Martin Moore (3:08)

Thank you very much. Good to be here.

Carl Miller (3:11)

So, Martin, I mean, I've known you for a long time, and you were one of the very first people that started to raise the alarm about the power of platforms back in the day, about how they were capturing news, how they're in many ways controlling news, even accidentally. But this book is not about the platforms, is it? This book is about governments.

Martin Moore (3:28)

Exactly, yes. And that is the key, I guess, in the sense that when I was doing all that work and I could see the growing power of technology platforms and see that they become this de facto public sphere, it was obvious that they were going to play an incredibly important part in political communication globally. And. And they have, and they are. What was really not clear to me then was that if you like, governments would fight back. And at the time, it felt as though governments were kind of in retreat and, and nation states from retreat and that, that, you know, if you like, that the people had. Had jumped over the barricades and, you know, they. They had taken control. And there was all this talk about the end of power and the. And how we were seeing sort of this dissipation, this democratization. And that was all the language, and certainly it was the language which the platforms put out. But what became clear it was when I was doing some work with Tom from War Studies, Tom Collie. He and I were looking at what Russia and China were doing in particular in terms of their international news services. So Russia with Russia Today, RT and Sputnik and others, and China with Xiji and Xinhua, it actually became clear that it started with autocracies, but actually governments, including increasingly a lot of democracies, were finding ways in which to take back control, if you like, take back control of certainly of certain political narratives. And they were doing it, and some of them were doing it in a very kind of concerted and deliberate fashion, such that, you know, by the time we get to 2025, you can see around the world an awful lot of governments, not just autocracies, but a lot of democratic governments, have successfully kind of regained an awful lot of power and are increasing that power and I think increasing it in a dangerous way, in a way that is very undemocratic and is leading us to this much more authoritarian public sphere and leading us towards, as Russia calls them, these Kind of sovereign realities.

Carl Miller (5:41)

So I remember the heady days of Tahrir Square. We were both writing back then, answering questions such as, is despotism now outmoded? Has Facebook made autocracy impossible? And just the distance that we've moved since that debate to where we are now. So, Martin, the fight back's underway. As you say. Governments, I suppose, in different ways. And I suppose that's really what the book tries to expose, isn't it? There's lots of different ways in which governments have been experimenting and trying to take back power. But it's not just taking back control of the Internet in general that you focus on, is it? It's the news in particular. So why the news? Why is that an important part of this story?

Martin Moore (6:22)

The news is central to the story. What many of these governments have realized, and some of them have said so explicitly, is that in order to gain, as they see it, narrative supremacy or kind of narrative dominance, in order for their story to be the primary story, they need to, if you like, control the agenda and indeed control some of the facts that fit the agenda. And to do that, they need to have a large degree of control of news. And that is news. And this is the thing that I suppose really struck us when we were looking at it. We thought that in this incredibly chaotic, incredibly sort of open digital public sphere, it's impossible for anyone to really control the news, because not only you've got the old publishers, you've got the new publishers, you've got the new influencers, you've got all of us, the kind of the general public, you've got this incredibly complex and chaotic atmosphere. But actually what we've seen is this progressive kind of, I don't say takeover, this progressive influence over not just legacy media publishers, but all the other kind of structures of news production and dissemination, such that in a way, particularly if you live somewhere like Russia, you simply, you know, you don't see information, you don't see news, you don't see stories that challenge your worldview. And even if you are a skeptical citizen, even if you do kind of have a healthy degree of kind of pushback against the government narratives, it's really hard. It's really hard to kind of to know what isn't there, to kind of to know what isn't being told. I mean, you can certainly talk about it, but you quite quickly sound like a conspiracy theorist. So in a way, if you are, as a government able to not even control all the news, but control the majority of the news, then that it Takes you a long way down the road towards dominating the kind of national narrative.

Carl Miller (8:26)

Well, you've used this phrase narrative dominance a couple of times now, and I think that that's the last concept that I think we need to unpick before we can actually jump into some case studies, jump into some countries. So I don't think, Martin, before I read the book, I fully realized how important storytelling is for. For political power and for domestic control. So tell us a bit about narratives, the way in which you need a plot, characters, setting, key points, important moral lessons, and that really flows out to kind of key political implications, elections and the things that actually all politicians, whether in autocracies or liberal democracies, really want, ultimately power.

Martin Moore (9:10)

Absolutely. And suppose I dated back a little bit to thinking done many decades ago by a cognitive psychologist, Jerome Bruner. Jerome Bruner, who looked at how people think and how people learn, and he put forward this kind of proposal that actually an awful lot of people, their understanding of the world comes not through what we might think of as sort of objective reality. In other words, they're not going to endlessly going out and finding out things for themselves. I mean, of course, they find out things from their direct experience, but there's an awful lot that's beyond their own direct experience. And most of us make sense of the world through what he called these narrative realities. So we understand these kind of broader stories and broader pictures. And that idea, which started out in the kind of. He was working in the field of education, started out in the field of education, gradually sort of started to infiltrate all sorts of other fields to the point where you get to the last 10, 15 years and you have almost any field you look at, whether it's commercial, kind of in marketing, they're always saying the answer to selling more products is to tell better stories. If you look towards, you know, most institutions, they say if the institution's in decline or it's under threat, they say, we just got to tell our story better. And then you see this kind of move more and more into politics. And you see, for example, in China. In China, in 2009, the Communist Party decided that actually the problem was not with the way that China governed. Problem was not with China from a geopolitical perspective. The problem was that China's story was not well understood by the rest of the world. And actually what China needed to do was to, as it literally said, tell its story well. And it started investing enormous amounts in infrastructure and in content in order to tell its story well. This belief is that if you can create what scholars call this strategic narrative. And a strategic narrative goes beyond simply kind of a specific individual story. It goes to a much broader story which has. It has kind of a narrative arc. It has a sort of an origin story, if you like. It has individual characters, those characters, a little bit like, I suppose, a Hollywood plot. Those characters are often binary. So you have, you know, baddies and goodies and clearly kind of it's deterministic in the sense that it's sort of leading towards an end point. So to take, I suppose, a really an example that many of us will be familiar with in terms of Russia, when Russia presents the war in, as it calls it, the special military operation in Ukraine, it presents itself as a kind of. I know this might sound astonishing to us. It presents itself as this kind of David versus Goliath. It is Russia against the West. In its story, Ukraine was becoming increasingly extreme, right, even fascist, even Nazi and Ukrainian government, along with the Azov Brigade, was attacking and killing people in the Donbas. People in the Donbas who Russia claimed saw themselves as Russian. And therefore, by taking military action, Russia was saving the people of the Donbas from extermination by these Ukrainian Nazis. And then the west, and it does call it the west, the west reacted and the west started funneling arms and military resources and even personnel into Ukraine in order to fight back against Russia. And this is the sort of the much broader story into which all the mole minor stories fit. The way this works in news is whenever there's an event, the event is not. It is obviously reported, but it's reported through a particular prism. And that prism has to be the overall strategic narrative. So if Russia is retreating, Russia is actually making a tactical withdrawal in order to attack somewhere else. There is never a moment at which the facts can't kind of contravene the much larger story. They have to fit somewhere within it. And that goes not just for Russia now, it goes increasingly for governments across.

Carl Miller (13:28)

The world and Russia. I mean, you describe, I think this story, this national story is a kind of sovereign reality for them. Something which has kind of floated away from the rest of the world to such an astonishing degree. You're right. It is actually jarring when you now watch Russian media and just how unbelievably different, absolutely everything is. How the facts are organized, how they're presented, the underlying assumptions to anything that we would be telling ourselves in the West.

Martin Moore (14:00)

We talk in the book about Newton's third law of motion, which is for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And it's almost like that is the way the Russian media deals with events in Ukraine. In other words, where something happens in Ukraine, it's reported in the equal and opposite way in Russia. So if there is, the most glaring example is Bucha, you know, where there's a massacre, a documented massacre, a massacre documented by many, many, many independent observers of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians. You know that that is a stage managed action by the west against Ukrainians in order to alienate people from Russia and in order to allege Russia is, is guilty of war crimes. In fact, to the extent that, and Jade McClint writes about this very well, the ext Lucha now in Russia is a shorthand for fake news. So they literally use that word as a way of saying this is an example of how the west constructs these events in order to make Russia look guilty.

Carl Miller (15:02)

Let's move from the what they're doing to the how they're doing it for a second. So, and perhaps here let's draw in China too. So, so, so Russia had to kind of scramble, didn't they, to kind of be able to achieve this kind of sovereign reality. Perhaps they were caught a little more flat foot footed about the rise of the Internet, like many autocrats around the world. But China didn't like from the very beginning, you argue, they took a underlying economic and infrastructural approach and always sought to control the kind of deeper kind of layers of the Internet and how information essentially flowed around.

Martin Moore (15:34)

Exactly. So I think the first time the Internet ever arrived in China was 87, 1987. And it was literally from the very early stages that China was very skeptical and nervous about the role that the Internet would play within the Chinese political system. And it was partly because they were looking at what was happening in Russia or the Soviet Union at the time. So their belief was that actually glasnost and perestroika were disastrous for the Soviet Union. And actually glasnost openness, that openness, particularly of communications, had accelerated the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union. And so from very, very early on, they were determined not to kind of replicate the what happened to the Communist Party in Russia. And So from the 1990s onwards, they started this program, the Golden Shield program, part of which was the so called Great Firewall, which is this virtual wall around China through which they can control what comes in and out from outside China. And then from the early 2000s, starting to putting the responsibility on the technology companies themselves to essentially censor, initially manually and increasingly in A very automated way what was happening on their platforms. And at that point we still had some US platforms in China, Google's in China. Google tried to accede to some of the demands of the Chinese government, eventually in 2010, decided it just couldn't do that. And so we saw Western companies either banned or remove themselves from China and Chinese equivalents start to grow within China. And those Chinese equivalents very much worked closely or at least responded closely to the demands of the CCP and had in some cases hundreds if not thousands of internal sensors who are working within these companies and building software to censor. But it was at that point when by the end of the first decade of the 21st century that China having sort of, if you like, gained a high degree of control internally, started to look externally started to say actually you know what, we're going to go beyond China and start investing heavily, not just in content that tells our story well, but in infrastructure, communications infrastructure around the world. That's in some cases literally the hardware. So you know, buying satellites, paying for cables, it is making sure that they have agreements with lots of media organizations around the world. They start investing in media organizations around the world. They start making sure that their channel, CGTN particularly are prominent when it comes to, you know, if you turn on the TV in Nairobi, probably the first default news channel you'll get is cgtn. They made sure that Xinhua, which is the sort of the Chinese state news agency, they increased the number of staff to I think it's about 10,000 now, international bureaus around the world and then provided an awful of the agency copy for free for news organizations. So you start sort of seeing how the Chinese perspective and Chinese produced news starts to become a foundation. It starts to be infiltrated into news around the world. And of course what that means in practice is that you get a very, a very Chinese perspective. I was just thinking actually last week when we were hearing these stories about the spy, the collapsed spy trial in the uk, it was just occurring to me how long it's been since we've heard any news that's really critical of the Chinese government, the ccp. I mean there was a few years ago we had, obviously we had Xinjiang and re education camps in Xinjiang. We had Hong Kong and the kind of anti democracy actions in Hong Kong. We had various other critical stories of China. Where are those critical stories now? Where are those investigations about what the Chinese government is doing either domestically or internationally? Indeed, stories about COVID 19. I mean there are many, many stories which have effectively disappeared. And I think that's in part because the trans government has been very successful, if not necessarily convincing people that it is, you know, benign and it is an alternative to the kind of US hegemon at the very least, limiting and restricting the negative news that's coming out about it.

Mia Sorrenti (20:04)

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies just to see if you could save some cash? Well, Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Ordinary checking a $300 head start on checking Ordinary Savings High yield savings that grow your money Ordinary Mortgage A mortgage with a rate that drops the market does why settle for With Oregon State Credit Union you get all sorts of welcome to human to human banking Oregon State Credit Union insured by NCUA equal housing lender $25 minimum balance required Subject to change terms and conditions the holidays.

Martin Moore (21:10)

Mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info and more places that could expose you more to identity theft.

Carl Miller (21:18)

But LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our US based restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed.

Martin Moore (21:25)

Or your money back. Don't face drained accounts, fraudulent loans or financial losses alone. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with Lifelock.

Carl Miller (21:33)

Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.

Mia Sorrenti (21:40)

Kay Jeweler's Black Friday sale is on. Now's the time to get up to 50% off Black Friday deals. With savings this big, you can get gifts for everyone on your list. Plus, if Black Friday lines aren't your thing, skip em at Kay. You can buy online and pick up in store or get free shipping right to your home. This holiday season. Unwrap love and savings with Kay. Exclusions apply. See kay.com exclusions for details.

Martin Moore (22:09)

Shopping is hard, right? But I found a better way. Stitch Fix Online Personal styling makes it easy. I just give my stylist my size, style and budget preferences. I order boxes when I want and how I want. No subscription required. And he sends just for me pieces plus outfit recommendations and styling tips. I keep woodworks and send back the rest. It's so easy. Make style easy. Get started today@stitchfix.com Spotify that's stitchfix.com Spotify.

Carl Miller (22:45)

And then we find ourselves, Hungary, the kind of first nominal, like democracy, I suppose, on our list. Also a country that's extremely concerned about trying to legitimize their capture of news. Martin. But one that kind of perhaps is much less profound than China. Not really trying to build everything from the infrastructure up. Tell us about how they really went after the institutions of the Hungarian press.

Martin Moore (23:11)

I think you're right. I think Hungary is really interesting because it is, well, it calls itself an illiberal democracy, but it is part of the eu. It is considered a democratic country. It's also increasingly considered certainly in the US as a sort of model that they would like to consider as an alternative to their system. And what we see in Hungary, and this is particularly really from. From 2010 when, when Viktor Orban and the Fidet's party take over for the second time because he had been in government previously. But it's from 2010 to now, really, that the FIDAT's government, and Orban in particular, lead this really very systematic and structural takeover of the news media. And it starts kind of with regulation itself. It starts with changing the law and changing the regulations essentially to make sure that the regulator is, if not controlled by the government, certainly unwilling to challenge the government, unwilling to act independently and certainly willing to support the government. When the government, for example, challenges mergers or acquisitions by independent organizations, but. But not when it's by pro government media organizations. And having sort of taken control of the law and the regulation, it then moves on to the public service broadcaster. It literally strips out. I mean, I think one summer they fired about 800 people at the public broadcaster and install loyalists there. So you have a whole series of people who are, according to some transcripts, which a journalist managed to get hold of, literally taking transcription from the government when they're writing headlines and when they're doing stories. And then there's a really interesting period between sort of 2015 to 2018 when Orban, there's an old school friend of Orban, a man called Lauren Metsaros, who was literally a gas pipe fitter in Orban's hometown in Hungary, in Felsford. And suddenly his fortunes changed really considerably in 2010 when comes back to power, he gains some political power, which he'd never previously sought. But then suddenly he starts to become very, very wealthy. The wealth is as a consequence of being given all these public contracts, public contracts to waterworks for various infrastructure projects, et cetera. He becomes very, very wealthy very, very quickly. And then he suddenly starts buying up the first tens and then hundreds of these media organizations, previously independent media organizations. Hundreds, yeah, exactly, hundreds. Along with various other friends of Orban who have similarly been, whose wealth has similarly increased. And this happens really relatively quickly over the kind of mid 2010s until in 2018, all these friends of Orban suddenly, coincidentally, remarkably, give, literally give these to a government run foundation called Qezma, because they say this is for the better good, this is for the public good, this is for the better of the nation. So suddenly, having had, maybe similar to other politicians, a degree of influence and control over the commercial media sphere, suddenly the government has direct control of not all, not 100%, but a significant amount of the commercial media market. And that includes, for example, really crucially, loads and loads of local newspapers, local media outlets, such that by the time you get to the next election, every local newspaper is endorsing Orban, every local newspaper is saying, you must support Orban for re election. And then finally, just quickly, from 2019, 2020 onwards, the government starts turning their attention to social media and they start working, or at least, sorry, I should say they have plausible deniability because this is a sort of pseudo independent company, but a pseudo independent company that suddenly becomes awfully rich with very opaque funding which starts to, to cultivate, nurture, coach and fund right wing influencers online. And that means, you know, identifying people with the potential to become influencers, bringing them in to get sort of sponsorship and coaching, funding them to inflate their audiences and their followers online and to promote their posts online. And then as the 2022 election approaches, essentially sort of pushing the narratives and pushing these influences across social media prior to that election. So you see how in a very, very step by step fashion, Orban is very carefully taken over almost all. I think it's important to note he has left enough to be able to still claim, no, no, no, look, there is an independent media and there are, there are independent, but they are absolutely in a minority. They struggle for funding. Obviously they're dismissed by all the kind of major broadcasters and the public service broadcaster. And so, you know, they only really serve a kind of minority, relatively small minority audience. And they're always being kind of dismissed as the so called dollar media that is being funded by the us, being funded by US foundations and being funded particularly by the kind of, the baddie in all of the Orban stories, who's.

Carl Miller (28:29)

George Soros, that kind of direct support and cultivation of a right wing influencer culture, paying for promotion, getting the training, building the kind of underlying cooperations between them so they can do cross posting. That seems to me, Martin, to be one of the clearest examples of how autocrats learn to start swimming with the tides of social media rather than against them.

Martin Moore (28:52)

It really is. Yeah, no, I think that's a really, that is exactly what it is. Although I think that the, the kind of, the most astonishing and fascinating example of that is really in Brazil rather than Hungary, because it's in Brazil where you see the election of JAYA BOLSONARO In 2018, a candidate who is dismissed entirely by mainstream media, by the large media outlet.

Carl Miller (29:18)

He's a joke to them.

Martin Moore (29:19)

He's a joke. He's a nostalgic, kind of embarrassing uncle who always says offensive and disreputable things and is not taken seriously by anyone. And yet he manages, particularly with the help of his sons and others within his kind of immediate circle, he manages to not only get reelection in 2018, but effectively to create this sort of parallel information ecosystem online, an ecosystem which by, by the next election, by late 2022, an awful lot of Brazilians, that's their main sources of information, and they are no longer reading, or at least they're no longer taking seriously the mainstream media outlets. They are only really existing and listening to these kind of information bubbles that have been very consciously and very deliberately created by Bolsonaro and the Bolsonaro government. And, and that, that was what I suppose really astonished me, the fact that you can kind of create what one New York Times journalist called a mass delusion without even needing, without even needing the, the big media houses anymore. I mean, admittedly, one has to take into account that Brazil is quite unusual in some senses, because Brazil, Brazilians kind of flocked to social media very quickly. They, they are huge consumers of social media. They are highly reliant on messaging services and particularly WhatsApp. And because, and it is important as a structural point, but it's just important because the way Meta works, Meta did partnerships with various different telecoms providers in Brazil. And most Brazilians buy monthly plans. And you have a particular data limit on that plan. That data limit for many Brazilians will run out after kind of 15, 20 days a plan. But because Meta has this deal with the telecoms companies, you still have access to Meta's services. So what that means in practice is people have become more and more dependent on WhatsApp, not just for communications with friends and families, but for their news, for their information, for understanding politics, essentially. And that was what really kind of bolster, really successfully took advantage of both in 2018 and 2022.

Carl Miller (31:34)

Which of these have the loudest flashing red lights for the uk, do you think, Martin? Because I mean it's probably unlikely that we're going to be seeing here a broad capture of press by the state. Maybe. I mean we are seeing obviously mainstream press in the UK being delegitimized, we're seeing attacks on it, we are seeing a kind of alternative news ecology building up. But maybe in India also there's a lesson of. For what we need to be worried about here because the kind of believers are more subtle, aren't they? Money, access. Actually the things that perhaps not money, but certainly there is a currency in politics and in political journalism to do with access that liberal democracies are as accustomed to as anyone else.

Martin Moore (32:22)

Absolutely. I think that's where we do sort of need to understand and learn that actually whilst we've always known that autocratic governments have lots of tools to, to control speech, to introduce new laws, etc, that are not available to democracies or at least not openly available to democracy, democracies actually have a lot more levers than they think democratic governments. And, and as you say, we saw that absolutely in India where the BJP and, and Narendra Modi's governments have, have used money and access and friends, by which I mean sort of friends of Modi to gain much, much greater influence over Indians. India's news ecology, such that broadcast news is now effectively sort of almost entirely pro BJP and broadcast news, particularly cable news channels, Republic TV Times now and others. The main way in which most Indians get a lot of their news, either through the channels themselves or on social media. And those levers are absolutely available in other democracies and we saw it in Hungary actually in Hungary the Orban government massively increased, massively increased the amount that it was spending on advertising in part so that it could then use that as a lever to direct it to media outlets that were in its favor and take it away from those that weren't deprived them. And of course what a lot of these governments have realized is that media, in the sense of sort of institutional media, is in a particularly vulnerable position. I mean, business model has been declining for years now. Many news media organizations are constantly anxious about whether they'll be sustainable, whether they'll last till next year, let alone 10 years time, and so are necessarily very, very aware that they need money, they need advertising income, they need in some cases indirect or direct support. Bearing in mind obviously in this country government funnels support not just through advertising but through tax breaks, et cetera. And they need access. They need access in order to produce news. And all those are levers that the government can pull. In addition to which, we shouldn't forget that actually the thing that's been highly effective and obviously we've seen it in the us We've seen it in many other countries like Mexico. Governments can constantly and very viciously attack the legitimacy of media outlets in the sense of attacking their credibility, in the sense of attacking individual journalists, in the sense of saying, do not believe them, believe me. And that can have again, really damaging effects. And actually we may look towards reform and say reform has been very critical and there's been stories recently about how reform have been preventing journalists from covering them. But actually we shouldn't forget that for years the Conservative Party was extremely critical of the BBC. A number of Conservative politicians talked about defunding the BBC, challenging the future of its license fee. And so there is already, I think, a degree to which we've seen certain. Yes, at a much more minor scale. We've seen some of the practices that we see in Hungary, that we see in India, even that we see in Mexico happening here in the uk.

Carl Miller (35:40)

Well, we're almost out of time, but I want us to end on a slightly uplifting note, which is also the end of the book, funnily enough. But what could be done about all of this? So you spent time with BBC Verified, didn't you? And I think it's not just a story of authoritarians trying to capture news. It is also a story of news fighting back.

Martin Moore (36:00)

It is, it is, absolutely. And I think that we have to recognize that we do live in an extremely different information environment than we did two decades ago. And necessarily in a new information environment, institutions need to evolve and process, democratic processes need to evolve. And one of the things that I think has been fascinating has been the enormous growth of what we talk of as truth seekers, and that's open source intelligence and fact checkers and others, and this whole international growth and network of those who are willing to challenge governments. And I hope Jonathan Rauch is, I think, really valuable book called the Constitution of Knowledge talks about how we talk about political constitutions an awful lot, but we don't talk about the constitution of knowledge, by which he means these institutions and processes that we've relied on for the last few hundred years to sort of create a basis of knowledge. And that's partly it's about news organizations and journalists, it's about scientists and scientific organizations, it's about the legal system and the justice system and academics more broadly. Et cetera. So there are ways in which we have built processes to build and check and verify and disseminate knowledge, and those have been really challenged and are being really undermined at the moment. And I hope that these new truth seekers signal a way in which we can start to recreate, reinvent and rebuild these institutions of knowledge which are going to be crucial if we have any sort of foundational ground truth going forward.

Carl Miller (37:32)

Well, Martin, thank you so much. That was Martin Moore, everyone, co author of a new book and it's a fascinating one, dictating the global battle to control the news. It's out in just a few days and I thoroughly recommend it. So I've been car Miller, you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you so much as ever for joining us.

Mia Sorrenti (37:51)

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Conor Boyle and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future events, head to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full live events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

Martin Moore (38:31)

In a world of endless notifications, there could be an important one you're missing. Your kidneys may be signaling an SOS with high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes. Your kidneys could be warning you of early signs of damage, which may put you at higher risk for events like heart attack or stroke. But there's a simple test that can help spot a hidden signal. Ask your doctor about a urine test called UACR to help detect kidney disease and heart risk early. To learn more, visit detectthesos.com today.