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The Current Transcript for February 20, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Facebook’s mission is all about giving people a voice and bringing people closer together. I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy. That’s not what we stand for.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: It may not be what Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook stands for, but that's the suggestion of the indictments that spell out how Facebook was used in the last U.S. election. And with its own VP of ads tweeting a defense that only raised more questions about Russian interference through Facebook, the social media giant has more than one critic demanding stronger accountability and regulation here in Canada —home to some of the most active Facebook users in the world. In an hour we're asking about Canada's vulnerability to election manipulation. Also today, want to be happy? There's a class for that.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: You can’t just hear about these studies and automatically become happy, you have to put the work in which is the tough message. Becoming happy takes intentional daily effort, like learning to play the violin.

AMT: Close to one-quarter of all the undergrads at Yale University have signed up for Laurie Santos' class on Psychology and the Good Life, with assignments like changing bad habits performing random acts of kindness and re-thinking traditional goals around high marks and high earnings to find happiness and reduce anxiety. The professor says she created the course because of the stats on mental illness on her campus and most others. Hear her and some of her students in half an hour. But we begin with political pushback against #MeToo.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Today I stand before you with humility and a renewed sense of purpose, and with a steely resolve that for the good of the party and the good of the province, together we must now finish what we started.

[Sound: Cheers and applause]

AMT: He resigned as Ontario's Conservative leader just three weeks ago after reports of allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. Now he wants his job back. We're asking how that affects the #MeToo movement. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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What does Patrick Brown's leadership bid mean for the #MeToo movement?

Guests: Mike Crawley, John Ibbitson, Randi Rahamim

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: To be vilified without due process is absolutely gutting. To be shunned as an outcast in a party that I love over fabricated news reports hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s been devastating and that's an understatement. But let me tell you, you learn who your true friends are.

MANY VOICES: Patrick, Patrick, Patrick!

[Sound: Cheering and applause]

AMT: That was former Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown, surrounded by supporters on Sunday as he declared he'd be fighting to get his former job back. It was a very different scene from his late-night press conference, just three weeks ago.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I want to say these allegations are false, categorically untrue, every one of them. I know the court of public opinion moves fast. I've instructed my attorneys to ensure these allegations are addressed where they should be, in the court of law. I reject these accusations in the strongest possible terms. It's not my values, it's not how I was raised, it's not who I am.

AMT: Hours later after CTV News reported on the allegations made by two women, Mr. Brown stepped down. And with a provincial election just months away — in June — his party was thrown headlong into a leadership contest, featuring high profile candidates such as Doug Ford and Caroline Mulroney. As for Patrick Brown, by most accounts, his political life was over; cut down by the power of the #MeToo movement. But now he's back. The party must still sign off on his candidacy. But his last-minute entry to the leadership contest raises big questions for party politics, and the #MeToo movement more generally. Mike Crawley is CBC's Ontario provincial affairs reporter, and he's with me now from Toronto. Hello.

MIKE CRAWLEY: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: Before we get to the specifics Mike, have you ever seen anything like this in your political reporting?

MIKE CRAWLEY: This is great. It's such a soap opera. And every day there's something different. I have never seen anything like it.

AMT: For people who have not heard much about Patrick Brown until all of this happened, remind us who he is and what was at stake for him as leader of the Ontario PCs?

MIKE CRAWLEY: Patrick Brown became leader of the Ontario PCs after a relatively nonentity kind of a period of time as a member of parliament. He was a backbencher in Stephen Harper's government and he kind of came out of nowhere, worked really, really hard, and won the leadership with the PCs in 2015. For the past couple of years he's been leading in the polls quite significantly. And so he was kind of the premier in waiting. He could have been the person in charge here in Ontario.

AMT: Before he stepped down he had a really good chance of unseating the Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne?

MIKE CRAWLEY: Absolutely. All of the indications in the polls were that he had a very strong lead. But the one thing that's kind of interesting is that every poll seemed to indicate that about half of Ontarians had no opinion about him. They didn't know enough about him to have an opinion. Well that has completely changed in the past three weeks.

AMT: Interesting. Now you cannot mistake the enthusiasm of those Brown supporters in the clip we just heard. What extent is his base still with him?

MIKE CRAWLEY: So he's got a significant number of candidates who've been nominated to run for the PCs in the coming election — more than a dozen. A couple of the sitting members of the legislature are with him. He helped build up the party membership over the past few years. Thousands and thousands of people signed up under Patrick Brown's time in power. Some of those people are still with him. How many exactly? Nobody really knows. And we'll only know that if he does actually get the opportunity to be on the ballot in the leadership race.

AMT: So talk to me about this. What does the Ontario PC party have to decide? When will they do this?

MIKE CRAWLEY: So they have a vote that starts in less than two weeks — March 2nd till March 8th. That's an online vote. Every party member is eligible to vote and to pick the leader. It's a ranked ballot kind of system. There are five candidates, including Brown. And then the winner gets announced on March 10th and that's less than three months away from the election.

AMT: But the party senior’s get to decide if he actually can run still.

MIKE CRAWLEY: Yes. So party officials, who’s basically a committee, that has to approve the candidates to be eligible to run. It's kind of a vetting process. And our understanding is that Patrick Brown has not yet been vetted by this party committee. Even though if this party committee doesn't green light him, he can appeal. And honestly I think there would be a revolution among the PCs if he doesn't get approved because he does have thousands of members who support him. You can certainly see it on Twitter. You could see it at that rally that he had on the weekend. So if the PC party actually does try to stop him from running and try to stop him from having the opportunity to put his candidacy towards the full membership, they're opening one huge can of worms.

AMT: It's so interesting because he did come out and say that he was defamed. He says he's vindicated. CTV stands by their original story with some minor changes in the ages of one of the people making the allegations. But even after that he was removed from the caucus. That was the plan. And they removed from the caucus.

MIKE CRAWLEY: Yeah. So Patrick Brown says his name has been cleared. But if the media story and his party caucus dumping him as leader was judge jury and executioner, Patrick Brown's trying to be a one man appeals court. He says he's been cleared. I think that's really up to the party members to decide whether in fact he has cleared his name because he's pointed out, let's call them inconsistencies in the stories of the two women who made the initial accusations, and those inconsistencies don't necessarily mean that the story that the women told was not fundamentally overall true.

AMT: Which is what CTV is saying and standing by their story. If he is allowed to run what could that mean for the other candidates? An interesting roster.

MIKE CRAWLEY: A lot of the attention is on Brown right now. The other candidates, in particular Doug Ford and Caroline Mulroney, have come out very hard against Patrick Brown even being in this leadership race. That it's not good for the party is what they're saying. Patrick Brown says he is doing what's best for the party. Other people are thinking you know he's in it for himself right now. He's trying to vindicate himself through this leadership run and that's risky for him because let's say he doesn't win, does that prove that the accusations were correct and that the party was right to dump him? It's quite a risk he's taking.

AMT: So what's the impact on the party's image right now with Ontario voters? Can you tell?

MIKE CRAWLEY: The polls seem to suggest that, if anything, the party has not has not been damaged in comparison to what happened before all this. I don't know to what extent voters’ look at internal party backstabbing as being a bad thing for choosing that party to go and government. Certainly the Liberal Party and the NDP here in Ontario are saying, 'look at these guys they're in such a mess. How can they possibly govern the province?' I don't know to what extent that actually resonates with voters. And certainly everybody knows what's going on within the party now. And since it doesn't seem to be hurting them in the polls, it might be proof of that old adage of any publicity is good publicity.

AMT: Fascinating stuff. I know you have lots of work on this to do again today, so I'll let you go. Thank you.

MIKE CRAWLEY: Thank you.

AMT: Mike Crawley is CBC's Ontario provincial affairs reporter with me in our Toronto studio. Well, this is a story not just about Ontario politics, but the wider #MeToo movement. And I'm joined by two guests now for their thoughts on what it all means. John Ibbitson is writer-at-large based in the Ottawa bureau for The Globe and Mail. He is in Ottawa today. And Randi Rahamim is a principal at the public strategy and consultancy firm Navigator. She's in our Toronto studio. Hello to you both.

RANDI RAHAMIM: Good morning.

JOHN IBBITSON: Hello.

AMT: John Ibbitson, how surprised are you by what's happened with Patrick Brown and all of this turmoil being experienced by the Ontario Conservatives?

JOHN IBBITSON: Well it's profoundly surprising. Sometimes I think I've lived too long. I've lived to see the age of Donald Trump and I've lived to see turmoil in the Ontario Progressive Conservatives. I think what's at root is that all of the old institutions, the brokerage institutions, the backroom boys as you used call them, the smoke filled rooms, that adjudicated these kind of contests in the past and made sure that this didn't happen or that didn't happen. They're all breaking down. They're breaking down because of the decline of deference. They're breaking down because of the rise of social media. The results are often very good. They're often very exciting. But sometimes they also result in this kind of exposure, this bare naked exposure of political processes. For example, supporters of Mr. Brown said that "due process needs to be observed. Innocent until proven guilty." I guess. That's a legal challenge rather than a political challenge. But here it is for everyone to see. He is being adjudicated in the public square. And indeed due process might result in the fact that a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct, whose senior staff quit within minutes of the accusation, whose own caucus completely rejected him, is going to run again for the leader of his own party. It's very hard to fathom, I have to confess.

AMT: Well you say you might have lived too long. Maybe you haven't lived long enough [laughs] to see this great change. Randi Rahamim, what are you thinking here? Where is the Ontario PC party going here? What are they weighing? What does it risk if it allows Mr. Brown into that leadership race?

RANDI RAHAMIM: Well I think the biggest risk for the Ontario PC party is that the voters view this as a proxy issue for the #MeToo movement overall. And people will be looking to how the PC party actually handles this issue as a way to judge the party on this issue. The idea of due process is out the window when it comes to the court of public opinion. And although that may be unfortunate, I think we hold our elected officials to a different standard perhaps than we do if this was a private sector organization. I think that the biggest risk to the party quite honestly is that this derails a lot of the substantive discussion around policy that actually needs to take place in the province of Ontario prior to the June election. And instead we're going to be very much focused on the issues of leadership, on internal politics, and on the #MeToo movement instead.

AMT: Randi, let me ask you. How much did the #MeToo movement play into the party's decision do you think to distance itself from him so quickly?

RANDI RAHAMIM: I think what we're seeing regardless of whether it's a political party or any other organization, we're seeing people trip over themselves to try and be on the right side of this issue. I think what we're seeing is people are scared that perceptions are going to run away and they don't care about how they actually get to the truth and the facts. They just want to be perceived to be on the right side of this issue. Whether or not the party allows Patrick Brown to run and whether or not Patrick Brown actually wins the leadership, he will dominate headlines through the March 10th leadership and I would suggest all the way through the June 7th election.

AMT: Do you think the party could have responded to the allegations differently?

RANDI RAHAMIN: I think they could have because I doubt that they only found out about this in late January. I would suspect that there had long been rumours — who knows if they were true or not true — about misconduct and Patrick Brown. Certainly there would have been a way to say, 'you know what? We're hearing all these things. Let's launch an independent third party investigation so that we can actually demonstrate that we're doing something productive to get to the bottom of this. And then make a decision about leadership'. I think this was a political calculation quite honestly. This was, 'let's actually lance this boil now instead of facing this risk closer to the election'.

AMT: John Ibbitson, I'm wondering what you think. Patrick Brown says he plans to sue CTV News for defaming him with trashy journalism. The network did change one piece of its story about the age of the person who alleges one of the incidents. CTV says it stands by the wider substance of the story. What do you make of the way he's fighting back?

JOHN IBBITSON: Well again it's like nothing I've ever seen before. It's just an incredible political soap opera. But politics these days whether it's in Great Britain or the United States or in Canada or for that matter in Germany and France, it's just a wild soap opera. But look there have been accusations that the CTV story isn't inaccurate. But CTV is a deeply reputable organization. It adheres to the same kind of journalistic standards that the Globe and Mail adheres to and that the CBC adheres to. And as of yet the fundamentals of that story have not been challenged. If CTV has somehow committed some really fundamental breach of conduct in the way it reported and broadcast the story then it would deserve everything that happens to it because it did bring down someone who was on track to become the next premier of Ontario. But unless and until that occurs I am not prepared to abandon the substance of the accusations. The #MeToo movement is always going to have these kinds of moments where you question the accusation and you find the person who's being accused to be used to be so reputable that you wonder where it's coming from. But this is a very broad based movement. I said this in the Globe, this is very different from [unintelligible] or "Occupy" or "Black Lives Matter" which is not to discredit those movements at all. But they are not like #MeToo in that #MeToo is a very broadly based and very deep and wide, I believe, act of momentum if that's the way to put it. Women across the private and public sphere are saying that they refuse to accept this kind of harassment anymore. That’s not going to discredit the movement. That's not going to change regardless of what happens individually in this case even though it's a very highly public case.

AMT: Let's look at some of the push back. More than 100 women in Simcoe County, which is part of the riding Patrick Brown represents, signed a letter to support him. They wrote in part and I'm quoting here, "We live in a precarious moment where the #MeToo movement has crossed into dangerous territory with no line when it becomes acceptable to destroy a man's career, reputation, and life." Randi Rahamim, they did that last night in Barrie, Ontario. Hedley played to a packed house even now they had to step away from the Junos because of allegations even though they have admitted to what they called a cliché rock 'n' roll lifestyle. What do you take from all that?

RANDI RAHAMIM: First of all, I actually despise the defence that a hundred women saying I am great, therefore I could have spurned no woman or I could have done nothing wrong. I actually find that a very reprehensible defense. Or saying "I have sisters" like Patrick Brown originally said. You know I couldn’t have possibly done this "I have two sisters." That actually has nothing to do with this. But what I think we are going to start to see and what I think symbolized this most was probably Steve Paikin’s case, where TVO actually took the lead and said, 'you know what? There are these allegations. We're going to actually not act too swiftly. We're going to act swiftly in our response. But our response is going to be an independent third party. And then once we get the facts we're going to make a decision'. That's the first time I think in Canada we've seen an organization sort of take more of a step back and say, ‘let's give this the proper consideration this deserves and then make a decision'. So I would say we haven't actually felt the full wave of #MeToo accusations in Canada yet. I think a lot has gone on in the United States but we have yet to see the substantive of critical mass of that movement up here. And once we do at some point there is going to be a bit of a turning point. There is going to be a push back where people are like, 'wait the second. Do we need to give this a bit more of a pause? Are we actually willing to watch organizations move so quickly? Does this require a different type of response?' The #MeToo movement is raising very legitimate questions. It's around process that we could get a little bit tripped up.

AMT: So do you agree with John that the #MeToo movement does have a very deep long life?

RANDI RAHAMIM: Who can predict when this will end? I actually don't know and I don't think we've ever seen anything like this in terms of, first of all, the reach. This originally started with the entertainment industry but it's actually going through the private sector. It's going through public life. It's spanning borders and oceans. So who knows where this will end? I can't predict that yet. But I think that would be very bad for the movement is if it actually started to create a groundswell of negativity that actually wasn't substantiated and then discredited the very real and good conversations that are being generated by them.

AMT: John Ibbitson, where do you think the questions have to be answered in that? How does it move forward?

JOHN IBBITSON: Well we can't predict. It depends on who accuses who next and how credible these accusations are. Let's remember a couple of things. First of all these are very high profile people. These are producers of movie companies. These are political leaders. These are journalists. This matters only if it percolates down onto the shop floor or into the office. #MeToo only matters if it produces a broad substantive shift in public attitude to what is acceptable in terms of treatment of women in the workplace. So these are only examples.

AMT: And that's what we have to wait and see I guess. We have to keep watching to see what else comes up.

JOHN IBBITSON: We all need to remember one thing very quickly. Kathleen Wynne is a profoundly unpopular politician. She is as popular as Bob Rae was just before he was soundly defeated in the 1995 election. It is possible that Patrick Brown or whoever ends up leading the Progressive Conservative party could become the next premier of Ontario, despite all of this. So could Andrea Horwath of the NDP. It is a wildly impossible thing to predict right now.

AMT: OK. Well we have to leave it there. Thank you both.

RANDI RAHAMIM: Thank you.

AMT: Thank you.

AMT: John Ibbitson is writer-at-large based in the Ottawa bureau for The Globe and Mail. And Randi Rahamim is a principal at the public strategy and consultancy firm Navigator. What do you think? Let us know. You can find us on Twitter @TheCurrentCBC, or on Facebook, or on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. The CBC News is next. Then, it's the most popular course at Yale University, and also the most difficult. She joins me, right after the news, to talk about teaching happiness. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

Back To Top »

The secret to happiness? Ask this Yale professor (and the 1,200 students taking her class)

Guest: Laurie Santos

[Music: Theme]

AMT: New indictments in the U.S. of Russians allegedly trying to sway the 2016 election raise all sorts of questions, including just how much responsibility Facebook has to bear. We'll hear from Facebook Canada's head of public policy and more in about half an hour from now. But first, you can't buy happiness but one professor says you can "learn" it.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Hello. Bonjour. My name is Alex Mackay. I'm sophomore, a second-year here at Yale University, majoring in neuroscience, and I am originally from Vancouver, Canada. So like many Yalee’s I'm taking this course Psychology and the Good Life because I want to find authentic happiness. That's not always the easiest thing to come by.

AMT: Finding authentic happiness is not usually what you find in university classes. But this is no ordinary class at Yale. It's trying to address the mental wellbeing of students. From getting the grades to get in, to choosing the right courses, to landing a good job afterwards — going to university or college is often a stressful experience. Ninety percent of Canadians in post-secondary education say they felt overwhelmed by everything on their to-do list, according to a 2016 survey. More than half felt overwhelmed by their academics. A Yale professor is hoping to help her students experience the good life amid the pressure cooker of an elite school. And her course on living well has become the most popular in the school's 317-year history, with one of every four undergrads on campus signed up students like Alex, who take their homework for the class very seriously.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: So this week our rewirement is doing nice things for others. So I am going to be doing a random act of kindness and I hope you guys enjoy.

[Sound: Ordering coffee]

AMT: Well in the name of rewiring or rewirement Alex just bought a coffee for a stranger. And head to the library and you'll find fellow classmate Yannis Messaoui.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: My homework for this week is to perform random acts of kindness and I just bought these little cute donuts that I am going to give out to random people in the library to encourage them in their studying.

VOICE 2: Thank you so much.

VOICE 1: No problem. Do you want one too?

VOICE 1: That felt good. I don't know it's just cool. I think this is probably a multi-collateral effect of this class. But it's just good see a more positive culture on campus. You know I just brought smile to my friends and neighbour. Some positive change happening at Yale.

AMT: OK. Well two some random acts of kindness that involve food. Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale University and the head of one of the residential colleges at the school. She teaches the popular course Psychology and the Good Life. And she joins us from New Haven, Connecticut. Hello.

LAURIE SANTOS: Hello. Thanks for having me on the show.

AMT: What is a good life?

LAURIE SANTOS: I think it's one in which you feel like you’re satisfied with your life and your positive emotions are a little bit higher than your negative emotions. That's really what we're going for with the students in the class.

AMT: And how good are Yale students at making themselves happy and figuring out how to live a good life?

LAURIE SANTOS: Well we hope they'll get better over time. I mean as you mentioned in your introduction the statistics on college in general are pretty dire. In the U.S. you find that around 80 percent of college students are feeling overwhelmed. Over 50 percent are feeling lonely. Around a third are so depressed it's hard to function. I mean these are pretty dire statistics and the goal of the class is really to get around some of these big issues.

AMT: What does the size of that class tell you about how they see life on campus?

LAURIE SANTOS: I think the size of the class tells us two things. The first is that I think students want this culture to change. They're not happy feeling so overwhelmed. I think they're of course amazingly privileged to get into an elite college like Yale. But there's this question about at what cost? And I think the interest in the course really suggests that students want to do more to make their culture better and they want to do more to live a happy life. But the second thing I think the course tells us is that student’s sort of see a way to get around this and that through some of the social science we've been learning about. The course focuses on positive psychology but also behavioural change. And I think this is something that's really exciting to the students too. Behavioural work is kind of in this heyday right now. Richard Thaler just won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on nudging your behaviour. I think it's kind of really hot right now for students to think about how they can use the science of psychology to live a better life.

AMT: Well tell me more about what you have been seeing among students that made you want to create this course.

LAURIE SANTOS: I mean really what you see at Yale is the kind of thing you see at a lot of elite institutions. The students work incredibly hard to get there. They have to focus very carefully on grades and accolades and these things. But there is this question about whether or not those things are there the kind of stuff that really happiness is all about. I mean we tell our students that they have to worry so much about grades. But really what the research shows is that focusing on things like social connection, focusing on gratitude, and even focusing on what's called time affluence — the idea that you just have time to do the things you like. Those are the things that make for a good life. And those are the things that will make for a good life for our students down the line too. And so I started to really worry that the kinds of goals we're putting in place for our students, they may not be the kinds of things that are going to make them most happy in the long run.

AMT: So tell me what the classes are like. What are you teaching them? What are your lectures like?

LAURIE SANTOS: So we start off in the course with some misconceptions about what makes you happy because we have to get those out of the way first. And these are things that we commonly think are going to make us happy but the research suggests they just don't. Things like a really high salary and lots of awesome some stuff; for my students it's getting good grades. We go through the science that suggests that these are misconceptions. They’re spots where our minds are lying to us. Then we go through a little bit of the psychology to talk about why that is. Like why do our minds deliver to us this incorrect information about what's going to make us happy. But halfway through the course we get to what really will make us happy — kind of all the things I mentioned. And then the last part of the course is really on the science of behaviour change. What can we do to put better habits in to achieve these good goals? And I think that's a lot of what's really exciting the students the most. It's one thing to learn about the science of psychology but if you can't put that science into practice you're not going to really get the benefit yourself.

AMT: And so what kinds of assignments are they doing?

LAURIE SANTOS: Well it's a course you know. So you have your typical Ivy League college requirements. Things like midterms and final papers and quizzes and so on. But we also have a different set of requirements that we jokingly refer to as the rewirements. And that's because they're there to rewire students’ habits. And these are things like taking time to experience gratitude daily and writing a few things you're grateful for. This week the students are focusing on doing random acts of kindness. They're supposed to do five per week. And these sound a little cheesy but they're based on real scientific work suggesting that if you put in that intentional effort to do these kinds of practices you're just going to increase your subjective well-being. And that's the goal of the rewirements; kind of putting these habits into place that will lead to healthier outcomes down the line.

AMT: And so do they come to class and talk about those random acts of kindness?

LAURIE SANTOS: They're keeping track of them on their own. We'll soon have up and running a new app. So it's a mobile app that students can log their acts of happiness and acts of gratitude and so on. As a professor I didn't realize how hard it was to develop this app — so a little bit behind on that. But the hope is that students can track these things and we'll see them over time. I mean they're not getting a grade for experiencing gratitude. But really if they want this class to benefit them those are the practices they need to engage in daily.

AMT: How do you grade this?

LAURIE SANTOS: Well the grades are based on a midterm and a final paper. The final paper is one where students need to learn about the research on happiness and what makes you happy. How they can put those practices into place and then they get to do a little research project on themselves where they have to apply one of these techniques in their own life and kind of do a little bit of an experiment to see what happens.

AMT: Is that what you call the hack yourself?

LAURIE SANTOS: Yes. The students like the "hack yourself." So they find that funny. But they really think of this as a way to use the science to kind of hack or make these changes in their own lives.

AMT: The Yale campus paper reported that you joked you might give every student a D grade. Basically part of your argument that grades don't necessarily make you happy. What happened when you joked?

LAURIE SANTOS: Yeah. It was actually a joke that was in one of the student web pages — on their Facebook page. I just put up a joke that students I had. But that really scared some students I think despite the fact that we're hearing that grades don't increase well-being. If anything the data suggests might go in the other direction. It might actually be higher high school GPAs are correlated with less well-being. With stress you can see why that might be the case. But I think students were really worried about it. I got some calls from deans who are the academic advisers on campus who had heard from parents who were worried. So I think it just shows we have a lot more work to do to convince people that even though your mind are telling you these goals are good they might not be increasing happiness in the way you think.

AMT: It’s also telling that some parents did contact the deans because not only their minds were telling them their parents are telling them.

LAURIE SANTOS: That's right. And I think this is kind of a broader concern with the class is that we've gotten excitement on campus obviously with one in four students wanting to take the class. But really I've been amazed at the excitement I've seen beyond campus. The emails I'm getting aren't from other students, they're from parents, they're from coaches, they're from retirees, and they're from folks who want to implement these kinds of practices in their own lives. I think a lot of the stresses we're seeing on campuses are just a tiny microcosm of the sort of stresses we see all over the world in our adult lives.

AMT: It's almost as if you dared to speak what everyone was afraid to say.

LAURIE SANTOS: Maybe. The hope is that really we are in this exciting moment where we have science to help us out with this, right? Before we took for granted our minds are telling us this I guess we have to go with it. But now we have this fantastic work in positive psychology and behaviour change that can lead us to some really important ways we can apply these tips and really get better in our lives.

AMT: It's interesting. When we talk about grades, as I read about your course, the real question is whether they'll fail themselves if they're there and they really take to heart what you're trying to bring forward?

LAURIE SANTOS: I've joked with the students that this is the hardest class at Yale. They have this hashtag they use #hardestclassatYale. And the reason is that what the research shows is that you can't just hear about these findings and automatically become happy. You have to put the work out which is the tough message. The positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky is famous for saying that becoming happier takes intentional daily effort. She likens it to learning to play the violin or learning an elite sport. You have to put the practice in and that means this class takes a lot of work to really do the rewirements everyday of form these new habits. You have to put that effort in. For students they have to put their time in which is even more difficult. And so my sense is that many of them might get As in the course, but might not use the course in the way that I want them to which is to really put these habits into practice. That's going to take much more effort.

AMT: I'm sure you know sometimes years later someone can remember something that a professor taught them and suddenly the penny really drops and they understand how it really does affect their life. This is something I am guessing that can stay with you and allow you to maybe make choices beyond your academic career as an individual in life, right? It sets a pattern.

LAURIE SANTOS: And that's really the hope for the classes that a lot of the things they're learning about they can apply on campus. But a lot of them are for when they leave here. We're talking about the kinds of things that make marriages happier, that make you not get adapted to your spouse, and things that you can do to continue experiencing gratitude five, 10 or 15 years into a marriage. My hope is that the students are learning things they'll really take with them into the future. And in part because we think this is so important, Yale has agreed to release a shorter version of the class on their Coursera platform and so that's something that learners can use once they've graduated from Yale learners all over the world can access for free. And so we really want to make what we think are really important materials available.

AMT: So tell us a little bit more about what the research has taught us about what does make us happy and why it isn't always what we think?

AMT: What we know is mostly based on research on who is happy. So researchers just go out and they ask people "Are you happy?" And they ask "OK, what are the practices of happy people? What are they doing that seems to make them different from people who are unhappy?" And by and large what you find is that happy people tend to have practices that make them a little bit more social. They tend to spend more time with friends. They tend to prioritize social time. They also do a bunch of positive practices. Things like experiencing gratitude. Things like experiencing compassion. They tend to do random acts of kindness for other people. And they tend to be sharp enough to give themselves some space. People who are happier tend to engage in practices like mindfulness and they tend to sleep more. In some ways it feels like a lot of platitudes. But what the research is suggesting is that simply kind of being kind to others, being social, and giving yourself some space can have a much huger effect than we think on our well-being.

AMT: And what kind of impact do you hope this course has on the campus mind set of focusing on good grades and a good job?

LAURIE SANTOS: My hope is that the class can have an impact beyond just the things we're teaching them. With one out of four Yale students taking the class, if students really are doing things differently, if they're engaging in different practices in the class, that could have a side effect and I hope really change the campus and really change the culture of focusing too much on grades and internships. Maybe make them think that caring about others and really engaging in practices where you're being healthy and taking time for yourself. Those things can be even more helpful than students often think. So I hope I can really see change across the campus.

AMT: You were talking about some statistics earlier. Nearly one in five post-secondary students in Canada and the U.S. report that they've been diagnosed with anxiety or depression. How much can a course such as this help that group that may also need some mental health care?

LAURIE SANTOS: I think finding resources for mental health care is important and hopefully this class will also contribute to that conversation as well. But part of the anxiety seems to come from all these misdirected goals. In the U.S. there was a national college health assessment back in 2009 that found that around 47 percent of students are experiencing overwhelming anxiety. But if you look at what they're anxious about it tends to be about academic stress. It tends to be worries about things like grades and papers and internships. Worries, the research suggests, just don't matter for happiness as much as you think. The hope is that teaching students the right way to spend their time and the right things to worry about and the right things to focus on, might actually shift things around such that students who are engaging in these healthy practices might actually be able to overcome not just the kind of garden variety depression and anxiety but maybe even the bigger things too.

AMT: So what did all those students who wanted to get into this class been allowed in?

LAURIE SANTOS: Yes, which is great on Yale's part. They had to first simulcast different rooms. We're now teaching the class in the room that we used for stadium concerts. So the big concert hall on campus, which isn’t set up to be a classroom. There are no desks and there's no projector. But Yale's administrators did a great job to make sure that anyone who wanted to take this class was able to do so.

AMT: Have you ever taught a class that large?

LAURIE SANTOS: No. I mean no one at Yale has.

AMT: [Laughs]

LAURIE SANTOS: I haven't done that yet.

AMT: And what's that like to be on a stage with a massive group that that clamoured to get in there?

LAURIE SANTOS: I mean I think it's really fun. It's very exciting to be teaching a class knowing that so many students want to take it and knowing that so many students want to hear this message. That's really been fantastic. I'm humbled but experiencing a lot of gratitude about it.

AMT: It's not a huge student body, the undergrad group.

LAURIE SANTOS: That's correct. We have about 1,200 students in the class and that's about one out of four students at Yale total — undergraduate students at Yale total.

AMT: So you've basically taken a quarter of the undergraduates and how does that go over with your fellow professors?

LAURIE SANTOS: I've been surprised at the extent to which other professors’ are excited about the class. I think it just creates a few logistical challenges. You know everyone heads to that one room at lunch. Everyone leaves the dining hall at a particular time. So I think there are logistical challenges we didn't expect. But so far everyone on campus has been really positive about the class.

AMT: Is this something that you will now continue every year?

LAURIE SANTOS: Well I still have my kind of day job. I teach evolutionary psychology and I'd like to get back to that — a different popular class at Yale the students were sad that I hadn't taught. So next year I'll be back to that one. But the hope is that we'll be able to put the class back into action again. In the meantime we've put together this Coursera class that any student at Yale or anyone in the world can access for free and we hope that shorter version will kind of give everyone at least a lot of the tips that are most important from the class.

AMT: So we know that some parents contacted the dean over that joke about failing students. Do you know if any parents have tried to sneak into the class and catch a lecture or two?

LAURIE SANTOS: We've definitely had a lot of auditors who like to come in. Some parents have asked. I know students are sending the materials back to parents and that's been really fun as well. It means the students are bringing this material to the masses. They're writing little Facebook jokes about it. They're sharing these materials with their brothers and sisters. If you have asked if their family members who are at high school can access their materials so this is the kind of material that's resonating with a lot of students on college campuses. I think it's important material for a lot of folks to learn.

AMT: So what tips your hand for the rest of us who aren't students at Yale or students at all on how to figure out what a good life could mean for us?

LAURIE SANTOS: I think the top three tips that we're telling students is first take time for yourself. Really focus on time affluence. Often we wind up working too hard to get access to salary and money and compromise our time, but it turns out that because salaries aren't making us as happy as we think that might not be the best strategy out there. A second thing is to really take time to be mindful and grateful. A short 5 to 10 minutes every day where you meditate or just sit down and write five things that you're grateful for. Those things don't take a lot of time but can have really serious impacts on subjective well-being. And then the third tip would just be to think about doing nice things for others. It turns out that the reason that money doesn't have an impact on our happiness that we think is we often keep it for ourselves. People who give money away, give things away, donate to charity, and volunteer their time, those are the folks that tend to be happier. And so the more nice things you can do for others the more you'll inadvertently end up increasing your own happiness.

AMT: You made the point that you teach evolutionary psychology as well and you do research on this. What does your work in evolutionary psychology — how does that inform what you're doing now? How does that inform how we are as individuals facing these kinds of issues now?

LAURIE SANTOS: I think the evolutionary perspective gives us two things. First it tells us a little bit why the stuff we think might make us happy probably doesn't, right? We're species that are built for our social connections. We're species that are built to cooperate with one another. As we get further and further from that I think we see the seeds of some of this unhappiness. The second perspective that evolution gives us is the fact that our minds are a little bit [unintelligible]. You know we didn't have an intelligent designer who designed them from scratch. They're kind of just built from our old primate brains and that means of course they're going to have some errors. Of course they're going to have some motivations that don't really work. And that provides some hints about the fact that our minds can be lying to us about what really matters. We should take the data seriously and not always believe the kinds of things we're getting from our [unintelligible] primate brains.

AMT: Is this cause leading you toward a better life?

LAURIE SANTOS: I think so. One great thing about the class is that I have to practice what I preach. You know the students will tell if I am not sleeping enough or not taking time for my own time affluence. So it's really forced me to do a lot of the same practices I am doing with the students. And in that sense it's been really fantastic. It's also giving me something to be incredibly grateful about that we were able to start this conversation. It's resonated with so many people. I'm really thankful for that and I feel really humbled by it.

AMT: You actually live on campus, right? You're in one of the residential colleges.

LAURIE SANTOS: That's correct. So I live with students. I'm in the dining hall with students all the time. I'm really part of their community and it's allowed me to really see that kind of need for a course like this.

AMT: Fascinating stuff. I wish you well.

LAURIE SANTOS: Thank you so much.

AMT: Thank you very much. Bye bye.

LAURIE SANTOS: Bye bye.

AMT: Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale University. She teaches the course called, Psychology and the Good Life. She's in New Haven, Connecticut. Let's hear from one more of her students now. This is Derek Demel, it's the end of his day, he's back in his dorm room and it's time to write in his gratitude journal.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I really like this exercise because it has me sit down and think about the events that happened to throughout the day that brought up me happiness. One thing I'm very happy about is that this morning my professor met with me outside of his scheduled office hours for 45 minutes to go this topic in multivariable calculus that I was really confused about. Something else that happened, actually about half an hour ago as I got back to my college, and my roommate on bought me a [unintelligible] because I was out of money and I was starving and that made me very, very content. If you see yesterday's I have a lot of them here. And that's 'cause yesterday was actually my birthday. A lot of crazy cool things happened and I was very thankful for that and so I wanted to log them all to make sure I didn't forget. So one of those things was that my parents actually mailed me birthday cake in a bunch of dry ice and I was able to have that yesterday because it's my first time having a birthday away from home and I thought that was really sweet.

AMT: Well there you go. Another example: beer, coffee, donuts, cake – random acts of kindness all related to food [laughs]. I want to tell you about our special program coming up tomorrow. We'll be bringing you the first of our town hall series, called Facing Race. We're taking on race issues right across the country, and we started in Halifax with a program focussed on the Black community in Nova Scotia. One of my guests, who you will hear tomorrow, was El Jones. She’s a poet and activist who speaks out about discrimination and violence against Black women and girls.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Their stories really aren't being heard at all. Some of the stuff you'll hear from very young girls. For example, I've had girls tell me, particularly girls that have been in the care system, that they were sexually assaulted at age 12 or 13. And it says in their files that they were street workers and prostitutes and so their rapes weren't taken seriously. One girl told me that in her file it said well her body is very curvy like an adult and this was used to deny her reported being sexually assaulted. Young girls in school have told me about their mental health not being considered. One girl came to me she said my teacher told me am a bully. And I said what do you mean by that? She said well I got upset at school I get angry. And the teacher taught me I'm a bully and they basically told me I can't be in the class. And this was a younger girl that was suffering abuse in her home. So rather than asking this young girl what was happening in her life she was being labelled as violent and essentially criminalized and then pushed out of the school. So you hear these stories over and over again. So when we're talking about #MeToo, we're not talking about state violence we're experiencing in prisons where we see black women being the highest rate of women being put into prison and we know that women who were criminalized are victims of trauma and they're not being part of this conversation.

AMT: That is El Jones. You can hear more of what she has to say when we run our town hall in Halifax. Tune in tomorrow for more, on a special edition of The Current, "Facing Race." Coming up in our next half hour how safe are Canadian elections from foreign meddling and how important is Facebook to the story of what happened in the U.S.? We’re asking next. This is The Current.

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How safe are Canada's elections from fake news on Facebook?

Guests: David McCabe, Taylor Owen, Kevin Chan

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: The indictment charges 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies for committing federal crimes while seeking to interfere in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 presidential election. The defendants allegedly conducted what they called information warfare against the United States with the stated goal of spreading distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.

AMT: That was Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general of the United States, speaking Friday. As investigations into potential Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections continue, last week's indictment marked a major turning point. Both in the worlds of politics and social media. Because the "information warfare" Mr. Rosenstein was describing there, took place in large part on the world's largest social media platform. Facebook's Vice-president of ads, Rob Goldman, took to Twitter over the weekend to address the renewed criticism of his company over what role it may have played in. He was adamant that ads placed into Americans' Facebook feeds by Russia were not intended to sway the election results. But primarily to sow distrust in American institutions. That earned him a retweet from President Donald Trump. But it may have only added fuel to the growing fire under Facebook. David McCabe covers tech policy for the news website, Axios. He joins us from Washington, D.C. Hello, David McCabe.

DAVID MCCABE: Good Morning, Anna Maria. Thank you for having me.

AMT: Good to have you with us. What do the indictments say about the role that Facebook played in spreading disinformation during the 2016 election?

DAVID MCCABE: The indictment lays out this large scale Russian interference campaign around the 2016 election. It explained how they not only with Facebook ads, which we obviously knew a lot about, but also used it as a platform for the campaign more broadly, including things as simple as using it to message people who were interested in getting involved. But absolutely the big element to all of this was pushing out content. Pushing out the kind of content you see on Facebook whether that was supported by ads or not, and using that to sow discord as part of this larger campaign.

AMT: And can you explain the role played by the so-called troll factory, the Internet Research Agency?

DAVID MCCABE: The Internet Research Agency is this Russian troll forum that's at the centre of all of this. At the centre of this pretty stunning indictment. The indictment lays out a more detailed description of the inner workings of the Internet Research Agency around this campaign than we've previously had. Things as simple as the fact that at one point an internal review was conducted of one of these online groups that they were running and they said you have to disparage Hillary Clinton more specifically in some of your posts. It explains that they created fake accounts to do this and it presented a picture of an organization that was very, very sophisticated and very, very targeted in its effort to interfere around the election.

AMT: And as I mentioned Rob Goldman, Facebook’s head of advertising, reacted to the indictments on Twitter. Tell us a little bit more of what he was saying.

DAVID MCCABE: So Rob Goldman is an executive at Facebook. Like some other executives of Facebook in the recent months he's been using Twitter to engage with reporters and kind of get the company view out there. And after the indictment came out he said this indictment is exciting but then he said something else which got him in trouble. And that was that the primary intent of this campaign was not to sway the election but rather was to sow discord among Americans. It was obvious that was a tactic that the campaign used. Pushing out divisive content to rile people up. The indictment itself says and I'm quoting here that the organization "engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and to support Bernie Sanders and then candidate Donald Trump." So what ended up happening with Goldman's tweets at the very least looked like he was saying something contrary to the indictment, which puts Facebook in the position of going off against the special counsel which is not what the company wanted and in fact not the message the company's been trying to send for months.

AMT: I mean it doesn't seem like much of a defense anyway to say well primarily they were just trying to sow distrust.

DAVID MCCABE: I think that the company pretty much knew we started working the phones and saying 'he's not speaking for us. They did that'. They sent that message to Capitol Hill staffers we reported yesterday. And they've said essentially nothing we found contradicts what the special counsel found. They didn't even try and support his argument. They came out and essentially said this doesn't speak for us.

AMT: In the meantime of course his remarks were seized upon by President Trump and his supporters to justify their position on Russian interference. How damaging is that for Facebook?

DAVID MCCABE: I think it really underscored how much Goldman's tweets potentially put them in trouble, right? And it turned them and Goldman and one of their staffers into more of a political football which is absolutely not something Facebook wanted. In the long-term we'll see how this plays out. There are a lot of factors at play and I think it is important to remember that Mueller and Facebook are all involved in a really long game.

AMT: These indictments are happening as the U.S. heads into primary season for the midterm elections. Last week a panel of U.S. intelligence chiefs testified at a Senate hearing that they believe Russian efforts to interfere are by no means over. We've got a little sample here of what they had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Yes we have seen Russian activity and intentions to have an impact on the next election cycle here.

Voice 2: I agree with Director Pompeo's assessment about the likelihood of 2018 occurrence as well.

VOICE 3: This is not going to change or stop.

VOICE 4: Yes, it is not going to change nor is it going to stop.

VOICE 5: We have not seen any evidence of any significant change from last year.

VOICE 6: I agree with director Pompeo.

VOICE 7: As do I.

AMT: David McCabe, there seems to be consensus among the intelligence chiefs that election is not over. How much consensus is there in Washington about what to do about it?

DAVID MCCABE: I think there's not a lot of consensus or not at least a lot of consensus or momentum — momentum is probably the better word here. There's not a lot of momentum. I think on Capitol Hill there's an ad bill that essentially said you'd have to have more disclosure requirements around digital ads. Well it came out of the gate with bipartisan sponsorship including from Senator John McCain who of course is leading lion of the Senate. It hasn't gone anywhere. The Federal Election Commission might be able to do something here but that hasn't happened yet. I'm watching two other things in the absence of that. I think what law enforcement and intelligence community — those gentleman you just played — do is going to obviously play a big role in this. The same is true of what happens at the state level because elections in the United States are carried out by state election commissions. And finally we're watching the efforts that the companies are taking to bolster disclosure on their platforms which I think is potentially a big moment for those companies and the credibility that they have. If what Facebook is doing does not work it will be noticed and it will have a big effect on the debate.

AMT: OK. David McCabe, thanks for your time today.

DAVID MCCABE: Thank you for having me, Anna Maria.

AMT: David McCabe covers tech policy for the news website, Axios. He was in Washington D.C. Well, the United States may be on the lookout for interference as it heads into a mid-term election year. But Canada has big elections on the horizon next year too. And, we're definitely not immune to interference in the democratic process. Canada's Communications Security Establishment has already warned it is "very likely" outside groups will attempt to influence the election. In response Facebook has announced a new Canadian Election Integrity Initiative to help "ensure the platform is a space for authentic civic engagement." But the government is still not satisfied. Last week Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Facebook it could face regulation from Ottawa. I'll be speaking with Facebook Canada in a few minutes, but first I’m joined by Taylor Owen. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. And he's in Vancouver. Hello

TAYLOR OWEN: Hello, Anna Maria.

AMT: Given what the U.S. indictment has revealed how big a concern is Facebook to democracy in the U.S. and Canada?

TAYLOR OWEN: I mean certainly it's a global problem because the platform itself is global. In my view though I think we need to move away from this focus on discreet threats whether it be Russia or any foreign actor that may want to intervene in our elections and really focus in on the platform itself and how it was designed because ultimately what the Russians clear from these latest indictments and it's there's growing evidence to this that what the Russian government did in the previous U.S. election was really just use these platforms as they were designed to be used. They used Facebook ads which of course is the lifeblood of Facebook. Facebook made almost $40 billion last year collecting data about its users and allowing that data to be used to make micro target advertising which the Russian government did very effectively. They rewarded divvies of content and peaked engagement which is what social platforms do. They reward things that make us angry and divide us rather than things that bring us together. They played into that beautifully. They used Twitter automated bots to inflate messages that they supported. Like when Trump would say something they would use armies of bots to inflate that kind of comment. And that's how Twitter is designed to allow bots because the bots increase engagement on their platform which makes them more money. So I think we need to move the conversation away from particular negative actors and realize that these are the tools that have been built and anybody can use them. Political parties in Canada use them. Individuals, NGOs, or foreign actors — everybody can use these tools because they are how the system is designed.

AMT: And you're making the point we need to move the conversation. Is anyone having that conversation in Canada?

TAYLOR OWEN: So it's interesting. Certainly on the governance level we have been much slower to react to this than they have certainly in Europe where I would say this is being treated as an emergency threat to their democracies and actions are being rolled out accordingly. And even in the U.S. where the public debate is growing very rapidly and that is leading to some at least louder political discourse. Whether or not they're going to do anything on this is a very open question. But in Canada we haven't seen that yet. In many ways there has been a wait and see approach by our governance institutions to see what the platforms are going to do to address the problem they caused. And my view is that’s a little bit too hands off for the degree of vulnerability we face in our information system.

AMT: So what is Facebook doing?

TAYLOR OWEN: So you mentioned the election integrity initiative which is actually really interesting program in a number of ways. Primarily that Canada is the test case for this. So Facebook is a global platform with a billion posts a day around the world. Canada's a very small part of that. But this initiative is actually being tested here so we could have a disproportionate role in what this looks like when it's rolled out in other elections around the world; in Brazil coming up soon and in the U.S. midterms. I would say the first round of things they've done were largely symbolic. Things like digital literacy and training MPs to use their Facebook pages better. I mean those things are superficial to a certain degree. This latest initiative though is to go after the transparency of advertising which is actually a really important thing they're doing there which is can we see more information about who is getting which ads on the platform. The problem is., is without strong government pressure and oversight and regulation of what they're doing, they're making the decisions about what they are and making transparent and what they're not. So right now you can go onto a page and you can see some data about what that person is doing in the ad space, what ads they're showing, and how many people those ads reached. But we have to ask is that meaningful transparency? So if I'm a government regulator overseeing ad spending in the election I need to know much more than that. I need to know where the ad was purchased. Was it purchased by a Canadian or by someone in Russia, for example? I care about that. I need to know how many Canadians it reached in which Canadians? I need to know exactly what their message was and I need to know how that message was evolving. So making an ad transparent makes sense in an in the all advertising world. But what if a candidate is running or an actor in another country is running 50,000 ads a day? What does seeing those ads really mean? Is that a meaningful act of transparency? I don't think it is.

AMT: You mentioned Europe. What's it doing differently?

TAYLOR OWEN: So platform companies — this is essentially about how we as a society are going to regulate what are ultimately four platform companies that essentially control the internet right now.

AMT: Name them please.

TAYLOR OWEN: Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.

AMT: OK.

TAYLOR OWEN: So the regulations and the policies and the laws that Europe are bringing in are vast and sweeping because these companies could mitigate broad ranges of society. Our economic activity. Our social activity. Our communications systems. Our media ecosystems. So the reach is broad so the policies are broad. On this particular issue though they're taking two approaches. One, an approach that seeks to define what is legitimate speech. So these are a series of initiatives that Germany has led on to basically say we are going to set some ground rules for hate speech in our society Writ Large and Facebook and platforms you will have to enforce what we see as hate speech on your platform or we will fine you. So in the case of Germany it's 50,000 euro fine. For an act of hate speech that is identified and not pulled down by Facebook. Now this is an effort to, I would argue, control speech which is a very difficult place for governments to be. But there's a whole other bucket of policies that they're enabling mostly through the EU and this new data general data protection regulation that's about to roll out. Here what they're doing is going after the rights of individuals as opposed to controlling the speech on platforms. They're enabling the rights of individuals to control the data it has collected about them.

AMT: But that's all of these platforms make their money. They share the data about us.

TAYLOR OWEN: Exactly.

AMT: They share the data about us.

TAYLOR OWEN: So GDPR in very interesting ways goes after the structural problem at the core of all of this which is that data controls how these platforms function.

AMT: But that's the point you're making, that it's a structural problem. That it's the very design of the social media systems that's used by everybody that's being used nefariously.

TAYLOR OWEN: Absolutely. It is the data that allows ads to be targeted. It is the data that fuels the algorithm, that spike's engagement, which drives the divisiveness of content, and is the data that has allowed these companies to largely monopolize the internet. And so giving each individual citizen in Europe the right to decide whether their days their data is collected by companies or not and allows them the mobility to take that data and give it to another company for example that wants to use it in a different way really changes the structure and takes some of the responsibility away from the platforms to govern themselves. I mean we have to be clear here that platform companies are largely saying, and their PR position is, ‘this problem is complicated. It is an engineering problem. It can be solved with more engineering and we are the people to solve the problem we caused’. That is the argument and I think governments need to step in and then really evaluate that and whether that is the right way forward.

AMT: Well we'll hear what Facebook Canada has to say about what you're saying. Taylor Owen, thank you for your time.

TAYLOR OWEN: Thank you. Anytime. Talk soon.

AMT: Taylor Owen, is assistant professor of digital media and global affairs at UBC. He is also a senior fellow at the Columbia journalism school. He joined us from Vancouver. We invited the Minister of Democratic Institutions, Karina Gould, to comment on this, but she was not available for an interview today. Kevin Chan has been listening in to our discussion. He is the head of public policy at Facebook Canada. And he is in our Ottawa studio. Hello.

KEVIN CHAN: Hi, thanks for having me.

AMT: I want to ask you first about the news from the U.S. Back to Rob Goldman, Facebook's vice president ads. He tweeted amongst other things and I'm quoting here "I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was not the main goal." Is that the official position of Facebook?

KEVIN CHAN: No it's not. You know Rob was expressing his own views. They do not reflect the company's views. I think we've been very clear that we stand by the findings of the special council.

AMT: When he was announcing the indictments last week the deputy U.S. attorney general Mr. Rosenstein referred to information warfare. How concerned are you that this kind of warfare is happening in Canada?

KEVIN CHAN: Well I mean in Canada we are fortunate to have had a kind of report from the government two years in advance of an election. As you mentioned Anna Maria, the Communications Security Establishment laying out what it perceives to be the cyber threats for 2019 and the election in 2019. And there they have intensified two things that I think Facebook has a role in. One is just sort of classical sort of cyber security issues. Somebody hacking into your profile, hacking into your email and then taking control of your online persona. That's one challenge. And then the other one that they identify is misinformation. In response to that we released our Canadian election integrity initiative as you noted which does deal squarely with these two issues. So again cyber security and misinformation online.

AMT: And how do you react to my last guest pointing out that that still leaves you in charge of what the issues are and maybe you need some regulation?

KEVIN CHAN: I think that very clearly we are reacting to I think what government experts have said are the charges and so obviously we want to address them fairly and we want to address them head on which is why we have the initiative. With respect to regulation obviously we are not waiting for regulation in order to take action. I think that's the responsible thing to do. So the two proactive things that we have done two years ahead of the election; one is the election integrity initiative as I said which deals with cyber challenges which deals with misinformation and we're working with MediaSmarts which is Canada's digital literacy organization to mount a digital literacy campaign. But the second one which Taylor mentioned was in fact a very transparent approach to Facebook advertising. It's called View Ads. It is only available in Canada for the moment. It is a test. Any Canadian at this point can go on any Facebook page and click on View Ads and see all the ads that that page is running. And that is intended to get at the challenge of knowing well how do we know whether or not a page just advertising and Facebook is sending messages or advertising that is consistent. They may choose to send and I think we saw some of this and the U.S. election certain messages and certain ads to one portion of the population and then send something quite different to another portion. And this level of transparency which by the way doesn't exist anywhere else online or offline will allow users to be able to understand more what exactly is going on with this page and the advertising that they're trying to direct to users.

AMT: And I appreciate what you're saying about trying to make an effort on that. I mean you're basically dealing with troll forums. They could just create another company in different hours and then you wouldn't be able to compare.

KEVIN CHAN: Yeah. I mean with respect to that — this is part of a much broader effort, right? So we're doing kind three things. We talked a bit about digital literacy. But there are two other things that are important to tease out. One is we are making sure that these things that you calling "ad forums" really are inhospitable on Facebook. A lot of this is financially motivated people kind of set up websites full of ads and they can put crazy headlines in their articles to try to get people to click through and that's how they monetize. We are now taking strict enforcement action to prevent that from happening. We have automated systems that prevent them from actually being able to monetize on Facebook using that. And that dries up the financial incentive. It turns out despite what we've heard a lot of, that turns out to be the more significant driver of why we see a lot of misinformation, a lot of sort of spam content online. But the second thing to your point is we are actually investing significantly in artificial intelligence and technologies that will allow us to better understand the patterns that allow us to identify fake accounts, and allow them to take them down. To give you one example in Europe recently there were several elections — the German election and the French election — where we took down tens of thousands of fake accounts through these kinds of new technologies. While it's certainly early days and very much a work in progress I think we’re pleased to see that in the German election independent studies have confirmed that the phenomenon of fake news and misinformation did not play a significant factor in the election.

AMT: How do you respond to my last guests' point that you that your very design is the issue? That you have a structural problem. That your structure needs to change or be heavily regulated.

KEVIN CHAN: Well I was glad to hear that. I think Taylor acknowledged that controlling speech is maybe not the right way to go. I think with respect to the other one about data — I mean that's an interesting one. We have long been regulated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. We are subject to the law of the land in Canada which is PIPEDA, the personal information protection act. So very much this idea of having control over your data, owning your own data, deleting your data, and removing it from Facebook and taking it elsewhere if you see fit, that is entirely the purpose of our data policy framework. Anybody who is on Facebook knows that they can do all those things. And again we are regulated in the sector. We do go above and beyond giving people user control and we're quite comfortable with that.

AMT: Except that it didn't seem to help in the U.S. in the indictments — that user control.

KEVIN CHAN: If I may I think the questions that were raised and the issues that the special counsel concluded with are questions of people abusing our platform. We've said very clearly from the beginning when we began cooperating with the special council and with Congress that we should have acted sooner. We should have identified these challenges sooner. But these are big challenges in some respects I think as you saw in the indictment bigger than Facebook. These are cases of individuals impersonating U.S. citizens. And this happens not just on Facebook but many other institutions as the indictment…

AMT: Also on Twitter. Also on Facebook's Instagram feeds — you all have a problem. All four of you. Amazon, Google, Facebook... But you all have this problem do you not?

KEVIN CHAN: I wouldn't pretend to speak for other platforms. I think for Facebook we are moving very quickly and aggressively to address these issues in the ways I've mentioned. Again just to repeat we've hired — we're going to be doubling the number of people who work on security from 10,000 to 20,000. We're investing in artificial intelligence to try to proactively identify and remove prohibited content. And we're working on digital literacy Anna Maria because I think at the end of the day while we can do all that we can and we will to make Facebook inhospitable for this kind of content and these sorts of bad actors. The other day we also want to make sure that we help the ecosystem to make sure that when people — individuals — encounter content that they think critically about it and I think at the end of the day because it is people who are reading and then thinking or taking action it behooves us to also make sure that we address this from an ecosystem and a broader societal standpoint.

AMT: OK. Well Kevin Chan, thank you for your time today.

KEVIN CHAN: Thank you. Thank you for your interest.

AMT: Kevin Chan is the head of public policy at Facebook Canada. He joined us from our Ottawa studio. Let us know what you think about what he had to say. Go to the social media platforms. You can find us on Twitter @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook, or go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Tom Power is joined by author Zadie Smith. And remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening in just a few seconds. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Also a reminder we have a special edition of The Current tomorrow coming to you from Halifax. The first our three segments on Facing Race. I’ll be coming out of Halifax talking about racism in Nova Scotia’s Black community. That will be followed by Piya Chattopadhyay who is recording tonight before a live studio audience in Vancouver, and later by Duncan McCue in Montreal. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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February 20, 2018 Episode Transcript

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