Offline with Jon Favreau - How the Internet is Radicalizing Young Men

Episode Date: April 23, 2023

Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of Men Who Hate Women and Fix the System, Not Women, joins Offline to shed light on one of the darkest corners of the internet: the manosphere. Made up of tens of thousands of incels, pick up artists, and white supremacists, the manosphere is an online hotbed of misogyny with violent real-world implications. Laura describes how she went undercover to infiltrate these platforms, and what she learned about protecting men and boys from radicalization. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

From such a young age, like literally from one or two in playgroups, you will hear parents say things, obviously not with bad intentions, but you hear people say, you're going to be a heartbreaker, lock up your daughters. First date. They're on their first date, right? Oh, I think someone has a little crush. You know, they'll even like pass over the baby and oh, he likes blondes because he grabs your hair. And I know it's not badly intentioned, but we sexualize these mixed sex friendships to such a degree that kids start to self-segregate by gender in our society from a really young age. And radicalization is massively aided by that. Because if boys don't have close friends who are girls, it's much easier for someone on the internet to convince them all women are like this or like that. Whereas if they're thinking, well, hang on a minute, like my really good mate, such and such isn't like that, you know, that's a really good piece of kind of armor for them to have. So encouraging kids of all genders to have

really good platonic relationships is actually another really powerful thing that parents can do. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of Men Who Hate Women. We've had a lot of good conversations on this show about the Internet's role in fueling all kinds of extremism. But there's one thread through all these conversations that I've wanted to pull on more. The people most driven towards online extremism tend to be men. The last decade of the internet has been marked

by a notable uptick in online misogyny, be it Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson or the incel movement itself. So why is that? What is it about the internet itself that fuels violent misogyny? And what can we do, if anything, to fight back against it?

Those aren't easy questions to answer, but Laura is expertly equipped to help us try. Laura spent the last decade researching and reporting on the rise of what she calls the Manosphere, a vast interconnected online network of incels, men's rights activists, and others who promote misogyny and often encourage violence. In her reporting, Laura has even gone as far as to disguise herself as a man online and infiltrate these communities, an experience she writes about in her 2020 book, Men Who Hate Women. Bates' book is a difficult but important read. She'll frequently quote verbatim posts she saw inside these close communities,

unveiling a sinister worldview where women aren't just less equal than men, but less human. Laura joined me to unpack this worldview. We talked about the manosphere's increasing cultural impact, how these misogynistic trends are infiltrating our politics, and what we can do, especially those of us who are men, to fight this ideology. As always, if you have comments, questions, or episode ideas, please email us at offline at crooked.com. And please stick around after the interview. Max Fisher will be joining me once again to unpack the last minute settlement in the Fox News Dominion case and talk about the death of the blue checkmarks. Here's Laura Bates.

Laura Bates, welcome to Offline. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So we've talked a lot on the show about how the internet has helped fuel racism, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, offline violence. One common thread among the people who get caught up in this online extremism is that they tend to be men. And you've done extensive research and reporting to show that not only is this not an accident, it's increasingly the result of an extreme misogynistic ideology that's all about oppressing women and encouraging and glorifying violence. Can you talk about what led you down this particular rabbit hole? Sure. So I was aware of these communities and this particular form of extremism from really

the beginning of my work in the feminist space, because if you are a woman with a profile, particularly if you're a woman with a, you know, feminist profile, working online, working publicly, these people come to you. So from around a decade ago, when I first launched the Everyday Sexism Project, which is simply a space for people to share experiences of gender inequality, within a couple of weeks, I was receiving perhaps on a bad day day 200 rape threats and death threats in a day and that has stopped in the decades since so an awareness that there were these communities kind of congregating around extremist misogyny and trying to silence women was very much there from the beginning of my work but for a long time there was this kind of belief that we

shouldn't give them the oxygen of publicity. And then what changed for me was that part of my work is going into schools and working with young people about sexual consent, healthy relationships, gender stereotyping, and how it, you know, hurts kids of all genders, and so on. And a few years ago, there was a real shift in the attitudes of the young people I was working with, particularly young men who were coming to sessions with some real misinformation that was quite deeply ingrained. So they were coming out with, you know, feminism is an anti-men conspiracy theory. The gender pay gap is a myth. Me too is a witch hunt. Good men are losing their jobs.

White men are the real oppressed minority these days, and so on. And I really recognized some of the exact kind of fake statistics and the arguments they were using from these online spaces. And at that point, I realized this was a kind of radicalization that was happening very effectively, but almost completely under the radar. At that point, if you talked about incels, you know, when I was researching the book, people asked, is that a kind of battery? Like people just hadn't heard of this at all. And so it meant that actually, I thought at that point, we did need to talk about it because it was reaching kids in a really effective way. And if as a society, we weren't aware of it as a form

of radicalization, then it meant that we weren't able to support young people when they were confronted by it. I want to sort of define the different groups that make up these sort of online communities that you've discovered. I had heard about incels. I'll admit I'd never heard the term manosphere until I read your writing. Can you explain the manosphere for people who might not know? Yes. So this is the name that has been given, not by me, but kind of by researchers to this particular online ecosystem, if you like. And I think what you can say that unites all the different communities within the Manosphere is that they all take as their starting point the idea of taking the red pill, which is an analogy borrowed from The Matrix, that they're kind of seeing the world as it truly is. And what they claim to see is a kind of inversion of oppression. So men are

the real oppressed minority. Women have sexual freedom, economic freedom. Men are increasingly oppressed by feminist gains. But then within that kind of base system, there's then different ideologies that grow from that across a kind of loosely connected network of blogs, websites, forums, members groups, social media platforms, Reddit threads, vlogs, you name it. So within that, you have your incels, who are men who describe themselves as involuntary celibates. They're not having sex and they want to be. They're obsessed with the idea that women owe them sex and that women should be punished and forced to have sex with them. And they really incite offline physical and sexual violence against women. But you also have men going their own way or so-called MGTOWs who think that women

are so dangerous, false rape allegations are so rife that the only solution is for men to cut women out of their lives altogether. You have so-called men's rights activists who kind of have this veneer of public respectability because they claim to be fighting for issues that affect men. But in reality, they are very much focused on fighting against women and feminism. And they really undermine and don't support men with the issues that they're facing because they double down on the kind of stereotypes that we know are hurting men. And then you have pickup artists, which are, again, a kind of related group in terms of kind of seeing women as a kind of sexual prey, objectifying and dehumanizing them. So if incels believe that the sexual marketplace, as they call it, is rigged, they see women as kind of slot machines that will never pay out for them,

then pickup artists think that there is a set formula that you can learn, that anyone can learn, that if you push the right buttons and say exactly the right catchphrases, you can make the machine pay out every time. So it's all based on this kind of dehumanization of women. But from within that, it's then quite a diverse group of communities. And can you talk about how the incel community has evolved over time? Because I read in your writing that it started relatively harmlessly, and then it sort of grew into a much more dangerous community. That's right. So originally, in the kind of early 90s, it was a Canadian woman called Alana who started a very small online community for what she described at the time as in cells with a V in the middle that's now been dropped. And it was a benign,

supportive community for people of any gender who hadn't had luck in finding a relationship to talk about their experiences to support each other. It was a small community and she eventually found a relationship and moved away from that community and then I think some kind of 20 years later she was in a bookstore looking through a magazine when she saw an article about Elliot Roger who had committed a massacre in Santa Barbara, California where he had murdered, I think he murdered six people and injured another 10 in the name of this so-called incel movement. And it was a complete shock to her to see what it had morphed into. So the incel movement today would not include women. They would not accept the idea that women could be involuntarily celibate. But more than that, it is not,

as it's sometimes portrayed, a supportive, kind online community for lonely men that's been misinterpreted and maligned. It is a community that is violently misogynistic, and it isn't supportive of men. It is, you know, men often egging each other on to kill themselves. So it's kind of bad for everyone now. Can you talk a little bit about the scale of the problem and the direction it's been heading? Because I think it's, I'm holding a couple different ideas in my head. You know, you have 2017, it's sort of the Me Too movement. And there's a feeling that maybe things are getting better. And now we're living in like, you got Andrew Tate, and you got Jordan Peterson, and it seems to be getting getting better. And now we're living in like, you know, you got Andrew Tate,

and you got Jordan Peterson, and it seems to be getting much worse. And that's just on the surface. And clearly, your work has been underneath the surface in these sort of online spaces, where it's really this kind of misogyny is running rampant and getting quite dangerous. Yeah, so these spaces have, of course, predated the kind of mainstream iteration of the Me Too movement. But I think we've certainly seen them kind of swell in in-cell forums, for example, have between 10 and 30,000 registered users, which doesn't include the number of people that are, you know, following, interacting, reading them. What we've seen is that in the last 10 years, over 100 people have been murdered or seriously injured by men explicitly acting in the name of these communities. So men like Elliot Roger, but also men like Alec

Manassian, the Toronto van attacker, or of course, most recently here in the UK, Jake Davison, who committed the biggest mass shooting that we've seen in a decade, who was heavily involved in incel websites online. What we've seen in terms of a correlation with Me Too, I would say, is a really cynical and deliberate manipulation of public response and misinformation to try and present Me Too as a threat to men and to capitalize on it as a means of recruitment. And that's often aided by the mainstream media and the way in which it's approached Me Too. So for example, we have had mainstream radio programs, TV programs asking, is Me Too a witch hunt? Are women hysterical? Can men even talk to women, because we're hearing, you know, men like Donald Trump talking about this stuff quite openly. And so that makes it that has facilitated, I would say this radicalization.

Yeah, it seems like there's a broader permission structure granted by people like Trump by some of the media highlighted backlash to Me Too, that then makes it easier to sort of go down these rabbit holes. You went down one of these rabbit holes. You infiltrated some of these online extremist groups by creating a fake identity, a man named Alex. What was Alex like? Like, what kind of things did you have him say to earn the trust of men in these groups? And I'm just really interested in sort of what you experienced, you know, from the top of the funnel, getting until we got down deeper into this. So Alex would have seen himself as a very kind of normal guy. He was in his early 20s, white, university educated. And he had this kind of slight sense of resentment at the idea that a lot of the media

seemed to be calling him privileged, calling him part of a problem when actually, you know, he didn't have a great time with women, he saw himself as kind of struggling a bit financially. And so it was quite appealing to him to kind of look at first at quite surface level, on some of these social media platforms, you know, YouTube, for example, at some of these kind of videos, viral YouTube videos about feminists being taken down, their arguments being obliterated. And then, of course, without me going looking for anything more extreme, the YouTube algorithm would serve up incrementally more extreme content. And then at a certain point, you get directed by somebody in the comments with a link

to say a bodybuilding forum, you know, real men look like this, if you don't want any problems with women anymore, go here. And then from there, you kind of end up with someone who in the comments, there was a 14 year old boy in one of those threads on the bodybuilding forum, who said, there's a girl I kind of like in my class, I'm not quite sure, you know, how to approach her. And the first comment was rape it and a link to a pickup forum. And so it's kind of gradual and it's often presented at first as banter and jokes. And Alex was kind of seeing himself as being ironic originally, you know, it's just banter. None of us really mean this.

And it's this very slippery slope where it's really hard to put your finger on the point where it stops being a joke. It stops being ironic. But by the time it does, you're kind of desensitized. And a lot of the guys I spoke to who had been involved in these communities and weren't anymore, said they were so young, and it started so kind of generically on 4chan or on Reddit. By the time they reached these more extreme corners of the internet, they were so to it it was so desensitized to misogyny to the language that these sites used and that was a language that I had to learn in order to kind of you know get along and assimilate into these environments so you don't use the word woman really ever in these sites for example which are all about women

because you would use words like foid which means means female humanoid, which kind of gives you a sense of how little they see women as human beings. Or you'd be using a term like a roasty, which is a term that they use for women they consider to be too promiscuous. There's a lot of kind of pseudoscientific nonsense. So there's a lot of quite kind of scientific language that's mixed up in there as well. They want to create this idea that this is a really kind of scientific in-depth world view when the reality is of course that it is just based on extreme misogyny it's wild too because on the surface before you for for people who haven't gone down these rabbit holes to these and experienced these more extreme groups the the whole like, oh, this is just a joke thing is pervasive.

Yeah. And so if you haven't spent a lot of time watching people get more and more and more extreme, I can see why it's easier for a lot of people to think, oh, well, yeah, that's a that's a offensive joke. It's tasteless. But it seems like these guys are just a bunch of idiots joking around. I mean, it is a it's also like a microcosm of sort of what, or the best example of this here in the US

is the whole Trump phenomenon, right? Which is like, he's just joking. His people are just joking. Should you take him literally or should you take him seriously? Oh, whatever. He's just a performer. And then suddenly it becomes very real

and very scary pretty fast. Yeah, absolutely. And actually that's why I had some tension with my publishers, where I had to fight quite hard to be allowed to include in the book some of the direct quotes from the forums, because I think they felt it was incredibly hard hitting and that it would have been easier on the reader to kind of paraphrase to hint at what was being said. But it was so important for me that people recognized we're not talking about a few off-color jokes, you know, like no feminist in the world is up in arms, wasting their time trying to stop guys from joking on the internet. That's not what this is.

This was, you know, a school shooting and they were sharing the video and complaining that there wasn't audio because they wanted to hear the girls scream as they died. You know, there was a school shooting during the time I was researching the book and there were rumors going around online that the shooter had been, had apparently asked out a girl at the school and she'd rejected him. And these guys were celebrating this massacre and they were putting online comments like, I hope he raped her first so that she died knowing that the man she rejected had been inside her. It's that level of misogyny. It's that level of vitriol. There was a day when I was researching and I came across a whole website within one of these sites that was just men purely focusing on together kind of fantasizing and competing for the worst ways that they can imagine raping me,

murdering me specifically. They were talking about using pieces of furniture to give me internal injuries. This isn't, you know, a few off-color jokes. And these guys were actively and explicitly saying when there was a shooting, this is how you should have done it differently. This is how you could get a higher body count. This is how he could have got more women in the victims. This is what you should do if you're going to do this next. And you have guys on these sites saying things like, you know, I'm giving up like, you know, life is so awful. And the response from other guys is don't waste it by just taking your own life, take some voids down with you. You know, they are actively inciting offline attacks and massacres. And I think that's what people don't understand. Just ask you a personal question. Like how

difficult was it for you to constantly inhabit this world for the work that you do? Like, were you able to, are you able to fully disconnect when you step away? I did find it really hard. It was a kind of very intense kind of 18 months to two years when I was really in it every day. There were days when I had to just turn off my laptop and cry. There were days when I felt really, it was very, very bleak. And what was hard was that after the book came out, and after the research was finished, it was I wasn't able to then just kind of step away from it, because then the threat started. And the guys in the forums where I'd been undercover were posting messages in threads

that I'd been in saying, which one of you bleep is Laura Bates with like pictures of machetes and guns. And the police then came and looked at a lot of the threats and said that they were credible and came and installed panic alarms in my home and all sorts of things so it follows you I think there is a real toll to doing this work both mentally because there are things that you've kind of seen that you can't unsee but also in terms of physical threats because there are members of these groups who have for example in the case of a judge who was involved in a legal case with someone who had been a member of these groups, and they took against her, decided that she was a feminist and she was deliberately slowing down

the case, and they disguised themselves as UPS drivers and turned up at her house and opened fire and murdered her husband and seriously injured her son. So you do think about it and it does follow you and it does come at a cost. You write in your book, Men Who Hate Women, quote, it doesn't all look like terrorism, murder, violence, or even misogyny on the surface. What does it look like on the surface? We talked a bit about sort of the, oh, this is just a joke. How else does it sort of manifest itself on the surface level? So it's a continuum and it's very deliberately a continuum. So the guys who kind of run these websites and who are active in this sphere, they talk

about what they describe in their own words as adding cherry flavor to children's medicine. And what they mean by that is targeting boys as young as 10, not using websites that say you're an incel and you hate women, but using memes, using GIFs, using cultural touch points, using kind of viral Instagram images. So it's not kind of a starting point of a 10 year old boy typing in I hate women. It's a starting point that he's on social media and something pops up on his feed, you know, and it's a cartoon that says women deserve equal rights and lefts. Or it's a picture of a woman covered in blood at the bottom of the stairs. And it says now walk it off and get

back to the kitchen. Or it's a picture of a kind of 1950s housewife and of heavily tattooed woman with her head shaved and piercings. And it says 1950s 2020 thanks feminism it's these kind of packages I suppose that disguise misogyny and the starting points of misogyny as jokes and memes and banter and it's really deliberately done so that young people can be consuming this content without necessarily seeing it for what it is so a lot of the kids in school who are regurgitating this content to me wouldn't necessarily have ever heard of men's rights activism or what the word in cell means. And you can see that in the general public as well. So obviously, these guys who are actively paid up members of these websites might be a tiny minority.

But 27% of American men now say that they wouldn't have a one-to-one meeting with a woman in the workplace. So that idea that false allegations are so rife that men's careers are being ruined by them is taken hold really effectively. One fifth of young men in Spain aged between 16 and 21 think that gender-based violence is an ideological invention. Those are pretty big numbers. So the ideology is kind of smuggled downstream in the kind of guise of these jokes and banter and memes and so on. Do the men who become radicalized tend to share certain characteristics? Like I'm trying to figure out, are they more prone to this kind of extreme misogyny because of existing violent and antisocial tendencies? Or are there plenty of fairly well-adjusted men who get sucked into?

Because hearing it, it's so like it's so foreign to me, like I can't even get my mind to even go towards any of those places. And I'm just like, I wonder how much is the person and how much is sort of the the the route to extremism that you see online, which I know is the question that we ask for all of these radicalization tendencies. It's very, very varied. And that's really important to say it's not a monolithic group. People kind of often sort of think that they can simplify it. People say these are mainly guys who are out of work or this or that. The reality is that there are some men who feel a sense of kind of a grieved entitlement, that they feel that they're entitled to something that they've been denied. And that might be around sex.

It might be around the idea that women are taking their jobs. But where we can look at demographics, and to be honest with you, there isn't much data, nobody can say for sure. But what we can see is that there is a significant sort of group within this community who are white, college-educated young men. So the idea that these are kind of, you know, really kind of down and out guys who are desperate and really down on their luck and vulnerable doesn't tally up. Where men have been

unmasked as having been members of these community, there are examples of guys who, for example, one who was running one of these websites where he was online writing about how rape isn't all bad, because at least the rapist enjoys it and all women have a rape fantasy. Offline, he was a serving Republican politician. We've got members, MPs in the UK, members of our government who are actively kind of speaking at men's rights conferences. You've got guys being unmasked as trolls who've sent thousands of hugely misogynistic, abusive messages to women online, and they're, you know, accountants who coach their kids' football teams. So the idea that it's any one kind of specific type of person or that these guys

are all kind of living under rocks with no offline influence definitely doesn't stack up i want to ask you about how these incel communities and the broader manosphere are affecting women, especially young women who now live most of their lives online. We talked about some of the more extreme examples of how it can affect women, but like, what's it like to be a teenage girl in this online era? I think it's incredibly difficult. And I think we just don't necessarily recognize it because we're living in a unique moment that has never happened before in history, and will never happen again, that we somehow just never really talk about, which is a moment where a generation of digital natives are being parented and educated by a generation who are not digital natives. And

that's a culture divide that is absolutely massive. So where grownups think of YouTube as the home of, you know, grumpy cat videos and movie trailers, for kids, it's what they consider their primary news source. That's a massive difference in perspective. When you talk about online porn to some parents and carers and teachers, they think you're kind of talking about an online version of the FHM or Playboy centerfolds of their youth. But actually for kids today, the online porn that we know that 60% of them have seen by the age of 14 is showing women being brutalized. It's showing women being raped, being coerced, being humiliated and degraded and hurt.

And so you're going to schools and hearing 13-year-old girls saying, I'm scared to have sex because I know that the woman has to be crying and hurting. I was in a school where they'd had a rape case involving a 14-year-old boy, and a teacher said to me that she had asked him, why didn't you stop when she started crying? And he said, because it's normal for girls to cry during sex, because that's what he'd seen online. So the impact of this is massive, and it's not just anecdotal. Here in the UK, for example, one third of teenage girls say that they experience unwanted sexual touching at school. We know that one rape per day of the school term on average is being reported from inside UK schools to the police in the UK. And so I think what we're seeing is an impact of something that we're not accurately measuring. Because even when somebody actively

commits a massacre in the name of incel ideology, like Alec Manassian in the case of the Toronto van attack, the media doesn't describe it as terrorism or extremism. They are not tried by the justice system as terrorism. So if even in the most extreme cases, we don't make that link, we're definitely not making the link with the potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of teenage girls who are facing harassment or misogyny that might be coming from boys who've been swept up in this movement. We just don't know. Nobody's really talking about it. I do think the point you've made about the generation gap here is so important and something I feel doing this show because like I'm a millennial, right? And so not a digital native, but also young enough to sort of understand how much the online era has taken hold of so many

people's lives. And you feel yourself in sort of this interesting middle ground where you don't quite understand the lives of digital natives, but you also understand that generations older than us totally don't get it. Yes. Yeah. me too. That's the same position that I'm in. So I've been thinking lately about these issues around misogyny as it relates to politics. We've had this growing gender gap in the U.S. where more women keep voting for Democrats, more men keep voting for Republicans. And for a while, the biggest demographic the Democrats kept losing was white men without a college degree. So that's been for a while. But over the last few elections, Republicans have started to gain some support among Latinos, even some

black voters, even some younger voters, but almost entirely among men in those demographic groups. And some of these young men might be like, you know, Barstool sports fans, and others might be listening to Joe Rogan, and then there's some who are Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson fans. And I wonder what you think can be done to sort of prevent these men from falling even further down the rabbit hole, especially some of these young men. Well, I think that one thing we have to say in that context is recognizing the links between these particular misogynistic ideologies and white supremacy and the far right. Because what we see is that members of those groups of the far right, white supremacists, they explicitly

see online misogyny as a gateway drug. They see these communities as a kind of gateway to pulling people further down the road to white supremacy. And it isn't really possible to disentangle those two things because within incel communities, they are explicitly and extremely racist. They are not just furious that women aren't having sex with them. They are particularly furious about women in mixed race relationships, but also foundational in the beliefs of white supremacist is an inherent misogyny, right? The obsession with birth rates, with the idea of white women as a vulnerable, dehumanized commodity to be plundered, the ideas around forcible sterilization of women of color. So I think part of what we're seeing there is also about racism. And that's also

partly why we're seeing this significant number of white women voting for men like Trump as well. So it's partly that there is a racial component here that we have to recognize. But it's also, I think, about trying to reach people before this point. We know from all the research there is that de-radicalization is difficult. It's expensive, it's time consuming, but prevention is much better. It's much easier, it's cheaper, it's more effective. So I think the answer to this is conversations from a much younger age. It's too late to talk to kids about this stuff at 14 or 15. It's too late to try and unpick the

kind of radicalization of figures like Andrew Tate, when they've already preempted it by telling them, you know, the matrix is going to come for you, and they're going to try and persuade you that I'm wrong. It's about, I think, giving young people tools, not just around gender stereotypes, and around these kinds of issues about consent and healthy relationships, but also around internet literacy from a really young age, because so much of this stuff is misinformation. And understandably, they're not necessarily recognizing that, particularly if you're a vulnerable 11 or 12 year old. It's also about providing spaces offline where men can experience what is attractive and appealing in these online groups. So for teenage boys, it is giving them a sense of community, a sense of justice, a sense of a cause, a feeling of kind of brotherhood and comrades, and having kind of shared senses of identity. And all of those things, I think, at one time,

young men would have been able to access in offline spaces like youth groups and community centres. So in the UK, in particular, we've seen those spaces decimated by austerity cuts. So creating spaces where young men are actively supported, given community where their mental health issues are supported and addressed offline, all of these things would also help. Because a lot of the guys in these spaces are vulnerable, you know, they are vulnerable kids. And this is not about attacking those boys, it's about supporting them. Because ultimately, what Andrew Tate is telling them, he exploiting these young kids for his own financial gain, telling them that they need to have a woman choking against the wall and pull out their machete and have their 10 sports cars. That is not ultimately someone with boys best interests at heart. That is not a lifestyle. Those are not relationships that are going to be happy and fulfilling.

So it is also about, you know, compassion and supporting guys as well. Yeah, I know. It's so interesting what you say about sort of the style and approach because, you know, we just talked about how these extremist groups sort of lure men in by basically meeting them where they are, starting with memes that they can recognize, things that are culturally significant to them, jokes, all that kind of stuff, and then sort of lure them in. And I wonder if on the other side, when we're trying to prevent it from happening, we have to have an approach as well. You mentioned

compassion, which I think a lot of people would be like, compassion for these assholes? What are you talking about? But like, we don't want them to fall into that hole. And I wonder how you balance sort of the need to make sure young men understand what is true, what is false, what is misinformation, and also supporting them and showing that kind of compassion. Well, I think we have to differentiate between kind of different groups within these communities. Quite often people want to treat them as if they are all the same. So they tend to be either painted as if they're all evil kind of irredeemable villains

or they're all vulnerable, damaged loners who we should feel sorry for. And the truth is obviously somewhere in between, right? You have got boys who are young, who have specific issues and problems in their lives, who need support, who are being exploited and radicalized by these groups. And you have got men who are exploiting them, who are radicalizing, who are knowing exactly what they're doing, who are saying go out and massacre women. And clearly, those are two groups of people who need to be treated differently. But in terms of how we do that, I think for me, there's a really crucial piece of the puzzle here

that men have to play in boys' lives. Because particularly when some process of radicalization is already underway, if schools are leaving it exclusively to female teachers to talk about this, those are not necessarily the voices that are going to cut through. And it doesn't just have to be parents and teachers, you know, it can be other relatives in boys lives, it can be sporting role models, it might be coaches, it might be, you know, youth workers, there is such an opportunity here, I think, for men to stem this tide of radicalization in the ways in which they interact with and role model towards the younger men in their own lives? Yeah, I mean, look, I have a two-year-old boy and like the most important

things that I want for him are, you know, health, happiness, and learning to treat other people with kindness and respect, especially women. And I'm always thinking about this as I am now a new parent, relatively new parent and parenting Charlie and parenting a young boy in this world. Do you have advice for parents of young boys, fathers of young boys too? Yeah, I mean, I think little and often is really important. I think sometimes people get hung up on the idea that this has to be one huge terrifying conversation that you have when your kid turns 12 or 13 and it's kind of awful for everyone involved. But actually, it's much more, it's not sitting them down and lecturing them. It's finding the small opportunities in their day-to-day life to give them permission to

question and to challenge. So, you know, it's when you're in the toy store and you see that there's a big sign that says girls toys and there's a doll underneath and saying, that's weird. We like to play with dolls don't we you know or hey look you know that's the all of the cleaning products and and it says girls toys but you know dad does the cleaning in our house you know it's it's those little challenges day to day and I think another big piece of advice for parents of kids is not stigmatizing mixed sex friendships. Because from such a young age, like literally from one or two in playgroups, you will hear parents say things, obviously not with bad

intentions. But you hear people say, you're going to be a heartbreaker, lock up your daughter. First date. They're on their first date, right? Oh, I think someone has a little crush. You know, they'll even like pass over the baby and oh, he likes blondes because he grabs your hair. And I know it's not badly intentioned, but we sexualize these mixed sex friendships to such a degree that kids start to self-segregate by gender in our society from a really young age. And radicalization is massively aided by that. Because if boys don't have close friends who are girls, it's much easier for someone on the internet to convince them all women are like this or like that. Whereas if they're thinking, well, hang on

a minute, like my really good mate, such and such isn't like that, you know, that's a really good piece of kind of armor for them to have. So encouraging kids of all genders to have really good platonic relationships is actually another really powerful thing that parents can do. It's so interesting because I, before I had a child, I would have said, oh, well, those, that first date stuff, the like, oh, they must like each other. They're going to get married to me. I would have said that's harmless. What's the problem with that? Now that I have a child, I can, because you realize how quickly kids pick things up, even at this age and how they internalize things and then how they sort of like give it back to you, you know, even at this age, and how they internalize things, and then how they sort

of like, give it back to you, you know, you're like, Oh, wow, you that really made an impression on you. And they are so impressionable at this age, that I really start to think more that like that stuff isn't harmless. Yeah, I think so. And there's so much like that. I mean, the good thing is there are so many opportunities in really small ways to kind of role model this stuff in our own lives. Another great example, I think, is when kids see like older relatives, giving them a choice of how they want to greet them. Like, do you want to do a high five? Or do you want to wave? Or do you want to do a hug? Particularly with girls, rather than teaching them, you have to go and give grandpa or uncle, whatever, a hug, because, you know, that's what

you have to do. And their wishes are more important than your bodily autonomy. So, you know that's what you have to do and their wishes are more important than your bodily autonomy so you know when we talk about teaching kids about consent and stuff people kind of panic and go you can't talk to two-year-olds about sex but when we teach kids of two that they don't hit other kids nobody goes oh my god you can't talk to them about violence because we do it in an age-appropriate way of course so no you're not going to talk to them about sex but you're going to say this is your body and you get to choose what happens to your body. And we respect other people's bodies and they get to make choices about their bodies. And, you know, it's that simple. One common thread in so many of these conversations about online extremism,

and you brought this up earlier, is sort of a lot of this stems from social isolation that is a hallmark of the extremely online era. And these people who feel isolated for whatever reason then fall down these rabbit holes and find these communities. And so many of the solutions I've heard seem like they are about trying to get people into other communities that are healthier communities. And I wonder how we build those healthier communities. And it probably has to happen a lot online because so many people are living online now. From a young age, how do we build these healthy communities to draw people in to places where they're building relationships that aren't going to let them fall down these rabbit holes? That's such a great question.

I think part of it is about not being kind of preachy and po-faced. So I think part of the reason why the right has been so successful in the far right in this space is because they have been able to appropriate these forms of entertainment and of kind of lightheartedness online in a way that the left hasn't really. So it's partly about playing them at their own game it's about using kind of memes and graphics and viral videos but I think it's also a question for men to answer you know for guys to be creating these communities and to be supporting younger men into them is really important because it isn't a question that women can kind of wade in and answer and dictate it is for men to kind of decide what

those new communities are going to look like. And that's really exciting kind of positive possibility, I think. Yeah. Laura Bates, thank you so much for joining Offline. Everyone should check out your books, multiple books now that you've written about this. It is a difficult subject to read about and you've done some really difficult work, but I think it's incredibly important and I'm really glad that you've done this. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Hey, everyone. Stick around after these quick ads. I'll be talking to Max Fisher about the last minute Fox News Dominion settlement and what it's like to lose our blue check marks. All right, we're back. And before we go, Max Fisher is back with us again. Hey, Max.

Hey, pal. Two news items from this week we should talk about. First, we have been denied the media trial of the century. We have. Because Fox News settled their defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million. Dan and I talked on Pod Save America this week about how it may have been foolish to expect a small company to save democracy. It was some of the commentary that I hadn't realized that expectations had gotten where they were. But I think some people expected the marshal of the Supreme Court to come out and pull Tucker Carlson from the air.

Real Bob Mueller vibes. Real Bob Mueller vibes. Real Bob Mueller vibes around this. You've been covering this case for Crooked. What do you think? Like, what, if anything, does the outcome mean for democracy? What, if anything, does it mean for the rampant spread of disinformation? What's your take? So I feel like I have become a little bit contrarian. And like, I think this is actually like not a slam dunk, but a pretty good outcome.

I think that we wanted or I wanted like three things out of this. And I think we got two out of three. I think that we wanted, for the sake of democracy, disincentives against future lying, which I think we got. I think that we wanted meaningful accountability which I think we got in the form of this number and I think that we also wanted or were at least hoping for and we wanted an on air apology not just because we wanted to see Tucker apologize for fun although that would be

fun. Lots of fun. But for the hope of like moving existing Fox viewers hopefully in a better direction and we didn't get that and that is a bummer but i still think that we came out ahead in the end like as a society from this that's hopeful i kind of i i mean my views are like we shouldn't have expected this to be a big deal right we shouldn't have expected that like this was going to end fox news or turn all of their audience into libs or be the end for Tucker

Carlson and Rupert Murdoch and all that. But I wonder if the message that sends to Fox and to OAN and to all these right wing media outlets is be a little bit more careful how you lie. So I hear that. I think that we have two data points that give me a little bit of confidence that the first is that if you actually look at the specific statements that Dominion was making issue of from Fox hosts, they actually were pretty carefully couched. It's not like Tucker looking into the camera and saying, by the way, Dominion voting systems, voting machines changed votes from Joe Biden to Donald Trump. It was like a lot of Americans are concerned about election integrity generally. And it's not hard to see why. It was very carefully couched. And Dominion clearly believed and got Fox to a place where Fox agreed that that would be enough to potentially bring, you know, many hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

The other big data point is that we actually know now from some reporting from inside the case that ran in The York York Times today, that Fox News' own thinking on the case changed over time. They went into this thinking, you know what, the standards against defamation are high enough, and we couch this carefully enough that we think that we will get away with it, basically win the case. And that over the course of the last few months, their thinking on that changed. And I think that what that shows is that the legal landscape has changed, not in a huge way, it's not transformative, But some of the individual rulings that came out in the course of discovery over this that were very unfavorable to Fox, the way that kind of like things have played out with discovery, I mean, clearly has changed the way that the lawyers at Fox think that they think, OK, we have to move the bar internally for what we can say and can't say before we hit this level of liability. And they have to know they're going to pay out again, too. Well, so there's the Smartmatic case. They're the new welcome. Welcome to the new Bob Mulligan. And it's been interesting. You and I were going back and forth on this on watching Fox respond to the Smartmatic stuff

because they have I mean, both in the statement that they put out after the Dominion settlement and how they've responded to inquiries about the Smartmatic case, they're like, we have the highest standards of journalism and we acknowledge that some judge somewhere said something that might not have been true.

But you know what? We think that the claims of a president about voter fraud are absolutely newsworthy. So there was a little bit of a, fuck you people. Absolutely. We don't seem cowed at all. Why do you think they'd say that

if internally they'd still be a little more reticent to lie next time? Because I think that they, I think the, honestly, maybe the most important part of this settlement, even more so than the number or the apology that we didn't get is the fact that the number was public. And that usually doesn't happen in these settlements, usually it's secret. And that was something that Dominion specifically had to argue for. And it also makes me a little bit more like when people say like, oh, Dominion, they're just greedy corporate lawyers. They just wanted to cash out. Like, there's probably something to that. But they really did do us kind of a solid

in making that number public because it forced Fox to paint a target on its own back that says, if you can prove to this kind of new standard, not hugely new standard, but a little bit of a new standard in this Dominion case that we demonstrated actual malice in lying about in a way that impacted your company, that could be worth $800 million. And the Smartmatic case actually has even an arguably stronger case because Smartmatic is a little bit of a bigger business than Dominion was, which is, as you pointed out, is a really small business, which makes the number of the settlement that much more striking. Well, and this morning, Smartmatic said that they won't accept any settlement smaller than this $787 million and that they need a, quote, full retraction from Fox disavowing the lies

that spread about the 2020 presidential election. I think they'll get one of those two things. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of next time around when Donald Trump will probably be the nominee and if he loses, will probably claim voter fraud again. Like how does Fox act? Do you think that there's that they're going to be a little more careful? I mean, we won't know until it happens. I do keep going back over and over again because I think it was so fascinating

to see in the emails and texts that came out the moment of decision within Fox where they were really wrestling, not for any moral or ethical reasons, for the worst possible, most craven possible reasons. They were wrestling with, are we going to follow Trump and Sidney Powell on this election lie?

And it was close. And I think that that is a reason that makes me think that next time around, I think that they are going to have to be more cautious because the next time around is going to come in 2024. And the Smartmatic cases isn't even until 2025. So they're already facing, or it's expected to be in 2025. I mean, who knows? knows they are already facing shareholders it sucks that all this comes down to financial incentives that's yeah that's not great that's what happens when private companies you know face a lawsuit all right right right they're already facing shareholders who are saying you blew like half a year's adjusted revenue on

this one lie and you're gonna blow half a year's adjusted revenue on this one lie, and you're going to blow half a year's adjusted revenue again in 2025, if you fuck it up again, you might actually go into the red. And just like the pressures on that, I think, are just going to be really high. Now, there's still going to be Fox News. Tucker Carlson is still going to be a white nationalist. It's still going to be a horrible, corrosive force in our society. But in these edge cases, I think I came out feeling a little bit more optimistic. And I think in a way that did like minimal damage to press freedom.

So here's one more offline-y question about this whole thing. We saw through all of these texts that we got in testimony that Fox was scared of losing audience to OAN Newsmax. So you imagine like maybe Fox is a little more careful about lying. Maybe some of the audience, they don't change their minds, obviously, but they go to, you know, you could try to sue them too. And then they're- They are. Which they are, right? And then they're just going online to get all of their conspiracy theories. What do you think about the value of defamation lawsuits as a tool to fight disinformation

in this extremely online era? I think that it is, I mean, you've heard, like, I'm a little, like, not tortured about this, but I have mixed feelings. I think that it is the best tool that we have in an era of rising disinformation. And I think that it is good that we are now able to do that more than we were in the past. Like that standard has demonstrably moved a little bit. And I think that while it's true that there's always going to be some segment that can just go on YouTube, can just go on 4chan, whatever, and is like kind of lost. You do see in there's like a Sarah Longwell focus group of Republicans on the big lie and the Dominion conspiracy specifically. And the like

people who are really hardened on it, they already think Fox is a bunch of rhinos anyway. So there is like a meaningful segment of more casual Fox viewers who will repeat the Dominion lie, but they do it as like in-group signaling rather than like actually believing it. And like, it's very hard to say how much Fox being forced to move its line a couple of inches will affect those viewers. But of course, a premise of this show is that the media you consume doesn't just drive your opinions, but it drives your emotional affect, your sentiment, the way that you think about the world. So I think that in that sense, anything that can move the needle in a better direction,

I think is good. I remain a little bit concerned about the like ability for corporations to wield this precedent in a bad way. But we're just going to find out what the future looks like. All right. Last item. The blue check marks are gone.

R.I.P. Feeling a little lighter today. Weighing it down. Let me tell you over at Mastodon this week we are feeling pretty smug. Pretty good about ourselves. There is a lot of happy chatter.

A lot of tooting. Oh, yeah. You know what Mastodon's solution to the blue check marks? What's that? Don't have any because no one's going to try to impersonate you on Mastodon. So it's not a problem. And even if they did, there's nobody to see it. It's actually, it's brilliant OPSEC.

It is wild to scroll through twitter now and you just see the blue checks and you're like oh you got a blue check i know it's it is it is amazing and then there's a lot of people who are trying to explain themselves you know like i just have the blue check for long form video and editing right it's okay it's okay i had to report on the platform i'm not gonna i'm not going to drive you off the platform. It's each his own. I'm not paying Elon $8 a month. That's my thing.

That's fine. It's amazing how quickly it is flipped as a cultural marker. Just 180 degrees, which is funny because it's like, you know, this thing that we have lived with for so long that it means celebrities. It means big media organizations, and now it means, like, 4chan-er, right-wing, like, cat-turned troll. And you see the, like, celebrities who still have it, like, trying to get rid of it, which is nuts and also is terrible for Twitter.

There was this great thread, Hugo Rifkind, who works for... You think it was Hugo Rifkind. Right. Who works for Times of London. And he was like, this whole thing is an exact illustration of sort of the larger populist political trends in politics in the UK, in the US,

which is, it's like a bunch of people who want to, who are just angry about elites. They want to take down elites. Own the elites, yeah. Right? and so which which they did in brexit and they did here with trump right and then of course and also both on twitter and in the in the u.s politics with the help of a billionaire right yeah right and now that they have smashed the hierarchy and all the blue checks are gone all these people are still mad. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. This is what you're seeing. Now they're like, why are the celebrities paying the $8? Why are these? How dare they? It's like, hey, you got your way.

Now there's no blue check marks. It really shows. You're still pissed? It's like Elon trying to chase these like online alt-right grievance politics. It's just like it's only going to blow up in your face because it's always going to be in search of a new grievance. Always. And like, and he's, it's so sad. He's doing the, you know, he paid apparently for LeBron James's and Stephen King.

Who still tried, both tried to reject it anyway. And he's like, no, no, no, these blue checks are on the house. It honestly makes me a little bit sad. Like, did you have that kid in your grade school who was like, no one wanted to come to his birthday party

so then he like offered to pay people to come to his birthday party and still no one wanted to come? Look, I have a lot of empathy for a lot of people. Okay, fair point. I just, you know,

probably too much at times. I cannot muster for Elon Musk, that fucking guy. Yeah. It is honestly enjoyable watching it. It is enjoyable watching it. It is a little bit. It's not enjoyable watching Twitter just sort of devolve. Right, and like the blue check mark go from something with a positive value for the user base and the platform into something with a negative value for users and therefore for the platform itself.

I mean, just the speed with which he's turning his assets into liabilities is pretty impressive. The one thing that's changing for me is how I use the platform, which a lot of people have probably done this forever, and I'm stupid for not, but I'm creating more lists. I'm turning on notifications for just people i want to get tweets from because i don't want to scroll through garbage yeah i do that too i'm not checking my mentions as much anymore which i kind of stopped doing that a while back but like it's

that's healthy yeah because they're all garbage anyway because it's just a bunch of shit right um is kind of putting us through a healthy social media day. No, that's what I'm saying. Like, you know, I don't want to thank him because it certainly wasn't intentional. Let me turn to the camera. Thank you, Elon Musk. Please, please pay for my blue check.

I want my blue check back now. Yeah, no. So I think now the impersonation issue is troubling. It is. What's that Marxist line about heightening the contradictions of capitalism? Is it like Elon Musk

doing like an inside job on like social media capitalism to like heighten the contradictions of social media? It's really, it's a lot. But yeah,

we'll see how the impersonations go. I saw that someone was Barack Obama, someone was Bernie Sanders. I mean, I enjoy that just for the humor.

Who are you going to impersonate, do you think? I should impersonate Jon Favreau. I was thinking about enjoy that just for the humor. Who are you going to impersonate, do you think? I should impersonate Jon Favreau. I was thinking about it. Oh, the director? Yeah. Okay. Just put up who also is not paying for his blue check. I had to check because I know that he knows Elon because of all the

Iron Man stuff and all that. No blue check for Jon. Which means I could just take his picture and just start tweeting about Mandalorian. And do some Star Wars takes. That's what I'm thinking. Max Fisher, thanks for joining Offline. Thanks as always.

Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Rachel Gajewski,

who film and share our episodes as videos every week.