Alex Stamos on Fighting Election Disinformation in Real Time
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2020
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former chief security officer of Yahoo and Facebook. Alex has appeared on the podcast before, but this time, they discussed a new coalition he helped set up called the Election Integrity Partnership—a coalition focused on detecting and mitigating attempts to limit voting or delegitimize election results. Disinformation and misinformation around the U.S. presidential election has already started popping up online, and it’s only going to increase as November draws closer. The coalition aims to counter this in real time. So how will it actually work?
They also asked Alex for his hot takes on TikTok—the popular video sharing platform facing pressure over concern about influence from the Chinese government.
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Transcript
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.1 | People who are taking photos of mailboxes being trashed in the like that are years old, |
| 0:39.4 | that are effectively stock photography, they're old from old news stories, and they're attaching |
| 0:44.1 | them to tweets about decisions that the USPS is making right now. |
| 0:48.2 | And so you have this combination of a legitimate political debate combined with an actual |
| 0:52.4 | example of disinformation that is making it more difficult to have illegitimate. |
| 0:56.6 | One of the interesting things is a couple of people have found that local election officials |
| 1:00.4 | have said that now people are calling in and canceling their order for mail-in ballots |
| 1:04.4 | because of all of the coverage of the USPS issue makes them believe that their mail-in |
| 1:08.9 | ballots aren't going to be counted. |
| 1:10.7 | If those people don't end up voting, then that was election suppression. |
| 1:15.1 | I'm Quinted Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast. |
| 1:19.4 | August 20, 2020. |
| 1:23.1 | This week, on our Arbiter's of Truth Series on Disinformation, Evelyn Dwaccan, I spoke |
| 1:27.9 | with Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the former Chief |
| 1:33.2 | Security Officer of Yahoo and Facebook. |
| 1:36.7 | Alex has appeared on the podcast before, but this time we're having him on to discuss |
| 1:41.0 | a new coalition he helped set up called the Election Integrity Partnership. |
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