Big Technology Podcast - Election Results Breakdown With The Daily Beast Editor In Chief Noah Shachtman

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

As the election results come in, Noah Shachtman, the editor in chief of The Daily Beast, joins the Big Technology Podcast for an 'Emergency' show to dive into the results, the future of the Democratic Party, and how the tech platforms handled the election. Recorded on 11/4/2020.

Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. And today we are recording a special emergency podcast to talk about the election results, where we stand today in the United States of America, and a little bit about how the tech platforms have handled it. Joining us today is Noah Shackman, the editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. Welcome to the show, Noah. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. How are you feeling? How's the last 24 hours been for you? Oh, it's mellow. It's totally mellow. We had a good night's sleep, got a facial, took a nice jog. It was great. Good stuff. What's it like managing a newsroom on an actual night like this one? Yeah. I mean, like, luckily, we've got a newsroom where everybody's really, you know, everybody's a baller, everybody's mission focused. And so, you know, people, people are excited to dive into the news. And so it's great to see, you don't have to encourage people really, just got to kind of unleash them. But look, I think, but, but look, you know, when you see results that are that are confusing or stressful or what have you, I think it's important to buck people up and remind them of their mission and why they got

into this business in the first place, which is to tell the unvarnished truth no matter what and to really and to find out as much as you can and then lay it out for people. And so I think, you know, for those of us in the news business, that that mission is more important than ever. Totally. And I hope we can do some of that over the course the next, you know, 28 minutes or so as the time we have here today to talk. I want to introduce you to the audience a little bit to begin with. You have a very interesting background.

So you actually worked in politics before going into media. You were on the Clinton campaign in 1992. So can you tell us a little bit about what you did there? Sure. I was a 20, 21-year-old kid at Georgetown University when Bill Clinton announced his presidential run there. and I kind of wasn't as taken with him at first, but then he came back for a series of speeches, and I got more and more into what he was saying,

enough so that I dropped out of Georgetown and went to go work on his campaign for a while. And then after that, I worked at the Democratic National Committee for about a year. But look, you know, politics is a fucking dirty game played by professional liars and honestly just after a while I couldn't deal with it anymore

but I had at the time started to mess around with some of our chats on on CompuServe and Prodigy in the early 90s and I had convinced this this guy named Bob Newman

who ran a like one or two-person PR shop to sort of bring me on board to run, to start publicizing clients on AOL and Prodigy and Copyserve. And he was sort of like, yeah, yeah, whatever, kid, this will never work. But it kind of did. And so I sort of pivoted from politics to technology there. And that kind of eventually led me to a gig that's kind of confusing, but editing some of the first internet business books at a publisher called Van Nosten Reinhold. And when that publisher got bought up, I had no idea what the hell I was going to do with myself.

And so I started freelancing for some of the like dot-com era business magazines about internet business and also a little bit for Wired.com. Right. And it feels like the Daily Beast sort of is a combination of those two interests, right? It is very political, but it's also deeply steeped in the online communities out there. Is that the right way to describe the publication? Sure. I think that's true. And then the other thing I was going to say is, you know, throughout this whole time, I was living about half the time in a van and playing rock and roll. And so I'd like to think the beast has like a, has a rock and roll element to it too. And, and, you know, we like to combine kind of like, you know, really geeking out on our subjects and really, you know, as you said, getting steeped in online communities while totally nerding out on politics. And, you know, know, having fun and presenting the information in a way that's like, you know, whoops.

Reasonable. Yeah. That's like grockable for normal people. And so that's what we try to do. Great. So let's learn out a little bit about the results. So it's close. I mean, what do you think?

What are you looking at right now? Yeah. So look, it's 111 East Coast time on Wednesday when we're taping this. You know, at the moment, if you were a poker. player, you'd rather have Joe Biden's hand than Donald Trump's hand, for sure. He seems to have more outs. It seems like, you know, these upper Midwest states and Pennsylvania, you know, have enough ballots out there from urban areas that are going to break Joe Biden's way. But honestly, who the fuck knows? Because, you know, the last five years of politics has been so,

you know, so crazy and so topsy-turvy that there's always a chance, a large chance that things, you know, invert. Yeah, and certainty to me seems like the worst policy in politics right now, especially because this could end up going to the court. But we can't talk a little bit about the closeness. I mean, what do you make of the fact that we're living in the middle of coronavirus? Everyone's lives seem to be disrupted. The economy isn't going in any certain direction. and yet Trump has kept it as close as he has. Yeah.

Well, I thought Kevin Ruse from The Times had a really good point, either last night or this morning, which is just, you know, I think that pollsters sort of overestimated people's stated, you know, preferences and underestimated their actual displayed habits, which is to click on Trumpist after Trumpist. news article on Facebook. And I think that we're also a little bit, I think that people in the professional political class have really kind of underestimated how, you know, for normal Americans, Facebook is like one of their biggest, if not their biggest information source. And it is dominated by these sort of pro-Trump pages. And so if you're, you know, in kind of. you know, red state or purple state America, the chances that you're getting a lot of your news

from really pro-Trump places is very high. And so I think that's a major factor. Okay, I was going to leave some of the questions about the tech side of this to the end, but let's just get into it because I feel like this is important. So what do you, so first of all, what sort of importance do you give to the tech platforms influencing people's hearts and minds versus the cable networks? Because we do see right now something important that's happening is Fox News is not going along with some of the tweets the president is putting out saying that the election is won already and that the Democrats are trying to steal it. Yeah.

Just in terms of the way, and that's sort of an important bulwark. So just in terms of the way that social shapes people's hearts and minds, do you give it a higher emphasis than cable news? I mean, how should we think about it? I certainly think it's as high, at the very least. Look, I've been saying for about a year that if Trump was going to win this thing or even make it close, it was because of the heroic efforts of Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. And I continue to believe that. I mean, I think you've just got to look at how of the kind of behaviors that Facebook has valued.

And you look at some of the reporting about, you know, kind of dialing down, quote unquote, liberal news and dialing up, quote unquote, conservative news. And you can see that for a lot of people whose main information sources, Facebook, you know, they're getting, you know, essentially unfiltered pro-Trump, hardcore adjaprop. And it's not as if Facebook, although Facebook will quibble over the numbers somewhat, it's not as if they were unaware of this. They were very aware of it and this is the direction they chose to go on. Right. But I wonder, like, you know, we like to blame the media and the medium a lot, but doesn't some of this fall on the Democratic Party itself? Fuck, yes.

Isn't there some messaging issue? So let's talk about that and we'll come back to the tech stuff. Yeah. Yeah. There's absolutely an issue. Look, if we're going to, you know, barely eking out a win over somebody who's overseen the deaths of a quarter million Americans is not good, you know? And honestly, And I've been fighting sometimes with my own reporters about this, but I've been really struck by how little of a message Joe Biden had beyond, you know, Donald Trump's a dickwad, which he is. I mean, Donald Trump has been a disaster of a president. But, you know, I've been really struck by how little of a compelling alternative Biden offered.

And I think they've got huge messaging issues. with a huge chunk of America. And even if Biden wins, they're going to have to take major steps to fix that. How do they solve it? It's a really good question. You know, I'm out of the politics game. I'm in the reporting game. So, you know.

Well, okay. Well, yeah, sorry. Go ahead. No, but I mean, all I can say is that I think that merely being anti- tie is not going to get it done. And they've got to be really, you know, for something, not just against Donald Trump. And so anyway, like I said, I'm not really like, you know, Mr. Political strategist. And I can say, but I can't, but I do know something about the news business.

And I think one thing that's really important is to actually. you know, not get too caught up in these kind of like intro Washington political stories or stories that only resonate on, you know, in the Assella Corridor or, you know, or in the Bay area, you know, we've really got to make sure that we're telling stories that take place in the whole country. One way we've tried to do that at The Daily Beast is to really tell the coronavirus. story, you know, city by city, state by state, and really focus in on the dozen different local responses to coronavirus rather than just focus in on what's going on in the White

House. You know, we've also got an interest in some topics that, frankly, some of the other political focused media just think are beneath them, I think, which is, you know, we love good stories about true crime and about, you know, cops and robbers. And we love great pop culture stories. And, you know, we're trying to reach an audience on a bunch of different levels, not just on the political level. And I don't know.

I think that's really important to keep doing. Yeah. And let's talk a little bit about the message because it does seem to me, and there's definitely been some talk floating around Twitter today about how, you know, this could potentially be an indictment on some of the farther left side of the Democrats. You know, when you were working on the Clinton campaign, the message was, it's the economy stupid. The message for the Biden campaign is fight for the soul of our country. And a lot of that has been manifested in talking about how, you like, you know, Trump is a jerk and he's a white supremacist. And I just wonder,

I mean, you look at the results. And the Democrats, what Trump, Trump is, one, the highest share of non-white support of Republicans in decades. So is there a limit to that sort of resistance style messaging for the Democrats? I definitely think, look, I don't think that the Democrats did a good enough job tying what was actually going on with the coronavirus to Trump's response, right? I think that was in some ways, you know, if I'm thinking about it, that's kind of a major failure. And I think for a lot of people, coronavirus felt like an act of God, like a hurricane or like a tsunami, and that, you know, government was just as powerless to stop the virus as it was to

stop a hurricane or a tsunami. But of course, we know that's not the case, right? We know that, you know, that had really a certain basic public health measures been put in place earlier and in a more sustained fashion that, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of more people would still be alive. And I don't feel like I don't feel like the Democrats ever quite tied those two things together. And then I don't feel like they, while they said, hey, we're going to take this seriously, we're going to be competent. I never felt like I got a great answer at a team Biden for what they were going to do differently, like other than just follow the science, which is, you know, a solid foundation. But I don't feel like they laid out like an ABC, one, two, three kind of plan. So, I don't know.

I feel like that's what that was a. message failure there. Right. But if you take the coronavirus out of it, I mean, they would have had, I mean, it looks like they would have had the floor wipe with that. So the question is, when it comes to the future of the Democratic Party, I know you're not a political strategist, but I also wonder is, is the thing that comes front and center, is it the economy or is it the sort of, you know, more further left anti-racist type of

message. You know, I don't know that those things are necessarily intention in the way that you put it. You know, I feel like that's a bit of like, I feel like, you know, you can push a message of justice that's not like either economic or racial. So yeah, I'm not sure I'm not quite sure it's in either or there But what I do think is, you know, you got to like

You got to speak to people on their level And you got to like address people, you know, eye to eye And And no matter what message you deliver I don't know I mean, we'll see how these results play out But it's certainly still a question And I definitely think there's probably going to be some form

of discussion with the Democrats in terms of what the soul of the party looks like, because right now it seems unclear. Oh, for sure. It's going to be like it's going to be really, really, really, really intense between the sort of left wing and centrist wings of the party. And look, and I think, you know, Nancy Pelosi is going to come under some fire too, right? You know, she had a deal on the table basically for more stimulus, you know, in the face of coronavirus and, you know, turned it down.

assuming that she was going to get a Democratic Senate and a Democratic White House. Now that's very much in question. And that puts a lot of people's livelihoods in question. And so she's going to come under a lot of fire for that. But listen, I just want to say this too. I mean, I think one of the reasons, though, I think the medium and the message things do go hand in hand. And, you know, for a lot of people, they're now living in a closed information ecosystem, whether it's, you know, they're only watching Fox or they're only watching MSNBC or, you know, they're only getting their news from, you know, from their favorite people on Twitter or they're only getting their news, you know, from these Trumpy types on Facebook. And I think that that is one of the main reasons why it is hard for any message to penetrate these days, even the best of them.

Yeah, definitely. Okay, I want to talk a little bit more about that and the tech platforms themselves when we come back from this break. So why don't we do that? Stay right here. We'll be right back with Noah Shackman, the editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast here on the Big Technology Podcast. Hey everyone, let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative

takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you using right now. And we're back for our second segment here on an emergency edition of the big technology podcast.

Joining us is Noah Shackman, editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. We've talked a little bit about the results and sort of figuring out what they mean, you know, as they come in and what it's going to mean for the future of the Democratic Party. Obviously, the Republican Party is going to have some reckoning to do on its own, but the Trump coalition seems to have held up decently. So maybe less of a transformation there, although if he loses, it could, it could definitely lead to some soul searching. But why don't we talk a little bit about the platforms? So as we speak, Twitter's putting like every Trump tweet under a label. There's one that I was

looking at. They are working hard from Trump. They are working hard to make up 500,000 vote advantage in Pennsylvania disappear. ASAP, likewise in Michigan and others. Twitter has put that under a label saying that it might be misleading in terms of what's going on with the election. Facebook's also done some labeling. This is what they told us they would do. I personally think that, or I tweeted that the platforms have done a pretty good job over the past 24 hours. Somewhat controversial statement, I'm kind of curious what you make of that. Noah, do you think they're doing a good job here? So I think they're doing a good job on a couple of different fronts.

Front number one, they've been much more aggressive on foreign interference than they were four years ago. And I think Twitter and Facebook especially deserve a lot of credit for that. Secondly, I think they've done a good job, but a late job in going after some of the more violent domestic extremist groups like Q and on. You know, I thought the steps that they took on Q&N were really needed if a half step behind. And I think they deserve a lot of credit for that. I think they, I think the labeling stuff, I think it, I'd be curious how effective some of it is, I guess is my question. I'm like, I'm in favor of it in theory, but I'd like to know what a practical effect is. And then, you know, you haven't mentioned it, but I think one thing we ought to get into real quick was Twitter's,

actions around the New York Post and their Hunter Biden story. And I thought there, I thought Twitter really kind of overreacted. It's not that the Hunter Biden story was legit. I think the Daily Beast kind of led the way in debunking a lot of that New York Post article and others that were hyping with stuff up. but I thought they just, I, I really think they kind of like tried going after a fly with a howitzer on that one. And I think it wound up making them look bad and, and, and, and, and so on some, a little bit of distrust.

And so I thought they, they kind of used the nuclear option there when a, when a, you know, more tactical weapon would have been called for. Yeah, no doubt. I've thought that the social media companies are doing whatever they can. to avoid a repeat of 2016. To me, that seems to be just the operating principle of these companies. And this election is like, let's not do 2016 again in terms of like all the platform manipulation that went on. So they were on alert that the FBI, you know, from the FBI, I believe that there might have been a hack and leak operation conducted by some foreign

entity. It's still kind of up in the air about whether that happened and then just quickly hit the button saying we're not going to get blamed, you know, for being manipulated by a foreign entity this year. I mean, the same thing with these labels. No, I think that's absolutely right. I think there was a lot of talk in law enforcement, national security, and technology circles to be on high alert for a hack and leak operation that it was, you know, that one was coming. You know, I can say that for a fact that there are those discussions going on. And I can also tell you that, um, You know, look, Rudy Giuliani in particular was looked at as a vector for foreign misinformation.

You know, his sort of partner in propaganda, this guy, Andre Dirkhatch, was labeled by the Trump administration to be an active Russian agent. That's a verbatim quote. And Steve Bannon was also mixed up in this, and he's looked on as a vector of, at the very least, overseas disinformation. He's got this Chinese billionaire who, who, you know, pushes a lot of disinformation and is kind of bankrolling Bannon's operation, bankrolled a lot of Bannon's misinformation about the virus. So, yeah, I agree. I think they were on a hair trigger, high alert, wanted to avoid any 2016 repeat. And so they overreacted. Yeah.

And I personally think, you know, we talked about the labels too. I kind of think they're effective. Like, they do take a little bit of the steam. out of the Trump tweet that says, you know, we won or, you know, the Democrats are stealing votes. You look at that and it just kind of, it seems different. I don't know. It seems like you put less credibility into it. Here's a question for you. I mean, I'd be curious what you think. If Trump loses, how long will he have his Twitter account for? Great question. I mean, it's all going to depend on what happens over the next couple of weeks, right? Because

we're in phase one of this right now, which is he's starting to discredit the result. What happens in phase two? You know, one of the worries I have about social media is it creates this otherism, right? You start to see people as an other, it dehumanizes them. And you can't see them as another person. And so now what happens if Trump says the election was stolen by the Democrats and starts to call his supporters into the streets? You know, he hinted at political violence yesterday, but do we end up seeing that happen now? And that's really the, the, the, the Lori for me, I kind of think that that's going to be the big story now is, you know, if Trump loses, how does he react to this loss and what happens? I mean, what do you, I mean, so that's

sort of my, so I feel like if he calls people out onto the street and asks for violent, tries to get them to be violent and has already lost the election, then Twitter might take that account away. But it would have to be such an extreme event for that to happen. What's your perspective? My perspective is they were rightly reluctant. to take away the account of President Donald Trump. Private citizen Donald Trump? I don't know. That's a really different thing.

If he, like, loses and actually is out of office, you know, and it's March of next year, and he's, you know, spreading, you know, either inciting violence, spreading bullshit, what have you. I don't know. I mean, I think there's going to be a lot of pressure if he's out of office. there's going to be a lot of pressure within the platforms to, to boot him off. Right. Well, the standard is imminent harm. Like if you're causing something that's going to, you know, put someone in imminent danger, then you're not a lot of use it, not a lot of state on the platforms. That's why when the coronavirus hit, people that were sharing misinformation about the virus got their accounts either suspended or got the post taken down.

And you're right. When he does become a private citizen, it sort of becomes a little bit less easy for the platforms to. justify it as newsworthiness but it would i mean it really sort of depends on him right like if if this is going to get to a place where we're going to see violence inside it or we're going to you know it'll be winks to people to get out on the street you know stand back and stand by proud boys what does he say to the proud boys now then i think we get into that situation yeah what do you think's going to happen there by the way i'm kind of curious what your perspective is you know do if biden ends up taking this thing are we going to end up seeing you know social media being used to stoke I mean, obviously, we'll see big protests out one way or the other.

But are we at risk of political violence here? Yes. Can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we've had a right wing, far right wing, not normal conservatives, but we've had a far right wing in this country that's been increasingly radicalized. And has been, and, you know, we've seen that. that far-right actors who commit, you know, who murder people are celebrated in the, you know, in the sort of broader Trumpist community.

And look, you know, one thing we didn't talk about about, my background is for a while I was a national security and conflict reporter. And I'm reminded by, you know, the years I covered insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, which is that it doesn't take that many violent-minded people to really, you know, spark a wildfire. It just takes the consent of a lot of people around them. And, you know, I really worry that, you know, you can have, you know, I hand. handful of wackos and a big community of people kind of egging them on or tacitly accepting what they do. And it could be really bad. And look, I think that's, that is, I'm sure I'll get some hate tweets on this too. But, you know, I think there's, there's some part of the left too

that of the far left that has decided that that political violence is okay too. And at the very, And while they haven't, you know, done the kind of harm to, you know, well, I mean, it's just, look, I just think it's a bad precedent and it's a bad situation on both sides. So, yeah, I'm concerned about it. You know, we'll see what happens. I really, I really hope, you know, things go smoothly. I really hope so. Yeah. So, and that's sort of when I come down and do a final calculus of the way.

that the social media company has performed over election day slash week. It's one thing to put these labels, which I think are helpful. And I'm also sort of of the belief that we should be pretty hands-off, you know, as hands-off as possible with political content, you know, echoing some of the stuff that you think about the New York Post story. But, you know, what cost do we pay in terms of the fact that this sense of the other person is a totally different, you know, sort of dehumanized because of the fact that they get painted that way. And these echo chambers created on social media and what kind of cost do we end up paying for the fact that social media has helped foster that?

Yeah. It's very difficult to evaluate and say, okay, you did a good job, Facebook, Twitter, and Google when that sort of stuff still hangs in the balance. That's a great point. That's a really great point. Okay, so we have, we're just about out of time. What's your guess on what happens from here? Speculate a little bit.

Yeah, so look, I mean, fuck, I hate speculating. I'd rather report. But like, you know, it looks like. We won't hold you to it, but like you have, yeah, you watch this stuff. Yeah. Look, it looks like Biden's in a little bit better shape electorally. There's obviously going to be tons of lawsuits around it. Um, right now those legal challenges don't look, um, particularly potent, but, you know, all it takes is, is, um, you know, a couple of Trumpy judges and, and we could be into something really freaking crazy.

I think the other thing to keep an eye out for, um, is, um, sure seems like the post office didn't deliver a lot of absentee ballots. I think that's going to be, you know, that has the potential to be really, that's, that's, that's, yeah. Yeah, that's disputed. I think that there's conflicting reports on that part. Yeah, but I think that's, I think there's more information on that, like, coming out, like, as we're talking. So I think that that's, you know, I think that's going to be really big. And then, you know, my guess is we'll see, you know, as you said, protest no matter what. And I hope, you know, that's all it stays as is,

just protests um so um you know i'm i am hoping for a uh only slightly insane resolution to this but you know it's 2020 man so so um preparing for the truly insane yeah so preparing for the truly insane is probably the best um is the best approach yeah and i know that we're we're really early in this process but i'm kind of hopeful from what I've seen so far. It seems like the voting is going as normal. It seems like Fox News isn't going along with anything that's sort of out of bounds from what we've seen in the past, which is super important. I mean, we don't have a decision yet, but the streets have been fairly quiet, which I think is a good sign. So I'm hopeful, but fingers crossed, it's going to be

a very interesting couple of weeks ahead. Yeah, that's the understatement of the year, man. Yeah. Well, we're prone to them here. All right. No, no. No, shout. from the Daily Beast. Thank you so much for joining us here on this emergency edition of the big technology podcast. If you are a longtime listener, it would be great if you could rate us on your app of choice. And if this is your first time here, please subscribe. We do a new edition every Wednesday. I want to thank the folks at Red Circle for helping host and sell ads on the podcast. And Nate Gwapney, our terrific editor for making sure it sounds good and a limited amount of time today. Thank you all for listening. We will see you again next Wednesday.

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