Alex and Evelyn sit down with the authors of two recently released books about our online information ecosystem and what to do about it: Annalee Newitz, author of Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, and Renee DiResta, author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.
Renee DeResta:
They can't actually vanquish the foe because then they'd have to move on and find some new foe. It's just this state of almost performative... God, I always butcher the pronunciation. Kfabec, like...
Evelyn Dweck:
"Hey babe."
Alex Stamos:
Well, if there's people really care about pronunciation, it's wrestling fans. So you definitely need to get that. We'll get a lot of letters if you don't-
Renee DeResta:
I know, I will. There's certain words where you see them written 5 million times and you only ever say that them out loud on some random podcast once.
Alex Stamos:
Random podcast? Excuse me. Wow. Cut her mic Evelyn.
Renee DeResta:
Sorry.
Evelyn Dweck:
We're done, we're done, thank you for your time.
Hello and welcome to Moderated Content Stochastically released Slightly random and not at all comprehensive news update from the world of trust and safety with myself, Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos. We have a special episode for you today with not one but two authors of books about online lies and manipulation and a bunch of other things. So Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and science fiction author and Hugo Award-winning podcaster of the podcast Our opinions are Correct, and their most recent book is Stories are Weapons. Psychological, Warfare and The American Mind which came out last week. Congratulations on the book launch.
Annalee Newitz:
Yes, thank you so much for having me on one of my very favorite podcasts.
Evelyn Dweck:
Too kind and we also have friend of the pod, Renee DiResta, researcher and author of Invisible Rulers, the People Who Turn Lies Into Reality which came out yesterday. Super exciting. Congratulations, Renee. This is a wonderful milestone.
Renee DeResta:
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.
Evelyn Dweck:
All right. Now these books have a lot in common and we're going to canvas a lot of that. They also have some differences and we'll talk about that too but one of the things that they have in common is that, Alex, you are a character in both of these books.
Alex Stamos:
Oh great.
Evelyn Dweck:
Which I don't know if that's a selling point or not, but anyway, it's a true fact about these books. So did you enjoy that particular fact while reading them?
Alex Stamos:
I did which is normal for me now, is I've gone in the habit of doing the Washington Read where it used to be you looked for yourself in the index. Now it's much easier to just control F on your Kindle and.
Renee DeResta:
Yeah.
Alex Stamos:
Look for yourself. And I do appreciate that I was not misquoted by either one of them. So that is a plus because generally when I'm mentioned in books now, it's with terrible lies and slander. So it's nice just to be accurately quoted. That's pretty cool. But yeah, this is awkward, I got to say, to have two of my friends have books on topics that are very relevant to each other, release the same week. I feel like I went to the party and I'm the first one to notice that two people were wearing the exact same outfit but I can't mention it. Everybody just has to pretend that it's totally cool.
So we'll just move forward and one day we try to figure out how your publishers ended up having you guys release at the exact same time. But we'll start with Annalee, so Annalee, you have a long history as a journalist and a sci-fi author. This isn't a field that you've written about before, although a lot of your work touches upon the internet and the misuse of the internet and has thematic pull through from your fiction into the stuff that's going on in the world. First, what attracted you to doing what is effectively a history book on online lies and where they come from?
Annalee Newitz:
I mean, it really started because we have been so deep into culture war at this point that it's almost impossible to cover social media, to write about technology and even science without coming up against conspiracy theories, propaganda and friends of mine are being attacked online. There's a lot of backlash against queer people and trans people, which has affected my life personally. And as a science journalist, I've written a lot about history. My book before this was about ancient cities and so, I think my reflex is always to try to understand cultural phenomena by going back as far as I can in history and trying to contextualize it and look at where it comes from. And so that's what really got me started was looking at where does culture war come from in the United States specifically? And that's what got me interested in psychological war and more formal military operations around propaganda, around what is often called providing information, providing the information that of course only the state power wants you to have.
And so that sparked it but then of course along the way, I made a ton of weird discoveries about how basically the United States was founded on fake news and right up into the present, this is still haunting us. So it's been a journey and there is a little bit of science fiction in the book too.
Alex Stamos:
So Renee, I think one of the interesting differences between the two books is, I mean, well, Annalee, you are in the writing. You could see your personality come out and you use the first person sometimes. Renee, your book is a combination of being very descriptive but also almost a memoir since you are in some ways, the most interesting woman in the world and you've done every possible job and you've been involved personally in some of the most interesting events over the last decade. Was that your intention from the beginning to have so much of it be about your personal experience or is that something that changed?
Renee DeResta:
No. I tried to not do that at all. Just to give the glimpses, so I wrote the proposal starting in maybe 2018, I think. I was like, "I want to write a book about modern propaganda." And what I specifically said, I remember sitting, I was in Berggruen Institute, a friend of mine was a fellow over there. I was visiting him in LA. He had this blog called Ribbon Farm. I'd written for it over the years, and I was like, "I want to turn these essays into something." We jokingly within the group referred to it as the Great Weirding. This idea that the internet had suddenly gone weird but things had gotten really terrible actually, and we chronicled it in these essays. The digital Maginot line was one that I think my first essay that ever went viral was arguing about this concept of information war where it was going to go and who was going to be in it.
And I wanted to write a book about that. And the pitch was, I want to write manufacturing consent but for the current information ecosystem and system of incentives. And what I like about Chomsky's book was that it pulled a concept from the 1920s into the 1980s, manufacturing consent is a phrase from Walter Lippmann. He pulls that forward and then he writes this whole explanation of how a system of incentives gives you a particular type of outputs. And I was like, "Wow, perfect. Elegant. This is what I want to do for the now." And I cannot tell you how many rejections I got because they were like, "She's interesting. Nobody wants to read a book about media theory."
And so I kept actually fighting to not do it until I was of course, probably friends with the pod, no, the subpoena from Jordan came down last year and I felt like, ""Okay, I am a character in this story now and as much as I might not want to be, when you become the starring character in a conspiracy theory, I felt it would actually help explain to people how that had happened and what that experience was like."
Alex Stamos:
Right. So I find that an interesting challenge that you probably faced is that you have this Heisenberg-ing problem of you don't get to be a neutral observer here because like you said, you've become part of the conspiracy theory. Has that changed your opinion of... I mean, it makes a book much more relevant to folks and I think it makes it much more personal, but has that changed your intellectual conception of what is going on? The fact that you have now been on the other side? For people who don't know, Renee is alleged to be the centerpiece of the entire censorship industrial complex. Something that doesn't really exist but if it did exist, Renee is the queen of it.
Renee DeResta:
I would lead it.
Alex Stamos:
And leads it. In fact-
Renee DeResta:
Right.
Alex Stamos:
Yes. Thank you so much, Renee, for everything you've done for me.
Evelyn Dweck:
For pulling the strings.
Alex Stamos:
I have to say, for pulling the strings.
Renee DeResta:
There's so many layers to it. They're periodically, they will write things. So one thing that's very interesting and I think this is where some of my work in Annalee's perhaps overlaps. What I wanted to write about was the experience of tropes and character creation. And I felt like I had been made into this character. And what I saw also were people I knew, people all around me who were made into other characters. Sometimes supporting, sometimes lead, but it was ways in which the people who created this cinematic universe leveraged. Once they establish you as a character, you're never not going to be a character. You are useful. They have invested in you. They have written two to four blog posts about you every week for six months. And when you're not the starring role, maybe you were on a webinar with that person. Congratulations, Annalee. Now you too are part of the censorship industrial complex by virtue of being on a podcast with me-
Alex Stamos:
Right.
Annalee Newitz:
Oh yeah, I've been there before.
Alex Stamos:
Right now, somebody is listening to this and they're taking a piece of red yarn and they've now printed out your photo.
Renee DeResta:
You on the board.
Alex Stamos:
Put it on the board and tied the yarn.
Annalee Newitz:
This isn't my first conspiracy rodeo, I'll tell you that.
Renee DeResta:
And you also watch how they do it. Women of course get it way more. They caricature you in some ways. Nina Yankowitz said she wore red lipstick, she was immediately a ditz. Kate Starbird, she had short hair. Obviously the LGBTQ agenda was part of the cabal. Me, I used to work for the CIA. I was an intern back in 20 years ago. So I got this Spider Woman, all powerful mastermind, not the worst caricature if you have to get one, I guess but it was funny to watch it play out. And I did feel like if I was going to explain tropes and characters and the role they play in propaganda, this was my experience. And I think to the question about did it change my view, it made me completely lose patience for how we respond to this stuff. So my experience of just sit back, the media cycle blows over. Don't say anything, don't defend yourself, don't put out the counteracts. It's the wrong response. And that was, I think for me, the most frustrating part of the entire thing.
I had the skin in the game whether I wanted it or not, and the fact that nobody seemed to know what you were supposed to do to respond was the part that I found the most frustrating.
Alex Stamos:
Annalee, how do you feel as a Hugo award-winning science fiction author, does that resonate for you, the idea that people are being turned into caricatures and how much do you see that as playing into how this, as you said, culture wars is played out?
Annalee Newitz:
Yeah, I mean, one of the really interesting figures who I write about in my book Stories are Weapons is a guy who was instrumental in creating the United States policies around psychological warfare. His name was Paul Linebarger, and he worked in psychological operations during World War II. And after the war was over, he wrote the US Army's first guidebook to psychological Warfare. And the book is full of advice about how to create effective propaganda and he really believed that the key was to make it as much like pop culture as possible. He said, "It's better to have your message be like a Laurel and Hardy movie than it is to be like a square jawed man teaching you to farm." That that just doesn't work. And the interesting thing is Linebarger led a secret life as a science fiction writer and under the name Cordwainer Smith, he had a couple of other pseudonyms too but under Cordwainer Smith, he wrote science fiction stories, all of which were actually about waging psychological war.
There's a lot of psychic battles, people spreading propaganda in order to foment revolution. And so he's working out his ideas in popular media but at the same time, he's encouraging his students and his fellow PsyOps experts to do this as well. So storytelling is, I think, the most powerful form of de-contextualization that we have. So what's happening to Renee, what she's describing here is precisely that she, as this person, is being torn out of her actual context and dropped down into a pre-existing narrative with villains and heroes. She's the villain, she's pulling the strings, she's orchestrating the censorship industrial complex which imagine if that existed, that'd be amazing. The people who are doing that, by the way, are also, I guess responsible for Taylor Swift. So Renee, thanks for Taylor Swift's great tour. That was really nice of you.
Alex Stamos:
Right, motel six operators across the country thank you Renee.
Annalee Newitz:
Yeah, thank you for the injection of money into the local economies. So I think that this is really, I say in the book and I think this is true, this is a really big part of the American approach to culture war and psychological war. Using the tools of pop culture in order to make our messages not just persuasive but fun and entertaining. And that's the thing that we always forget is that engaging in conspiracy theories is fun. It's like playing a video game. You participate in building up a world and that's part of the lure of it, and that's hugely dangerous. Hugely, hugely dangerous.
But I want to return to what Renee was saying at the end of her comments about the way in which I feel like we're gaslit about how to respond to being attacked online and having propaganda made about us and told things like, "Oh, just get a thicker skin. Just ignore it and it'll go away." Which really is itself a PsyOp. It's telling you, "What's happening to you isn't really happening." And so I just want to know, Renee, what are you thinking is a better approach? What has been a good approach for you?
Renee DeResta:
I've actually started scoping this out as my next book.
Annalee Newitz:
Good.
Renee DeResta:
Because I think that's actually really the question, which is nobody seems to have an answer. One thing that happens a lot is you get people who say, "Well, we need to..." So first of all, you can't just fact check the problem away.
Annalee Newitz:
Right.
Renee DeResta:
That, I think, is something that anybody in the work I do looking at propaganda, looking at the way that it manifests, whether it's from state actors or domestics, all of that, you have to either replace it with something, give them a new story, change the story, change the narrative. And so when the interesting experience that I've had is that you'll hear from some people, "Well, it hasn't made it into the Washington Post. The conspiracy theory is not in WAPO, so we can safely ignore it." And they foundationally do not understand how a factionalized reality, factionalized media works. So one of the reasons I wrote the book, and it really became much where in my mind, my target audience is institutionalist.
It's people who believe institutions are necessary for society, and the institutions are not meeting the moment. So what are the ways in which we can explain to them that communications have changed, that where reality is shaped has changed, that the fragmented nature of reality has changed? And what are the ways to "solve that" or at least return to some reality where consensus is possible? Not even agreement, I mean that we're arguing from the same basis of facts on some of these topics and that I don't think anybody really has an answer. What you hear from comms people is you should be more proactive. But there's also a budget that comes along with that. One of the things I talk about a lot in my book is influencers make money.
Not only are the people who are writing about me the heroes in their own epic, but they're also charging $9.99 a month to serialize it. So, you know?
Annalee Newitz:
Yeah.
Renee DeResta:
So the target is put in this position where who are you going to go hire at a $10,000 a month retainer to run some sort of comms program on your behalf? It doesn't exist. That is not a thing that is available to you. So unless you have your own army of internet fans who are going to fight on your behalf, it's a very asymmetric environment that we're in today and I don't actually know what the answer to that is.
Evelyn Dweck:
So I want to pick up on it or drill down on this question of what is new here and what's old, because it strikes me, this is quite an interesting time to be releasing books about online information warfare or our online information ecosystem because we've been through this cycle where maybe four years ago there were a slew of books about how everything has changed. The information environment is completely new. We have hypodermic needles into your brain and fake news is ruining democracy. And then we went through that for a few years and then we saw a backlash against that narrative to say, "Look, no, it's not so simple. This is much more complicated." And Annalee, one of the wonderful things about your book is tracing the history here about how much of this is not new. You go all the way back, you go... You have some wonderful stories about Benjamin Franklin which I won't ruin for the reader and things like that. And you were talking about lineBarger as well.
So I'm curious, having looked at this history so deeply, what is old and what is new and how do you think about that?
Annalee Newitz:
I think what's new is basically scale. And what I see looking back on the history of this stuff, is that every time we get a new form of mass media, whether it's newspapers or radio, movies, internet, you always see propaganda jumping in and using it. It's like porn uses it first and then propaganda or maybe those are at the same time but they're early adopters. And that's because of course, propaganda, psychological warfare, the way that they work effectively is by blanketing a population with the same message. To get everyone on the same page, to create what you might call a false public sphere. Because the public sphere is, we think of it in the United States in a liberal democracy mode, is a place where we can debate and negotiate and reach consensus or at least as Renee was saying, at least be on the same footing with how we're arguing about the issues. But information warfare depends on the idea that everyone is receiving the advertising, the propaganda, the message.
And so what's new of course, is that now we have machines that are even better at delivering these messages at scale but also, that they're better at figuring out how to target those messages. And one of the things I learned is that the military, when they craft PsyOps, they refer to them as products. I took a class actually with a guy who teaches psychological operations in the military.
Evelyn Dweck:
I'm so glad you're going to talk about this because I have so many questions like, "What?"
Annalee Newitz:
So I took this class with this army instructor and he showed me some of the materials that they use. He showed me a recently declassified textbook and they use the tools of target marketing and they use the same language. So you find a target audience, you develop a product, they do work shopping. They'll often bring in key members of the communities that they're trying to reach and ask them, "Does this message make sense to you? Is it cringe?" Whatever. And so, I think now that we have these tools like the things that we saw all the time on Facebook with target advertising but which we see everywhere, it's just completely normalized now. These become, again, a way of making propaganda more effective. And there's this idea in advertising that you can develop psychographics of people and figure out what messages will trigger their anxieties, their vulnerabilities.
That's the foundation of advertising. Advertising uses psychology all the time. And so again, we can get these very allegedly well crafted messages. They don't always turn out the way that I think that the military would hope or that our adversaries would hope. You still get a lot of cringe, you still get a lot of just bonkers stuff that doesn't land but you don't have to care about that because you've got such scale. You can just keep launching message after message after message. And I think, so that's really the shift. But if you look back even at how radio was used in World War II, it's all the same tricks that we're seeing people use online. Impersonating mainstream media organizations, pitting citizens against each other, even using comedy.
One of the biggest influencers during World War II was this guy, Lord Haw-Haw, which was his nickname. He was an Irish fascist who loved fascism, hated Jews. He joined Hitler's group pretty early on and he would do radio broadcasts intended to get British people to join the fascists, but he used humor and he was a funny guy. And he would just make jokes about wartime rations and leadership and again, we see the same thing now. The right wing, they've got a lot of funny guys trying to get us all excited about fascism. So same playbook but much more effective targeting.
Renee DeResta:
I have so many things I want to say to that. First-
Annalee Newitz:
Yes.
Renee DeResta:
No. So going back to the long history, I always liked, the reason that misinformation was a word that graded on me which Alex makes fun of me about, but it so foundationally misunderstood what was happening. I remember being in meetings and they would say, "Mistis and propaganda, it's the word you're looking for. Just go with it. It's what it is." Because it also has this rich history, this evolution. You look at Jacques Ellul in the 1960s talking about propaganda must be immersive for it to be impactful. How does it become immersive? You reach people where they are all the time in all spheres with the messages targeted to the right audience. And this is where you start to see marketers. Right message, right place, write time. Kate Starbird and I were working on this paper about influencers in the 2020 election and I was writing the background and I'm drawing on all the marketing, these literally marketing blogs.
I was like, "Is the journal... You're an academic, I'm not really, are they going to complain when we cite the marketing blogs?" But that's who actually understands it and in some of my prior lives, I brand marketing at a startup. I was a co-founder for a while. I had to be the marketing person until we hired somebody better which meant I sat there doing the segmentation and the targeting and the messaging and the AD testing and all the stuff. And you see how easy it is with what's been given to you. And you think about that versus in the broadcast era, the mass blasts, so they're not quite so impactful. But the other thing that I was thinking about as you were talking was, and since I'm not all the way through your book, maybe you saw this, maybe you didn't, but we investigated a Pentagon influence operation in the course of some of our work at SIO.
And it was garbage. It was absolutely... It was mortifyingly bad. As an American, I was pained by it. No, I was like, "What JV bullshit is this? This is horrible." I was like, "If you're going to do it, I mean, my God, somebody somewhere should invest in it." I don't think they should be doing it candidly. I don't think that it has the impact they want it to have and when they do it sloppily, I think it loses the moral high ground. It's egregious. And I feel like that again was a lesson we learned from the 1980s from Cold War propaganda. But in this particular case, it was not well segmented. They recycled their aliases. You could trace domain, AdWords tags that they would turn off and turn back on and it was really quite a debacle. And it did get me thinking, and this is something that does come up in the book, the uncomfortable reality that the tools of propagandists are in the hands of ordinary people and ordinary people are a million times better at doing it because they understand their communities.
You don't even have to do all of the A-B testing and the niche stuff and when I was doing marketing for a SaaS company, so that was a whole other thing but you don't have to guess at what your audience wants because you're already part of your audience. The influencer is part of the crowd and that's why you have the tools of propaganda plus this information environment. And that's where I think that that question of what has impact is not something that we've really reckoned with at this point.
Alex Stamos:
The Pentagon operations SAO we wrote about, I see that really as a reflection of the modern grift in the military industrial complex. Annalee is talking about World War I, World War II propaganda when perhaps the Department of Defense knew how to buy things without getting ripped off. But now when you look at that propaganda, the goal of that was not to convince anybody of that. The goal of that was to do the minimally viable product that passes the bar for some defense contractor to make millions and millions of dollars with almost no effort. And I see it as the same reason why the United States can't build ships anymore and can't have a defense project that's not four to five times over budget as much as anything to have to do the actual propaganda. There's a budget out there, if it's going to get ripped off and somebody is going to utilize. It's something that shouldn't exist. I totally agree. I think it should be beneath us and it also creates a significant opening.
As we talked about in the report, our criticism of the Pentagon got way more reached than anything that this Pentagon propaganda did and then was cited directly by Chinese propagandists, Russian propagandists.
Renee DeResta:
Yes.
Alex Stamos:
Of being examples, and just unfortunately opens the door for authoritarian states to do what they want and then say the US is exactly the same.
Renee DeResta:
Yeah, I got off a red-eye flight. I remember this, it was five. I was at Dallas. I opened my phone to get the Uber and all my messages start to come in. And the Minister of Foreign Affairs, one of the Chinese wolf warriors, is thanking us for our excellent research. And I get name checked and there's a whole... And she's just articulating all of the evil things that the United States has done and thanking Renee at SIO for... And I was like, "Oh boy."
Alex Stamos:
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in China, not the only people that have only read one SIO report and nothing else which we put out, which just for the record, is mostly we are not big fans of the People's Republic of China over at SIO. Yeah. Or their propaganda. But anyway, so Annalee, talk about the historical link. So one of the interesting differences here is that you're specifically, the entire book is about this has warfare, is PsyOp. Renee uses, I think a much broader term, propaganda and I actually agree with her for the record, her disagreement with the use of misinformation of being massively overused in the literature and by people who don't actually mean misinformation, they mean something else. But I think the interesting part here is you talk about a psychological warfare, warfare generally being things that are done by states on behalf of their populace for geopolitical means, but the book then covers how that has become something that has done between individual people.
So are we living through civil psychological warfare? How do you square the use of the term PsyOp and warfare with the fact that most of the participants now are, of the combatants, are civilians?
Annalee Newitz:
Yeah, it's a really interesting question and that is what I wound up grappling with a lot because a lot of the ways that we're seeing domestic citizens talking to each other or arguing with each other really do imitate in almost every way, what we've seen the US military do. And I found it really useful to use the war paradigm because unlike culture warriors, psychological warriors in the military have codified what they're doing. They may not be doing it well as we've been discussing, and they are actually underfunded at this point in the army but what they have done is appreciate how a story can be weaponized and they have a couple basic ways of describing that. One is it must be a story that is trying to activate people, trying to make them do something, change their behavior, change how they interact with each other.
It usually contains lies, a grain of truth. It's nice to have a grain of truth in there but then you kind of de-contextualize it and generally, it will contain violent threats. So these are the ways in which you can identify something that is PsyOp-like. Is it a statement that tries to get you to do something that's full of lies and violent threats? And a violent threat can be, you might go to jail or you might lose your job or you might get beaten up and killed. There's a range of the ways those work and we're seeing that rhetoric in our culture wars all the time now, especially. People threatening each other's lives, threatening each other with these half-truths, re-wrapping stories in conspiracies and exaggerations, and creating a public sphere that's incredibly chaotic where it's very hard to know when people are being authentic, what's real.
And so I think that it's useful to frame it that way because part of the problem that we're experiencing right now is that the public sphere is a war zone and the public sphere can't function as a war. A war is a war. The public sphere needs to be a zone of peace so that we can actually have incredible arguments and debates over what we want to do as a country. Where do we want to go as a country? What policies do we want to have? How do we want to fund schools? All these things. We need to be able to yell about them in a space where we aren't feeling like our lives are threatened just for stating a political belief or stating a policy position. And so part of what I've tried to do is going back to what Renee was saying, how do you respond when people are basically attacking you and turning you into a caricature and essentially abusing you and trying to traumatize you with their stories?
I think what we need to do is change the metaphor, get away from that metaphor of warfare, stop thinking of public engagement as an act of war, attack, defense, and try to think about other models of communication. Peaceful models or models from negotiation. So I think that's what's been useful for me is being able to identify where the weaponization is taking place in our cultural conversation and then using that as a way to say, "Why don't we actually have disarmament?" Cultural disarmament would be a goal, and thinking about what that looks like and what that would mean.
Alex Stamos:
Yeah, I mean unfortunately, my fear with your metaphor which I think is actually quite accurate, is that there's not a lot of great examples of unilateral disarmament. That generally, the best examples of peaceful step down have either been because one side completely collapsed like the collapse of the Soviet Union, or because things got so incredibly bad that both sides were willing to give up something. But I feel like we're pretty far away from being a place where anybody in the United States is willing to give up anything.
Annalee Newitz:
Yeah. I mean-
Alex Stamos:
But I think you're unfortunately really right, that complete defeat versus coming to consensus is absolutely the goal of online propagandists now.
Annalee Newitz:
Yeah. And I think... I mean, again, psychological war, the goal is usually to have the adversary surrender. So it's no wonder that we're locked into this mode.
Renee DeResta:
I think there's something that is interesting about... I don't know, that friend I referenced at the beginning, the fellow who's at Berggruen wrote this essay once called the Internet of Beefs. I don't know if people are familiar with it but it was, again, another one of these viral classics at the moment as the world was starting to unravel a bit. And he made this interesting point that's always stuck with me which was actually that for the influencer, they gain nothing by winning. It is actually the pervasive perpetual that is the point because they don't actually want to defeat the enemy because then they can't monetize the process of defeating the enemy. They can't actually vanquish the foe because then they'd have to move on and find some new foe. And so it's just this state of almost performative... God, I always butcher the pronunciation, kfabec like...
Annalee Newitz:
Hey, babe.
Alex Stamos:
If people who really care about pronunciation, it's wrestling fans. So you definitely get that. We'll get a lot of letters if you don't.
Renee DeResta:
I know, I know, I will. There's certain words where you see them written 5 million times and you only ever say that them out loud on some random podcast once.
Alex Stamos:
Random podcast, Excuse me. Wow. Cut her mic Evelyn.
Evelyn Dweck:
We're done, We're done. Thank you for your time.
Renee DeResta:
Well, I appreciate the correction.
Alex Stamos:
Feedback is a gift as Sheryl Sandberg told me personally.
Renee DeResta:
Dear God.
Alex Stamos:
One day I'll tell you, not on a podcast, the feedback that came right before I was told feedback is a gift.
Annalee Newitz:
Feedback is a gift. That phrase in itself is a PsyOp.
Renee DeResta:
There you go.
Alex Stamos:
Oh, it's absolutely how you end every... It's like starting with all due respect. If you end with feedback is a gift, you really need to look inside yourself and see what you've really just done to somebody else. But Renee, I think on your point, you're totally around the fighting, just in the last 24 hours, there's a story about a woman who just very casually used a really bad racial slur in an Instagram video. Ended up getting fired from her crappy job and then immediately turned it into, I'm becoming an influencer now. It was, the whole thing is a clear plot. Getting canceled is the goal. As Annalee was talking about, it's a complete economic incentive. I guess both of you talk about this in your books. The economic incentives here are amazing. I think that's one of the problems that I think would help with some disarmament if people were just a little more cynical about the motivations.
The cynicism that we apply to other people is that they're evil. The cynicism should be, they're saying this because they want to be famous and they want to be rich. That's a more accurate, I think, cynical take on people's online personas in 2024 America. It's not that they're deeply evil, it is that being the crazy person ends up making them, first, a lot of dopamine as they get both, they get to fight with people and they get positive feedback as a certain billionaire who is captured by his own platform is clearly, but then eventually perhaps becomes a full-time job.
Renee DeResta:
Well, and that is why when you see the whole "censorship industrial complex" thing, it's written by people who want... They desperately want to believe that they have uncovered the story of the century, right?
Alex Stamos:
Yeah.
Renee DeResta:
And there's such resistance to the actual evidence that refutes every single point that when you send a fact check with the most basic, "Hey, you got this, this, this, this and this, wrong. Objectionally, wrong. I was not employed at this place at this time, I did not work on that project." Basic stuff-
Alex Stamos:
LinkedIn mistakes-
Renee DeResta:
It turns into book.
Alex Stamos:
Right?
Renee DeResta:
Right. Things where if you're an investigative journalist, I don't know, maybe you would've checked my public LinkedIn but there's the moments where you're like, "They're completely resistant to correction." And actually the response I got from one of them was to pivot to the next conspiracy. Are you working on a project called, whatever the hell it was? And I was like, "I don't even know what this is."
Alex Stamos:
Oh, you don't deny it Renee. You're working on-
Renee DeResta:
And that's the thing, you can't deny everything. You leave the one allegation out of the fact check and they're like, "I noticed you didn't refute this one point over here."
Alex Stamos:
It's suspicious.
Renee DeResta:
You think something is-
Alex Stamos:
Just ask you questions. Yeah.
Renee DeResta:
But again, that's because they really want to believe that they have found this cabal and that they're vanquishing it and that they're the heroes in this epic, and there is a lot of that that happens. Influencers sell themselves as they're a brand, they are a story. The story of how they came to be influencers is always part of the package and that's just where we are. I think it is trying to get people to be more aware of those incentives that I think matters.
Alex Stamos:
Right.
Evelyn Dweck:
Yeah.
Renee DeResta:
Maybe it has some impact.
Alex Stamos:
I think we're all living downstream of, you mentioned two major moments, Renee, in your book. Which is GamerGate and QAnon. That GamerGate demonstrated what Annalee was talking about, about the personal destruction being a game that people want to play. That they feel personally empowered if they can make somebody else's life hell, just because they disagree with a video game reveal or their politics.
Annalee Newitz:
Well it's an example of culture war imitating psychological war where it's a war over feminism basically, but it's imitating. It's as if we're fighting over nuclear weapons but we're just fighting over women's right to make a video game.
Alex Stamos:
And then QAnon really turning that into a gamified experience of how do you make this into basically an alternative reality game which used to be a marketing trick and now, you wouldn't ever do that now because that's just what people's lives are like on social media these days.
Annalee Newitz:
I think that's why it's really important to have books like Renee's out there which are re-contextualizing the facts, not as bullet points but as narratives. Like what we were talking about earlier, telling different stories and stories that are entertaining and engaging and maybe emotionally engaging even because part of telling a personal story is that you engage the reader and get them to identify with you. And so I think that's part of the way we get out of this is by telling our own entertaining, engaging world building stories that are fact-based and that do suck people in just as much. And so that's part of why I love writing science fiction is that you can give people an exciting adventure but you can also smuggle in a lot of lessons about here's what propaganda looks like, here's how it operates, here's how it mobilises people and maybe be suspicious next time.
Evelyn Dweck:
One thing I was trying to get a handle on as I was reading both books and then listening to you both talk the past hour and change and saying a bunch of pretty grim things, is how optimistic or pessimistic you both are. On a scale of zero, everything's fine to 10, start getting your cans of beans and putting them in the bunker. Where are we in this moment? Because I think it's fair to say neither of you having written these books about information operations... There's a lot of alarmism out there about social media platforms and information operations. I need Alex's voice for that one.
Alex Stamos:
Information operations.
Evelyn Dweck:
Information operations, I can't do it. There's a lot of people getting a lot of attention, running information operations about information operations, and I don't think either of you are in those buckets but where are you? Where do you sit on this scale and how do you, as we head into this election year, not just in the United States but around the world, a lot of elections going on. How do we think about where we sit? Are we ready? What should I do with my beans is my question?
Renee DeResta:
Yeah, stockpile the canned food and shotguns, I think was the gremlins meme. Anyway, I feel like the election is going to be just a brutal slog of terrible experiences for a lot of people. I'm very concerned about the election officials and the people who are poll workers and the people who are in that position where they are going to be targeted. And that's because unfortunately, people have seen that this works. That is going to be the takeaway of 2020, that this works. That some of them will eventually get restitution after lawsuits two years in the future maybe but I am actually very worried about that. I am worried about the institutions. I don't think that they fully have an internalized how different things actually are, and I don't know what it takes. I thought maybe some university presidents getting fired in the way that they did would jolt them out of that complacency, would make them realize that the world had changed.
Then I watched the same thing happen with the NPR thing, and I really crossed my fingers with that one. I was like, "Come on." Whatever I think of the tweets. I thought they were ridiculous personally but at the same time I was like, "Let's just not do this again. It's just another damn scalp. Can't we move past this. Can we have an institution that just says like, 'Okay, here we are. Thank you for your feedback and now these are the changes that we're going to make. These are the changes we're not going to make and she's keeping her job, next.'" And per the point about telling stories, this was where I opened the book with my experience in a pro-vaccine advocacy campaign and I went to the CDC because they had this little convening and we explained what we did, and people were enthralled that a bunch of moms had made a Facebook page and run ads and tried to grow a pro-vaccine movement.
And I tried to explain what was happening, and they were like, "Oh, honey, that's just some people on the internet." I was like, "You have to pay attention to this. This is bigger than you think." "Oh, honey, that some people on the internet" was the... Literally, that's some people on the internet was the quote. And I don't know how you jolt the institutions out of the complacency there. That I think is, for me, my biggest concern. I think I would put myself maybe then at around a, I don't know, a six and then we reevaluate in January.
Annalee Newitz:
Yeah, I think I land somewhere in the mid-range there. So a couple of cans of beans but also don't get too scared too quickly. It's okay to keep watching Bridgerton. You don't have to immediately watch news all the time. I think everything that Renee said is right. One of the things that I worry about a lot is the fact that as citizens, so maybe not people who are running elections, maybe not bureaucrats in any state institution but just regular people consuming media, we are being exposed to a lot of messages were the goal of the message is to traumatize us. And trauma induces cynicism, nihilism, hopelessness. And I think one of the problems is that in the United States, culturally, we have this idea that free speech means that we should all just have a really thick skin. We're rugged, free speech individuals and if something bugs you, just yell louder and just don't let it bother you.
And the fact is that that's, we're humans. We can't not let it bother us. We have to acknowledge that we are being traumatized by these media messages from our leaders, from influencers and cope with that and sit with that and say, "All right, this is actually interfering with my ability to be logical" and prepare ourselves for it. So just as an institution needs to prepare itself for personal attack, I know librarians right now who are having to take classes in how to deal with people coming into the libraries and harassing them and asking for information from them. They're taking the steps that they need to be prepared. And I think as citizens, we need to do that too. And think about when we get messages like, "Is this a message that's intended to hurt you? Is it full of threats? Is it full of misdirection? Does it tell an emotionally engaging story? Where are the point of the story is that there's another group out there who should be abolished or imprisoned or not allowed to teach in school or not allowed to get healthcare?
Pay attention in the same way that we understand how say a fictional genre works. If you go to a horror movie, there's going to be jump scares. They're going to fight the monster at the end, and hopefully they'll win. If it's a standard horror story, you win over the monster in the end. Well, propaganda is the same way. It has certain tropes, certain hot buttons that get pushed and learn to recognize them and just... And not engage. Instead of trying to fight back, go volunteer at a trans teen health clinic. Go volunteer at your local library or a food kitchen, don't fight people. Go build a community somewhere that needs help, that's vulnerable. And I think that's how we're going to make it through this because it is going to be a fricking shit-show, and we're all going to feel like people have been horribly abusing us by the end of this year. And I hope that we're all going to be fine but we need to be prepared for it.
Evelyn Dweck:
Well, on that cheery note...
Alex Stamos:
We always end moderated content on a cherry note-
Annalee Newitz:
But I mean at least you have-
Alex Stamos:
Talking about-
Annalee Newitz:
Those cans of beans.
Evelyn Dweck:
That's right.
Annalee Newitz:
You're going to be [inaudible 00:45:39] to have them. Have some chickpeas, try to mix it up a little bit.
Evelyn Dweck:
You got it. Beans, Bridgerton, and volunteering at the soup kitchen, that is my agenda to get through the next year. Thank you so much, Annalee and Renee for joining us and congratulations again on the launch of two wonderful books. I recommend them both wholeheartedly to our listeners. And with that, this has been your moderated content episode for the week. This show is available in all the usual places and show notes and transcripts are available at more.stanford.edu forward slash moderated content. This episode is produced by the wonderful Brian Pelletier. Special thanks to John Perino, Justin Fu and Rob Hoffman. Talk to you next week.