Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 446: Social Media Propaganda

Episode Date: December 10, 2018

Stories from the Week

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. recording live from glory hole studios in chicago this is cognitive dissonance every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way we bring critical thinking skepticism and irreverence to any topic that makes the news makes it big or makes us mad it's skeptical it's political and there is no welcome at this episode 446 of cognitive dissonance. And this is going to be a little different. See, so instead of the usual plethora of wacky religious hilarious, goofy stories, it's a little bit of wacky.

So we're going to talk a little bit. We're going to talk long form. It's going to be if you're looking for, you know, dick jokes about the prophetess can't care, relisten to episode 444. Yeah. I think you'll really like that one. Again, just go ahead and put that one back on. But we're going to be talking about slightly more serious topics today or one topic in particular. Mainly one topic.

Yeah. We're going to be talking quite a bit today about social media, social media and kind of their social and political responsibilities and kind of what they've done with those responsibilities, what they haven't done with those responsibilities and the impact that that's had on our elections. And then I think also just on America in general and sort of how we think. So Cecil, you found a whole bunch of material that we're going to talk about today. Yeah. I think we start with a little bit of background on sort of what we're going to be talking about. We're going to be talking about two podcasts that we listen to.

They're both of them were from The Daily. We'll put links in the show notes if you want to listen to those podcasts exclusively. One of them happens to be on an internet group that was in Pennsylvania. We wound up being a man and a wife who were, ran a Facebook page and they talk about sort of what kind of stories they had. We're going to get into that in a little bit. And then we also are going to be talking about, uh, specifically the, the drama that has unfolded at Facebook, um, since sort of the beginning of all of this, we're talking about before the 2016 elections, when people were saying, hey, some shit's going on down there. The Times did a expose on this, a big, long article

about this. And they talk about sort of what has been happening, you know, in a timeline fashion since the beginning of all this. And really it comes down to, it starts out with the idea that Facebook really was sort of suppressing this for a very long time. They had found out, Stamos is one of the guys who was their senior- Chief security officer. Yeah, he was the chief security officer of that company. And he found out a long time ago that there were some real issues with fake news, with Russian, with Russian bots and that sort of thing. And they, and they ignored it for a very long time. They pushed it under the,

under the rug. Well, and just as much as they ignored it when he brought it to light, when he brought it to the board and bypassed Zuckerberg and Sandberg, he got in all kinds of shit for doing that. They yelled at him for it. They were upset. It was a big problem. You know, what's interesting is the story that Facebook has told publicly does not match the reality, right? So let's talk about that a little bit. The story was, the narrative as we kind of were led to believe was that the Russians had created, let's go all the way back. The Russians, we know, what do we know? What do we know is true? What we know is true is that

for a significant amount of time, although nobody really knows exactly when it began or what the first sites were, the Russian government has been using agents to spread a campaign of disinformation in the United States, aimed very specifically at creating a divided electorate. They did this by creating both fake news stories and distorting existing news stories and amplifying the message of both fake news and distorted or one-sided, particularly conservative news often, and then using social media to amplify that message and to create engagement through divisiveness in order to sway not just what we think, but how we think, and in order to change the election cycle. And they did this in the Ukraine

too. So they have a test case that's already, they already did it. Like they've already done it. And they successfully, it's successful here, but it's successful there. We don't know how successful here. Right. And that's the problem. We don't know how successful because the social media companies will never tell us how successful or unsuccessful it was. But we know that it was successful in the Ukraine. Well, you know, and that's part of the problem, right? Is that how do you measure how many minds got changed or how many minds got, you know, how many people showed up to vote or how many people got influenced in ways that they don't even know they were influenced? Because that is what propaganda does, right? This is a propaganda campaign.

If you're being propagandized well and you're being fed disinformation well, you don't ever realize that it was disinformation. You are the subject of disinformation. It is only valuable if you believed that it was information. They do know that one number, and they mention it in one of the things that we watch. They say 146 million

people on Facebook were touched by these messages. Tens of millions on Twitter were touched by these messages. That's not quantifiable. We don't know how deep they were touched. We don't know how much a mind was changed, like you were saying, but we know the

number. And to put that into perspective, 146 million people were touched by these messages. 137 million people voted. So in terms of the amount of reach, it is a deeper reach into the mind and vision of the American population than the population turned out to actually vote. The population is 320 million. Remember, not all of that 320 million are eligible to vote. Many of those people are under the age of 18, et cetera. So you've got, and no matter how you cut this,

you have just an incredible amount of impact. A massive, massive, massive impact on what we think and like the information that we get and the way that we engage that information. Yeah. And this is known. Facebook knew about this before we knew about this. Yeah, absolutely. They knew about this and they did not tell us.

And more than they didn't tell us, Zuckerberg went on and said, it's a crazy idea. This isn't happening. He said it was crazy months after he had already found out that it was happening. Yeah, this is after this was. So, like, he knew that his site, that his that his billion plus dollar company was being leveraged in by a foreign government to influence the way that you think the the way that you vote, to subvert our fucking democracy. He knew it. Yeah. And he went on and he said, that's crazy.

That's not happening. Also, in the back of his mind, I fucking know that's happening. Yeah, he knew it was happening the whole time. I know that that's happening. And I will say, like, and we watched also an interesting documentary. What was the name of the documentary we just watched? It's a half hour NBC special. It's on NBC.

I'm going to post the link to it. It's Factory of Lies, Democracy Under Attack is what it's called. Very dramatic name, by the way. Very dramatic documentary. Very dramatic documentary. But there is some interesting takeaways. It's about a half an hour documentary.

I'll post it on this week's show notes. You know, like I thought I was thinking about this and it's like, it's not a surprise that Zuckerberg, that Facebook would sweep this under the rug, right? Because not only is it damaging to their business model that this happened, but you know, like

the more that we are engaged, the more times we're on Facebook, which means the more of our personal information we're giving to Facebook, which is what they gather and sell, right? And means the more of our personal information we're giving to Facebook, which is what they gather and sell, right? And then the more of our ads that they see, because if I'm engaged in an argument on Facebook and I'm going to go and I'm going to check it, or do they reply? Do they, I'm going to reply. Do they reply? I'm going to reply. I'm more like the more divisive

the news that I get, the better it is for Facebook's business model. This, this is good for Facebook because remember all. This is good for Facebook because remember all Facebook wants you to do is spend time there. There's an interesting confluence of a lot of different things that happen to make Facebook the powerhouse that it is. And I want to go through a few of these things

to talk about them. Facebook, before they became public, partnered with big data. And what we don't understand is that like Facebook isn't just the only place that gathers your data. Of course not. There's a lot of places that gather your data. There's a ton of places out there that have a shit ton of information on you. And I found a ProPublica article that I want to read a little bit of just to just sort of put this under, put this into perspective. I'll post the ProPublica link as well on the show notes.

They started with the basics like names, addresses, contact information, and add demographics like age, race, occupation, and educational level. Also include income levels and things like that too. The companies collect lists of people experiencing, quote, life event triggers, end quote, like things like getting married, buying a home, sending a kid to college, or even getting divorced. Credit reporting giant Experian has separate marketing services division, which sells lists of names of expectant parents and families with newborns that are updated weekly. The companies also collect data about your hobbies and many of the purchases you make. Want to buy a list of people who read

romance novels? Experian will sell that to you. Oh no, pardon me. Epsilon can sell that to you. As well as a list of people who donated to international charities, a subsidiary of a credit reporting company, Equifax even collects detailed salary and pay stub information for roughly 38% of the employed Americans, as NBC News has reported. As part of handling employee verification requests, the company gets information directly from employers and how they get it. Here's another thing. Two companies actually responded with details of how volunteers' information has been shared. Upscale Furniture Store Restoration Hardware said that it sent your name and address of what you purchased to seven other companies, including data cooperatives

that allow retailers to pull data about customer transactions. Walt Disney also responded and described sharing even more information, not just the person's name and address and what they purchased, but their age, their occupation, their number, the ages and gender of their children. It listed companies that received data among them owned by Disney, like ABC and ESPN, as well as others. In September 2013, Axiom, AxiCom, I guess, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, debuted aboutthedata.com, which allows you to review and edit some of the company's marketing details about you by entering your name, address, and birth date. And the last word, digital security number, I guess you can go on this aboutthedata.com and change the data or

delete some of the data, things like that. I don't know, I haven't done it, so I don't know what you can do, but it seems like a pretty interesting thing that they've put together. Now understand that once they partnered, they had this really cool thing, right? So you have all this data out there that's floating on about Tom, right? So there's a million things about Tom that tell you all these different life events that have happened, all these other things. But Facebook allows this really cool thing to happen, which is, and I don't know, I say cool.

I don't mean, but interesting thing to happen, a powerful thing to happen, which is, and I don't know, I say cool, I don't mean, but interesting thing to happen, a powerful thing to happen, which is suddenly I get access to Tom when I know all this other stuff about him. Way better than you can predict with a TV ad. Way better than you can predict with a radio ad. It's personalized. It's personalized. It's just like Minority Report. If you remember the movie Minority Report, they're walking by the ads and they see the eye and they're like, oh, hey, Bill, here's a thing for you. It's the same thing. And that dystopian movie?

Yeah, and that dystopian movie about Facebook. Yeah. But in a way, that's a very incredible partnership that they have. They have all these real world things that you're fiddling with, and then they get to put that in front of you in front of in cyberspace. So the other thing that happens is, is that Facebook users are retreating slowly into echo chambers. Right. And the reason why they're retreating into the echo chambers is because it's safe there. Right. I can go to my echo chambers.

There's one of the specific things that we listen to, and you can listen to it yourself. It's the daily podcast. The guy who created this website that went on to become a multimillion dollar website that made a ton of money off of fake news, quote unquote fake news, he went there and started it because he was pushed out of the liberal groups for having a dissenting opinion. He went there because he wanted to go of the liberal groups for having a dissenting opinion. He went there because he wanted to go find somebody who was like him and he couldn't find people who was like him. So he created something that was like him. You want to go and have these not just contentious arguments, but also want to connect and share and kibitz with all the other people who share your opinion.

You know what? I will say, like, it reminds me of episode 444. We were joking about the witches. They talk about community, right? This is what they mean by community. Yeah, exactly. What they really mean by community is an echo chamber of people that are like-minded. Yes, exactly. Now, the creators of Facebook are using this platform for personal gain, right? They want to make money off this. That's why they went public with it in the first place. They went, they want to make a lot of money off of it, but they're bending the truth

and sort of abetting dissension in the rest of all of us because it makes you, like we said, go back. You're going back again and again and again and again. And they want your eyes on Facebook. They want your eyes on Twitter. Then you get these other creators that start trolling, right? And this isn't necessarily a bad thing right it's just people can't we're just kidding around what i'm just trolling what

i'm just kidding around what i just unfortunate i'm just saying some crazy shit well now people are starting to amplify that crazy shit so the currency of truth stops becoming factual and starts becoming facebook suddenly becomes this giant argument from popularity, right? The more likes something has, the more validity it has. That's not true. That's just not a true, that's not a true statement. That's a logical fallacy.

It doesn't matter how many likes something has, it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. But people start mistaking how many likes something has or a blue check mark on Twitter for something that is real, that is true. That doesn't mean it's true. But people start mistaking how many likes something has or a blue check mark on Twitter for something that is real. That is true. That doesn't mean it's true. It just means something popular happened to it. That can happen all the time, but people aren't using their reason to try to decide whether something's true. They're just relying on others. They're pulling the audience in the biggest way you possibly can. It's the, it's the world. It's billions of users on Twitter.

Then you start looking into the Russian disinformation campaign. They're actually using it for nefarious purposes, but they're starting to look to see these trends of people retreating to the echo chambers. Well, they infiltrate those echo chambers, and then they start posting stuff that might not be true. They create them. Absolutely, yeah.

And then finally, at the very end, we talk about the data leaks with Cambridge Analytica. There's a huge data leak that happens with Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica has found out to not just have the data that they paid for, but data that they never paid for. That people willfully put on the internet, but didn't know that it was going to go for this particular purpose. And that's when people suddenly just start changing all their data profiles on their, on Facebook, which is a good thing, right? Yeah. Cambridge Analytica coming to light is a great thing because it woke people up to the fact that your fucking data is important and people can, can, can use that data against you. And you've got to be, you've got to be, uh,

vigilant to make sure that that doesn't happen. And then Facebook at the very end of this starts hiring a PR firm and they hire a PR firm that's dealt with conservative PR in a long time. That is exactly basically just looking at how to attack the other people without actually clearing your name. Make it about Apple. Don't make it about you. Make it about other people. What about Apple? What are they doing? What's Google doing? Muddy the water until nobody trusts the water anymore. And so that's sort of this confluence of all these things that are happening. And, you know, it's like a forest fire. We didn't rake well enough. You know what I mean? Like we didn't rake the fucking leaves up well enough. And a lot of these things are, you know, it's bad on bad.

It's bad stacking on bad. Well, I think, you know, I think that a lot of people, not everybody, I think a lot of people, if they ever stopped once to consider the business model of something like Facebook, which I think, I think a lot of people never bother to stop to think about the business model of the things they engage in. It's like, oh, I can go on here. I can share some pictures. I can connect with my buddies. It doesn't cost anything. That sounds great. And if they ever stopped to think about like the business model, like, oh, it's ad supported. And that's probably about as far as most people would go

because why do they care? But it's not just ad supported. It's much, much more than ad supported. They're taking the data and they are feeding you personalized ads. And if that's where it stopped, I find that a little weird, but I know a lot of people don't.

A lot of people even like it. Like they like to see ads that mean something more to them. That's fine. But then they also congregate your data. And then as a separate thing that they sell, they sell that data as its own thing. Because really, part of that model isn't just to show you an ad, so that you click on the ad to go buy a dress. The other thing that they want to do is to have you constantly feed them exactly who you are, aggregate that data, take that data, much the same way that like mortgages were bundled into troughs and sold in tranches rather and sold in giant groups.

They take that data and then they sell that. If you take that- Well, Facebook doesn't do that. That's the third party people that do that. Facebook sells data. Facebook does not sell data people that do that. Facebook sells data. Facebook does not sell data. Facebook, that's absolutely not true. Facebook keeps the data, but they do not sell the data.

Facebook allows you, like other apps, to collect data on you. Okay. But you have to sign up for that. Facebook does not sell your data. They won't go to these big data companies and say, I have a bunch of shit on Tom. Here's a bunch of shit that he's liked. But if you opt in based on some of these apps and things, which is exactly how Cambridge Analytical collected it,

right? What they did is they had a little personality app or something, some dumb shit that you've looked at at your phone. It was like, what fucking hat, what fucking battleship am I or whatever? You know what I mean? Like it doesn't matter.

But they had that thing. And so you went in and now they can then scrape your data so they can sell access to you. I guess. And so let me walk that back. There is a distinction. And that's an important distinction. I think that from a practical perspective in terms of how individuals interact with Facebook, it's all in the same house for people. And I think that that's an important piece too, right? It's like, yeah, I didn't break into your house, but what I did do is I left all your doors and windows open last time I was there

and then somebody else, but I didn't, you know, like, it's still the responsibility I think of the platform. But regardless, the larger point that I was going to make is like data only has value if the data can be used to change your behaviors. Right. Data has no value to anybody. Nobody would buy it. Sure. If it didn't have access to if it could not be leveraged to change people's behaviors. And it's one thing to leverage that to change your behavior to get you to buy a

dress, right? That's who gives a shit. Like maybe you were going to buy a dress anyway. Maybe you bought a dress you particularly liked because of it. But maybe now you're thinking about Black Lives Matters differently. Maybe now you've got shit in your feed that you didn't want in your feed. Maybe now you're being marketed to by Russian bots differently. You know what I mean? Sure. Data is valuable and we don't treat data as a monetarily valuable resource. What we do now, which I think is insane, is we buy, we engage in behaviors, which are at this point, socially impossible not to engage in, right? Like, I have a cell phone, right? My cell phone gathers a ton of data about me.

Sure. All of which I have to agree to in order to use the phone. Yeah. And I have to use the phone because I have to use the phone for work. I can't not have this cell phone. I'm required to have this for work. And you're required, really, to be part of modern society society to have certain basic social tools at your disposal. And you have to opt into all this shit, which is pages and pages and pages long, which you're never going to really read.

And then all this information is gathered and then you give it away for free, even though it's obviously valuable because companies buy it. So if it wasn't valuable, who would buy it? And it's valuable because it changes your behaviors. Sure. We need to look at data as a monetarily valuable resource that is inextricably linked to our right to privacy. Those things are one in the same. I really do think that when you look at these things and we think about all the valuable, monetarily valuable information we give away for free, we can't gather together and sue, right?

We can't have a class action lawsuit and say, my, my, my data was, was collected and used without my knowledge because we don't have damages. We don't have damages because we've not collectively agreed that our data is monetarily valuable as a consumer. We know it's monetarily valuable for companies to buy it and sell it. But we have not agreed yet, collectively, socially, that that data that I give you for free, it's crazy. You buy a phone, you spend money on it.

You spend money on the plan. Then you take that phone, you spend money on it. You spend money on the plan. Then you take that phone and you hand somebody something that they're going to turn around and sell and you give it to them for free. And then when you're harmed by it, and we are harmed by this, our democracy is harmed by this. We don't have any fucking recourse because we can't show monetary damages. We need to get to a point where we recognize that data and money are the same, that data and privacy are the same. You know, what's really interesting is, especially on the podcast that we listen to, there's a group, it's a website, and I don't remember, I'm not recalling the name of the website. It's something news, world news, something. It was a website that was created, a Facebook page that was created specifically pulling articles off the internet. And the guy even says, if I can make...

Mad world news, right? Mad world news. That's it. If the guy, the guy who they interview in this Times piece says, if I can make a non-story into a real know, if I can make it into a bad story, that's a good thing. That's a viral story is what he says. Yeah. And, you know, I think- He wasn't in the business of creating viral stories.

Absolutely. Viral stories that were, and the headlines on these stories, when they read them aloud, were just ridiculous. Hillary spits in the face of voters and, you know, Trump, you know, Trump loves, I mean, it was like, like, I don't remember. I remember that one specifically, Hillary spits in the face of American and, you know, Trump, you know, Trump loves. So, I mean, it was like, like, I don't remember.

I remember that one specifically Hillary spits in the face of American voters or things like that. And I remember that one, but there's a bunch that they read off that are all just like you, you listen to it and you're like, that's just, I would just scroll past this garbage, but people don't people, people use it. I feel like you don't even have to know date, know about data. You don't even have to dig into data to do the kind of things that the russians are doing and to do the kind of things that this company which profited greatly off of changing news just enough to make it fake news and viral

right you don't have to you don't have to even know anything about anybody because we'll do it for you we will find these things that we agree it for you. We will find these things that we agree with and share them. We will find these things that we hate. We'll share them. We'll be like, fuck this guy. I can't believe this. We'll find that stuff because on social media, that rewards that behavior. Suddenly you'll get a bunch of likes or angry faces or whatever it is that makes you feel like I contributed to this community in some way. And so we don't even need to even roll. I mean, the data is a bad thing and you're right. It absolutely can cause people to, you know, target you and do all kinds of things, but you don't

even need it. Like you don't even need it to cause damage, which is what happened for many, many years before anybody even caught this. So one of the things I want to talk about that because it's one of the notes I took from the documentary wrote says, you know, the idea here is to create and this is kind of new. Like we I think I think in times past, I was trying to think about what's new about social media. Like what are some of the things that that makes this different than than broadcast media? Because this isn't really a broadcast media, right? In the same way that I turn on Channel 2 News, you turn on Channel 2 News, it's identical, right? It's always the same news. You turn it on at 7, it's only on at 7. It's only on at 7 for me. It shows you the same image it shows me. So that's broadcast. That's passive to the audience, right? What's different about social media is that the focus is to create an audience first, right?

Not to create a message or content for the audience. So first we create an audience. Then we create content for that audience. And that's backward. That's different than everything we've done before. Everything before, yeah. Right? And I think that that's really important because what that does is it says,

okay, it doesn't really matter what the content is. We're not trying to get this content to an audience. What we're trying to do is get an audience to content. So we will create the content based on who our audience is.

And we can create in this hyper-personalized way. And that's really incredibly unique. It's like i sat on a meeting the other day and this was like meeting of some pretty fucking smart folks and we were having a conversation about um you know getting our about our website and one of the guys said well let's google and now and see where it comes up and i had to stop and say you know i'm not gonna use his name but i said i just stop and say hey you know that I'm not going to use his name, but I said, I just stopped and said, hey, you know that like when you Google and I Google, we don't get the same result, right? Like you,

yeah, like you know that, right? And like he paused and then he said, oh, you know, I guess I do know that. But he didn't know it first. Yeah. He knew it only after he stopped to think about knowing it. And that's how most of our interactions, I think, with media are. Most of our interactions with media are not considered interactions. They are intuitive interactions because they're so casual and they're so easy. And so there's this list of things we know intentionally. And then there's the list of ways we behave unintentionally. And they don't match each other.

And I think that what we see is that because we are not careful consumers of media, and we're not generally, and we know this, like study after study shows that we're not good at differentiating our messages. It's very easy to manipulate people. It's very easy to get people to think that, man, this is what the world looks like because this is what the world looks like when I see it. Sure. And that step back, that constant vigilance isn't natural. It's an unnatural thing because it causes us to doubt our community. To do that, you have to doubt that the community that you are existing within, your social online community, you have to doubt its validity. We're not good at that. That's not something like we're naturally tuned to do.

And that is being intentionally manipulated by bad actors who want to get you to behave differently. And I think that story after story shows that it's working. It's causing us to behave differently. And that's incredibly distressing to me. It's interesting because one of the things that they were talking about in this video that we watched, they were talking about in this video that we watched, they were talking about Facebook ads. And they did this really innocuous piece on like one of those, the daytime TV shows, like daytime news shows, early daytime news shows, this day or this week or whatever it is. I don't even know what the fuck those things are even called to be perfectly honest. But you know, like the morning show, it starts at nine. It's a news show, but it's also kind of a talk show.

And they did a fluff piece on Facebook ads. And this woman walked away from the piece thinking, wow, you can target people by their demographic. You can target people by what they like. You can target people by this and this and this on all these like little, very small slivers. You can, like you said, I can send something to my audience. I can sense, I can now, I know what my audience is. All I have to do is just send the content to them, right? We create the audience first. And so she sees this

and she thinks, wow, this could maybe use, be used for some nefarious things. And then a couple years later, here we see, here we see it's used for some nefarious shit. And it's funny because it's just like, like it's somebody who's, who's mining in a mine and they have TNT and they're like, man, this TNT could probably do some real damage.

Huh? You know, if you put a bunch of this shit in a truck, you might be able to blow up the World Trade Center or something, you know, but they don't, we just didn't add

two and two together or we did and we just didn't care. Yeah. Well, I think, I think it's like, I think social media is like anything else, right? Is that it's like driving while texting

or it's like drinking or smoking or it feels good. We have an incredible amount of data that shows that like maybe this isn't really good for us. We have an incredible amount of data that shows that. But it feels really good and we like it. And so it's like, well, I'm still probably going to eat that steak. You know, but it feels really good and we like it. And so it's like, well, I, you know, I'm still probably going to eat that steak, you know, like it's maybe not good for me. And I recognize it's not good for me, but I like it more than I care about how bad it

might be for me. So that's the, that's just the truth. Right. And then that's okay that that's the truth. But then the question is like, what are we going to do about it? Cause the answer is not walk away from social media. The world is not going to do that. So we're not going to do that. We have to do something. We have to make changes. And like these social media companies have been very disingenuous in the way that they've said, we create the platform, not the content. Yeah. That's really been kind of a message. That's been their message. We create the platform, not the content. We have, we have terms of service that nobody fucking reads. And if you violate them

and you've already violated them and somebody reports you, then we'll have this discretionary decision about whether or not we take down your post. We probably will, but whatever. Maybe not. Unless you're Trump, in which case there's a financial disadvantage. Well, there's some things that they choose to ignore and there's things that they choose not to ignore. You know what I mean?

They do it all the time. Right. I really think that what we have to recognize are a couple of things are different about this world now that were not true before. One, I think that these social media platforms are the new town square. We have to just say they are the new town square. So if they are the de facto new town square, then we probably need to regulate speech. Governmentally, we have to regulate free speech in these town square places in the same way that we regulate speech in other town squares, right? Because so the Nazis can have a page. I think that that's got to be, I think we have to say like, because your other option is

then we continue to allow private companies, no matter how big and no matter how influential, to have complete discretion without any oversight. I think, go ahead. And that strikes me as that's not working. I think we already know

that that's not working right now. I want to point something out here. We know that Mark Zuckerberg lied to us. We know. It is a fact. It is a 100% certainty fact that he lied to us, right? He knew about this stuff. Stamos has come out and said, I told them about this stuff in early 2016.

He said a few days before the election or a few days after the election, I don't remember which. This is crazy. That is crazy and it's not happening. That is 100% a lie. Yes. I don't want to trust him or his company

to decide what's true. Right. And that's what we're going to have to do if we decide to say, okay, Facebook, we're going to let you crack down on what's true and what's not. We're going to allow you to get to filter our news for us and say this is fake news and will not be reached. This is not fake news and will be reached because I'll be perfectly frank.

I don't want a liberal bubble that is Facebook. But make no mistake that if there is no regulation about this, then all of this is entirely at the discretion of private corporations whose primary investment requirement is to keep you engaged, and disinformation will keep you engaged, divisiveness will keep you engaged. Divisiveness will keep you engaged. We know that that's true. Yeah. It's been studied. It's not a guess.

Like, we know it's true. Sure. Their financial incentive is to lie to you. And we cannot hold them accountable because they are not accountable to you yet. They are only accountable to their bottom line. They're a private company. We don't have any reach into them. They don't owe you shit yet.

They don't owe you anything. Yeah. So I think we need to decide, like, they are the new town square. Yeah. That's just, and then I think we need to treat them like a public utility. So in many- Break them up? Well, no, I mean, maybe.

I don't think so. But I think that, like, I mean, because you're looking at, right now we're looking at antitrust. If you're talking about antitrust stuff, Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, these are trillion dollar companies. At least two of them are. Trillion dollar companies. The U.S. budget is $3.8 trillion. These are trillion dollar companies, right? I just named two. Facebook and Google are both in the hundreds of billion dollar range.

I don't know that they've reached a trillion dollars yet, but we're talking about billions, many billions, hundreds of billions of dollar companies. Yeah. So, you know, that's bigger than I think the robber barons were. break them up in the same way that you do trust busting. Maybe you do. I don't know. I do know that like, I do know that these need to be thought of as a, I think we need to create a new category is what I'm saying is that a new category of public utility, a speech-based public utility should be created the same way. Like we have a gas company and a phone companies are public utilities, but they're private companies. I buy my electricity from Commonwealth Edison. Other people buy it from Exelon. Other people buy it from, so they're private companies. I buy my electricity from Commonwealth Edison. Other people buy it from Exelon. Other people buy it from... So they're private companies, but they're public utilities. Yeah.

So there is a... And I think that what we have now is we have these giant social media platforms like Twitter and like Facebook, and they're big enough where we should say this is a public utility related to free speech. And we need to have some rules and laws and there needs to be some hooks and some transparency into how these companies operate because their impact is so huge. Their impact, if you can't engage it, is massive. And their impact, if you do engage it, is massive. And it should strike anybody when you say like Facebook is a company worth, you know, many billions of dollars. Oh, but isn't it? It's free.

How are you worth billions of dollars if it's free? How's Google worth billions of dollars? Because I'm giving you something. Yeah. I'm giving you something of tremendous value. At least, at least with Apple and Amazon, you know, you're buying something. Exactly. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, at least with those companies, you know, you're buying something. Exactly. You know what I mean? At least with those companies, you know you're paying for something. There's no transparency to what you're paying for. The other two are advertising companies. Make no mistake. Facebook and Google are advertising companies that happen to have a service that you like. But they are advertising companies, bottom line. And so I think we need to say, okay, if we are going to decide that these things are

important, and I think we would agree that these are important. I was reading a little bit to prepare for this. The average user that has the Facebook app installed, the average user checks Facebook 14 times a day. That's the average number of times. Most people check Facebook within the first 10 minutes of waking up. Wow. Most people are engaged on Facebook between six and eight minutes per check. If you're on Facebook 14 times, times six minutes, and you're awake for 16 hours, you're spending about 12% or one eighth of your waking life on Facebook. You can't pretend it's not important. It's one of the most important things you do

because you engage in it one-eighth of your waking life if you are the average user. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a massively important, massively powerful tool that we have no transparency into. We have no oversight and regulation of at all. You know, it's interesting because I was thinking while you were talking,

we know when we walk in the supermarket that the weekly world news is garbage. Right. We know that the sun is garbage. We know, and that's the sun in the States, which is a tabloid. Right. We know the Enirer is probably going

to be garbage, right? We know it's not real or it's fake or it's exploited or it's, it's just, it's blown up. It's, it's, you know, as they were talking to one of these documentaries, there's a kernel of truth, but there's no real truth, but we ignore it or we buy it, but we buy it for sort of a guilty pleasure. It's not a, it's not a thing I'm going to get my information on. Certainly not the Weekly World News, which I think is a parody newspaper anyway. It's gone now, by the way.

I looked it up. Oh, really? I didn't realize. I know. Weekly World News for many years was a bad boy type of thing. I loved it. I have an entire book, or at least used to have an entire book,

that was just Weekly World News covers. Oh, it's amazing. And you'd scroll through it and just see all the Weekly World News stuff on there. It was, it was funny. It was hilarious. They had a goofy, um, you know, goofy stories or, you know, 10,000 pound person or whatever. He was assassinated by UFOs and stuff like that. It was hilarious, but you knew it was garbage. You knew it was garbage. How do we get to this next level of human understanding where I don't have to tell

anybody if they walk into the supermarket that it's garbage right now, but we just know intuitively that it is garbage, right? I don't have to be studious. I don't have to be intelligent. I don't have to fact check to know that when I pick up those things, it's not, it's just junk. How do we get there now with what we have in technology? How do we get there with that sort of, like with news sites, with, how do we get there? I was thinking about that.

And I think it's easier. I think that there are real technological solutions that are not actually that difficult to put in a place. So if you really gave a shit about spreading fake news, right? The first time anybody, the first time a link gets shared on Facebook, let's say, because we're talking about

on Facebook, it should have to go through an approval process, right? And you could do that much simpler than it sounds like, right? Because you could say you could whitelist anything from your major, from WAPO, from Fox News, from MS. You could whitelist all the big ones immediately, right? So if address equals whitelist, then it just gets shared. And every share, after the first verified source, every share is whitelisted subsequent, right? So that means that it's not like, oh my God, every time I want to share a story, I can't share the story because very likely you're not the first person to find it, right? So you could create a system where anytime something, not from a whitelist source, any

source could apply to Facebook to be whitelisted, right? So, okay, I'm a legitimate news source. I want to be whitelisted. I go to Facebook. I apply to be whitelisted. There's a transparent program, a series of metrics that Facebook applies to say, yes, this is a legitimate news source. Not just a blog or a whitelisted media

outlet. Right. If I want to share something and I think Facebook should identify a very clear banner style with a different color, news. Entertainment will get a different color and a different moniker. So if I want to share my blog about my fucking kids,

I just don't list it as news, right? Now, anybody who's looking at their Facebook feed and they're scrolling through would get a big visual cue. That's news, that's bullshit. That's news, that's bullshit. It would not be technologically that difficult to put those systems into place. It just wouldn't. But they don't, like, there's no incentive to put that in place.

The financial incentive is the opposite. It's a disincentive. Right. They want to make sure you're in front of it, and they prefer this sort of thing. That's the thing. That's the interesting thing about this is that they want your eyes in front of it. And the more divisive it is, the more fake news is out there, the more chance they have of having you in front of. Because this isn't a complicated problem to solve. It's just not.

They pretend it's complicated, but it's not a complicated problem to solve because you can come up like, I'm just some fucking guy. You can come up with good solutions to this in the better part of an afternoon, which will then take time to build. Yeah, you have to build it. And you also have to hire for it too, right? Because there's going to have to be a slew of people that have this entire day just spend like, what the fuck is science blog slash this slash this? What the fuck is that? That's not news, blah.

But you could also just rely on the whitelist only. You know what I mean? So you just like, there is no approval process except for getting yourself whitelisted. That's the only approval process, period. There's not like individual instances. There is no interest in fixing this problem. Right.

It is more financially valuable to not fix this problem, but to put out a commercial that says, hey, we're going to show you more baby pictures. Yeah. a commercial that says, hey, we're going to show you more baby pictures. But the reality is like, if I look at a baby picture and I fucking hearty face it or whatever, and then I say, oh, your baby's so cute, I'm very unlikely to ever go back to that picture 23 times

because I'm engaged in an argument about Hillary's fucking email. About how cute this baby is. Right. I mean, you might be engaged in that argument. Your baby's ugly! I do that on everybody's baby, though. I'm just like, your baby's super ugly. Why do you put this shit on Facebook? Show me a cat. Right. Because I remember, like, when I used to that on everybody's baby, though. I'm just like, your baby's super ugly. Why do you put this shit on Facebook? Show me a cat. Right.

Because I remember, like, when I used to play on Facebook, like, I would get into arguments sometimes. And then I would get, like, I would get, like, You'd get hot. I would get fucking hot about it. Yeah.

And I'd spend a huge chunk of time back and forth on that shit. I remember the first time I ever got into an argument on the internet, I was in college. I get into an argument on the internet and I was like, I was, I was palpitating. I was hot. I was all the things that happen in person was happening online. I was typing. I was like, oh my gosh, this guy's such an idiot. What a fucking fool you are. And I, for years would go back to the site, argue with this guy. I remember arguing about evolution was a main thing I was

arguing about. And I would argue with this guy and I remember arguing about evolution was a main thing I was arguing about. And I would argue with this guy and I'm just like, you're a fucking idiot. Like, oh my gosh. And the arguments would get heated and we'd get shitty with each other. And I just saw, you know, cause initially my argumentation style was very simple.

Like, let's talk about it. Let's figure it out, blah, blah, blah. But I was getting pushback. Exactly, yeah. The rhetoric started getting put and it was snarky and shitty. And then I was like, oh, blah. But I was getting pushback. Exactly, yeah. The rhetoric started getting put and it was snarky and shitty. And then I was like, oh, fuck you. Like, oh, well, fuck me, fuck you. Yeah, right. And there's

this level of anger and I was upset and I wanted to come back and like you say, check it six times a day to make sure because back then you didn't get notifications. You'd have to go there and be like, well, I want to go back to that Bell bulletin board and see if that guy said anything.

Fuck that guy. I'm going to tell that guy he's wrong again. I'll keep telling him that somebody's wrong on the internet. I need to do something about it. You know?

And I did. I remember arguing about it. And I know you've been in arguments. Oh, yeah. I used to like, I used to joke like, I had this terrible job.

I hate it. And I would have a bad day at work. I'm like, I'm going to go find someone to fight with. I would just go find somebody and I would just fight with them online. Cause it was a fun thing to do,

to go argue and bitch online. Like, it was just a, it was a way to vent. Sure. Sure. It was a way to just vent and be like, I'm going to go be right about something.

Cause I was wrong all day. I hated the way that felt. You know, I'm real right about this. I bet somebody doesn't think so. Do you remember what I said? Oh, man. You would say controversial shit that you knew

would draw people out. Right. Yeah. And then she'd be like, I can fight this all day. Yeah. I can roll with this all day. This is my day now. Yep. This is what I'm going to do. This is my day now. You know, it's interesting too because like, when I go to bed, I'll take my iPad in to watch things on occasion, Netflix on occasion

once in a while my wife will be like hey let's look at cute animals she'll say let's look at cute animals and so there's a page RR on Reddit or whatever and we'll scroll through

cute animals there's nothing that can put me asleep faster than scrolling through cute animals right like fucking cute cat being like

oh look at how coy that cat is that's super cute you know that's not going to keep me engaged right I won't go back day after day, after day, after day, after day to go see those because it literally puts me to sleep, right? I won't go back day after day. I won't do that, but I will like check my, you know, check the politics subreddit and go back there a bunch of times during that day, because I want to find out about this new story that developed.

What about the Jim Acosta thing? How's that turning out? What about this Ivanka email thing? How's that turning out? What about this other piece where he says he doesn't even want to listen to the Koshaghi or whatever that guy's name is? They don't want to listen to that tape because it's a suffering tape. What about that?

Like, how does it? And what do the people on Reddit think about that? I want to go into the comic section. I want to read about it. Because it's not only an echo chamber, right? Which I, which we do retreat into period.

It's just something we do. I try to break out of that, but I definitely retreat into my echo chambers. I think just as much as other people do, but you know, there's also that feeling of there's a little bit of, you know, it's,

it's the drama of your life. It's the, you know, like life wouldn't be fun if there wasn't anything to conflict with, right? Right. If heaven was a real thing, heaven would be fucking boring

because you're constantly traveling to the most beautiful place on earth, period. And you're staying there for an infinite amount of time. There's no conflict in your life. Life would be boring. Right. And so we seek those conflicts out when they're not having them in a personal life,

just like you just explained you did after a long, hard day at work. Just like you just explained you did after your, after a long, hard day at work. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's just,

I think I don't, I mean, I want to be very clear. Like these things aren't going away and human nature is not likely to change. So if we know human nature is not likely to change and we know that these social media systems are going to continue to evolve and they're continuing to get, you know, more sophisticated, which there's no reason to believe otherwise.

The thing we have to do socially, culturally, we have to figure out now, okay, well, we know some things we didn't know. And that's okay. Yeah. It's okay. We know some things we didn't know in 2014 and in 2004 when this was invented,

in 2016 even. So knowing this, what do we do now? Yeah. What do we do now? We have a responsibility now to reconsider the way that we look at these media platforms. I think we need to consider the media companies the same way we consider television stations, which are highly regulated. Sure.

FCC, right? Yeah. We need somebody that says, okay, I am responsible. Right. Yeah. We need we need somebody that says, OK, I am responsible because right now what we have is we have nobody responsible for any of this. Two point two billion people on Facebook. And the only guy who's in charge is some guy who built this in his dorm room and is financially incented to lie to you about the Russians influencing our elections. Sure. Those are all true things. Sure. You know, what's interesting too is we watched a documentary about sort of how the Russians did this, right? How the Russians sort of, what they did. And I know that there's going to be pushback because we get it all the time.

We feel like, oh my gosh, Russia, are you kidding me? But, you know, there's things that are easily documented. I mean, just read the Times article. Yeah. Just read the Times. You know, don't believe me. Go fact check this yourself. And I think that should be sort of the,

I think that should be the message of this entire thing, which is don't believe everything you see on the internet. Fact check that shit, man. We talked about this a little bit while we were watching the documentary. You know, I, every time,

and I know I'm not, I'm not a, I'm not an average media consumer, right? I know that. Every time I see something, memes, they were saying one of the things, one of the throwaway lines in this was, you don't fact check a meme. I immediately paused the documentary and said, I do. Like, I genuinely do. If I see something flash across my screen, that's a meme about something. And it looks like, you know, if it's something I know is true, it's true. And that happens a lot. I think I'm a pretty well-rounded person when it comes to information that I gather. And I feel like I'm the kind of guy who studies news a lot. So I am informed on a lot of this stuff that some people might not be.

So I'll see something, I'll be like, oh, I know that's true because I read a story about it. I read an article about it. I've already been informed by a good news source. So I understand that it's true. But then some things will come across and be like, is that true? And then I'll fact check it. If something comes across that I know that I haven't read before, I will do my due diligence to fact check it. I might not even be sharing it, right? I might not even be commenting on it. I just want to know whether or not that thing is a true thing. I know that I'm not, I'm not the person who is the standard, right? I know there's a lot of people out there that don't do that. And the guy's right when he says, when he's saying you don't, what he's saying is the common person doesn't. That's, that's, it's shorthand for that. But sometimes the

insidiousness of this is that they put in some important, really true information. Like they said, 80% of the story is true and copied. And then 20% isn't. And if you listen to that daily podcast, that's what they did.

They added their own spin on these stories. And the spin was the harsh, harsh headline, tagline, viral line that's going to get you hooked. But they're forgetting that the content of the story isn't really as... Yeah, and that's a common thing across a lot of news media. And we talk about that a lot on this show, that that headline doesn't match what's in this article.

And you can do all of that, too. Keep in mind, too, that you can do all of that message changing through omission. Yes. So you can take a story and just omit. Absolutely. You know, there was a great example from the documentary we watched, the NBC documentary we watched, where the moderator of the 2016 debates. Fox News guy. Yeah.

Asked Hillary Clinton a question about an email. And he asked in such a way that he excluded the back half of her sentence. So she had said something in an email about how she wants open trade and open borders. And the rest of that sentence was with respect to energy. He excluded the second half of the sentence. Absolutely. So is it true that Hillary said she wants open trade and open borders? It's true that those are all words she said in that order. But if you omit the back half that contextualizes that sentence, you have changed the message. that sentence, you have changed the message. So you can have a story which is, in fact,

technically full of true things, but which message has been changed. And that is literally a disinformation technique which is and has been employed and is being employed aggressively in order to create divisiveness amongst us. This is something that is in the playbook. It's part of how we get people worked up about things that didn't fucking happen. You know, it was interesting the other day, I was listening to a politics podcast and there's a right wing guy on there. And somebody had said something about the voter suppression in Georgia. And when they said the thing about the Georgia, the thing about voter suppression in Georgia, Ivan had a chance to go fact check the things he said, but his response was,

well, a lot of that stuff had to do with the counties, had nothing to do with Brian Kemp and a lot of things. And he started naming off all these things that had to do with counties. Like, you know, maybe 50 people were gonna vote there, and they were planning on closing down the voting center and things like that. But one thing he steered clear of by omission was when Kemp was closing down voter registration things and also holding people on voter registration and putting in sort of these weird draconian voter registration laws that excluded tons of people who were just registered, you know, things like that.

And he didn't include that stuff. And he made it seem like Brian Kemp's hands were completely washed clean. Right. Oh, he's not yet. But if all you have to do is just omit the tiniest bit of information and suddenly it looks like, well, maybe it's not Brian Kemp's fault at all. Maybe it was all about the counties. Maybe it was all about the way in which the state handled it. And he had no control as the secretary of state in that particular election over a dozen little tiny things that happened during an election. But when you start talking about the big picture, no, he still had a lot of control over the election. You just omitted it. Yeah. And one of the things that like that social media is really good at doing is making it seem like a story because of repetition.

I mean, you talked to us before. Because it's repeated a lot, it makes it seem like it's more true. That's something that's part of how we as people process information. If I get a piece of information once, maybe, if I get it 12 times and it all has the same basic message, it seems more real, even though the reality of that message may not have changed. And it is a actual tactic by the Russian disinformation campaign to do that by changing the frequency and changing the balance of what the audience sees. So if they see that more often, that changes your perception of reality. You think that's what the world looks like. It was funny because one of the things Zuckerberg said when he was denying that any of this happened is he said, people vote based on their lived experience. And that's a funny thing for him to have said, because what it does

is it seems to deny that Facebook is part of your lived experience. But it is part of your lived experience. It accounts for a huge part of how people interact and behave. It's his own company. It's a hand wave. He's hand waving off his responsibility. And I want to talk about that a little bit too, because that's something that people do erroneously. It is always a mistake, always, always a mistake to say, it's just Twitter. It's just Facebook. It's just online. It's just online. As if that minimizes the impact, the emotional impact,

the social impact, and the intellectual impact of that message. Look at how much bullying gets, just gets washed under the rug because it's just online. But you know, like, if you doubt that for a second, look at the money.

Yeah. If all of this was unimportant, companies couldn't make billions of dollars. Sure. They can only make billions of dollars because it's important enough to change your behavior to get you to move your money around. Yeah. So if you ever doubt whether that's true or not, just look and say, hey, that's free and it makes billions of dollars. How?

Oh, it must actually be important. People must be emotionally invested. So this idea that you can brush off an interaction because it just happened on Facebook is bullshit. Zuckerberg tried to do the same thing about his own company as if it's not part of our lived experience. Oh, but we're bringing people together. Oh, our message is to bring people together. You're all together. Kumbaya. This makes people happier. Oh, but it's not part of your lived experience. Wait, which is true? Which is true? They can't both be true.

You can't collect both of those things in the same reality. And we know that you follow the money. That's following behavior. It's true. This is part of our lives now. We have to recognize that like all of the onus right now is on you. Because it's one thing for me to say like, I think we need to have all these regulations.

I think we do. I think we need to treat these like a public utility. I think we do. I need to create a new space, public space for these things to exist. I think what they need is all of the onus is on you right now.

Yeah, well, and I don't think that, I don't think that I want to push away any of my personal responsibility because I do want to be responsible for myself. And so I absolutely will check my security settings. I absolutely will do that. But I will say they should

make it a lot easier to do that. Yeah. They should have a big, big fucking button in the corner. It's like, turn that shit off, period. And it shouldn't be listing every tiny little thing that I want to say yes or no to.

It should, you know, turn it off or turn it on. You want the bells and whistles of Facebook. You're going to have to have it on. But if you don't want that and you just want to look at baby pictures, well, you know, turn that fucking thing off. You know, stop them from collecting a lot of that stuff. Make it easier to navigate for the average person to try to figure it out.

Like there are some, I don't know if you've ever seen these Tom, but sometimes they'll post some really weird esoteric fucking here's how you do it. It's like fucking how to get 30 guys on Contra. Like it's fucking crazy. It's's like what do i have to do i have to go through like four different menus to dig myself down so that i won't be targeted by some weird crazy shit that i never wanted to be targeted by but you have to like you have to dig in there no nobody's gonna know that just organically there was a guy i was watching a documentary recently and by by the way, I'm not going to post the link to it, but another great documentary, because this is all over the news right now.

Well, another great documentary happens to be one that what PBS did, Frontline did. It's a two-part documentary. You can watch it on Amazon Prime. It's two-parter on Facebook. Excellent documentary, even more in-depth than anything we covered on this show. Really excellent stuff.

But, you know, they talk about this guy who's in, he's in one of those overseas countries, I don't know where, but they have different privacy laws there. And so he asks for his data on Facebook and they deliver hundreds of pages to him of all the data that they have on him. They have deleted conversations that he had

with a friend of his that was in a mental asylum. He deleted those conversations and they still have them. Of course they do. They have them because they're not deleted from your view. Yeah. It's like, yeah. What were you crapping? Yeah. It's not, it's like, yeah, yeah. You know, like, yeah, I can get away with it with the people I know, you know, those people that don't have access to the backend, but the people that have access to the backend have everything. Like this is is part of the thing, too, is remember, you didn't pay for it. Yeah. So you don't have any consumer rights. Sure.

Because you didn't pay for it. There's a reason Facebook is free. Yeah. As long as Facebook is free, no matter what happens, you don't suffer any monetary damages, which means you can't join the other 50 million people whose data was collected against their will and have a class action lawsuit. You can't do that because you can't prove any financial damages.

You don't pay for it for a reason. They don't want you to pay up front because then you're a consumer with consumer rights. You don't have consumer rights when you get something for free. So I deleted the conversation. No, you didn't. You deleted your ability to view the conversation.

That's all you got rid of. All you did was curate your looking the way you get to see it. Facebook already has it. And that's okay because you gave it to them for free. You're using their platform. Stop. Stop. And that's a solution. That's a solution.

Make it cost something. But they don't want to make it cost something. Well, you had a solution. You said one of the things we're watching this documentary and you said, well, what, nobody's even mentioned this, but why don't people just not use Facebook? Right? Like that's a solution. It absolutely is a solution. It's absolutely a solution to turn that, turn the notifications off on your phone. It's absolutely, absolutely a solution to limit your Facebook time to a certain portion of the day that that's the only time that you check it.

It's absolutely a solution to delete the app off of your phone or to make it so that your browser doesn't remember that site and you have to type it in every time to log off every time. So you have to type in your password every time. There's plenty of hacks, life hacks

that you can use to make Facebook. It's funny because all the life hacks are just, don't use it. Don't use it. Don't buy it as easy. Like don't make it as easy as possible. Right. Don't. It's so funny. You know, yeah, it's like it's no longer there for you to just mindlessly while away the hours on. It's now something that you actively have to engage in and you might not do it. You might be like, well, fuck, I don't feel like logging in. Right. I don't feel like I do that all the time, man. Constantly do that.

I'm like, yeah, maybe should I check? But no, I don't feel like logging in. All right. I'm doing something else now. The end. You know, it's so funny because like I will share this one personal experience. And it doesn't even have to go on the show. But like I've I've I've stopped using Facebook for several months.

So I haven't used Facebook in any substantial way since July or August. I haven't. I posted a few things. I took them down pretty much immediately. I don't miss any, like after a very short period of time, you don't miss anything for it. I look once a day at my wife's Facebook because it matters to her that I look at it.

And then I don't look at anything else. So I don't bother to look at anything else. I don't look at my notifications and I don't read my, and like your life goes on just the same, like nothing changes. Yeah. Like for, for most people, you know, sure. It's not, it doesn't have to be a big part of your life unless you want it to. But I think no matter how it is a part of your life, however, you decide to interact with it. And I don't, I don't recommend the way that I do it. Like I'm not saying that that's not necessarily for everybody.

Right. But what I am saying is have a thoughtful. This is something that we do need to be thoughtful about how we engage. It's like eating meat. Whatever your decision is on eating meat, don't do it just because this is what you've always done. Have a real plan because it's important enough. It's significant enough in your life that you should have some thought given

to how you want it to be a part of your life, what role it should have, like how important should this be? And then act on that so that how important it should be is how important it becomes. You know what I mean? There's a difference difference. Like be thoughtful, like anything else, be thoughtful about it. Yeah. It's, it's, uh, you know, I know that I don't use Facebook in the

same way that I did maybe a year ago. Um, and I don't use it specifically because I don't find, I don't find a ton of value in it. Like I don't. I like to interact with certain people on Facebook and I will check Facebook and check certain pages and I will look at my notifications and see who tagged me and what. But for the most part, there's a lot of things I just don't want to engage on Facebook

and I'll scroll right past them. There is a hobby that I try to keep up with on Facebook and so I will check it for that because I'm part of this hobby and it's something that I do and it's something that I want to keep track of. And so I will use it for those types of things. I will see what I missed, you know, this weekend and things like that. So I'll play, I'll play along there. But I, I definitely, we had a conversation a while back about how many times you check your phone because of the notifications. And I realized I was checking

my phone a lot because there would be a notification on there. I'd be like, oh, what, what happened on Facebook? So-and-so tagged me on something. And so I turned off all those notifications, Twitter and Facebook. I don't get them anymore. I'd never get those notifications. And I find that Twitter, I check every third day, every fourth day I'll check too, because I don't have any reason to be on Twitter. And then I only check it for the show and I only have a show account. So I only look at what those mentions are for the show and then I don't pay attention to it otherwise. And then and most of those posts, anything that could post it on social media for us is not done by us. It's done by our employee.

Our employee handles all that stuff. We don't ever really do it. I don't look at a lot of the interactions. You know, our employee may bring our attention to some interactions. But the best way to contact the show has always been an email because that's something that Tom and I actually actively look at. We look at it every time we listen to the voicemails and we look at the emails. That's how we interact with the audience. That's something we've been doing for a long time. I rarely will look at sort of if a show has a

dozen mentions on it, I might not even bother to look at sort of what those mentions are because it's just not as important to me. But I did find that the phone was sort of controlling how I was acting. And I didn't like that. I don't like being manipulated. I know that I'm being manipulated a lot in my daily life. But if there's any way I can control that or curtail that, I will try to curtail that.

I will try to change my behavior. I was curious how it, like turning off the notifications, like it did, it changed your interaction. It changed my consumption. It absolutely does because I'm not being, there's not a ding every time that happens. I have to keep the Facebook messenger notifications open because our group that does the show, the Citation Needed show happens to communicate that way. So I have to keep that open, but I would

prefer that it wasn't on there to be honest, because I would turn off those notifications too. I would be, you know, when I check Facebook, my couple times a day that I check Facebook, I would do it on those times and pay attention to those notifications then. Because you're right. I think that there is something to that. I want to talk a little bit about sort of, you know, another thing that we sort of got away from it. It's this kind of, this is a conversation.

So sometimes that happens. But I want to talk a little bit about how the Russians were doing some of these things. Cause we talked a little sort of touched on a bit and you were saying, you know, one of the things they do is inflate, make it inflate the numbers, make it look like the numbers are different, make it look like some stories have more validity or more people believe in this thing than actually do believe in it. And that's something that people don't understand. You know, like when I first started hearing about the, the, the, the Russian interference, I started thinking, I was like, well, what did they, they bought ads? Well, I would never see them because I have ad blocks. So why, it doesn't even make any sense. Like, like I didn't think that that would have been

a big change. Like I was initially very skeptical of it and I still don't know what it, what effect it had. So I want our people to understand, I am still skeptical of whether or not it affected anything. Cause I don't know how much it affected anything. And I don't think we ever will know, but I know that there was some effect at, there was some effect and it was coinciding with a lot of things that were happening with the election. So I don't think you can just write it off. But one of the things that I, that I was, I sort of, the reason why I wrote it off was I was like, well, if they post a story that's fake, maybe people will find out if it's fake. If they post an ad that's garbage, people won't really pay attention to it. But some of the stuff that they were doing was really insidious. Commenting,

being just a commenter, having multiple, multiple accounts to go in and comment and like, and to do that sort of thing to make it look like they were a user rather than a provider. And so, you know, they get the, they, they wind up, uh, changing people's minds, not just by providing bad information, but by upvoting and sharing that bad information back to you and finding these conspiracy nuts. We talk about the conspiracy nuts every week, but the Russians have made it, you know, an, uh, a target of theirs to find that stuff that is really crazy. The crazy conspiracy stuff, amplify it just enough.

So it makes it seem like it's actual news and send it back to us, which we can't then distinguish from actual news. Right. Yeah. And like, it's not like, it's not, you go on and it says,

you know, Vladimir, you know, it says, it says, it's Bill, it's Bill and it's Bill Johnson. Right. And that's like, it's not like those fake news Bill. It's Bill Johnson. Right.

And it's not like those fake news sites are.russia.u. Sure. They're.com websites because they just buy space in the American space. They could be living here. They don't even have to be overseas physically. It is insidious as hell. Did you see the New York Times article where it was like, can you spot which one is Russian and which one's not? They had a thing where like you click and it's like, man, it's really hard to tell.

It's really hard to tell. And like if you're doing what I suspect that most people do, which is scrolling casually because you're not thinking about this as your, you know, I think like, I think people are good if they're saying, okay, now I'm going to go look for news. And so now I'm going to behave in this sort of concentrated way. And I have a set of behaviors based on how I'm going to go find my news

and who I get my news from. I think it's different. And that's part of why it's so insidious when it's just like, I'm gonna go on Facebook and I'm gonna see your baby picture. that's so great and then i scroll and like wait what was that fucking thing because when you're not looking for it intentionally then that's like wait what and then you see it again maybe not and you know what i mean like yeah that

that placement is kind of it that's part of what the problem is, is because they're catching you off guard by putting this in spaces where you're not intentionally trying to find it. Sure. Yeah. You know, it's interesting too, another thing that they did was they timed things really well. You know? Right. That's the thing that we can easily pay attention to, right? It's something that we can look at and say, oh, well, that's times really interesting. I should maybe scrutinize that a little more than I should anything else, right? Because of the timing of it is very suspicious. Look at, I want to read off some of the dates that WikiLeaks dropped some things. WikiLeaks

on October 12th of 2016 released million, like the 2000 emails or whatever that Hillary had. Right. So that was a big WikiLeaks drop. But on the 7th, Trump, the Trump tape got released. The insider edition, Trump tape got released.

Access Hollywood. Access. Oh yeah. And the, I write access Hollywood. I apologize. I just don't, I didn't,

I didn't want to impugn in. Sorry. My goodness. For the pedantic correction I'm trying to get in front of. Oh my goodness. Oh man, that would have been rough for us. I'm telling you, one celebrity out there. I believe it was on Current Affairs.

It was on the Maury show. You know, they dropped that pussy tape then, right? So there's some timing things that are happening that are real unfortunate for the Clinton campaign, right? Really unfortunate. And the WikiLeaks, we've talked about this a dozen times on this show, but do yourself a favor.

They have them on WikiLeaks. Go look at those fucking Podesta emails. There's literally nothing in there. Search for all those search terms. They're lying to you when they say those search terms. They're not there. The story is just the fact of the story.

The story is the timing of the story. Yeah, yeah. All they did was create, not all they did, the creation was, look, we need a smoke screen. We need something to other, pay attention. It's the Apple research piece, right? Yeah. It's like, hey, Facebook got in trouble.

What do they do? They hired somebody to make Apple and Google look mad. So now you're mad at kind of everybody and you don't know what to do. And it all seems like poison, so fuck it. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting too. They're talking about another thing that they, that the Russians do is they have a consistency of message over several, several, several tweets. And actually that feels like to me that they would be easier to spot that way.

But what it really does is up the numbers of the person who you like up the, up that it makes that thing more true because there's a consistency of message. Maybe someone's trying to mislead you when they keep saying the same thing over and over and over and over again. You know, you say a lie enough times it'll become true, you know? And, and so it's something to pay attention to. It's something that we, you know, what I think you should walk away from this with is maybe start putting together a toolbox to contend with all of this information that we're getting. Yeah start putting together a toolbox to contend with all of this information that we're getting. Put together a toolbox. Because years ago, I read in Demon

Haunted World, the baloney detection kit. And I've carried that with me throughout my entire life. I've used that from my young life when I found that baloney detection kit. I use that all the time. It's how to spot logical fallacies. It's how to spot people that are trying to trick you It's how to spot scam artists And it tells you all those things Because they're easy to see if you just pay attention If you just use that for a moment Develop one of those for social media

You're a skeptic You're listening to the show, you're a skeptic Be a skeptic out there Don't just post something because you think you want it to be true. Post something because you know it's true. That's important. You don't want to share anything. I always feel so awful. And it's happened a couple of times on the show where we shared something too quick, something that happened that was too quick. And we've said something that's false. And I've always felt awful about it afterwards because I want to make sure that, you know, I'm not giving you, I'm giving you a lot of opinion, but anything that I tell

you that I think is true should be true. I shouldn't, I don't want to lie to anybody. I never want to lie to anybody. So I want to make sure that everything I give is true. So I feel awful when it happens. So develop something like that, carry that with you in life so that you can use that. Because like I say, you know,. Because like I say, it's easy to do. It's easy to fact check these things. It's easy to find these things out. There's plenty of sites out there that will tell you whether or not something is true. That can show you why it's not true, give you sources on why it's not true.

All right, well, that's going to wrap it up. We hope that you like this. Like we say, it's a very big departure. We normally don't do this sort of thing, but it's a very big departure from what we normally do. If you liked it, disliked it, send us a message and let us know what you thought of it. Dissonance.podcast.gmail.com is the best way to get in touch with us. Don't leave a Facebook message. If you left it, you didn't leave it for me.

That's going to wrap it up for this week. We're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed credulity is not a virtue it's fortune cookie cutter mommy issue hypno babylon bullshit couched in scientician double bubble toil and trouble pseudo quasi alternative acupunctuating pressurized stereogram pyramidal free energy healing water downward spiral brain Thank you. aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak, stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands.

Bloody. Evidential. Conclusive. Doubt even this. The opinions and views expressed in this show are that of the hosts only. Our poorly formed and expressed notions do not represent those of our wives, employers, friends, families, or of the local dairy council. you