Engines of Outrage Pt. 2

Summary

Podcast Summary: Landslide - "Engines of Outrage Pt. 2" (NPR, Feb 13, 2025)

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Overview

In this episode of Landslide, host Ben Bradford investigates how the Internet, social media, and the business of attention have supercharged American political division, acting as “engines of outrage.” Through expert interviews and vivid case studies, the episode traces how online platforms, right-wing media ecosystems, and human psychology have fused to create a reality where misinformation flourishes, trust erodes, and polarization deepens. The episode lays the groundwork for understanding why these systems work so efficiently—and hints at possible solutions to be discussed in the next installment.

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Main Topics & Insights

1. The Rise of the Online Outrage Engine

• Early Online Crisis Mapping

  • Kate Starbird, University of Washington professor (then grad student), describes using social media to help during the 2012 Boulder wildfire ([00:43]).
  • Social media was first an uplifting tool for community assistance.
  • Over time, it became flooded with rumors and conspiracy theories, especially after high-profile violent events in 2015 ([01:07-01:44]).

• Discovery of Organized Disinformation

  • Starbird’s research found a mix of groups—gun rights activists, white nationalists, Russian actors, bots—were intentionally amplifying conspiracy theories ([01:57]).
  • “We're not looking at accidental rumors… we're looking at pervasive disinformation.” – Kate Starbird ([02:13])

2. The Internet’s Profit-Driven Transformation

• Original Sin of “Free”

  • Hani Farid, professor and expert in digital misinformation, describes how early Internet business models—focused on free access—required advertising and mass engagement ([05:59]).
  • “The only business model that seemed to work was ad-driven economy. And so that was, in some ways, the original sin.” – Hani Farid ([06:27])
  • This led to the attention economy—success was measured by user engagement ([06:58-07:02]).

• Facebook’s News Feed and Algorithmic Revolution

  • The 2007 expansion of Facebook’s News Feed marks a tipping point, shifting from chronological updates to algorithmically chosen content ([08:02]).
  • “The most outrageous, the most salacious, the most hateful, the most conspiratorial. …that’s what the algorithms pushed.” – Hani Farid ([08:58])
  • Like buttons, feedback loops, and relentless algorithm tweaks followed, incentivizing ever more provocative content ([09:10-09:20]).

• The Algorithmic Effect Across Platforms

  • This model spread to Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok—every major platform. Even non-social platforms like Amazon are affected ([09:53-10:02]).
  • Content is optimized for engagement, not accuracy or utility, leading to “news” that is about entertainment or outrage rather than information ([10:40-11:03]).

3. Outrage, Bubbles, and Right-Wing Media Synergy

• No Editorial Oversight and Individualized Bubbles

  • Algorithms show each user what’s most likely to engage them specifically, creating parallel realities ([11:24]).
  • “We could all vanish into entirely separate worlds. And that's what happened.” – Ben Bradford ([11:24])

• Rise of Conspiratorial Beliefs

  • Examples: Growing numbers believe in Covid conspiracies, climate change denial, and election lies ([11:43]).
  • “Our free Internet... has become an engine of outrage and division.” – Ben Bradford ([12:03])

• Right-Wing Media Ecosystem

  • Social media’s mechanisms especially benefit far-right voices ([12:27]), amplifying and syncing with conservative media bubbles.
  • “Far right voices dominate social media.” – Hani Farid ([12:27])

4. Case Study: The Spread of Election Misinformation

• From Social Media to Fox News to Political Action

  • Matt Gertz, Media Matters, tracks how conspiracy theories (e.g., “birther” movement, election fraud claims) move from fringe online communities to mainstream right-wing media and political leaders ([14:58-16:32]).
  • “You can see these conspiracy theories move very quickly from random people posting on social media to Donald Trump in virtually no time at all.” – Matt Gertz ([16:04])

• Sharpiegate 2020

  • Kate Starbird highlights how the “Sharpiegate” conspiracy spread: voters misinterpreting voting procedures, small Twitter rumors amplified after Arizona was called for Biden, then nationalized by Fox News and Trump’s circle ([17:48-20:13]).
  • “We see the same pattern over and over and over again.” – Kate Starbird ([20:40])
  • Even clear debunkings don't undo the feeling of being cheated ([20:49]).

5. The Psychology of Outrage

• Outrage as a Mobilizing Force

  • Danigal Young, University of Delaware, explains that outrage is uniquely effective for political mobilization as it activates group threat, “us vs. them” thinking ([26:00]).
  • “It is naturally mobilizing. …There is a threat that I need to stop from doing what it’s doing.” – Danigal Young ([26:00])
  • Conspiracy theories work not because of their truth value, but their usefulness in activating tribalism ([26:28]).

• Dehumanization and Cultural Effects

  • Outrage narratives can make it easier for people to dehumanize the ‘out group,’ opening doors to extreme behaviors ([27:51]).
  • “If you can get people to see an out group as less than human, you basically have changed the calculus in how they're going to treat those people.” – Danigal Young ([27:51])

• Mainstream, “Nonpolitical” Media is Political

  • Young notes that even culture, video games, YouTube reviews, and entertainment podcasts are politicized through the bubble ([29:00-29:42]).

6. Consequences & Dividing Lines

• Information Divide Reflected in 2024 Poll

  • Where people get their news predicts their vote: traditional news watchers skew left, YouTube and Fox viewers (and news-avoiders) skew right ([29:56-31:19]).
  • Outrage-based media sources (e.g., Fox, YouTube) dominate in shaping right-wing identity and action ([31:44-31:56]).

• A Self-Reinforcing Death Spiral

  • The bubble of outrage and misinformation continues to grow as more people tune out of traditional news, with political and social consequences ([31:44-31:56]).
  • The episode closes with the question: what could possibly break or reverse this cycle? The next episode will seek answers ([32:03]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Kate Starbird: “I felt like we went from studying like the best of human behaviors to studying some of the worst of human behavior in the worst of times.” ([02:28])
• Hani Farid: “When you believe the Earth is flat… you also believe that the media, you, the scientific experts, me, and the government is keeping information from you. And there's the actual problem.” ([04:38])
• Matt Gertz: “I mean, we’re basically in an environment where the information ecosystem is totally bifurcated.…And within that bubble, anything goes.” ([16:32])
• Danigal Young: “If you can get people to see an out group as less than human, you basically have changed the calculus in how they're going to treat those people… perhaps they'll be willing to engage in violence against these people, engage in unspeakable acts that they otherwise wouldn't.” ([27:51])
• Hani Farid: “I am angry, I'm scared, I'm depressed and I'm pessimistic about the future. And I don't know that I would have said that four years ago.” ([22:51])
• Danigal Young: “It's almost like a match made in heaven. If you are, you know, one of these platforms, it's a match made in hell if you're democracy.” ([27:27])

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Key Timestamps

• 00:43 – Kate Starbird on social media as disaster response tool
• 01:40 – Online conspiracy theories after mass shootings and terrorist attacks
• 02:13 – Transition from rumors to organized disinformation
• 05:59 – Hani Farid on the development of the ad-based Internet
• 08:02 – Facebook News Feed and algorithmic content selection
• 09:53 – Algorithmic curation spreads across major platforms
• 11:24 – Personalized “bubbles” and loss of shared reality
• 12:27 – Far-right content’s dominance in online outrage engines
• 14:58-16:32 – Matt Gertz on the birther movement’s spread from fringe to mainstream
• 17:48-20:13 – “Sharpiegate”: How a minor confusion became a national scandal
• 25:40-27:51 – Danigal Young explains the psychology of outrage, group threat, and dehumanization
• 29:56-31:19 – NBC poll: information sources drive political choices
• 32:02-32:03 – “There’s hope”—promise of solutions in upcoming episode

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Conclusion

“Engines of Outrage Pt. 2” paints a bleak but vivid picture of how online business models, algorithms, and media ecosystems have turbocharged polarization and misinformation in American politics. By blending psychological insight and clear case studies, the episode dismantles the myth of a neutral information environment and reveals how outrage is now both a product and a fuel of American democracy’s most dangerous divides. The stage is set for next episode’s exploration of possible solutions.

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For more details, sources, and future episodes, visit nuancetails.com.

Transcript

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[Ben Bradford]

Head to warbyparker.com this episode contains some strong language. Listener discretion is advised. In a catastrophe, there's always a fog of war. Rumors fly, events get Misleading reported in 2012, a wildfire raged in Boulder, Colorado and Kate Starbird, a PhD student at the University of Colorado, fought through the fog. To provide clarity.

[Kate Starbird]

We would like make maps of what was going on, of who needed what in what area.

[Ben Bradford]

Kate and her colleagues made maps not of geography, but social media posts where.

[Kate Starbird]

People could pick up donations, where they could make donations, who needed what, who was injured, who needed help, and it.

[Ben Bradford]

Was uplifting in a way.

[Kate Starbird]

All of the best of human behavior during the worst of times.

[Ben Bradford]

Kate continued this work, but noticed the fog of war during disasters growing thicker. Untrue information and conspiracy theories swirled more widely. In 2015, she was confronted with a pair of horrific events. A mass shooting in Oregon. It happened on the campus of Umqua Community College. At least seven people were killed. A month later, suicide bombers and shooters killed more than 100 people in Paris.

[NPR Reporter or Correspondent]

Chaos on the streets of Paris tonight.

[Ben Bradford]

Gunfire. Rumors swirled online that the events had been staged by governments.

[Kate Starbird]

And we were starting to see the same conspiracy theories over and over again in these shooting events.

[Ben Bradford]

Kate, now a professor at the University of Washington, taught her students to make maps. They found a diverse array of groups intentionally helping conspiracy theories pinball around the Internet.

[Kate Starbird]

They're wired together and they consistently post about these conspiracy theories. They've got these audiences, they're shared audiences, they're building.

[Ben Bradford]

It included gun rights activists, white nationalists, the Russian government, an army of bots and students.

[Kate Starbird]

And I begin to realize we're not looking at accidental rumors, we're looking at pervasive disinformation.

[Ben Bradford]

Kate had stumbled on how the Internet, profit motives, human psychology and political benefit are fusing together to widen our political divide.

[Kate Starbird]

I felt like we went from studying like the best of human behaviors to studying some of the worst of human behavior in the worst of times.

[Ben Bradford]

This is Landslide Engines of Outrage, a miniseries about our information divide and what, if anything, can bring us back to a shared reality. Last episode I told you about a split Widening slowly over the final decades of the 20th century, Americans began to diverge in where they got their news. A right wing media ecosystem rose to challenge TV networks and mainstream news sources. With a very different intent.

[NPR Reporter or Correspondent]

From the beginning, it's always been an ideological project.

[Ben Bradford]

We fax rush Limbaugh almost 24 hours a day. Where do you think he gets half of the stuff that he puts on the radio program? The rapidly expanding right wing bubble was premised not on news gathering, but advocacy, entertainment, outrage. And then a new technology expanded its power exponentially. This episode is about the Internet, social media. If you've wondered why they seem jam packed with anger, how wild lies and conspiracy theories like Kate found flourish, or just the reason looking up a recipe for chicken means you have to read someone's life story. Well, so have I. And it turns out the answers to all of these questions are tied together. And at the heart of it is the reason that so many of the most successful Internet businesses also became the great force multipliers of our division. So if you'll just give me your name and what you do here at Berkeley.

[Hani Farid]

Yeah. My name is Hani Farid, and I specialize in everything from detecting manipulated and malicious media to studying disinformation and misinformation campaigns online.

[Ben Bradford]

I'm in Hani Farid's office and I sought him out because he's been working on this problem of people being wrong on the Internet, especially since its advent.

[Hani Farid]

I don't think any of us saw where we are today, but we knew something was coming. And that's. I started thinking about this 25 years ago.

[Ben Bradford]

You said, where we are today? Where do you think we are today?

[Hani Farid]

So when we started thinking about this problem and we looked at who believed the Earth was flat, who believed that the moon landing was fake, we measured those in single digits. 1%, 2%, 3%. And I used to thinking this is sort of dumb. I don't care about this. But here's what I got wrong is when you believe the Earth is flat, when you believe the moon landing was fake, when you believe 9, 11 didn't happen, and the long litany of things that are unfounded, you don't just believe something that's factually incorrect. You also believe what that the media, you, the scientific experts, me, and the government is keeping information from you. And there's the actual problem. Because then when Covid hits and climate change hits and we have an election, you. You don't trust those very institutions that you need to trust to move forward. And that's how we went from 1, 2% to 10% to 20% to 50% believing things that are factually incorrect. Right. This isn't fun and games. We're not making fun of people who think that the earth is flat anymore. This is a serious consequence for our society.

[Ben Bradford]

How did we get to this? How did the Internet become a super spreader for lies and conspiracy theories? How did it deepen our division? The answer, of course is complicated. But Fareed sketches out a relatively simple story that starts with an early decision which shaped our entire Internet.

[Hani Farid]

So let's rewind to the early noughts. Facebook and Google were the early players here. And do you remember what people were saying about Facebook and Google? There's no way you can make money. Nobody saw it. You're giving everything away for free. Email is free, search is free, Google Drive, everything is free Facebook. And everybody laughed at these companies. How are you ever going to make money?

[Ben Bradford]

Fareed says at the time, in the early and mid 2000s, tech entrepreneurs felt like their products had to be free.

[Hani Farid]

People didn't like putting their credit cards online. Even Amazon was struggling to get people to buy online because we were not comfortable with it. And so the only business model that seemed to work was ad driven economy. And so that was in some ways the original sin.

[Ben Bradford]

We take for granted that this is just how the Internet works. If you're asked today to buy music, news or an app, you might balk. But that model of free led to a cascade of effects. Services needed advertisers and advertisers needed eyeballs.

[Hani Farid]

The business model is attention driven economy.

[Ben Bradford]

And so early Internet media and especially social media were looking for users, as many users as they could get who would use their services without wanting to leave. Skip to 2007.

[Hani Farid]

Fareed says, yeah, I'll tell you what the tipping point was.

[Ben Bradford]

Facebook saturated the darling of the tech world, the social media company. Facebook had grown in just three years from a million users to 5 million to 50 million. But internally there was fear.

[Hani Farid]

They maxed out the universities and they really sort of maxed out the basically usage. And there was these series of articles that like Facebook, all hands. Everybody's panicking because they knew that there was going to be one winner in the space. There aren't two winners in the space, right? Just like Google, right? There's Google and then there's what's next. And I remember seeing those articles thinking, this is going to be bad.

[Ben Bradford]

Do you remember what they chose? So they're, they're at that moment and then what was the, what was the strategy? What was the change?

[Hani Farid]

The News Feed.

[Ben Bradford]

Facebook's News Feed was its big innovation. You could see what your friends on the service were up to. All in one place, without clicking around birthdays, relationship statuses, their posts about how they were feeling. The posts were roughly reverse chronological, most recent, first. But then, Fareed says Facebook tweaked the newsfeed in a way that seemed innocuous or maybe even exciting. What did it do when they did that?

[Hani Farid]

Yeah, so then it started algorithmically choosing what you got to see. They reach into the billions of pieces of content that are uploaded, and they pick winners and losers. They say, we're going to promote this, we're going to demote this, we're going to ban this, we're going to allow this. And so they were making decisions based on what engaged people? Well, what engaged people. Now this is where we become jerks.

[Ben Bradford]

Farid says Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his team quickly discovered an ugly truth about what motivated people to keep clicking.

[Hani Farid]

The most outrageous, the most salacious, the most hateful, the most conspiratorial. And so whatever engaged us, no matter how good, bad, ugly, dishonest, illegal it was, that's what the algorithms pushed.

[Ben Bradford]

Facebook continued to iterate. It introduced a like button, another way of measuring engagement that also gave users an incentive to post their most gripping content.

[Hani Farid]

And then it's a feedback loop, right? The algorithms start to promote things that are awful, and the humans respond being like, well, I want my stuff to get promoted, so I'm simply going to learn what the algorithm wants.

[Ben Bradford]

Over time, Facebook tweaked its algorithm in a whole bunch of ways, all with engagement as its North Star. It began recommending news stories, and the source or veracity weren't always important. But it wasn't just Facebook. Farid says algorithms became central to nearly every major social media site, including Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Onward.

[Hani Farid]

Google started Facebook, perfected it, and then TikTok really, really perfected it. But I think if you look across the board, they all sort of landed in the same place.

[Ben Bradford]

Even sites you wouldn't think of as social media. For instance, go to Amazon to find a biography of Ronald Reagan, and you might also get recommended the Democrat Party Hates America by conservative talk radio host Mark Levin. I was. By the way, this is the reason recipe websites have huge, long personal intros. The pages are optimized not for us, but for Google's algorithm, which prefers longer posts and the name of the recipe and its ingredients popping up over and over. Farid says the combination of apps seeking engagement, algorithms delivering what they think we want, and human nature created a toxic brew.

[Hani Farid]

So what happened in the Internet? Well, a couple of things happened. One is that news, if you can call it generously, that was not about informing. It was about likes and retweets and making money right and becoming Internet famous. And so suddenly getting it right wasn't what it was about. It was being fast, being funny, being an asshole and getting engagement.

[Ben Bradford]

And on these sites, total lies, wild eyed conspiracy theories and breathless fear mongering look exactly the same as real measured information. Same font, same formatting, same placement, or better, if it incites enough engagement.

[Hani Farid]

There are no editorial standards, there are no journalistic standards. There's no consequence for getting it wrong. In fact, quite the opposite.

[Ben Bradford]

One other point, these algorithms didn't just supply outrage, they supplied what would individually outrage you. So while everybody could traditionally look at the front page of the New York Times and see the same thing on Facebook or Twitter, we could all vanish into entirely separate worlds. And that's what happened.

[Hani Farid]

Some 20% of Americans believe that there was a conspiracy to create Covid by, for example Bill Gates. Roughly one in five Americans believe climate change is a hoax, not how to respond to it. Not that it's not created by man, that it's a hoax. One in two Republicans believe that Donald Trump won the previous election.

[Ben Bradford]

Our free Internet, the ad based Internet, the engagement Internet has become an engine of outrage and division were all subject to its influence. But it also happens that the elements so intrinsic to Internet success, outrage, conspiracy, self reinforcement were the same elements already propelling a rapidly burgeoning right wing media ecosystem.

[Hani Farid]

Those platforms are good for far right voices. Far right voices dominate social media.

[Ben Bradford]

When the two synced up, the engines of outrage roared.

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[NPR Reporter or Correspondent]

Today it is hard to get a house. Getting that down payment together, brutal. You shipped off to Djibouti to afford a down payment for a house. Yes, sir, 100% on planet money, the high price of housing, what the Trump administration is trying to do about it, and will it work? Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[NPR Science Reporter]

There is a long history of misinformation about autism, from accusations about bad parenting to RFK Jr. S false allegations that Tylenol has something to do with it. But science is getting closer to truly understanding what drives autism.

[Ben Bradford]

It looks like there are hundreds of genes that are involved.

[NPR Science Reporter]

To find out what the research actually says about autism and what we still don't know, listen to Short Wave in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bradford]

You said you've been doing it for 17 years. How much worse has it gotten and how quickly?

[Matt Gertz]

Yeah, so I don't want to fall too much victim to recency bias.

[Ben Bradford]

Matt Gertz is a media analyst who monitors Fox News and other right wing outlets for the progressive watchdog group Media Matters.

[Matt Gertz]

I would write about major right wing media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity stoking conspiracy theories about the Clintons murdering a former White House aide, Vince Foster.

[Ben Bradford]

This is what we explored in our previous episode. The key pillars of conservative media operated with a different purpose from traditional newsrooms. Kurtz tracked Fox and conservative talk radio hosts as they stoked conspiracy theories and outrage for profit and political gain.

[Matt Gertz]

I was writing about the early days of the birther movement conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and so was not eligible to be president.

[Ben Bradford]

But then he watched this idea spread more widely, expanding through newly popular social media apps. Algorithms from, for instance, Facebook picked up the idea that maybe the president wasn't born here, circulated it to users most primed to engage with it. They liked it, shared it, commented on posts about it. And so people created more posts and articles that could be shared. And the myth that our president was illegitimate and the government was covering it up gained traction. Talk radio hosts and Fox News guests spread it further. There was profit and political gain, and a key proponent of the birther myth became perhaps the most prominent voice for these audiences.

[Fox News or Conservative Media Voice / Trump Supporter]

He doesn't have a birth certificate now. He may have one, but there's something on that birth certificate. Maybe religion, maybe it says he's a Muslim. I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want that or he may not have one.

[Matt Gertz]

You can see these conspiracy theories move very quickly from random people posting on social media to Donald Trump in virtually no time at all.

[Ben Bradford]

By 2011, a poll found more Republicans believed that the president was not born in the country than believed he was. There's an early demonstration of how the Internet and its incentives would sync up with right wing media, and Gertz says it's only gotten worse.

[Matt Gertz]

I mean, we're basically in an environment where the information ecosystem is totally bifurcated. You have a completely separate, more or less sealed bubble. And within that bubble, anything goes.

[Ben Bradford]

The bubble is sealed. A Harvard study several years ago examined partisan outlets and social media posts from across the political spectrum, right and left, and then it looked at what those media sources were linking out to.

[Matt Gertz]

I use that in presentation sometimes. It's a very, very good reading. You have left wing outlets that are to some extent feeding off of mainstream reporting that is credible, and you have right wing outlets that, that are kind of making up their own stuff, often with significantly lower standards and often leading to the circulation of fairly wild conspiracy theories.

[Ben Bradford]

Inside the bubble, Fox remains the main source cited by conservatives. Surrounding it are a world of pundits, other right wing outlets and influencers batting back and forth messages, but with little actual traditional reporting to ground it. It's relatively easy to get pulled in by the outrage engine, by culture war, by content that seems to confirm a worldview someone already holds. And to get out is very difficult. Kate Starboard, the University of Washington professor who makes maps tracing how misinformation travels, describes the power of the bubble with a story. It was 2020 in the lead up to that year's presidential election.

[Kate Starbird]

President Trump at the time and his supporters, media pundits and others had set a frame and an expectation that the election was going to be rigged, she says.

[Ben Bradford]

Every day people thought they were going to be cheated because they'd been told they were going to be cheated.

[Kate Starbird]

They went to their mailboxes, they went to the voting booth and they witnessed things that they thought were evidence of this cheating and they would record it.

[Ben Bradford]

In Arizona, some voters arrived to cast their ballots and were puzzled when election workers handed them permanent markers.

[Kate Starbird]

Sharpies and the Sharpie pens bled through the ballot, this thing called sharpiegate.

[Ben Bradford]

And people protested in Arizona claiming some ballots have not been properly counted. It's being called sharpiegate.

[Kate Starbird]

Their votes were counting. The Sharpie pen. The ballots were designed to be used with Sharpie pen. It didn't matter if they bled through.

[Ben Bradford]

Starbird says it's actually good to use permanent marker because the ink won't smear on the lens of vote counting machines.

[Kate Starbird]

But people didn't understand this, and so people became convinced that their votes weren't counting. And at first you just see like this tiny little conversation on Twitter. We have a couple of thousand posts and retweets on election Day.

[Ben Bradford]

And that was it. A relatively small pocket of confusion until later on election night, Arizona gets called.

[Kate Starbird]

For Biden instead of Trump, which really disrupts a plan for Donald Trump to win and to claim a rapid victory.

[Ben Bradford]

The call came from the generally well respected election analysts at Fox News, to the dismay of the cable channel's anchors.

[NPR Reporter or Correspondent]

Are you 100% sure of that call?

[Ben Bradford]

The answer was yes, I'm sorry, the.

[Fox News or Conservative Media Voice / Trump Supporter]

President is not going to be able.

[Hani Farid]

To take over and win enough votes to eliminate that.

[Ben Bradford]

Suddenly, Starboard says the cries about sharpiegate grew louder.

[Kate Starbird]

And so within hours, you see influencers, including both of Donald Trump's adult sons at the time, begin to retweet and repost claims that they went back and found of people in Arizona who think that their Sharpie pens affected their ballot.

[Ben Bradford]

In the days that followed, Fox, even though its elections team had called Arizona, platformed Trump campaign officials and pundits to sow doubt. And you mentioned dead people voting in Arizona. It looks to be focusing on the Sharpies.

[Fox News or Conservative Media Voice / Trump Supporter]

Did they register?

[Ben Bradford]

Protesters rallied outside ballot counting centers. Sharpie data, the myth of election fraud by permanent marker was spread by influencers and Fox, but also their audiences.

[Kate Starbird]

We see the same pattern over and over and over again.

[Ben Bradford]

Within the bubble, people believed the election was stolen, not just because they heard it, they thought they saw it.

[Kate Starbird]

And even if someone shows them that their vote counts, that didn't undo this feeling that they had been cheated.

[Ben Bradford]

There are so many other details I heard from Kate Starbird and Matt Gertz about how partisanship, polarization and misinformation operate within the bubble, how it's leading to its own culture and products.

[Matt Gertz]

I mean, you have all sorts of right wing businesses that are sort of springing up as counters to, you know, liberal razors.

[Ben Bradford]

How it's caught political leaders in the same web of misinformation they've helped spin.

[Matt Gertz]

Which is now their own source for information.

[Ben Bradford]

And how, as the Internet creates more choices, Americans across the political spectrum are favoring style over substance for their news.

[Kate Starbird]

Turns out that right now, trustworthiness has less to do with accuracy and more to do with authenticity.

[Ben Bradford]

But most of all, I'm struck by the growing size and power of this ecosystem, the shrillness of its messages, and the alarm of people who monitor it, such as Matt Kurtz.

[Matt Gertz]

It's a constant bombardment in which this audience is being told day in and day out that they are under attack in a real way from Democrats, from liberals, from the media, that their very lives are in jeopardy, that their children are endangered, that the American project is being sold down the river. It really does not stop, ever.

[Ben Bradford]

The engines of outrage spin louder and louder, hotter and hotter, and what can diffuse them?

[Hani Farid]

I keep waiting for people to wake up and being like, oh my God, we're being manipulated.

[Ben Bradford]

This is Hani Fareed, who you heard earlier.

[Hani Farid]

But the problem is to wake up, you have to get trusted information. And now we're back full circle, right? We're back full circle and I don't know how to get out of this death spiral that we're in.

[Ben Bradford]

Are you angrier?

[Hani Farid]

I am angry, I'm scared, I'm depressed and I'm pessimistic about the future. And I don't know that I would have said that four years ago.

[Ben Bradford]

This is a daunting topic as I've talked to experts who study our information environment. The word I've heard constantly is bleak. That doesn't mean there aren't answers. We're going to find them. To do that, we need to understand why the engines of outrage work so well on us.

[Danigal Young]

If there are hostile coalitions coming over the hillside, that is going to get people to act.

[NPR Science Reporter]

Do you ever feel like no matter how many hours of sleep you got, you're still fatigued?

[Danigal Young]

We have to be able to differentiate sleep from the different ways that we.

[NPR Science Reporter]

Can rest on the Life Kit podcast. The seven types of rest and why each one is important to living a full, healthy life. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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On.

[Fox News or Conservative Media Voice / Trump Supporter]

Wait, wait, don't tell me. It's not so much we get to talk to celebrities, it's that we get to talk to celebrities about other celebrities like we did with actor Nathan Lane.

[Matt Gertz]

I remember having to tell George C. Scott that I was leaving the show.

[Fox News or Conservative Media Voice / Trump Supporter]

To do this musical and he said.

[Matt Gertz]

To me, you're leaving me to do a magic show.

[Fox News or Conservative Media Voice / Trump Supporter]

Listen to Wait, Wait in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bradford]

On NPR's Wild Card podcast, Melinda French Gates on seeing her ex husband Bill Gates name in the latest Epstein files.

[Danigal Young]

For me, it's personally hard whenever those details come up, right? Because brings back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage.

[Ben Bradford]

Watch or listen to that wildcard conversation on the NPR app or on YouTube @NPRWildcard. We've examined the key characteristics that built and drive today's right wing bubble. Simmering distrust in traditional news. They try to make it Appear that.

[Hani Farid]

We are bigots, that we are prejudiced.

[Ben Bradford]

That we are biased, that we are immoral. Alternative products that wedged in focused on activism and entertainment using outrage. I thought white men were the new pigs of society. And then the Internet turned up the heat and hardened the walls.

[Matt Gertz]

It's a constant bombardment in which this audience is being told day in and day out that the they are under attack.

[Ben Bradford]

When you run someone through an outrage engine, through the constant bombardment, what's happening, why does it work and what does it do? I called Danigal Young at the University of Delaware.

[Danigal Young]

I'm just writing some things down that I just want to make sure that I don't forget to touch on.

[Ben Bradford]

Young is kind of the perfect person to talk to. Her field is psychology and politics and media and how they interact together. She says of all the emotions we humans can feel. Politicians and activists choose outrage for a reason.

[Danigal Young]

It is naturally mobilizing. It causes people to act because there's a sense that there is a threat. Not that I need to run from, but a threat that I need to stop from doing what it's doing.

[Ben Bradford]

She says outrage is often used to create a sense of us versus them.

[Danigal Young]

Right? We are the moral group, what we do is morally good and what they do is morally bad. But it's this real sense that there is a looming out group threat and that's outrage.

[Ben Bradford]

And it can be driven very effectively even by conspiracy theories.

[Danigal Young]

Like it's truth value is besides the.

[Ben Bradford]

Point because they become a shared story.

[Danigal Young]

It's all about identifying the out group threat, getting people to feel that negative emotion, to identify the target and to move at the same time at the thing. You know, in terms of evolutionary psychology, the thought is if there are hostile coalitions coming over the hillside, that is going to get people to act.

[Ben Bradford]

Outrage perks up our ears, points us in the same direction. And Jung says that's why it's so effective.

[Danigal Young]

And all you have to do to activate it is say, ooh, you know that other side they want to get you. That's it, that's it. And think about how that is the special sauce of our media environment.

[Ben Bradford]

Activation, engagement, the goal of the key outlets of the right wing media ecosystem and so many of our Internet businesses.

[Danigal Young]

It really is. It's almost like a match made in heaven. If you are, you know, one of these platforms, it's a match made in hell if you're democracy.

[Ben Bradford]

Jung says the reliance on outrage to motivate people, whether to click or to vote, is dangerous and dangerous in a way. That goes beyond the obvious problems of rampant misinformation, a way that left me chilled.

[Danigal Young]

If you trigger these kinds of feelings, especially in the context of that moral evaluation where this the out group is acting immorally, we are not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people who are acting immorally. And sometimes we're not even inclined to give the status of human to people who are acting immorally. Well, maybe think of them as vermin or animals or, you know, less than human, which we know from years of social psychological research that if you can get people to see an out group as less than human, you basically have changed the calculus in how they're going to treat those people. It means that you are going to then have unlocked their inhibitions. Now perhaps they'll be willing to engage in violence against these people, engage in unspeakable acts that they otherwise wouldn't.

[Ben Bradford]

The engines of outrage spin and their pull grows. And Young says that's especially true on one group. People who don't realize it's happening.

[Danigal Young]

We are witnessing even more and more and more people who are taking all their political hats off. And they are just like, I don't do politics at all.

[Ben Bradford]

Once again, Americans are opting out of news.

[Danigal Young]

The problem with those folks is that, guess what? All of our media spaces, they're political.

[Ben Bradford]

A video game might star a woman as a protagonist among a diverse cast of characters. A YouTube reviewer might criticize it for being too woke.

[Danigal Young]

Messages about gender roles. That's political.

[Ben Bradford]

A listener might tune into the most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, to hear him talk to comics or mixed martial artists and absorb conspiracy theories.

[NPR Reporter or Correspondent]

Joan Rivers said that Michelle Obama was a man. I thought it was a joke. I thought it was a joke, too. But the way she said it wasn't like jokey.

[Danigal Young]

She was like, that's political.

[Ben Bradford]

There was a poll by NBC in mid 2024 which gave a glimpse of this information divide and its effect. A rough glimpse. It asked people where they got their news and who they were voting for for president. The connection was clear. Among people who primarily watched traditional news. The eventual winner, President Trump, was down by 20 points. Among newspaper readers, the gap was even largera staggering 49 points. But among cable viewers, where Fox leads, Trump was up by 8. YouTube viewers favored him by 16. And among people who said they did not follow political news, Trump led by 28 percentage points. What does that mean? You could argue that just reflects the obvious. Democrats generally rely more on traditional news and Republicans distrust it. I would suggest it shows more. The poll shows our information divide and how what's in the bubble drives today's politics. Consider the media sources where conspiracy theories and misinformation have flourished. It's being called Sharpiegate on the Internet, through YouTube, on Fox, apparatuses designed to engage, to activate rather than to inform. And these sources buoyed the winner, a candidate who got his own political start leveraging the same forces.

[Fox News or Conservative Media Voice / Trump Supporter]

He doesn't have a birth certificate.

[Ben Bradford]

And that poll shows how news, real news, traditional reported news, has eroded and been replaced by engines of outrage. As more people have tuned out or tried. The right wing bubble has grown. The engines within it spin hotter, bolstering and encouraging action that seemed beyond the pale not too long ago, pardoning some.

[NPR Reporter or Correspondent]

1500 January 6 rioters appearing to freeze.

[Ben Bradford]

Federal funding for programs across the government.

[Fox News or Conservative Media Voice / Trump Supporter]

Greenland is a wonderful place. We need it for international security.

[Ben Bradford]

Without a change in trajectory, what stops the bubble from continuing to expand? What stops the outrage?

[Danigal Young]

There's hope.

[Ben Bradford]

There's hope. Now that we understand the characteristics of the bubble, the outrage, the engines and the psychology, we're gonna look at solutions. What can be done? That's next time on Landslide. Engines of Outrage. If you think this miniseries is helpful, you want more people to know about it or you're interested in interested in more from Landslide? Please pass it along. Tell even more people about it. You can stay up to date by signing up for our mailing [e-mail] Landslide is a production of Nuance Tales in partnership with WFAE and distributed by the NPR Network. It is created, hosted, reported and produced by me, Ben Bradford, Edited by Noya Carr. Jay Sebold is the sound designer and engineer. Music is by Matt Bradford. Thanks to everyone at WFAE and NPR who's helped make the series possible. You can view the key sources for this [e-mail] thanks for listening.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Sources and methods is NPR's national security podcast. When world news changes by the hour, we help you zoom out to understand shifting alliances, global flashpoints and what is really happening in places like Iran, Venezuela, Greenland. Our reporters on the ground connect the dots to explain a world order changing beneath our feet. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. World news is changing by the hour on sources and methods, NPR's National Security Podcast we zoom out to explain shifting alliances, global flashpoints and what's really happening in places like Iran, Venezuela, Greenland. Our reporters on the ground connect the dots to help you understand a world order changing beneath our feet. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.