D (11:32)

Thanks so much for having me.

C (11:33)

Tell me about the podcast as a whole. Did it start as let's do a few seasons or did it start as I noticed, episode one was in September of 2021. Did it start as let's do a 20th anniversary of 911 series?

D (11:48)

Yeah, well, as you know, I have spent a lot of my career on 911 and wrote a book about it and was interested in revisiting for that 20th anniversary. What to me were the big unanswered questions or sort of lingering questions of 9 11? Everything from what was the target of United Airlines Flight 93? To was there a fifth plane? Who. Who was the 20th hijacker? Sort of all of these, I think, sort of questions of history that we still wonder about years later and what that evolved into was the model that we have used now for four seasons across long shadow where we try to pick a topic each season and use history to explain why America is the way that it is. The that I think in our information environment today, in our cable news pundit driven comment culture, too often people approach things as if everything is brand new and this is the first time it's ever happened. And everything is unprecedented. And what history actually teaches you is everything is precedented. In fact, there are usually, when you go back and look very distinct moments and choices and decisions that are made by specific people at specific times that help drive where the country goes and how we end up the country that we are. And so we've done that, as you said in our second season, about the rise of the American far right in the third season, the exploration of what we call the uniquely American problem of gun violence, and then in this fourth season that came out this summer, looked at the rise and fall of the Internet and social media and how this tool that arrived with such promise of how it was going to bring people together and democratize information and drive transparency and accountability for officials, topple authoritarian dictatorships around the world, has instead become such a weaponized tool of partisanship and polarization and driven us apart. A story you have of course, lived yourself in your career as well.

C (14:35)

It's a powerful tool and I look at it as like many other tools, as contingent upon the motivations and skill of the wielder. And so as we look at the Internet, it is, I think, useful to think about the early days of hope and then the Arab Spring, where the Internet seemed to be doing good things, mainly because we, we were on the side of the revolutionaries. I mean, it does bring outcast groups together. If we are sympathetic to the outcast groups, like people who want to protest against oppressive Egyptian dictators, that seems great. When the outcast groups are Kuhnen or white supremacists, that seems less great. But it's still the same tool in many ways, is it not?

D (15:21)

Absolutely. And I think that that is, you know, a major part of the Internet story is that it is a tool, not an ideology, and that it can be used for good and for evil. And in fact, the story of how the Internet became such a tool of partisanship and polarization has been the extent to which bad faith actors have weaponized it and seized opportunities to weaponize it that people who were good faith actors.

C (16:00)

Didn'T imagine as bad faith actors always will with something very powerful. So I want to get into specifics, especially with some recent breaking news about what we know about the stuff that you report on, although your reporting was months earlier, stuff we know about the investigation into Donald Trump and the GRU and Russian hacking. Okay, but my question is, is it so much that the Internet, you know, in some way curdled or disappointed people or. It always was this neutral tool. The governing ethos of it was leave it alone. As a lot of people looking to make money on something they invented always want lack of regulation. Was there really any? Maybe you look to Europe, maybe there are other examples where we could have seen that pivot point where America didn't pivot in some way. But is there really a case to be made that the Internet wasn't always going to cause gigantic disruptions? And if the underlying system is something you more or less wanted to preserve, then you're going to be discomfited by the disruptions. If the underlying system was in need of disruption, disruption, then you're going to cheer it on.

D (17:14)

Yeah, I think there's more than a kernel of truth in what you're saying there, which is, I think, one of the things that I was surprised by and I covered a lot of this story along the way. I lived it in various stages of my journalism career. And I was really surprised by how again, the Internet that we have ended up with today, particularly in regards to social media, is One that traces back to very specific decisions by specific companies, especially Facebook, to maximize profit as they went for IPOs in the sort of late 2000s and early 2010s that where they decided that they would build their profits on an advertising eyeballs based model and thus needed to stoke engagement and attention on the sites basically at any cost. And that I think you're right that government, particularly in the US wildly missed the window to regulate these companies in any meaningful way. I think part of what I'm concerned about in this moment, and I'm sure we'll talk about more of this as our conversation unfolds, is that it feels like we're about to repeat all of those same mistakes with AI right now, that we're sort of racing down another set of tracks towards another looming disaster. And everyone is saying, boy, this is really going to be a disaster coming up ahead here.

C (19:21)

Could certainly be a disaster. Hey, remember Facebook? Remember that disaster. Let's not do anything differently. Although I do have to say that you chronicle on the show Facebook certainly was, let's go for engagement and outrage. And then you quote former Facebook executives who are of course rich because of the IPO saying, I won't let my kids use Facebook or social media for that matter. And then you chronicle Facebook's. They've taken many different actions. And there were maybe periods where Zuckerberg was motivated by something other than cynical self interest. I mean, he at least wanted to be in the good graces of one set of people and then another set of people. But even when he tried to correct, even when they took away the cesspool of disinformation that was dominating news feeds and went more towards, you know, we're just going to allow people to talk to each other and their friends and get back to the personal connection, which I think, you tell me, I think was motivated by. There was pressure on him to change the way of doing things. But also we thought that this was the right thing to do. Well, that gave rise. There was the unintended consequence, I do think it was unintended, of giving rise to white nationalists instead of just disinformationists utilizing the very powerful Facebook feed. I'll throw one more thing in there. So let's especially blame Facebook. And they were the phrase you used, you know, trying to maximize profits. Google wasn't right. I don't think it was just branding that they said, don't be evil. But then they buy YouTube and YouTube is maybe more of a force of radicalization than Facebook ever was. So throw that all out there?

D (20:58)

Yeah. And I think that that is where you, you know, what these companies come to understand is the things that make us angry are the things that keep us on their websites. And that, you know, in, in YouTube's case, in a related way, you know, one of the things that, that YouTube's algorithms sort of learns over the course of many, many human viewings is that Americans who are interested in one conspiracy are interested in watching things about other conspiracies. And that these bespoke media diets that our algorithms now feed us are increasingly geared towards sort of more enraging and more conspiratorial material, because that's the things that keeps us clicking and engaged. And you see this actually at one point in the Facebook algorithm for News Feed, where Facebook actually waits. What is basically the dislike button, five times stronger than the like button, by the way.

C (22:24)

Was that going in? They decided that that would be the scores or did it turn out that they got information that when people dislike things, it was much better for their bottom line and that's the retroactive score they gave.

D (22:36)

Exactly. That was the. That was the evolving score that the. The algorithm adopted as it came to understand what people like.

C (22:45)

This is the perfect distillation of the entire thesis that the more that being angry at something is five times as valuable as liking something and therefore all of the engagement we will be for being upset.

D (22:58)

Exactly.

C (22:59)

I want to get to some specifics now. I either didn't know or had forgotten. Remind me of the somewhat failed experiments where I think it was Russian state actors took to social media and tried to get some unrest around hoaxes. One hoax, a hoax, police shooting and a hoax. I do remember this one. A chemical plant explosion. Remind. This was fascinating to be reminded of these or maybe even told about them for the first time, but tell me about them now.

D (23:31)

Yeah, these were, you know, we didn't really understand until well after the 2016 election what Russia had been doing in the social media environment in the run up to the election. This as a sort of reminder for people. There are distinct lines of effort by Russia against the 2016 election. One that is the military intelligence hacking of Hillary Clinton's emails. Sorry, Hillary Clinton's campaign emails, campaign chairman John Podesta, others, the dnc. And that separate from that, there was an effort by the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who of course famously went on to lead that mutiny in the Russian armed services amid the war in Ukraine that was unsuccessful. Backtrack off the back and then died.

C (24:45)

In A plane crash?

D (24:46)

Yeah. Totally surprising to everyone. His plane mysteriously fell out of the air a few months later, killing him. He had run something called the Internet Research Agency that was basically, you know, factory for social media memes and bots and Internet trolls and that they had run in operation against the 2016 election that targeted existing fissures in American society. I think this is always an important part about to make clear when talking about disinformation and misinformation is that when someone like an Internet troll comes along, they are generally not successful in creating new fissures. What they are good at and what they're successful at doing is exacerbating existing divides in politics and sort of inflaming places where people are already inclined to be inflamed. And so part of their effort was they ran a couple of different operations that were really, that we did not realize at the time, but that we sort of came to understand were attempts to sow civil unrest or sort of civil concern in communities. That one was a wave of fake reporting about a chemical plant in Louisiana that according to these Internet trolls, had exploded and was on fire and sending poisonous fumes into the community. And then relatedly, again, think back to 2015, 2016, Ferguson, the Michael Brown shooting, and the debates over police shootings in America where they had sort of invented a fake police shooting in Atlanta that they were trying to stoke people up about and try to see if they could launch protests around.

C (27:17)

But they didn't work. People didn't buy them or, or they didn't catch fire for whatever reason. And maybe, maybe one of the reasons was that they were see through. Maybe one of the reasons was that authorities came in and could be trusted back then 10 years ago. So what purpose did they serve for their long term agenda?

D (27:36)

I don't know that we really know. And, and this is part of, I think the challenge of going back and looking at so much of this is it remains very unclear what impact the Russian efforts around the 2016 election really ended up having on voters. We know that Russia was able to successfully organize a handful of offline protests in Florida and elsewhere, where they hired people to go do street protests against Hillary Clinton and for Donald Trump in 2016. We know that they did an enormous amount of Internet trolling and social media memes and posts from bots in all directions. I mean, on the one hand boosting Donald Trump, on the other hand trying to boost Bernie Sanders, on the third hand, attacking Hillary Clinton in all directions in all ways, because really their goal was not to help any one candidate, although Donald Trump was the center point of their campaign, but it was to really sort of stoke and encourage any division that they could come up with.

C (29:08)

Oh, it's not over. There's so much more. The disinformation didn't end then. Garrett Graf will be back tomorrow to talk more about Long Shadow. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

B (29:28)

Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.

C (29:36)

That's not the itinerary we're following.

B (29:39)

Well, I'm departing from AT and T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.

C (29:52)

Bon voyage.

A (29:54)

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C (31:22)

And now the Spiel I was surprised to see Charlie Kirk get moments of silence before different NFL games. For someone who opposed Kirk's ideas, the fear would be obvious. This sort of recognition risks spreading Kirk's ideology without rebuttal. A public ritual like a stadium tribute does not pause to say by the way, this man opposed the Civil Rights Act. Or here are the more Outrageous things, Charlie Kirk said, you should know before we observe our silence. It risks elevating Kirk, giving him a veneer of legitimacy, even martyrdom. And this helps explain why critics quickly responded in some of the most prominent places available, the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Although in case of the Post, it's the silence on Kirk or the silencing of one Kirk's quote, unquote critics that we're going to discuss. So I think it is proper and necessary to track down some of Kirk's most offensive remarks in order to contextualize him and accurately. If none of this was reported, it would be weird. But remember, at root, Kirk was a standard Republican communicator. He was inflammatory, he was skilled. He had facts, some facts, or at least talking points at his disposal. He was adept at using provocation to attract attention. And attract attention he did. This was after all why he said the 64 Civil Rights act should never have been passed. He knew the stance was crazy. He relished the attention that came with it. That's the ecosystem of the Republican radio host, the podcast host. The influencer applies to many left leaning influencers to outlandish statements is fuel for notoriety. So issue the correctives. Fine. Kirk's ideological opponents did just that and more, or maybe we should say less. The lowest rung of the quality ladder. There was Keith Olbermann, once a major presence, now spinning himself into smaller, angrier spirals on blue sky. He lashed out at Ezra Klein for offering Kirk a compliment on his skilled Polish politics. So Oberman writes, Charlie Kirk advocated for forcing 12 year olds to watch the public execution of Trump's government opponents. Maybe by guillotine. No, Kirk didn't advocate that. Kirk didn't say that. No fair minded viewer of the discussion that happened around execution and children. And there was a reference to a guillotine, but it was France last executed. A person by guillotine in the 1970s said minutes before they started talking about public executions and should we let kids watch? So no reasonable person would come away thinking that Oberman depends on everyone reading his bleat as either not being reasonable or being unwilling to check or uninterested to check the original words. Fine. Over at the New York Times, Jamel Bowie delivered a long and pretty effective rebuttal to Kirk's ideas. Effective insofar as I would think a regular reader of the New York Times would say, oh, I didn't know all that and I benefit from it. So that's what critics are supposed to do. I did find two outright errors. Maybe not the most egregious in the world, but errors in trying to take the high ground and trying to argue that Charlie Kirk was often error prone and inaccurate overall. It was quite an ungenerous framing to Kirk. But Bowie would argue, most Times readers would argue we have no obligation to generosity to Charlie Kirk, even if we might be. Or it has been argued that we're in a tinderbox and possibly on the brink of an escalatory spiral. Then again, you know, I'll acknowledge from Bowie's perspective and the majority of Times readers perspectives, Kirk's worldview is the thing that will lead us into dangerous directions. By the way, this is the dynamic that never allows for breaths and deescalation. Anyway, I do think inaccuracies matter. Bowie claimed Kirk was preoccupied with, quote, black crime. I'm not sure preoccupied is the right word. It implies, I think maybe that there isn't a very real problem of crime in black communities or that Kirk's usage was similar to the Breitbart notorious black crime rubric on their webpage, which is what they would do. And they would stoke racial animus. They would collect individual stories of a black person committing a crime and try to give that national attention. Kirk, even in the clip Bowie sided, was speaking more broadly about crime as a social phenomenon. And it is serious, damaging, and born most heavily by black communities themselves. That was just the introductory sentence to this. The actual inaccuracy. Bowie writes that Kirk falsely told his audience that quote, 1 in 22 black men will be a murderer in their lifetime. Yeah, that is false. That's a stupid statement. And that by age 23, half of all black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested. Okay, the 1 in 22 figure, that's nonsense. But the second claim, putting aside the non factual assertion, not enough been arrested, that by age 23, half of all black males have been arrested. Well, that's true. Or at least as close to truth as we get. When you can cite a peer reviewed study that has been cited by many, many other scholars. The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. No one's, to my knowledge, ever criticized the methodology of these findings. And they found that by age 23, 49% of black men have been arrested, 38% of white men. Kirk's way of presenting it, you know, wasn't how the New York Times would present it and included that offensive coda. Right, but it's not false as far as we can tell. Bowie also plays loose with quotation marks to put some words in Kirk's mouth. Not literally. Kirk did say the words white demographics when he was talking about border crossings, but the way Bowie frames it is so as to make Kirk appear to say that a citizen force quote unquote should defend quote unquote white demographics from quote, the invasion of the country, end quote. Yes, he said all those words, not in that order. There wasn't any connective tissue. They weren't in the same sentence. And he only said white demographics, not as the people who need to be protected by the citizen force. White demographics, Kirk was saying, is what the left admits to wanting to be diminished. And yeah, some people on the left have in fact openly stated that they're eager for the white majority to go away. Fine. But then there is Karen Attia, formerly of the Washington Post, who tried to leverage the Kirk assassination into her own story in a stunningly self aggrandizing media martyrdom monetization substack post. So Atiya writes that the Washington Post fired me, but my voice will not be silenced because earlier in a string of bleeds on Blue Sky, Atiya used the Kirk assassination to share her analysis of whiteness and violence and wrote my only direct reference to Kirk was in one post his own words on record, quote, black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person slot. End quote. Attribution Charlie Kirk only problem, not a quote from Charlie Kirk. It's an inaccurate attribution. Kirk was speaking of four specific high profile liberal black women, Michelle Obama, Joy Reid, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sheila Jackson Lee, who have all said they benefited from affirmative action. And that is not the nice way to say it. That is not the way that readers of the New York Times would want it said to allege that a Supreme Court justice or Sheila Jackson Lee doesn't have the brain power to be taken seriously. That's offensive. It's just not a quote that he said about black women writ large. Atiya got specifically grandiose during her self defenestration in that exact moment, citing the Post for a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold. Let's check those standards. The Washington Post social media policy requires employees to avoid posts that might cause a reasonable reader to doubt the paper's ability to cover issues fairly. I consider myself a reasonable reader and I do not think Karen Attia demonstrated the ability to cover this matter fairly. If you convey a quote and that quote was Never said you've done something wrong as a journalist. So this brings us to an even bigger question. Why is it that all those threads, those bleeds, those tweets, even the longer edited essay meant to dismantle Kirk's ideology, Kirk's ideology. Why do they all contain some amount of errors, some arguably minor, some pretty enormous? It's not as if Kirk hasn't said plenty of things that a decent person would object to or would be ashamed of, or that could legitimately be used against him. If using statements against Charlie Kirk is really what we need to be doing two days after he was shot and killed, why not simply stick to the record, a fair, accurate, airtight assessment of what Kirk said. And I kept thinking about this until a pattern became pretty clear. Yes, there's the aspect that we're all in our silos and people write for an audience where the audience wants to hear a certain perspective and a certain ideology. So the. The economics lineup, as far as that goes. But it's not the whole explanation. What was happening was a pretty familiar political dynamic, the imperative to define one's enemy before the enemy can define himself. And in Kirk's case, the critics worried that he was being defined via NFL tributes or mainstream mourning, or simply because of the lack of criticism. He was being defined too softly. His image was experiencing a boost it did not deserve when checked against the record. So they rushed to redefine him, to sharpen the edges, even if it meant cutting corners. The result was a flood of oppo research, Opposition research. That's what we got. This played out like oppo research. And the source material, interesting for almost all of this was Media Matters for America, which is the standard opposition research mill for Democrats and liberal circles. Media Matters serves a purpose in the political process, I think is usually a tool that a real journalist can use to check back with. It's not journalism per se, shouldn't be defaulted to, as happened too often in these write ups. So what we were seeing was politics, classic politics. Charlie Kirk lived as a political figure and now in death, his legacy is being treated as a political battlefield. That is understandable. I have also argued, perhaps to your chagrin, given the length I've argued it, that it's a moment where we should be prioritizing de escalation. That would be more valuable than escalation, or defining and redefining and arguing about ideas. But that is not the world or the media ecosystem we live in. I should not be surprised. I'm foolish to be disappointed, but I still, I guess I hoped, even in the midst of a political process, that it might in fact be the place for something like a healing process to intrude. That's it for today's show. Cory Warra produces the Gist. Ashley Kahn's Our production coordinator Kathleen Sykes very much helps me with the Gist list. You want to subscribe to the Gist List list? I know you do. Go to go to Mike pesca.substack.com you want 25% off the gist list? Text Mike to 33777. Michelle Pesc is the CEO of Peach Fish Productions. I wish I had a text for her just to hit me up. And Jeff Craig is our new social media manager. Jeff Craig. More about him in the future. We'll try to get a running gag with Jeff Craig. The many faces of Jeff Craig coming up. And thanks for listening.

F (43:51)

Hey, this is Dan Harris, host of the 10 Happier podcast. I'm here to tell you about a new series we're running this September on 10 happier. The goal is to help you do your life better. The series is called Reset. It's all about hitting the reset button in many of the most crucial areas of your life. Each week we'll tackle a topic like how to reset your nervous system, how to reset your relationships, how to reset your career. We're going to bring on top notch scientists and world class meditation teachers to give you deep insights and actionable advice. It's all delivered with our trademark blend of skepticism, humor, credibility and practicality. 10% happier is self help for smart people. Come join the party.