Offline with Jon Favreau - Why Has Social Media Made It Impossible to Follow the Israel-Hamas War?

Episode Date: October 15, 2023

As fighting intensifies between Israel and Hamas, Jon and Max break down the ways social media is terribly equipped for delivering news about the war, helping us process it, and recognizing people’s humanity. What’s more, the platforms have basically given up on content moderation and fact checking. The guys explore how the combination of these factors made last week the single worst breaking news experience on social media ever, and why everyone feels compelled to issue a PR statement. Are the algorithms forcing this outrage upon us or is this just the result of the unique circumstances of this conflict? Get your virtual tickets to Pod Save America live from DC now at MOMENT.CO/PSA 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.

If you haven't listened to Heavyweight before, it's a podcast that's all about revisiting those moments from your past that keep you up at night. Whether that means making things right with someone you've wronged, rediscovering something crucial you thought you'd lost forever, or answering a question you've never been able to get an answer to. In each episode, host Jonathan Goldstein pairs up with a listener who has a moment that's been weighing on them. And together, they go on a quest to get to the bottom of things no matter what it takes. The stories go just about everywhere, from a woman who got kicked out of her college sorority without explanation and wants to know why to a juror haunted by his decision to hand down the death sentence. The show is emotional, it's funny, it's heartwarming, and it's all done documentary style so every episode feels deeply

immersive like you're listening to a movie. They have a new season coming out this fall that features unconventional love stories including one about twin brothers on a mission to find a beloved pet parrot they haven't seen in 20 years. Another about an artist who can't stop painting portraits of his ex-wife. And a story from a producer on the show who needs some questions answered by her 8th grade crush.

The new season of Heavyweight is available now. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That's writing, baby. The worst human activity possible it's an ancient lost skill i'm doing my best to lose it personally i've been trying for years i'm making significant progress towards literacy i have to tell you forget about the offline challenges no more writing challenge i looked at so many fucking tweets this week that

i i think my like glasses prescription probably needs to be updated or something you ever looked at a screen for so long you start to get a headache i looked at this for so long i got a headache and then i kept going and then i started to get a stomach ache from the headache so it's like i saw my girlfriend last night it'd be like i'm sorry i have a tummy because i read too many tweets welcome to offline i'm john favaro i'm max fisher it's been a week oh my god it's been a week uh so we have a few lighter stories to cover burning questions like have the brands ruined humor on the internet and And is your Alexa an election denier? My Alexa has great politics. My Alexa gone woke.

But first, we want to talk about the biggest story of the week on the internet and the real world, the Hamas attack on Israel that has now led to war in Gaza. The news coming out of the Middle East has been painful and horrific enough, but somehow the internet and social media, and especially the platform formerly known as Twitter, have made the experience of getting that news worse than I think it has ever been with any crisis. So if you've been feeling that too, we are here to commiserate about it, unpack why and what has changed, and talk about what it all means for the future of knowing what the hell is going on in the world at any given moment. And how lucky I am to be

talking about this with an expert in both global conflict and social media, Max Fisher. It's a real week for the cross sections of the most depressing things that I know about. Yeah, you're really in it. If Myanmar invades, then it's really going to be my moment. That's going to be a whole thing. Yeah. All right, let's just start here. But is it just me or has it been impossible to follow this crisis in a way that makes you feel reliably informed?

I really think it's not just you. I got into journalism right around the dawn of the social media era. I've been on all the platforms. I've been covering major international platforms. I've been covering like major international crises, like major political events. And I really believe that social media has never been worse

than it is right now. It's never been worse. It is. And we do this for a living. Right. This is our job. And I'm still like trying to find accurate,

reliable information. It's so hard. News basically does not exist on any of the, and it's not just Twitter. It's on any of the platforms. We can talk about why that is. And it's so hard news basically does not exist on any of and it's not just twitter it's on any of the platforms we can talk about why that is and it's like rumor and misinformation is rampant both of like the kind of misinformation that we typically think of as like fake videos but also like a i think much more pervasive kind of misinformation than just like exaggeration

or rumors and it's also like completely overrun with just the dumbest possible culture war fights and like interpersonal Twitter beefs. And this is what the majority of Americans get their news from. The majority of Europeans get their news from social media. This is, I think, a really big problem. Yeah. I mean, there's been, and we're going to talk about it. There's always been a lot of takes about the misinformation, but it's not just misinformation. It's an avalanche of takes, right? Too many takes, not enough news.

Very little context, unconfirmed rumors, unverified sources, uninformed analysis, in some cases, completely fake images or videos. The CEO of CBS News told Axios, I think this week, that they went through over a thousand videos of the conflict and found only 10% usable. Wow. Also, that sounds like a really difficult way to spend,

I mean, hats off to them for going through that. How much do you think the general and shitification of Elon Musk's platform is playing a role in this? There's probably a case that Twitter's relative degradation is the worst and that Twitter used to be very, very good for breaking news events, for following the news, for getting firsthand accounts on the ground. And now it's basically impossible to find any of those things that are really buried. And of course,

Elon Musk has changed the algorithm to deliberately downrank news sources. So it's not a coincidence you can't find it. The algorithm is literally withholding them from you and has instead serving you just like viral Twitter arguments. And he's also dismounted, of course, a lot of the trust and safety teams, but all the platforms have done this. I mean, we've talked about like all of Facebook's platforms have made versions of these changes and TikTok and YouTube, like never even had the good version to backslide from. They've always been like this. So it's like, and it's also like, I think this conflict, this issue in particular, like it brings it out in people. Yes. Yeah. I want to, I want to get into that too, because I think a lot of times it's hard to separate out. Well, first of all, fog of war,

it's just hard to get information, right? So it's not like everything has always been perfect. And social media, even at its best, quote, put that in quotes. Social media, even at its best, I think, as a crisis is unfolding, it's sort of difficult to figure out what's accurate, what's reliable, what's changing. But I think that we're in a different level now yeah and i think that this conflict in particular because you know it has had its roots in biblical times and uh like we're dealing with it for thousands of years right and also it is i think the feelings about this conflict go far beyond the region where it's happening. That's true. And I think that's so it's sort of pulled everyone in.

Right. And Americans especially have a very emotional relationship to this conflict, which is not unreasonable. And people tend to identify very strongly with one side. So they want to see information and takes that validate their side. I think it's also just important to talk about, like, when we hear misinformation, we think like the fake Hamas videos or things like that. And it's definitely a big part of it. But I think

that the like, way more pervasive kind of misinformation right now, which I think is illustrative of where social media is going, are things that are just like, a little bit exaggeration or a little bit decontextualization or something that's like uncertain and is taking the kind of like hookiest possible version of events that like, we think of misinformation as something that like other people do. Like we would never do that because we don't need to lie because we're right and our side is righteous

and we don't need to do misinformation. But like, I am really telling you, if you are active on social media, I think there's like a 90% chance that you have shared misinformation in the past week. And that doesn't mean you're a bad person. You're following the incentives of the platform. But they're like, and I'm so sorry, these are really horrible. So I'm going to try to gloss over them a little bit. Like there was a video of an Israeli woman that had been taken hostage in Gaza. And from the initial video, it was not clear whether she was alive or dead. And the reports that circulated on Twitter said that she was confirmed dead and confirmed sexually assaulted. And like, you could look at that video or that photo and reasonably make that

conclusion. But the version that so many people saw was the most extreme interpretation of it, that now is just like fact for a lot of people. And you hear politicians repeating. Yeah. Similar to that, there was one point when Netanyahu made a statement where he called on all Gazans to leave buildings occupied by Hamas, which is terrible because that means like apartment blocks. It got a little bit like weirdly mistranslated. And it sounded like he was saying, all Gazans need to leave Gaza. And then again, that was like, see, I just, I didn't know that until just now.

Exactly. Right. And it's like, it's, you know, you could reasonably look and be like, well, what's the difference? Or it's still bad. And that's true. But it's just like these versions of events where you get like multiple take cycles before it gets corrected. And then there are just like people do a lot of takes that are very emotional and very like I'm really taking a strong stand on behalf of my side that it's hard to label misinformation as such, but are just exaggerations in a degree that I think are really misleading people.

Like I've seen a lot of tweets in the last few days that said that most Palestinians support Hamas to some degree. And like there's probably some truth to that, but it's also a lot more complicated. And it's the kind of thing that you wouldn't put like a fact check stamp on necessarily. But I see that as a kind of misinformation that is like meaningful. One challenge is that you can find almost anything on social media to support what you already believe right and so to the point about most of palestinians uh support hamas you can certainly quickly if you search find a video of uh palestinians were not in hamas cheering on the death of Israelis, right?

And you can certainly find videos of Israeli government officials saying what seemed like horrific things. And maybe are, but like are not, they don't have the full context. there can be real video audio evidence of exactly what you're trying the point you're trying to make that doesn't necessarily represent the totality of what everyone in that group thinks of course right and the context of it is just like shifted enough to be misleading and i also part of what i think is really hard about it is like if people are encountering the like really sharp elbowed Twitter takes first and then later they read the news article and the news article is trying to introduce nuance it's both like a little too late people have already seen it and then people's response is usually to be like look at the lying media that is trying to downplay the other side's crimes and it just like it's an information environment that it just is really

hostile to that i mean the sort of the most salient but i think also the most horrific example of this is it has been this debate over whether or not hamas decapitated the babies that they murdered and it's like you know yes we want the most accurate and complete account of what happened. But the debate over which account is correct becomes polarized in a way that mirrors the larger political debate. So the insinuation is, if you think the decapitation story is true, you must be pro-Israel. If you think it's wrong, you must be pro-Hamas. And of course, the way I just said that is, of course, simplified. But that is the tenor of that debate. And you're like, the babies were killed.

I know. That's like what we're arguing about over like how like I can't even say the words again, you know, but it's just like, what is everyone doing? many people online are so intent on litigating this question of like the cause of death of these 30 some or maybe 40 infants and every middle east reporter i know or person who spent a lot of time in the middle east or is from the region is like who fucking cares yeah like what and i i understand people like like it is accurate information is important I'm not saying that it doesn't matter. I'm not saying it's irrelevant. And it's also like, it's not ideal that within 24 hours of this information coming out that it seems like it was at least like a little bit overstated, but like 50% true.

The president repeated it as fact and said he had seen it confirmed. Like that's not amazing and really says something about the misinformation and how easy it is for it to spread now i want to hit on that point because so there's one response to all this which is stop getting your information from the internet yeah right and who cares or social media social media right and it's all on social media and just like put your phone we've said this put your phone down walk outside do something else yeah how are you doing with that? Because I'm not doing well. Not well. But like a couple people have made this point.

Ryan Broderick made it in his Garbage Day newsletter, which is like Twitter has become a terrible source of information, but is still the place where journalists and especially political leaders and policymakers go to make news and get news. So even though it is, and Ryan said, Twitter has continued to remain at the top of the digital funnel while also being 4chan levels of rotten, it's still being used to process current events in real time, even though it doesn't have the tools or the leadership necessary to handle that level of responsibility. So what happens is it is this just garbage dump

of misinformation or information that's exaggerated to me take all that kind of stuff and yet somehow it's still getting to joe biden i know he's the president united states and and it's not just him right like other world leaders journalists people who do not necessarily have the intent to misinform right but are sort of just getting this bad information anyway. And I even think like, as I, and again, I don't, I hate talking about this story because it's so horrific, but even as you get into the debate over the story about the infants, it seems as if it was an honest mistake on whether they're happy or not. And it was just people, again, in the fog

of war trying to get the best information and somehow the internet always attributes bad intent right to misinformation when sometimes misinformation is just an honest attempt to tell the right account and just people fail at doing so right an israeli guy walked into an incredibly horrific scene of a massacre saw some tens of numbers of dead babies some of whom uh had been killed in a way that led him to say that i don't even want to repeat it and like got emotional and now we're saying that he's like doing propaganda and doing incitement to genocide and i like again i don't want to be dismissive of the idea that accuracy matters. Of course it does. But I really think that in some ways, this is a marker that like misinformation is a subset of the polarization problem.

Like I'm texting with like people in DC who are like foreign policy officials and they are really, really engaged with the question of, did someone send some tweets on Twitter that took an un-nuanced view of the conflict or were like insufficiently humane in how they referred to the other side. And like all of these tweets are terrible. There's a lot of people cheering atrocities on, I hate using the phrase both sides,

but people are cheering atrocities and that's really bad. But so many people who I think we need engaged with the conflict in a nuanced way are really focused on, I saw someone do a take. That means that the left is bad. It means that liberals are bad. And, you know, nobody should be doing their little press release tweets on this, honestly. I mean, well, I do want to get into that. a tweet that is just like it is it is sad but it is also like funny and that it is the perfect

representation of everything that is wrong with how people have been responding to not just this crisis but other crises over the last several years it's a former member of the eu parliament and he i don't he's deleted the original tweet now, but it was some piece of information. It was passing along an ostensible Israeli poll that showed that some proportion of Israelis blamed Netanyahu for the attack. All right. And so someone said, oh, this is wrong or you said it wrong. Oh, no, they just asked for a source. They were like, wow, that's wild. Where's that from?

So the tweet is, I got it from a Portuguese tweet and it seemed genuine enough. I have scrolled back but unable to find the original tweet why do you doubt its veracity it seems very plausible to me why do you doubt its veracity it seems very plausible to me is like the motto it's the slogan of people on the internet that's right yeah it's not only does it must it be true because it seems plausible but if you so much as question or ask it for a source that means that that you are a Jenny Sedair war crime insider who is apologizing for the worst misdeeds of the other side. Yeah. No, it is. It's just like, it feels true. It feels true. Why would you doubt that? But that's, I mean, look, I try to, and it's been hard to do it this week, I try to remind myself not to blame people wholly for being misinformed by trillion dollar technology companies.

And the thing is, if you log on to Twitter, you're not just seeing little snippets of incorrect information. You are being bombarded with it. That is all of that validation. We see so many people not just agreeing with it, but angry about it. And like outraged on behalf of this piece of information is really hard for your cognitive defenses to hold that back. Yeah. Can I read you another funny tweet? So it's, I saw someone tweet something about, you know, I keep seeing this thing in the media. It's happened like a dozen times already that they'll show a photo and they'll say, look at the terrible devastation in Israel. And then an hour later, they'll come back and say, whoops, actually, this was in Gaza. And it had,

you know, a million impressions and tens of thousands of likes and retweets. Smiling because I think I know where this is going. I'm sure you know where it's going. And then I was like, wow, that's really messed up. And, you know, that's upset to hear it. So, I clicked on it, looked at the responses. Of course, people were saying like, wow, can you give us an example? And he had one example. And do you know what it was? Justin Bieber's Instagram. And like my guy, if that's where you're getting your news.

And again, I don't wholly blame them because if you open up Instagram, it's going to show you Justin Bieber's take and not, you know, the Reuters report. Right. And because Justin Bieber made the mistake of having the pictures of Gaza over his wishes for Israel, and it was a mistake and that he changed it, suddenly that story of a wrong take becomes a huge story. And everyone thinks, oh, it's such a cycle. Right, exactly. It just builds and builds and builds. And it wouldn't be news. I think in an earlier year, we wouldn't care. We would be like, that's funny.

And then move on. But like this guy's tweet, I thought was like really striking because he was complaining about misinformation and doing misinformation in the process. And you see so many of these people log on and they're like, wow, I was misinformed by social media. The news media must be lying to us. And they've never encountered a single article from the news media because platforms are withholding it from them. And that's a shame because it tells people to distrust credible sources of information, not to mention, you know, reporters who are putting themselves in real peril on the front lines.

No kidding. I also want to talk about all the images and videos across social media that aren't misinformation. CNN reported on Wednesday that schools in the United States, United Kingdom and Israel have been urging parents to delete their children's social media apps over concerns that Hamas has threatened to broadcast disturbing videos of the conflict on social media. I got to say, it makes me truly furious with the social media platforms, which make money off my kid using them and our kids using them, but like won't do anything to protect kids from scrolling past perhaps a live execution. I don't even know what to do about that because, you know, some people have said like content moderation, even under the best circumstances, is impossible. What do you think about that? So I think this is actually one of the few areas where the social platforms I think are actually pretty good about moderating and auto-moderating

really effectively. There was a big couple of trends maybe three or four years ago of, and I'm sorry to keep making this so dark, of people self-harming on Facebook Live. And this was also just after there was a lot of ISIS propaganda that was being pushed on a lot of platforms. And all of the tech companies geared up together and developed this really pretty impressive digital fingerprinting technology that can automatically detect and block those videos and those photos before they're even uploaded to the platform. And it's not perfect, but it like really does work pretty effectively. And I interviewed a guy once who worked on it and he was like, look, I'm thrilled that they're using it, but there's nothing stopping them from deploying this same technology around so many other harmful kinds of content like things that kids see that might be upsetting or there might be bad for them or you know forms of

sexualization that you don't want on your platforms do you think twitter under musk is going to be able to do the same thing that's a good question i know that's right that's where i probably worried them like i didn't of course i I also don't know what someplace like TikTok is doing about it either. But are you suggesting that maybe the people telling parents delete the apps, it's like an extra precaution, but that the social media platforms might be able to handle that anyway? Because that would make me feel better about the social media platforms. Yeah, I think that out of all the things to be worried about, it's definitely possible that you could encounter this. I have definitely seen some things that I wish I hadn't, but I think this is something that they can be relatively good at. And TikTok is actually one of the most aggressive at auto-blocking.

That's good. Twitter, they have access to this technology they've used in the past, but it's a very good point that they are in such internal chaos and they've fired so many of their teams responsible for this that it's certainly not impossible to imagine they could fall through on their execution. But I would consider getting Charlie off of Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he's not on Twitter. He's really posting.

He's got a lot of takes. Put that poll up. Yeah. All of the tweets we've read have been by Charlie. That's right. I now worry because it's like, we'll watch YouTube videos. But like my YouTube algorithm is a mix of all the kids' videos that Charlie watches when he sits on my lap. But then also like new stuff. Right.

You know, and that just like it all mixes together. So that's the kind of thing that I worry about. Do you know what I really worry about? And I was just, I don't want to out them because they, we were just talking informally. I was talking to someone

in the office who has, you know, older parents who are very politically engaged. And she was telling me that they spent a lot of time on YouTube autoplay

and the things that they have seen about this conflict, the like crazy conspiracies, the hate speech. And again, a lot of it is not like outright Illuminati, whatever, but it's just like such an incredibly skewed and angry description of the platform that they're like furious at her because she is not calling for, you know, the bombardment of everyone in Gaza. Right. No, I, well, we've also seen.

Get the boomers off YouTube. That's what I'm saying. Well, I, well, we've also seen the boomers off YouTube. Well, I know. I mean, on that note, something that's become more common during the crises of the last few years is an expectation that we all post about what our views are and who we're supporting and why, including the brands. Absolutely. The one that got is like Barry's bootcamp statement on Israel. And I was like, why do I need to hear a fitness brands take on the one that got is like barry's boot camp statement on israel and i was like why do i need to hear a fitness brands uh take on the middle east it feels like it's always the fitness the like number of and look i love yoga i love my yoga teachers but the number of

yoga teachers i've seen issue these like kind of unhinged statements on the conflict it's like look i can't fault you for not having the most nuanced view on this, but like, why did you, why did you feel the need to post that? Well, so, I mean, there is this pressure and the brands are the brands. And I like, again, if I was advising a brand, just don't, you don't have to post anything. That's honestly million dollar advice. You don't post. You do not have to post anything. That's honestly million dollar advice. You don't post. I don't have to post anything. I'm sure they do because they probably have employee bases where there are employees of that

brand or customers who are reaching out and saying like, this is a hurtful time and I'm going through this and this is tough. And so then they feel like, oh, well, we got to do something about that. What can we do? We can post, right? And there is this larger pressure to post something. And we've seen it. It's not just around this conflict. We've seen it in other moments like this over the last several years. One thread that caught my eye was from Rachel Greenspan. She used to cover right-wing extremism for Insider. And her thread started, quote, right now, a lot of posts say things like, your Jewish friends are hurt by your silence. So let me just say, I'm your Jewish friend and I give you permission to not post.

You don't ever have to post. Hope this helps. And she goes on to talk. It's a big plus one for me. Right, yeah. And she goes on to talk about how really nobody owes anyone social media content. Like you owe people kindness and you certainly owe your friends how are you doing right no one owes anyone a post yeah because that's like not doing anything and part of the

reason i think people don't post is because it's hard to know the right thing to say and it's very risky to be wrong yeah i have certainly heard from many people in my life that they don't know what to say. And it's people who will be like, so what's going on? And what side are we supposed to be on? And what are we supposed to say? And they're so scared by it that they're just like, well, I'm not going to say anything. And then of course, I also have plenty of people in my life who've been posting and I have Jewish friends who are having a tough time. Like, what do you think about this pressure to post? It is definitely one of the really noticeable ways that just a change in the algorithm is changing norms, not just online, but in the real world. Because you log on and you see these like my individual press release on how I feel about the conflict everywhere.

So you feel pressured to do everywhere. So you feel pressured to do it. And you feel like if you're not doing it, you're failing. And you also, there's a lot of posts that you see that say that the most important thing going on right now in the conflict is fighting online. And that therefore, you have an obligation to participate because if you yell at the right people enough for their bad takes, that will be the thing that finally turns the conflict. So people feel that pressure. But like, I have been writing about Israel-Palestine for a long time. And it's hard. It's not, you know, I think sometimes people overstate how complicated it is as a dodge. Like, you know, I believe very strongly that the occupation is overwhelmingly the driving force

in the conflict. But it's hard to appropriately thread the right moral needles of kind of acknowledging things on either side and to kind of like convey things in a way that is thoughtful and nuanced and accurate. And I'm not surprised and I don't blame people for the fact that, you know, whatever the CrossFit trainer, the yoga teacher puts out a statement and it's not the most nuanced or it gets some little things wrong, like that's fine, but you shouldn't have to post it in the first place. And I think that that is also contributing to the misinformation because we're getting so much of our information, so much of our understanding about how the conflict works from these takes. And it's like, to your point, most people don't know that much about it, which is fine. It's fine not to be an

expert in it. Right. And look, we just talked about how President Biden was having trouble getting the most accurate information. It's really shocking an octogenarian would. Journalists who've covered this are having trouble figuring out exactly what to say. So people

who do this for a living, and now we're expecting our random friends from high school or in other parts of life who don't pay attention to this for a living and now we're expecting like our random friends from high school uh or in other parts of life who don't pay attention to this for a living to like nail it when they post i had someone like very close to me in life who got a text from a friend like sort of a friend who was like um i know you're active on social media and your silence wow has really like i'm surprised that you have not uh said anything about your jewish friends and this is blah blah blah and the person was so taken aback because they're like i sure yeah like i just had deleted instagram earlier in the week because i

didn't want to continue consuming content about right dead children right you know yeah so she's a mom and i was like i it it really kind of like shocked me a little bit because suddenly this pressure you know we like to say like oh it's it's all online and it's crazy people are online but it really does affecting people it affects people offline as well and like look my view of that is if if you have any friend who is having a tough time that is a close friend then like a normal real friendship is you go to your friend and say hey i'm having a tough time that is a close friend, then like a normal real friendship is you go to your friend and say, hey, I'm having a tough time with this.

Whether it's this issue, whether it's any issue. And I'd want to do that to my friends and I'd want them to do that to me. But when everything is public and it's like a big public issue. The big panopticon. Yeah, then suddenly it becomes like, oh, I didn't know I was supposed to reach out.

It's like, well, the Instagram said that you were supposed to reach out. Didn't you see the meme that was going around where everyone said, you know, your Jewish friends are noticing your silence? You should have seen that meme and then you should have went and said something. And that you're supposed to condemn the bad takes and you're supposed to argue with the people with the bad takes. And like, look, I'm falling victim to it. And not just the like, I see something that turns out to be misinformation and like, believe it before I end up checking it out. But I'm victim to it in the sense that, like, I see something that turns out to be misinformation and, like, believe it before I end up checking it out. But I'm victim to it in the sense of the, like, incredible polarization that comes from this, like, discourse takes first social media coverage of it.

And I have opened my phone so many times in the last week, gotten absolutely furious at some bad takes that I know don't matter. I know they don't have any significance and gotten so mad at it. And then I do it again. Why am I doing that? What do I think is going to happen? I know don't matter. I know they don't have any significance and gotten so mad at it. And then I do it again. Why am I doing that? What do I think is going to happen? I know. Well, and I do think, again, it's a conflict that naturally, because of the nature of this conflict, pushes us into one side or the other. I know there's a lot of research on this. Social media doesn't cause polarization, but it certainly helps fuel polarization and it pushes us into one side or another because of the simplicity, because of the algorithm, because we are seeing the most extreme takes on both sides.

And yet this is a conflict that asks us, challenges us to sort of recognize universal truths about the fact that the death of civilians anywhere is horrific and tragic. And we should respect all life. And you know what I'm saying? The way out of this crisis is sort of this universal recognition of our common humanity. And that is not what the internet allows for. Right. And it's also, it's pulling eyes off of, and well, actually something I think is really important about that is one of the things that, this happens in all conflicts,

but in this conflict in particular, one of the big barriers to any kind of progress or resolution is the really widespread tendency to conflate civilians with combatants. This happens with, you know, I've seen so many takes, and this has been going on for years, that say that anyone in Gaza is complicit in Hamas because they voted for them once 16 years ago, whatever it was, in 2006.

And, you know, everyone in Israel is a settler, so they're a combatant and they're fair game. And that is an incredibly dangerous worldview that is, you know, tends to drive conflicts from within. But the fact that that is increasingly becoming the international attitude is, I think, really dangerous. And it is a, it is sort of further up the funnel. But if you think about, I've been thinking a lot about in this conflict, it's like sort of the dehumanization of people that allow you to either not care

when people are butchered in their sleep or not care when people are like bombed out of their buildings, you know? And, you know, we can tell ourselves and pat ourselves on the back for not being there yet, right? But like, it starts with these okay well how are we conflating these and let's argue on the internet about whether you

know babies were like this is the right it's like just having these arguments that are so sort of devoid of humanity and nuance and grace is it's dangerous path. And it's pulling people's eyes off of the actual events. Like before we came in here to record, maybe half an hour before there was an artillery strike, an Israeli artillery strike that killed a Reuters cameraman. It was up by the Lebanese border. And I heard about it from a friend and then went online to Twitter like an absolute idiot,

which I really have no one to blame but myself here, to read about it. And what were all the tweets, but people arguing about a three-day-old blog post and whether it was like, how bad was it? And is it responsible for driving the conflict? And these are, I think, smart people who are having their eyes pulled away.

Yeah. So just to end by hearkening back to the beginning of the social media age, Ev Williams and Jason Goldman, who've both been on the show, they were at Twitter in its earliest days. I've heard them talk about the excitement people had for the future of the internet in the wake of the Arab Spring. It feels like we're very far from those days. Is this our new normal now? And do you see a path towards a better normal? So, there has been a normal in the past that was really productive and positive on social media. Like you hear the Arab Spring site a lot,

and I think that's a great example, like big protest movements that kind of get broadcast on social media and we all care about. But I, to me, one of the most positively impactful roles of social media in the world was actually the last big Israel-Gaza conflict in 2014. I don't know if you remember this. It was not nearly as bad as this one, but was the worst conflict up until that point since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. And for people who were following at the time, you might remember that the role of social media, the prevalence of social media in frontline news reports, and especially in firsthand accounts from civilians on the ground, both in

Israel, but especially in Gaza, played a, I think, a really significant role in really changing Americans' attitudes. And there are a lot of reasons that American attitudes on Israel-Palestine changed, but around 2014, I think, in at least significant part because of the way that social media allowed us to see that conflict firsthand and see what it was really like and really experience it in a way that I think people hadn't before really shifted a lot of people's attitudes. It's really shifted the Democratic Party position on it as a result, I think, Joe Biden notwithstanding. It's changed our kind of politics around it, not in a way that is yet transformative for the conflict itself, but is a gradual but important step in that direction. saying we're down-ranking news and we're up-ranking conflict, is really deleterious for not just our ability to understand the world, but the ability as American citizens whose government plays a big role in events

to, I think, push it in the right direction. Yeah, and I think what it originally gave us was awareness and lifted up voices that we just hadn't heard for way too long. And that was a good thing. But the next step after awareness is, okay, what do we do about this? And I think where everything's become really messy is that when something bad happens in the world

and there's a crisis and you feel like you are part of it and drawn in because you are watching it unfold on social media, then I think the natural human reaction is like, oh, we got to do something about this. What can I do? And also this is horrific. Who can I blame? And I think social media and the internet leads us to some very bad options because A, sometimes there's nothing that we can do if we're sitting here right um but it also when there isn't much you can do when you're just watching this you feel like what you can do is let's say you

can post you can argue right right uh you can try to get people for having wrong information right like you can do all these things and so it did try to it gives people like the illusion that they have control over world events right when really, oftentimes we don't. I think that's definitely true. And there's always been something about, I mean, going back to like Kony 2012, that like posting is activism, is revolutionary radical change. And the harder you post, the more revolution you're going to bring to the world. I do, which I mean, truly one of the incredible episodes in our nation's history. I do think it's not for nothing, though, that in 2014,

when the things that were saturating social media generally, because even Facebook then was promoting a lot of news, were firsthand news reports and firsthand civilian accounts that the conclusion that, at least according to polls, a meaningful and pretty unprecedented number of Americans took the lesson of, we have to push our government to constrain Israeli behavior in Gaza. And we have to pressure our government to pressure the Israeli government to at least take some steps away from the occupation. And I think that the fact that what social media is showing you now is culture war arguments over Harvard Law kids and angry debates over who had the worst post and these kind of like fine grain hair splitting over the cause of death of 30 to 40 infants in this

kibbutz. I think that you're seeing that push people's attitudes for what they think is driving this conflict and what they can do about it in a bad direction. Right. And to your point about 2014, the question always should be when you're wanting to do something is like, okay, what action can have a real effect, right? How do I pressure my government, right? How do I, I can go to a protest, I can go to Congress, right? Like, there's just, there's, I can organize, like, there's tangible things you can do. Posting is usually not one of them. Arguing on the internet is for organizations that are helped, right? Like there's plenty of, I think the key is to think about the action that I'm taking right now, can it have a tangible real effect on solving the crisis, fixing the crisis, moving us to a better place, inching us towards a better place, or actually persuading someone to think differently, right?

And if it's not doing either of those things, it's probably not worth doing. Right. And to your point that it's not just us, the online Twitter addicts, but it's even people in positions of power. Yeah. I think it's, again, it's not for nothing. And there are multiple causes for this. It's not just social media, but it's not for nothing that in 2014, there was some degree of Democratic Party unity over Israel should not do a ground invasion of Gaza. And this time around, as far as I can tell, most Democratic lawmakers and officials are focused on sniping at each other. Yeah. Yeah. No. Well, that's I also think that's partly due to sort of like the horrific nature of the massacre.

That's true. That's true. Part of the point is to make everyone, you know, even more impassioned. Yeah, right. Also insane. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think we fixed that. I think we did some incredible work.

I do wonder if we want to like give people tips on how to, like if someone's like, I want to follow this, but I don't want to fall down these rabbit holes. Yeah. Like I've been sort of trying to go away from Twitter and like looking at the New York Times, looking at the Washington Post,

like trying to new sources that at least I know have some editorial judgment Right, right. involved. Yeah. But I know that's not perfect.

Like even like I'm not the world's biggest CNN fan, but just like a straight like news updates. It's like the perfect moment for that. They all have like

perfectly decent live blogs. Yeah. I'm going to I'm going to actually great like news updates it's like the perfect moment for that they all have like perfectly decent live blogs um i i'm gonna i'm gonna actually take action i think and delete my twitter account wow this recording i just like maybe i will too i keep thinking about how toxic it is and how little i'm learning from and how much time i'm spending on it i really feel like i'm failing at self-control and i need to just take it away from myself and it's just making me feel bad too. Right. And I, yeah, it's like, that's not as like front of mind conscious, but like I've noticed

after five days of this or six days of this, it's like, why do I feel so shitty? I know. I feel terrible. I think we're all, everyone's feeling that, but it is, it's, yeah, it's, it's not great. I do think also if you are seeing a piece of information or a take that perfectly aligns with your preconceived views of the situation. Be skeptical. Be skeptical.

Yeah, it's probably an exaggeration. And I also think giving each other grace for mistakes, for sharing misinformation if we do, for trying to clumsily find our way to a position on the, you know, like all of that kind of stuff. You just giving people some grace, I think is important. Yeah, I agree. Don't broadcast it. And also dunking on it is rebroadcasting it.

Yes. Even if you think that you're fighting it, you're absolutely telling the algorithm to promote it more. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Few quick housekeeping notes before we move on. Here at Crooked Media, we've created our very own storefront on bookshop.org, where you can find books published by Crooked's imprint, a selection of favorites from their Crooked staff, and lots more.

Bookshop.org directly supports local booksellers. We love that. That's always a plus. Head to crooked.com slash bookstore to find your next read. If you can't make it to our show in D.C. this Thursday, October 19th, don't despair. We'll be live streaming the whole event exclusively on moment.co. Love It Tommy, Dan and I will be joined by Senator John Fetterman, Chef Jose Andres, Jennifer Carol Foy, and guest host Simone Sanders. Join us and your fellow listeners live from anywhere. You'll feel

like you're at the show, but at the same time, you'll be on your couch. Some might call it the best of all worlds. The internet, not all bad. Get your virtual tickets now at moment.co.psa. Okay, two more stories to talk about. This week, the Washington Post reported that Alexa, Amazon's personal voice assistant, has been telling users that the 2020 election was stolen. Join the club, Alexa.

When asked, Alexa, was the 2020 election stolen? The assistant reportedly responds from Rumble.com. The 2020 election was stolen by a massive amount of voter fraud. After the Washington Post contacted Amazon for comment, Alexa's response was changed. What's going on here? First of all, do you think people who get their news from Alexa and also want to know, like are not sure whether the 2020 election was stolen. The undecided. Undecided on 2020.

I know how I'm going to get to the bottom of this. I'm going to go right to Alexa. Some people are doing their own research on the internet. Alexa, do my own research for me. I kind of want to try, I don't have an Alexa, I kind of want to try like a battery of conspiracy questions. Like, Alexa, who my own research for me. I kind of want to try, I don't have an Alexa, I kind of want to try like a battery of conspiracy questions like, Alexa, who killed Kennedy? Alexa, was it right-wing Cubans?

The Washington Post in their story about this, which is just the tone in this was quite funny. Tech companies have long resisted being cast as arbiters of truth online, but technologies like voice assistants and chatbots, which serve up a single definitive answer rather than millions of ranked links or posts, stand to magnify debates about online speech that have dogged Silicon Valley since the 2016 election. Yeah, no shit. It's really surprising to hear the Washington Post skeptical of the idea that the Bezos robot should provide one sentence answers to all. I mean, this is the like serious answer, which is like for as long as there have been like AI bots that aggregate information and give you the answer, the information has been terrible. Like do you remember Taybot in early 2016?

Okay. So it was Microsoft set up one of the, it was like early, early like chat, like Neanderthal chat GPT. Chat GPT was like a Twitter that you could like neanderthal chat gpt chat gpt it was like a twitter that you could talk to you could go back and forth but then it's just like aggregated a bunch of tweets to figure out the way to have a normal human conversation and of course within a day it was a maga conspiracy theorist hardcore racist anti-semitic bot because it's just like when you just scoop up all the information on the internet and you don't

have any guardrails for how to process it you're going to end up with terrible stuff and of course the reason i think this is an important story beyond the millions and millions of people who are getting all of their news from alexa is that as we head into an artificial intelligence dominated world there will be much smarter chatbots than alexa or the one that you just mentioned that i'd never heard of and it it's going to be a huge there's going again to be the illusion that they are giving you accurate information right but it may not be as obvious as oh by the way the election was stolen in fact it probably won't be right but it's going to be harder and harder and harder for people to tell what's real and what's not information requires human curation it just does it just and it's and you can do it i

mean look at wikipedia which i will always stand up for wikipedia like very cheap to operate great quality of information human curation yeah um okay on a lighter note the new york times published a piece this week that really spoke to me uh here's the headline if every brand is funny online is anything funny uh the piece argues that the decade-long joke of cringy brand accounts that have tried to imitate first millennial and now gen z humor has gone on for too long they reference tweets from dominoes, quote, red flag, not dipping your slice in ranch. Cool. Applebee's, don't eat after 8 p.m.

Okay, then why are apps half off after nine? The infamous ill-advised 2021 Burger King tweet, women belong in the kitchen. And just a lot of brands that are doing like, LOL, okay. Sure. A lot of like, you know uh lowercase that's cool on the internet what can be done about the brand every time i see one of these i just like my heart breaks a little bit because i picture some like poor 24 year old english major who was like i wanted to be a novelist and this is like just like hung over trying to make rent

and it just like grinding out these tweets that are destroying their souls and like I feel bad for them you know what they're destroying

our souls too but you know what you know who loves this shit normies normies fucking love this shit they do

you don't want to I don't want to believe it normies love this stuff I think everyone's sick of it now here's why this has driven me nuts for a long time okay because and i i can't remember we've now done offline long enough that i can't remember if we've actually talked to someone about this

but i have always thought that one thing the internet one of the many bad things the internet is doing is it's like ruining humor just like the because yeah everything is machine processed everything is machine processed everything Everything is imitated. All the jokes are out there. So it's hard to find new, funny, interesting stuff to be humorous about. And so everyone's copying the humor style of everyone else. And like I said, it's been a problem for a long time. It seems to be acute with Gen Z and Gen Z influencers.

Because they have their there's like, have their different phrases and different jokes and they are just repeated over and over and over again online on social media. And it like, it's like, yeah, maybe it was funny the first couple of times to say it's giving this energy, but like now all the brands have done it and now I'm seeing all the time.

And guess what? It's not funny. I know. It's not funny. It's definitely what happens when you're parented by the tiktok algorithm that tells you that hitting the applause line over and over and over again to get the approval of everyone but you know what there was a much worse version of this and this is so much better than i don't know if you remember brands after 9-11 oh god, God. I don't, actually.

It was a truly dark time. There was a SpaghettiOs, I believe, in the image team that was like the giant SpaghettiO in front of the Twin Towers that was like SpaghettiO remembers. My personal favorite was Marriott at one point put out free mini muffins and they sent a little sign that said, in remembrance of those we lost on 9-11, the hotel will provide complimentary coffee and mini muffins from 8.45 to 9.15 a.m. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Never forget the mini muffins. Here's the thing.

Having spent a brief, brief period of my life consulting um i have been around like branding firms and watch them present to brands right and it is shocking is this the stuff they come up with well this is what happened you know why these things happen right because they sit around and there's some like stodgy corporate people right and they're like oh we gotta we gotta get out there and we gotta you know we gotta reach the kids how do we everyone's how do we reach the young kids and they're like you got to do something different you got to be authentic right yeah oh how do we be authentic which is just a funny question and they're like you gotta be funny here's a joke that went viral

oh we need our version of that joke that is now old and then they do it right i wonder if it's like gen xers are now in position of power because who is more obsessed with authenticity and with the youth than gen xers i don't i don't mean to implicate anyone who might be sitting at this table but like get a second thing to care about well and it's also it's the attention economy too right because of course what do you need if you're a brand? You want attention. Everyone is competing for attention. Here we are talking about brands. Here we are talking about brands. And so like to get people's attention as a brand,

you can't just have a nice message. You can't just be normal. You can't just be going along your way trying to sell your product to people. No, you have to make a splash. And the way to make a splash is to make yourself sound like a fucking idiot. And everyone knows that the most effective, the most morally upstanding way to advertise is, of course, ad reads at the beginning of Crooked Media Podcast.

People will notice when I do the ad reads sometimes. I have some dripping. Hopefully the brands don't notice. I'm dripping with sarcasm in some of the brand reads because I can't believe what I am reading you're dripping with sincerity and earnest love of the brand for the brands anyway that got very meta very fast

and I'm glad we've ended there because it's been a long difficult week so you know one thing we can all come together on is beating up on brands absolutely and we appreciate their service for that everyone have a great weekend. Try to stay off the internet. Try to stay off your phone if you can.

Please. And we'll talk to you next week. Cheers. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor.

Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos provide audio support to the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reed Cherlin, and Andy Taft for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.