Making Sense - Sam Harris - #378

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

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00:00:45.320 Well, did you see Trump's appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists?

00:00:52.540 That was spectacular. As you probably know, it went off the rails at the first

00:00:58.080 question, which in Trump's defense, it was a very hard-hitting question. I didn't catch

00:01:05.240 a journalist's name. She was from ABC News, but she was great. And Trump performed like a robot

00:01:13.860 that had had its racial software updated somewhere around 1972, about the time that Archie Bunker

00:01:22.440 was the most famous character. His clueless and probably actual racism was just leaking out of

00:01:32.900 his pores in that context. And it was fascinating to watch. I would point out, however, that the man

00:01:39.500 spoke with reasonable fluidity, despite the absolutely bizarre hand gestures. He was a very different

00:01:47.100 near-octogenarian than President Biden. We should be very grateful that Biden is no longer in the

00:01:54.620 race. And from what I've seen, Vice President Harris has responded, well, I'll remind you, this was an

00:02:02.820 event where, in front of, I assume, an exclusively Black audience, Trump questioned whether the Vice

00:02:10.040 President was actually Black, and in fact claimed that she had only just turned Black, having previously

00:02:16.400 identified as an Indian her entire life. Of course, none of that's true, but true or not, it was an

00:02:23.300 amazing thing to allege in that context. Anyway, it seems like Harris has responded well to this by

00:02:29.960 just letting surrogates respond. She has just laughed it off, which I think is the right move.

00:02:37.580 I published a piece on Substack yesterday, talking about how I think Harris should pivot to the

00:02:45.400 center. I really do think this is necessary. She's just trailing so much video and audio where she,

00:02:53.380 in the 2020 campaign, played connect the dots with bits of woke, sanctimony, and delusion. She has to

00:03:01.600 perform an exorcism on that stuff. If in an interview or debate she gets led back onto that terrain,

00:03:07.560 and is asked about, you know, defunding the police or the new gender identity law in California,

00:03:15.520 what she thinks about the epidemic of teenage girls who apparently want double mastectomies

00:03:20.360 so that they can transition, unless she can show that she has her head screwed on straight amid those

00:03:27.680 kinds of topics, there is just a nuclear bomb waiting to detonate for her at the center of democratic

00:03:35.040 politics. And I just don't think she's going to be able to ignore it. It'd be great if she could

00:03:39.980 just talk about Trump's corruption and reproductive rights and gun control and uniting the country.

00:03:48.760 But unless she finds a path through the minefield that was patiently laid by progressive fanatics on the

00:03:58.220 far left of the Democratic Party that is sane and appears honest, it is just a disaster waiting to

00:04:05.620 happen. So anyway, in this piece on Substack, I argue that it would be very easy to pivot here,

00:04:11.780 and there's not much to explain, right? It does not need to seem like hypocrisy.

00:04:17.660 And I even scripted how I think she could do that. For better or worse?

00:04:21.580 Okay. And now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Renee DiResta. Renee was the technical

00:04:30.880 research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and she generally focuses on the

00:04:35.560 abuse of information technologies. Her work examines rumors and propaganda, and she's analyzed

00:04:42.180 geopolitical campaigns created by foreign powers, such as Russia, China, and Iran. She worries about

00:04:48.920 voting-related rumors and the integrity of our elections, health misinformation, and conspiracy

00:04:55.060 theories. And she has been widely published in The Atlantic, Wired, Foreign Affairs, The New York

00:05:01.500 Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and elsewhere. And she also has a new book, Invisible Rulers,

00:05:09.820 The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. And we talk about the book. We discuss the state of our

00:05:16.080 information landscape, the difference between influence and propaganda, shifts in communication

00:05:22.100 technology, influencers and closed communities, the asymmetry of passion we see online, and the

00:05:29.060 illusion of consensus, the troublesome unwillingness to criticize one's own side, audience capture,

00:05:36.140 what we should have learned from the COVID pandemic, what is unique about vaccines,

00:05:40.900 Rene's work at the Stanford Internet Observatory, her experience of being smeared by Michael

00:05:46.960 Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi, Elon and the Twitter files, the false analogy of social media as a digital

00:05:54.520 public square, the imagined censorship industrial complex, the 2024 presidential election, and other

00:06:02.840 topics. And now I bring you Renee DiResta. I am here with Renee DiResta. Renee, thanks for joining me

00:06:15.660 again. Thanks for having me. So you've written a new book, which speaks to the insanity of the moment,

00:06:22.660 which is obviously quite important. That book is Invisible Rulers, The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.

00:06:30.820 There are more than a few of these people, but we'll discuss a few of them. And maybe you've been

00:06:36.480 on the podcast before and we've touched some of these topics. I think the most recently was about

00:06:42.280 a year, year and a half ago, something like that. Yep. But maybe remind people of your areas of focus

00:06:49.900 that have culminated in this book. Yeah, I study influence and propaganda. And for about five years,

00:06:56.160 up until June of this year, I was the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.

00:07:00.820 where we study adversarial abuse online. Right, right. And we'll talk about the controversy around

00:07:07.000 the Internet Observatory. But let's just focus on the big picture to start here. One thing we think

00:07:15.620 about and talk about under various guises now is propaganda. But propaganda is a bad word for a certain

00:07:24.140 kind of influence and persuasion. Obviously, there are benign and even beneficial forms of influence

00:07:32.320 and persuasion. How do you differentiate the problem from the unavoidable and even good variants of just

00:07:40.380 the spread of information online? Yeah, I think propaganda didn't used to be pejorative, right? So

00:07:45.960 prior to the 1940s, it was just a word that meant the kind of desire to propagate information or the

00:07:52.840 need, rather, the need to propagate information comes from a word used by the Catholic Church.

00:07:57.600 After World War II, it becomes that kind of bad information that those people over there do,

00:08:03.000 right? So it becomes the sort of information that your adversary puts out into the ether to manipulate

00:08:07.080 people. And it becomes, you know, it takes on that particular tone. So I think roughly speaking,

00:08:13.080 you could define it as the systematic and deliberate effort to influence the attitudes and beliefs and

00:08:20.560 behaviors of a target audience, but in a way that often involves biased or misleading info to promote a

00:08:26.140 particular agenda. So information with an agenda, and oftentimes that agenda is unclear. So it's a lot of the

00:08:32.760 time it's differentiated from persuasion in that persuasion is seen as making an emotional appeal,

00:08:38.600 but doing it more ethically. Persuasion kind of respects the autonomy of the audience. It doesn't

00:08:44.000 necessarily aim to manipulate them. It isn't using fakery. It isn't selectively leaving out

00:08:51.400 significant pieces of information. It's always been, I think, a fuzzy term and one that people kind of

00:08:59.320 quibble around. So in the book, I really tried to differentiate it in part by this very active,

00:09:04.780 systemic effort to shape public opinion as opposed to something that is more organic.

00:09:11.960 And how have our online lives and the various platforms and tools changed this problem? I mean,

00:09:19.780 in your book, you go back to various cases, you know, a hundred years ago and beyond. People have

00:09:27.760 drawn analogies to the printing press and you talk about the alarming case of Father Coughlin,

00:09:35.040 which is now almost a hundred years old. What has changed for us?

00:09:40.380 So in any new media ecosystem, anytime there's a shift in technology, communication technology,

00:09:47.320 you have new means by which you can reach large audiences. Social media was pretty distinct in that

00:09:53.440 you could reach very, very targeted audiences. So it really enabled propaganda to go from something

00:09:58.920 that was seen as a function of mass media, right? Manipulating large numbers of people or creating

00:10:05.320 a national narrative to something that became very niche. So I think that's particularly different.

00:10:11.720 You could point back to maybe the era of the printing press and the pamphleteering wars where there were

00:10:16.200 niches then, but there was a significant trend over time towards the mass, the mass media,

00:10:21.460 the mass narrative. And now we've reverted again to the niche.

00:10:24.680 Just to focus on that for a second. So what is the significance of it being a niche is that

00:10:30.060 one, your targeting can be that much more effective and, you know, bespoke, but there's also this

00:10:37.500 feature that the rest of the world can't really see what the niche is seeing, right?

00:10:43.480 Right, exactly. So the messages, the memes, the things that resonate really come up.

00:10:51.460 Not only in media, but in closed groups. So a lot of the time, one of the things I talk about in the

00:10:57.380 book is that there's always been this perception that media messages reach the public and that is

00:11:04.000 how public opinion is shaped. And that's actually not really true, right? For a very, very long time

00:11:09.040 since the 1940s, we've had these research studies that show that the media reaches certain groups of

00:11:14.940 people. And then those people, they're called opinion leaders, really sort of socialize and

00:11:21.240 communicate with people who are like them in trusted communities. And that's how opinion is

00:11:26.560 formed. So it's sort of moderated through these opinion leaders. This is called the two-step flow

00:11:32.460 theory of communication, right? And sort of communication theory. And so there's that piece

00:11:37.820 where it's not just that you've seen the thing somewhere. It's that your community accepts it.

00:11:43.280 Your community is talking about it. You are talking about it with them. So the interesting piece about

00:11:47.660 social media niches is that you have both the fragmentation of media, but you also have these

00:11:53.320 closed communities that are global yet simultaneously niche, right? So there are people from all over the

00:11:58.740 world in them. It's not people you know in real life. You are brought together because you share some

00:12:03.420 sort of alignment. And then in those closed communities, you talk a lot about the media that

00:12:07.740 you see in your ecosystem. So, you know, almost like a double niche, if you will, right? You have

00:12:12.400 the niche communicators, the niche influencers, the niche content producers, and you also have out of

00:12:19.160 the field of view or out of the broader, you know, zeitgeist, if you will, you're kind of discussing

00:12:25.740 the things that you see in the niche within the niche. And so that structure of social media is

00:12:31.100 interesting, both from a content perspective, but also from like how we form opinions and who we

00:12:35.280 talk about things with. And then there's this effect where the niche suddenly becomes a perceived

00:12:41.540 majority, even when in fact it remains a minority. You have this, this is something you discuss in the

00:12:46.700 book in various places, this asymmetry of passion, which masquerades as consensus. And maybe you can

00:12:55.380 say more about that. Yeah. So one of the things that I guess another, another thing that's

00:13:00.180 fundamentally different now is that you have a very participatory environment, right? So we all

00:13:07.400 can go out there and shape public opinion through our own posts and our own means of contribution.

00:13:14.360 And one of the things that you see, and it really starts, it starts to become very visible in 2015

00:13:19.080 on Twitter in particular, is that small groups of people who become very, very activated all decide,

00:13:25.260 okay, on this day, at this time, we're all going to talk about this thing, right? It's very,

00:13:28.980 very coordinated in the early days. There were even apps that were made to help you do this.

00:13:33.340 There was one called Thunderclap, where you could register your social media accounts and one kind

00:13:38.700 of activist organization could essentially co-opt your social media account to send out the same

00:13:43.880 message at the same time in hopes of triggering a trending algorithm, which makes it look like a

00:13:48.920 whole lot of people are talking about something all at the same time. That's not necessarily actually

00:13:54.160 a large number of people. It's just a large number of accounts. And one person can control

00:13:58.720 thousands of accounts potentially. So you have this interesting phenomenon that happens where the

00:14:03.240 perception of a majority opinion or a significant area of interest also becomes something that is a

00:14:10.340 function of, you know, algorithmic curation, surfacing content to people that makes it look like

00:14:15.980 a much bigger deal than it actually is.

00:14:19.600 Yeah. And I guess there are variants of that where it doesn't have to be enabled by any

00:14:24.540 gaming of the technology. It's just the fact that the loudest people online are the voices that

00:14:31.580 you hear. And especially when they're unpleasant and they use kind of trolling tactics that

00:14:38.680 really not merely become more salient, but actually just actively silence and block the participation

00:14:45.920 of more moderate voices. So you just get this sense that everyone agrees. I mean, I would have to be a

00:14:51.740 moral monster to even have a divergent opinion on this topic because, you know, the opinions I'm seeing

00:14:58.000 online are so strident and the reputational damage done to anyone who traduces one of these,

00:15:05.880 these, you know, what's any part of this new orthodoxy is so complete, you know, that it's just

00:15:12.060 you completely lose sight of the fact that most people on earth are, you're, you're, you're not

00:15:17.100 hearing from them at that moment on online or anywhere else.

00:15:20.180 Right. And, and it, it becomes a sort of a reinforcing phenomenon. There's always been an element

00:15:26.700 of, you know, demonizing your opponents in propaganda, right? This is a, you know, anytime you see a

00:15:30.960 conflict, of course, the, uh, you know, referencing World War II, as we did earlier, the, uh, those

00:15:37.000 people over there, right? The Nazis, the, you know, pick your kind of adversary. There is that

00:15:42.180 phenomenon of demonization that becomes very effective, you know, sometimes, sometimes justified,

00:15:47.640 sometimes not. And what you see though, on, on social platforms is when you go through that

00:15:53.120 demonization process, you can essentially push people out of the conversation entirely. Because as you

00:15:59.400 note, you can make it seem like it's a social liability to have an opinion that aligns with

00:16:06.940 something that is, you know, that belongs to them over there. And so you see that the group gradually

00:16:13.480 becomes more and more insular, more and more strident. And people who are seen as deviating in some way

00:16:20.500 are, uh, either sort of, you know, they, they self-censor or they are pushed out. And so you do see

00:16:25.800 those groups become more homogenous. You see them become often more combative and that, you know,

00:16:31.900 that, that comes to create the phenomenon that we see today of like social media as the gladiatorial

00:16:37.500 arena, right? It's not the public square at all. You're not there to debate and dialogue and be in

00:16:42.120 communion with your neighbors. You're there to, you know, own and destroy your enemies. And you're

00:16:46.100 going to do that, you know, using some, some very particular types of tactics to intimidate them out

00:16:50.640 of the conversation or harass them out of the conversation or, you know, or, or just create an

00:16:55.080 environment where nobody in their right mind wants to participate when the cost of participation is,

00:16:59.600 you know, is what you see in front of you.

00:17:02.040 Yeah. One other aspect of this, which drives me fairly crazy is the unwillingness to criticize

00:17:08.320 one's own side, right? I mean, that is just a clear filtering function, which increasingly

00:17:13.900 radicalizes the various sides of, of any issue. And it is the, you know, among perhaps a few other

00:17:20.380 variables that in my, in my mind, it is the thing that more or less guarantees are a race to the

00:17:25.420 bottom. I mean, it's just, you get less and less honest and more and more strident and you're willing

00:17:32.120 to defame the other side by any means necessary. And it's just very quickly, no one is having an honest

00:17:39.240 conversation about real facts. Right. And I think what you see there is there's actually

00:17:45.400 incentives that drive people to do that at this point. And one of the things I tried to do with

00:17:50.460 the book was, you know, was, was talk about it in terms of like, what are the incentives that lead us

00:17:55.260 to this place? Like why there's, of course there's social psychology, there's crowd psychology, there's

00:17:59.920 human nature reasons why this happens. And I try to go into that, you know, Cass Sunstein's had a whole

00:18:05.540 body of literature on how crowds trend towards the most extreme over time. But one of the things

00:18:10.140 that happens on social media is the most extreme voices are rewarded, right? And they're rewarded

00:18:15.780 in terms of clout within the group, which has always been the case. That's the sort of social

00:18:19.480 component. But there's also an interesting financial component that's also very, very different today,

00:18:23.780 which is not only as propaganda participatory, but it can be quite profitable. And so you have that

00:18:29.880 phenomenon where the influencer has to appeal to the niche and there's a finite amount of money that's

00:18:36.200 going to be spent in the form of, you know, patronage or sub stack subs or, you know, attention,

00:18:41.520 various forms of attention. And, you know, in terms of Twitter, it's rev share, you know,

00:18:46.480 depending if your tweet is seen by a lot of people, there's that potential for rev share.

00:18:50.340 If you're on YouTube, it's who gets the sponsorships, right? So that accruing some attention

00:18:54.940 becomes like a flywheel effect for getting more and becoming, you know, developing more profit from

00:19:00.060 it as well. And so when you're catering to a niche, this is the phenomenon you see with audience

00:19:04.480 capture, where the influencer becomes, you know, it sort of feeds the crowd, right? The crowd gets

00:19:10.300 Mark's dream, so does the influencer. And that phenomenon is happening in tandem. And so it does

00:19:15.760 become very much a race to the bottom, in part, you know, motivated by the ideological and social

00:19:20.620 reasons. But also there's a, you know, a profit component to it that I think is important to

00:19:24.740 highlight because it's really unique and different in this particular media environment. The idea,

00:19:29.780 the figure of the influencer really comes out of social media in a very distinct way.

00:19:37.020 Yeah, this is a phrase which I think Eric Weinstein coined, which many of us use now,

00:19:43.100 the phenomenon is, you know, of audience capture, where, you know, a creator or influencer begins to

00:19:49.540 notice, signal in their audience that they cater to. And there's this effect of, you know,

00:19:55.840 where you see people, I mean, we will probably talk about some of them. You see people who've just

00:20:00.240 grown radicalized by the act of pandering to their own audience.

00:20:05.260 Well, I think one thing that happens is if you are not doing that pandering, somebody else will step

00:20:10.000 in and do it for you, right? And so if you are not selling those subs or, you know, doing those,

00:20:16.620 you know, capturing that attention in that moment, somebody is going to be there to do it. And so

00:20:21.120 you are going to lose in a sense. And there's, you know, kind of ego components to that. There's

00:20:27.040 financial components to that. You know, you do see a pretty short lifespan for people who become

00:20:33.720 influential in only one thing. And then when that thing ceases to become the thing of the moment,

00:20:38.500 they have to find ways to make themselves relevant. We saw this with, you know, people who became

00:20:43.860 highly influential during COVID as COVID has waned, right? As COVID is not the kind of all-encompassing

00:20:51.340 attention grabber that it was in 2020 or even 2021, you see them kind of pivoting and going off into

00:20:57.880 other adjacent kind of culture worry areas where they can continue to monetize their audience,

00:21:04.360 engage with their audience, and remain relevant to the public conversation.

00:21:06.940 Yeah. Well, I want to get to your personal story and just, you know, all the drama that has been

00:21:14.160 kicked off in your life of late. Perhaps COVID is the bridge. And we can talk about COVID and perhaps

00:21:20.740 what you've learned from dealing with the anti-vax community, you know, long before COVID, because

00:21:26.100 that's really where you got inducted into this network phenomenon. As a student of computer science,

00:21:31.960 you had the tools to respond to what you were seeing there, but it was the first part of,

00:21:37.260 you know, conspiratorial culture you got blindsided by was just as a parent dealing with, you know,

00:21:44.080 vaccine requirements or lack thereof in your kid's school. But to take COVID for a second,

00:21:49.080 what do you think happened during COVID? What did we get wrong? I mean, you know, when the history of that

00:21:55.740 moment is written by sober people who have not been deranged by their own bad incentives,

00:22:03.580 what do you think the verdict will be of what happened to us and what should we have learned?

00:22:09.480 What should we not do again when you're talking about the attempt to influence societies, you know,

00:22:17.440 in good ways in response to a moving target of a global pandemic that we, you know, did not

00:22:24.880 understand in the beginning and did not understand in the middle, but understood differently and,

00:22:29.920 you know, understood differently again in the end. And, you know, the evolving scientific

00:22:35.040 conversation was at every point entangled with the political needs of the moment and just a wilderness

00:22:42.980 filled with bad actors and grifters and, you know, actual lunatics. What happened and what should

00:22:50.540 we have learned? You know, it's such a complicated question. I'm trying to think of how to break it

00:22:56.860 down. I think first, for me, the very first inkling we had that there was going to be a very,

00:23:05.040 very serious outbreak of something was in December of 2019 or so. And I was paying attention to it,

00:23:12.580 actually, because I was looking at state media narratives at the time. I was doing a bunch of

00:23:15.760 work on Chinese propaganda and Chinese influence operations over the years, and they began talking

00:23:20.380 about it. And their state media began focusing very heavily on their response, right? The incredible

00:23:26.820 propaganda operation that began out of Chinese state media about their response. And then,

00:23:31.140 interestingly, ways in which they had these sort of online influencers, they're sometimes called the

00:23:36.200 wolf warriors, these Twitter accounts that began to reach for conspiracy extremely early on,

00:23:41.980 right? Well, yes, people are saying that this came from China, but what if the U.S. military brought

00:23:46.600 it during the World Military Games in Wuhan a couple months earlier? Some people on the internet

00:23:50.920 are saying that this is actually a bioweapon that came out of Fort Detrick, right? And so I thought,

00:23:56.060 okay, this is going to be a thing, right? This is going to be a narrative battle. And this was before it,

00:24:01.060 you know, before it reached American shores and before it became politicized through the unique lens of

00:24:05.660 the American culture war. What was very interesting to me was that the anti-vaxxers were on it,

00:24:09.800 right? They were on it. They were like, this is, you know, they started making videos. This is

00:24:14.960 fantastic for us because if it does come to the U.S., they're going to rush out a vaccine and then

00:24:19.280 people are going to see how shoddy vaccine science really is, right? They're going to come and we're

00:24:25.400 going to convert them. And they really saw this as an incredible opportunity because they also didn't

00:24:30.220 believe that it was real, right? So it was simultaneously not real, but also a thing that was real that might

00:24:36.300 get a vaccine and then the world would realize how corrupt vaccines were.

00:24:39.800 One of the things you notice is, you know, like in quantum mechanics, right? Two completely

00:24:44.940 conflicting states can be true simultaneously until you have the observation. I think about

00:24:48.720 that a lot when I watch kind of conspiratorial narratives evolve. But what happens with COVID

00:24:52.860 is you have the anti-vaxxers and the people who are well-networked and very well, you know,

00:24:57.400 kind of well-connected early on that are preparing to mount a response before it even gets here.

00:25:01.700 And then you have, meanwhile, the public health authorities who I talk about in the book,

00:25:07.980 my dealings with them back in 2015, 2016, during some of the measles outbreaks, they do not

00:25:12.600 understand modern communication. They, you know, there's this phrase that I've never forgotten.

00:25:18.320 These are just some people online, right? And that was something that was, you know, sort of,

00:25:22.460 it sounds very patronizing what they meant by it. And it is very patronizing, of course.

00:25:26.760 But what they meant by it was that, yes, there were anti-vaxxers. Yes, they had large followings.

00:25:31.500 But ultimately, people would vaccinate because they trusted their doctors. They trusted their

00:25:35.780 experts. And it was, you know, in the toss-up between experts and just some people online,

00:25:41.320 they thought the experts would continue to win. And I did not, you know. And I thought, okay,

00:25:48.940 somebody at some point is going to be responsible for modernizing communication within this institution

00:25:53.700 or any other institution. And that turned out not to be the case because there was nothing that was

00:25:58.080 really urgent, right, that really would galvanize them into recognizing what they had to do until all

00:26:04.520 of a sudden it was in front of them and live and they could not cope. And one of the ways that you

00:26:11.060 saw this play out very early on was in the conversation about masks, where you had influential

00:26:17.220 people with large followings on social media. You know, Balaji comes to mind saying, hey, this is a big

00:26:22.880 deal. People should be wearing masks. People shouldn't be traveling, even as you don't see

00:26:27.780 the health institutions kind of coming down on that side. They're reticent. They're not communicating.

00:26:32.720 So you have a situation where there is an information void and it's being filled by people

00:26:37.780 who, in this particular case, turn out, you know, to be, we thought, correct. Now the anti-maskers are

00:26:43.520 arguing that they were never correct. But you see this incomplete information and nobody knows what is

00:26:49.440 true. But in the meantime, the health officials are not speaking. The other people are. And so when

00:26:55.120 they finally do come out and say, yes, you should be wearing masks, they appear to be leading from

00:26:59.220 behind. So they take kind of a credibility hit. And one of the things that you see is scientists who

00:27:04.420 are waiting until they're absolutely sure of something to come out with commentary. Even as the

00:27:09.520 conversation is moving, the public is forming opinions, the influencers are driving the narratives,

00:27:15.080 and the health officials are still very much sitting on the sidelines. So that's one phenomenon.

00:27:20.540 But then the other thing that you see is it quickly becomes politicized, right? This is an election

00:27:25.320 year after all. But it's also, it, you know, the anti-vaccine movement did move from being kind of

00:27:32.960 crunchy lefty crazies in the, you know, Jenny McCarthy greener vaccines era to being much more of the,

00:27:39.240 you know, the sort of right-wing conspiracy theorist. That shift starts to happen around 2017.

00:27:43.440 And so it becomes an identity. And once it becomes an identity, you have influencers who politicize the

00:27:51.660 vaccine, who politicize the treatments, and everything becomes adversarial. You have to be

00:27:57.300 communicating about how evil and terrible the other side is. And that becomes the, the sort of

00:28:03.620 dominant means of engaging. There is always some form of agreement. There is always some complaint.

00:28:09.560 And so you have both real institutional problems, real institutional shortfalls, and then engineered

00:28:17.280 and exacerbated anger and aggrievement at institutions because it is profitable and attention,

00:28:24.680 you know, provides attention to the people who become the contrarians who are offering an alternative

00:28:30.720 point of view. They begin to develop large followings. And then they double down by constantly

00:28:36.300 implying that anything that comes out of an institutional communication is somehow compromised.

00:28:41.680 And moreover, any effort to surface good information and downrank bad information is some sort of horrific

00:28:47.700 act of censorship. So that becomes part of the, part of the discourse around that time as well.

00:28:52.460 Yeah, that's a, just a larger point we may come back to, but I mean, perhaps we should just touch it

00:28:57.700 briefly now. We're going to talk a lot about the reaction to perceived acts of censorship, but

00:29:05.500 one, one almost never hears the people who are most exercised about this issue entertain the question,

00:29:13.720 should the government or should institutions try to amplify any message preferentially under any

00:29:23.740 conditions, right? I mean, here you have the condition of a global pandemic in which it is believed that

00:29:29.940 millions will die, very likely, if we don't get our act together, or many more millions will die than

00:29:37.160 will, in fact, will die unnecessarily if we don't get our act together. And, you know, the tacit

00:29:43.900 assumption of all of these people for whom the Twitter files is the biggest story of the decade

00:29:49.280 is that any attempt to steer the conversation, any attempt to flag misinformation, any attempt to

00:30:00.660 amplify genuine signal and deprecate actual noise is sinister, right? No one can be trusted to do that.

00:30:10.740 And that is, I mean, I think if you take 30 seconds to think about that, you know, that as an algorithm

00:30:16.220 for dealing with any possible global emergency, that is just about the stupidest thing anyone has ever

00:30:22.920 thought, right? So, so then what are we arguing about? We're arguing about specific cases of influence

00:30:29.120 and whether or not they were ethically deployed, whether they were in fact were, you know, based on

00:30:34.240 facts or misunderstandings. But it's a little bit like the claim to free speech absolutism online of

00:30:41.160 which, you know, no, no one with a straight face can actually defend it when you look at the fact that,

00:30:45.900 you know, even a place like 4chan has to have a moderation policy.

00:30:49.360 Right. Alex Jones, yes, has one of the best. Yeah.

00:30:52.740 Yeah. You point that out in your book, Infowars has, I think you, you, you quote their terms of

00:30:56.660 service, which are, you know, as, you know, seemingly normal as any other terms of service.

00:31:00.700 Right. Well, I mean, it's, you know, you, there has to be some kind of, you know, guardrails and,

00:31:06.980 and one of the ways that that manifests, sometimes it's about, you know, harassment and that sort of

00:31:10.880 thing. There were, one of the things that was interesting about COVID was the rapidly evolving

00:31:16.980 policies. And this is where you do see the platforms recognizing that, hey, this stuff is

00:31:22.700 all going to be going viral on our site and we're going to have to, we're going to have to think

00:31:27.660 about that. And it is treated in some ways, I think, by people who hadn't been following the

00:31:33.640 conversation. It's treated as like a novel thing that just emerges with COVID, but it's actually not.

00:31:39.140 And one of the reasons why in the book, I try to draw the through line is that there had been,

00:31:44.020 for example, a measles outbreak. And in Samoa, there had been a measles outbreak in Brooklyn.

00:31:49.820 The one in Samoa killed about 85 kids. The one in Brooklyn hospitalized several hundred kids.

00:31:55.200 And what you see is the platforms beginning to come up with policies for trying to up-level good

00:32:00.940 health information very early on, right? It's not something that comes up during COVID. They build on

00:32:05.340 the policies that they've pulled together for these other outbreaks and these other situations.

00:32:09.140 And what they try to do is they try to amplify good information. And one of the things that's

00:32:13.140 interesting about that, and I talk about in the book, having conversations with them about this,

00:32:17.900 this was where the freedom of speech, not freedom of reach kind of model of thinking comes into play,

00:32:22.960 which is, you know, you allow these groups to stay on the platform. They're not taken down.

00:32:27.240 But what you see the platforms do around these other outbreaks is they stop accepting ad dollars,

00:32:32.160 right? They stop putting anti-vaccine targeting in their, you know, sort of list of targetable

00:32:38.320 criteria. They no longer proactively recommend these groups. That was something that happened

00:32:44.080 to me in, you know, 2015. I'm sorry, 20, gosh, 14. I had had a baby and all of a sudden these anti-vaccine

00:32:50.380 groups were being recommended to me, not because I searched for them, but because they were being

00:32:54.040 proactively pushed. And so you see the platforms begin to think about, hey, ethically,

00:32:58.060 what should we proactively amplify? Maybe this is not something we have to proactively amplify.

00:33:03.760 If people want to search and go find it, they can, but we're not going to proactively boost it.

00:33:08.080 So these are the sorts of frameworks and questions they've already been asking for

00:33:11.040 four or five years prior to when COVID happens. But one thing that they constantly emphasize

00:33:16.400 in conversations with, you know, researchers like me is, unfortunately, the institutional health

00:33:22.460 authorities produce really boring content. Nobody is picking it up and sharing it, right?

00:33:28.060 Nobody is like, hey, this is a really great, you know, PDF by the CDC. Let me go and boost it.

00:33:33.100 That's not happening. So what you see is physicians groups who know this, right? Like people who are

00:33:39.780 like normal people on the internet who are extremely online know that nobody is sharing that stuff. And

00:33:44.260 people who are engaging with patients all day long actually begin to also say, hey, I'm a doctor.

00:33:49.760 I have something of a following, not very big, but I understand what's happening.

00:33:53.300 How can I get my, you know, my experience as a frontline worker during COVID kind of out there

00:34:00.000 into the world so people understand what's happening? Or when the vaccine rolls out, how can I explain,

00:34:05.200 like how can I contextualize a side effect? So what you start to see is people who have never worked

00:34:11.860 to be influential on the internet, they unfortunately don't have very big followings, all of a sudden

00:34:16.460 realizing that the institutional communicators are not doing that great a job. The government is putting

00:34:22.320 out messages, but the government is distrusted by, you know, half the people at any given point in

00:34:26.320 time in the U.S. these days. So can they try to counterspeak? Can they try to put out content?

00:34:32.540 And they do when they are, but they're not getting any lift. They're not getting any amplification.

00:34:37.220 So this becomes a question of how should platforms uplevel good content and good speakers and

00:34:42.800 accurate information to the, you know, best possible extent that we understand what's accurate at a given

00:34:47.740 point in time. And it becomes very much a, you know, they make mistakes as they're doing it. You

00:34:52.680 do see policies come into play, like the decision to throttle the lab leak hypothesis, right? Which is

00:34:59.500 a weird one. It's kind of an outlier if you look at all the other policies that they pulled together,

00:35:03.800 because most of the others relate to some form of harm, right? A false cure can actually hurt you.

00:35:10.380 Misinformation about a vaccine that increases hesitancy can actually hurt you. But the lab leak,

00:35:15.320 like that one's sort of a, you know. No, this fell into the woke bucket of, you know,

00:35:21.260 this quasi-racist, right? Yes, that was how it was justified. But even so, it was one of these

00:35:26.920 things where, you know, it was a perplexing choice. And unfortunately, then it became a cudgel to

00:35:32.760 sort of undermine or to complain about every policy that they tried to implement, many of which did have,

00:35:39.180 as you know, like very real reasons for existing. Yeah, yeah. Is there something,

00:35:45.260 unique in your mind about vaccines here? Because I mean, I just noticed that there's, I mean,

00:35:51.100 maybe there are, you know, activist groups around other categories of medical error that I'm just,

00:35:57.520 or perceived medical error that I'm not aware of. But I don't see people get, I mean, this really does

00:36:05.060 have a cultic, you know, slash religious quality to it. This level of activism, advocacy, and

00:36:13.420 immunity to any kind of, you know, fact-based correction. And so, like, I mean, to take a,

00:36:21.680 like a personal example, like, you know, like, I think I've said this before on the podcast, like,

00:36:25.360 you know, you know, I tried to take statins at one point and got side effects and then discovered

00:36:29.460 that something like 5% of people just can't take statins because they get, you know, muscle aches and

00:36:34.060 they can, you know, get torn Achilles tendons. And, you know, it's just, statins are great for millions and

00:36:38.920 millions of people, but they really suck for, you know, about 5% of people who try them. And I'm in

00:36:43.680 that group. But so having had that experience, it would never have occurred to me to have become an

00:36:49.780 anti-statin activist, right? Or to find a group that could kind of ramify my personal concerns about

00:36:56.840 statins, you know, was I harmed? And, you know, was this experience, you know, even if I had it torn an

00:37:02.580 Achilles tendon, which I happily didn't, it would never have occurred to me to organize my life around

00:37:07.960 the dangers of statins based on my personal, you know, statin injury. It occurs to me now I have

00:37:14.220 another example of this. I had, you know, some hearing loss that just came out of nowhere about

00:37:18.980 20 years ago. You know, there are all kinds of drugs that are ototoxic, right? I mean, perhaps I took

00:37:25.280 a course of antibiotics or, you know, some other drug that destroyed, you know, some of the hair cells in my

00:37:31.520 cochlea, right? I don't know. But just again, it would never have occurred to me to then make

00:37:38.340 kind of go on a quasi-spiritual quest to figure out the connection here. And yet vaccines, I mean,

00:37:44.980 I guess I'm in the process of starting to answer my own question here that I guess because they relate

00:37:50.280 to, you know, something we're putting into the bodies of healthy children. But even there, there are

00:37:56.080 all kinds of interventions and drugs that children get exposed to that I just don't think draw this kind

00:38:00.860 of energy. I mean, what, do you have thoughts about this? So in the, so it is, I think, you know,

00:38:06.180 kids is a huge piece of it, right? You know, everybody, particularly after you've had a baby,

00:38:10.120 you know, you have a, first of all, you're deluged with information about how you should take care of

00:38:16.420 the baby, how you should deliver the baby. You know, the, the anti-epidural crew is, is very much,

00:38:21.680 you want to talk about people who make it their life's work to scream at you on the internet,

00:38:25.600 talk to anybody who's been in a, you know, mom board and is debating whether to have medication

00:38:31.140 when they deliver or not. But the, the thing that's interesting is that the first, so anti-vaccine

00:38:39.860 narratives are very old. They go back to the 1800s, you know, the first, the advent of variolation for

00:38:45.860 smallpox, right, is, is seen as something akin to witchcraft, right? You're taking, because it comes,

00:38:51.980 you know, it comes from like, you're taking material from a cow, right? You know, and you're sort of

00:38:55.160 swabbing it and it seems kind of gross, right? Yeah. Um, so there's a lot of, a lot of things

00:38:59.640 that, that, that, that triggers that make people uncomfortable. There's a liberty component. Again,

00:39:04.240 the idea that you should be compelled to do something for the public good. Uh, this is

00:39:10.260 something that various moments in history have, has been seen as, um, you know, something pro-social

00:39:15.180 that we do to help our neighbor versus something that the, you know, authoritarian tyrants demand of

00:39:19.500 us. There's some actually terrible stats coming out now about how Republicans feel about, um,

00:39:25.160 about school vaccines and just the precipitous decline in support among people who have the

00:39:30.860 strongest degree of support for Donald Trump. So very heavily correlated to that. And it's sort of

00:39:35.260 stats are just beginning to come out now as, uh, as, as it's become part of political identity.

00:39:40.140 But one of the things that happens, and I, I call it asymmetry of passion in the book, is that

00:39:44.960 when you have people who sincerely believe that vaccines cause autism and, you know, it is something

00:39:51.760 that parents are very afraid of. So a lot of the narratives around vaccines connect it to autism

00:39:57.780 or to SIDS is the other big one, sudden infant death syndrome. And so it creates a degree of

00:40:04.500 hesitancy because these are not small side effects. These are life altering, you know, potentially fatal

00:40:10.320 in the case of SIDS risks that, that, that the anti-vaccine propagandists are telling you, you are

00:40:15.980 taking when you don't need to, the argument is your baby is healthy. Why would you do this?

00:40:21.560 So the cost of, you know, the, the cost is what makes people very afraid, I think. And you have

00:40:29.220 most people who go and back, you know, go vaccinate, nothing happens. And they don't talk about the

00:40:34.020 many, many, many positive experiences or the- How fun it is not to get measles. Yeah.

00:40:38.200 Right. Exactly. And so what you hear instead is only the people who either do have a legitimate

00:40:44.840 documented vaccine reaction, and that is, you know, you have a higher chance of being struck

00:40:48.560 by lightning or things that they attribute to a vaccine themselves, all evidence to the contrary,

00:40:55.520 like autism and that, that narrative, even though it's been, you know, debunked over and over and over

00:41:02.100 again, people have to trust the debunkers, which means they have to trust the scientists or trust the

00:41:07.860 health authorities. And as distrust in government and health authorities has increased, you're going

00:41:13.500 to see, and we're already seeing a rise of distrust in childhood immunizations as well, that's not

00:41:20.180 rooted so much in the actual facts and evidence, but just in what is the information you're seeing

00:41:24.160 and who have you decided is, is a trustworthy source. Yeah. There's an asymmetry here between committing

00:41:30.880 some harm and, and the, that triggering, you know, loss aversion or harm aversion and balancing that

00:41:38.220 against this hypothetical risk that one is avoiding, but one will never really be confirmed to have,

00:41:44.200 have avoided it. Right. So the idea that you could do your child some lasting harm or even kill them

00:41:52.040 based on an effort to avoid something that is in fact abstract, you know, that's just the worst

00:41:58.560 possible emotional optics. All right. So we've kind of set the context for your own personal

00:42:03.900 adventure or misadventure here. What's the right place to enter here? I mean, actually one, so the

00:42:10.640 last time you were on the podcast, you were on with Barry Weiss and Michael Schellenberger. Barry has

00:42:18.340 kind of dropped out of the, you know, this conversation and this controversy. So I don't know that we need to

00:42:24.400 bring her into it, but Michael, I, in the, in the aftermath of that podcast, I just stumbled upon

00:42:31.620 an amazing clip of Schellenberger talking to Brett Weinstein about your appearance on my podcast and

00:42:39.480 your appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast and how nefarious all that, that appeared. It was very,

00:42:46.140 very strange that you had appeared on my podcast next to Schellenberger. And it was the, you know,

00:42:51.880 it was even more deeply strange that you had somehow gotten onto Joe Rogan's podcast. And all of this

00:42:57.280 was quite amusing from my point of view, because I know exactly how you got onto both of those

00:43:01.720 podcasts because we, you know, one of the podcasts was mine and I just happened to invite you and

00:43:05.500 Schellenberger because I wanted, you know, I wanted the two of you to, to have a conversation,

00:43:09.500 um, along with Barry. And I also happen to know that you, you got on Rogan's podcast because I

00:43:15.580 texted him and he said, he should invite you on the podcast. So, you know, I'm, I was the, uh,

00:43:21.380 the evil, um, nexus here, but they were spinning up a conspiracy about you that you are, you know,

00:43:27.580 kind of a deep state CIA plant that has, um, been weaponized to mislead the masses about many things,

00:43:35.940 but, you know, government censorship and a free speech, you know, perhaps, you know, first among

00:43:40.420 them. And then you were, they, along with, um, a few other people, I guess Matt Taibbi is prominent

00:43:46.880 here in unveiling the treasure trove of, uh, the Twitter files, uh, for the world to see,

00:43:54.640 they really, uh, went after you by name. And this has, you know, that, you know, you feel free to

00:44:00.760 pick up the story here, but this has really been extraordinarily disruptive to your life. I mean,

00:44:06.220 you and I haven't talked about this, but I mean, just, just viewing it from the outside,

00:44:09.980 it certainly seems to have been. So tell us what happened here.

00:44:14.020 Yeah. I, I think about it as, um, you know, it's, it's, it's opportunism and a fairly classic

00:44:19.440 smear campaign, right? Well, one thing that's interesting about my job is, uh, I've seen this

00:44:23.820 happen to so many people that when it happened to me, it was not either surprising nor, nor novel.

00:44:28.620 It was more, and we can talk about this, the frustration of how to respond to it because I

00:44:32.340 had opinions and Stanford had opinions and they were not aligned. But now that you mentioned Stanford,

00:44:36.460 I mentioned it earlier, but perhaps you should just say what you were doing at

00:44:39.960 Stanford, what the internet observatory was.

00:44:42.640 Yeah. So Stanford internet observatory, I joined in 2019. I was the first research director and

00:44:49.120 we were a center for the study of adversarial abuse online. And that took, you know, several,

00:44:55.980 several different types of research. That was trust and safety research where the adversarial harms

00:45:00.700 were looking at things like spam and scams, pro-anorexia content, brigading harassment, you know,

00:45:06.640 bad experiences that people have on the internet, sort of human nature side of, uh, there's a phrase

00:45:12.080 sometimes that trust and safety employees use, like the problem with social media is people. So

00:45:15.660 it looks at, you know, how online conflict happens and things like that. But another area of work that

00:45:20.040 we did looked at propaganda and influence and, uh, state actor disinformation campaigns and things

00:45:25.360 like this. So I did a lot of work on Russia and China and Iran, sometimes the U S Pentagon, right?

00:45:29.980 It was the adversary running, uh, running influence operations. And, uh, and I did a bunch of work

00:45:34.840 studying those dynamics, including, and this is, I think what put me on Tybee's radar, uh, in the

00:45:39.620 context of Russia, right? And so, uh, I think the first time I came on your pod actually was before I

00:45:44.460 even started at Stanford. It was because I was one of the outside researchers who did the investigation

00:45:48.940 into the Russia dataset that the social media platforms turned over to the Senate intelligence

00:45:53.820 committee related to the internet research agency's propaganda operations from 2015 to 2018. So that

00:45:59.940 included their election interference. And then also the GRU Russian military intelligence and the sort

00:46:04.700 of hack and leak operations that they put together. And the work I did there was very honestly mundane

00:46:10.640 candidly, right? It was, um, how do we describe the stuff in this dataset? How do we understand the

00:46:15.820 strategy and tactics of a, of a modern Russian propaganda campaign carried out on social media? I never said

00:46:21.440 it swung the election. I never said anything about collusion, none of that stuff. But one of the

00:46:25.800 things that happens is when people want to smear you, they, they find ways to tie you into existing

00:46:31.460 hated concepts or groups. And so all of a sudden they tried to turn me into this Russiagate hoaxer is

00:46:37.420 the phrase that they use, um, alleging that I said that this somehow swung the election, which I had never

00:46:43.580 said. Uh, but again, one of the things that you learn very quickly is that when the allegation is made,

00:46:48.380 the audience is not going to go and dig up everything I've said or done or written over the last eight

00:46:53.600 years. They're just going to take the word of their trusted influencer. So one of the things that SIO did

00:46:59.860 going back to SIO is that in 2020, we ran a very big project called the Election Integrity Partnership in

00:47:06.040 conjunction with the University of Washington, uh, this group called Graphica and the Digital Forensics Research

00:47:11.600 Lab at the Atlantic Council, who also periodically gets tagged as being one of these, you know,

00:47:15.500 imperialist Russia hoaxers. And so the work that we did in the 2020 election just sought to study

00:47:21.840 narratives about voting. So not Hunter Biden's laptop that was completely out of scope for the

00:47:28.220 project. We were only looking at things related to allegations about procedures having to do with

00:47:33.940 voting. So for example, tweets that said vote on Wednesday, not on Tuesday. So procedural interference

00:47:38.740 things or narratives that attempted to delegitimize the election preemptively. And we laid out this scope

00:47:47.020 very clearly publicly. And we had a whole public website, a rapid response, you know, tweets, blog

00:47:53.200 posts, you name it. We worked in full public view. This was not funded by the government. And what we did

00:47:58.320 was we studied the 2020 election from August until November. And we just kind of documented and chronicled

00:48:05.440 the most wild viral narratives, these sort of election rumors and propaganda. At the time, we

00:48:10.740 used the word misinformation a lot too, you know, that we're spinning up about dead people voting and

00:48:15.240 voting machine fraud. And, you know, and of course, unfortunately, we started the project thinking it

00:48:19.500 was going to be a lot of state actors, right? Thinking it was going to be Russia and China and Iran. And

00:48:24.040 they were in there a bit, but the people trying to undermine the 2020 election is the president of the United

00:48:29.080 States. So this turns into, you know, we are, again, this is an academic enterprise. We have

00:48:36.420 about 120 students who are working on this project. And what they're doing is they're creating JIRA

00:48:40.880 tickets. So JIRA is just a kind of online, sorry, not online. JIRA is like a tech kind of customer

00:48:47.240 service ticket queue. If you've ever filed a bug report for a, you know, app, it's gone into a JIRA

00:48:52.780 somewhere. And people just kind of trace the tickets. They just follow it through. So we were using

00:48:57.300 that technology to trace election narratives. And periodically, we would tag social media platforms,

00:49:04.540 meaning we would let them know, hey, you've got a viral thing here. It appears to violate your

00:49:08.520 policies. You know, you should have a look at it. Or we would periodically tag state and local

00:49:13.980 election officials. So for example, hey, this narrative about Sharpie markers in Arizona isn't

00:49:19.660 going anywhere. It's getting bigger. It's actually probably worth a response. We're not going to tell you

00:49:23.680 how to respond. But, you know, this is a thing that is worth paying attention to. And they in turn

00:49:28.440 could also reach out to us. And they had the ability to reach out to platforms directly. They

00:49:34.680 didn't need us to serve as some sort of switchboard conduit to, you know, get platforms to take down

00:49:41.040 tweets that offended election officials or the Department of Homeland Security or whomever. But that

00:49:46.120 was how it was reclassified by the Twitter Files boys and the right-wing media that discovered that

00:49:53.600 we had done this work two years after we did it and got mad about it then. And this was around the time

00:50:00.720 that the election fraud narratives and court cases and the Dominion lawsuits and all of the sort of

00:50:08.640 big lie, right, the effort to actually delegitimize the election had kind of fallen away. They'd lost all

00:50:14.360 their court cases. There was no evidence that anything had been stolen. And so they turned to

00:50:18.960 looking at us. And they reframed the project that we had done as being something that kind of cataloged

00:50:26.440 and triaged and addressed election rumors and misinformation into something that had been

00:50:31.760 a vast cabal-like effort to censor conservative speech. And what you start to see is this individual

00:50:39.680 named Mike Benz, who, you know, connects with Tybee and Schellenberger ahead of their Twitter Files

00:50:45.040 testimony to Jim Jordan's committee. He begins to make these crazy allegations that we had somehow,

00:50:51.240 you know, used an AI censorship death star. I'm not making that up. It's a verbatim claim to mass

00:50:58.620 censor preemptively entire classes and categories of narrative. And again, this is one of these things

00:51:04.820 where if you stop and think for 30 seconds, the man is alleging that we somehow managed to

00:51:10.260 censor the discussion about Sharpiegate and, you know, Sharpie markers in Arizona or the discussion

00:51:17.380 about Dominion voting machines. I mean, these are things that anybody who paid even marginal attention

00:51:23.540 to the narratives that went viral on social media about the 2020 election will remember. And that's

00:51:28.860 because they were not censored at all. They were instead actually wildly viral. And one of the things

00:51:34.580 that we did was after the election, we added up how many tweets had gone into these sort of top 10

00:51:40.800 most viral procedural and, you know, procedural election rumors we'd looked at or these delegitimization

00:51:46.380 claims. And the number that we arrived at was 22 million. So again, after the election, we do this

00:51:51.820 analysis, we add up a bunch of numbers, and we say, okay, there are about 22 million tweets related to

00:51:56.260 these most viral election rumors. And then Matt Tybee and Michael Schellenberger, under oath to Jim Jordan's

00:52:02.360 committee, say that we censored 22 million tweets. So the actual number, and again, this is all in our

00:52:09.880 report. Anybody can go and read it. It sat on the internet for two years prior to this all happening.

00:52:14.860 But what they do instead is they reframe this as some vast cabal that has censored 22 million tweets.

00:52:21.200 No evidence is ever offered of this, mind you. There is no Twitter files dump in which they produce the

00:52:27.620 list of the 22 million tweets. Elon Musk has never made the supposed 22 million tweets available to

00:52:33.240 the public, nor has Schellenberger or Tybee produced any actual emails in which we are requesting that

00:52:38.640 this happen. But it doesn't actually matter at this point, right? Because they managed to sort of launder

00:52:43.940 this through the right-wing media apparatus, and then more importantly, through a series of congressional

00:52:49.000 hearings. And all of a sudden, the actual work that we did, just sort of studying these election

00:52:52.920 rumors, becomes, you know, oh, along with the Hunter Biden laptop, they censored all of these

00:52:58.600 things. So all of a sudden, we're also lumped into, you know, Hunter Biden land, which is just a

00:53:02.840 shibboleth, you know, and that just kind of conveys this idea that we had something to do with that

00:53:08.460 also, even though we never worked on it and never weighed in on it. So again, you know, smearing by

00:53:12.980 association is a very common tactic. It's just when it becomes, when it's not only internet lunatics that

00:53:19.840 are doing this, but when it is the sitting, gavel-holding members of the United States

00:53:25.360 Congress and attorneys general that are doing it, that's when you cross a line from, okay, this is

00:53:31.780 an online smear campaign, and that's, you know, kind of a pain in the ass, but, you know, cost of doing

00:53:35.540 business, to now the American government has been weaponized against its own citizens to go on these

00:53:40.540 crazy witch hunts based on nothing more than, you know, something some yokel put out in a tweet.

00:53:45.900 Yes, I want to echo a big picture point that you make in your book somewhere, I think explicitly,

00:53:53.120 which is that what's happening here is that you have an academic institution and a group of people,

00:54:00.200 most of whom are students, I think most of whom are undergraduates even, doing a project to study

00:54:07.060 the spread of misinformation online entirely within the scope of their own free speech rights,

00:54:15.280 and the product of that effort is of much greater concern to the people we're talking about, you

00:54:21.640 know, Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, this person, Mike Benz, who seems like a proper lunatic,

00:54:28.660 and everyone else who's trailing in their wake, you know, in Trumpistan, this is of a much greater

00:54:35.180 concern to them than the actual attempt in plain view by the sitting president to steal an election,

00:54:42.200 right? I mean, like, that's how upside down this whole thing is.

00:54:45.620 Well, the people who, the congressmen with the gavels who subpoena us and demand our documents

00:54:52.100 are congressmen who voted not to certify the election. The attorneys general who, you know,

00:54:58.780 begin to name check our undergraduate students in depositions, right? You can imagine what the

00:55:04.440 internet does with that. These are attorneys generals who joined amicus briefs to overturn the

00:55:10.620 Pennsylvania vote, right? To fight against the Pennsylvania vote alongside Ken Paxton in Texas,

00:55:15.480 right? So you have, and then the people who then subsequently sue us, by the way, because that's

00:55:20.120 the third part of this, you know, the, which I can't really talk about because I'm under pending

00:55:23.880 litigation now for a little over a year at this point. Stephen Miller and America First Legal sue us

00:55:28.980 based on this, you know, this allegation, this series of allegations, again, evidence-free,

00:55:32.740 baseless allegations. But again, the people suing us are people who also supported the big lie,

00:55:38.000 right? So there is something that these entities have in common. It's not accidental. This is

00:55:42.820 political retaliation. And I think that that is a piece that, you know, I found it a little bit

00:55:48.380 frustrating that we did not emphasize that in our communication about what was happening,

00:55:53.860 that that is like left out. That is, you know, the motivation.

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00:56:27.000 you

Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 02, 2024

#378 — Digital Delusions

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