powered by cable. announcer: if you ever missed any of c-span's coverage, you can find it anytime online at c-span.org. videos of key hearings, debates, and other events feature markers that guide you to interesting and newsworthy highlights. these points of interest markers appear on the right-hand side of your screen when you hit play on select videos. this timeline told makes it easy to quickly get an idea of what was debated and decided in washington. scroll through and spend a few minutes on c-span's points of interest. now a discussion on the risk that social media could pose to democracy, with former democratic house majority leader richard gephardt. this is about 40 minutes.

>> ladies and gentlemen, please welcome alix fraser, the honorable richard gephardt, farrow candace, eli frazier, anatole -- and nicole tisdale. [applause]

>> just waiting on one more here. mic challenges. while we're waiting, it's a pleasure to be with you, audience, but for me personally, it's a true privilege to be with this panel, an incredible group of people, many of whom i get to work with on a regular basis on the council for responsible social media. as i've sat here these last few days and listened to these conversations and grappled with the core of what we're trying to do and understand, i've come to one central question, can our democracy survive if something isn't changed in our information environment? and of course at the core of that is social media, which is what we're here to talk about today, technology. and it's become the dominant form of communication. it's becoming the predominant way in which people get their information and news, particularly for young people. and what has this world resulted in today?

very different conversation if we were having this conference 20 years ago. well, what it resulted in is mass spread of false information flooding the airwaves, creeping into our minds. it resulted in the worst mental health crisis ever for young people where we see 2/3 of young people saying they're anxious more than half of the time. self harm has increased threefold for young girls. it's remarkable what happened to our democracy. we think where congressman gephardt served in the united states house of representatives. we find it hard to understand how these are the same institutions. you think of how practitioners it is. we didn't have a speaker of the house for three weeks. bipartisanship seems to have died. so much more has changed in the era of social media, not to mention our foreign adversaries are licking their chops and using every opportunity they can to divide us further, to spread disinformation and so much more. so i paint this picture for you all because it's really important to understand what the center of this is, which is a broken business model we heard a lot about last night from cara swisher, which is about engagement. keeping your eyes on the platforms with the most powerful, addictive technologies

ever created, sucking you in to they earn more money. and through those business models, we see then powerful algorithms to keep us in information silos or worse, radicalized people in very profound ways. now we have to deal with degenerative a.i. and all that thrown in the mix of this cycle. i just painted a dreary picture for you. but i promise you this is the optimistic panel. we're here to tell you there's real genuine hope because we can -- i'm seeing signs every day for the possibilities of change. with that i'm going to turn now to our distinguished panel and start with the issue of kids. many of you may have seen in january, the c.e.o.'s of the big tech companies came to washington and were dressed down universally across the aisle, so much so mark zuckerberg was compelled to apologize to grieving parents in the room. it was a rare moment of

bipartisanship, a glimmer of hope there is possibility to do stuff with both parties. and that is best demonstrated by the kids online safety act which has 67 co-sponsors in the senate, just introduced in the house this weekend, something we have been working on very intensely. while we care about the future of our kids and the health of their mental state and so much more, it has profound effects for democracy and what we're talking about as well. my question, we'll start with congressman gephardt. outside of the immediate impact on our children and safety, why is kosa so important for our broader tech reform effort and how can it have a bigger impact on our information environment and democracy? mr. gephardt: we need a win. we have not had a win since the beginning of social media. they run the show. they have got all of the money.

we have not had a win. we believe that kosa can be passed this year and sent to the president. crs and is -- crsm is a totally bipartisan organization. we have 40 to 50 members, very diverse, from all different selectors of this problem, and we're working top-down, a lot of the groups that are great that are here are working bottom-up to fix this problem. you need both top-down and bottom-up. and we go up on the hill and talk to republican members, democratic members, and i've never been more optimistic than i am today that we're going to get legislation done this year as the beginning of dealing with this problem. [applause]

alix: anyone else want to chime in on the importance of kids online safety and how this could impact the environment? >> having worked on the issue of young people getting radicalized for the last 20-plus years since 9/11, is that we learned a lot about the process of radicalization and how ideas can be weaponized. we have across the board, both from conservative and liberal entities, universities, as well as think tanks and nonprofit organizations done a lot of thinking around what we can be doing to be able to protect young people. what was just said about we need a win is extremely important because there's been so much failure along the way. we've failed our children and failed the future of the american leadership, whether or not they are going into the public sector or private sector,

we're looking at generations of young people for whom these ideas are really compelling and if we don't do more today to be able to build a safety net for our future generations of americans, what are we doing? so i couldn't agree more on the issue of we need a win. but i will also say that win can be backed up by data we didn't have 20 years ago and we have today. eli: i really appreciate the optimism. there's kind of been a learned helplessness about this problem, that, like, we can't do anything about it. and i think that's pernicious and starting to change. and, you know, the conference has democracy in the title, but digitally we live essentially in kind of these autocracies.

we operate in, you know, corporate environments that people have no say in, they have no rights in. i think shaking that off and starting to think about how do we as citizens govern our information environment is a really critical step that we need to kind of take. so this is a start to that. nicole: i'll add to what everyone is saying. but also, i want our optimism to the empowering. i always tell people these social media companies owe us, y'all. we use their the platform, they make money off of us, they operate in an open society. all of that is the foundation of a democracy. so while i'm very optimistic, i'm also really forceful about this is no longer we're asking you, we are demanding accountability and we're demanding transparency. we are demanding these social

media companies do their part to uphold democracy. i'm very forceful and passionate about that because i think that's also included in how we get the win. we stop asking and start demanding. [applause] alix: more collapse. let's go now to national security and we're fortunate enough to have some real national security experts with us here on stage. russia, china, iran, and others regularly interfere in our elections, polarize us further, spread false information through disinformation campaigns and much more. the house recently passed a bill to essentially ban tiktok. it's taken up to the senate and president biden said he'll sign this bill into law. the reason for this is there are concerns about data, the c.c.p. access to sensitive data and the ability to manipulate the algorithm advantageous to the communist party and not american

policy. farah, starting with you, does this approach make sense and expanding that further, what else can congress and the u.s. government do to most effectively protect u.s. national security when it comes to foreign platforms like tiktok and our own companies domestically? farah: that's a real critical question you're asking and i want to scope out a bit before i get into the nitty-gritty of what we can do in terms of solutions. because solutions are available and affordable right now. that's the headline. let's take a step back and think about what human aspects we -- assets we have. outside of time, which is in fact the most precious asset that we have, our own human data and information is the next in line. and what we are talking about today in the world we have constructed, and it's not just america but around the world. that data has been used and it's

part of our daily life. we can't live without sharing data and what food you eat or what clothes you buy, all this stuff. it's part and parcel of how we live. but for the average american, we aren't -- they aren't waking up every day wondering what russia and china and other nonstate actors like an isis or hamas or a neo-nazi group might be thinking. for those of us who have been doing foreign policy, we think about those alongside what's happening domestically and that domestic piece for me is part of what i think is most compelling . because we are not living in the -- in the 1950's. we are in 2024 where international and domestic have emerged. i remember very strongly when i was working in the bush administration, during 9/11, you guys will remember perhaps the danish cartoon crisis, where

something that happened in copenhagen affected lives in kabul. we were ready as america to understand, we didn't know what viral meant. we didn't understand something that had moved along in europe could make our troops vulnerable. people lost their lives. all over the world because of that cartoon. begin to understand that in fact, these ideas and the ricocheting effect of how these things get spread, this is way back in 2006, 2007 when we did not have twitter or x, and other social platforms. even the most basic things. for me, as i think about this, and is somebody who has spent my career thinking about the ideas about extremism and how bad actors use these platforms, i think about my own country and i think about what do americans need to understand about things that are being shown on youtube,

or conversations happening on discord, or conversations happening on twitch, if you don't know what twitch is, take a look. and why that matters to their daily lives. because your ability to behave as americans can be manipulated by states and non-states. away we are as americans will change because there are adversaries that want that to happen. if we begin to understand that we should not be duped, and if we begin to understand that we have an opportunity today to take everything that we have learned about all of the things that we know, and to build fortifications away are not duped, that we are protecting american societies, that we understand very critically that there is not this moment where we put our hands up and think, oh my goodness, it is too hard, we are boiling the ocean. no, we are not boiling the ocean. we are taking a very confident, and very focused approach to how

we build resilience. that resilience can happen the way i described it to people is there are nano interventions, there are micro interventions, there are micro interventions, and there are mega interventions. it is not just government that needs to make laws or policymakers that need to move. it is also regular citizens who think about their own fortification of their communities, and what we stand for as americans. for me, the national security point, yes, of course, we are worried about china taking advantage of an american society, of course we care that a platform like tiktok can mobilize a change in american behavior. of course we care that there is propaganda being put forward by russia that is making us think differently and act differently. but we should also care that the very nature of who we are as americans are changing. people who are not americans are

deciding that is what they want to do. the way in which we approach this, the solution side, one piece of this, of course, is the tiktok component. but it is much bigger than that. it is a holistic assessment of who we are, what we stand for, and what guardrails we want to put on society so we are not duped. alix: thank you for that. nicole, you spent time in the white house and congress working on these issues directly. tell us your perspective what can we do and what are the biggest cap -- biggest threat? you are concerned about? nicole: just to echo her point, i want to say this. i'm comfortable because i'm from mississippi and in front of a texas crowd, but two things can be true. we are all getting these questions about, what about the tiktok ban? you can support, which i support the tiktok ban and decentralizing who owns tiktok and who has the ability to

demand the data of the people who are on the platform, and it is not enough. that is what i tell people. this false equivalent that people are giving you that you can only have one. that's not true. we can do hard things. yes, it's going to be hard to decentralize tiktok and hold american social media companies responsible. but we can do that. when i think about from a national security standpoint, one of the reasons i'm so passionate about this is because farah's point is right. it is not just the people's republic of china, it's not just iran or russia. these influence campaigns, and i'm cognizant to not call them disinformation, because all of the information is not all -- not false or misleading. some of the best influence campaigns are because they are spreading kernels of truth, they are saying things that are not totally false. they are not totally misleading.

the examples i use are i am a black woman. when i hear people say it is disinformation to say that some people don't want you to vote. i look around and see what is happening to black voters, hispanic voters and indigenous voters. it is not false or misleading to say that some people don't want us to vote. the source matters. if russia is saying that they don't want you to vote, the american politicians don't want you to vote, i know what happens in russia. no people vote out of fear of being jailed. it matters to me when russia is spreading influence operations and spreading information because the source matters. when you hear -- i am also a woman. when you hear that the people's republic of china are doing influence campaigns saying american politicians don't care about a woman's autonomy of her body, it matters because it is

coming out of china. that is true that also doesn't care. difference between when russia says it, when china says it, and when it happens in the united states as we live in a democracy. there is an option, there is a process, there is due process for a change. i tell people, i'm not happy with what the supreme court did as it relates to women's rights. but there was a process. we are in a place now where congress can come in and asking in that process and change. you don't have that in russia. you don't have that in china. whatever they say is the law or is the rule, that is the role. think getting people to be empowered to understand, sources matter, also our communities are not in a place where we can't understand that. i think that was a very quick summation of what happens in russia and china. is see people nodding. i know people understand that. you have to be able to, from a national security standpoint,

but this stuff and context for people so that they understand that we can't have this on our social media platforms. these companies have a level of her sponsor ability that we are just enforcing. if you are going to operate, if you are going to have us on your platform, you have to acknowledge when your platform is being used for bad. alix: i'm going to pivot us to another creative and optimistic possibility. elizabeth warren, lindsey graham, don't have much in common. pretty much don't agree on anything. last year, they came together and proposed to the creation of a new digital regulatory agency to oversee technology and social media. it is the most clarifying. when one issue happened on alaska airlines flight, one issue, no one is hurt, but it is

one serious issue, hundreds of planes are down for months, billions of dollars in lost revenue for companies. lasting applications for boeing. yet when products are wreaking havoc on social media causing immense harm in summoning ways that we have talked about, there is nobody that oversees that dedicated just to that cause to say, we will take down this product, test this product. my question, let's start with eli. do you think some sort of structural change like this agency is necessary to bring oversight, and beyond this proposal, are there any other structural solutions >> you make a great point. we have federal bodies, just about anything you can think of, but we don't have a body that is holistically responsible for regulating the place where -- i

have young kids. this is a big part of the environment that unfortunately, they will be growing up into. we don't have anyone who is at the wheel of the ship there. so yes. i want to stretch the conversation a little bit, because i think these questions of regulation are absolutely in, in the sense that if we were talking about public education and we were only talking about regularly -- regulating private schools, that would not be a full conversation about how you secure education for a population. if we were talking about making sure everyone had access to information in libraries, regulating stores will not get you to the goal. -- regulating bookstores will not get you to the goal.

i think we need to think about it that way for our digital spaces. our friend has a great story about ben franklin in the post office. ben franklin is mostly known for her keys and lightning, but the post office was a critical visionary invention in early america that subsidize the ability of people to very easily trade information. so many people worked for the post office, that you can describe america in the early days, and this is his words, as a post office with a small military. that is what we wear. that was critical, when you talk about going around america and seeing this civic society that was emerging, it was because we had invested in an infrastructure, a public infrastructure, for information exchange that bound us together and that encoded our democratic values from the beginning. we have done that many times

over history. we have done that with libraries, we have done that with public parks. it is one of the things that makes america amazing, that we have had this continual public innovation and how we organize ourselves and our information. if you like we have lost -- i feel like we have lost that reflects that we are ceding all of this ground to, how can we tweak the algorithm and facebook and make it better or make it a little less worse? i run an organization called public, the focus of which is thinking about not everything in digital space needs to be publicly driven, public infrastructure. there are places just like you can have bookstores and libraries. there are places where we need to build things around public values. karen swisher said last night that this is a business problem. she is right. there are certain things that multinational businesses are never going to care about, are never going to make a priority. if you don't build the kind of

civic institutions that do that, we will not get where we want to go. >> absolutely, we need to reign in the accession -- the harm of the existing platforms but we also need to be thinking about how we create, you know, what is the equivalent of that kind of postal service for the digital age, what is the equivalent of the libraries and parks and how do we bill those times of institutions as well? -- build those kinds of institutions as well? >> what are the structural changes we need to see to really mecca difference? >> -- to really make a difference? >> we need top-down work to get guardrails in these platforms. but we, the people, have to build things bottom up, as we always have. as we always have.

that is what makes this country so fantastic. people do things. i think the digital agency is a real help and i hope we can get something done on it. let me give you my wish list for legislation that i hope we can get done in the next year or two. number one is xhosa. we have to take care of the kids. that is the first problem. we have three mothers on our counsel whose kids kill themselves and a lot of people don't know theanrs that come from the way social media operates. one of the mothers told me her story. she said, my son was 14. he came to me one day with his phone and said, look at this. this is funny. she said, what is it? he said, it's the choque challenge. she said, that sounds dangerous. don't get involved in that.

he says, i never would. i just thought it was funny. a few days later, she finds him hanging from his belt in the garage, dead. why does that happen? the media platforms, if i am a youngster and i go on and i am asking questions about eating disorders were being depressed or cutting myself, the algorithms drag me into these challenges and i am told there are like 15 different challenges that all lead to the same result. i mean, this is -- i mean, the people who run these platforms know what they are doing. this is immoral behavior. i'm sorry. so we need privacy legislation.

the base property that they use to make their money is us. we are the product. they know everything about you if you are on the platform. everything. they know to boost you information to keep your attention on the platform so they make more money. so privacy legislation would help with national security. it would help with everything we are talking about. the third thing is section 230. and i don't want to go to long on this but i voted for section 230. in 1994 or whatever. and if you would like to hear all my bad votes, i can spend all night. that was a bad votes but at the time, the platforms came to us and said, you got to make us immune from harm that would be because they what is on our platform. if you don't, you will never

have an internet economy. these are little companies. the second said, more importantly, we are just a dumb pipe. we don't put any content on. the people put it on. so let them be sued but don't sue us. since then, they have become the most intelligent pipe in human history. they know everything about me so they are boosting to me information 24/7, 365 to keep me angry and upset so they keep my attention. so we need that piece of legislation as well. maybe we can't rescind it. maybe we can amend it to make it safer so that they have to have accountability for the harm that they are affirmatively creating. when our mothers tried to sue the platforms because of the harm that came from her son killing himself and the suit was

thrown out because of section 230, immediately. my wish list for top-down, those are the four things, and we are going to work our heads off to get those four done. [applause] >> for those who are not aware, section 230 of the communications decency act affect -- essentially gives a lot of technology companies blanket immunity from lawsuits for the harms they cause. you want to jump in? >> can i say a couple of things just in response to the two wonderful comments that have just been made? i want to pick up on this idea of who we are as americans. and who we have always been. and i see a lack of imagination on these issues and it surprises me because we don't have a lack of imagination in america. we figure out how to do things as americans, and for some

reason, this is too hard, right? and i -- i look at what we have decided is important to society, the decision that we are making as a society about ourselves and i shake my head because we see what is coming. we see the train that is coming yet we are not change -- we are not seeing anything to change behavior. what was said about top-down and bottom-up, absolutely 100% but it is also circular. we have got to look around and say where are the places where creativity and imagination that we have not thought about before? the digital agency is one exceptional and really smart idea but there are lots of smaller things that will nudge people in a direction that will change behavior and we have done that and america. we did that when aides came in the 1980's and we never could say -- we could not even say the word condom out loud. we could not talk about all these things and we thought how will we ever get americans to

change their behavior? years later, we have figured this out. there was a time in america -- if a european looked at an american and said they will never recycle, they will never change their behavior, americans are not like that, they are so wasteful, they don't do what we do, well, over time, we have taught communities how to put plastic in this place and paper in another, so these kinds of behavioral changes can happen. the nudges that happen both from the private sector and the public sector can develop itself in such a way that these protections that we are talking about, the safety components, but also the society components are there for the taking, and for me, as i think about what you have just said about who we are as we, the people -- we, the people, ought to be better for this magnificent country and think creatively about how to do this in a smart, effective, and

try a little. not be so sure that we are going to fail. i think that is part of the reason why we have hit so many roadblocks. nobody wants to take ownership over this. they don't want to have it be a disaster. have got to experiment the way we would in other fields. >> i love that. one of the pieces on the wish list was data privacy. i would love for you to share with this audience here something that has happened recently with respect to data privacy and anything else you would like to add to the wish list of what else we can do to fix this legislatively. >> sure. there has been a really important privacy deal that has been in congress. on the house side, we had really good movement, bipartisan support, and it got held up in the senate. i am trying not to use the member's name because i don't think it is important, about who was supporting it and who was moving it. what has happened as of friday is there is an agreement to get

tech done with the commitment to move forward. what i want people to pull from that is there is a commitment to do something and so as we are talking about the different legislative proposals, but also just some of the history of societal changes in our country, it all comes from us doing something. but privacy committee, we are very excited about the possibility that there is going to be agreed upon legislation that will actually get a vote in the house and the senate and i think as you are hearing about a lot of the proposals of how do we hold social media platforms accountable, the most important thing to remember is we have to take a vote. so when you talk about voting on section 230 in 1994, i just think that is too long for us to have a piece of legislation and not amend it, not reform it, not change it, not just vote on it again. we don't see that in any other

industry and we don't see that with any other laws. we are talking about the post office and i know people have strong thoughts and opinions about the post office but you know what? post office gets reauthorized we vote on that. congress votes on that consistently and as the needs of the people who use the postal service change, the loss change with it. everything in our democracy, in our legislative process, requires us to go back and make sure that these laws are still pertinent for the time that we are in. it is insanity that this law was passed in 1994 and it is hands-off. i was 10 years old in 1994. we did not have internet access in my home in 1994. it is fair to go back in and say we need to look at this. just today, there's a really big surveillance bill that failed in the house vote today. it was passed originally after 9/11 at a time when we were

really worried about kind of homegrown terrorism and trying to make sure we did not have another 9/11. that is a really big piece of legislation and we knew that it was important, and congress said, every five years, we are going to bring this up for a vote and every five years, people fight over it. i hated the vote, to be honest, when i was working in congress, because it required so much and you had members of congress that are on different sides. it doesn't matter what party they are in. that bill failed today because they are going to continue to debate on it. they are going to deliberate on it. the senate has an option but it is happening. it is action and i think that is the most frustrating thing about section 230 or any kind of reform with social media companies. we won't take a vote and there are a lot of grassroots people that are here and you are trying to -- you don't have to figure out which proposal you like.

demand that a vote be taken on laws and provisions that were set up when these companies just did not have access like they do and they were not so much of our life. >> i completely agree with you. i want to finish off with a teaser to other things. there was a lot happening, our optimism. there is a lot of stuff you alluded to. the private sector, entrepreneurs, and individuals like those watching here in the audience can do something. i would like you to expand upon what you can do as individuals to help protect our democracy. >> you know, in some ways, this links not only a part of this conversation together but also parts of the conversation throughout the day. which is, you know, robert putnam wrote a great book called the upswing which tracks this

extraordinary thing in the early 1900s. and you know, these innovations, as the congressman says, do often start bottom up and i am particularly taken with the story about public high school which was something that is a totally crazy idea for a while. a couple of schools in iowa started experimenting with it. within 20 years, you had a universal public good. the place where i am really focused and which really, again, speaks to some of the focus on local journalism and local news that we have had earlier is that where we are seeing some emergent good patches of social conversations, social media, it's in these local contexts which are not always kind of driven by large platform mechanics. they often have people involved and are actively pulling them together. and they are doing some of the

jobs that, you know, that are missing, so i think there is an extraordinary opportunity to think about if we were to take apart what news media and other civic institutions did in the 20th century and rebuild it for the 21st century. what does that look like? i don't think any of us totally knows yet but that is a really exciting project of invention that a lot of people, we are seeing tons of people experiment with this right now. in vermont and in detroit and in brooklyn and all sorts of places around the country, people are experimenting with how do we build this unit away that doesn't lead to the awful incentives that the congressman talked about? i think that is really -- that is an exciting thing about this moment. there's a lot of harm but there is also a real opportunity to think about the kinds of civic institutions we want to build and how do we do that not just

through policy and through government but kind of build a new kind of civil society that will see us through this new digital era? i think that is the opportunity we are all here together to explore. >> on that note, thank you so much. incredible conversation. i hope you all that feeling more optimistic than you came in about the possibilities, but thank you very much. >> ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our afternoon program. thank you for coming. >> c-span's washington general, a life form involving you to discuss the latest issues in

public policy. from washington, d.c. and across the country. coming up wednesday morning, paul from the group discusses his efforts to expand school choice in the u.s. and its recent survey of teenagers about k-12 education in the u.s. and then thomas of the alliance for safety and justice talks about expanding resources for survivors of crime, promoting public safety and criminal justice reform. c-span's washington general. join in the conversation at 7:00 eastern wednesday morning on c-span, c-span now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. court hears oral aument in ae case on whether former prt donald trump has presidential immunity against crimi prosecution for his alleged role in attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. our live coverage of the argument begins at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span, c-span.org, and the free c-span now video app.

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view of government. we are funded by these television companies and more. ♪ >> may supports c-span as a public service along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. seat to democracy. -- front row seat to democracy. >> the role it could play. director burns discussed china, the situation in the middle east, and u.s. intelligence sharing. director burns was introduced by george w. bush. >> i want to thank today's panelists.