Women and Women's Rights

In 2014, Margot Wallström, former minister for foreign affairs of Sweden, made headlines around the world as Sweden became the first country in the world to formally adopt a “feminist foreign policy.” Wallström joins us to discuss what a feminist foreign policy can achieve, what challenges governments may face in implementing it, and what she learned from her leadership on the world stage. Transcript VOGELSTEIN: OK, good morning, everyone. Good morning. We’re going to go ahead and get started. Good morning. Welcome, everyone, to the Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Rachel Vogelstein. I lead the Women in Foreign Policy Program here at CFR, which analyzes how elevating the status of women and girls advances U.S. foreign policy objectives. I want to begin by thanking Sundaa Bridgett-Jones of the Rockefeller Foundation and the New Ventures Fund for their generous support for our meeting today. And also would like to remind everyone that our session will be on the record. Our conversation this morning is focused on feminist foreign policy, a relatively new and growing phenomenon in international affairs. Over the past decade or so, several governments have taken steps to integrate gender equality as a pillar of foreign policy. And at the Council we have been tracking these initiatives and can report that today a rising number of nations have adopted action plans, created funds, appointed special envoys and ambassadors, and established eight targets to advance gender equality through foreign policy, defense, trade, and aid. Perhaps the most comprehensive of these efforts was articulated by the Swedish government in 2014 which, as many of you know, became the first to adopt an explicitly feminist foreign policy. And today Sweden is no longer alone in its bold approach. Last year the Canadian government launched a feminist international assistance policy. And earlier this year France proclaimed the adoption of a feminist foreign policy as well. Although the definition of what constitutes a feminist foreign policy differs, the Swedish policy we’ll hear more about is structured around three Rs—women’s rights, representation, and resources—and commits to applying a systematic gender equality perspective across the entirety of the foreign policy agenda. So how has feminist foreign policy been implemented in Sweden? And how might it be strengthened? And what should nations that prioritize gender equality in foreign affairs actually expect to achieve? For insight into these questions, we are incredibly privileged today to be joined by the honorable Margot Wallström, most recently Sweden’s foreign minister, who launched the Swedish foreign policy five years ago. In addition to her role as Sweden’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Minister Wallström has held numerous positions in the Swedish parliament, across Swedish government and the European Commission, including serving as minister for culture, European commissioner for the environment, and the first vice president of the European Commission. From 2010 to 2012 she also served as the first ever U.N. special representative to the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflicts. Please join me in welcoming Minister Wallström. (Applause.) We will begin with brief remarks and an overview from Minister Wallström, and then we will begin our discussion. So over to you. WALLSTRÖM: Thank you very much for inviting me. And first and foremost, thank you for everything that you are doing on a daily basis to work for gender equality and try to make sure that this is put into the political structures and creating a norm by which also women will be included in decision making, enjoying fully human rights and also being able to take part of the resources and the distribution of resources in each country. I’m here because actually I’m very proud and happy that yesterday I was given an award by IFES, you know, that work on electoral systems. And together with Madeleine Albright and Steve Hadley. And it was a debate about democracy and the future for democracy. And I can quote Madeleine Albright who says that I’m an optimist that worry a lot. (Laughter.) And I think that is maybe our overall impression these days, that democracy is under threat, meaning that today that more people live in countries that go in authoritarian direction that countries that develop democratically. And to me, a feminist foreign policy or a feminist policy, a feminist government is really a part of strengthening democracy because women make up half of the population on this planet. And without women participating fully, enjoying fully human rights, I don’t think democracy will thrive, of course. But also we have another reality, because I guess people—most people ask me, so why is it a foreign policy? Why should this be part of the foreign policy? And it’s rather simple, actually. We know from experience by now that more women means more peace. If women are around the table when peace deals are negotiated, then those peace agreements will last longer. There will be more options on the table when these negotiations take place. And women are good peacekeepers, as well. And also, a situation that we have today, which is—which is very unfair to women—actually from 2017, I think the last statistics show, that only seventeen women are now state of—heads of state around the world. And in 193 countries that were looked at, based on how many women there are in parliament, Rwanda, Bolivia, and Cuba are first on the list. And we are on seventh place, with 43.6 percent women. But it looks rather weak in many countries, as you know. And under the period from ’92 to 2011, more than 90 percent of all the people around the negotiating tables were men. And when it comes to peace deals, the signatures were to 96 percent men. So that’s the reality. And women still own less than 20 percent of land resources on this planet. In very many countries women are not allowed to own land, not to open a bank account. They’re still discriminated against on the labor market. They cannot take any jobs. They are married away at very young age, so they cannot choose with whom to marry or if they want children or not. And so this is—this is the stark reality that we deal with. So how can you not have a feminist foreign policy? Meaning that women should enjoy the same rights, and obligations, and opportunities as men. That’s how I define feminism. And I also understood early on that if I am to make sure that this makes a difference around the world, we have to use our diplomatic representation around the world. And of course, I can see that there were those that thought that this was a rather provocative rubric, to say it’s a feminist foreign policy. They were a big hesitant. But I also found that very soon this became something that engaged all of our embassies and all our diplomats in a rather amazing way, because they could see the needs. They started to ask different questions. And I created those parameters that they could use. I said, it has to do with rights. Check on whether women have the same legal and human rights in every country. What about child marriages? What about their rights to do—to open a bank account, or start a business, or what have you—their economic rights? Secondly, are they around the table? Do they have a seat around the table where most important decisions are being made? So what about political representation, and how can we help that? And, thirdly, about resources. What about the statistics and the facts that also—do they have gender budgeting, for example? And do we know how resources are distributed? Do they meet also the needs of girls and women? So it became—to me, it’s very practical. This is how you change the world, by being very, very practical. I’ve been involved, and I refuse to get involved, in all of those theoretical discussions about definitions, and what have you. I really think it must be a practical tool. And this is also how we can come together, because I really—I thought it was so important yesterday when people in that room, at IFES, said we had to do more by partisan projects as well, where we can unite, when we can found common ground that allow us to move forward on some of these issues. And sometimes it might mean that we say, all right, we know that we disagree on this particular issue, but let’s start with what we agree on so that we can start to change reality. So I—and I’m not saying this to defend something that goes on here that worries me a lot, which has to do with sexual and reproductive health and rights, but I find that everywhere in the world there is so much of identity politics, there is so much of polarization that it will lead to an undermining of democratic principles and democracy as such. And that’s why we really have to figure out how to move things forward. So to me, we have to be—we have to be practical. And that’s why I would say that in combination with a fourth R, which is a reality check—because its starts with a reality check. (Laughter.) I think these three Rs still works after these four years, that they have been useful parameters and tools for all our embassies also. So nothing mysterious. Not having to change everybody’s attitude first, but rather being very hands-on in looking at reforms and everything. And then we’ve had some unexpected results. And I’ll finish with that. But how it moves also into, I would say, culture, because we made a photo exhibition called Swedish Dads. And it was really photos of Swedish dads with their children. VOGELSTEIN: That’s really nice. WALLSTRÖM: Yeah, it’s very nice. It’s also simple. And we have used that around the world. And it has led to changes in the decision, where they have started with parental leave in some countries because they realized it created enormous debates, like in Rwanda, and other countries as well. They asked any citizen to any men to send in pictures of themselves and their children and write the story. And they were very moving and important. So I think it created a debate that actually in some countries changed the legislation. So I think you can use new means. And maybe the very last thing, we also did Wiki gap. As you know, Wikipedia has a 90 percent of all editors are men. So it means that there are so many stories that are never put out on Wikipedia. So we only opened up sort of a platform for those who wanted to write the stories about women and make women more visible in—on Wikipedia. And so we’ve had so many more articles and so much more information put out there. And an enormous interest also in this. And we will continue with that. So I think you had to use all of these ideas as well to change reality. To me, it’s about democracy. To me, it’s about this is the hope, I think, for our world. What women and young people are doing. I think we can—we can change things around, and just have to mobilize and create the opportunities for women. Q: May I just add that the Swedish Dads is at display in house of Sweden right now. So you can come and see the exhibition. WALLSTRÖM: Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. And I’m happy to answer some questions. VOGELSTEIN: Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, we are certainly, here are the Council, following your lead, and tracking the policies under this rubric of feminist foreign policy that you’ve articulated and led several years ago. We are also, incidentally, following your lead on the Wikipedia front, and hosting an event here at the Council—I’m turning to Rebecca Turkington, our assistant director—on November 12 at 6:00 p.m. to help write women into foreign policy on Wikipedia, by literally sitting around and editing Wikipedia right here at the Council. So we hope that we’ll see many of you back for that as well. Minister, I will start with a few questions for you, and then invite all of our participants to join a discussion. I wonder if I could start by asking you to just reflect back a bit on the past four or five years. Since you launched Sweden’s feminist foreign policy, you’ve just now handed over the portfolio to the incoming foreign minister in Sweden. What were some of the biggest challenges that you faced in implementing and pursuing a feminist foreign policy in your country? And where do you think the Swedish government should pick up and focus its efforts going forward? WALLSTRÖM: Well, I’ve heard already, of course, that my successor Ann Linde will continue with a feminist foreign policy. And she also, as a trade minister, which she was before, looked at, for example, the mystery of why women’s shirts are so much more expensive when it comes to trade and customs. (Laughter.) So why would there be a higher—higher price on women’s shirts? And so I am confident that Sweden will continue with a feminist foreign policy. I think—I, of course, understood that if you choose the concept or if you choose to call it a feminist foreign policy, feminism has a negative connotation in some countries and an interpretation that is very often twisted in a negative way. So I knew that I would have to start to explain what we look like and what we mean by this. So it was important immediately to decide how should we address that? How do we work on this through all our embassies and through our diplomatic representation? But as soon as we got that done, as we are doing now with what we call a drive for democracy, we are doing exactly the same thing. We are creating the parameters to say: Can we find allies? And we work more with the Ds—you see that I like this alliteration or to use it to make it simple. But we have to use dialogue. We have to use debate. We have to fight sort of the doomsday feeling that we live with. We have to, again, find a very practical means to work on issue like that. So it was—and we had to put up a structure within the ministry as well, so to make sure that this lives on. And we had done so. And you know that there is even a handbook on the feminist foreign policy. And I think it is very fair in showing both the problems and challenges that we had, but also the successes in some of the figures, and how you—because how do you measures success? As with everything else, you had to define, you know, how to follow up, and also to make priorities. So every year we have an action plan with clear priorities. For example, economic issues or economic opportunities for women, or if we do more on the sexual and reproductive health issues, or if we work on violence against women. So we make every year a list of priorities, and it was then also clear for all our embassies that this is what they should focus on. I think that has—that will live on. So it’s not a whim. It’s something that is a structured approach. And I think also to work on the network with women mediators and negotiators. And we expanded that, so it’s now fifteen women, well-experienced diplomats, that are now deployed to war or post-war situations and negotiations in many countries, from Colombia to Afghanistan. And I think they are doing stellar job, all of them. And this has also spread. So now there are these networks of women mediators around the world. This is something that the U.S. could follow up on immediately, with all your—and I think there are an international network also, of course a lot of American women as well. So—and I know now they are being held in Africa and other parts of the world as well. VOGELSTEIN: Very promising model. I wonder if you could compare/contrast the approach that Sweden has taken with, for example, what we have seen the Trudeau government has articulate on a feminist international assistance policy in Canada, or even the recent proclamation from the French government in advance of the G-7 this summer that France now has a feminist foreign policy. What are the fundamental building blocks that you would like to see in any government’s articulation of a feminist foreign policy? Is it the three Rs? What are you looking to see when you’re evaluating other nations taking this approach? WALLSTRÖM: I think it is easier for many countries to start with development policy, because it is clearly many of the projects that countries are carrying out in the world really are directed towards the needs of women and girls. And we can see that that’s necessary to save lives, women and children’s lives. And also what role women play in most of these projects. They are the ones who do a lot of the work also when it comes to development projects. So that is not controversial at all. That is not controversial. So I think every country has to choose their own sort of priorities. And I have not had time to—maybe you know more, actually. You’ve done the comparisons, so you can see how they approach it. And I’ve not been able to sort over the very last months been able to follow exactly how it is being carried out. I hope that that this serves as an inspiration, but I think every country has to find their own—their own way forward, and not forget that this is about peace and security. It’s not a women’s issue. So thank you to the men who come also, because we—(laughter)—it’s not a women’s issue. It is really about peace and security and development. Without women, we cannot have neither peace, nor security, nor anymore development. So that’s very important. And it’s not an exclusive policy, but inclusive. And that is why we have to keep it also on the Security Council’s agenda. And we served as a permanent member and really pushed very hard. And just to give you one example, we wanted to make sure that in every resolution, in every sort of written statement from the Security Council this should be mentioned, that we should not ignore sort of the role of women. And in the end, my Ambassador Olof Skoog to the U.N. said: You know, I was always the one raising my hand saying: Where are the women? Are they mentioned in resolutions? Are they there as peacekeepers? Are they around the table? And in the end, I thought, is this really getting the result we want, that I have to nag on about this all the time? (Laughter.) But then the whole Security Council traveled to Mali, and when they got to Mali women came up to Olof and said: Thank you very much, because without that formulation in the resolution we would not have been at the table here. We would not have had a seat. So it is important what you do also in the Security Council to make sure that there are gender advisors, that violence against women is looked at, that sexual violence is mentioned in the resolutions. If, I’m sorry, but it’s still the fact. If women do not ask for that, it is not given. In fact, it won’t be even looked at or mentioned in resolutions or in reports. So we just have to make sure that this comes naturally. Now other countries also ask the question: Where are the women? They look after the whole issue. So I think we are slowly moving in the right direction. VOGELSTEIN: Right. And eighty-two countries now that have articulated national action plans on women, peace and security. So hopefully a growing body of nations more focused on asking precisely those questions. I wonder if we can take you back to 2015, and to some of the criticism that you heard upon issuing this new policy. And I want to talk specifically about Saudi Arabia, which you recall recalled its ambassador from Stockholm in response to statements about, at the time, a very public flogging of a blogger. There was a cancellation of a military agreement between Sweden and Saudi Arabia. And there were leaders of businesses, prominent businesses in Sweden, signing a letter that objected to these events, warning that this new policy would ruin Sweden’s reputation as a trading partner. So I wonder if you could respond to the controversy that took place then, and reflect on whether it is inevitable that the pursuit of feminist foreign policy, from time to time, would come into conflict with other national security interests, and how do you weigh those competing priorities? WALLSTRÖM: I think as a political leader you have to show, and I tell young diplomats when they come to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that they have to be courageous but also patient. Sometimes change will take time. But they have to be courageous. And we have to be courageous. If you only do the things that nobody will ever criticize or have another—have opinions on, then I don’t think you’re doing any good, and I don’t think you should be a leader. (Laughs.) You have to be—you have to put your—what do you say? You have to put your chin up, or your— Q: Yeah, stick your neck out? WALLSTRÖM: Stick your neck out. (Laughter.) Confusing with a Swedish expression. I think you have to stick your neck out now and then. And you have to do what you think is right. And with Saudi Arabia, we had—it was some mix of things, where we finished a military agreement on cooperation at the same time as I made a statement about the flogging of this blogger, which continues to be a debate with Saudi Arabia. And was I right or not? What has happened in Saudi Arabia? What are they doing? They killed Khashoggi. And of course we have to criticize this. I was a rather lonely voice. And I got criticized by some not-so-courageous business leaders. Actually, nothing happened. Nothing negative happened to these companies. Not at all the things that they threatened. And I think on the contrary, very many of the Swedish companies who are serious and want to invest in countries—also countries that we disagree—where we disagree on their sort of policy or their laws and what have you, they will always say that it is easier for us to say as investors in a country that respects human rights, or where we can trust the respect for the law or, you know, all of those things are in place. But I think we’ve sorted it out. And I actually visited Saudi Arabia not long ago, just a few weeks ago. And we can respect each other, and we’ve overcome also these problems. But you have to stand your ground. And I think these days respect for human rights is so important. But that’s what happened. So of could you will be criticized. And you just have to make sure that you can keep a dialogue open, and that we can sometimes agree to disagree, but continue to talk. So we actually also talk to Iran because, you know, you have to—you have to be able to talk directly to them, speak directly to them, as much as we disagree with what they do. VOGELSTEIN: Lessons on leadership for all of us. I wonder if I can ask you about the issue of sexual violence, recalling your prior role as the first ever special representative to the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict. I wonder your perspective on the rise of the global #MeToo movement, and whether treatment of sexual violence in general, or sexual violence in particular, whether you perceive any change in response to the growing level of activism by women on this issue around the world. WALLSTRÖM: I really hope so. I really hope that it leads to a change. First of all, in the fact that we can talk openly about this, that it can be mentioned, that women can talk also to each other about what they have experienced. Now, this is extremely important. But it has to move from that to also looking at, so what happens? Is there total impunity for these type of crimes? And what do you do to change those things? And this is my personal view. I actually also think as long as we have prostitution and the kind of pornography that is allowed today, I think it will be very difficult to work for gender equality. I think as long as you can buy another person’s body, as we see in prostitution, and also the very violent pornography. Not that I’m—you know, people can watch pornography. But today most of it is violent—extremely violent. And we know that so many of even twenty-year-old boys, they start their sort of—this is the first thing they see when they are experiencing their own sexuality. And that—if this sort of shapes their idea of what it is with sex, then we are in big trouble. I think it is—it plays out in some way or another. But that’s my personal take on it. I think there are a number of elements that we have to analyze to see how we can change the respect—and it starts with schools, with boys also respecting girls. So we have to start very early with children how to teach them to respect each other. VOGELSTEIN: I want to bring in many of the experts around the room, some of whom also have been working on the issue of feminist foreign policy. WALLSTRÖM: But can I just say one more thing? VOGELSTEIN: Please, yes. WALLSTRÖM: Because I must say that those couple of years when I worked as the U.N. special representation on conflict-related sexual violence, and the trips that we made to conflict and war areas, and the women that we met, because most of them—there were also men who were victims of this, but mostly women and girls. And that changed me forever. And it changed me in a way that I keep saying it gave me nightmares and a heavier heart in many ways, but also more hope for the future, paradoxically enough, because these women also refused to be seen only as victims. They said, well, we want to be able to influence our own future, our own lives, and our societies. And one could see clearly how that affects not only an individual, a family, but a village. And then a whole country, in the end. And I think the—can I just share a story? It’s like an anecdote, but it will take only one minute. Because I remember that in the DRC there was this—we visited Saldekut (ph), which is a place where some of these victims of sexual violence are being helped. And we met this girl who was sitting, like, on her hands, not looking up the whole time that we were there. And she was there with her father. And he told the story about this girl and her friend that went home from school one day. When a military jeep stopped and asked them to buy cigarettes. And when they came back with the cigarettes, the girls were taken onto this vehicle and then taken away for, like, three days. And when this girl came home, he said, the light had gone out from her eyes. And she was the first girl in this family who had gone to school, who was able to go to school. And she was the most clever girl in the whole school. And all the hopes of this village was connected to this girl. And she was destroyed—completely destroyed. And I was thinking, this is—you know, what does the DRC want to be seen as? And how does it want to be presented? Not the rape country or the rape capital, but really something else, where also young girls can have a future. So I think it goes so deep in a society when this happens, and when it is allowed, or followed by impunity. So this is like the stories that follow me from then on. And one has to understand. And the same thing can happen for a person who is—and a woman who is raped, that it will destroy very much of her own life, and future, and also sometimes her family or her daughters. It will affect the way you think about life, and your role, and your worth. So I think this is a very important discussion that we’re having. VOGELSTEIN: And yet, you remain an optimist. WALLSTRÖM: Yeah, because they also—we told this girl, it’s not your fault. It’s not your—you are not to blame. It’s the perpetrators. And that was the first time she looked up and looked at us. She needed to hear that. She’s not to blame. And that often the victims are the ones who are being blamed. And so she wants to have an education. She wanted to have an education and go on. So those are—I think we must remember those stories. VOGELSTEIN: A powerful story, indeed. I want to bring in others with questions. Why don’t we start over here? Please. Q: I’m Tami Hultman from AllAfrica.com. You may have encountered our co-founder Amadou Mahtar Ba, who was appointed to the U.N. secretary-general’s high-level panel on women’s empowerment and is working very hard as one of the few men on that on these issues. I wonder if you could reflect a bit—and we’re going to adopt your photo idea for pan-Africa. But I wonder if you could reflect a bit about what difference having women in policy positions could do for peacebuilding in Africa. As you know, there are many courageous women working on peacebuilding, including young people in some of the worst conflict situations. But what difference would it make? And do you have any examples about kind of peacebuilding in Africa? WALLSTRÖM: Yeah. I think it is what I tried to say before, what our mediators say, and negotiators say is that when you get women around the table you will have—we mustn’t think that we are better. I mean, we would like to think that we are better. (Laughter.) But that’s not the point. We are not. We come with different—with a different perspective, with other experiences and with other ideas, with new ideas. And when you bring all of that on the table, you will have—you will be better equipped to find a good solution. And I think that this is what happens also in Africa, where many women actually do so much of the practical work, the day-to-day work. And they are not the ones with the gun and the uniform, or with power, or with money. But they are the ones who know how everyday life must be organized very often. And when you bring that to the table, you will have another solution, hopefully. And we can see it in Syria. We can see it in Yemen, because the Yemeni women also, they—they say, well, we have to struggle to make sure that we can find clean water every day or find medicine for our kids. And we have to be very inventive to do that. And these are things that you can use in peace and negotiation. And we want to have a voice. We want to give our voices to that debate. And I think this is what they experience, that it gives another sort of perspective or aspect to any peace negotiation. And without them, how can we keep peace? If you don’t have it ingrained in the whole society, how can you keep peace? So I think for Africa also very, very important with these networks of women who can be negotiators and help. Not only the warring parties, but most of the conflicts today are actually civilian turmoil conflicts, or it’s not army to army. So they are already part of the conflicts, but as victims mostly. VOGELSTEIN: Thank you. We’re going to come over here to Stephanie, please. Q: Oh, it’s on. OK. Hi. Stephanie Foster, formerly at the State Department. And just worked with Susan and Our Secure Future on a paper about feminist foreign policy in the U.S. So as a part of that, we interviewed a lot of people. And one of the things that people agreed on a lot is that there is a need for women’s voices. We saw less agreement about how that would translate to policy, right? Where there’s a—how do you say just because we have women around the table, you know, is there a direct correlation to a policy that’s more feminist, and what that means. And so I’m curious about how you see that sort of tension, because there can be women around the table who are not feminists or would advocate for non-feminist policy. So I think that’s always kind of how we figure out the need for more women, but then how we bring in other allies who are feminists who are men, and how we think about moving from just women’s representation as a goal to the policy goal. WALLSTRÖM: Hmm. Well, this is why I think it is important to decide on what it is that you want to achieve. And to me, of course, it is—the starting point is about democracy. It’s about the fact that women cannot be excluded in the way they are today. It’s not—you know, you cannot have peace agreements that allows 96 percent of those who put those signatures on those are men. It will never be long lasting peace agreements or peace deals. And then you had to look at—so we had all the facts. From the World Bank and others, we have the fact—the facts are clear of how much more of economic growth we would have if we were sort of given the opportunities to do business or to be involved in—given the economic opportunities as well. So it’s really about equality as well in the bigger picture. But you can start by saying that violence costs a lot, violence against women. And that exists everywhere. So you can start by saying it’s rationale to see what we can do to fight violence against women. We can make sure that women enjoy that they are not discriminated again. We can start there, with putting the bar sort of at not accepting discrimination. And of course, I belong to those that hope that there could be an Equal Rights Amendment, but that’s for your to decide. (Laughter.) But you know, so you have to decide yourselves where you think—what is practical, and how can you move things forward. So I think that you have to—and I think it’s important to move to the practical outcome as soon as possible, because otherwise one can get stuck in the sort of opposing views on society, but rather what it is that we can unite around? VOGELSTEIN: From feminist foreign policy to feminist domestic policy. WALLSTRÖM: Yeah. Well, it is also domestic policy in the end, because you have to live according to this. You have to deliver yourself on, for example, then what do you do against discrimination against women, and what do you do on fighting violence or the representation issue as well. So that’s important. We also have a feminist government. And we have gender budgeting. So we check—and to get the facts right is very important in many countries. You start by looking at—do you have the statistics here? Where does money go? Do you know? And what about the needs of women? How do you check on that? So very often you have to get the reality checked out as well. VOGELSTEIN: That fourth R. WALLSTRÖM: I don’t know if that was not a proper answer to your question. (Laughter.) But I think there’s a lot to think about. VOGELSTEIN: We’re going to come over here. Please. Q: Hi. My name is Federiga Bindi. I direct the foreign policy initiative at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. A few years ago you said that you were—that you and another group of Nordic foreign ministers wrote a letter to Federica Mogherini asking her to name a special envoy for gender, which she eventually did with Mara Marinaki. So my first question is, how would you evaluate her work in terms of feminist foreign policy, both in terms of policy and in terms of appointments? Because it’s true that you have to put forward foreign policy policies, but if you want to promote the values you really need to appoint women ambassadors around the country, or in a given case around different delegations. So I would like to, you know, know more about that. WALLSTRÖM: I will not make it sort of a personal thing to Marinaki. I really think that I am not satisfied with progress within the European Union. I think we could have done so much more in making sure that every member state has a national action plan on 1325. I think we have to look at appointments, as you say. I think we have to look at the way we, through our military or civilian missions, how are women represented, not at all to an extent that would make me pleased. So there is much more to do. But I think Marinaki has sort of picked up the battle. She’s trying to do a lot of things. But also member states have to understand that we have to be credible by how we appoint people and what we do in also formulating the missions. And I think Federica has also struggled, but I am not entirely pleased. I think we can do much more. VOGELSTEIN: Come over to Kathleen. Q: Oh, thank you very much. So nice to see you again, Minister. And congratulations on your award last evening at IFES. I wanted to come back to your concern about sexual violence. Yesterday in the New York Times there was an article about the use of certainly technology and online pornography, and especially very radicalized sexual abuse of children. And apparent Facebook’s message is one of the primary carriers of this kind of material. I want to bring it forward, because how do we—how do we deal with this in terms of policy? Because we have businesses and technology that have kind of carte blanch. We have—we are in love with our technology, but at the same time it creates openings that really are horrific. And how do we make sense within the Women, Peace and Security agenda on this, because, well, it has entered our warzones as well? WALLSTRÖM: I wish I had an answer to that. I really don’t know. And I can say I know that every time you even try to mention pornography you will be labeled as a moralist and, you know, this is really up to—and I’m just saying one thing. You can look yourselves. You know, it will take ten seconds for your twelve-year-old boy to find PornHub, or whatever it’s called. I had to do this myself. And I was so afraid that my son would find, you know, use my computer and see that. (Laughs.) You know, it was just funny because even though this is not something I would do. But I had to see what it is. And what I learned also from Gail Dines—she’s a professor and she gives speeches about this—is, for example, they used—for a long time there used to be an unwritten rule about not dressing up actors in porn films as children, because it would sort of trigger pedophilia. But now all of those rules are gone long time ago. And it’s so violent you cannot believe. And you can say—you can try to raise your children, of course, in the best possible way, but this is available to anyone. And this is what most of them also look at. So if this is how they think sex should be between people, then we are in trouble. I have no idea what—how to attack this, other than I really think we should know. And I’m sorry, but I had to look at it myself, just to know what we’re talking about. And the same thing with prostitution, because in Germany—since there is a debate constantly about this. Should we label it as sex work or is it prostitution? And of course, if it’s sex work, should you be compelled to do it as well then? And what about Germany and the Netherlands, that have—where this is legal, and where they think that maybe as much as four hundred thousand women are working as sex workers? Do you think they are German? Do you think they are from the Netherlands? Ninety-eight percent is from other countries because they cannot meet the demand. So it drives trafficking. They have to get women from Albania, or Georgia, or from Africa, Nigeria. So those are the places where most of these prostitutes come from. And it’s hell on Earth. I’m sorry, but this is just destroying our societies. And as long as this is—there are offers. You can get there, you can have a beer, a sausage, and you can choose any woman for a fixed price. As long as we have that, can we talk about gender equality, and thinking that women will be respected if this is allowed? That’s where we are, if you ask me. I get a bit cynical about this, but I really think that this is problematic. And I don’t know how we—I really— Q: In terms of the business of— WALLSTRÖM: Yeah, I think you have to—you know, you have to look at— Q: And, you know, Silicon Valley. WALLSTRÖM: Yeah, maybe, yeah. Q: Because, I mean, we’re talking Facebook, people use it every day. And this is children now. It’s not even adults. WALLSTRÖM: Yeah. I think that this—that’s what I—that’s what I think is important to do. I haven’t had time to engage on this in particular, but I think that’s probably the way forward. VOGELSTEIN: Thank you. Thank you. Beverly, please. Q: Thank you so much. And it’s nice to see you. I want to follow up on Kathleen’s question because you mentioned the actors with impunity. And at CSIS we hosted President Jahjaga a few months ago and she talked about rape as a weapon of war, and how twenty years after the Kosovar War almost none of the people who committed the acts of sexual violence have been brought to justice. So how do we work to bring the people who are doing these crimes to justice? WALLSTRÖM: Well, that’s the first objective, to end impunity for these crimes. And that was also—I think this is the role for the Security Council. I think we have the legal instruments for doing that. We have good resolutions that give us the—all the arguments why and how we can do it. But we also have to convince countries and governments to follow up. And that’s why it’s so important to check on that this is mentioned, also in peace agreements, and not to give forgiveness for this crime all the time, you know, that you just move on—forget about this, and you just move on. But rather, go after and make sure that this is also part. I think there—we have the legal instruments, but we just have to carry on and make sure that it is made visible. Very, very important. Q: Thank you. VOGELSTEIN: Katherine, please. Q: Katherine Marshall from Georgetown University. I think we perceive a backlash that’s happening against feminism. I’d be interested in your view on that, whether it’s in terms of rethinking human rights, which is quite frightening, but also the whole sort of focus on the family, which you see in reservations to U.N. conventions. What I guess, first of all, how much—how significant do you see it, but also is this the last gasp that we sort of watch with anxiety? Or is it something that you see as something new? WALLSTRÖM: It— Q: Can I? WALLSTRÖM: Yes. Q: I think it would be efficient—Sandra Pepera from NDI—for me to piggyback that, because my question was very much more about how do we protect this issue around gender equality in the rise of very toxic, nationalistic conservativism, fundamentalism in many of our countries. I’m a Brit. I’m just horrified at what’s going on in the U.K. right now. But I think, you know, it’s not just at sort of the multilateral level. Sweden, I think, you’ve evolved to a place where some of these base understandings are shared within the society. But you also have a rising right wing. How are you going to or how do you suggest we all think about ensuring that that space for gender equality doesn’t become part of the sort of nationalist tropes, the use of gender as sort of dog whistle politics, to undermine rights across the board? WALLSTRÖM: It is already, unfortunately. And you can see that in those countries with autocrats taking power, they often start by attacking women in one way or the other or making reforms that undermine the rights of women. So this is definitely an element that we can see in many countries right now. And we have to look out for that, and we have to fight back. And I think we just have to organize more, mobilize more women. And we have to raise our voices about this. And we have to make it clear to everybody that this is part of the tactic to oppress women. And at the same time, it’s really two different images that I see also around the world, with so many strong women that really make headway and helps to reform countries. But on the other hand, there is definitely a pushback from all of these more authoritarian leaders that we see around the world. So it often starts with that. And we have to explain this. That is part of a tactic. And also, the redefinition of—as you said—the redefinition of human rights. Only some rights should be given, or culture comes first, or development come first, before you can exercise human rights. So you give human rights to everybody. So this is why it belongs to a debate about democracy and how to preserve democracy, and democratic rules and principles. And it worries me a lot. So it has to do with politics, in the end. VOGELSTEIN: Come here, and then we’ll come over here. Please. Q: Yeah. I’m from Development Gateway. We’re an NGO that worked closely with Canada’s foreign—feminist international assistance policy and then foreign assistance policy. And a big part of that—implementing that was benchmarking, and trying to figure out, you know, what’s the best practical measure versus what’s, you know, evidence-based and theoretical. So I’m wondering, from you experience, you talked a lot about, you know, getting women at the negotiating table and also looking at budgets. But are there other good tools, other good metrics maybe that you come across that kind of help galvanize the foreign policy behind this feminist initiative? WALLSTRÖM: I think you will find—in the handbook, you will find some examples of this. Also what has been done and the things that we think are working. And I mean, we have to start sort of early on also. We have to look at how is this described in—even in schools, you know, with children? What do we teach children about respect for each other and about the different gender roles that we are given? And the whole way through, looking at—because we need to have also a legal framework and a normative situation that allows us to claim our rights also as women. This is very important. But you also have to be engaged in a debate in society about these things that allows us to raise our voices. And I think you have to use all the statistics. As I said, I think the World Bank provides a good basis for a follow up on the things that now restrict women and provides—actually constitutes discrimination of women. And then you have to, in every sort of—in different situations and countries, you have to choose your—set your own agenda, where you think you have to start. But now it’s really about—it’s not enough to put the thumbs-up on social media for things. We have to sort of meet. And we have to sometimes take to the streets and demonstrate also when we see that our rights are violated, or that the autocrats are taking over instead. VOGELSTEIN: Some very practical action steps. I recognize we’re close to the end of our time so I’m going to ask each of our remaining questioners to go in series and then give Minister Wallström an opportunity to respond to all of you. So why don’t we start here? Q: OK. Thank you, Minister. Alanna Galati from Guttmacher Institute. Sweden seems to be one of the only countries that will speak as forcefully about feminism or gender as well as sexual reproductive health and rights. So I would like to just understand why you are able to make that bridge when so many other countries, including the U.S., are not? VOGELSTEIN: Thank you. Come over here, please. Q: Thank you. My name is Saskia Brechenmacher. I’m a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. My question was around sort of the framing of feminist foreign policy. I think in our current moment a lot of people feel excluded from foreign policy in general and feel that foreign policy hasn’t really served them and their communities, both here but I think in other countries around the world as well, and that it’s a mostly elite-driven process. And that’s to the extent that people are even tuned into foreign policy and follow it at all. So given that reality, how do you make the case that feminism is the right lens to arrive at a more inclusive foreign policy, rather than just reinforcing some of these sort of in-group/out-group dynamics where people feel , oh, this is just about women. This is not about me. Or it’s just about elite women. It’s not about me. So kind of making the case that feminism is a lens to look at other factors of inclusion, not just the inclusion of women. VOGELSTEIN: Thank you. And then finally here, please. Q: Katherine Shultzenall (ph), Princeton University. I wanted to return back to a question that Rachel asked, about the balance between promoting feminism and also comparing other national security priorities—particularly around Russia, when thinking about this, the decriminalization of domestic violence in 2017, and at the same time, you know, Sweden sort of ramped up preparation for sort of Russian aggression, should it happen in the Baltics and what the Defense Ministry has been doing in those terms. So I’m curious if you can kind of talk to how—particularly in the case with Russia—how you sort of critique without villainizing in a way that I think might sort of spur greater tensions. VOGELSTEIN: OK. So we have sexual and reproductive health and rights, inclusivity, and finally Russia. (Laughter.) In two minutes or less. WALLSTRÖM: In two minutes. No, but these are most sort of—as all other issues—they’re most clever issues on also sexual and reproductive health and rights, because it makes sense. Because from everything we know about working on also in development and aid policies, if we do not take that into account, we will not be effective. So it’s both the smart and the right thing to do, to make sure that there is—that this is included. And I think this also goes way back. With development assistance we’ve always looked sexual and reproductive health and rights, because we clearly can see the reality in so many countries where this saves lives. It saves women’s and children’s lives. And also to us it’s very basic. But of course, I understand that this is—it’s controversial here, and also in some other countries. But out there, this is a must. And we have to continue to fight for this. I think also it’s clever to—and it’s connected. All those questions are connected also. Why a feminist lens? And does it mean that we—and, again, it means that this is not—as I say, it’s not a women’s issue. It is a peace and security issue because more women means more peace. And that’s why it is important. And it’s important for men and well. So we need—I think I scared away the only man. (Laughter.) Maybe when I started on the pornography. (Laughter.) But I think we have to make sure that in looking at Syria, how can you—how can you arrive at peace in Syria without allowing women’s place in the constitutional commission or at the table, or taking into account the suffering of women, but also the role that they play? How can you do it in Russia? And we have to be able to criticize what they are doing on a legislation like that, on domestic violence, and at the same time be clear about our sort of policy versus Russia. So we have to do both. And I think you arrive at—if you have a clear policy like this, then they know what to expect. They know what I will ask. When we meet, they know exactly what are the points that I will raise with them. So we put ourselves also clearly on a spot where they know what to expect. And I think this is a good thing to do as a politician. And often they are prepared, of course, with a response. But it means that we can open up to a dialogue also on the difficult questions. So to me, it’s just it belongs there. And we cannot have peace for men and boys if we are not also involved in looking at the opportunities for women. And this is missing. They are not there. They are not represented very often. Still it’s so difficult to get them to the negotiating table. In Yemen as well, women are desperate. They are the ones that hold life up in the rubbles of war. But they are not allowed in. And when they came to Stockholm to discuss, one woman. One women. And then a group of experts. So they were considered the experts, but they were not part of the official delegations. So we are—still it’s a long way to go. And they know this. They know—in their hearts they know that women—they depend so much on the women to keep peace. So to us it’s a natural part of everything that we do. And sexual and reproductive health and rights is one of the priorities among many, but it is also about violence, or economic opportunities, and so on. But without it, we would not be effective because it saves lives. And we have this campaign, Midwives for All, which has been really successful also. VOGELSTEIN: Well, clearly a lot of work still to do, but no doubt the framework you’ve articulated will continue to be studied and emulated for many years to come. So we want to thank you for your time, for your leadership, and for sharing your pioneering work with us here today. Please join me in thanking Minister Wallström. (Applause.) WALLSTRÖM: Thank you very much. And I wish you all the best also. And let’s see what happens in the future. I will find one way or the other to continue to engage on this. (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.

Since March, millions of Hong Kongers have protested their government’s proposed law to allow the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China. Although Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam recently announced the withdrawal of the extradition bill, protesters continue to call for all five of their campaign demands, including universal suffrage, an independent inquiry into police brutality, that protests not be classified as riots, and the dropping of all charges against demonstrators. Our speakers Denise Ho, Hong-Kong based artist, pro-democracy and LGBTQ rights activist, and Joshua Wong, secretary-general of youth political group Demosistō, discussed Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, the role women play in the demonstrations, and their testimony at the Congressional-Executive Commission on China with activist and University of Washington PhD student Brian Leung.  STONE: All right. We have a friendly group tonight, I can tell. I can tell this is going to be a good conversation, a good meeting, a good roundtable. Thank you so much to everyone that is with us tonight. I want to wish you a very good evening. My name is Meighan Stone, and if I didn’t already get a chance to personally welcome you, thank you so much for making time to join us tonight. We’re grateful for your presence and for all that you’re going to bring to this conversation. If we haven’t met before, I’m a senior fellow here at CFR in our Women and Foreign Policy Program. And before joining our talented team here at CFR, I served as president of Malala Yousafzai’s foundation, the Malala Fund. So really grateful to be able to talk about human rights tonight with such an esteemed audience. So a word, a friendly word, tonight we’re on the record. So I know that many CFR events are not on the record. Tonight is on the record. I had a couple people ask me if they can take their phones out and take photos or Tweet. And I’m here to say yes. (Laughs.) Please. I see already. You know, we want to expand this discussion beyond the room, and so everything tonight will be on the record. So our structure tonight is we’re going to have a conversation for about thirty minutes with our speakers, until 7:30, and then we’re going to open it up to your questions, which I’m sure will be a really vibrant discussion. So think about your questions in advance. We’re going to open it up at 7:30. So why don’t we just dive right in and get started? So as we know, just to set the stage, since the spring and summer Hong Kongers have very bravely taken to the streets for over fifteen straight weeks in more than four hundred separate demonstrations, involving more than eight million people of all ages, including children. We know that the youngest protestor who’s been arrested was twelve years old. So let that settle in for a minute. They joined together in unprecedented protest against their government’s proposed law to allow the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China, a law that would apply to liberal activists and also to the over eighty thousand Americans who call Hong Kong their home. So although Hong Kong’s chief executive Carrie Lam recently announced the withdrawal of the extradition bill, protestors continue to call for all five of their campaign demands, including universal suffrage, an independent inquiry into police brutality, that the protests no be classified as riots, and dropping of all charges against demonstrators. So tonight we’re very honored to host our speakers to share about this movement that’s really inspiring the world right now and continuing to unfold quite literally every day. Dense Ho, who’s a Hong Kong-based artist, pro-democracy and LGBTQ rights activist, and Joshua Wong, secretary-general of youth political group Demosistō. And I also want to give a very special welcome to some other key members of their leaderless pro-democracy movement that are here this evening who were part of the delegation to D.C., who are all joining us tonight. I want to recognize them because they’re all risking their lives, their jobs, their educations, their families for this cause. And they really are showing us that coalitions and young people can change policy. So Nathan Law is the founding chair, if you want to raise your hand, of student activist group Demosistō. Brian Leung is a doctoral student at the University of Washington who read out a statement on protestors’ behalf at the July 1 occupation of the Legislative Council. He was the only unmasked protestor that day. And I want to give a special thanks to Jeffrey, who’s a doctoral student at Georgetown here in town, and he’s been working with us very closely on planning this gathering. Thank you, Jeffrey. So let’s just jump right in and start talking about actually the last few days here in D.C. So right here in Washington you’ve done an incredible amount of outreach. I have to say that yesterday the atmosphere was electric at the Congressional Executive Commission on China. At the hearing you had the key leaders from both parties and both chambers expressing very strong support for your cause. I know that you had extensive meetings on the Hill today, yesterday, and that there’s two pieces of legislation that we’d love to hear about, and the nature of those meetings. Those two pieces of legislation are the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which would make officials in China and Hong Kong vulnerable to sanctions, require annual recertification by the U.S. secretary of state of Hong Kong’s autonomy, that results in its special trade and businesses privileges, and prohibit U.S. visa denials related to convictions of offenses that are related to these kinds of demonstrations. The second piece of legislation is the Protect Hong Kong Act, which would bar U.S. companies from exporting equipment used to violently crack down on peaceful protesters. So can you share with us about the nature of your engagement on the Hill? What have legislators been saying to you on both sides of the aisle? And how has your reception been in D.C. as you’re talking about these two bills? I’ll start with you, Denise. HO: Hello everyone. Thank you so much for making the time to be here. I would really want to thank Meighan, because it all started out with an email, and I had no idea it would become something huge like this. So thank you so much. Just a short introduction of myself. I am a singer and activist from Hong Kong. My activism started in 2014 in the Umbrella Movement, where I was moved by students like Joshua Wong, and Nathan, and the other students. And so I was among the protests and I was arrested and detained on the last day, in the seventy-ninth day. So this time, five years later in 2019, I’m also, you know, moved by another group of a newer generation of students which I would like to introduce. Sunny here, Sunshine, Joey (sp), and Kex (ph) here. They are from the university IDA (sic; IAD), the group IDA (sic; IAD), which is—they are reaching out to international governments to advocate on the issues of Hong Kong. And so this time were are in D.C. to push—to advocate the Congress on the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. So I would like to pass the floor to Joshua. WONG: Thanks for the invitation. I’m Joshua. Last time when we traveled to Washington was two years ago, before I went to prison. During that time is around May of 2017, only five lawmaker cosponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. But with the recent summer of discontent, it really impressed lots of Hong Kongers continued to come to the street, and also kept our international advocacy campaign. So I will help you have a brief sharing of what’s going on in Hong Kong and what’s our advocacy in the United States and in the international community. As you guys are all aware, oh how more than two million Hong Kongers took to the street in the middle of June. And I remember when I was in prison at middle of June, I saw TV news, and really impressed by how Hong Kong people, under the hardline oppression, they still keep on the fight, and with our calls to free election and stop police brutality. In the past five years, after the end of Umbrella Movement, we experienced activists being jailed, lawmaker just—(inaudible)—democratically elected (but later on and sent ?) by Beijing. Book publisher being physically kidnapped from Hong Kong to mainland China, and also foreign correspondent from Financial Times being expelled from Hong Kong. The only observation for us is how one country two system eroded to be one country, one and a half system. And with the recent protests, we urge government completely withdraw the extradition bill, but it result in Hong Kong riot police fire more than three thousand canister of tear gas, more than 1,500 activists who are arrested, two hundred of them, including me, who were prosecuted especially with, just mentioned, the twelve years old primary school kid being arrested, and also two young professionals joined the protest peacefully result in permanent blindness. But with all type of pressure and blame from Beijing what we are asking for is just a fundamental goal and the promise of Beijing mentioned in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which means free election. We hope to elect our own government by our laws. And that’s a demand under the current existing constitutional framework. So after expressing all the will, all the police brutality, and the demands of Hong Kong people, I can emphasize more on our goal during our trip to Washington. As we all know that 1 of October is the Chinese national day. And with the threat of Beijing, we still have mass mobilization. But we urge the world, keep the eyes on Hong Kong, and we especially empathize on three demands. The first is we urge the U.S. Congress to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. And the second goal is we hope U.S. government to stop export riot weapon, including tear gas and rubber bullets, from U.S. to Hong Kong police force. We strongly realize and urge U.S. government should not be the partner or giving any endorsement to Hong Kong police crackdown on human rights. And for the third issue, I think it’s really significant to have a bill on the U.S. foreign policy to China and Hong Kong. And with our experience—no matter Denise Ho, Sunny, Joey, and I—we joined the Congress here in yesterday, and we strongly experienced the situation is far more better than what was going on five years ago during Umbrella Movement. With the soft power expansion in Australia and Canada, with the Belt and Road Initiative in European country, and the chaos of the trade negotiation, and how people are aware of uprising China model just results in how Beijing does not respect on the international rule with liberal value, especially after they enter WTO around two decades ago. So I think now is the time to show the remarkable day of how the Speaker Pelosi and different lawmaker, congressmen and senators, they just hold a press conference from the—with the delegation from Hong Kong, which implied that it’s time to have the new bipartisan consensus on China’s policy, and the policy of U.S. towards Hong Kong, especially when we are aware Hong Kong is the place with Hong Kongers standing in the forefront to confront the authoritarian rule, and also we look to safeguard political and economic freedom. Especially we just want to let the world to know that how Hong Kong people are fighting for—we are not—what is not only beneficial towards Hong Kong people, but also significance to let the world aware that it’s time to let Beijing and President Xi to learn a lesson, especially respect on people’s voice and also respect on universal value. So the future, we hope U.S.-Hong Kong relation can be more prioritized and also be more significant issue, especially when movement will keep the momentum, and how we also heard—hope our voice will be heard in the international community when we are facing the troops moved to the border, and how leaders of Hong Kong suggest to implement the emergency ordinance, as martial law. Well, this kind of chilling event generated by Beijing is not only targeting Hong Kong people, but also international community. And now is the time we will keep on our campaign. That’s the reason, no matter Cantopop singer, just like Denise Ho, or student activist from student union, just like the International Affairs Delegation, or several graduate student and lawmaker from—and lawyer from Hong Kong, all we hope to travel around the world and let our voice being heard in the free world. Thank you. STONE: I know, Sunny, that you testified yesterday. You talked about bipartisan support. You talked about your press conference to Speaker Pelosi. Senator Rubio, of course, is the Republican co-chair of the Congressional Executive Commission on China. Said at the hearing yesterday, quote, “The U.S. and other nations have options precisely because Beijing benefits from Hong Kong’s special status—a special status which has made Hong Kong an international financial center, build on the promises that China made to the world with regards to Hong Kong, which they seek to break.” There is Chinese human rights scholar, Professor Sharon Hom who also testified with you. She put it this way—it was a very spirited testimony yesterday—that mainland China wants the goose’s golden egg, but said golden goose is not free range. (Laughter.) So I’m wondering, Sunny, if you can talk a little bit just about the nature of your meetings? And did you feel like members of Congress are expressing this as a common sentiment? Are they seeing this as a place of leverage? And, you know, what kind of engagement were you finding on the Hill across the aisle? CHEUNG: Hello. So far, I think that people in United States, of course, they realize that China manipulates Hong Kong as a loophole of world liberal system, trying to do some illegal trading under the table, including China is using Hong Kong to do trading with Iran and North Korea. Actually, a few months ago when the U.S. government gave a warning to Hong Kong government that they should not allow a ship from Iran to come to Hong Kong. But the Hong Kong government denies this demand from the U.S. government. And this actually shows that one of the reason why the U.S. government should monitor the Hong Kong situation is to secure the interests of the United States. And that’s why, despite those humanitarian reasons, one very crucial reason is that if you keep looking and monitoring Hong Kong situation you can find out China really depends on Hong Kong until now. That’s why if you can actually do something to help Hong Kong or try to monitor Hong Kong, you can increase your bargaining power and increase your leverage in order to contain China. STONE: Thank you for sharing that. I want, Denise, for you to speak just a little bit about your journey as an activist. And I know that’s come at great cost. So of course, you’re a Cantopop star. You paid a price for your pro-democracy and LGBTQ advocacy. You’ve had lucrative brand contracts cancelled. You’ve been banned from performing by the Chinese government. But you’ve still been unstoppable in your support of this movement, including testifying at the U.N. Human Rights Council in July. And you said very powerfully in your congressional testimony yesterday this is not a plea for so-called foreign interference. This is a plea for democracy. And you quoted Eleanor Roosevelt to the committee when you were testifying. Can you talk about your journey of being a pro-democracy activist, particularly what you’re seeing with the role of women and young people in the protests? Because I always hear you in the press really crediting their energies. What would you share about what you’ve seen on the ground? HO: Yes. Well, as you all know, if you take a step forward there’s no turning back with the CCP. Like, they already put you on that list. So I have been on that list since 2014. And of course, this movement, having gone to the U.N. to speak in Geneva and also with this hearing, like, I’m probably blacklisted for a few lives, actually. So right now the sentiment in Hong Kong, it’s there is a lot of—it’s a very brave movement. But at the same time, there is a lot of fear of political reprisal. As you have seen probably on images, it is largely anonymous. People are putting on masks and helmets and googles. For one, it’s because there is a lot of tear gassing going on. But the second reason is that, you know, people don’t want to be recognized. They don’t want to get their identities revealed, because anyone who is recognizable could face charges or prosecution from the police. So personally, I have faced a lot of censorship, not only in China but also in Hong Kong, where brands and businesses, they are staying away from me. And also, of course, like, very recently it has also seen overseas, which is very worrying for us and also probably for everyone here, because we see that this kind of self-censorship, it is happening overseas. Just two weeks ago me and my friend here Badiucao, he is a Chinese artist based in Melbourne, he invited me over for a(n) event, a panel discussion. But he had great difficulties in getting a venue, even in Australia. And we were rejected by—from ten venues they applied for, we were rejected by nine of them, which among them was a government institution which is the NGV, the National Gallery of Victoria, which is an art museum. They refused our application for the venue because of so-called security concerns. So, you know, this is something that is real, that is happening right now. And even very recently in Canada, even, there were Hong Kong activists who were banned from a gay pride in Montreal, my hometown. So it is very concerning. And that is why I have said in my hearing yesterday that this is not only a call from Hong Kong to the world to, you know, save us because we are in a humanitarian crisis, it really is a very global fight where we are seeing this kind of Chinese influence. You know, their economic powers, along with their set of regime—the values from their regime coming into the world. And it is destroying a lot of our universal values, when they are trying to make people conform to their set of values. And a lot of businesses and even government institutions, they are succumbing to this kind of suppression. So I would—if I could, I would like to pass the floor to Badiucao, just to say a few words. BADIUCAO: Sure. I’m born in China, so I’m not really Hong Kongers. But as a mainlander, I fully supporting Hong Kong’s fight on this very important cause. Well, now I am Australian citizen, but Australia is a very important ally to America. But in Australia, we’re experiencing all kinds of infiltration and influence or manipulation from Beijing. There are—5 percent of the population in Australia are actually having Chinese backgrounds. So the weight is there. However my people in Australia are heavily manipulated by the influence from Beijing. From media aspect I could say maybe about 90 percent of the Chinese Australian media is controlled by Beijing. They’re following the same censorship principle as Beijing. And as we’re talking about universities, yes, Chinese students are very important resources for the universities in Hong Kong, but in a way because the university, they are aware of that, and they don’t want to lose the market from China. So they’re compromising a lot in the regarding of free speech and independence of academic. So a lot of sign(s) are showing that the Chinese aggression will just stop within their own territory. It will not just stop in Hong Kong, but they’re also expanding far away. And probably Australia is the frontline is battling it. About American, I guess a very important thing is the online free speech has been endangered because of Beijing influence. For example, this year is the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. I proposed the Twitter company to create a special emoji to coordination with this very important anniversary. However, I got rejected by the Twitter company saying emoji for them is limited resources. And when I am trying to follow up saying that actually I’m an artist, I design emoji for them, for several candidate, and I’m offering if there’s a financial limitation that I would like to fund my personally. But I do not have response from Twitter from that ever. This is very disappointing, to see an American internet company is compromising because of the Chinese influence. And this is not just stopped with Twitter. We also see Google having the Dragonfly project, coordinating with Chinese censored version of a search engine. And Facebook is also very problematic that—actually, again, my art is recently censored in the Instagram, which is belonged to the Facebook group. And the reason for that is I think there are a lot of trolls from China. Some of them are just individual ones, some of them are organized by the Chinese government. And the way they can export this censorship is by reporting some of the information they’re not particularly like, like my art. And they’re causing a trouble and ended up my work will be deleted from the platform and the company of America. So these are my experience, that when I’m overseas, when I’m no longer in China as Australia Chinese, but I’m still have to facing all this kind of difficulty physically and in the digital world as well. STONE: Thank you for sharing that perspective as an artist. I think we find with these kinds of movements there’s a lot of intersection between art, youth movements, digital organizing now, of course. I want to go back to Joshua just to talk about, you know, speaking of youth movements, about your experience, you know, as a youth organizer and your journey from the Umbrella Movement, of course, in 2014 to today. You know, a lot of the things that you’re talking about, in the media in think people think these sound like crazy demands when they consider the Chinese government, and they don’t realize that many of the things you’re asking for, if not all, are already enshrined, as you talked about, in the 1984 Sino-British Declaration, which was already signed. It’s a binding international treaty by the Chinese government. Can you talk about how that erosion of autonomy led to your activism in 2014, how old you were when you started becoming an activist, and then what you’re seeing in terms of the demands being met or denied today? What’s the status of the five demands? WONG: I start to engage in street activism at the age of fifteen, since Hong Kong and Beijing government decide to introduce the patriotic education school curriculum seven years ago. Not only for—not only encouraging students to love the country, but even forcing student loyalty to regime. And that’s the reason for a scared one hundred thousand people surrounded the government headquarters. And with our calls on free election, this just result in the legacy of Hong Kong movement, which is the Umbrella strike. But I think one observation that I would like to profile is I remember five years ago during the Umbrella Movement for world leaders, they might have more hesitation to comment or pay attention to Hong Kong. Perhaps it will be the second or third year for President Xi to rule Hong Kong and China. And people still have kind of understanding or less discontent to his leadership. But I think with what’s happened in the past five years, it’s just stricken more and more people discontent. And that’s the reason on the G-20 summit how the prime minister of Japan met with President Xi one day before the G-20 summit and urged President Xi: Pay attention to the implementation of one country, two system. And that’s the things that we never imagined in the past, especially—usually for the Japan government they might have more passive attitude to comment on Hong Kong strike. And around late of August, after the end of G-7 summit, world leaders issued a joint statement, recognize the existence and the importance of imposing and recognizing the Sino-British Joint Declaration. From my memory in the past two or three decades never Hong Kong would be on the agenda of G-7 summit. And none of the world leaders will issue statement or comment on Hong Kong strike. But I believe it’s with the threat of Beijing to Hong Kong, and with such kind of wide terror has just driven more and more attention. That’s why I think the tremendous bipartisan support that we experienced in the past few days during our trip to Washington has just symbolized the new chapter of U.S.-Hong Kong relation. And it’s a must to prioritize the human rights condition and the strike in Hong Kong, because what we are asking for is just a political system reform under the current constitutional framework. So I would say that supporting Hong Kong should not be the matter of left or right. It should be the matter of right or wrong. And that’s my observation from five years ago, the strike, till the summer of discontent. STONE: Thank you for that. I know we’re going to shift to questions in just a few moments, but I want to make sure we hear from Nathan as well, as another student organizer. Can you share about your experience? And then, Brian, we’d love to ask a question about what happened on July 1 in the Legislative Council. LAW: Well, thanks for the invitation. And I remember when I testify in May, well, obviously everything was exploded. Massive mobilization was not there yet. And I realize that the understanding of the American politicians about Hong Kong situation was quite limited. So I testify in May for educational purposes. But for now, we can see an overwhelming bipartisan support that this particular bill, the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, that also Hong Kong people wanted to see its passage, indeed received an enormous amount of support, like Joshua has said. Like, five years ago when it was first introduced it was cosponsored by five congressmen. For now, the update—the most updated data would be more than fifty congressmen cosponsoring it, and a lot of private conversation with the senators and some other senior leaders in the Congress, they also predict that this will be passed in this year. So this is quite an optimistic prediction for that. So for me, I believe that it means something, the passage, or the introduction, or the huge growth of the supporting array of the act indeed means that we are entering the new paradigm of the U.S.-Hong Kong relation that U.S. politics is not seeing Hong Kong only as a part of China that put there into Chinese policy just a part of that, but also seeing it as, well, with each agency and specific policymaking, targeting to the autonomy and democracy in Hong Kong. So I think it indeed means something for Hong Kong people that by having this emphasis on Hong Kong situation on human rights and democratic situation, that we may get a lot of—more support from our international allies, and from the free world, that we share the same values. So I do believe that, talking about the act, my fellow colleague Jeffrey Ngo would be, like, the one who knows the most of that, because he’s been following that, and he’s been doing all sort of communication work. And I think after Brian, like, speak on his experience, and I think Jeffrey could talk about—more about the act and how to think about the current political situation. STONE: You are true activists, because you’ve taken control of this discussion very ably. (Laughter.) Who am I to say no? All right, why don’t I go to Brian. You know, Brian, can you share a little bit just what happened on the day of July 1, storming this Legislative Council protest, and then you were the only protestor to remove your mask, and to be seen, and to be identified. And you gave a speech. And you listed these five demands. Did you know that was going to happen that day? Like, what led you to go that day? Were you prepared to take that step? You’ve become an icon in the movement in a lot of ways. I know it’s a leaderless movement, I want to be respectful of that, but that was a really brave act. That was a bold act that day. Can you take us into that moment? Because we’re in a very antiseptic room right now. We’re very removed. But what was that like in that moment? LEUNG: Sure. I think I’ll try to be brief and, you know, talk a little bit about my experience, but also give more time for, like, general discussion and questions. So I think the essence of that action is really about expressing the frustration over the lack of democratization for the past two decades. We, like, I think, many young activists here were born, like, before or after the transfer of sovereignty, right? And we basically grew up with, you know, post-sign-over era and grew up with the democratization movement, right? But what we have seen is, like, over the past two decades there have not been any substantive democratic reform in our system, right? So in that legislative chamber we have seen a lot of abuse of power. We have seen, like, democratically elected, like, legislative were being unseated. We were seeing a lot of policy that have been very forcefully passed in that chamber. We have seen, like, about half of our seat in that chamber is still not democratically elected, right? So I think that chamber really symbolized a lot about the root causes of the whole movement and the problem, right? So some of the protestors that day chose to, you know, storm the Legislative Council and went into the chamber. And to me, the mentality is, like, even though that action is very divisive, right? People would disagree, and, you know, might argue about is it justified, right? But to me it’s like someone has to step up and provide a justification, right, to provide a concrete demand about why do we have to do such—(inaudible)—right? To me, it’s to feel that fill that moral vacuum, it’s to fill that political vacuum, that what’s our demand for doing such (act ?), right? So I took the moment, and I—you know, I read the demand, I gave—you know, read a manifesto on behalf of the protestors and basically laid out the five demands that have been reiterated throughout the movement. So I think, again, I just want to say, you know, my action is really about giving a voice to a protest, or why did I choose to do so, it’s really because over the past two decades, the system is still not changed. I think about, like, the promises of one country, two system it’s going to expire in, like, 2047, right? So we are in the halfway point of the whole, like grand scheme of one country, two system, right? But our democratization still lags so behind, right? Think about when are we going to see full democratization that is promised in the basic law, right, if we already have passed through half of those years? So I think it’s really about making a systemic change now rather than later. STONE: Thank you so much. I think, Jeffrey, Joshua’s insisting that we hear from you. I know you’ve been organizing actually this entire Washington trip. It’s been quite a week, I have to say, for young activist—between Greta Thunberg being here in D.C., and all of your activism. You know, you are a doctoral student at Georgetown here. Do you want to share briefly about the trip and what you feel is being accomplished? NGO: It’s—yes, it’s been a busy week. And actually, past week was also very busy in terms of doing scheduling for our delegation. You’re right, I’m a Ph.D. student. Some in the room might know how it feels. (Laughs.) You know, three courses, language, TA. But, no, I’m—(laughter)—it’s been—it’s been— STONE: Is this a side hustle, is that what you’re telling us? (Laughs.) NGO: No, it’s been—that and all this is difficult, but yeah. You know, the emotional toll, right, of seeing events in Hong Kong and not being able to be there, but then the sort of, you know, rational side prevailed over the emotional side in thinking about what we can do in D.C. And that’s why, you know, I’ve been able to help out in terms of this delegation. More specifically about the bill, I think this is—this is number-one priority for this trip. And I guess for the purposes of this audience it will be something interesting as well. I think Nathan and Joshua touched on the most important points already. I mean, we’ve seen literally a tenfold increase in terms of the number of co-sponsors. I just checked, it’s fifty-one co-sponsors on the House and Senate side combined. A couple years ago it was, like, three and two. Now it’s fifty-one. So it’s very impressive. I think the—you know, for us, this is about finding bipartisan support. It’s an unpredictable time in Washington with the current administration. But I think what President Trump has been able to do is to force political leaders on both sides of the aisle to rethink what strategy they have to use against China. And you know, since pretty much when Nixon first went to China, certainly after 1989, the idea has always been that, you know, whichever party’s in the White House will be the pro-engagement party, and then whichever party’s out of the White House would be tough on China. You know, we see, you know, then-candidate Bill Clinton criticizing on, you know, Bush, Sr.’s policy on China after ’89 being too soft. And then obviously when President Clinton took office he delinked, you know, human rights too, with the MFN status, and then subsequently advocated very strongly for the admission of China into the WTO. You know, there wasn’t a very robust response from the Obama administration five years ago during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, which was in and of itself a remarkable moment. But what we see now is that, you know, whether or not you agree trade war being a good way to deal with China, the consensus seems to be that at least you have to think about, well, if not the trade war then what? And we’re seeing, you know, 2020 Democratic, you know, presidential candidates, for instance, saying so much about Hong Kong. Especially I’m thinking of Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who raised Hong Kong actually as an issue in the presidential—most recent Democratic presidential debate. That hasn’t happened since 1992. And then since, Elizabeth Warren spoken repeatedly in favor of Hong Kong since June. So, you know, Hong Kong arising as a sort of U.S. presidential politics issue, you know, that would have been completely unimaginable five years ago. So much has changed on the ground, and in Hong Kong as well, over the past five years. But, you know, in Washington here we’re seeing a lot more support and a lot more interest. The fact that we have good turnout tonight and, you know, is a testament to that. And I look forward to more questions. But it’s been heartwarming for us. STONE: Well, thank you. Professor, can you tell that Jeffrey’s a doctoral student in history at Georgetown? (Laughter.) Just gave us a brief synopsis of Chinese-American engagement. This is the moment to start discussion with you. Please, you know, identify yourself. We want to know who you are. Tell us your name, your affiliation. And if we could keep questions brief, and then also responses brief. Maybe one person can take each question? So that we can move quickly. At the Council we usually put our placards up to indicate that we have a question. So feel free to start right now. And we’ll start right here on this side of the table. Q: Michael Mosettig, PBS Online NewsHour. There’s been a lot of commentary here, particularly in the last few days. And you even mentioned the fact that there’s no leaders in this movement. How far can a movement go without leaders to set priorities, to negotiate? And particularly since you’re dealing with a very disciplined entity on the other side? When do you start narrowing this down and start going from leaderless to having a chain of command and leaders? LEUNG (?): I think, of course, on the one hand you see how protests are using, like, communication technology to help them, you know, coordinate action. People have much more ownership over the movement. They could come up with their own initiative, right? I think you can—you have to also look at it from another side of the story, which is debating strategy, right? So in terms of ’14, in Umbrella Movement, their strategy is basically to wait us out and to let the movement die out, and basically use co-optation, such as, like, holding a dialogue platform to create internal divisions, right? Their idea is, like, as long as we, like, not bloodily repress the movement, we can simply wait us out and cause, you know, internal divisions so that the movement would—you know, the leaders would debate with the—you know, the mass, and, you know, it would create divisions, right? So I think people—that’s what happening actually a platform and a leader in 2014 in the Umbrella Movement creates so much, you know, divisions and debate within—from within, right? So I think in 2019 people actually react and adapt to that Beijing strategy by saying: Hey, if we create a centralized platform and leaders, right, it actually, you know, would make us play into the Beijing strategy. Why don’t we decentralized the ownership, right, so that everybody could have some sort of, like, say in the movement, right? So that nobody—no single individuals could be co-opted into a system, and cause that kind of internal division, right? So one remarkable consequence of that is the whole movement has remained a high level of solidarity and people across different factions, across different—you know, maybe they have difference across ideologies or tactics, right? They still remain united, exactly because there is no strong sense of internal division. So I think it’s not only, you know, about the good or creative way of the movement, the spontaneity. It’s also about how we, as protestor, like, having some sort of so asymmetrical position vis-à-vis Beijing, right, we might not want to use a traditional method. We might have to come up with creative method. STONE: Yeah. I hear always in the press them saying it’s a David and Goliath, you know, matchup. And so maybe requires a different tactic, and that winds up being more effective. And I think it’s also generational. Digital organizing, a different way of thinking about power and power structures. I want to go to right here in the corner, your question. Q: Maria Stephan with the U.S. Institute of Peace. And I guess my question—first of all, thank you for coming out. It’s been remarkable to observe and witness your movement. I’ve been telling various audiences that you’re putting on kind of a clinic on activism for the world. But a question that I had had to do with kind of a common tactic that repressive authorities often use, is to deploy agent provocateurs in an attempt to foment violence within a movement, with the idea being that violence is easier to justify crackdowns against and violence in a movement tends to decrease overall participation, which is a key variable in the success of movements. So I guess my question for you all is kind of what is your approach for countering that? And do you consider that kind of nonviolent discipline to be a strategic priority for your movement right now? And then also, what is your time horizon? When you’re thinking strategically about how this plays out, what is your planning timeline? Is it three months? Is it one year? Is it three years? Is it ten years? Thank you. STONE: Who wants to take that one? Maybe Joshua? Or why don’t we try to—it would be great to hear from everyone who wants speak tonight as well. If you just took the last one, Joshua, do you want to take this one, or? WONG: Well, yeah. Well, I think the way we understand what has been going in Hong Kong is they’re just like an AI machine. All the Hong Kong people are the—one of the, like, small parts of it. And they incubate on the internet, they bring some ideas, and they discuss into the software, and then they execute it in the local sites. So they have been through a trial and error process, which we can see that. When they make mistakes they will reflect on the internet, and they will go to a apologize when they make mistake on the next day when they had it, and they changed strategy. So that’s how Hong Kong protests go. And I think, well, from—well, when you understand how the mechanism of that with disorganized, and decentralized, and leaderless nature of that, it’s really hard for us to predict, well, this master plan for future months, because it relies on the agenda of the government. For example, the first of October will be the 70th anniversary of the Chinese government. So that will—that will mark a remarkable day. And, well, we can expect that there will be a massive mobilization of people. And in terms of the tactics of the resistance, and I think sometimes—well, indeed, it is devastating to see, right, the levels of conflict, some kind of violence. But for us, the way we understand, well, the state’s violence, well, definitely what country means is they have dominant legitimacy of using violence. But when the police force is out of any accountability and no one can hold them accountable, and checks and balances are basically unavailable, and they can do whatever they want because they are granted permit from the government, that sometimes we give discretion to the protestors because they need to protect themselves and they understand that all this police brutality will not be punished, even if these are well-documented by the reporters and by the global community. So I think the way these conflicts happens, as long as it’s proportionate—there’s, like, proportionality, where there is, like, specific target—for example, the political symbol and vandalism on the representation of the authority, and also with—well, with a very restrained manner. Then I think as a part of the protest, even though we are, like, really hoping that we create a solidarity and uniform image to the global community and less well excuse by the CCP to be manipulated to stigmatize the movement. But we still need to have a certain flexibility and discretion to this behavior under this context. So I think, well, at the end of the day the momentum, and the spirit, and the morale, and sense of being united in Hong Kong is still very strong. And I think it is more pushing us, like, moving forward. HO: And may I just add too, the way that we have countered the agent provocateur is that with the humor and the flexibility of Hong Kongers where, for example, when we first knew that there were these undercover police among the protestors, it actually created this sort of paranoia, which resulted in the incident at the airport. But then they recovered very quickly by—they came out to apologize. And then not only apologizing, but really changing the way that they are reacting to these things. And the way that they did it is next time they saw these undercover police, they just held these banners saying: Oh, we thank you for supporting Hong Kong. Or, you know, Tiananmen massacre, you—we are against it. Like, stuff that cannot appear in Chinese internet, and then those people would be just like, oh, no, don’t take photos of me. (Laughter.) So I think this sort of flexibility was very key to how this movement sustained itself for such a long time. We are past the 100-day mark. And most probably—you know, we don’t have answers in the future yet, but I’m quite confident that these young people and basically the people of Hong Kong, we will come to a solution very quickly. And that, in place of this machine, it’s very huge, but it’s also very slow. So every time we change the tactic they would need time to counter so. So, you know, that’s how we buy time. And then on other levels we will be doing advocacy and work too, so. STONE: All right. We’re going to keep coming around the table and then go. I saw you in the back as well, so we’ll come around to you. Why don’t we go right here to the right, to Benjamin, did you have a question? Q: Hi. I’m Ben Pauker from Vox. Denise, thank you for the unpaid product placement there. (Laughter.) I’m interested in the appetite for sustained popular mobilization on the streets. Obviously the withdrawal of the extradition bill was a big step. There are still significant other demands. But honestly, what do you think the sort of appetite for sustained, widespread popular mobilization of the citizen in Hong Kong continues to be, or will be, over the next—the course of the following months? MR.     : I’m still optimistic for Hong Kongers to keep the protest movement, no matter. First of October will be the symbolic day for mass mobilization. And middle of October will be the day for Beijing to decide whether they will conduct political censorship to disqualify candidacy to run for office. It will also trigger more people continue to strike. And more important issue is after we successfully forced government to completely withdraw the extradition bill, even we still had to claim that’s kind of victory, but it’s still a remarkable achievement to show the power of people. So with such empowerment, people just targeted the second goal, urged government to set up the investigation commission of police brutality. Five years ago, during the Umbrella Movement, business leaders or business sector are the one against the protest and having the same side with the government. But now, not only protestor, even business leader and those businessmen strongly recommended and urged government set up investigation of police brutality. I guess that’s also started from early July, the general chambers of commerce, representing most tycoons in Hong Kong, issued a statement urged to conduct investigation. We just implied that—according to the survey conducted by Chinese university, more than 80 percent of Hong Kongers urged to set up the committee. From my memory, in the past few decades never will have any kind of opinion poll where more than 80 percent agree on the same demand. So even government completely withdraw the bill, with how we described it Hong Kong already transformed to be a police state, it still encouraged our movement go forward. And now even some of those pro-Beijing lawmaker agree to conduct investigation. And just imagine, from February to August, Carrie Lam said that there’s no reason to withdraw the bill. But finally, two weeks ago, she still withdrew it. So it’s no surprise, if we keep our movement in the next few months, it will finally force government compromise to Hong Kongers. STONE: Thank you. I want to move around the table and call on Nury, who of course is a Uighur attorney and advocate. Q: Thank you, Meighan. Thank you so much for bringing us all together here. I’d like to welcome my good friend, Denise Ho, who I had the honor to share the share the stage at the Oslo Freedom Forum this past May. And also welcome all of you, and also extend solidarity from Uighur people with you. We are standing with you all the way because historically, politically, we have a lot in common. In 1949, Stalin’s Soviet Union handed us over to Mao’s China. And look what we got ourselves into, from autonomy to a concentration camp, digital authoritarianism, Hong Kong police being trained by Xinjian police and exchanging notes, sending plainclothes police to beat up the protestors, disinformation campaign, mind control, and very similar. With that, I’d also like to point out that, Jeffrey, it’s actually CFR started the questioning of the presidential campaigns to make a position on Hong Kong Uighurs and other China-related issues. So they deserve a lot of credit for making them to talk. With that, I’d like to ask two questions. One, are you guys been prepared or having any kind of strategies for Chinese government’s potential programs, the efforts to do mind control? As Deng Xianhua (ph) pointed out, that he’s blaming you because your mind has been intoxicated with democratic ideas and civil liberties. And too, if the disinformation campaign that the Chinese government waged during the protest had any effect among the protestors? We talked about the leadership, but we are also experiencing disinformation campaign. If you go to Facebook, Twitter, there are a lot of trolling efforts being taken. So if you can comment on those—on those two questions really appreciate it. STONE: Who would like to take that? BADIUCAO: I think I’ll go with the first question because I am not from Hong Kong. As an observer, and also being a dissident who’s very familiar with a similar campaign from China. One thing I know for sure is they are lacking the sense of beauty. Although they have very sophisticated propaganda machine, but you cannot really find art or good visual expression from their thing. So I think, from my perspective, very importantly art is playing a very important role to maintaining this protest, and maintaining, in a way, to counter the propaganda system. And I also want to go back about the violence that we’ve seen from the protest. Like, there is worrying to say if the reaction would go more violent. But the problem is I don’t think the whole movement is turning more violent. It’s the perception of it is turning more violent. While peaceful demonstration is magnificent when you see the first million, two million people. But as it’s going on it’s quite boring, to be honest. You just see people marching in the street. And then the media start to pay more attention on the more explosive content, and violence is definitely one of them. So the counterstrategy to the violence, I think the answer will be creativity. Like, Hong Kongers doing the Hong Kong way, when people are hand-in-hand in the streets, this is also attracting media attention. It’s giving the whole campaign a very positive image. This also united people to continue doing it, because there’s new things happening all the time. So I would say art played a very important role on maintaining the protest, but also in the way to defending the people from the brainwash or the propaganda. Thank you. STONE: And perhaps a brief answer to the second question? Anyone want to take that one? CHEUNG: Is the second—I thought the second question is about disinformation. Q: Disinformation. STONE: Yeah, or his other question, that Nury offered, yeah. Q: The mind control, and potentially Chinese government is doing—what they’re doing in the Uighurs’ homeland, brainwashing— CHEUNG: Yeah. It’s definitely troubling and unfortunate that that has happened in—you know, in Xinjiang and in other peripheries of China. We are less worried about that happening in Hong Kong. If anything, the repression in Hong Kong only leads to more radicalization of the youth. I mean, you know, you can’t imagine a twelve-year-old schoolboy being arrested anywhere in the world for protesting. This is what Hong Kong has come to now. And then, you know, Joshua made the statement in his testimony at the congressional hearing that, you know, China just doesn’t understand how to govern a free society. And so when—you know, when China pushes, I think Hong Kong pushes back. And that has been—you know, that has been the case in 2003. In 2012 with the national education. 2003 was the first attempt to legislation the national security bill. And then in 2014 denying us democracy, leading to the Umbrella Movement. In 2019, trying to extradite Hong Kongers to China, leading to the summer of discontent. So I think, you know, every summer, you know, Beijing tries to do that, tried to tell Hong Kongers how to live our lives, we push back, and we show that that is—you know, that just doesn’t happen to Hong Kong. And I really do hope that the experience in Hong Kong can—you know, can inspire the Uighurs and Tibetans, you know, hopefully caution the Taiwanese as well, that their democracy’s vulnerable. You know, I do agree that China is perfecting authoritarianism in the twenty-first century, you know, with disinformation, you know, exploiting the internet, right? You know, the interest was supposed to be the place that opened the world to everyone. China reverses that. Mind controlling tactics, as you were talking about. But I think, you know, whenever the state evolves, I think the people also evolve. You know, we’ve heard from Brian and Nathan earlier talking about how networks have prevailed over hierarchy in terms of how Hong Kongers have been organizing ourselves in the movement. You know, the Baltic way was a good example of that, you know, Eastern Europe trying to assert their self-determination in 1989 against the Soviet Union. And then now there was the Hong Kong way a couple of weeks ago. I think, you know, as late as ’86 or ’87, no one would have predicted that Soviet Union was going to collapse. The Soviet Union was the state that would not fail. But then, you know, to the surprise of many observers at the time that, you know, eventually we saw that happened. But, you know, I think—you know, with Hong Kongers determination, with our creativity, you know, with our support from the international community, especially here in Washington, I think miracles can happen. HO: So I would like to add a little bit to that. The reason why the Chinese smearing campaigns could not really work was at least the youngsters in Hong Kong—personally, I think that language is key. Because in mainland China they speak Mandarin. And in Hong Kong we speak Cantonese. So at least on the cultural side of things it is very difficult for them, say, to get their TV shows into Hong Kong, or their songs into Hong Kong. So that has been something that was protecting us from that kind of misinformation. Although, it did work on some, like, more elderly people. But Hong Kong people also, with our creativity, say we created parody pages of their pages, pretending to be their pages, so kind of, like, tricking the elderly to come into our pages and get our information. And also because the elderly, they really love those, like, promotional images with these lotus flowers. So the youngsters also created the same imagery, but with our messages on top of it. So for Hong Kong, I guess that is not as worrying. But I do worry about Taiwan, because from what I know is they’re—they speak the same language. They speak Mandarin. So some of the youth in Taiwan, they are getting influenced, at least by the Chinese cultural side of things. Say, they watch their TVs shows, and they’re very into it. And so that is something we—they have not yet found an answer to, like, how do we counter that? And also, because the Chinese students, whether they are within the Chinese perimeter or overseas, where they are also getting this sort of misinformation. So how do we counter that? Maybe that should be a conversation that should be started here or elsewhere. Q: Thank you. STONE: Here sounds good to start conversations that matter. I know that our time needs to come to a close very soon, so what I’m going to do is a lightning round. I’m going to call on people that have had their cards up for quite a while and are very patiently waiting. If you could just say who you are, a brief question, and then if we could do quick responses. And then if you are around for a few minutes after and are willing to talk to anybody that didn’t get a chance to connect, that would be wonderful. So why don’t we just start right here with Stephanie. Q: Stephanie Hammond with the Department of Defense. You spoke really extensively and thank you for speaking on Capitol Hill yesterday about your engagement on the Hill and support for the Human Rights and Democracy Act. I’m curious, did you meet with other government agencies when you were here in D.C.? And what are some of your main messages for them? Jeffrey, you speak really eloquently about U.S. policy and presidential candidates the last few decades, as how forward-leaning they’ve been with human rights in China and Hong Kong. I think some of the foundational arguments among U.S. policymakers are how forward-leaning they should be, and whether or not how effective that is, whether they do more public-facing human rights campaigns, or engagement behind closed doors. STONE: Thank you so much. Let’s get all the questions quickly, and then we’ll do a round of answers. So why don’t we go on the back wall. You’ve been waiting very patiently, yeah. Q: I’m Adam Nelson with the National Democratic Institute. I lived in Hong Kong for almost ten years. One of the great social movements in Hong Kong is the LGBT community. I was happy to participate in the 2008 pride parade. Can Denise Ho speak to the movement from a feminist perspective and the LGBT perspective? Are both of those voices being given room in the movement? STONE: That is a great ally question, thank you for raising your placard. (Laughter.) Joseph, what’s your question? Q: My name is Joseph Torigian. I’m a fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations. I was in Hong Kong for the June 4 memorial this year. And there were some interesting discussions about how the older generation thought that the human rights campaign in Hong Kong was inextricably tied to the one in the mainland, but that the younger generation feels differently, and that Hong Kong people should focus on Hong Kong and not on the mainland. I wonder if you could speak to that issue. STONE: Great. And our last question tonight’s going to come from Matthew. Q: So I’m Matt Squeri with Senator Jeff Merkley. One of the dilemmas that advocates and champions for human rights and democracy in Hong Kong wrestle with is the fact that on the one hand perhaps the United States’ greatest leverage over China to promote these issues is the determination that our government makes regarding there being sufficient political and economic autonomy to warrant the continued special status for Hong Kong. Yet, we also are cautioned fairly often by advocates for democracy and human rights that making a determination that Hong Kong does not have that economy could be punishing the very people that we are trying to help. And so I’m wondering how you would encourage us to think about that tension. STONE: That’s great. Why don’t we start with answering that question, and I’ve taken notes to work our way back briefly, so that we can close to on time. I know we started a few minutes late, because people were connecting with each other. Who wants to answer Matthew’s question first, that he just shared? MR.     : Sorry, which question was this? (Cross talk.) LEUNG: Yeah. As recent as, I guess, maybe half a year ago if you asked many pro-democracy, especially older generation of pro-democracy advocates and former legislators, you know, what do you feel about potentially revising Hong Kong’s status as a special customs territory in accordance with U.S. law, they would probably have some reluctance, because they, you know, exactly as you said, that, well, if you start treating Hong Kong as separate from China economically, then, you know, you’re going to harm Hong Kong’s economy, unemployment rate is going to go up, you know, GDP probably will go down, et cetera. And that sort of ends up isolating Hong Kong. But then I guess the genius of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act is that it actually reaffirms Hong Kong’s identity and Hong Kong’s sort of distinct—as a distinct political entity in the international system. So then even if the—if our economic privileges have been stripped away, it does not mean that the U.S. would altogether stop treating Hong Kong as a completely liberal part of China. In fact, it does the exact opposite. It continues to treat Hong Kong as separate, but it reorients the U.S. policy on Hong Kong so then it’s just not about economic ties or cultural exchange, as has been the case since 1992 in accordance with the Hong Kong—U.S.-Hong Kong policy act—but that human rights and democracy are front and center, whatever the U.S. does considering Hong Kong. So that’s why that’s very important. And that’s why I urge, you know, members of Congress, senators left and right, to back the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. And that has been our message. And then very quickly also to the earlier question about how forward-leaning America should be, my answer would be: As forward-leaning as possible. And I think Sunny also made that point earlier in the—tonight, and also at the hearing yesterday. You know, if not the U.S.—really, if you think about the international system as a system of anarchy, it is about, you know, what country and has the power and has the courage to stand up against China. I know many European countries want to do the right thing, but they just don’t have that power to do it. And I think, you know, the EU as a whole, you know, that—they could be strong. You know, if you think of Australia, if you think about Canada, these middle powers, they want to do the right thing. But they’re looking to Washington. They’re looking for American leadership on these issues. And I think if done right, I mean, American foreign policy can be a force of good in the world. And I think—and I want that to happen. And I want that to continue to be the case beyond just this current administration. We will be meeting with members of this administration for the—for the rest of our trip. You know how scheduling goes, we’re still finalizing this and that. There are always last-minute changes. But we will be meeting with, for sure, representatives from the Department of State. And I look forward to exchanging views with them and letting them know our—we need their support as well, beyond what we have on Capitol Hill. And then, you know, just one last thing. I mean, China always likes to call what happens in Hong Kong an internal matter. You know, if the West speaks up somehow they’re supporting interference. But China has consistently benefited economically from the fact that Hong Kong is a global city, because Hong Kong is a global financial hub, because Hong Kong has been treated as a separate customs territory. That’s how China got rich since the 1970s. And so if—you know, if the U.S.—if Washington policymakers back off from supporting Hong Kong because they feel that somehow that’s going to give—you know, that’s going to give talking points to the Beijing government that, you know, that’s going to offend China or that’s going to get you into trouble. Well, you know, then you fall exactly into the trap of China, because exactly what they want to do is to scare you against taking any real, concrete actions to support Hong Kong. And the best way to counter that is to back the people of Hong Kong. STONE: Thank you, Jeffrey. We’re going to do two very brief answers with moderator’s privilege so we can end our event tonight. How about the question about LGBT movement? Denise, I think that was for you. HO: Yes. So in this movement we have seen a very strong participation from women, first of all, where I do think that there are two sides of this, where it is a very big empowerment to the young women in Hong Kong, because, you know, we are being treated as equals and you see in the frontlines where there are so many young girls, women, put gear on. I have no idea where they find the courage, but they’re, like, really in the very, very frontlines helping out and extinguishing the tear gas and really being there together. But also, of course—and, you know, you see we have young women here also in the IAD delegation, where they are going into international stages to speak for Hong Kongers. And at the same time, of course, women are being the targets of attacks, where there have been cases where women, young women, who were arrested, they were sexually abused in the police stations. And several cases of that. Whether it’s verbally or maybe even physically. So that is something that we are struggling with because you see with these thugs, and mobsters, and also the police becoming these very violent force, it’s difficult for the women to counter that because physically we are at a disadvantage in these situations. But then, of course, the society is there in support with the women. As so on the LGBT side, unfortunately, we don’t really see a lot of LGBTQ communities being—I mean, they are, of course, among the people, but there haven’t been a lot of mobilization of the community. And very recently the pink dot, you probably know it from—we have our version of pink dot in Hong Kong. It has been cancelled because probably we won’t get the permission to hold a gathering at these very sensitive times, where we have many, many, like, several dozens of assemblies and marches being banned by the police. So but at the same time, I feel that there is a very wide support for these LGBTQ issues in Hong Kong, in the younger generations at least, with maybe—you know, with our visibility we, and also—and other pro-democracy activist and singer who has come out in 2012, Anthony Wong, a very good friend of mine. So our participation in this movement, you know, it is telling the people that we are all humans and we have all the same beliefs. And on the legislative side, it is, of course, very difficult in Hong Kong to see any progress on these issues, because we don’t have the democratic system that we need. So that is why we have focused more on pushing ahead these—the universal suffrage and the political reform. So, you know, that’s the situation. But one happy thing is that we are seeing Taiwan progressing on these issues, where they have had the same-sex marriage bill pass last year, this year? Yeah, very recently. So that is something for the Asian community. STONE: OK. Thank you. I think we are so over time I’m wondering, Joseph, if you feel comfortable connecting after the panel and having more discussion? Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us tonight. Can we say thank you to our speakers tonight? (Applause.) I want to say thank you to Alex Bro who is another young leader on our staff for organizing tonight. Thank you so much, Alex. (Applause.) Thank you so much for joining us for this discussion and have a wonderful rest of your evening. (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.

As user-generated content on the internet continues to increase in popularity, the question of who moderates this content comes to the forefront when discussing the future of social media . Dr. Sarah Roberts, author of Behind the Screen, Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media and assistant professor of information studies at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, joined the Women and Foreign Policy program to speak about the world of content moderation and the importance of this invisible work.     POWELL: We’re going to go ahead and get started. I’d like to welcome everyone. And my name’s Catherine Powell. I’m with the Women and Foreign Policy Program here. And I want to acknowledge the Digital and Cybersecurity Program which we’re co-hosting with tonight. So some of you may have gotten the email through that program as well. It’s with great pleasure that I introduce Sarah Roberts, who is a professor at UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. I’m not going to read her whole bio because you have it in front of you, other than to say that she came to my class today—I’m a professor at Fordham Law School where I’m teaching a new seminar this semester on digital civil rights and civil liberties. And she came to speak with my students about this fantastic new book she has out, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media. And it was a very engaging discussion. So Sarah’s going to outline some ideas for about ten minutes or so, and then we will open up for discussion because we have a number of experts in the room and the discussion is always the most fun part. Just as a reminder, this is on the record. Without further ado, let me turn it over to Sarah. ROBERTS: All right. Thank you so much. Thanks to everyone for choosing to spend time here this evening. It’s certainly a delight to be a part of this series, and to be present with you. So thank you. I am going to do my best. I’m a professor, so I have a problem with verbosity. We try to keep it short and sweet. I’m going to try to speak quickly so we can get to discussion. So if there’s anything that seems like a bit of unpacking, we can return to it. But I’m going to do my best to give an overview, assuming that you have not all spent as much time as I have with the subject. So basically I’ll talk a little bit about the research that’s contained in the book, and then I want to tee-up some issues that I think are pertinent to the present moment particularly, because this work is the culmination of nine years of research. We like a slow burn in academia, so it’s been simmering for some time. When I began this work in 2010, I was myself still a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, but I had a previous career in the IT field, although I had, you know, perhaps made the unfortunate decision of finishing my French degree—French literature degree rather than running out to Silicon Valley during the first kind of net bubble in the mid-’90s, so there you have it. But I have fun when I go to France, I guess. Anyway. So I was working in IT for about fifteen years before I decided to go back to school. It was going to just be a quick in and out sort of master’s degree. And I became enthralled with really feeling like I needed to pursue some of the issues that I had to live through first-hand, mainly the widespread adoption and also commercialization of the internet. I had been a user of the internet at that point for almost twenty years in 2010, and I had considered myself a late adopter. I thought I kind of missed the wave of the social internet. But anyway. So in the—in the summer of 2010, I always want to give credit where it’s due, I read but brief but powerful report in the New York Times tech section. It was sort of what we would consider below the fold. I didn’t say that to your students today because I didn’t know if they’d know what I was talking about. (Laughter.) But it was a below the fold kind of piece, a small piece about a firm in rural Iowa. I was sitting at the time in the middle of a corn field at the University of Illinois, so I could relate to these people who were described in the article as working in really what, for all intents and purposes, seemed to be a call center environment. And they were working not taking service calls for, like, your Maytag washer or your Sears home product, but in fact what they were doing was looking at material from unnamed social media sites that had been uploaded by users and which had been flagged by other users as having some issue, being problematic. And this typically fell around issues of perhaps being pornographic, or obscene, gratuitously violent, all the way to things like child sexual exploitation material, images of abuse of other sorts, and the list goes on and on. And I won’t belabor it with examples, but you can sort of imagine what one might see. What I wanted to do upon learning that as really get a sense of what to what extent this need was in fact a fundamental part of the at that time ramping up but very significant social media industry emanating from Silicon Valley. So I should just contextualize this by saying I’m talking about American companies that are based in Silicon Valley. I’m not an expert, unfortunately, on some other parts of the world. But these companies, of course, cover the globe. And in fact, last I knew the stat, Facebook’s userbase is 87 percent outside the United States. So it’s quite significant that these American firms and their norms are circulating around the globe. The findings are detailed in here. It’s also a bit—I have to admit, I guess this is a first-time book writer’s thing where you sort of go into your own autobiography and you really wax poetic. That’s in there too. You don’t have to take that too much to heart, but I think what I wanted to do was contextualize the way in which from that period in the—in the early to mid-’90s to where we are now, the internet has become—and what we consider the internet, which is our social media apps usually on our phones, right—has really become an expectation, a norm, a part of our daily life in terms of interpersonal relationships, in terms of maybe romantic relationships, business relationships, political discourse, and the list goes on and on at how these platforms are a part of—a part of the fabric of our social life. And how those companies that provide these essentially empty vessels rely upon people like us to fill them with our so-called content. Content is a funny word, because it just stands for, evidently, any form of human self-expression you can think of. And so I often come back to that as an interesting thing to unpack. I’ll tell you a little bit about what we found, and we’ll buzz through this, and then we’ll—I’ll get off the mic for a minute. But essentially what I discovered over the subsequent years was that this activity of content moderation on behalf of companies as a for-pay job—something that I came to call commercial content moderation—was viewed by the firms that solicited it as a mission critical activity. In other words, these firms viewed this practice so important as to be really unwilling to function without this kind of stopgap measure to control the content on their sites. This—you know, we can think of this as a gatekeeping mechanism, which means it’s also a mechanism by which content is allowed to stay up as much as it is a mechanism to remove. But what was really important to me to understand about the impetus for this particular activity, and then the creation and shoring up of a global workforce, was that the activity was taking place primarily as a function of brand management for these firms. What do I mean by that? Well, I mean that just as, I don’t know, CBS Studios is unlikely to flip on the camera, open the door, and ask New Yorkers to just come in and get in front of the camera and do what they will—without any control—neither are these platforms. But one of the biggest differences about the ways those kinds of relationships have come to be understood in our—in our everyday life is that I think the expectation about the former is much clearer than it is about the latter. These platforms have come to take up and occupy such an important space, in large part because they were predicated or sold to us on a—on a claim that essentially it would be us, to the platform, to the world. In fact, YouTube’s on-again, off-again slogan has been: Broadcast Yourself. I mean, they say it better than I can, right? You just get on there and emote, and do your thing, and it’s going to broadcast all over the world. So what I came to find was that in fact there was a workforce in the middle. And to me, that was revelatory, and it was shocking. I had never considered it. And I was supposed be getting a Ph.D., right, in this stuff. And I had worked for fifteen years in this area. I actually started asking other colleagues around campus—esteemed professors who shall remain nameless, but who are victimless here—they also said, gosh, I’ve never heard of that. I’d never heard that companies would hire people to do that. That’s the first thing they said. Then they said, don’t computers do that? Now, if these are the people who are—have their fingers on the pulse of what’s going on in social media, why didn’t they know? Well, that led me to speculate that in fact this practice was intended to be, to a certain extent, hidden. That actually is the case. So I’m just going to talk for a minute about what this workforce looks like, and then we’ll go into some of the maybe provocations, I guess we can call it. As we speak today, I would—it’s difficult to put numbers on what kind of global workforce we’re talking about, but I would estimate that we’re thinking about maybe 100,000 at this given moment. The number I arrive at for that may be conservative. But I take that number from looking just at the public numbers that Google and Facebook now offer up around their workforce, which are in the tens of thousands. Those are two platforms out of how many? The Snaps, the Instagrams—they’re not counting Instagram—the TikToks of the world, right, whatever the latest thing is. I’m starting to show my age and I don’t even know what’s going on anymore. But anyway, so any—essentially any company that opens the opportunity and—as a commercial entity—opens the opportunity for someone to upload is going to introduce a mechanism to control that. And that’s where we can arrive at these numbers. The thing about this globalized workforce is that it’s diverse, it’s dispersed. You can find it a number of different industrial sectors. But there are some things we can say about them overall that they share in common. And those characteristics that I think are important to mention is that this work, and the workers who undertake it, are typically viewed as low status. They are typically low wage earners. And they are typically limited term workers for a firm. So the expectation is not that one would make a lifelong career at this work. We can think about why that maybe is. It may in fact be because you wouldn’t be able to stomach this beyond this—right? We’ve got the shaking heads. It’s like, no thank you. I—personally, I couldn’t do it for a day, much less a year. But it’s often limited term. The work is often also to some extent done at remove from the platform that actually needs the service. So how do they do that? Well, no surprise, it’s going to be contracting, outsourcing, and other sorts of arrangements that look other than permanent and look other than direct employ. They often, of course, in the case of the United States, for one, given that circumstance, lack significant workplace benefits. Now, when we start thinking about the fact that this work can put workers in harm’s way psychologically because of what they view as a precondition of the work, that lack of benefits, that lack of—and even under the Affordable Care Act people might not be able to afford mental health support, because we know that’s often extra. I mean, I know even in my health care plan as a UCLA professor that’s something I would have to pay for, to a certain extent, out of pocket. How might a worker, who’s contractual, and low wage, and low status, go about obtaining that? Now, when we think about this work being global, we also know that there are places in this country and in other parts of the world where mental health issues are highly stigmatized. And so seeking that help is also encountering barriers just based on cultural norms and other sorts of attitudes towards that kind of—that kind of support. And so really, what we’re looking at is a system of work that has been essentially outsourced and devalued. And yet, those who are near to this kind of operational activity within firms know that it’s mission critical. They know that this gatekeeping mechanism and ability to control what’s on the platform has a fundamental function in their operations. And they really wouldn’t go forward without it. As one person quite candidly put it to me once: If you open a whole on the internet, it gets filled with, blank. And so that was her way of telling me, therefore every time we allow someone to upload something into essentially this empty vessel, we have to have a mechanism to control it. OK. So I’ll talk a little bit about the outcomes here. I’m just going to list them. We can come back to them. But the primary findings in the book, I would say, are as follows. We’re talking about a fractured, stratified and precarious workforce, as I’ve mentioned. You will find this workforce not sort of in a monolithic site that can be easily identified as this is where commercial content moderation is done, but instead in a variety of industrial sites and sectors, some of which might not be recognizable to workers who are actually doing the same work because of the setting or because of the nature of the work. What do I mean by that? Well, some people go to work every day at Silicon Valley. They sit next to engineers, or maybe down the hall as the case may be. But they have a different color badge. They’re contractors. While others do this work disembodied over a digital piecework site, like Amazon Mechanical Turk. It maybe even has a different name. One person might be doing work called “community management,” and another person is doing dataset training for machine learning algorithms. And guess what? They both might be doing some form of commercial content moderation. So this—when we think about how workers might self-identify, these are the features that make it difficult. There is a patchwork approach to covering this labor need. So, again, global. And, again, using these different industrial sectors, because there’s simply often not enough people available to just be taken up into the apparatus and be put on the job, just going straight through one particular firm or one particular place. This is where we’re now seeing big labor provision firms in the mix. The Accentures of the world and others are now in this—in this field. Workers, again, globally dispersed. And one final thing that I’ll say that I think is actually very key, again, it is often secretive. The work is often under a nondisclosure agreement. Now, many of you know that Silicon Valley asks you to sign a nondisclosure agreement every time you turn around. It’s sort of a cultural norm. But this is taken actually very seriously for these workers in particular. So I had to guarantee a certain level of anonymity and use pseudonyms and other things when talking about particular cases in the book. I talk about a case called Megatech. And I was speaking to the class earlier today, one of the funniest things that I never would have expected is that when I meet people from industry and Silicon Valley, and have over the last few years, they say to me: Well, we’re sure that our company is Megatech. We know you’re talking about us, Megatech. I’ve had, like, six different firms tell me they’re certain that they were the field site. (Laughter.) Now, I can neither confirm nor deny that, so that leaves them a little anxious. But I find it fascinating that so many companies see themselves in what I reported here. I never would have expected that. That’s the beauty of doing research, I guess, and having it out in the world. OK. I just want to give a few provocations or thoughts about—I know everyone here is quite interested in policy implications and things of that nature. So I want to give a couple highlights about that. I’ll say I’m not a lawyer. I kind of like to hang around with them a lot. They seem to be a good crowd for the most part. (Laughter.) But I’m not one myself. But the nature of this work, and the operationalizing of this work, means that I have to have a direct relationship to what’s going on at a policy level, and then ever further at a regulatory level. And that’s sort of been an interesting trajectory for me that I might have not expected originally nine years ago. So what’s going on? What are the pressure points on industry around this type of work? Well, I would identify them as follows—and I guess this is sort of in a sort of order, but not really. The first one I would say is regulation. Regulation is the big one, right? That could mean European maneuvers at the EU level. So we’ve seen things like that already—GDPR and other regulations passed sort of at a pan-European level, but also at the state level. Germany, for example, or Belgium, or France, where they have pushed back on firms. We have heard about, and are seeing, movement around antitrust in the United States, for example. We have seen discussion and invocation of perhaps a need to revisit Section 230 in the United States, which is what has allowed these firms to grow to where they are now, because it has given them the discretion to both decide to keep up, but also to remove, again at their discretion and to their benefit, content over the years. And then there’s this—I guess the next kind of layer I would talk about would be litigation. We have seen a number of interesting cases crop up just in the last few years—this is a new trend—of current or former content moderation workers, working as commercial content moderations, who are filing lawsuits. So there’s been a couple lawsuits that have been individual cases. One that was very interesting was about Microsoft. They had a hard time claiming these workers were not direct employees because, as you may know, Microsoft got the pants sued off of it a couple decades ago around this issue of having long-term employees they called contractors. So that was an interesting thing with that case, where the people were unequivocally direct employees. But also there is a—there is a class-action suit that’s in the state of California right now. There’s also rumblings of some cases being filed in places like Ireland which, as you may know, is a huge operations center for Silicon Valley firms, for no small reason because it’s a tax haven. OK. What else? Journalism. Negative journalistic coverage. This has been a big one, a big pressure points on the firms. Exposés around working conditions for content moderation. We’ve seen them over the years. I’ve partners with many journalists, and many journalists have broken stories themselves around this. It tends to focus on the negative working conditions and the impact on the workers. Doesn’t often go to some of the deeper policy dimensions, but it’s the kind of headline that shocks people, and it brings people into a position of, first of all, knowing that these people exist and, secondly, taking issue with their—with their treatment. And that leads us to consumer concern. Of course, the biggest fear for platforms is—well, maybe not the biggest—but a huge fear for platforms is losing their userbase. They want to gain a userbase and they want to keep people coming back. Of course, they’re advertising firms and they connect these users to advertisers. But if consumers become dissatisfied enough they may leave the platform. So when that sort of rumbling occurs, they respond. And then finally, last but not least—well, I guess I would say also academic research has had an impact to a certain extent here. But last but not least, labor organizing. This is seen as a huge threat. Again, the same with the regulatory pushback. I think labor organizing they’re trying to avoid at all costs. I think it goes without saying that these firms site their content moderation operations in places that are probably on the low scale for strong organized labor—places like the Philippines, for example. Places where the United States might have had a long-standing colonial relationship, and therefore firms there can say things like, our workers have great colloquial American English, as if that just happened by happenstance. (Laughs.) It didn’t, right? All right. So I think I’ll leave it there and we can just open it up? Is that good? All right. I tried to be short, sorry. (Laughs.) POWELL: So as is our way here, please just turn your card sideways if you would like to ask a question. I certainly have questions of my own, but I’m going to first turn to you. And I’ll just jump in later. So let’s start with Anne (sp). Q: OK. So I just want some facts. ROBERTS: Yes. Q: Where are these people geographically? What is their demographic? Are we talking about Evangelical Christians? What are their value sets? What is their filter? Because—you know, how hard is it to control what they do? ROBERTS: That’s right. OK. So the first company that I came in contact with was this Iowa firm. And this firm’s tagline was quite literally, “Outsource to Iowa, not India.” So they were setting up this relationship of don’t go to the racialized other somewhere around the world. You want your content moderation homegrown, are good Iowa, you know, former farm family workers. Of course, their farms are gone, so now they’re working in call centers. So that was something that they actually saw value in and they were willing to treat as a commodity, to a certain extent. What’s going on now with the larger firms is that—so these are—these sites can be found in places like the Philippines, especially for American firms, but also in India. Then for each country that sort of introduces legislation that’s country-specific—for example, Germany. Suddenly, there needs to be a call center in Germany, because they need to respond quickly to German law, and those people have to be linguistically and culturally sensitive to the German context. So these places are springing up, frankly, like mushrooms all over the world to respond to the linguistic and cultural needs. How do they homogenize the responses? This is the difficulty. Well, you would not believe the granularity of the policies that are internal. If there are—if the percentage of the image is flesh tone to this extent, delete. If not, leave up. If the nipple is exposed, delete, except if it’s breastfeeding. You can now leave that up. Except if it’s sexualized, delete that. So these are the kinds of decisions that have been codified— Q: From headquarters? ROBERTS: From headquarters, correct. And the expectation is that the workers actually have very little agency. But what they do have is the cognitive ability to hold all these things in their mind at once, which guess can’t do that very well? Computers. Algorithms. Not successful in the same way on all of this content. Some things computers can do well, but the cost of building the tools to do this and the worry of having false positives, or losing control over the process, means that humans are filling the gap. I think there’s a sensibility in Silicon Valley that this is just for now. That soon that we’re going to have computers that can do this. Q: But— ROBERTS: Right? Thank you. That’s what I say too. And if you talk to folks close to the operations, you know, in a candid moment they’ll say something, like, look, there’s never going to be a moment where we let the machine loose without some sort of engagement in human oversight. In fact, when the algorithmic tools are unleashed on some of the content, what has been happening is that it goes out and aggregates so much content that they actually need more human workers to sift through the stuff. So it’s actually not eliminating the humans out of the pipeline at all. Hopefully that answers— Q: But in the U.S. case, Facebook, Twitter, they are using Filipinos and Indians? It’s an outsourcing industry right now? ROBERTS: And, again, that’s— Q: In some instances. ROBERTS: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s—again, it’s like a patchwork, right? So there might be folks who are local. There might be people who have specific competencies who are employed to look at certain types of content, or certain cases. An example I would give is Myanmar, which Facebook took a lot of heat for not having appropriate staffing. You know, they’ve staffed up. So there are people who are, you know, kind of country-specific, like the way we think about people who work in policy work, actually, right? But there is often a fairly significant gap between those people who are—who are putting into operations the rules, and those people who are making the rules. And that’s another big kind of tension point, if you will. POWELL: Let’s go to Joan next. Q: Hi, Sarah. ROBERTS: Hi, Joan. Q: I’m Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the Naval War College. ROBERTS: Hi. Q: Thank you for a great presentation. I’m wondering if you could talk a little more specifically about the gender aspect. ROBERTS: Yes. So actually in my research I found that it was fairly gender-equal in terms of who was doing the work. One of the interesting things however is that in talking to some of the workers who were female or female-identified, in particular one woman who was working on a news platform, she talked about the way in which her exposure to hate speech that was particularly misogynist in nature, or that would typically include rape threats or other kinds of gender-derogatory terms, was affecting her personally to the point that she described herself as—I’m sorry you heard this already—as a sin-eater. And she was supposed to be employed part time, but she found herself when she would be maybe out to dinner, out to a restaurant, sneaking away to check her computer to see what had filtered in. And she talked—she was a person. She’s female-identified. She self-identifies as queer, working class, and oriented towards racial and social justice although she’s white herself. And she talked about the way that misogynist language in particular and threats, homophobic speech and threats and behavior, and racially insensitive and hostile material was starting to affect her so much that she felt like when she was not even on the clock she would go in and check the site, because if she wasn’t there doing it she felt like others who weren’t prepared to see the material were being exposed. Right? So she described herself as a sin-eater to me. And she said, I call myself a sin-eater—as if I knew what that was. I didn’t know what it was, I admit. So I asked her to describe it, and I looked into this later. And for those who don’t know, it’s a figure—something of a folkloric figure. But it’s a person who in the context of England and Wales was typically a poor villager, man or woman, someone destitute in a particular community, who would upon the death of someone more prominent volunteer to take a loaf of bread or other kind of food that had been passed over that individual, was imagined to be imbued with their sins, and would eat it. That person would therefore be absolved of the sins and go to heaven, and the person who was eating the sins would, I guess, suffer the consequences later. So that’s how she described it. And she—in the book we go into detail about her experience and how it became very difficult for her to separate her multiplicity of identities. But especially as a woman, and as a queer-identified woman, dealing with the kind of vitriol that she was responsible, essentially, for cleaning up. So that was a pretty stark one. (Laughs.) That was—that was tough. Yeah, thanks. POWELL: Let’s go to Catherine (sp). Q: Yeah. This is super interesting. And I actually have an experience as an early comment moderator myself, because I was the sixth employee of the Huffington Post, who would get phone calls from heads of—like Dick Cheney’s office, calling and saying: Could you please take this negative comment down about the vice president? And we would—you know, it was from the Secret Service. So, anyway, lots of stories there. But my bigger question is, what—like, it sounds like you’re talking about the labor force and this unrecognized labor force. But then from what you just said, it’s the fact that we have this unbridled comment stream of hate and how are companies ever going to really reconcile? Like, when is the moment where they finally say: We have to do something bigger than just moderate all day? ROBERTS: Well—(laughter)—what—if we can solve that this evening we can go find VC investment and we will—we’ll resolve it. But I think—you know, if I can sort of read into what you’re saying, I mean, I think your discomfort is on a couple of levels. One is, this is the function of—good, bad, or ugly, however you feel about it—Section 230s, internet intermediary definition of these platforms as being able to decide to what extent and for what purposes they will moderate. So that’s the first thing. But I think the second thing is a little less apparent. And it has to do with business model. It’s not as if it was a foregone conclusion that the whole world would just flood channels with cat pictures, and this was my sister-in-law’s wedding, and whatever they’re posting or, you know, Nazi imagery or other—you know, terrorist material, child sexual exploitation material. But there’s actually a direct relationship on these platforms to the circulation of material that we call content—which already, again, I would say is a ridiculous, too-general category—and monetization, and treating that material as commodity. So what I’m getting at here is that the platforms are a little bit in a bit of a pickle, to say the least, about how they have developed a business model that’s predicated on a constant influx of new material. Why? Well, because they want us to come back. If it’s just the same stuff all day every day, they don’t think we’re going to come back. What is—what is going to get the most hits from viewers? Is it going to be something really boring and uninteresting, or is it going to be the things that’s just maybe this side of bearable and everyone’s talking about it because it’s viral, right? So these are the kind of economics and logics that have been built up around the constant influx of content. And so it’s gotten to the point where this computer scientist that was at Dartmouth, and he’s now at Stanford, who developed one of the primary AI tools to combat child sexual exploitation material, and actually does work very well in that use case, he pointed out in a paper that he wrote, and then I cited him heavily in a recently in a paper I wrote, where he said: Look, what’s never on the table when I’m in boardrooms is, what if we slow down the hose of the influx of the material? That’s never under question. And he’s—for heaven’s sake, he’s the developer of this tool. And he’s the one thinking, hello, the always on, constant on, kind of unvetted uploading from anyone in the world is maybe not an awesome idea, right? Like after the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand, which was a horrible massacre, that was maybe the first time you heard Facebook seriously question, maybe we shouldn’t just let everyone in the world turn on a livestream and go for it. Maybe it should only be trusted users, or people whose info we have or something, right? So we get back to this problem of the business model. And it’s the thing that it’s kind of like the elephant in the room. It’s, like, the thing that they don’t want to touch because that’s how they make their money. They monetize the content that we provide. I’d also say that we are unfortunately fairly implicated. And I mean, like, look, I’m sitting here with my phone, tweeting, doing all of the things, right? We are implicated ourselves as users and being a part of the economy. But I can’t in good conscience tell everybody to throw out their phone and get off the platform, because I can’t do it. So they’re—I don’t know. There’s got—you know, there’s a slow food movement that came up a number of years ago because people were sick of the scary supply chain industrialization of their food, right? And I often think about, who’s going to come up with slow social media? Q: Yeah. No, that’s sort of my—I have a friend who’s pretty high up at Facebook. And they’re complaining about how the guy who wrote what the Zucc, or something—or, Zucked, advertises on Facebook all the time. Like, the very— ROBERTS: Yeah, right? Q: But then they’re making money off of that. Which is like a terrible cycle. ROBERTS: Which is, like, also—yeah. And these people are probably completely disembodied from that ecosystem anyway, right? So I think one of the other things I just throw in the mix to think about is that we’ve hardly tapped any control mechanisms that might be at our avail in other realms. So things like—again, like some of these regulatory things. Or even the fact that these firms have been, for fifteen years, been able to self-define almost exclusively, without intervention, as tech firms. It’s not just because they have an allegiance to the tech world that they call themselves that, but what if they called themselves media broadcast companies. Well, what happens when you’re in broadcast media? Can you just air anything you want? I mean, George Carlin made a career out of lampooning the fact that you can’t, right? So, you know, one day at some point years ago I thought, let me just go look at the FCC’s rules on broadcast media and what you can and can’t do. Let me go find the comparable thing for social media—oh, right? And yet, they’re all engaged not only in soliciting our material, but now they’re engaged in production of their own material too. I think about YouTube as, like, the prime example of that business model relationship, where we have literally people getting checks cut to them if they—if they get a lot of views. So there’s a whole economy now, and the logic of the platform, that almost goes unquestioned and seems innate. And yet, it hasn’t been that long that it’s been this way—which is one of the things I’d like to think about. I don’t have the solution, however. Remember, I— Q: More like, is there going to be a tipping point? I mean, that’s what I—yeah, if you’re seeing it. ROBERTS: Yeah. I mean, I don’t—I’ll tell you this. Like, I don’t like to do prognostication because, again, I decided to do my French degree and not go to Silicon Valley in the ’90s. (Laughter.) But I don’t think—if I had to bet, I don’t think the pressure will come from the U.S. I think the pressure is coming from Europe. Yep, and they’re very, very worried about that. Q: Did you see that the Danes have an ambassador to Silicon Valley? ROBERTS: Yes, they do. I saw that. Indeed. Q: I was just in Denmark. And you know, these people think differently. And they’re going to think harder about the regulation issues. ROBERTS: But you’ll also see—you’ll also see social media CEOs be received as though heads of state. I mean, we’re talking about policy that rivals legal code. Q: And economies that rival maybe the GDP of some small countries as well. ROBERTS: Correct. Correct. POWELL: So we’ve got Rufus (sp), and then Kenneth (sp), and Abby (sp). Let’s go to Rufus (sp). Q: So, a two-part question. And they kind of play with each other. So this is mission critical from a brand point of view, and it supports their advertising, and, you know, you want to have control over your platform. But I’m curious in terms of is the—is it somewhat a resource problem? Like, are they just not investing enough in it, and therefore you have very bad labor practices, and that’s the problem? And then the second part of that, of my question, actually has to do with maybe how it’s different in China, because it seems like they moderate their content real well. (Laughter.) And they have social platforms— ROBERTS: Yeah. Let’s copy that model, right? Yeah. (Laughs.) Q: Yeah, no, but, you know, I’m just curious. Like, clearly they have control over their social platforms in a way that we don’t. And I wonder if there’s anything to learn from that or be afraid of in terms of we should control more. Does that— ROBERTS: Well, to answer the first question, I think it—I can’t just say yes or no, right? I’m going to have to— Q: Sure. ROBERTS: Sorry. (Laughter.) I’m sorry. I think it is a resource problem, but it’s also a problem of prioritization. So how can I put this? This function, although it’s been present in some form, I would argue, since the platform started, was never thought of as central. So it was always a bit of an afterthought, playing catch up. And I think that that position of the activity within the firm has always lagged, essentially. There’s an interesting moment in this film called The Cleaners that I was involved in, where Nicole Wong, who was at the time the general counsel at Google, was up one night making content decisions. So there were people in the firms who knew—I mean, at those high echelons—who knew this was an issue and a problem. But, you know, it was sort of, like, someone else’s problem? And it wasn’t a problem that was seen as—it wasn’t—it wasn’t a bucket that was going to generate revenue, right? It was a cost center. I mean, there’s a lot of ways to slice that. I think you could argue, for example that, well, a PR disaster in the absence of this activity would be immensely costly, or you could say that a company that has good, solid practices and has an identity that maybe they even build around their content moderation that gives a character of flavor to the platform could even market on those grounds. But the decision was made early on to sort of treat this activity as secondary at best in terms of how it was presented to the public. I think that was also because they didn’t want to be accountable. They wanted to make the decisions and have the discretion to make the decisions. So because it’s always been laggard, it’s like there’s been this huge resource shift within the firms to figure out, go figure, you know, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So the answer is let’s get computation on it solve it. Well, one of the reasons that they want to use computation is, of course, the problem of scale. So despite there being maybe a hundred thousand people working in this—in this sector, that pales against the amount of content that’s produced. It means that just some portion, some miniscule portion of content is ever reviewed by humans. That’s one of the reasons why they want to use computation. But another reason—there are a few reasons. Another reason is because that’s what they’re in the business of doing. And that, again, also takes out this worry about rogue actors, people resisting, people making their own choices, making errors, disclosing to the media or others—academics, such as myself—what they’re up to, disclosing to regulators or others who might want to intervene. So there are other—so we should be suspicious about some of the motives around the computation. But I think functionally, at the end of the day, there are very few companies that could actually build the tools. I mean, we’re talking about bleeding edge AI implementation. When I started this research I went over to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois. We were in the—in the cheaper side of campus, so I went over to the monied side where the big computational stuff was going on. And I went to this computer vision lab. Now, again, this is 2010, to be fair. But I went into this computer vision lab and I spoke to this research scientist. And I said, look, here’s the problem. Let me sketch out the problem for you. Can computers do this? Is that reasonable? And he said, see that over there? And he pointed at an oak table in the middle of this darkened cube—visualization cube kind of space. I said, yeah. He said, right now we’re working on making the computer know that the table is a table. Like, controlling for every—(laughs)—you know, aspect of the—we’re way beyond that today. But it kind of shows the fundamental problem. First of all, what does it mean for the computer to know? Usually it’s pattern matching, or it’s some kind of matching. So the best kinds of computational tools for content moderation are matching against something known. This is why the problem of child sexual exploitation can be effectively treated with a computational tool, because for better or for worse people who traffic in that material tend to recirculate a whole lot of material. So it can be put in a database and can be known. But for stuff that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, or is hard to understand, or has symbols and meanings that you have to be a cultural insider to understand, or you have to just be a human being to understand, there are only a few firms in the world that have staff, money, know-how, the need to put workers on it. For many firms, it’s just cheaper to get humans. Now, your second question about China, I confess to being an ignoramus when it comes to China. But I would say that, you know, just off the cuff, a huge difference is that Chinese companies don’t just spring up and do what they want from the start. I mean, they are—(laughs)—I mean, they are fostered by the state and they’re typically quite intertwined with the state at first. There is no Section 230 in China, in other words, right? And there’s probably a lot more labor to put on this in China, and more of a sensibility that it’s going on, I think, than in the United States. But people have creative ways around it, always. POWELL: I guess it would be harder to carry out your research in China too, to document what’s going on there. ROBERTS: I mean, yes. Although, you know, I should tell you, I have a new Ph.D. student coming in a matter of weeks. And he’s coming to work with me because he told me he wants to do comparatives studies of the Chinese case of content moderation versus the United States case. And we’re on Skype and I’m, like, dude—shut up, dude. (Laughter.) You know? Like, we’ll talk about it when you get here, man. I’m, like, all nervous, because I don’t know who’s listening. Yeah. So I think that work will come. And I think we need comparative studies, because I am limited by my cultural context, which is the American one. But that is an important one to understand right now, because of the global impact. POWELL: Kenneth (sp). Q: To what extent can you offer specific normative suggestions on how to improve content moderation towards the ideals that you have? ROBERTS: Well, I think—yeah, it depends on what we consider an improvement. I think for the purposes of the book, it has to do with working conditions. So let’s take that as the goal. And to get ideas around that, I’ve often relied on the workers themselves, since they’ve thought so much about what would help them. I think there are a few things—well, I think there are a number of things that we can think about. The first thing that comes out of everyone’s mouth, you won’t be surprised to learn, is: Pay us more. I mean, it’s sort of a flip response, but I think it says a lot, because when I hear workers say that I hear them say: Value our work more. I also think the secretive nature of the work is something that impacts the psychological difficulty of dealing with the work. So— Q: Excuse me. What are they paid? What’s the range? I mean, are we talking— ROBERTS: So I’ll give you a very recent example. In May, Facebook made a big announcement, sort of leading the way in this arena of how to better support content moderation workers. They’ve taken a lot of heat, so that’s part of the reason. And they announced that for all of their American-based content moderators who are in third-party call centers, or wherever they are in the chain of production, the base rate of pay would be $15. And in other metro areas, New York, kind of—San Francisco, high-expense areas, it would be a higher rate of pay. So fifteen’s the floor, and then going up from there. Q: My maid makes twenty (dollars). ROBERTS: So, right. So this raises some important issues. Q: That’s like basic minimum wage now. ROBERTS: For—right. We know that also, again, they’re a step out from basic minimum wage that will be enacted in California, first of all. So again, thinking about how this—there’s a strategy of being head of regulation a lot of times. Q: But without benefits? ROBERTS: Well, right. And then the other thing that this brings up—there was sort of, like, the deafening silence from other industry players. I thought maybe some of them would follow suit. Q: That was way too high, yeah. ROBERTS: Yeah. But they haven’t. Google went on record and they said that, I think, 2022 they were going to get everyone there. Also, this was American only, but we know that there is so much of this work that’s outside of the United States. Unless it’s a place where the mandatory minimum wage is higher, which might be in some European cases— Q: Not the Philippines. (Laughs.) ROBERTS: Correct. So it’s usually very low wage. The other thing that companies have started doing—Facebook is one, and others—is bringing on psychological support on site. Workers told me a bit about this in their case. And they said that while one the one hand that was a welcome improvement, because they didn’t really necessarily have access to those services, it was in some cases voluntary. And what ended up happening was that the therapist, the psychological services person would come at the appointed time, take a room in the department, and anyone could come and speak to him or her. So that worker who’s struggling and having a hard time has to get off the queue, tap out of his or her work, stand up, walk through the department, walk past the boss, walk past the coworkers, and go in and sit with the therapist—thereby, letting everyone know: I’m struggling with looking at content, which is the precondition of my job. So some of them said: It would be nice if that were mandatory, and if everybody had to visit with a therapist at some—at some prescribed time. That’s another thing. I think benefits is another big thing. And I would also add that very little has been done by way of developing tools that could be supportive or assistive. When I talked to some of the workers, they were using outmoded kind of homebrew solutions. Or, in the book, we talk about a firm that was using, like, Google tools—like, Google Docs, Google Chat, like, sort of kitbashed or kind of—kind of quasi-internally developed but really, like, just commercially available stuff. I think there’s a market for tools that would allow workers to do things like specify a queue that I’m not comfortable being in today. Like, today I just—if something comes in and it’s flagged child abuse, I just can’t see that today. I’m going to tap out. I’ll take the one that’s, yeah, take your pick, right? Rape threats. I’ll take that one. But, you know, when we—when we as users report content, we usually go kind of triage that material. So that could be used proactively on the worker side to allow them to opt out. And it’s not—you know, some days you can handle it, some days you can’t. These were kinds of things that the workers reported to me. You know, usually I’m OK with animal abuse. That day I just couldn’t do it. One guy said, I just can’t take it when there’s someone screaming in the video. So maybe he could look at videos with audio off. So there’s, like, little things that we could do. Making the screen black and white rather than color or making the screen fuzzy might be a tool. Again, based on and maybe tailored to a worker preference. Workers told me that they would do things like they would look at the screen by squinting so that they would only get—you know, they would know it was gory and they could tell just by squinting if it was too much blood, according to the rules, or too much kind of violence, and then they wouldn’t have to, like, experience the whole thing. We could develop tools that could do that for them, right? And maybe if they felt like, I need—unfortunately I need a closer look, I’ll press the thing to unveil the entire image. So there are—I think there’s a lot of things we can do that it’s just frankly not been prioritized, right? It’s not the thing that’s going to—it’s not the new function that they’re going to blast around. POWELL: So we have two more questions. I think we can—oh, OK. Q: Sorry. POWELL: No, it’s fine. (Laughter.) So let’s see. We might have to get the last two together. But let’s go to Abby (sp). Q: Sure. So just—it’s a—it’s a bit of an expansion on the question that Kenneth (sp) just asked. But what do you think the changes to the labor workforce would be on the actual product, which is the moderation? So let’s hypothetically say we have a workforce that is appropriately compensated, that is centered, maybe directly employed. How would the product of content moderation change, in your view? What would look different to the user? What would look different to the company? ROBERTS: Well, again, I think there’s sort of a fundamental missed opportunity in the fact that the work was rendered secret, whereas again there were all sorts of experiences we have in our daily life where we look for expertise and curation. So what if we thought of people who did content moderation not just as cleaners or janitors, or people who sweep up a mess—which, of course, are important activities but are typically undervalued in our daily life. But what if we thought about them as people who were curators, or tastemakers, you know? I don’t know, sommelier of the internet. I’m just making stuff up, so please don’t—(laughter)—don’t say, that woman said sommelier of the internet. But, you know, people who can help be a guide rather than an invisible agent. I think that that has really hamstrung the circumstances for the workers in a lot of ways. I think thinking about—I didn’t—wasn’t able to get into this in the talk, but there’s a whole host of metrics—productivity metrics that are laid on these workers in terms of how much stuff they’re supposed to process in a given shift, for example. When I was in the Philippines, the workers described to me that they used to have something like thirty seconds per review, per item that they were looking at. And it had been cut to more, like, ten to twelve seconds. Now, another way of thinking about that is their productivity had been more than doubled, the expectation. Or that their wage had been cut in half vis-à-vis productivity. So I don’t think anyone benefits from a ten-second look. I don’t think the workers benefit. I don’t think users benefit. I don’t think the ecosystem benefits. Ultimately, I mean, from just, like, just a cost-benefit analysis on a balance sheet, I guess that comes out looking good for the firms. But I don’t think in a perfect world that we get any kind of quality any more than we think of a McDonald’s hamburger and, you know, a—I don’t know, a farm-to-table meal as the same thing. They’re fundamentally different. Q: What you’re saying is things get through that shouldn’t and things that should go through don’t? The famous image of the girl in Vietnam. You know, you all know that. ROBERTS: That’s right, the terror of war. Q: Right. ROBERTS: Now— Q: You know, just don’t do it very well. ROBERTS: Right. And you have ten seconds, and you’re a twenty-two-year-old college graduate in Manilla, you’re educated—you asked a bit about demographics. All of the workers I talked to were college grads. That has shifted somewhat now, but the workers in Silicon Valley in particular were grads of places like Berkeley and USC. But they had, you know, such as yours truly, made the unfortunate decision to major in econ, or history, these other—I’m kidding, right? (Laughter.) Like, I mean, I think these are very important disciplines. But they—you know, to be employed in STEM or to be employed in the valley, they were, like, kind of not prized disciplines. And yet, they actually had the acumen and the knowledge to make better decisions than some of their peers would. POWELL: So let’s collect Lawrence (sp) and Donna (sp) together, and then let you make concluding remarks. ROBERTS: OK. Q: So you’ve been discussing the irregularities, inconsistencies in the workforce in terms of particular categories of content, which need some measure of moderation—sexualized images, violence, and hate speech. But all these, I think there’s some margin of error. In the case of sexualized imagery, A, it’s—they’ve been able to quantify it, to some extent. I’ve had pictures I took at major museums that were censored because they thought the content was oversexualized. I thought it was silly, but so what that they censored it. Which way they err doesn’t bother me very much, unless it’s child pornography, and you say that they have pretty good methods for that. In the case of violence, again, I hope the err on the side of eliminating violence. It’s not a First Amendment concern or something like that. In the case of ethnic—things that stir up ethnic discord, such as what happened in Myanmar, again, I hope they err on the side of eliminating that kind of hate speech. But what really concerns me is inaccurate—is false content, often spread by governments, the Russian other manipulation of the U.S. elections, the Chinese and Taiwan elections, others in Europe, where it’s a question of facts. And here you have huge competing values. You have—here, you’re talking about real political issues, and governance issues, and it really should be a First Amendment right to speak on these issues. And yet, this false information is doing—particularly deliberately spread false information—is doing enormous damage to democracies around the world. So how do you begin to train people to moderate that, which is far more critical. If anything there’s, to me, less room for error. Less room for error in censoring what should be allowed. And it’s quite a tragedy that so much of this is being propagated and that we’re unable to control it. So how do you begin to deal with that? How do you train a workforce to deal with that? POWELL: So we’re going move to this question. We’re going to collect Donna’s (sp) question as well, and then you can answer them together. ROBERTS: All right. Q: Sarah, I don’t know how you remember that. I’ll make mine, I guess, kind of simple. You are familiar with the Verge—the Verge articles that have come out? ROBERTS: Yes. Q: I guess one question I have for you is I’m trying to get my head around listening to this and saying: What is it that’s really concerning you? Because part of this conversation has been about the worker, about the human piece of it. You have asserted—and I’ll say it’s an assertion—that technology can’t clear—can’t significantly reduce the gap, it seems. And then we’re talking about the social media companies, but we know that this is an internet issue. It is not just a social—it is not just Google, YouTube, and a Facebook issue. So it’s like, when you sit there and look at that—so I was trying to figure out too, OK, is your angle, you know, this is—we’ve got to go after—is this about Facebook and Google? Because if you think about it, right, they’re cleaning—they’re required, in essence, because they are commercially operating a channel, to keep that as clean as they can. And we do regulate that a little bit, right? But the fact of the matter is, our challenge in the content era is this content can show up anywhere on the internet, on any—you know, any website. And that’s the challenge. I’m sure if you followed, you know, child pornography, right, they’re not just looking on social media channels. They’re going to find it anywhere, including the Dark Web. You know, anywhere, parse video. So I guess it’s, like, who are we as society looking to to address this issue? And I guess, is it the worker piece that you’re—are you—and I understand there’s a big issue with humans, you know, involved in the processes. POWELL: You have approximately a minute and a half to answer both questions. (Laughter.) ROBERTS: So the answer to your question is, yes, it’s the worker welfare piece that first compelled me, yeah. And I think I wanted to address my remarks for an audience that I thought would have maybe more direct relationship to policy issues and regulation. But that’s—the book is concerned with the worker welfare, and that’s what my concern has always been, and that was my point of entry. I think what I found is that you can’t really carve that out somehow from the other issues. So for me, that was a foot in the door to now I have to understand the ecosystem. So what I tried to do was also map that out to a certain extent. I’m not certain that—(laughs)—I mean, I’m not sure I would necessarily agree with you, per se, in the way that you framed up the issue of it’s not an XYZ issue, it’s an internet issue, in the sense that I would say this: I find it difficult to, in the American context, locate many internet platforms or services that are not commercial. And that’s part of my—you know, that’s part of the claim that I make of why there is an ecosystem of this work going on. It’s because there was great profit to be made in setting up channels that encouraged people to upload, and to do it all the time, and to actually, in some cases indirectly but in other cases directly, monetize that activity. And that is fundamentally different from what the internet used to look like, which was not—I’m not Pollyanna about it. It wasn’t the halcyon days. In fact, it was a real mess for a lot of the—a lot of the interaction. But it was a different kind a mess and a different set of problems. So that’s sort of the conceit here. But it’s not some—you know, it’s not—it’s not a simple case of exploitation writ large without any other complexities. And it’s not a simple case of Facebook is trash, and sucks, and should close down either. Which has put me in the weird position of, like, working with these people, right, to problem solve. The other question was about basically veracity of information and gaming of the platforms. The one soundbite I’ll give you with that is I think that the issue that you raise is fundamental to the protection of democracy around the world. And I would also say that it’s much harder to make determinations about those issues than it is to know if too much of a boob is showing. And so what the companies tend to do—and I call them on this all the time. I say, you are—your level of granularity on things that maybe don’t matter is in the absence of your ability—or your willingness, let’s say, to articulate your own politics. Because guess what? Other countries where these platforms are engaged don’t have the same commitments to democracy, or to freedom of expression, or whatever it is. And they want to be in the Turkish marketplace, and they want to be in China. And that’s put them on the ropes, and put others in the position of making demands on the firms of, like, well, what are your commitments? Well, they’re very mushy middle. And so then it’s easier to look for and take care of, in a way, some of this content that is obviously bad, versus sitting and spending time, and money, and energy figuring out is this truthful or false? Is this from a vetted source, or is this propaganda? And I think, just to close out, your point that state actors are the ones who should be scaring everybody the most is a great point, for sure, because those are the folks, like you said, who are calling up Facebook and saying: Take down blah. POWELL: Yeah. We should end it there, but please join me in thanking Sarah Roberts. ROBERTS: Thanks. (Applause.) (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.