On Monday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the “unregulated media” in the United States was to blame for her loss in 2016.
During a wide-ranging conversation with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) at an event hosted by Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, Clinton warned that the media and Big Tech companies’ greed and lies hurt democracy.
Clinton warned other countries about the effects of websites like Facebook and others that don’t care what kind of fake information they spread as long as they make money from ads. If these cases against Fox are successful, we will be back to a media that isn’t controlled much and doesn’t have to be fair or take responsibility for lies.
Clinton made a brief mention of Russian meddling in the 2016 election as she thought about her loss. She said that the team of French President Emmanuel Macron had called her to find out what had happened so that they could get ready for a similar performance.
She said, “Probably what really helped Macron was a law in France that said no coverage of the election 72 hours before, and many of the people we were working with to take down Macron didn’t know about that law.” On the Friday before the Sunday election, they started putting out all of this false information, but since they didn’t know about the law, it had no effect.
Clinton also remembered a conversation she had with Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand, in which she asked why Wellington was less affected by political division than Australia.
Clinton said that Ardern said, “We’ll never let Rupert Murdoch have a TV presence,” but Ardern said that Clinton was wrong.
During their whole talk, Clinton and Pelosi agreed that the state of American democracy is dangerous. Pelosi said that the 2016 election was the start of the “backsliding” of American democracy, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin “feared” Clinton the most.
Pelosi suggested that we get rid of “dark money” in politics by making it clear to the people “what’s at stake.” Clinton agreed, but he stressed that voters shouldn’t give up hope but should stay determined. When they talked about the future of the United States, they did so with a careful sense of hope.
Clinton added to her earlier warning that AI is a threat to democracy. She also brought up a deepfake film in which Pelosi looked like she was drunk.
Clinton said, “I was so angry that I called her office to tell her so.” I told Facebook, “Yes, but you can’t make up your own mind about this because it’s not real.” The company refused to take down the post, saying, “We believe that our customers have the right to make up their own minds.”
Clinton added, “The third thing is how it will affect politics and government. Because other people have so much information about us, we will always be in a state of uncertainty and instability.” “Democracy requires some level of trust,” they say.
Pelosi didn’t let the event bother her too much, but she did warn that AI could be used in the future to hurt the reputations of people who had nothing to do with it.
“I’m not even drunk,” she said as a joke. Again, AI is like a double-edged sword: it opens up amazing options, but in the wrong hands, it can make any world the user wants.
A news release from Columbia says that Clinton will teach a course called “Inside the Situation Room” in the fall of 2016. The course will look at how big decisions were made about things like talks with Iran, the “red line” in Syria, and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Keren Yarhi-Milo, dean of SIPA, said that Monday’s talk was the first in a series where top past officials will talk in depth about important issues “as they close one chapter of their career and look to the next.”