Pod Save America - “Hold my putter.”

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

The Department of Justice indicts 13 Russian nationals who conducted information warfare against the United States, Mueller’s charges offer hints about his next move, Trump reacts on Twitter with his characteristic subtlety and cool, and the students of Stoneham Douglas lead a movement to stop mass shootings. Then Lovett talks to New York Times writer Zeynep Tufekci about Facebook’s role in the Russia indictments and whether mass shootings are contagious.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm a very reflective Jon Levin. I'm Tommy Vitor, and I too feel very reflective on this President's Day, unlike a very insecure Oprah Winfrey. On the show today, we'll be talking to New York Times writer Zeynep Tufekci about Facebook's role in the Russia indictments and whether mass shootings are contagious. Guys, we're back in the studio. Oh, it feels good. We haven't been here in a while, the three of us. Look at us.

Slave drivers making everybody come in on President's Day. Yeah, that was a mistake in hindsight. Not everyone. Just the people that need to help us with this podcast. We've got Elijah, we've got Michael, we've got Rich here. And we have a big announcement. We do. Tommy, do you know what the announcement is? I Michael. We've got Rich here. And we have a big announcement. We do. Tommy, do you know what the announcement is?

I do. I read the tweets. We are launching a newsletter at Crooked.com. The newsletter is called What a Day. What a Day. What a Day. What a Day. And it will deliver everything you need to know about what happened and why it matters

to your inbox at the end of every wonderfully awful day here in the age of Trump. Please go to crooked.com and sign up. We're going to test it out for a little while. So it's probably going to be a couple of weeks away. March 5th. Well, the people who just got nervous about that date that we announced, the people who are writing the newsletter, Priyanka Arabindi of our Crooked Media, Brian Boitler, editor-in-chief of Crooked.com, three of us, the whole Crooked team, that's the newsletter crew. Yeah, so we've been thinking about this for a while, and basically we've been talking about what we would want to see at the end of the day on the days when we were insanely busy

and not able to totally keep up with the news that kind of would help you figure out what happened that day. Yeah, you can expect the same kind of tone that you get here on Pod Save America, the same kind of information. Listen, warm up your unsubscribe clicks, okay? Because you're not going to get any other newsletters once you read this bad boy. That's true. This is it. Once in a while, we'll be listing people's birthday here at Crooked Media

and random people around Los Angeles, if you find that interesting. Yeah. We'll be inhaling Steve Bannon's breath. West Wing mind meld. Okay. All right, guys. Sign up. Sign up for the newsletter.

We're not using the other newsletters anymore. That's it. That's the only slogan we need. Other housekeeping. Love it. How did the show go on Friday? We had an awesome love it or leave it with Ii, Roxane Gay, Solomon Giorgio. We ran through the week's news.

We ran through the Mueller stuff. We also had a big announcement of a contest that you can all participate in right now. If you go to portraitmode.crooked.com, you can submit your official portrait of Donald Trump for the Smithsonian. We are accepting submissions for two weeks i'm going right now we are going to uh select some of our favorites we have a panel of interns and art historians and uh we're going to post our favorites and what we're going to do is we're going to uh choose some winners and one winner and then we're going to print them up on shirts on hats on mugs we're not sure exactly what we're going to print it up but we're going to sell them and all the proceeds are going to go to

arts programs in public schools so you know if you're wondering be creative if you're wondering to what end we use the resources we have here at crooked media this is your answer is it oh i'm sorry i didn't realize that john didn't support art in public schools that's something i learned tommy weren't you weren't you shocked i I was well-versed in his hatred of the arts, actually. I'll give money directly to the arts. Tommy, how was Pod Save the World this week? It was great, John. Thank you for asking. I interviewed a very, very smart journalist named Steve Kahl.

He's written some of the best books about the war in Afghanistan. Ghost Wars. Ghost Wars. Director at S is his latest one. It's about the CIA's role, the military's role, all the challenges in the region, why we're still there after 17 years. So we tried to make this conversation a little different than your standard should we send more troops or not discussion about Afghanistan and really focus on Pakistan, their nuclear weapons program, because that's really the reason why we're there. And if you don't get that, you don't really understand the internal machinations of policymakers in the

administration. So give it a listen. It'll make you smarter. He's a great, great journalist. Excellent. All right, let's get to the news, guys. News. On Friday, the Department of Justice charged 13 Russian nationals and three companies with conspiracy to defraud the United States through a campaign of information warfare that was designed to defeat Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump. Mission accomplished. Happy presidency. Well done. The entire U.S. intelligence community came to this conclusion a year ago, but this is different. This is the United States government stating that it can prove the existence of the Russian operation in court beyond a reasonable doubt.

The operation included identity theft, wire fraud, breaking U.S. election law, buying political advertisements and posting fake messages on social media platforms like Facebook, staging political rallies in the United States, and coordinating political activities with unwitting Trump campaign officials. Isn't that a bit redundant? We're still, we've still yet to find a witting Trump associate. Just to give some, a few examples of how this operation played out. Some of these groups, they post on Facebook and there's a lot of focus on the Facebook

advertisements, but most of the Facebook activity was posts, and they pretended to be different political groups. Or stole identities of real Americans. Or stole identities of real Americans. They encouraged African Americans not to vote or vote for third parties. There was one Instagram account called Woke Blacks. Sample ad, we cannot resort to the lesser of two devils, then we'd surely be better off without voting at all. And choose peace and vote for Jill Stein.

Trust me, it's not a wasted vote. There's another group called United Muslims of America that said American Muslim voters are refusing to vote for Hillary because she wants to continue the war on Muslims in the Middle East. And so on and on it went with groups like this. Guys, I want to spend plenty of time on Trump's reaction to all this, but what were your first reactions to the substance of the indictment on Friday? What were your any holy shit moments?

I mean, I it's fascinating to see something that was probably a counterintelligence investigation or an or an intelligence based deep dive into what happened in this election gets spelled out an indictment in these clear terms like that. So I think the fact that we can now point to these specifics with a 37, 36 page indictment, I think really bolsters the case. The thing that has bothered me, I mean, not just about the Trump response today, but all along is all of this was knowable to him, probably through various intelligence means, counterintelligence, the CIA's work, what the FBI was looking into on sort of a regular day or course of action. So the system shouldn't be surprised by these indictments in any way. It's just, I think for all of us to see it spelled out is striking. It was both not surprising and then also so disconcerting to see it all laid out in such exquisite detail. I mean, the reaction I had when I was seeing the charges and seeing the indictments was indictments don't have feelings. Like Sean Hannity can make like septuagenarian

racists think they don't matter. He can make them scared or angry, but you can't make indictments that are angry. Indictments are reality. You can't trick the indictments into not existing or into not charging the people responsible. Like this is the world. This is what happened. And we're lucky that we still have institutions strong enough that someone like Robert Mueller isn't going to be intimidated out of putting forward the charges he wants based on the evidence he has. Yeah, it's fascinating because, I mean, the truth is, none of these Russians will ever really see the inside of a U.S. courtroom. They're not going to get extradited. And so you might say, you know, well, then why did Mueller do this? But it is the year of knowing that the intelligence community has been saying this

hadn't really sunk in as much as the, and it's not, everyone says it's Mueller's indictments. It is the Department of Justice. It's the United States government saying we can prove in a court of law that United States laws were broken by these foreign nationals who tried to subvert our election. I mean, the entity that did this, the Internet Research Agency, was the subject of a really fascinating 2015 profile in New York Times. So we've known that this bureaucracy existed to just fuck with people on the Internet. What Mueller did is he established a criminal conspiracy with these Russians.

And phase two will be if he can tie U.S. persons to it, like little Donnie Jr. or anyone that Paul Manafort's about to flip on or Rick Gates or any of these folks. So anyone who thinks that this is over is probably not correct. There seems like there could be a whole other phase here. Yeah, no. And so, you know, I want to talk about the Trump reaction next. But John, did you hear that crackling on the phone line it's like someone got patched in and we didn't do it we weren't sure this would be possible today but we actually we have one of the russians charged in the indictment with us today on pod save america are you there sir hello hello

it is it is me joe america i'm humbled humbled by very powerful Justice Man. This is not funny anymore. Joe America in big trouble. Joe America needs help. Joe America, can someone, if you hear this, please call Making Murderer. Call Serial. Please call Serial. They made that Adnan look very good.

And I need urgent, urgent help, please. Please, it's not, please, why are you laughing? Joe America, very scared. He said, oh, come, you know, you'll have fun in America. Go to Miami Beach, drive jet ski, live in big, live in big fancy house no one pays for anymore. And you, you know, brown lawns, you know, but you keep your house. Are you still in Mar-a-Lago? No, I can't say where I am exactly.

It is gray. They brought me this phone. They look very cross with me. They say I can turn on someone, but I feel adrift. Anyway, Joe America bit like dog that caught car. And anyway, again, if you call that small nun, Susan Sarandon once played, what's her name? Do you know the woman? She advocates. She's very tough, very small. Find her, again, if you call that small nun Susan Sarandon once played, what's her name? You know, the woman, she advocates, she's very tough, very small.

Find her, someone, please. Get me Alan Dershowitz. I don't care. Get me a sleazebag. Get me Lanny Davis. I don't care. Get me the lowest of the low. Get me the scummiest lawyer.

Get me Michael Cohen. Please, somebody, call Michael Cohen. Please, I sign anything. Get me David Pecker at National Enquirer. I sign whatever. Give me help. Anyone, please. It's Joe America, a good man, American person, long-time American, love America, red, white, and blue, USA.

Go Eagles. Help. Please. Help. Help. Well, they're laughing their asses off in Moscow. That's right. Oh, God.

Okay. Thank you, Joe. We will check in with you later when you are arraigned. So, the Trump people cherry-picked two parts of the indictment to claim vindication, and I want to take both separately. First, the White House pointed to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's comment that there is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged scheme. Guys, I said Rosenstein and scheme. I know you did. Anyway.

I was thinking that. Yeah. An hour later, a person with knowledge of the special counsel's probe told Bloomberg that Mueller hasn't concluded his investigation into whether Trump or any of his associates helped Russia interfere in the election. Obviously. What's going on here? It was interesting. The word unwitting is doing a lot of work in the indictment. It was almost as if it was there to say it was like it was clean.

It was saying, I'm going to lay out the interference case and it's not going to be touched by any of the other facets of the investigation right now. And Mueller has been so sophisticated in how he has laid out his charges. He is very carefully constructing a building that isn't finished. And so we don't know what exactly it's going to be. But he starts by showing that he has people who are willing to plead guilty. He now is moving on to the actual parts of it that are true interference, the unassailable evidence of interference by Russians. It leaves open other facets of the investigation, facets like collusion, facets like obstruction. And then the final piece of it, other crimes that have been uncovered, that Trump is financial crimes, what have you. But so he's still leaving him.

And on top of that, the other forms of interference like hacking that we yet to know more about. That's a very big point. The hacking was not included. Right. And we know that that's out there. We know that these we know that Russia sent over agents to America to gather intelligence. Now, if they sat down with like the gang at the hotline or the Cook political report to kind of get the lay of the land, like certainly those people wouldn't be charged as part of a conspiracy. Right.

They were just like doing a background briefing. But that doesn't preclude. I mean, we know jr attempted to meet with russians to get dirt we know that all this if it's what you say i love it especially later in the summer if it's what you say i love it you guys what you say i love it these guys these guys just cling to whatever desperate little fact they can at any moment to get them through the next two hours of news cycle, and that's fine. I don't feel the need to fight every one of these battles. That is exactly right.

I was thinking the same thing, Tommy. They do this all the time. It's the worst political instinct that other political people have had forever, which is just, get me through the news cycle, and I'll worry about bad things later. So they don't care. Things might be coming in the future that are bad for them. They don't care.

They just need to get through the day. They just need to stop Trump from screaming at them. And so they'll say whatever they need to to just celebrate and move on. But that's the point. I mean, this is where their ability to shape the news doesn't matter at all.

There is value for them to getting through the day. There's really nothing they can say to fend off whatever is coming in the next few weeks or months. So in a lot of ways, what they're doing, getting Sean Hannity out there to say that Trump was vindicated by this has some value for this period of time, because three months from now, when they're off onto the next, you know, whatever form of misinformation to deal with, however worse this has gotten, they'll just try doing the same thing again.

Rick Wilson always says this, which is that, you know, Mueller has a royal flesh and the Trump team is just playing with a pair of twos. Yeah. It's like, this is all they can do. They've got the cards they've got. They're playing go fish. Right. Can I read you guys something funny?

They interviewed one of the, the Washington Post interviewed one of the trolls and asked him, do you think it worked? And the guy said, the guy's job was to like write stupid comments under news articles in Russia about Russia all day. He wasn't transferred to the Facebook wing where they screwed with the Americans because he didn't have good enough English. And the guy's response was, who really reads the comments under news articles anyway, especially when they were so obviously fake. These were mechanical texts. It was a colossal

labor of monkeys. It was pointless for Russian audience, at least, but for Americans, it appears it did work. So they have built up an immunity to propaganda. We don't have that antibody yet. I want to talk about what this indictment actually said and the type of charge in the indictment, because I find this fairly interesting. Bob Bauer, who was the Obama White House counsel, he's one of the best Democratic election lawyers in the country, maybe the best. Do you remember the scandal he went through where he found out that the staff secretary had been a serial spousal abuser and then he didn't tell anybody about it?

Because he didn't care. Oh, wrong White House counsel. Oh my God, that's not McGann. I'm being crass. I feel so stupid. So the charge that Mueller used with the Russians was conspiracy to defraud the United States. Also the charge that he used in the Manafort case.

So Bauer argues, Mueller didn't charge them with campaign finance law violations, even though foreign national spending money to influence a U.S. campaign is clearly against the law. It's clearly a violation of campaign finance law. Instead, he used conspiracy to defraud, which alleges that the Russians conspired to obstruct the ability of the Federal Election Commission to enforce the law.

In this case, the act of obstruction was the Russians' failure to report their illegal spending. Now, why would he do that? Bob thinks that if there are American co-conspirators that Mueller's going to charge, it would be difficult to charge them with violating the law that prohibits foreign national spending money to influence a campaign. But it would be much easier to charge the American co-conspirators with an act of obstruction, in this case, preventing the government from doing its job. So the idea is that the backbone of the, and Marcy Wheeler wrote about this as well.

You know, Bob Bauer's got to go back to law school. This is garbage. I have no idea what he's talking about. It sounds fascinating. It's also, I think for people listening at home, I don't think you're getting the full treatment because John is in a trench coat and sunglasses and he has a lot of red yarn in his hand. I am. Look, I went over this in detail this morning with Luis Mensch.

No, I think you're totally reasonable question. But it is conspiracy to defraud is looking like the backbone to this case, which is interesting because it also goes to the question of everyone keeps talking about collusion, collusion, collusion. And collusion is not the charge here. The charge is a conspiracy. And the charge could be that anyone in the Trump world who knew that Russians were influencing the U.S. election and decided to hide that fact from the U.S. government are guilty of a crime. So this goes to the Don Jr. meeting. This goes to Donald Trump writing a statement lying about the Don Jr. meeting and obstructing justice. So the question is, he's obstructing justice.

What justice is he obstructing? The Trump people obstructed the ability of the government to know that the Russians were influencing the U.S. elections. And that's what Manafort was doing with money laundering as well. that the Russians were influencing the US elections. And that's what Manafort was doing with money laundering as well. Yeah, I think this is also, it's a good reminder that again, we don't know what Mueller knows. We have been six to eight months behind what Mueller knows. Think about the things we have learned after the fact, months after the fact about what Mueller has been doing. So what he has uncovered about the machinations inside the Trump campaign, we don't yet know. The larger thing here too, though, is that may be the underlying crime Mueller is going toward. But

you've kind of seen a lot of reporting in the last few days that says, okay, okay, okay. We know that they may have had the meeting, but that's not necessarily collusion. Or we know that Trump told Lester Holt, obstruct justice, but that's not necessarily obstructing obstruction of justice. I think that there's, there is the still to be uncovered actual nuts and bolts details of what constitutes some kind of a crime. But the reality we're living in is the reason these indictments don't seem shocking to us is because the crime was conducted in public. You know, it's still the same issue. That's the hardest part.

The scandal is known. We know what we, Donald Trump went on television and said, hack her, you know, go hog wild. Two stories that really drive home, that should drive home for even the most skeptical people about this, that they could have committed a crime, are the Don Jr. meeting and Papadopoulos getting drunk and saying that, oh yeah, by the way, I know that the Russians are sitting on a bunch of hacked emails. Like this is, and also like the most basic theory they teach you in law school that everyone knows is like ignorance of the law is no excuse. Just because these people are fucking incompetent

doesn't mean that they didn't break a bunch of laws. Yeah, if being stupid was a defense, stupid people would use it more. I agree that like trump and putin probably weren't on the phone coordinating this whole thing it's a good likelihood that's not that doesn't mean that he didn't break the law right right the discussion i think that i'm sort of seeing more and more and i have a disagreement with our uh colleague brian boitler on this is like well it didn't impact the election and i'm very firmly in the camp that we don't know if it impacted the election. We never will know.

And it's probably a gigantic waste of time to spend effort trying to prove that the Russians moved the needle one way or the other. To use a very imperfect analogy, you can't try to rob a bank. You know, like it doesn't matter whether you succeed or not. The fact that they invaded our system in this way and did it with a criminal conspiracy is a problem that needs to be deterred. We need to respond in some way that's meaningful as a country and just start the conversation right there.

I think those are the two things that I think are so important about this that really aren't getting discussed enough. Because Donald Trump views everything through the lens of how it affects him personally, he's taking this entire investigation and everything we know personally. And so he cannot bring himself to do what it takes to prevent interference in the future because, A, it helps him and B, it reflects poorly on him. That's number one. So we're not doing anything right now to get ready for this possibly happening again. And two, the other piece of this, which we are not grappling with, is the fact that we were so vulnerable to this kind of propaganda that we were just primed to be abused in this way well i wanted to so the second

part of the indictment that the white house is sort of claiming as vindication is uh rosenstein's statement that the indictment contained no allegation that russian interference altered the outcome of the 2016 election and of course like you said tommy that fact is a political, Tommy, that fact is unknowable. He's not a political scientist. Of course that fact is unknowable. But Brian Boitler wrote a piece on this in Kruger.com. You should all go read it today. And Brian says, you know, we can't run the election over again without Russian interference to see how things would have played out differently in its absence, of course.

But the argument turns on whether we think influence operations of the type Russia ran can change human behavior at all. Clearly, we think it can. Of course. Or we wouldn't care. And the Russians wouldn't spend a million dollars a month doing them. Well, that's what he said. So, yeah, he basically says, with a budget of over $1 million a month to target swing

state voters with disinformation on social media, multiple troves containing thousands of stolen emails, news outlets like RT at your fingertips, and the complicity of a major political party nominee, could you move 80,000 votes in three states? Of course. We don't know, but it's definitely not crazy to think that. Right. It's just I think the hindsight definitive answer will never come to us. Oh, for sure.

Oh, we'll never. It's an annoying waste of time that people are spending on this. But yes, they did this in Ukraine. They do this to their own population. They spew propaganda on them all day long because it's effective. Right. It's a waste of time to go back and figure out, like, did it really happen or not? It's not a waste of time to assert that it could possibly happen because that's how we stop it from happening in the future, to admit that our minds could be changed by propaganda. Of course. Which seems basic, but a lot of people don't seem

to be. Yeah. Well, first of all, what is certainly true is there was a massive propaganda effort of which the Russians were only one part. And the misinformation led by the Russians, the misinformation by places like Breitbart, the misinformation at places like Fox News, the misinformation in places like Infowars, these guys don't need to be coordinated

to have a massive impact to fog up the debate to make it impossible to figure out what's true and what's not true. And I think given that this election was swung by 80,000 votes, it seems hard to argue that this giant apparatus had such a tiny impact that all of these forces altogether that have fundamentally changed the debate in this country didn't shift the outcome. I just think it's impossible. the outcome. I just think it's impossible. A world in which Fox News isn't spewing propaganda 24 hours a day, and there's no Breitbart, and there's no Infowars lying to people and scaring people, and the Russians

aren't there, you don't think that's 100,000 votes? How is that deniable? There's a reason that for decades, campaigns spend millions and millions of dollars on political advertisements. And super PACs do. There's a reason that companies spend millions of dollars on advertisements.

Because it works. No one likes to imagine that an advertisement works, but it works. This is why the Facebook response has always been stupid and frustrating and offensive. Because they acted like they are a company that is going to be worth a trillion dollars someday because they sell the most effective ads on the planet. And all of a sudden they were suggesting, you know, the idea that ads on Facebook couldn't really move the needle. Or the idea that your news feed on Facebook couldn't move the needle and change the way people vote suggested a lack of the russian ads and by the way the majority of ad spend happened after the election he was then retweeted by donald trump which i'm sure the facebook people really loved but it's just it's so ridiculous like of course look and also it wasn't just the ads it was the the facebook groups that they were making it was was the posts. It was like, it was everything. And the idea that 126

million people saw the Facebook ads. Well, of course it fucking did something. This is something I talk about with Zaynab in the interview, but this is a fundamental problem Facebook doesn't know how to solve, which is that it's unsafe at any speed. Either their ads work or they don't. Either Facebook's effective at driving behavior or it's not. They claim

on one hand that it is and the other hand that it's not. The other piece of this, by the way, is let's say you don't think that Facebook ads that have Bernie Sanders with a six pack saying, vote Jill Stein are very effective. Or Hillary Clinton with devil ears.

Okay. Do you believe that Jim Comey would have sent that letter if there hadn't been six months of propaganda designed to make the email scandal equivalent to Donald Trump's scandal? Do you think that James Comey,

bit of performative bipartisanship, would have been as necessary in a world in which the email story wasn't hammered for political purposes for months and months and months? I think the answer is obviously no. I mean, this bozo, 44% of the ads were before the election. Just because the Russians were like, holy shit, that worked, and they poured gasoline on the fire afterwards to continue to foment discord and hatred in our country

doesn't change the fact that those ads existed beforehand. And so his whole thing was such ridiculous bullshit. If you really want to see a great repudiation, check out our friend Kara Swisher's Twitter feed. Oh, yes. Because some other guy named Boz, apparently, he's not a linebacker from the 80s. He's some other engineer, responded and started engaging with her. And she said to

him, just a pro tip, since you think using Twitter will make you seem more approachable, you all are coming off like the arrogant, out of touch tech execs that everyone imagines you are, quote, parenthetical, not my take, since I do know folks at Facebook. So yes, they all like everyone, they're just fucking spinning. They're still spinning. Stop spinning. And again, as we said, the indictment doesn't include any of the hacking activities. And, you know, if you didn't think that made a difference,

as Chris Hayes has tweeted many times, publish your inbox and see what happens. See if it affects your narrative. If you don't think the hacking of the Clinton emails Publish your inbox and see what happens. See if it affects your narrative. If you don't think the hacking of the Clinton emails and the Democratic National Committee's emails made a difference, go ahead and publish all the contents of your email inbox. See what that does to you. For you to believe, I mean, imagine Sean Hannity not saying that the election wasn't stolen for Hillary Clinton if the reverse was going on. Imagine a world in which the right-wing media wasn't hammering every single day that this election was illegitimate because you look at all these pieces of it.

The hacking made no difference. And the Facebook posts made no difference. Are you are you crazy? We spent the email story made no. Are you crazy? We spent six months with the drip, drip, drip of information outside of the DNC and John Podesta's emails, all of which was accentuated by the same Facebook page that were designed to make people stay home, make people not vote, make people disengage from the process.

And if you look at the result of the election and think it didn't work, you're crazy. Everyone should read Dan Pfeiffer's book because it's very smart on this. But, you know, at one point along the way, Facebook had a bunch of human beings curating news, what was trending or hot topics, and they were accused of suppressing conservative news and people's news feeds in the trending news department. They lost their goddamn minds when that happened. Mark Zuckerberg called in a whole bunch of conservatives because the sin of being seen as partisan in their minds was bigger than the sin of having a platform that shoots garbage

down your throat in the form of some like Breitbart article or some other piece of shit. Like a lot of these right wing news sites aren't getting pushed forward because they're not quality news. They're made up like the idea that the lowest learner IRS scandal story should be fed to people is undercut by the idea that those stories were made up. They were nonsense. Yeah. And again, look, not saying this to excuse any of the weaknesses of Hillary Clinton's campaign. Of course not.

Saying this and arguing this because we have to figure out how to stop this when it happens again. Not if it happens again. When it happens again. The Russians will do this again in 2018. They will do it again in 2020. So says Trump's intelligence. So says Trump's.

Exactly. And so we as a country have to figure out how do we stop this from happening again to other candidates in possibly both facebook posts but to to insulate our registration vote our voter registration system insulate our uh voting systems probably need some backup paper ballots we need to back up paper ballots get rid of the fucking electronic ballots too early for that get rid of the electronic ballots what was this idea that we were going to save money it's so crazy we don't need to scale up voting it's the same number of people every year. Check a fucking box and have people count it up. It's worth the money.

What were we saving for? It is so crazy. Electronic ballots are so fucking stupid. It's so crazy. We need to get rid of them. Paper ballots. Paper ballots. And also, John, second, we really need to focus on the brittleness.

Civility in our discourse. The brittleness and the kind of anger that people bring to the conversation on Facebook. No, but seriously, the second piece of it is the harder part, which is as a culture, we are atomized and partisan and narcissistic and vulnerable to people telling us exactly what we want to hear, whether it's inspiration or outrage or novelty. We want to hear whether it's inspiration or outrage or novelty, something that, again, I talk about in the interview later. But Facebook figured out the kind of the political erogenous zones of human minds, and it has been extremely destructive. Media literacy. You can't just say media literacy. Thank you. I think of two things.

One, they should be sanctioning the people who did this. I don't know why Trump has not followed through on those sanctions, but that's a very obvious point. There should be a cost to the Russians who engage in these activities. There should be a massive covert action program going on that's making clear to them that if they pull the shit on us, it's going to happen to them back. And two, there's so much talk about media literacy. But I don't think that voters were smarter 30 years ago. I think you had outlets with guardrails. And I think we're like, I think people were dismissing. He was like, well, you really got to like study that.

But there's no way you would know that a Denver Post headline is real and a Denver Tribune headline is fake unless you're like fairly sophisticated. So I think what's happening is the way people get news, it's not the New York Times delivered at your doorstep or CBS at night, it's Facebook or Twitter. And they need to set up some guardrails to help people sort out the garbage from not. And that involves making choices that might be construed as partisan, and they need to have the balls to do it. Oh, I completely agree with that. I mean, the onus is on, if you're going to be a media company, the onus is on you. And by the way, Facebook doesn't like to think of themselves as such, but they are a fucking media company. And so is Twitter.

And so is all these platforms. Maybe they didn't start off that way, but they have become that. So they have to have the same kind of guardrails and editorial judgment that media companies do. And that's where the onus is. But that's dangerous, too, though. But that's dangerous, too. So then what is it? So no media literacy and no guardrails either?

Well, no, let's talk about it, right? I mean, this is the thing. If Facebook isn't just a media company, they are sucking up, Facebook and Google together are sucking up a huge percentage of advertising dollars. They are far bigger than a traditional media company. And for Facebook to be adjudicating our political debate is also really dangerous and really risky. I don't have the answer, but when we say that Facebook needs to show editorial judgment, we should just be nervous about the amount of power that that puts in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg.

I'm not saying that they should say this article is right and that article is wrong. But there are, I think, objective ways to decide if an outlet is quality or not. Are you worry about had like a black crime section you know like they're well-known propaganda arm they said that their their admitted stated goal by their white house correspondent is to destroy traditional media outlets i mean i think that yeah also like we place that kind of editorial judgment in the hands of the publisher and editor of the new york times the washington post like a whole bunch of things of course of course you can't invest too much.

I mean, this is why it's a balance between making sure that the onus is on these media companies to exercise some editorial judgments and the readers to have the knowledge. I mean, it's both. You have to have a balance of both of them. I don't know where the other option is. I don't know where the other answers are.

Besides, the publisher and the consumer both have some obligations here. I think it's recognizing that Facebook is not just the New York Times. It's the New York Times and the system that delivers the New York Times. And also, it's all of them. It's the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC, all of them added together and funneled through one place. And so I think one of the hardest parts we're going to have to grapple with is how do we diffuse that power? And I think that starts to become a conversation about monopoly. It starts to become a conversation about the manipulation of consumers,

about whether or not these companies should both be able to retain all of this data without telling us how they're using it. There's lots of larger conversations about the system that they've built that's less about editorial judgment on specific articles and more about saying, how do we take some of the power away from these companies? Okay, so that's good. That is the third area.

I think it's regulation. It is regulation of some of these media companies and that you say that we can't expect Mark Zuckerberg himself to be this benevolent CEO who's going to fix the problem on his own, that just like we've regulated other monopolies and other businesses in the past throughout our

country's history, so should we start to think about putting rules in place of these platforms. I mean, but on just the issue, the narrow issue of political ads, now they say they're going to start requiring a snail mail postcard that you send in when you want to purchase a political ad on Facebook that contains a specific code that shows that this postcard came from within the continental US or whatever the US it was sent and confirms that you're an American. They're still not going to apply that ruling to issue based political ads. So to me, that's a giant carve out that will allow manipulation on this platform to go completely unhindered.

And I think that's very troubling. And everything they do is fucking half-measured bullshit. There's bills in Congress right now, too, that haven't moved anywhere, you know, where you're supposed to know the origin of these political ads, stuff like that. And that just, at least there's some legislation that can start taking us in the right direction here.

And it goes beyond ads. I think that's exactly right, that they're not willing to do some of the things that need to be done because they don't want to spend the money. It's amazing to me what a company like Facebook says is possible and what's impossible. Possible. Building one of the most sophisticated

algorithms in history designed to target us individually with all kinds of information. Very successful. Very effective. Impossible. Rooting out parts of that that are dangerous. What I would like to know is what happens if you fill a warehouse with people and spend tens of millions of dollars on this problem?

Not half measures, not sending out a release, not doing a straight to camera announcement that you've put together a blue ribbon commission, but show us that you are putting the same attention into the problems you've created as you put into building this massive, massive system. They were all built on this idea that you can be agnostic and create this tech utopia

where ideas are shared and conversations flourish. And that's just not human nature. Yeah. Yeah. They're running up against the fundamental problem of human beings. And they have to face it. It's profitable, but it's not human nature. Other thing you need is you need governments and larger business community that are willing

to publicly report when these influencer operations are happening, which we also don't have right now. And by the way- Never forget Mitch McConnell did so much. Go for it. No, no, go please. I mean, never forget that Mitchnell stymied efforts to speak more clearly publicly about what was happening before the election and he deserves so much blame

for the outcome and the recriminations of fault yeah basically like you know blackmailing the obama government threatening them saying you can you put out a statement we'll say it's partisan which is classic mitch mcconnell as he was holding open the fucking supreme court seat for neil gorsuch he was also saying you tell anyone that this is happening that russia's trying to influence the election i will say that it's partisan and by the way you trying to that's why facebook is scared but just one one other thing too on this mcconnell it's it's also an irony about what facebook has done which is one of the reasons we're vulnerable as a culture to this kind of propaganda is the way we're talking to each other has become so attenuated and strange. We communicate with

each other via Facebook, we communicate with each other via Twitter about politics, we communicate with each other in this remote way. And our lack of contact with one another with people with which we disagree with with nuance with just human beings face to face has meant that the way we argue about politics online is so fucked up and strange. And we're so willing to believe the worst things about one another, which is a culture that Facebook helped create, which thereby made us vulnerable to these kinds of Russian ads and Russia propaganda on Facebook itself. So, let's get to Donald Trump.

So, Trump originally thought that this indictment exonerated him, because of course he did. But then he decided to spend all weekend holed up in Mar-a-Lago watching television, since his aides convinced him not to golf 40 miles away from the scene of a high school massacre. And the television made him very angry, as it often does does he tweeted 10 times in a 12-hour period some of the craziest general mcmaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the russians and that the only collusion was between russia and crooked h the dnc and the dems didn't know they were different organizations. Remember the dirty dossier uranium speeches, emails on the Podesta company.

Just words. He also said, now that little Adam Schiff, the leakin' monster of no control, is starting to blame President Obama for Russian meddling in the election, he's probably doing so as yet another excuse that the Democrats,

led by their fearless leader, Crooked H, lost the 2016 election. But wasn't I a great candidate? No, you weren't. Adam adam schiff a quick interjection should make a leakin monster of no control t-shirt and i will buy it and wear it every single day or maybe we can do it more tweets more tweets the very worst i'll just do the very worst tweet because she'll get us on off on another conversation very sad that the fbi missed all of the many signals sent out by the florida school shooter this is not acceptable they are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.

There is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud. What the fuck is wrong with him? Can you just set the scene? Like, imagine him staring out the window, wishing he could golf, complaining to Geraldo and Eric and Don Jr. about how he's being mistreated and just fucking raging. I mean, but the last tweet you read, the notion, first of all, like there's 35,000 employees

in the FBI. They have different divisions that work on things like the shooting in Florida or counterintelligence investigations. The idea that one was distracting them from the other is so dumb and so offensive and so fucking nakedly political that it took my breath away when I read that. The idea that the person running the the muller investigation is also manning the national tip line at fbi headquarters is fucking insane and everyone knows that except everyone on fox news who started this conspiracy

theory 24 hours before the president decided to tweet about it which is what always what happens it's just like this guy he's just a sad angry person he's like sitting at mar-a-lago his wife's mad at him because there's reports that he was having affairs with playboy models porn stars all this kind of stuff so she's mad at him he's sitting there he's pissed off they can't golf because there was a school shooting and so he's just watching tv getting angry because he thought this fucking indictment exonerated him yeah i would say first of all we're in desperate need of the cat in the hat uh when he is stuck inside on a rainy day or he's not allowed to golf we need to send in a mischievous uh cat with a hat uh to distract him uh that would be we're just the country needs uh the cat in the hat if you're out there your country needs you. So that's number one.

Adorse. Number two, the absurdity of it, of him deciding to use this as an opportunity to hit the FBI. It broke my brain a little bit because normally I'd be sort of angry, and I saw you guys were tweeting angrily, and I was angry. And then all of a sudden I was like, you know, I'm not mad anymore. This is him. This is him. He has no scruples.

He has no morals. He doesn't care. You went to the second order anger of being angry at Paul Ryan. I went to mad anymore. This is him. This is him. He has no scruples. He has no morals. He doesn't care. You went to the second order anger of being angry at Paul Ryan. I went to Paul Ryan. I went to Paul Ryan. I said, let me put this fury at someplace useful, which is Donald Trump tweets this because it thinks it helps him. He thinks it helps him because he only watches Fox News, but also because Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, Republicans of Congress, have created a culture in which Donald Trump pays no price for this kind of stuff. If Barack Obama ever said anything half as bad as this, there would be hearings, there

would be consequences. We talk about it as it is. We know that Paul Ryan, who joked about it at the Al Smith dinner saying, what tweet can I pretend to not have seen today? And then one other just small point. Donald Trump should not be picking more fights with the FBI. He does not need to remind them that he is not on their side and that they're not on his. And as far as I'm concerned, that is valuable.

It is quite nice that Donald Trump doesn't, that if there's anybody inside the FBI that forgot that Donald Trump is anti-American and hates all of our institutions and is out for no one but himself and is a criminal, that tweet just, you know, was a booster shot. Yes, it was. But that's, I mean, it's a good point. Love it. You know, you want to keep Donald Trump busy and not see tweets like that again? Give him a Democratic Congress. That'll keep him busy.

You know who's going to keep him busier than Devin Nunes? Adam Schiff. You know who's going to keep him busier than Paul Ryan? Nancy Pelosi. You know who's going to be, who's not going to blackmail

an administration into not talking about Russian hacking? Chuck Schumer, when he's the majority leader. Give him a fucking Democratic Congress, then you won't see those tweets it's just so amazing there was a horrific school shooting horrific school shooting so his his team was like sir the optics of golf would look pretty bad you should probably say inside and he was like hold my putter i'm going to tweet something so much worse than the optics of going golfing hold my putter let the

man go hold my putter uh yeah the other part too you know just on the the substance of it also the idea that what we had like there may very well have been a breakdown here where the fbi should have been able to isolate this guy and realize that he was a genuine threat i don't know the answer to that i don't know when a troubled kid saying crazy shit rises to the level of intervening, in part because there are so many kids saying crazy shit. And it's this backwards thing where because we know that the AR-15s are everywhere, because we know that the guns are everywhere, because they know that they're everywhere. Now we're left to this whole thing of like, well, the kid can always get the gun. So we have to stop him before he gets the gun. always get the gun so we have to stop him before he gets the gun and every single high school in this country has a troubled kid or two who are going through something some of them have violent

fantasies and then some tiny section of them some subset of them are going to act on those fantasies if the answer to mass shootings with weapons is creating a police state because we're so afraid to take the guns it is uh there was an armed guard at the entrance of this high school. I want to talk about the aftermath of the mass shooting at Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The surviving students have now kept the story in the news longer than just about any mass shooting since Newtown. Part of the reason is how they've been speaking out in a real forceful and inspiring way.

We have a clip of student Emma Gonzalez's speech, which went viral over the weekend. I think we can play. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS! They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS!

They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS! They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS! They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. So the big question here is, will this time be different? Feels like it could be.

I know it. Yes, it's going to be different. Because I'm so sick of the cynical response on these questions being the one everyone defaults to because it's hard everything in politics is hard so let's just hope that after schools and churches and movie theaters have been shot up this many times that we can find the courage to require background checks and ban fucking ar-15s and other assault rifles and consider getting a buyback program out there to get guns off the streets and out of circulation and that getting a buyback program out there to get guns off the streets and out of circulation. And that we ignore these like cynical proposals from people like John

Cornyn that are going to try to make this about, you know, sort of better enforcement of current law or stigmatizing people with mental health issues and all the things they try to do to keep up like real gun control solutions from getting talked about. Yeah i i agree alec mcgillis always talks about this uh journalist and and uh that there's this liberal fatalism when it comes to gun violence where you know and it is it's an extension of the lol nothing matters view of the trump era which is like nothing gets done and the truth is maybe nothing gets done in this congress but that doesn't mean this time can't be different in terms of starting a movement that actually changes the laws that starts at a local level that starts at the state level that elects a new congress that ultimately elects a new president i mean we gotta we gotta start the movement now and we gotta grow the movement now

and we've got to keep pushing and pushing and pushing. And when legislation dies in Congress, you elect a new Congress and then you keep going. You know, this is a long road on this, but we start now. It is a bit like climate change in that climate change is hard to wrap your head around because there is no one solution and solving it seems really hard. But then you look at the data, you look at what you can do, and you start to piece together the solutions from smaller policies, smaller reductions, smaller adjustments in our emissions, and slowly but surely you make big changes. It's going to take a really long time for America to have a less violent gun culture than it has right now. It's going to take decades to slowly and extrably get those murder rates and suicide rates and mass shooting rates down. But we have to start.

We have to start doing the work of making changes. Now, conservatives will say, oh, this wouldn't have made a meaningful difference. Or, oh, this, you know, you look at this and you look at the mass shooting statistics and the majority of the guns are bought legally. And that's an argument against gun control. But then also the ones that are bought illegally. And that's also an argument against gun control. Yeah, everything's an argument against gun control.

Every specific case, there's a way in which that person would have been able to acquire that weapon. But if you slowly but surely make access to these weapons harder, require more of people before they're armed, you will slowly but surely see a reduction in gun violence, which we've seen over and over again at the state level, that when you put in place smarter gun laws, there are fewer gun deaths. It is unequivocal. Courageous people will stand up.

There's a big Republican donor said he's not cutting another check until there's action on gun deaths. It is unequivocal. Courageous people will stand up. There's a big Republican donor said he's not cutting another check until there's action on gun control. John Kasich called for common sense gun control over the weekend and questioned the need for semi-automatic rifles. If we can get those voices to drown out the epic fucking cowards like Marco Rubio,

who literally said, if one person decides to do it and they're committed to that task, it is a very difficult thing to stop. That logic would never, ever be applied to terrorism. And terrorists are very determined to, and it doesn't mean we don't try to stop them. So we should hammer, hammer cynical, fatalistic people like Marco Rubio. And when kids in Florida are seeing these tweets from Donald Trump or seeing comments from Marco Rubio and saying, you know, that's outrageous. I think that is very powerful.

I was going to say, I want to talk about these students because the kids at Newtown, the kids at Sandy Hook Elementary School were too young to really speak out and to be politically active. The difference here is these are high school students. And that speech also talks about how they've actually had debates about gun violence and gun control in their classroom. She said there was actually one going on while the shooter was there. These kids just sort of fly right in the face of all of the arguments that millennials, that young people in this country don't care, that they're not engaged, that they're tired, that they don't, you know, they don't care about political involvement.

These kids, they are engaged and they're angry and they're also hopeful at the same time as being angry and they're going to fucking change this thing. This generation is not going to, 2018 and 2020 are not going to be like 2016. You can tell. It's fascinating. First of all, just hearing the speeches, it's moving and inspiring.

We've talked a lot about what's going to break this cycle. You know, we have a mass shooting, and then people talk about it for a day, and then nothing happens. What's going to break this cycle? We've kind of evolved a response system that repeats and repeats and repeats. And it turns out the kids were watching that cycle too. And they're breaking it. They were on Twitter. And they saw it every time. So they know all the moves too. They know the NRA's moves too. They know Marco Rubio's moves too. They know all the moves. And they saw it every time. So they know all the moves too. They know the NRA's moves too. They know Marco Rubio's moves too. They know all the moves.

And so they're interjecting in the middle of the loop we have. And they're saying, no, no, no, not this time. We're not going to be the school that goes away. We're going to be the school that keeps popping up. And they're not cynical yet. And the other thing too is one advantage to having a dumb fuck president who watches the news all day and doesn't actually read his briefs and has no idea what's actually going on in the world is protests are a TV medium. Protests work on television.

And we saw that there were reports that Donald Trump was wandering around Mar-a-Lago like he just was haunted by the ghost of Christmas past asking people what to do to fix this. Well, one of his visitors who has joined him that day suggested flying armed drones over schools because they work in Syria. Yes, Wayne Allard Root. That's whoever that is. Oh, my God. These are insane. Oh, my God. That was happening.

He really tweeted that. And Geraldo. He sees these heroic students on CNN and other places, and he's seething, right? And he's also, now he's going around and he's asking all these people paying $200,000 a year to be at his golf club. What should I do? That's his policy process now. You used to have like a whole deputies committee and then it's all that.

You just ask the dumbest people on the board. You ask the dumbest people who are super rich what I should do about this. Should I do anything? Now you go to crab leg night at Mar-a-Lago. Oh, I got some armed drones. That's the answer. Cool, cool.

Excellent. Great. That's how we're getting policy. You can see through a roof through hold my putter hold my pull my putter that's the episode can i get yeah i think it is uh just the other thing too is one of the things i saw a few people say is well these uh reducing gun access won't stop mass shootings they'll just prevent suicides that's good yeah great we have we have three giant problems all caused by guns we have suicides we have whatever quotidian murders and then we have mass shootings they are very different crises but they have one thing in

common which is that people have too much access to deadly weapons that's it the idea that gun control can't solve all gun violence so that we shouldn't pursue it even if it might solve some gun violence is so fucking absurd and i'm so sick of it rip the seat belts out of the cars get rid of those airplanes get rid of those airplane escape doors we don't need those anymore belts and airbags don't prevent all car crash deaths so they we shouldn't have them to try to prevent any that's a good idea yeah People with driver's licenses get into accidents, so I guess we don't need them. Ridiculous. Okay. When we come back, we will have John Lovett's interview with New York Times writer Zeynep Tufekci. Stick around.

Joining us on the pod today, she's an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a contributing writer for the New York Times where she covers the internet, technology, politics, and society. Seriously, one of the most prescient and intelligent writers on these topics. Very excited to have Zeynep Tufekci. Zeynep, welcome. Thank you for inviting me. Thanks for being here. So you've been warning people for a long time about the degree to which social media could be manipulated to influence and disrupt our politics. I don't know if you've been following the news, but it seems some others have caught on to this idea. Facebook was at the center of the charges the Justice Department announced last week against 13 Russians who've been accused of subverting our elections. What was your reaction to seeing these charges? Well, on the one hand,

what had been happening was visible before the election too. So to anybody who'd been following this, it's not terribly surprising. The interesting thing and the important thing for me isn't just that there was Russian source meddling, which I think at this point is pretty clear that there was some efforts, but that there was an information ecology. And there is a political polarization that made it so easy for this to work to some degree. And this has been my contention, even if not another ruble is spent on the elections in 2018 or 2020, a good deal of the problems that we're struggling with will still be here because we currently have a media ecology that makes it not just easy, but very rewarding to spread misinformation and to create polarization. And that's the problem we have to deal with. The Russians were using Facebook exactly as it was designed, as a platform for influence without checks and balances that we struggled for a long time to imperfectly get in traditional media.

Even there it wasn't perfect, but there was at least some institutional efforts to do that. And we're in this whole new world, and if they were misusing the platforms, that was one thing, but it's more like they're using it in the way they were designed. And that's what worries me going forward more than what 13 or 300 Russians may have done. Right, right. One thing you've said before is that we're susceptible to glimmers of novelty, messages of affirmation and belonging and messages of outrage toward perceived enemies, which I would call Facebook. I mean, it feels a little bit like sometimes Facebook is unsafe at any speed that they're sort of at a fundamental problem, which is Facebook is doing what Facebook is supposed to do. So how can they

fix it when it's inherent, when it's sort of the organizing principle of what Facebook is to try to garner people's attention in this way? So what we have is this new tool that optimizes for keeping you on the tool, right? Facebook makes this money by surveilling people and then advertising to them and sending messages to them. and then advertising to them and sending messages to them. A key way in which it keeps people on the site appears to be rewarding, as you just read, affirmations where we feel like belonging, or outrage where we have an us versus them polarization, or novelty, which is something people seek. So this is like fat, sugar, and salt to the human appetite,

is this kind of information is to our social existence. The other thing that Facebook does is makes it really easy for advertisers to find the kind of people you want to find using both the enormous amount of data it collects on you, and then using artificial intelligence to find people like you. For example, if you wanted to target now, I don't know how exactly the Russians did their ad campaign. But from what I can tell, the ad campaigns were just tip of the iceberg of what they were trying to do. The ads allowed them to reach some people, then they got those people to like their pages. And that gave them what the marketer people call organic reach, which is people who are susceptible to it. And now a question I have is whether they use the

tool. Pretty much everybody who uses Facebook to advertise uses is something called lookalike audiences. So let's say you found people who are susceptible to the infamous Denver Guardian post, Denver Guardian is a fake newspaper. It doesn't exist. Wait, what? Oh, my goodness. Sorry. I am so sorry to break it to you. So the newspaper that doesn't exist

had this news that obviously isn't true that implied that Hillary Clinton had tried to murder an FBI agent. In fact, the guy who wrote it is a liberal from Hollywood. He just was trying to make some money. He just typed up some stuff and it went viral. Millions of people saw it. So the thing is, it's not just that millions of people see it, right? And then they go,

let's say, click on a site. And then you have them in your reach. You can go to Facebook and say, find me more people like that. And that's called a lookalike audience. And more people like that isn't people the same age or the same, you know, politics exactly, according to the traditional advertising characteristics. It's just the artificial intelligence engine and it just goes and looks through a bunch of stuff and uses tons of parameters and just pulls people like it. So it doesn't necessarily go find people who are self-declared as this sort of political party. It's just much better than that. It's much more precise in finding an audience like that. And then you can go advertise exactly to them.

It's all gone underground. You know, I see Facebook ads. And one thing that's amazing is often how much they're able to know exactly what I'm about to want to buy. The number of times they've caught me right before I bought a backpack or gym shorts or something is pretty impressive, right? In some ways, they're a victim of their own success. I mean, you don't have a problem with, I mean, Facebook having the ability to kind of use their information to share with us things that we want isn't inherently bad. It's that it can be abused. And in this case, it was terribly abused, right? Or do you have a fundamental problem with their business model

of using the information they give us to show us things we want to see? So I don't think there's a way in which this business model doesn't cause problems, to be honest. And the thing is, of course, they're doing what advertisers have always wanted to do, right? They have enormous data on people, and they can target them one by one, and they can target them without their targeting being public. But if you are collecting this much data on people and using artificial intelligence and all these sort of advanced tools to precisely target them artificial intelligence and all these sort of advanced tools to precisely target them and externalize all the problems, which is what Facebook does right now, because according to US law, they're treated like a phone company or the post service, they're not responsible

for whatever gets said on their site, really, by law. There's a way in which I don't see how this business model doesn't lead to an information crisis like this. Ultimately, we're talking about a shift to an economy of ideas around attention. And haven't we learned something fundamental about people and what people want to put their attention toward, right? I don't care if it's Facebook or Twitter or some other new social media. We have learned that people want things that confirm their biases, that confirm their outrages, that excite them in some way, whether or not it's true. And you can't put that on Facebook. That's on us, right? That is both on us and on Facebook. So there's a demand side and there are human vulnerabilities at scale. But on the other hand, we can't deal with this by

making it very easy to make money from it. What's the one change you think that we could make right now that would make a difference? What's one thing that Facebook could do or the government could do to crack down on Facebook that you think if we could just get this one thing done, it would at least help? Well, it's the hardest one. I would like to change the business model and be the customer. I would like there to be right now. I mean, here's the ironic thing. Right now, because it's so easy to make money this way,

Facebook and most of Silicon Valley is stuck in a very non-innovative space. They're not disrupting anything. They're very non-innovative. They're just sort of making a lot of money doing one thing, which is their ad brokers. There are all these other ways in which our social media could work. There's all these new technologies that they could harness to do things better. None of it is happening really, as far as I can tell, because this is very profitable this way. So if you change the business model so that the people are the customer, and then there's some accountability to how you serve those people, and there's some public interest in what they do, then there's this

big space of innovation that could open up rather than this dull, narrow space that most of Silicon Valley is stuck in. So that's what I would want. I mean, like, if I had a magic wand, I would be, let me be the customer, stop selling me, rather serve me and, you know, the public sphere, the public's needs with all of this, and they would still be fabulously wealthy. I think it would be much more exciting. There's so much to do that's not being done. greatest minds of my generation are trying to make people click on ads, paraphrasing Hal. But it's really true. We've got lots of smart, smart people who are trying to profile us, survey us, and sell us some ads and keep us stay on a site. This is a pity.

And I think we should just get off this path. Look, I think the good news is that's only half the smartest minds. The other half of the smartest minds are designing new and more complicated financial instruments to cause a financial crisis we can't foresee. Well, I mean, actually, there's a lot of analogy to that. It used to be that like all the smart physicists and math people, the quants, they would go work for Wall Street. And they created these instruments that they couldn't understand and couldn't foresee the results of. And that's how we got the 2008 major crisis, is the sort of interactions that these smart people who are very smart in one domain and made a lot of money

but couldn't foresee what their little smart domain thing would lead to. We now have a similar situation in which we have people who are quite competent in a very narrow domain, and they're just messing with everything, and they're in over their heads. And the world paid the price for the 2008 financial crisis created by these math and physics PhDs who went to work for Wall Street

and the Wall Street companies that just use these tools they develop. And we now have a similar situation. A lot of smart people developing these tools they don't understand, and companies who are in over their heads. And the prices externalize the society that we all live in. And that really seems like a pity. This is a very young technology. There's so many upsides to it. There's so many more positive ways to go about this. And it's just 14 years old. We don't have

to be stuck here. This is a failure of imagination. I mean, at the moment, for all their talk of innovation, I think Silicon Valley is one of the most boring, dull places that is deeply un-innovative and not coming up with interesting things at all. Well, so what makes me nervous is that the math and physics quants who screwed up the financial system and are now screwing up our discourse are going to go somewhere else. And God help us. I don't even know where it's going to be, but it's clearly something to keep an eye on. I did want to ask one other, sort of touch on one other topic, because you've also written a lot about the social contagion around mass shootings. Obviously, we've just seen yet another horrible mass shooting. This is the most deadly shooting to take place at a high school. I don't think people fully understand what people mean when they say

contagion. What is happening when there is a mass shooting? And in your mind, why do you think that leads to future mass shootings? So let me explain by talking about something else that we know has mass contagion effects, which is suicides. This has been studied a lot. When there's a very high-profile suicide, unfortunately, if there's a sensational coverage of it, what happens is a lot of young troubled people get seeds of ideation and start to imagine it, and it causes an increase in the number of suicides you see.

In fact, recently there was that really sad case, Robin Williams committed suicide, and it created a huge amount of media coverage that did not follow the guidelines that the Centers for Disease Control has for suicide media coverage, which is very specific. It's not censorship. It's a way to do it that does not generate copycats or tries to dampen the copycat effect. And there's just a recent paper out, there's a 10% increase in suicides in the country in the US following that kind of media coverage, sensational media coverage describing method. I mean, it's a large number. So what we know from research right now is that a very similar situation in which we see that a lot of these sort of murder suicides, these mass murders are also partially suicidal people. They're, you know, a lot of them sort of kill themselves in the end.

And it appears that from research, from FBI research, from interviews, and from statistical studies, that there's a copycat effect. When you do one of these, the killer's face, the killer's words, name, the videos of people running in fear, all of those appear, you know, on loop on TV, they're on again, and again, and again. And if you have this distorted mind, and you're thinking, how do I get my revenge on the world and make my name be on that TV, like on that loop, you're basically giving them an instruction manual. Sensationalist coverage is pretty clear at this point by research is helping fuel and inspire the next one.

Now, when I say this, people say, what about guns? I'm, yes, of course. I mean, obviously, this doesn't say that this easy access to these powerful guns isn't part of the problem. It is a big part of the problem. But this is also part of the problem. We can cover these things without this level of sensationalism. But we don't because once again, the same problem ratings because it's like a car wreck you're watching and there's, you know, news to cover. And CNN puts it on loop and New York Times puts on the front page.

But the next distorted killer is watching this. And by the way, it's the same. It's a reminder of the problems that existed before we got to Facebook, right? This is the old way of garnering attention. That's right. That's right. I mean, look, we made progress on the suicide front in covering suicide in a more respectful way because people understood it. But at the same time, suicide doesn't get a newsroom all riled up. It doesn't get the national attention all focused on one story. This seems like a harder place to try to intervene to convince the media not to cover it. And so far we failed completely.

I know the name of the person who did the killing in Parkland. I've seen his face 30 times. It's not just sort of the name. It's the nonstop repetition that causes the problem. You know, the problem isn't like just once you have the name out, but it's just this nonstop repetition and playing on loop. If you want to get your manifesto on national TV read again and again, if you commit mass murder with large numbers,

that seems to be a surefire way to do it. And that plus easy access to guns is a very combustible combination, and that's the unfortunate part that I've been, you know, the research is pretty clear. The way we sort of stare and sensationalize mass murder and the way we report it is helping inspire the next one who unfortunately has access to guns and the problems are combining. So the thing is that we're not going to stop covering mass shootings. And you're not arguing that, obviously. That's not what I'm arguing. We just need to change how we do it. But, you know, you're a producer at CNN. Your job is to cover this.

You're hearing from your bosses that this is the story everybody's going to put on a loop. Is there a compromise where we could get them to understand the importance of not covering it in a certain way while still doing? Look, you know, I'm just acceding to the reality that they are going to cover a mass shooting for hours on end. And I don't know how you convince them to not do that. Is there a way that they can do that? Of course. I mean, they already do it for suicides. We already do it for suicides. Occasionally, it gets violated. Don't put the killer's face on loop. Don't put their manifesto on loop. Focus on the victims. Focus on the problems. Focus on the tragedy. Do not like this is a snuff film directed by that person.

So don't put that snuff film on loop. This is not hard. They're showing it again and again and again. It doesn't add to the news value. I'm not saying don't ever mention the name either. Just mention it, but don't put it on loop. Don't put that person's face on loop. Don't put the scared people running.

It's a snuff film. It's directed, produced, actual snuff film so that it'll play on loop. And it seems pretty straightforward to me that we don't have to play that game in the killer's terms. We can report this respectfully, focusing on the victims, focusing on important things of news value, without just filling the time with whatever we happen to get, even if it's a snuff film. So these are pretty grim topics and show, I think, the dark side of the way in which we communicate the access we have to one another now. At the same time, Facebook, Twitter, Google, they have taken down an old guard. They have taken down the gatekeepers that have allowed

all of us to participate and kind of know each other better than we thought and better than we wanted to. Do you feel positive about the world we've built? About the way in which we are now connected to one another? Do you think that this experiment has overall been a success? Actually, I know my topics are really grim. But the reason I focus on all this grim stuff is that I think this is fixable. I mean, I'm quite hopeful. I know you're going to say you said all these grim things, but I think we're really early in these technologies, and we have a failure of imagination that has gripped us.

And we're kind of like when I talk about the coverage, people say, oh, it'll never change. And I'm like, yes, it can. We did this for suicide. We used to have a lot of suicide contagion. And then people got together and said, this isn't really a good idea. There was waves of teenagers committing suicide, emulating the previous ones. And the Centers for Disease Control came up with perfectly sensible guidelines. And the guidelines are largely respected by mass media at the moment.

And it works. It put a dampen on this copycat. It's the same thing with Facebook there. It can be a fabulously wealthy company and do things different way. I mean, these technologies are wonderful in so many ways. And the old guard isn't coming back. And it wasn't that great either. There's all sorts of great things we can do. The reason I focus on the Grimm stuff is that when you get cars as a technology, your first thing

shouldn't be, wow, how fast this goes compared to a horse, which is true. It does go really fast compared to a horse. We should be thinking, wait, how do we make this safer? You know, how do we make this not ruin our climate? How do we design our cities so that we're not stuck in these things all the time, right? You need to focus on sort of the grim side and the negative side so that we can fix it. And if I thought we couldn't fix it, and if I didn't have hope, I wouldn't bother talking about all of this. I would just use the positive sayings and kind of ignore the other stuff. But that's, I have a lot of hope. We just have to have our imagination, our innovation, our technology, our policy, and everything else kind of get up and catch up.

And we don't have to let it happen this way. Well, that's a good place to end it. Zeynep Tufekci, thank you so much for being on The Pond today. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for joining. Thanks again to the New York Times' Znep Tefeci for that great interview and I guess we'll see you all

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