Angry Planet - AI and Propaganda in the Israel-Hamas War

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

This episode was recorded on 10/10/23.Every war comes with a fog that makes it hard, if not impossible, to tell what’s going on while it’s being fought. The Israel-Hamas War is no different. What sets it apart is a digital information space rife AI generated images, perverse incentives, and outright propaganda. This week on Angry Planet we sat down with Emauel Maiberg and Joseph Cox of 404 Media come on the show to talk about covering the war’s and how the digital world has supercharged disinformation.‘Verified’ OSINT Accounts Are Destroying the Israel-Palestine Information EcosystemElon Musk Broke All the Tools Historians Need to Archive Tweets About Israel-Gaza WarNetanyahu’s Government Is Trying to Suspend the Freedom of InformationAI Images Detectors Are Being Used to Discredit the Real Horrors of WarAngry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. So can you all tell me a little bit about who you are and what it is that you do on the internet? What you think you're doing over there on your fancy website? Fancy website. I mean, it looks very fancy, yeah, but making, uh, Not as much money as I think people would expect. But yeah, I'm Joseph Cox, one of the co-founders of 404 Media, and we wake up and we find crazy articles or investigations to produce. What about you, Emmanuel? I'm Emmanuel Myberg.

I am a co-founder of 4-4 Media. previously the executive editor and motherboard and Matthew's boss now is humble servant I'm very happy to be here a big fan of Matthew's work

thank you so much so y'all are here because you've published some things recently that made me absolutely furious when I saw them in a the way only a jealous blogger can feel It's real. That's a real form of jealousy.

I was so mad. I was so mad when I saw the Ocent one specifically, because I saw it and I was like, I should have fucking done that. I'm so mad. Well, we'll get into it, but this was Emmanuel's idea. Like, we get on a meeting like we sometimes do. And Emmanuel's like, here's one idea. And I said, that's a good one. And then I ping some sources. and then we call it up like immediately, you know?

Yeah. The, and I think it's very pertinent now, especially in the context of like what we've been doing on Angry Planet lately because it's become very hard when talking about the Israel-Hamas war to find like credible information. And listeners, thank you,

some of you who reached out. Everyone was very polite, actually, about a recent episode that we had. There were a couple of things. in there that were not exactly true. I think there was some heated discussion,

some people saying some things that I think they meant, but were they were taking some, they were taking maybe some something, some of what governments are saying at first blush, and not doing the follow-up. So I'm going to address some of that

a little bit later, listeners. But thinking about that, I was thinking about, like, how hard it has become this worst specifically just to figure out what the fuck is going on. So we used to have an information space that wasn't great on social media, on Twitter specifically, where you had a community of people that used open source intelligence to navigate the front lines of these conflicts and report what was going on. In places like Bellingcat and other specific individuals like Calibre Obscira, who you talk about, talk with in one of your pieces on 404.

did a really good job of kind of parsing through everything that was going on and giving people the truth of the situation as they saw it. Now, though, on Twitter, it is a sea of high follower count blue check marks with the words, oh, sent somewhere in their title. They are rushing to get information out. Sometimes they're posting footage from ARMA3, which is like, you know, an old trick. It's a trick as old as the internet at this point, basically. Like every major conflict, Arma three footage circulates.

But the problem is, the way the website works now, the algorithm promotes this stuff. And the next 20 replies, instead of being something kind of debunking it or making a different claim, it's a bunch of other blue check marks kind of piling on or making memes and jokes. And that's kind of the signal noise ratio is,

is out of whack. All that to say, y'all wrote a great blog, the two of you, at 404 about this. Can you tell me about it? Amanda, why don't you go ahead?

I mean, it was your original, very smart idea, and I can jump in after you, maybe. So we, I think, to be frank,

were caught a little off guard as a new media organization about how to cover it. I think, you know, we've only been up since August, late August. And until now, we've been able to pursue whatever stories we thought were more most interesting and worth pursuing. And that really worked well and our audience really enjoyed it and we really enjoyed it. And I think, you know, towards the middle of this week, we had, I had done a story. about the war. And then I went back to kind of my regular beat reporting as did everyone else.

But we realized that we had to engage with it for practical reasons, for business reasons, and then also for public interest reasons. It's just the only thing that is occupying people's minds right now for good reason. And we wanted to get into it. And I think being a only four reporters and not being on the ground and not being there and not speaking the languages. I speak Hebrew, but I don't speak Arabic. It just, it's very hard to report on a conflict like this in a way that is responsible. But what we can do is talk about the place we are embedded in and are very familiar with, which is the internet and which is Twitter specifically and other social media platforms. And it gave us an opportunity to talk about something that has

been, I think, rising in the last year. Matthew, you're very familiar with it. I think that this is something that has been kind of boiling since the full-on invasion of Russia into Ukraine and the rise of open-source intelligence. not just as a thing for a nerdy journalist and people who are like conflict analysts and think tanks and it just sort of like a thing that more people are familiar with everyone on the internet is familiar with

and more people are participating in and I have been doing it for a long time it's a very useful tool or it's a very useful method for reporting and verifying world events. And I just noticed that kind of some of the veteran open source intelligence people were getting pretty mad about some of the other viral open source intelligence accounts.

And not being, I think, as blunt as we were in our story, but kind of like, can't be like, hey, I don't know about this. You know what I mean? It's just like, open source intelligence is great and it's important, but there's a lot of stuff out there that doesn't seem like good information for people to retweet. And that was kind of the idea of the story and relating that issue specifically to this war. And I think, I mean, and I think we'll get into why it's such an acute problem in this specific conflict. But it kind of took some of the problems we've seen in the war in Ukraine, it made them so much more obvious that we kind of just had to address the problem, which is it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very popular genre of post

and people are engaging with it and people are creating this type of content. It seems first and foremost for engagement and not for verifying news. or claims by various governments. It's just a game. It kind of turned into a game. Can we talk about what has happened? I mean, obviously, one of the main reasons that this is happening is that Twitter has changed in the past year since Musk took over. So the incentives of the website themselves, which were already not great, have kind of been heightened or accelerated.

in a way that makes it harder, I think, to get to the truth. Can you tell me, like, what specifically has changed on the website that has made this kind of engagement so frenzied and popular? Look, there's always been misinformation on Twitter. It's sort of ebbs and flows depending on conflict. There's at the center of it. Or, as you say, certain product changes, you know, there was misinfo when, Russia invaded Ukraine, what in February 2022, right? But what has happened now, I think in June, was that Musk made certain changes to profit,

monetization and engagement on Twitter that at the time kind of seemed like just stupid little decisions. And now we're seeing like the really serious consequences of them. And specifically, I'm talking about that if you pay to be verified on Twitter, you know, the eight bucks a month or whatever, and you get your blue tick, you can actually get paid out by Twitter for the amount of engagement you get from other verified users. So you'll see people do viral tweets, sometimes in the style of like a cringe, like LinkedIn post, something like that, like a think influencer or whatever they call themselves.

and then all the replies will be from verified people and their replies will be at the top because that's another benefit of being verified. These people get catapulted to the top of the replies. Now, you can already see, well, that's going to encourage people to post content that puts engagement basically above anything else because that is how they can potentially get money. And we don't know all the ins and outs of how much exactly people getting paid, but, you know, There were people like Tim Paul, right, who tweeted, I think, screenshots showing he was making thousands of dollars off it or something. I haven't checked in on that sort of ecosystem in a little while.

But people are making, apparently, some money from this. Now, take that engagement and profit-driven set of motivations and dump it into the Israel-Palestine conflict, and it's an absolute mess. you have these people who, as far as I know, are not experts. They're certainly not the trusted series of OScent specialists that I followed for years and years and years. They've come out of nowhere. They just have a suit and a blue tick and they're doing these really long tweets where it's like, I'm sorry, I'm not reading all of that. But they, look, I can't be in their head and it would be unfair to say why exactly what they're doing is.

I can't say they're just making it up. But I can say that their information is wrong. And it is being, in some cases it's wrong. And it's being presented as OSENT. And that change to, you could potentially get paid out on Twitter, I think is really what makes this wave of misinfo different to what we've heard before. Yeah. Whenever you add in financial incentive to something, people are going to do it.

They're going to push the button, just full stop, right? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you could even trace it back to the sort of clickbait era of journalism, you know, like that's kind of past us now. Like, I don't think it's effective. People don't really do it as much. But it's that sort of thing, just being applied here to a new platform and all kind of a new medium, I guess. So I really saw this in the way. of the bombing of the hospital.

I think was particularly bad. And it seemed to me that we've got this place now on Twitter specifically where people have made a decision about what happened there. And then they can find the OSINT account that reflects their belief. And it will have a picture with graphs. You will get to hear, you'll get to see a guy say, well, you know, I have heard what a J-DAM sounds like when it's exploding. So obviously that's what happened here, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? In Emanuel, you said something earlier I wanted to circle back to that there's something

about this conflict specifically that has hypercharged all of this. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I think that everything we just said is true. but the Israel-Palestine conflict has been going on for, I mean, depending on when you want to count, like 70 years, 100 years. And it has always been true. Before the Internet, before open-source intelligence, before AI, before all of this stuff, people involved in the conflict directly, and people comment.

on the conflict cannot agree on basic facts. Like, people cannot agree on a basic timeline, on what specific people did, on the specifics of agreements and who agreed to them or disagreed to them. There is, I will speak only for, like, the Israeli side, because it's the side that I am more familiar with, having grown up there. But it's like, like, there's a very intense, very effective. mythology building apparatus. And you can see that play out via the official government Twitter accounts and Instagram accounts.

So that's basically it. And what happens now that open source intelligence is a thing that many people are familiar with is just an extension of that. It's exactly what you said, where people have their narrative, people have their ideas about what is happening and why. and you can just go to the internet and pull whatever quote unquote evidence

fits your version of events. But you don't need the internet for that and you don't need Twitter for that and you don't need open source intelligence for that. Before all of that, people would just reference different books and different historians and different commentators and different government statements. So we're just seeing

more of it faster and I would say one thing that is news, here is that like there's like two new tools here at play. One is open source intelligence, which, and they both do the same thing, which is give the claims an aura of credibility and an aura of like a scientific method. Like when you take an image and you mark it up with lines and you reference like specific munitions, it kind of makes it sound like you're doing actual research and you're presenting legitimate evidence. And similarly, when you take a, you take. And similarly, when you take

take a photograph and you enter it into an AI image detecting tool and it spits out a result and makes it seem like a more credible claim because you have used a tool that is doing computer science behind the scenes and it's spitting out a result and then you can be like, look, the tool said that I am correct. Look at that segue. You've been podcasting. Hell yeah. Look at that.

All right. So the other Another story I wrote that I wanted to talk about is this AI detection tool. It's called AI or not. It's from a company called Optic. It predates the war, obviously. What is the purpose of it

and how has it been I don't know if weaponized is the right word, but how is it being used to now? Yeah, weaponized is not far off. It's definitely deployed to people's, you know, ends. So yeah, I think we're kind of a couple of years into text-to-image AI tools becoming very popular and accessible. Anyone can find some sort of tool on the internet where they type a prompt, and an AI uses that prompt to create an image. And for many, I think, good reasons, people have

responded to the proliferation of AI images by creating AI image. detecting tools, which also in an automated fashion, you put an image into the tool and it will tell you whether it is generated by AI or a human or what it thinks the likely, you know, whether it's likely to be human or likely to be AI. Like a good reason for this to exist, for example, like one of the creators of these tools that I talked to said that the purpose of it originally was to help Reddit moderators detect AI art. So it's like there's all these art subreddits and they were created for humans by humans. And people have started creating AI images and putting them into those subredits.

Matthew, I think you wrote a story about like this AI image that went an art fair, right? And nobody knew that it was AI generated. So somebody made a tool where you can initially sort through images and be like, is this likely AI or likely human? And then another good reason in theory is, you know, we're talking about this messy information ecosystem. So in theory it would be useful if you had a tool where you can just like give an image to a computer and the computer says whether it's real or not. In reality, however, the way these tools work is very similar to the way that the AI image-generating tools work. You take a bunch of real images, and you take a bunch of AI-imaged, like, AI-generated images, and you train an AI on both, and it kind of just like, and then you give it a new image, and it says, like, oh, this looks more like,

the AI images I've been trained on or this looks more like the real images that I've been trained on. And, you know, on the high end, like the professional, like the very good detectors that are licensed to corporations and governments and costs thousands of dollars to access. It's not a thing you could just like look up on the internet. They have, you know, like 90%, 95% accuracy, according to the people who make them, which is, you know, 90 to 95 sounds good, but that's also plenty of errors. And it also is still automated, right? Like, it's just comparing one set of images to another. And it's not a perfect method.

Right. And sometimes the stakes can be a little high on that 10% that it fails on, right? Which is a bit what we've seen in this war. and it seems like both the one of the things that I think is driving both the OScent problem and this AI image detection problem, and we'll get into a little bit more the specifics of the AI detection here in a second, is this human need for certainty and discomfort with ambiguity or the unknown? We live in this world where we think we can get the facts immediately. And the truth about a war zone and a conflict is that there is a fog of war. It is incredibly hard to know exactly what is going on at any given moment, even if you're on the ground, especially if you're on the ground.

And so you may not find out what happened somewhere for weeks, months, years, until lots of eyes are on it. the evidence has been poured over and gone through by like a series of trained investigators. But the way that the internet works, we want to know exactly what happened immediately. So we can render our judgment calls or whatever we need to do for ourselves. And that is just simply not the way that the world works, as much as we would like to trick ourselves into thinking it has. I guess there's a tension there in that, you know, we are so used to immediate information and the benefits that can provide of sharing information. You know, even going back to the Arab Spring, the people constantly point to is, you know, this is the moment that social media showed it can really do something positive. And, yeah, I think you're, you know, bringing up the realities around war is a very, very good one.

there was already a fog of war, there's always going to be a fog of war because we're talking about bullets and bombs and kinetic events, you know. You can't like scale up the information side of that just as much as everybody would love to. You know, just sit down and wait and be comfortable with the fact that you don't know, but people, of course, as you say, don't want to do that. And you have both sides now generating images. is generating images, audio, video to feed into these systems, right, to kind of propel their own narrative forward. Like, Ukraine, I think, has been very successful at that since Russia invaded.

Like, I see a lot of FPV video of drones dropping, like killing Russian soldiers with the Benny Hill theme song over it, right? And people with cartoon Shibuino dog. avatars on Twitter, share that shit everywhere. And it becomes very popular and kind of gets worked into the narrative. Right. So I think we also have to be really careful about sharing and believing information when we want to believe it, especially about a war, because it may not always reflect the grim reality of what's actually happening. And with that in mind, can we talk about...

the specific images that kind of went around and were debunked, not debunked by this AI image detector. Like, why did this become a big deal these past few weeks? So how it becomes a big deal, I think, begins before the image even appeared. And that begins with the claim from Benjamin Nanyahu, who, and from here out, I reserve the right to call him BB, because he wasn't my prime minister for 20 years or so. He talked to Joe Biden and he said that Hamas had decapitated 40 babies, which was a statement that Joe Biden repeated and the entire world heard and some media outlets repeated. And then understandably, people wanted to verify that claim and they could not.

And Israel did not provide any evidence that this has happened. And since then, Joe Biden had, like, he walked back the statement. And Israel did as well, though not as much. When you say not as much? Like, what was there? I think they, so IDF, I think, said that they don't have evidence of this happening. We're getting into the minutia here because I've been following this very closely. But it's like IDF said, like, actually there's no evidence of this.

We don't have any, like, evidence to support this claim. but then I think it was the official Israel Twitter account that retweeted a Jerusalem post news story that said that they had verified it, but the Jerusalem Post, as far as I have seen so far, has also not produced evidence, right? So it's like, on the one hand, you have IDF saying that it's like, we don't have any evidence of this, but the official Israeli government account is retweeting accounts that are saying that it happened. that's kind of why I'm saying they're waffling. So, like, this is this is the environment that we were in, right? And it's that you have this horrendous claim and then no evidence and people are doubting that the, you know,

Israel government is telling the truth. And as a response to that, they tweet out these horrific images of what they say are, like, there's two images of a burnt corpse of a baby. and then one image of like the bloody corpse of a baby. And at Israel tweeted it. And then the prime minister's account tweeted it as well. And as a result of that, Ben Shapiro, who is a conservative Jewish commentator, tweeted it also with the same sentiment, which is like, oh, you doubt us.

You doubt that there were war crimes. Like, look at this image. And in response to him, people replied to his tweet with screenshots of this tool that you mentioned, AI or not, which shows that they fed the tool of an image, and then the tool says this image is likely to have been produced by AI, to kind of debunk those images as well. And then it ends up as a community note underneath Ben Shapiro's tweet, right? I know that people said that, and I've seen screenshots of that. I wasn't able to verify that independently, but it definitely seems that way. Yeah. But we do.

Don't, but the image is, how shall I phrase this, it is not AI generated as best as we can tell. I think the thing that you are being careful there about, which I will be as well, is that it is a photograph. I am very confident that it is a photograph as to when the photograph was taken and what is it of that I do not know. Angry Planet listeners. We're to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. Welcome back, Angry Planet listeners. We're back on with the 404 Media Boys. Can I step back here and ask kind of a meta question that's been running through my head as we have, maybe not a meta question, but it's been running through my head as we have these discussions. Does it, is this, we have all these conversations about like were babies beheaded,

were they killed? How much does, I mean, we know kids were killed, right? Like, as best we can tell, Hamas did kill children in that initial attack, right? Does it matter if they were beheaded or not? Does it matter if we have photograph photographic evidence or not when we have, like, eyewitness testimony from people? Like, does that question make sense? Like, are we equivocating?

Yeah, I mean, this is a very difficult, this is a very difficult question. And I'll try to engage with it. It does matter, right? It's like facts matter. I wrote this in my story. It's just like, our lives are facts, right? It's like, this is what I get paid to do to verify facts. That's a big part of my job. So it definitely matters. And, you know, eventually, like, the fog of war will dissipate. And we will want an account of what happened exactly. like every detail of what happened right it's like and this is true about everything it's like 9-11 happens it's it's a crazy event people die you have to so many things are happening but it's like years later it's like you want to read a 2,000 page report about what happened and why because we need to understand and we need to learn um what has happened if we want to prevent it from happening again or I don't know. History is important and the fact of history are important. I think it is important.

Does it help anyone big picture to resolve this conflict or reach a ceasefire or stop the killing or get closer to a peace deal if the babies were beheaded or burned alive or if 3,000 people died, or if 2,000. people died or 1,000 people. I'm not so sure of that. It's like people have the right to know and it's totally fine to demand to know and it's totally fine to be outraged when you are lied to or when you think you are being lied to. Like all of that is very fair. Um, that being said, I personally, like this is my opinion. I think that at the moment, there is probably a better way to prioritize what kind of discussions we want to have in order to get to better outcomes. And I don't think that that is one of those discussions, right? It's like the discussions that need to happen, that are happening, right? They're happening behind closed doors, but it's like, how do we get

aid into Gaza, right? How do we stop the bombing of Gaza? How do we reach some sort of agreement between these two factions, so the violence stops, and we can halt the killing and start the rebuilding. You know what I mean? It's just like, those are the kind of discussions that we need to have. And then eventually we need to have this other discussion as well as part of like, you know, in South Africa, they called it like truth and reconciliation. It's like it is actually very important for people to know what happened because if we don't acknowledge what has happened, we can't like heal and and move on from the trauma of it. and have people feel like they were heard and their experiences are valid and so on and so on. Does that answer your question at all?

No, no, it does. I really want to, I'm glad you got into this with me because we had like a former IDF guy on the last episode who repeated the beheaded babies thing. It was pretty early in the conversation around it. And some audience members got mad, understandably, I think. So thank you for kind of walking me through this from that perspective. My perspective, I'm not speaking for anyone else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your personal perspective, which I do think is informed and important on this specific issue, right?

You said you'd been following it closely. So I really appreciate you kind of try and like trying to suss this out with me. So I do think it's important. And I don't know. I just, like, it's so weird right now. Maybe it's just because I wasn't like, it feels like social media was not as active the last time there was a huge conflict between Israel and Palestine. And I'm sure you've got a completely different view. It feels extremely heated right now.

Tensions are running high. Everyone's emotions are running high, especially the emotions and tensions of people who, are not there. And that's a lot of what I see, unfortunately. And I think that that also doesn't help with the fog of war and with trying to suss out what's real and what's fake.

Everyone would rather just go on Twitter and find the O-Sent image that reflects what they believe. At least there's telegram. The Harpenter of Truth, Telegram. The one true tome

of knowledge is a group of telegram group chats. Can you, are you both on telegram? Yeah. Joe more than me. Joe more than me. Yeah, but in a much more,

that's where cybercriminals hang out. And I deliberately have not joined the Israel-Palestine conflict, telegram groups, because it's where exceptionally graphic material is being shared. And, you know, I'm,

very appreciative of the people, first of all, who are uploading it if they're trying to document the process. And of course, the legitimate OSIM researchers who do use that. But yeah, it's a bottleneck and a funnel, but I'm not dipping into that yet, you know, because I don't need to see some of this horrible, horrible stuff after covering ISIS on Telegram for years. I think I've seen enough brutality for a little bit, you know. I didn't know you covered Islamic State on Telegram. I did a series of stories about ISIS propaganda and especially on like how he was getting on YouTube and that sort of thing. This was back when, you know, social media platforms still had a massive problem with ISIS propaganda. And a lot of that did involve going into Telegram and

seeing the source and, you know, some very horrible stuff in there, which I'm sure there's lots of horrible stuff on Telegram right now as well. There is. Yeah. No, it's, it's, you can get a much more raw version of events that are happening on the ground on Telegram, which I think is one of the reasons it has become kind of like a first order place for a lot of people.

A lot of people who do what we do, a lot of people are just reposting things they've seen on Telegram on Twitter, right? I forget who said it. I don't know if I really, maybe you should look it up, but somebody said it very well. He said, all war footage is downstream

from Telegram. I think it was one of the Bellingcat people, but Higgins or maybe Eric, who's now at New York Times, but I think they've both kind of ranted recently about how they've seen a lot of war footage that they first see on telegram and then like a day or two later ends up on Twitter with either a watermark added or removed. And then they don't share the source of like which telegram channel they got it from, right? Well, that's also definitely the case in Justara, the piece we were talking about earlier about Ossint and Israel Palestine was because Calibur Abskura said that as well, the weapons specialist who's also a long-running Ocent expert. They pointed specifically to how a lot of the stuff on Twitter, his material just taken from Telegram, as you say.

But he added that, this is a quote, usually without context and usually with their own bias inserted, end quote. which yeah that's what we're seeing on Twitter like people at least you know the blue ticks or whatever the verified users a lot of them will say you know this is you know the platform of free speech and all that it's like no everything's being put through some sort of like frame here you know worse than a lot of places i'm not encouraging people go watch raw war footage on telegram i don't think ordinary people necessarily want to do that But yes, that is where the footage is coming from, especially in this conflict. And it's also important to remember that a lot of telegram channels, a lot of the big

telegram channels that are sharing information are run by local governments, local organizations. It is not as if there is, I mean, there are journalists on the ground that are using telegram, but a lot of the information streams are coming from state sources. you know, on both sides of the conflict that are generating this stuff, right? So I think that that's like an important caveat too. I think my favorite caliber obscure thing I saw in the last couple days, last week or two was there was a picture of ostensibly like Hamas soldiers with assault rifles that went around and people were retreating it, retweeting it saying like, where did they get these M-4s from? Those are American guns. And he was like, those are not.

You guys have no idea what guns those are. Shut the fuck up. Idiots. So, yeah, Calibro Obscure is a really great. Still a good Twitter account that is worth following. Learn lots about arms and armaments from them. One thing I'll just say on that, and this didn't really come into the piece, because this is more just my personal observation,

but I used to get a ton of information from all of these OSCE accounts that I mentioned in the piece, you know, including Ballin Cat and all that. and it's kind of hard to put my finger on because you can't necessarily point to a specific change beyond the fact that, you know, Musk has now split Twitter into a 4U stream and the following stream. You know, you click between them, whatever, it depends what you're trying to do. But I think we probably all agree with this, at least anecdotally. It's just harder to see the stuff you actually are interested and want to see. And I swear I just don't see the good Ocent stuff anyway.

I'm following them. I'm sometimes engaging with their posts. It doesn't mean I see their actual information. So hard to put my finger on, but there's like a more subtle change there as well. I think that, no, I think that that is absolutely true.

I've noticed that the amount of like weird algorithmically served like meme channels and like shit post channels and just kind of garbage engagement farming content, that I am served on Twitter is grown exponentially. Like that is definitely what the website wants to show me.

It does not want me seeing like what my fault, like what the people I'm following are tweeting about at all, especially if they're not paying for the website. So let me ask you this last question. First of all, where can people go to find more of your work? And second, how do we navigate these spaces now? Like, what is the best practice for being online and trying to figure out what the hell's going on? Yeah.

So, I mean, look, if you've enjoyed listening to what me and the manual spoken about, you can certainly go to 404media.co, which is the website where we publish our articles, but I would especially encourage you to actually check out our podcast, the very imaginatively named 404 Media Podcast. Search that wherever you get podcasts. And, you know, every week we talk about 30 to 45 minutes about the stories we've published. And that includes a lot of stuff about AI, conflict, crime for me. It really depends what happens that week.

But we actually talk about these specific stories as well. So if you want even more specifics, go check out that episode. As for, like, how do we navigate this ecosystem? I've been thinking about this a lot. And I think we all have at 404 Media because it's part of the reason why we actually quit. advice and made our own media company, right? Very small, very, very tiny, but our own media company. And the way I would say, the way I would characterize it is that we have all of these fragmented platforms now. Twitter is going down the drain for all the reasons we just explained.

Not everybody is on Mastodon. Blue Sky doesn't seem to have enough of the hard-hitting stuff at the moment. Even LinkedIn, like I'm using more, which I didn't think I would ever do. and maybe not the solution, but one way we're mitigating it, at least for our readers, is that you come to our website, you give us your email address, and then, you know,

we will email you when we get a big scoop or when we, a newsletter roundup, which sounds really stupid, almost like me saying it out loud, like that's not a new idea. Yes, but like the importance of direct to reader information now

has only increased as all these platforms have either gone down in quality or sort of crumbled and everybody's spread out. So I would encourage everybody, you know, find some platforms or rather some outlets or some experts who you trust and maybe just like sign up to them directly. You know, I know some of these OSINT experts are like on substack and stuff and, you know, that platform has its own issues, right? All of these platforms suck in some way or another and we're all just trying to navigate

the best and the worst of it. But, I mean, look, for me personally, it's going back to email where I don't have to, like, climb through the mud to, like, find something that's actually useful. Manuel Myberg, Joseph Cox. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, if you really like us, please go to Angry Planet.

deck.com. I guess $9 a month. Get commercial free versions of the mainline episodes, and you get them early. And we do have a bonus that's about to come out. That will be nice. It's all edited. I just need to get it out.

A lot of people have sent really nice messages and really sent very lovely things showing us they appreciate what we do. And it's been a pretty wild month or so, I think, to say the least. had some really difficult conversations and I just really appreciate everyone that's reached out and everyone that's said some pleasant things

really does help in these dark times. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe. Until then.