an inevitability to this because the other side will not stop and once America course corrects you can hear the confidence in my voice. Um then then I mean obviously America is going to play a huge role in this in this in this story. Yes. Uh my name is Kenneth Hoy. I teach in political science and data systems. The question that I have goes back to a classic function of propaganda in war and it’s usually two things that are going on. Exaggeration on atrocities of various sorts to provide a cause of spelli to get people fired up and exaggerations or non-exaggerations of estimates of casualties. If you look at Russians during the Afghan war, rumors of casualties. If you look at any of recent conflicts, atrocities are a big part of it. The specific question to both of you, to what extent does AI really make a difference in either of those two classic functions of propaganda in times of war? Examples of how it has made a difference or speculation on what difference it might make. Thank you. Such a great that’s a brilliant question. So I mean look, atrocity propaganda and then accusing the other side of atrocity propaganda and then people like Lord Ponenbby who famously wrote the first sort of evisceration of British atrocity propaganda to help launch World War I in an analysis that itself was deeply deeply distorted. So it’s this endless loop of talking about atrocities and then criticizing the talking about atrocities in distorted way that’s bread and butter of the propaganda around war since World War I and we saw it you know we we see it all the time. Um I suppose some people would say quite the opposite is that now we actually get to see the atrocities close up. You know in World War I there were rumors and stories. So we had this weird layering. If anything now you know I created a war crimes NGO at the start of the war. We are in a place of recording documentation and fixation which is kind of unparalleled. So if anything the trend is actually we might be able to root the the atrocity stuff in something much more in something much more strong. But at the same time, something much weirder is going on. So, um, remember the Syrian war and the amazing work of the White Helmets to to record the atrocities being committed um by by Assad and then by Russia. um never had did I don’t think we’d ever had that much recording of actual atrocities which we could sort of geoloccate define really certify. So we had all this evidence of atrocities and zero action. There was almost this the more atrocities we could actually see we were no longer reliant on rumors. It was almost paralyzing to a certain extent. People pushed it away. Yeah. Which brings me to the Lego videos because as I don’t know who made this decision in the Iranian propaganda firmament, they could have gone with the atrocity stuff. You know, the Americans hit a school

And yet they do absolutely the opposite. Knowing that Americans don’t want to think about this and will find it unpleasant and will push it away. They use MAGA’s own idioms against it and turn the whole thing into a game which is how MAGA was trying to project it. But a game that turns against against the MAGA propaganda. So it’s I mean I was like I was quite surprised. I was assumed that the main thrust of the Iranian propaganda would be around you know the hitting of the school and instead they do the absolute opposite almost understanding that people don’t want that reality. They want something else. So very strange we’re actually in a place where we can we can learn about the atrocities now. And yet what is the most effective thing when we can learn about them is storytelling which takes us away from them. And when we didn’t know about the atrocities, we had all the storytelling trying to fabricate them. There’s some somebody’s got to do a clever PhD on it. It’s not me, but there’s some sort of weird relationship there. On the other hand, it also plays very dehum dehumanizing role because basically we are deprived from any compassion because we understand that every picture of atrocity could be AI generated and unfortunately even some cases in Ukraine show that this AI generated video where uh pictures were not uh like real pictures of real kids that are abducted or so it doesn’t really play supportive role to to to to bolster us as a decent human being. very profoundly. So, unfortunately, um, yeah, it is what it is.

Hi, John Tilkco. Getting more and more depressing with all of that. We’re losing people. I’m so sorry. [laughter] It’s a loaded topic. John Tilko, MIT. I wanted to ask about maybe looking at the converse problem which is could we use AI to essentially curate the truth in a way that would be uh sort of in reaction to the business model of social media which is extending into the business model for uh AI which has resulted in less curated edited journalism and sort of put the whole field at risk. If you just look at the decline in, you know, subscribe journalism, the the we’ve gotten into a world where it’s very easy to publish unedited, unvalidated journalism. So, might it be possible instead of you you could assume that we’ll always have propaganda with us and it’s just going to take new forms of technology as it continues to propagate. But let’s I’d be very curious to see what your thoughts are about essentially using AI to create more of a truth machine and could it be curated and maintained in some fashion that would be useful. So, so I’m currently doing a series of interviews with European public broadcasters for for a sort of internal review of of where public broadcasting is in Europe. And we ask that to every newsroom. I mean, how do you see AI? and they see loads of positives. They’re very excited about um you know ideas of how you can use it for verification for for for many other tools. So so I see I see a lot of excitement. Um um so it’s um you want to talk about chat bots? No, I want to talk about something else. Um, okay. When I think about sort of chat bots, I don’t know if the problem is though around curation and verification, you can see how it could be useful for that. The problem that we’ve had is is with news as relevance. You know, people have felt that there is a a divide between the interests of the news organizations and their lives. And in that space, lots of very nasty propagists have been very effective at intervening. And with the destruction of local news that that has only exacerbated. So what what I would dream of is something that would help bridge that gap. You know, could we use AI to help to explain to people why the war in Iran or something else is relevant to them? Yeah. Not in a propagistic way, but in a genuine way. Can we start using AI to to seal that connection? because that’s what got broken. Yeah. um right now doing a little bit of work in America just in in um in central Pennsylvania working with local media and thinking about how they can create uh kind of a tighter ecology with their with their audiences and AI has has has many much potential you know from you know the interesting models that we know from from Taiwan about generating uh a more solutionsorientated conversation around important issues. Yeah. Surfacing the potential commonalities in debates through to this sort of making stories relevant to people and bridging that gap. Um there’s huge potential. There’s huge potential. There are a lot of excitement about um chat bots, AI empowered chat bots uh that actually could nudge people to change their political views or like some taking them out from some radical spectrums or like decrease polarization in communities just basically talking to local to locals and like asking them what do they want, how do they want to contribute to the community, what kind of architectural solutions do they want to have in their community. So this is something that is very much debated and I know some people in this room work on this sort of solutions. Um but in case to be persuaded you need to like you you need to have this will like initial will to talk to chatbot to be persuaded. So uh unfortunately it is it is a big debate but how efficient it is still debated too. Hi, I’m Sophia Anastasiaki, a PhD student at Harvard working in political theory and international relations and I mostly work on war. Um, I have a question that I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years that I’m hoping you can maybe shed light on, but it seems like there’s a kind of uh asymmetric weakness that democracies have on this issue and in this space mostly just because of free speech norms being fundamental to democracies. So it seems like maybe you could identify like a network of malicious actors and like curb their influence in some way, but that also might cut against free speech. Am some people don’t think this is a problem at all. Other people seem to think it is a problem. I’m just curious on your perspective. That’s my favorite question actually about freedom of speech. I mean so many aspects of that. Um should we choose one or should we try should we just tackle free speech in one go? Yeah. Um so um on the regulation one which is where a lot of the argument seems to be concentrated um I think there’s a a strong sort of argument to be made that freedom of speech is also um the freedom to receive receive information and that I as a democratic citizen should understand how my information environment is shaped. I should understand why an algorithm shows me one thing and not another. I should understand how LLMs are designed and what’s gone into them to give me the answers. And if I don’t have that information, I’m actually suffering from a form of I don’t want to say censorship, but but a lack of access to information. Um, and the way freedom of speech has been hijacked by some of the biggest sensors in society who own very powerful companies that suppress people’s voices without informing who’s being suppressed and why and how is part of the perversion of the discourse especially in America. So I think we have to reclaim freedom of speech. try to go back that it’s not just about the right to create online AI swarms to suffocate people’s chance to speak. It’s also about our right to receive information. So I think that’s very important. um working a lot on the idea of freedom of thought with infuriatingly clever lawyers um who really want to introduce it’s one it’s in the declaration of of many human rights it’s part of the UN declaration of rights never really been used and we’ve been looking at it from the point of view of the ind indoctrination of Ukrainian kids within the Russian system but there’s you know there’s some arguments that you could think about freedom of thought and techn technology. Do we really have genuine freedom of thoughts when we don’t even understand how we’re being influenced? Is there critical function there? Is there a space for autonomy? I think it’s a it’s a very complicated argument. Um but it’s one that we should start having because it’s about systems and not just about, you know, squeaking. Um, so I think we have to start we have to go back to a lot of these a lot of these um um a lot of these fundamental ideas that get thrown around rather cynically. Um but coming back to something way more simpler which is I think what you were talking about one of the reluctancies democracies have had to do foreign operations is that they will be suspected of doing it at home and essentially that did happen in the war on terror. I mean in Britain we had a government department that was whatever its you know whatever its motivations ended up trying to do influence ops against our own population because they were worried there were you know various types of radicalism growing and it all exploded in people’s faces. Bureaucrats lost their jobs. Um government departments were disgraced. The Guardian did large investigations and it is actually a very very very complicated and thorny issue and since then I I agree I think since then there’s been a reluctance for a lot of bureaucrats to take up that chalice. We see that again right now. I mean, we had something completely benign called the global engagement center at the state department, which is now being used within MAGA narratives that they were behind a censorship industrial complex meant to suppress American voices when they were purely doing largely analysis and exposure of Russian Chinese operations abroad. So, you can see how we, you know, how that is taken and and and turned. it’ll be taken and turned anyway. So absolutely essential that you have a very very transparent discussion within within democracies about it. What are our norms? What are our limits? Regulation, oversight, trust, etc., etc., etc. I think that’s still just about possible in Europe. Whether America is now maybe that’s impossible here, I don’t know. Can you please raise your hand so we will understand? How many questions do we have? Yes. Maybe we can take three together and then three together again because we like really have 15 minutes. How about I take these two on your side? Hi Peter, thank you for the lovely discussion. I’m really looking forward to picking up a copy of your book and getting to know your thinking a little bit better. There were a few quotes during your discussion that really intrigued me and got my brain moving a bit. The first one was your example of uh there’s some political office World War II era and uh someone says that the Germans are so into I believe you said Nazism in context uh that you cannot rely on say better angels to convince them out of their uh kind of despotic place of thinking that you can only convince them of some deeper clever lie that made me you know shudder a little bit to think maybe I’m a bit naive Uh the second was uh you Yeah. Okay. You seem So the book is all about that that tension. So I’m glad it made you shudder. Uh and that’s that’s why I wrote the book because I was so fascinated because it made me shudder as well. Yeah. So your shuddering is a good sign. Yeah. You you you concluded with how do you win an information war? And the obvious is you tell the truth. No, but you seem from your discussion a touch cynical on objective truth. You seem a bit cynical on truth. Can you speak towards that just from an epistemological standpoint on truth? What do you think of truth? We’ll take a we take we take two more. Okay. It was not really a cynical discussion. I I I like I want to assure you it was really democratic and nice discussion. I’m telling you. Could you please uh your question? I’m George Mo. I’m an independent scholar and uh I was reading Chinese philosophy and Han Fates said something very interesting a legalist scholar where he talked about persuasion and persuasion works best when the person you’re trying to persuade when you know what they want. And then Tom Edel in the New York Times in the last couple of days had a piece on AI and the upcoming election in the United States. And I’ve also seen a paper just read the the title and the brief which talked about AI as being more persuasive than people especially when they can elicit information from the people so that they know what they want. So this stuff goes back a long time, right? So I’m wondering about those type of things and how you look at that. My question rhymes with that guy. Um while being in a storm of disinformation, how do you cleanse the pallet and get back get rooted back to your truth? Like how did working closely with propaganda influence your relationship with your personal values, beliefs, and basic cornerstones of reality? I can unite those three into one. So, I’m just working on a new book and it’s a positive book. It’s a non-cynical book. My publisher said my publisher said, “Write a self-help book.” No, he didn’t say that. Uh he said he said, “Can you write a bit of book about propaganda um that gives us positive examples?” And I said, “It’s going to be a really short book.” He said, “That’s fine.” Um [laughter] but one of the stories that I’m literally just finishing writing is about a um uh an evangelical preacher in Arizona called Father Caleb Campbell. And his way of he’s evangel he’s an evangelical, but he’s he fights the Christian nationalists. So his whole thing is bringing people out of Christian nationalism into his form of evangelicism. But it’s very interesting. He’s a very interesting character. He was actually a neo-Nazi in his youth and he came out of that became a preacher and now you know he sees a lot of parallels between between the sort of you know suburban fascism of his youth and Christian nationalism today. That’s his comparison not mine. But his methodology is very very interesting. Um it actually reflects what Hannah Arant wrote about fascism and and many other things. But very simply his mission is to make the mind safe for reality or to make the world safe for reality. Essentially, he finds that the people he talks to are drawn to Christian nationalism. And the way he was drawn to some farright movements was because it offers a a total world, a totality, an explanation for everything, puts you in a position of privilege. All your opponents are demons. You’re on a mission from God. And and everything is is purely explained. and and his job is to kind of get people to a point where they’re comfortable with messy reality. Yeah. Now, in the middle of all these sort of ideologies, there’s usually a huge contradiction. So, Christian nationalism, you know, it’s Christian, but yet it’s, you know, it’s horrible about immigrants or minorities. And so, he’ll always exploit that. He’ll say, “Look, Aunt Betty, you’re a Christian. You know, we’re told to love migrants.” And she’ll say, “Well, I love immigrants.” And I love Jesus’s story in the Bible. They were immigrants. I know. But these immigrants are all criminals. Yeah. Or I’m a patriot. I would never support rioting, but all those people at the January 6th, they were trying to stop pedophiles who stole the election. So what the propaganda is giving people is disinformation that will smooth away the contradictions. Yeah. They’re doing everything to push away the contradictory nature uh of these world views and and pushing away the complexity of reality. And he knows that just like hammering and hammering and hammering that this is a lie, that this is untrue won’t work. Order’s work is getting people comfortable with reality again by doing many things. He takes them to local community to meet real immigrants. He gets them he changes their diet so they watch less of the national news and do more local news. They read books together. It’s it’s a very kind of individualized process. But it’s all about getting people to the point where they’re not searching for these totalizing ideologies where they can embrace the complexity of some immigrants criminals, some aren’t. It’s actually very hard doing this policy, right? Where they can just have that discussion. Um, so it’s it’s about that. It’s it’s really not about, you know, we’ve got to create environments where people can start handling the truth and start welcoming it in. So, you know, I asked him how successful he is because that’s that’s a very noble process. that’s taking people who are have embraced really quite radical alternative realities and and I asked him so so what’s your kind of like you know percentage of success and and I don’t think it was very high but he said something which I thought was a good credo to live by which is that at least he himself has been true to himself because he’s done his best to take these people to to what he thinks is the truth um it’s not ultimately in his power to change them. Um but he’s lived according to his own values because usually when when we meet somebody like that we either try to sort of convince them fail and then we just talk about sports or cookies or neutral things and that’s dealing with the situation. And he’s like no I’ve lived by my values I haven’t given up on what I believe in and I’ve tried to get them to this point where they can embrace complexity. So that’s my upbeat story. I’m not cynical. Uh my question has to do starting with uh the idea that you mentioned you can’t fight violence with violence. The phrase um you can’t fight injustice with more injustice. Um and then you also say the ph you talk about America focusing on ourselves and the wars we commit before pointing our fingers at somebody else. So talking about AI assisted genocide, apartheid surveillance, how do you I’m curious your thought process of um AI also costing people hundreds and thousands of people their jobs using finite resources like water to cool the systems. um how do we go back and forth of hey maybe this resource maybe AI is it’s doing more harm than good right now and how do you think through of hey are we using this to reach people and correct misinformation or in the process of it costing a ton of people their jobs is it doing more harm than good you can take two more Hi, my name is Jamaima Mabar and I’m in the um political science department here at MIT. Um I was really interested in your discussion um in your first book about how exposure to persistent propaganda during the Soviet period and then after um bred cynicism amongst the Russian public. And I’m curious therefore what you think uh the effects of persistent exposure to AI augmented disinformation may be amongst modern publics right here. Uh I’m Roger Wilson. I have uh I’m intrigued by your uh citation of of Dwey and I I wonder if a of Dwey Dwey. Yes. uh that uh I wonder if uh there’s a possibility of creating a political party media hybrid that is a community of truth and can win elections, an information-based party. Quite diverse questions. [snorts] Um, I don’t know about party, but let’s let’s do more more more good news. So, we just had an election in Hungary where we had AI generated slop and fantasy and fear against good hardcore leaks coming from somewhere. Um, recordings and economic facts and the leaks, recordings, economic facts. Huh. doorstepping. Yeah, Magard did amazing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And one one to one. Yeah. And Peter Muyard going doorstepping. I thought doorstepping means something slightly different for me, but but yes, but but in a good way. Doorstepping, not in a nice way. Um um so reality one, yeah, one-on-one communication, leaks of exposing government treachery and corruption and economic reality completely wipe the floor with AI generated slop and and fantasy fears. So we just had it. Um, I think America has a huge amount to learn from Muldova where we saw an all of society approach to undermining massive vote buying, threats against the integrity of the election, um, threats of violence that were coming from the pro-Russian forces. I know that sounds strange to America, but you have a lot to learn from Muldova. Look to Muldova. Moldova, population 2.5 million is your best hope for getting through the next two years. Um, and you can look to Hungary, but not in the way JD Vance meant. There is a lot you can learn from Hungary, but from the other side. Yeah. Um, so and and lots to learn from Ukraine. So I don’t know about a party. I think everything we know about defeating authoritarian populist movements is that you need an all of society approach. This is not a new insight. We knew this from the 20th century. But you have to forget about the usual party structures. The only way the pro-democratic forces won in Poland, in Brazil, going back further in Chile, is by creating a a coalition of social movements that go way beyond the parties, include churches, football teams, all these other bits of society. But that means and I know and this is where it all falls down usually all those people getting into a room together and finding a common denominator they can agree on. Yeah. And not the divisions that are really easy to find. And that takes a moment of self-discipline which is only something that somebody who’s been a mar in a marriage for 20 years knows how to do. It’s that kind of level of stepping over your to going, “Oh, we can do something bigger together.” And whether America can do that, we’ll see. It took Hungary three elections to do it. It’s not easy. Took Poland two elections to do it. Yeah, we can take more questions. Actually, we do still have four minutes. But actually, we have 10 because we started five minutes later. Yeah. What time are we going in? 6:30. Okay. Okay, it’s fine. Okay, last question. Oh my uh Steve, no pressure. No, no pressure. Steve Smick from the Davis Center at Harvard. Um this is not a well enough formulated question to be the last question, but your comment on the Lego videos uh had me thinking um that the the magic I use that loosely of the Lego videos is that it exploded the viewers stereotype about the Iranians, right? that because the the the stereotype propagated here was a dehumanizing one. And we see these and we think, “Oh, that’s clever. We could have produced that.” Or or it looks like a MAGA thing. I need to rethink my prior assumptions about who these people are were killing. And to some extent, that was the effectiveness of propaganda in the Soviet period. Right? The Soviet stereotype about the West was it’s crappy over there. it’s uh the workers are are uh it’s just slavery for workers. Uh and it turned out no actually uh life was pretty good. Um and so the more exposure uh Soviet citizens got to the west, the more it exploded the stereotype of the west that was created. So my question then is if we think about offensive um cognitive warfare by Ukrainians, is there any way to explode the stereotype of Ukrainians that are that’s being propagated in Russia, the dehumanizing stereotype that makes it easier for Russians to be waging a genocidal war in Ukraine? Okay, so the Lego videos are actually doing two things and which is why they’re annoyingly good. And let’s be clear, you know, I’m not a fan of the Iranian regime in any way. Um, but you know, sometimes you have to just recognize when they’re being effective. It’s not They did two things in one go that was infuriatingly good. They both changed the image of, you know, the Iranians from, you know, the Mad Mullers to little cute funny Lego things, but in exactly the same move, debaseed Trump. So, they detoxified themselves and humiliated Trump in one image. That’s quite neat. Like, you it’s one movement and you’ve done two things. Um, that’s quite annoyingly good. um effective in any way. Um look with with look with propaganda it’s it’s it’s all about effect. You start with it’s different to communication. It’s different to literature. It borrows from all these things but it’s all about effect. So here the effect is like can we undermine support for the war among among bits of the American population that that Trump needs. So it was very driven with with with Russia. I mean I mean there are bigger Russian experts than me in the room. I don’t know if that’s the main thing that we need to change in Russia. I don’t know if that’s the priority. You know, Russians have switched from Ukrainians and Nazis and we will murder them to Ukrainians are our brothers and we’ll drink with them very very quickly. So, I don’t know if that’s the that’s the important piece. Um, and [clears throat] I’m I’m not even sure I’d prioritize that. Um, much more important about what they think about their own regime. Um if we make the I don’t know let’s say we have a theory of change which says um Putin has to fulfill three functions in Russian society in order for his status to be cemented. Adjudicator, budget distributor, effective actor. How do we start undermining that idea of him? And what is the connection between that and preparedness to function in the war machine? And if that’s what we’re trying to solve, that’s where you’d work inside rather than the image of Ukrainians. I’m not sure changing the image of Ukrainians will shift very much. Um, so so I’ I’d just be like, you know, I’d be careful about setting our priorities. So I think we have to end. So please [applause] a big hand for Peter Porza and Bob.