QAA Podcast - Everyone Hates Fact Checkers (E299)

Episode Date: October 27, 2024

Despite Travis’ best efforts, it’s still possible to occasionally read posts on the internet that are not perfectly accurate. In fact, Travis’ failure to turn networking technology into primarily a means of rationally exchanging ideas and substantive policy issues has forced media outlets all over the globe to employ so-called “fact checkers.” To get a better handle on this phenomenon (for which, to reiterate, podcast host Travis View bears most of the blame) we spoke to the hardest working man in online fact checking: BBC Verify Senior Journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh. For years, he has tracked and reported on viral falsehoods, both silly and deadly, in many countries. We discuss how Shayan got into this unique discipline of journalism, his response to the criticism that “fact checking” primarily serves the reinforcement of establishment narratives, research which suggests fact checkers are less trusted than other kinds of reporters, the rise of deep fakes, atrocity denial, and how to maintain trust as a fact checker. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/QAA Shayan Sardarizadeh https://x.com/shayan86 BBC Verify https://www.bbc.com/news/reality_check Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast. SOURCES The Onion: Factual Error Found On The Internet https://theonion.com/factual-error-found-on-internet-1819566445/ Nieman Lab: Readers are more suspicious of journalists providing corrections than journalists providing confirmations https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/08/readers-are-more-suspicious-of-journalists-providing-corrections-than-journalists-providing-confirmations/ Rolling Stone: Right-Wingers Heartbroken by Picture of Little Girl Who Doesn’t Exist https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ai-girl-maga-hurricane-helene-1235125285/ Washington Post: Viral attack on Walz features fake former student making false claim https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/10/21/tim-walz-matthew-metro-video/ Newsweek: Gaza War Death Toll Passes 43,000, Palestinian Health Ministry Reports https://www.newsweek.com/gaza-war-deaths-surpass-43000-palestinian-health-ministry-reports-1975910 BBC: False claims of staged deaths surge in Israel-Gaza war https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67760523 UN News: Rights expert finds ‘reasonable grounds’ genocide is being committed in Gaza https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976 United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: Türk says world must act as darkest moment of Gaza conflict unfolds https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/10/turk-says-world-must-act-darkest-moment-gaza-conflict-unfolds

Keep mehame If you're hearing this, well done. You found a way to connect to the Internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 299. Everyone hates fact checkers. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky. And Travis View. In 2002, the satirical publication, The Onion, published an article headlined,

Factual Error Found on the Internet. It read, Long, Colorado. The Information Age. was dealt a stunning blow Monday when a factual error was discovered on the internet. The error was found on Ted's Ultimate Bradybunch.com, a Brady Bunch fan site that incorrectly listed the show's debut year

as 1968, not 1969. I think about that article a lot because it was published 22 years ago before the invention of social media as we know it today. There was no Twitter or Facebook or YouTube. There wasn't even a MySpace. There wasn't even a Friendster. But this Onion article shows that even in this immature stage of the Internet's development, it was understood that falsehoods were routinely published on it,

the quality that made the Internet so empowering. The ability for anyone to share their words or other creations with a world without a gatekeeper also enabled its most frustrating flaw. Someone who publishes anonymously on the Internet has fewer incentives to be perfectly factual than traditional outlets or publishers. and therefore getting information from the internet without being the victim of a hoax or misinformation requires a certain level of discernment. To better understand how to navigate the online realm without getting swept away by lies,

we are joined by the hardest working man in online fact-checking BBC journalist Cheyenne Zardarizada. Cheyenne is a senior journalist covering disinformation, extremism, and conspiracy theories for BBC monitoring's disinformation team as part of BBC. verify. Cheyenne, thank you so much for chatting with us today. Thank you very much, Travis, for having me. Yes, I know. It's, yeah, I will, like, I, I know that, you know, everyone in this field really admires your diligent work. Very, very, you know, you're always in the lion's den, you know, trying to sift through mountains of disinformation. So I'm, I'm glad to be able to finally chat with you. Yes, I often, I often look to Cheyenne's reporting and tweets as like a beacon,

a beacon of reality, uh, in an otherwise, like, complete sludge of, uh, of Twitter. So I do kind of feel like I'm meeting somewhat of a celebrity. We've also all been in the trenches for a very long time looking at all of this shit. So it's always fun to sort of talk to somebody who, you know, you've appreciated their work for very long, but never sort of like seen face to face. Well, or at least Skype to Skype in our case. Yeah, I feel like we're friends who've never met because obviously we've been in touch for for a long time. I've been a regular, an avid listener of the podcast for a long time. And yeah, we've obviously exchanged ideas online and we've talked to each other. I've reached out to you guys for stories and

ask comments and published your analysis of Q&N, particularly Q&N related stories or conspiracy related stories. But yeah, we never actually got a chance to sat down to chat. And I'm glad we finally got around to it. Yeah, long time coming. So first of all, I'm curious how we even got into this field because, like, you know, news outlets, they've employed fact checkers for a long time. That's usually to, like, independently verify, you know, reporting that, like, other reporters do. You know, like, reporting on, like, miss and disinformation is a fairly new discipline in this sense. So, like, how did you find yourself in this position? So I started journalism when I was 17 or 18, and I sort of, I trained as a normal journalist doing sort of regular

journalism and reporting it was around i think 2014 2015 when the syrian civil war was sort of raging that i got and also the first invasion of ukraine and that in that case eastern ukraine after the um after the uamaidan protests uh started and the sort of the beginning of this long sort of running conflict between russia and ukraine that the idea of doing open source journalism and uh covering these types of stories by basically just focusing on videos online and using publicly available resources and tools on the internet, which was incomparable, by the way, back then 10 years ago to what we have today. That sort of got me very keen because it was a very new field of reporting. Bellingad and Elia Higgins had just started basically doing these types of investigations

and I was fascinated by it and tried to sort of look at their work, try to sort of train myself into doing and sort of the BBC very quickly set up a team of journalists who were specialising in doing video verification and figuring out how to basically look at videos and figure out from a video from from pictures that get sent to the BBC or get posted online you know what's happening where is this true is this not who's done it where it's happened what date and sort of naturally from there when I sort of when we go into 2015 2016 and the idea of basically when people go go on the internet, there's a ton of nonsense that people see sort of started spreading around. And then the, if you remember, the 2016, the very controversial 2016 presidential campaign that you guys

had and all the allegations surrounding what was happening online, you know, what role foreign influence was playing in that campaign. That sort of, that got me very interested in this particular field. Obviously, I've always been fascinated by conspiracy theories, I think, like you guys and probably like most people are listening to this. But the idea of basically incorporating all of that into traditional reporting was something that was very fascinating to me and the BBC kind of caught up to all that stuff

and a bit late you would say possibly because by the time we all sort of there was a team of us that was set up in 2018 in the BBC very sort of handful and then by the time COVID hit I think all of us realized like wow this was this was a huge thing

I mean just sort of thinking back four and a half years ago you know January February March 2020 when most of the world was shut down and people were sat at home and we were all sort of afraid of this new novel virus and what what was going to happen what it could do to our economies to ourselves to our health and we all remember like the explosion of misinformation that happened in that period of time and a lot of news outlets a lot of journalists basically focused on the aspect of because obviously we were in a public health crisis it wasn't just some people

posting this online we don't care about it no suddenly we all cared about it and then from then on I feel like the idea of this specific type of work has kind of become really, really important to most news outlets and most journalists and also ordinary people. I mean, there's been a series of events that have happened since not just COVID and sort of vaccination campaign and the sort of what I call the revival of anti-vaccination movement, which was very fringe and still is fringe, but sort of saw some sort of engagement and some spotlight at the peak of COVID. But then you guys had your election campaign in 2020, which I think I don't. don't need to explain what happened there and in the aftermath of it, which sort of obviously misinformation and conspiracy theories played such a huge role in that, again, the other thing I don't need to explain, the world saw probably the rise of the biggest conspiracy movement the world has ever seen that sort of rose from the online world, obviously QAnon. And it got, it's,

it's sort of, it's fascinating to look back on it now four years later when the movement is not what it used to be, but in the streets of London here we had, at the weekend, the summer of 22, we had protests by QAnon supporters, which was so shocking to many journalists that, you know, what, what are people doing here in London talking about Q&O? And then obviously the war in Ukraine happened and all the sort of misinformation and fact-checking that was required and still is required in relation to that war.

And then obviously the events in the Middle East since the October of last year and now obviously another US presidential campaign. So all of these events happening one after another and the sort of the rate of misinformation and conspiracy theories that have been posted online with real world impact. In this case, it's not just, you know, a lot of people, in a lot of newsrooms, the idea has always been, well, it's just, that's just a group of people talking online. Who cares? We now realize that it does matter and we should care because it's not just necessarily some people talking online. Sometimes those people talk online and they believe in something based on complete lies and rubbish and then go offline in the real world and act upon it.

So now it's become something that, well, pretty much in most newsrooms, they do cover this information, fact-checking, conspiracy theories. And now the, obviously, sort of, as you said, a traditional fact-checking, which was rightly focused on, you know, in the older days, politicians, powerful people, people with influence, with money that have them impacting in our public lives, which, you know, we still rightly do all news outlets, rightly do, you know, holding power to account is a huge part of our work as journalists. But at the same time, we now focus also on the online world and what's happening there and what are people saying there and what is going viral online? What are people seeing say during the presidential election campaign in America? What are people talking about? What are they seeing? What impact does it have? Does it actually, is there, are there any signs that these things that are going viral online that are actually translating into what people are doing in the real world?

And all of that stuff. So that's sort of a very long winded answer to say, yes, obviously most use actors I think these days. And I think most audiences now recognize that this is a serious and necessary part of journalism. Well, and furthermore, you know, I feel like we've reached a point where anytime anything happens that can inspire a sort of international conversation is prone to be conspiracy, you know, have conspiracy theories made up about it or, you know, baked. I mean, even yesterday, even yesterday, I fell victim to misinformation online. when the huge story broke that one of the One Direction members had died and I rushed on Twitter

I was sitting with my wife I found this video and I was like oh my god there's something like fucking Elon like they've already posted the video of him fall you know of him falling off of this balcony this is fucking awful I can't watch this my wife was like okay I'll watch it and she's texting her friend she's going she's going

oh my god and there's already this video that's been posted that's going around like this is so awful like nobody has privacy we were talking about it and then like you know, 45 minutes later, we're, you know, we're eating dinner and she looks down her phone, she goes, oh, hmm, I think maybe that video like wasn't him, actually. It was like from a fire, like a guy jumping off a balcony from a fire three years ago. And I was like, well, we are victims of misinformation.

And I'm supposed to be like, you know, like kind of well versed in this stuff. And like, you know, it's so easy. And there's so, and there's now incentives online to post something very quickly to get eyes on it, to get clicks for clout or for followers or whatever the reason is. And it's just, it feels like we'll never get a break. As long as as reality keeps happening, there will be these accounts, especially online, you know, who jump in quick to, I don't know what it is, make up something about it or pretend that they've got more of the story when, in fact, it's from something completely different. Yeah, absolutely 100% right. I always say we now have to accept that.

We are living in a world when something, some event of significance happens, be it at a local level, something that's happened in a local community that is important to them, or a regional or national level, or in the case of, say, the war in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, or the US presidential election, which is the only election in the world that everybody has to care about, unfortunately, because you guys live in the most powerful country on earth, and who goes to the White House, who are you guys sent to the White House, and what decisions they make for the next four years, impacts all of us around the world.

have to care about it. So when something like that happens, COVID, by the way, is another example. When something like that happens, we are going to see a ton of misinformation, conspiracy theories, false claims spreading online. And the rate of that, most likely as more, more and more people switch from watching television and TV news, which, you know, our parents and our grandparents did, to getting their news online, which the vast majority of people now do, that is going to be an aspect of any major event happening and breaking and developing for the rest of our lives. And the rate of it is probably only going to increase

as social media platforms become more popular, more people spend time on them. So that's something that we have to accept. And then what we as researchers, fact-checkers, journalists have to do in relation to it, then, you know, that's the important topic. Yeah, you know, sometimes I think that I lament to sort of the more sort of optimistic utopian ideas

of the potentials of the internet that people talked about in the 90s. And I think that what people perhaps misunderstand stood in that time was the degree to which people saw posting information online as a means of acquiring, you know, influence or money or power. And when you have that, when you have that in the mix, all of a sudden, there aren't as many incentives to, like, just use it to, like, connect or share information or be factual. You know, there's, all of a sudden there are a lot more incentives to just post things that stimulate people emotionally rather than being perfectly truthful. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the internet still does a lot of good, but

there's this side of it that is important. And as I say, as more and more people get their news online, we have to care about it. So, you know, obviously you can't, you can't like fact check like every single false claim that flows around in social media. Like, you know, that intro, I gave the example of someone who got the, you know, the date of the starts of the Brady bunch wrong. So in this field, you have to think about, like, you know, whether reporting on falsehoods gives those falsehoods kind of like unwarranted oxygen or like actually help spread it more than it would. have if you had not covered it at all. So how do you go about deciding like what is worth actually fact-checking or not? Yeah, absolutely. First of all, you know, even if I wanted to be able to fact-check everything, it wouldn't be right for me to do so because, as you say, you don't need to fact-check

everything. There's a lot of stuff that goes around on the internet that is insignificant. When I say insignificant, I mean, people are not seeing it. So, you know, if there's a sort of doctored picture of Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Tim Walls or J.D. Vans on Facebook with 10 shares on it. Why would I want to sort of give time and spend the BBC's influence and reach on something that nobody's seeing and nobody's talking about? I'm actually making that picture that's been only seen by or shared by 10, 15, 20 people. I'm actually making it much bigger than it already is. So what you need to focus on is stories that matter and stories that are viral, stories that, you know, false claims that are viral that are being seen by

tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people that have potential to actually genuinely mislead people about something important. Now, the sort of criticism of that is, well, how can you be sure how many people are seeing this? There's these metrics that the social media platforms give you are not necessarily always accurate. We know they want to basically inflate their viewing figures, their sort of numbers, because it's good. It's sort of, social media platforms are all sort of, they're running a business and they want to appear. Like, there are a ton of people on those platforms and are engaging with the content. But the answer to that is that's the only thing we've got. Like, you know, I don't have access to Mark Zuckerberg's internal data. I don't have access

to Elon Musk data. I wish I did. That would be really fun. But I don't. So that's the only thing we've got. And we know those metrics are flawed. We know on some platforms, you know, you just watch a video for two seconds and that counts as a view. We know that. But that's the only thing we've got. And you still can say, hey, on this same platform, if something has got 10 million views and another thing has got 2,000 views, even by those, by that same platform, metrics, that means the other one is far more important. Now, the other aspect of it is, what if something is actually really, really significant, but it's not viral? So say, you know, if you're a reporter in, I don't know, Nebraska, and you find out that, you know, in a particular

county around you, there's a group of people, say, in the peak of COVID, who have created this sort of very, very small internet forum or this chat on telegram and they're planning to go, I don't know, with or without guns, they're planning to go destroy a vaccination center because they're anti-vax and they're sort of very extreme about it and they think vaccines are killing people, you know, all that sort of nonsense. And they actually want to go an attack a vaccination centre. And you're in that, you're aware of that group that has sort of 20 people in it. Well, in that case, it doesn't matter that only, you know, 20, 30 people are aware of this and you're one of them. In that case, this is a case of real world harm.

And you actually, by reporting on it, you're potentially preventing people getting hurt, a vaccination centre and people inside it and the staff of work, they're getting hurt. So then you have to report it. Not only that, you probably have to have to alert law enforcement as well that, you know, something serious might be happening. So it's a case of what the content is. That's first and foremost the most important thing and how relevant the story and the claim that you're seeing online is.

But importantly, I always say you should dedicate your time and your resources as a fact checker to stuff that is viral. No, I really, I'm obviously very fascinated by the subject matter. And I think, I think it's really neat that, you know, you're able to use discernment to determine what is and is not true and then explain on pack falsehoods online. I think it's very interesting. But not everyone agrees with this. So there's lots of criticism for, like, you know, fact checking in general or disinformation reporting.

And, like, one of the criticisms that sometimes here is that, like, like, reporters or fact checkers who, like, work for, like, especially, like, large media outlets, like the BBC. They aren't really, like, helping people understand reality better, but they're kind of, like, policing the boundaries of what is acceptable to believe, especially for like the establishment, for like power structures. So how would you respond to that criticism? Yeah, that's a very valid criticism, but you only respond to it by, you know, how you conduct yourself and how you do your work. And it is actually very dangerous for any fact check and not just from a major news outlet, but also independent factors to be viewed as basically repeating the narrative of the establishment.

because, as I said at the beginning, the first and most important job of a journalist or a fact-check is to hold the powerful to account, and we all have to remember that. So it's a case of, you know, your selection in terms of the content that you're selecting and also in terms of how you conduct yourself and what topics you decide to fact-check. But, yeah, that is a very sort of relevant criticism. In some cases, you know, as I always say, it depends on the sort of content and the story. So a lot of people, for instance, where we were fact-checking,

all the sort of baseless claims about vaccines during the peak of COVID. A lot of people who basically just were anti-vaccine that were saying, well, you're actually sort of doing the job of establishment. Well, no, it's just we actually went and investigated this and talked to the people who know what they're talking about and that's what they said. And in this case, yes, it actually aligns with the view of the establishment. It's not a fault.

It's just that's where the evidence lies, right? But in some cases, the evidence does not lie with what the establishment says. In some cases, the evidence is contrary to what establishment says. And in those cases, you have to do your job and you have to hold the establishment with whoever it may be a government or a minister or a secretary of state, whoever it may be, you need to hold them to account for it. I would like to get your reaction to an interesting study that was published earlier this year, which suggests that people like fact checkers less than other kinds of journalists. So the study paper, it was published in a communications journal, and it has the great title of,

Whose Pants Are On Fire, Journalists Correcting False Claims, Are Distrusted More Than Journalists Confirming Claims. So here's how the researchers describe their work. Participants read a detailed fact check that either corrected or confirmed some claims related to politics or economics. For instance, one focused on the statement, quote, congressional salaries have gone up 231% in the last 30 years, which is false. We then asked participants about how they were evaluating the fact check and the journalists who wrote it. Although people were fairly trusting of the journalists in general, more people expressed suspicions toward journalists providing corrections than those providing confirmations.

People were less likely to be skeptical of confirmatory fact checks than they were of debunking articles, with the percentage of respondents expressing strong distrust, doubling from a about 10% to about 22%. People also said they needed more information to know whether journalists debunking statements were telling the truth compared with their assessment of journalists who are confirming claims. So this is very much like the old Mark Twain quote, which is it's much easier to fool somebody than to convince them that they've been fooled. Well, I mean, to me it sounds like, you know, if like they read something from a journalist

that debunk something they would like to believe, all of a sudden they don't. trust that journalist as much and they want more information, they want to do deeper research. I mean, so Cheyenne, do you think it's like true as a study suggests that like news readers are more skeptical of fact checkers, especially when it goes against something you believe, than reporters that confirm their claims? I'm not surprised by the conclusion of research, to be perfectly honest with you. And that's like, yeah, I'm going to take a bit of time with this one because actually that's an excellent question and something that I think about all the time.

And he sort of even links to the question you asked earlier, you know, do fact checkers police the internet? And the answer to that is, no, we don't. And we shouldn't. If somebody thinks they are, you know, they're mistaken and they're wrong and they're not doing it right. You know, I always get asked who fact checks the fact checkers. And the answer is, oh, the answer I always give is you. You do. You should not trust what I do at all.

You should look at the evidence that I provide. That's why when I do a fact check, I tell you, here's the evidence. Go look at it for yourself. Do it for yourself. You're smart. You're actually very capable. Just set aside your views and your biases. Just go look at the evidence and see what you personally arrive at.

But when it comes to people, unfortunately, increasingly, and I think social media platforms and their algorithms have a lot to answer for for this. Not that, you know, confirmation bias obviously is something that a lot of people who are much smarter than me think is part of human nature, and there's no way of getting rid of that. However, I think the idea of spending a lot of time online on a specific, platform on, you know, a variety of platforms and getting fed all the time what you like and what confirms your own worldview because these platforms obviously want you to spend as much time as possible on there. And the way they do it is by feeding you stuff that you like. Now, you know,

if you're on YouTube and you say, like me, you like rock and heavy metal music and YouTube is constantly giving you, recommending you rock and heavy metal music, some of it you may not have heard before. You like it. I like it. Lovely. Don't recommend some sort of pop music to me that I don't like, give me more rock and roll. But when it comes to politics, obviously the danger is clear to all of us because then sort of it reinforces your existing views. You don't get, you know, you don't get to see and hear the opposing views on the internet. And then when, you know, you see a fact check or a journalist say, hey, well, this thing that you sort of have been talking about for a week with your friends online, yeah, that's

not true. And the reaction is, well, you're lying and you're sort of, you know, you're part of establishment or, you know, it can even get more, get more extreme that. But as I always say, present the evidence. The only thing that matters to me and should matter to any fact, okay, is the evidence. You should never have any presumptions about a story. You know, this may be true. You should never think about who said this or, you know, why, why sort of think about the person or the group of people is that it just give the story the time that it deserves and investigate it properly and accurately. And if you're 100% certain about it, that you'll sort of talk to the people who know who know best. Make sure you're sort of, you're gathering information for a variety of sources.

We all have to be. Again, it goes back to the issue of the algorithms. One of the biggest, believe it on one of the biggest parts of my job every day is to make sure that I keep my feet on all of these social media platforms that I check every day as diverse as possible. And it's genuinely difficult because I am wary of constantly fact-checking stuff from, as you guys call it in America, one side the aisle or one sort of a political ideology and sort of completely missing or forgetting about all the stuff that is going on the other side, you know. So I try to follow people from the right, left, center, sideways, up, down, whatever you want to do you want to think about. But then as soon as I engage with content from one particular ideology, then I see my feed

constantly recommending me more and more of that. And then I have to spend a lot of time to make sure that my feed is balanced and diverse again. It's funny because I like rock music. too, but YouTube, like, only wants to send me, like, guys, like, shooting Dracos with one hand, you know. But out of serious note, you hit on something that I think is so important. It's something that, like, I hadn't really thought about before, this idea that that social media and these content streaming sites are constantly feeding us stuff that we want to see and stuff that we agree on. And that has conditioned our brains in a way that when somebody pushes back on something

that we believe in or something that's sort of within our bias, it's this really awful feeling and there's this urge to sort of fight. And I never really connected the sort of relationship between, well, of course, because we're being fed so often things that we agree with or things from content creators who align with us politically. And so when somebody comes out of the blue and says, hey, actually, you know, this is no, what you think is actually factually incorrect, there is an immediate like feeling of dissonance because we're not used to that. You know, on either side of the political spectrum, it's really fascinating. No, 100%. There's no question about that. That sort of the age of

social media has made the sort of fundamental issue of confirmation bias among us when it comes to politics, was and also other issues. And I, you know, I constantly talk to people who share falsehoods and misinformation online because I'm fascinated by the sort of mindset and why they're doing it. And you'll be surprised. Maybe you won't be surprised. How many times when I talk to people, they say, well, I know that that's false. I don't care. It's just sort of align us with my, with my view. And as you say, lots and lots of times for people who are not that sort of ideological, but sort of consuming political content or social or cultural content from a specific, of a specific type, as soon as you present the sort of contrary evidence to them, yeah, it's

sort of, it is difficult to basically convince them that, yeah, that sort of content that you've been consuming, maybe in some cases for a long, long time is actually not true and here's the evidence. And again, that goes directly to what all of us are sort of fascinated with, which is conspiracy theory, is pretty much exactly the same. As you can become more conspiratorial, obviously, you get distant from reality and from people in your life. You keep your views in check from your friends, from your family members. And keep in mind, forget about the internet. Even in our own real lives, we're in our own bubbles.

Depending on the city, state, county, local area, town that you live in, you're still in some sort of a bubble, right? You know, your views might differ completely from people. If you live in California, your views probably differ from people who live in Alabama, right? It's same here. If you live in, say, London, your views may not necessarily align with people who live in a small town north of England. So we're all in our own bubble and on the internet gets much, much worse. And when you sort of go into the conspiratorial aspect of it, obviously, as it become more and more distant and you consume more and more of the material with these people, with the community that you've formed online, then sort of, you know, it becomes, that's why sort of getting people out of that is so, so difficult. because one sort of you've been conditioned in a way to believe all this stuff is true and you're fighting the good fight and everybody else is evil and there's not enough people in real life to help you and keep you in check then that's that's a real tragedy you know there's also i think a a very human thing of like monkeys see monkey do and we see other people whether they are as an example people on the opposite side of the political spectrum than we are we see them acting in a certain way we see them not caring about whether something is real or not to further their own political agenda. And so I feel like there is an aspect of, you know, people going, well, well, they're doing it. Like, why can't I? Like, why do I have to play by the rules? And I think it's had an overall negative effect on the kind of content that does go viral or that people choose to share like when they're posting online. Do you know what? I've been obviously fact-checking the U.S. election campaign since, well, pretty much June, July. I've sort of

focused on it. And the angriest reaction that I've got to any of my fat checks, the plenty that I've done up until now, has been calling out liberals in America claiming that Donald Trump faked his assassination attempts. That's the two times that I did that. And I continue to call them out. And I will as long as they continue sharing these conspiracy theories because they're obviously not true and they're very, very harmful and they're insane. So I will continue doing it. I don't care whether people shout at me or not. But the reaction that I've got from sort of liberal users online has been actually much, much louder and much angrier than any of the factors that I've done of Donald Trump or conservatives during this campaign. I think it's probably

due to the fact that a lot of conservatives and like right-wing people, they more or less have kind of like written off mainstream media very frequently or they don't really expect them to align with them. So, but when like, you know, a, but liberals, they, you know, they often least modern liberals, they believe in like, you know, establishment and institutions. And when, when, you know, someone from a respected outlet starts contradicting something that is dearly held, well, it can create, you know, a lot of cognitive distance and frustration. I also think that a lot of, you know, online liberals at least have built their online persona or maybe even their own personalities on the idea that they, that they are for truth, that they are for reality.

And they spent four years, you know, criticizing and making fun of and dunking on conservatives and general, you know, your average to your more extreme Trump supporters online for posting disinformation for coming up with conspiracy theories. You know, they are, you know, quote unquote, better than that. And so if, you know, if they are called out on spreading a conspiracy theory themselves or waiting into that territory, I think that's very uncomfortable for them. And nobody wants to look in the mirror and be told something about themselves that they don't like that is true. I mean, I speak for personal experience. The maddest I get at somebody is when they tell me something about myself or point out a way that I acted or something that I said. And I don't like that. And they're right.

You know, people have a hard time sort of going, oh, yeah, damn. Like, I guess that was kind of similar to this thing that I had been criticizing for four years. And so I do think that that that plays a huge part of the reason why there's so much pushback and anger and, hey, you know, it's we see other people doing it. I remember during the, you know, that huge surge of conspiracy theories online about these stage assassination attempts, you know, there were people who were saying, well, I don't care if it's not, you know, if it's not true. This is something that he would do. And so therefore, putting it out online is helping my cause, you know, whatever they. thought that, you know, that cause was. Yeah, I mean, obviously, 100% true.

I spoke to people who were like, I spoke to people who actually genuinely believed it, like perfectly normal people in America, otherwise perfectly decent, normal, I guess, reasonable people who believed because they couldn't, they were like, no, Trump is all evil and there's nothing redeemable about him. And in this case, I'm not going to sympathize with him. It must have been fake, right? We were talking about confirmation bias. And in the years that I've done this job, I've come to the conclusion, you mix.

confirmation bias with partisanship, and then you've got the two main drivers of misinformation online. There's no question about it in my mind. The number of times that have put, that have fact-checked stuff, and it's been directly related to people having very, very tribal partisan views mixed with sort of their confirmation bias about a story and about a topic that drives them to post-misinformation and believe in it and refuse to even consider the evidence to the contrary. Yeah, I could write an essay about that. Well, and what's so ironic is that, You know, you said this, you said something really interesting. You know, this guy is pure evil.

I refuse to have empathy for him. And so it's easier to believe that it was staged or I'm, you know, even further, I'm going to create content that shows, quote unquote, evidence to show that it was fake. And what's amazing to me is you're doing all of this because you actually do have empathy. And this is something that I think separates liberal, at least in my personal opinion, It separates liberals from, you know, your more extreme, like far-right posters, is that at the end of the day, nobody really wants to see somebody get murdered, you know, murdered on TV, even if they do believe that you're the next coming of Hitler, even if they do believe that you are a foreign

asset installed, you know, in America to further the interests of, you know, an enemy of the state. And so it's amazing to me. They're actually, I feel like people do have empathy, and And that's why they have to run away from it and dive into these conspiracy theories because they don't like that they maybe feel bad for this guy, which is actually a good thing and separates them, I think, from conservatives who are putting forth policy that would harm the lives of millions and millions of people without a fucking single thought. And so it's amazing to me that it's like you have to create these reasons in your head to run away from this thing that makes you more human and good.

It's just like fascinating to me. You know, I think the sort of the hostility to, like, fact checks that contradicts someone's held beliefs, I think just relate to the fact that generally people go on the internet and read content online in order to feel good. And even when they're, like, reading a story about, like, a horrible conflict or disease or something really wretched, they at least, you know, feel good about being better informed, feel like they're sort of connecting. They have, like, they have a sort of a sense of what's going on in the world. That feels nice. What doesn't feel nice is someone telling you that your understanding of truth and reality is flawed. There's a personal aspect to that, more so than just understanding the world. So it's almost like there's this sort of the subtext in the fact check where it's like,

it's not just here of the facts, as like, here are the facts and also you are flawed in some way in your understanding of the world. And people, it's just human to be very resistant to that kind of like accusation, even it's like sort of like, you know, in subtext. Yeah, 100%. I mean, it's the age-old issue of we don't want to admit mistakes, right? We find it very, very difficult to admit mistakes, despite the fact that all of us know perfectly well that we're deeply, deeply flawed,

and we hold all sorts of views that are wrong, and we're wrong in our personal lives and daily lives and, you know, in our careers all the time. But for some reason, we find it very, very difficult to admit mistake. So they get a little bit more specific about, like, I guess, the online world of disinformation, probably, you know, the most told story regarding social media, in this realm in the last two years, is Elon Musk purchasing Twitter, changing its name to X,

and inviting back previously banned super spreaders of disinformation, including Donald Trump. And now it seems like most of the content moderation on that platform is kind of crowdsource via the community notes feature, which is designed to, like, add additional facts if something is incorrect or misleading or something like that. But the tweet itself is that you're still spread and left up. So now you have had a Twitter account since 2009, according to your account, I checked, and which is much longer than I have. So how would you say that, like, Elon's changes have, like, reshape the platform in the last two years? Yeah, it's been, it's been a, it's been fascinating to follow it, and it's been a huge change in many ways. Now, the case of sort of

bringing back free speech, I think a lot of people supported it, because these platforms can actually go a bit too far with sort of their content moderation, Sometimes, look on some platforms, fact checkers get fact checked and suppressed because, you know, you develop an algorithm or an automated tool that is incapable of distinguishing between a sort of well-known and official fact-check and journalist doing a fact-check and somebody posting misinformation. And then on that basis, without any sort of input from a real human being, you just sort of ban them or suppress their account. And that's completely wrong and unfair. And no one should support that. And I, as a journalist, you know, I rely on free speech to do my job. I mean, imagine being a journalist in a country or in a society where you don't have free speech.

Like, there'll be no meaning to being a journalist and holding power to account. So in that sense, I think a lot of people, you know, supported the idea of restoring free speech. In the sense of how it's been going, I mean, initially, initially, obviously, it was a bit chaotic and there were all sorts of changes made to the algorithm and some of the features, obviously, the Bluetooth. That was the idea of people being verified and known individuals and organizations that was taken away and sort of became a monetized feature, which sort of allowed everybody to buy it and have their content boosted. So that sort of made it a little bit more difficult. I think people have now got used to it. Initially, it was very, very confusing. But in terms of sort of community notes, I think it's actually, a lot of people actually assume it was launched when Musk bought Twitter.

Not true. It was actually something that was started beforehand. But he basically made it a sort of a big. a feature and invested in it. It's actually an interesting concept community notes because it's, as you say, a completely user-based function of adding context to misleading and false information. And it is the only tool that X currently has against the spell of misinformation. And the sort of the tool itself on how it's been developed is everybody can sign up for it and then you start voting for any post that you think is misleading. And then if enough people with diverse views

vote up something then it goes up now obviously it's not perfect you know I've seen cases of some major influences with huge followings as soon as because when you get community noted particularly if you're a blue check

and you have a monetized account as soon as a community note appears under your post you will no longer be able to monetize that post so I've seen generally I've seen real cases of big accounts asking their followers as soon as a community note appears under their post to go downvoted and they do and the community note disappears so that's a flaw

or in some cases you have act Like, genuinely, I've seen people proposing anti-vax community notes, for instance, like genuinely community notes suggesting vaccines actually are harmful and kill people and that sort of stuff. But thankfully, very rarely you see that sort of stuff actually being voted up by the vast majority of people. But also it means you still have the issue of bias and it's not perfect. And sometimes you have community notes that appear, you know, there have been cases of false community notes appearing on their post that people completely misjudging it. But overall, I wouldn't say it's a bad feature. I think it's the only thing that Twitter has currently, or X, against misinformation.

So I support it, and it's a good thing that it exists there. But, you know, Twitter is not the only platform. I mean, by comparison, Twitter is actually pretty small compared to some of the other ones. I mean, I feel like I keep shouting about this. Like, people, unfortunately, it's a problem not just for newsrooms, but also for a lot of people and researchers and people who are in our field of world. But TikTok is the platform where the vast majority of people under the age of 14 now spend their time and get their news. And, yeah, I mean, where don't you get a lot of conspiracy theories on TikTok?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, it is, it is something there. And it's, and unlike Twitter, it's not, you know, 200, 300, 400 million people. We're talking about 1.2 billion people there and rapidly expanding all the time. So it is a problem that's sort of, as we've discussed at length, the issue of false information. and there ought to be, and I think we also put free speech, and we also, I don't think any of us wants Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or these people to regulate our speech on the internet. Like, no, I don't think that would be an ideal situation or a scenario for any of us. So we would like the internet to be free, and we would like to have, and I think most people would like to have the sort of freedom to express themselves freely on the internet on social media platforms.

But then, you know, there has to also be some sort of feature, some sort of function against sort of very viral. in some cases, very serious and very harmful misinformation threats, extreme content. And in that case, you know, it's a work in progress. Some platforms have got nothing against it at all. Some platforms have sort of flawed features. Some people, some platforms go way too far. And you can argue that sort of they're veering to outright censorship. So it's not perfect.

But, you know, it's a work in progress. And I obviously can't comment on what these platforms do and what sort of tools they develop and where they decide to invest. money and we decide not to. My job as a journalist is to hold them into account, basically, because they're incredibly powerful, incredibly wealthy. And most of us, I think, recognize just how much power these companies, these social media giants have over our lives now. And it will only continue. And it probably will, they will have more and more power in the future. Now, I think the other major recent development in the world of mis and disinformation concerns

like AI-generated images and videos, like deep fakes. And people have fredded for, like, many years about, like, well, the ways in which this technology could be used to deceive people or run smear campaigns. And, I mean, it's fair to say that, like, in the past, I don't know, a year or so, that has become, like, less theoretical and more real, the ways in which people have bought into deep-faked images and erroneously thought that they were, that, they are real. I mean, we saw this, like in the aftermath of the, you know, the horrible hurricanes that recently hit the eastern U.S. There was one particular image, which I believe you highlighted of, appeared to be an image of a little girl who was soaked with a life vest, holding a very adorable, also very soaked puppy. And this was spread by some on the right, including commentator Glenn Beck, to sort of push people's emotional buttons regarding the damage that

the hurricane has done. And I mean, I was very surprised to see like this kind of like deep faked image go viral because there are real images. There are people on the ground, you know, documenting the actual destruction that these hurricanes have done. But for some reason, you know, this sort of heart-tugging image of a little girl crying and holding a puppy was much more popular, even though it was totally made by AI programs, totally fake. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the Hurricane was an interesting one because, as you say, if you're on the right and you want to criticize the Biden administration for the response to the hurricane, which is, you know, perfectly entitled to do that as an American citizen, there's no shortage of real videos and pictures of

the devastation left by both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. You can use that. But in this case, obviously, it was a child with a puppy. And obviously, as you say, was going to, people were going for an emotional response. And it wasn't even a good AI image. But there you go. People on the internet just don't spend too much time. You see it on your feed. Two seconds, that's it. It's real. And the fascinating thing about those particular pictures of a child with a puppy, I saw three of them. It was crystal clear that were generated by probably the same person with similar prompts.

There was this woman who shared it, a member of the Republican National Convention. And she initially shared it and said it was, quote, see it into my mind or my heart, something like that. And then basically people said, well, that's AI. And she got community noted on X. And then even after that, she still tweeted to say, well, I don't care whether it's true or not or whether it's fake or not. It's still seared into my heart. And so I'm going to leave it up, which is like, that's, that's, that's the fascinating aspect of it to me. Because, and it was like, this photo still is very meaningful about, you know, people struggling.

It's like, well, it's not a photo. It's not a photo. It's fake. It's something that somebody's generated with a prompt. It's not real. There are actual photographs of the hurricane and the people who've been impacted, negatively impacted by. Share one of those.

Or, you know, ask your followers to go donate. Or if you want to criticize your political rivals for the response to the administration, share some real video of it. There's a ton of them and criticize the administration for the response. But even after knowing that something is fake and generated with AI to then insist,

well, no, I actually want this. to be true. I want to believe this. I don't even care that it's not an actual photograph. Like, this is 100% fake. This is something that somebody's just made up. I mean, yeah, it is, it is concerning. It is worrying.

Because at the moment, actually, when it comes to Gen AI, in relation to news, I'm not talking about the technology in general. Technology actually already does some amazing stuff. And the pace of advancement in AI is baffling and mind-boggling. Like, the things that I've seen that it

already do or soon enough it will be able to do. Yeah, I mean, it's going to change our world beyond what any of us have imagined. But when it comes to news, Gen AI pictures and videos in particular are still not that good. Like, it's not that difficult, actually, to be perfectly honest with you, to tell most of these images are not real. When it comes to pictures in particular, I mean, there are good AI generators out there, but still, if you have a trained eye, and there are tons and tons of these pictures being generated these days. You should still be able to tell it struggles with fingers, struggle with toes, it struggles with human skin tone, it struggles with hair, it struggles with generating text and letters in pictures that actually makes sense. It

struggles with background and in that picture, I mean, there were a ton of, ton of errors in it. Like, it should have been very simple for people to recognize that it was fake. And unfortunately, a lot of people didn't. And even after they were told that this is an AR generator fake, they were like, No, it still had an impact on me, so I still want to believe it's real. So I worry about when these images and videos become much, much better. I seriously and genuinely worry about the sort of impact that it's going to have on the public discourse. Yeah, like one of my favorite fact checks that you did, I believe it was early on in the Russia and Ukraine war. And it was a video that it was going around that even I myself had seen and was like, wow, it's really popping off over there.

like a cargo plane that was flying over the ground and there was like surface to air, you know, like cannons basically shooting with with tracer bullets up into the sky at this cargo plane and hitting it. And you posted that like this was actually footage captured from one of the ARMA PC games, which is a computer simulator. And what's so crazy about it is I play ARMA. I've played all of the ARMAs. And in the context of seeing the gameplay footage in a very small.

window within Twitter as you're scrolling with the context that oh my gosh like this was a scene captured from this area of Ukraine even I was you know this was a game that I had played and was familiar with and it wasn't until I saw your post and I went oh my God yeah and then when I looked at it it's like in a horror movie when when they have a ghost on screen but you like don't see it right away and then all of a sudden the music cue comes in you go oh my god it's been standing there all along. And then when I looked at this at this footage the second time, I could start to see the polygons and the jagged edges and I look down at the trees and oh my God, yeah, it's this like video game footage. And if something like that, because Arma is, you know, not necessarily, I would

say the most known for its, you know, insanely realistic looking engine. I mean, it's a great sim, but there are games that look better. And it's like if that is going viral and, you know, convincing even people who know the game, I can't even begin to imagine what it's going to look like. Because I've been seeing these videos now of people running video game footage through, I believe it's called runway AI. And they're doing it with Grand Theft Auto 4. They're doing it with Red Dead Redemption. And they're taking, you know, recorded gameplay footage and then running it through the AI to make it look more realistic. And so I can't even imagine if people are taking video game footage in the future and then running it through an AI and posting it as

news. It feels like the amount of technology that is working against fact checkers is like becoming insurmountable. Yeah, I don't want to sound like somebody who's sort of, you know, not a fan of technology. I obviously am and I love it and I enjoy it and all the rest of it. But at the same time, I think, yeah, we need we need to think longer. Like last week I saw this video, like somebody, some AI developer had basically created this generator now that the result of it was he'd just taken a picture of a random woman from the internet and had, it was just basically an image of a woman. And then he turned it into a video of this woman appearing as a CNN correspondent in Gaza, right? genuinely reporting from the text of a CNN report published on the CNN website.

And it was very, very realistic. And yeah, I was just sort of, and I said, that at the time, like, I tweeted about that, I said, well, if you're now going to have the technology to make realistic videos, hyper-realistic videos, of random people appearing as news correspondents, war correspondents, in a war zone, in a conflict with huge implications for the world, you can appear as a correspondent saying anything you like, we might want to pause and think about this. There might be a couple of issues we might want to consider first before sort of racing ahead. Obviously, it doesn't mean that, you know, the technologies, it's, you know, nobody can stop the technology, like, and we shouldn't because, you know, that's, that's the way the human race develops. And, you know, I remember, I'm old enough to remember what people said before smartphones came around. And in the early days of the internet on social media, I do remember those things. But at the same time, this is a challenge on a completely different scale. And as I say, I do, I do worry when the technology, like one of the, one of the biggest headaches, I don't know if you guys know this for fact checkers at the moment is AI generating. audio because with AI generated video and images, first of all, the technology at the moment

is not excellent. So if you have a trained eye, you can spot, one of the things I always say to people is a lot of these issues with AI videos and images and video games as well, by the way, would be resolved if you just pause for three or four seconds and play that video full screen or looked at that image full screen, then you would spot the issues. But that's what people don't do that. You know, they're just scrolling up and down their feet on their smartphones and they see something and the power of social media kicks in, you know, this thing has 20,000 retweets, 50,000 shares on Facebook and it's like, oh, 20,000 people can't be wrong, 50,000 people can't be wrong, no, 50,000 people can be wrong. In fact, 50,000 people are wrong all the time

on the internet. And then the second thing is when, when it comes to AI generated audio, with videos and images, we actually have the ability to reverse search. We have, we have the ability to go check on the internet whether this image has been created before, has been posted before. We have this databases for AI generators on Discord, on Reddit. We can go check those subreddits. We can go check those Discord servers, see whether somebody has somebody who generated that image has said, hey, this is me. I created this. So there are ways of checking video and image. When it comes to audio, and actually, in order to create a really, really good AI video, really good AI image, you still need to spend some time. You need to know that

tools, you need to know your prompts, you need to go consult somebody who's good at this, you need to spend some time. In some cases, you need to create a really good deep thing. You still need to spend some money. People in their own home, you know, most people will still not be able to create a really good one. But when it comes to audio, with the technology that we have right now, you can actually create a really, really good, believable AI audio of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris or Tim Walls or any politician you want to think about, or any public figure. And it is extremely difficult to check those and fact check and verify those because you You can't reverse search audio.

It's not the same as images and videos. You can't go back. There's no tool available that allows you to go back on the internet and see whether this audio clip has appeared somewhere before. And then the only way you have of confirming those audio clips is basically finding, locating, tracing back to the original source of this audio clip, which is so difficult. Imagine an audio clip that's sort of emerge from iMessage or from WhatsApp

or from sort of some fringe circle of text. And as now is not going viral on TikTok or on Instagram. It is so difficult to find the original source in many, many cases. And then you would have to contact the real person who's being the audio clip is supposed to sound like them. And then go, did you actually say this? And if they're a politician, you actually have to, because you don't have those many other ways of checking, you have to trust what they say to some extent. And the last thing I want to do as a fact checker or a journalist is trust what a politician says, right?

So confirming AI-generator audio already is a massive headache and extremely difficult. And it's only going to get better. And we soon might find ourselves in a situation. We have the same problem, despite the fact that we have reverse search for images and videos, we might have the same problem with AI images and AI videos because they become much more realistic, much better. And they will be generated at such a rate that it will be difficult to keep across all of them. I mean, how good is getting is concerning.

But like you mentioned, the other concerning aspect is that it doesn't have to be that good to convince people as it is now. I mean, just the other day, just the day before our recording today, there was a video circulating which appears to show a man named a Matthew Metro accusing. Oh, Jesus, yeah. Accusing a Democratic running mate, Tim Walls of sexual assault. Now, Matthew Metro, this is a real person. This is apparently a student who attended the school that Tim Walls. taught that in the 90s, but the video is a deep fake. It appears that someone took possibly online images or even like a yearbook image of this man to create this deep fake. Now, I think

it's pretty easy to discern this deep fake based on the low quality video. And even the audio is very weird, disjointed, but a lot of people took it seriously. So to give you an idea, so here's how that video starts. My name is Mati Mechow. I'm a survivor of sexual assault. For the past few years, we've seen many powerful men, even many celebrities, being held accountable for their social assaults. So, yeah, it goes on to make these baseless allegations. But, I mean, just from even that small clip, I mean, the audio sounds kind of robotic in the way that the man in the video is moving is a little strange and awkward. But like I said, that didn't seem to matter to a lot of people who want.

wanted to believe this accusation, and they went and continued to spread it on X. The Washington Post published an investigation into this fake video. That report includes an interview with the real Matthew Metro, who was a student at Westman Cato High School 27 years ago when Tim Walls taught and coached there. However, Metro told the Post that he never even met Tim Walz. And as the real Matthew Metro points out, the artificially created version of him in the fake video doesn't resemble him at all. Oh, it's obviously not me.

The teeth are different, the hair is different, the eyes are different, the nose is different, and the accent is definitely done off or anything. I obviously don't have an important accent, so I don't know where they're getting it from. Yeah, absolutely right, Travis, and that's why I'm concerned, because as I was saying last night, if we're now having problems with that,

with that deep fake video, which is that bad, that terrible, because, first of all, you know, as soon as you hear that audio, does that sound like somebody who grew up in the United States in Minnesota and went to school there? It sounds like a robot. And then there's a part of it that he mispronounces the name of his town, the town that he was supposedly born and raised in. So, yeah, I mean, if people haven't seen the video

and just hearing the audio, I encourage you to go and see the video and tell me where you think of it. Do you think it's believable? I think it's really, I've seen good deep fakes. That's not a good deep fake. That's a terrible deep fake. Yeah, it's got like a lawnmower man sort of, like a special effects quality where his face kind of looks like something is like bubbling out from the inside.

It's very strange. Yeah, the eyes, the lips, the voice. Yeah, everything is difficult to point out how many things are wrong about it because it's pretty much everything. But millions and millions of people saw it and believed they were without question. And it goes back to there are some people who because of their political views and because of their personal political biases, they want to believe these allegations against Tim Walls.

And that's it. That's all that matters. It may not even matter to many of them that this video looks so goofy and so stupid. And the guy provides no evidence at all for what he's saying. None of that seems to matter. It's just the case of, hey, you know, we're in an election campaign

and we're on the other side against Tim Walts. So this is a story that will hurt the other campaign. So I'm going to believe it. I'm going to share it. That's it. And when it comes to something that is that bad and that terrible, if it can go that viral and that many people can believe it, yeah, going back to what I said, I genuinely do worry about where we're headed. So yeah, the shift focus a little bit. Now that we primarily focus on like American conspiracy theories and disinformation, but you report on topics globally, especially

how it relates to like violent conflict, which seems to be one of the biggest sort of inspirations for disinformation and conspiracy theories. And that tragically often involves the dehumanization of civilians when they are harmed or killed. In that regard, I was wondering if you could explain your reporting on the so-called Pallywood conspiracy theory. This is a conspiracy theory that is nearly two decades old, but has become newly popular in light of Israel's most recent and ongoing campaign of largely indiscriminate violence in Gaza, which has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians and injured more than 100,000, according to Palestinian health authorities. The images, videos, and stories from the region are horrifying. Obviously, it's impossible

to do justice to the totality of the situation in our brief conversation, but even if we just limit ourselves to statements and analysis from the United Nations, it paints a dark picture. Back in March, Francisco Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and the occupied territories said, quote, there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met. More recently, the UN acting under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Joyce Masuya said, quote, what Israeli forces are doing and besieged North Gaza cannot be allowed to continue. The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying. Just days ago, the UN Human Rights

Chief Volker Turk issued a statement pleading world leader. to ensure respect for international humanitarian law as set out in the Geneva Conventions. Turk summarized the situation by saying, quote, the Israeli military is striking hospitals and staff and patients have been killed and injured or forced to evacuate simultaneously. Shelters, once schools are struck daily, communication with the outside world remains extremely limited. Journalists continue to be killed.

Now, despite all this, there are people who still deny the legitimacy of videos from the region capturing the kinds of things that Turkey. describes. So what have you found when researching so-called Pallywood claims? Yeah, very good question. This is, you know, I haven't done this job for a few years, I think like you guys, there's not really that much that depresses me anymore because I feel like I've seen the depth of human depravity and sort of the most awful things that can happen to humans and to mankind. I see them every day. I'll report on them. So it's like, yeah, I don't get

I get shocked still and I get really sad, but this is what, you know, people call atrocity denial. That is genuinely the sort of the depressing aspect of this job, which is, as you say, totally conspiratorial, but also completely breathed of sympathy for your fellow human beings, despite the fact that you might disagree with them,

you might be at war with them, you might not like them, but just sort of not even regarding them as, you know, people, real people, with lives that should be respected. It's not a new phenomenon, by the way, We saw it during the Syrian Civil War, we saw it during the Ukraine War, and we're seeing it again in this war, but the scale of it, unfortunately, particularly in the first two or three months, I mean, it's still going on, but in the first two or three months of the war in the Middle East, particularly the conflict in Gaza, it was so bad. We saw this, as you say, the Paliwood conspiracy theory for people who are not familiar with it is not a new thing.

it's been around since the early 2000s, but has really become a viral topic in this war, which is the idea that, you know, Paliwood, Palestine, Hollywood. The idea that there's some sort of an industry in Palestinian territories in Gaza of people genuinely going to the, going through the effort of creating fake videos

with crisis actors of people dying, getting wounded, suffering in a war zone to get the sympathy of the world. And every time people sort of present these called Hollywood videos and sort of tag me in or send me a DM and say, oh, here's your Hollywood video and I go check them. Very quickly, it becomes clear that, you know,

it's taken from a sort of a Palestinian or Arabic TV series or from a short film or from some promotional video that was created for some reason. It's got nothing to do with people actually trying to fake a scene of people dying or getting wounded in a war zone. All I can say is I understand that, you know, this is a conflict that goes back decades and people have very strong opinions about it and it has implications, not just in that region, but for the entire world. So that's why we all care about it. And the scenes are obviously terrible and shocking and nobody wants to see them. I don't think anybody needs to be told about the tragedy that's happening there. To then take that and try to dehumanize those people and say, well, no, actually, people are not dying or people are not getting killed or people are not getting killed or people are not getting wounded. It's all fake. It's all being staged. Somebody, you know, there are some directors that are filming these videos to get your sympathy. Yeah, it's really, really depressing.

And I've dedicated, you know, me and my colleague Olga from BBC Verify, we've dedicated quite a lot of our time to addressing this particular issue since the war started, and I will continue to do so because it's one of those things that is not just a case of misinformation and conspiratorial worldview and confirmation bias. It also is depressing in the sense that dehumanization and atrocity denial takes away from something that is part of our shared reality as human beings, regardless of who we are, you know, what background we have, what nationality, what race, what culture, we all respect each other as human beings. And when it gets to a degree that some people are no longer human or you don't no longer have sympathy for them or you no longer

care about their suffering, well, it needs to be, it needs to be properly addressed and it needs to be properly knocked down on its head very quickly. And that's why we've been doing it and we'll continue to do it. One of the most persistent phrases in the Q&on drops that was repeated over and over again, and it's repeated, you know, ad nauseum by people who still believe and generally just conspiracy theorists on the right is this, this idea that you are watching a movie. And, you know, if you think about the history of news and how people interact with it, you know, it's only very recently in human beings existence that we have access to all of this video, right? That people have phones. People are on the ground. They're posting stuff. We are seeing images, you know,

coming out of these conflicts in a way that humans have not before. You know, it's different than camera crews going into Vietnam during the Vietnam War and these images are coming back. This is a crowdsourced, you know, documentation of these things that are happening. But there's this also this, as we kind of, you sort of hit on earlier in one of your answers, you were saying how this woman said, you know, I know it's not real, but I don't care. It, you know, I, oh, it was about the flood image. I know it's not real, but I feel it in my heart. And when you said that, it sort of made me think, like, wow, we're sort of like TV-fying or the filmification of news and actual

real world events. And so I think it puts us in a really weird place because we are grappling with the idea that there is all of this video and we expect to see video and we are faced with horrific images that I think most people have a really hard time grappling with. And yet also there is this trend in society to almost view events that happen in the world as if they are a movie because that's where things make sense. You know, reality doesn't make sense in a lot of ways, but movies do, and there's a plot and there's a bad guy and there's, you know, all, everything is so well defined. And I think this entire conversation, you know, to me at least, has really sort of defined the intersection between narrative, reality, and technology. And it's,

I have no idea what it's going to be like going forward. But I do know that talking about it, with you guys has been, like, incredibly, it feels good. I don't know, it feels good to just kind of like brainstorm and sort of spitball about this massive problem that journalists are facing, that people who are covering journalists work are facing people in this, in this space of studying conspiracy theories and disinformation. And it's hard to imagine it getting better. And I'm curious, Cheyenne, like, if that's your feeling well, or if that's too personal a question. But, Do you have hope that we can correct this sort of path that we are on? Or is the job of a fact checker and disinformation just going to become a bigger and bigger and bigger industry

because there will be so much more need for resources that are desperately trying to get some kind of handle on reality? To give you an honest answer, I think people like and appreciate fact checking, but I'm not entirely sure. sure people want to pay for it or people want to, or there's that much, uh, there's that much incentive to invest in it when it comes to the private sector. In terms of news organizations to, um, yeah, I mean, obviously they have the resources to have fact checkers, but, you know, limited resources, obviously. The real heroes of this are independent fact checkers, the people who, you know, if they're listening to this, you're a wonderful and you're a fantastic, I've said it to in your faces all around the world, you know, small newsrooms of five, ten people,

in some parts of the war that we in the West don't necessarily hear about. I mean, Jesus Christ, want to talk about misinformation. In some parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, misinformation can actually kill people,

has killed people. And there are these, these wonderful people who with the most limited amount of resources are doing a heroic job, you know, fact checking an entire continent

like Africa with a team of five, ten people. So I do see hope in that, you know, there are good people around who care about this and want to do a good job. and very sort of crucially do not do it because of because they want to promote a specific political view or point of view they're just doing it as best as they can in a fair and impartial

and balanced way which is the way it should be maybe there's not there's not enough people but money is a huge problem and I know this for a fact speaking from somebody who comes from a major news organization I know independent fact checkers who are struggling with this and there's not that much, there's not that much support and there's not that many resources. But that gives me hope. And the other thing that gives me hope, and I think you will hear this from other people who do this job is as difficult and confusing, that depressing as it could get, because you see stuff that is sometimes so disgusting, as we were talking about, so, so dehumanizing, so sad and so extreme, that sort of, yeah, make you go, why am I doing this? But the thing, and also sometimes it could

they're really nasty online, particularly, you know, if you, if you sort of have a presence online and you sort of share your fact-checking online and try to engage with people, as soon as you, you know, say in a very sort of divisive and polarising election campaign, every time I post a fact-check that is sort of fact-checking Donald Trump or the Trump campaign, I get angry conservatives, and every time I do a fact-check of the Harris campaign, I get angry liberals in my replies. So, but, you know, that's the nature of it. But the thing that really sort of makes it worthwhile,

And I think it's probably the same for you guys as well, even during the sort of the most difficult days and even when it must be giving you sort of second thoughts and making you a little bit depressed and sort of mentally taking a toll on you. I think the thing that makes a huge difference for me is when you hear that one person who gets in touch and says, hey, you know, I sort of stopped talking to my parents because they fell down this rabbit hole and sort of their lives were destroyed and they lost their savings. and they saw this report that you did or this fact check that you did on Twitter and sort of that changed everything like something clicked and we've been talking again or you know somebody says hey my partner I fell down that rabbit hole

and saw this report that you did about this story and you know things are improving it's all those personal stories that I think pretty much most people who've done this job I'm pretty sure you guys have heard them as well I know other fact checkers have heard and misinformation researchers who've heard them and people who work on in the field of sort of investigating conspiracy theories,

those are the things that really make it worthwhile. Because it's like, even if in one year, you know, one difficult year, when you sort of have had to sift through all sorts of horrible stuff, you hear one story like that, just one. That's one is enough for me. That's like you've made a real difference to real people, good, decent people. You've made their lives better with your work. And that's, that's good enough for me.

And that's what I always say to other people who do it with, you know, huge challenges, huge problems, limited results. It's like, one of the, one of the huge issues that always comes up in the community of, in our community, the people who do this work is how much difference am I actually making? Does it even matter? Like, you know, there's this video that's got 20 million views on TikTok and I fact check it and my fact check gets 10,000 views. Why am I even bothering? Who cares? I can never compete with that. I'm never going to go as viral as that. The algorithms are never going to promote me as much as sort of that type of content. And that's true. That's 100% true. But the answer to that is

you are not in a competition with those people. If you think you are, you shouldn't because you will lose. That's a losing competition. We're not winning that competition of engagement and numbers and figures and views because social media algorithms are not designed to promote boring stuff. And facts are boring. Facts are dull. It's much more interesting and exciting to say, hey, I've got this video of Joe Biden doing this really, really nefarious stuff. And it's just been leaked to me. People are going to click on that. People are going to watch that.

But if you say, hey, this is a video of actually Joe Biden in a basement during COVID. There's nothing nefarious here. Somebody's just made it a bit darker to look nefarious. People go, okay. So you can never compete with the sort of virality and engagement rate of it. So you shouldn't even begin to do that. But what you should care about is if you manage to change one mind, one person out there who might have believed that piece of misinformation or that conspiracy

theory or was about to go down the rabbit hole and have their lives turn upside down for the worse and your work and your fact-checking and your reporting and your investigation help them and stop them from getting there or change their mind or help them reach their father, their mother, their partner, their brother, their sister, the uncle, their aunt, you know, their neighbour, the co-worker. If you even manage to do that for one person, you should take immense pleasure in what you're doing. You've already made a difference in the real. world. And that I think for most of us, that's what's worthwhile. I tend not to care about the angry comments and the shouting. And, you know, when things get really depressing, when those stories

happen, and I get a DM from somebody saying, hey, my, you know, we did this story. You guys, you know, I always have to explain this when I bring up this story. But I, thankfully, not on this podcast. You know, you guys already have spoken about Nazara and, and the conspiracy theory that many QAnon believers. Obviously, existed before Q&N, but Q&N, Q&N sort of amplified that a lot of people made the sort of turn from Q&on into Nazara again. And we, my colleague Olga and I were talking to this lovely, lovely young lady American, whose parents basically were almost going bankrupt because they'd spent all of their money in buying Iraqi dinars and gold and silver and, you know, all their social security savings,

all the savings from, you know, both of them retired. And she was, yeah, she was in tears when we were talking to her. And she was like, I just won my parents back. I just won, you know, they're destroying their lives. And, yeah, sort of we heard back later and she said, yeah, you know, I'm really glad that I talked to you guys and I shared the reporting and everything and, you know, we're talking again. Things are improving, you know, maybe they're realizing that this was all a lie and they're destroying their lives. And, you know, there's no truth to any of this. And maybe there's a way back. There's a path back to reality. Yeah, when those things happen, it's like, yeah, I'll never forget about that. And it makes the whole job and all the negative aspects of it worthwhile. You know, I think what you do is so valuable and, and as I said, you know, we're often looking to, and we've been, you know, we've started doing the podcast in 2018 or so. And so, you know, we've been around. But like, you know, I find myself still so often looking to your work as some kind of just little, little piece of reality that is totally devoid of feeling, which is actually so refreshing and so. so nice and it's, you know, an honor to talk to you and have you on the show. And I can't believe it's taken this long. I mean, this is really, you know, like I said, it's been, it's been a long time

coming. No, it's by pleasure, guys. Thank you for having me on. And yes, in this work, particularly as a journalist and a fact checker, the most valuable aspect that you have is trust. And you have to conduct yourself with dignity and you have to conduct yourself, very importantly, you have to be impartial. You have to be fair. You have to be fair in the way you select your stories and your fact checks and you have to be fair in the way you gather your stories and you gather your news. So not only what you write in your stories, but also how you conduct yourself on social media, what you post on social media, it all matters and take personal opinion out of it. And I think in America, because politics in America can become so, so toxic

and so divisive and so angry, thankfully in many other parts of the world, it's not the same. So I think most people understand that and get that. But in America, because politics can get so emotional and so divisive. Sometimes, you know, it's difficult to keep your emotions in check. But, you know, keep it impartial and keep that checking. And you guys as well, keep doing this podcast. You're making real difference to real people. Well, thank you so much, Cheyenne. Pleasure to have you on. Before I let you go, is there any investigations you're working on right now that people can look forward to? Yeah, there's actually, I feel like I've sort of named Olga all the time. I wish she could be with us because we sort of do mug this job, this job together pretty much every day all the time.

We're working on what we think is a network on Telegram and on X that is posting fake videos that are supposed to look like videos by mainstream news outlets like the BBC, like CNN, like Fox News, like NBC News. And we believe that these videos are being created by people with a pro-Kremlin narrative because most of these videos, are supposed to show Ukraine in a negative light as a corrupt country and then we've seen in the last month or so these videos that for more than a year year and a half they've been created they've taken a turn towards the US election they're producing videos about the US election and very very divisive videos of that at that professionally made in the sense that you know you could actually believe that is a genuine BBC video that is a genuine CBS video but at the same time completely fake completely false completely misleading we've been investing it for a while, and hopefully this side of the election, we are going to publish our investigation and explain what the operation is and what it does and why these videos are fake. Wow. Yeah, looking forward to that. That does sound fascinating.

Yeah, Cheyenne, keep up good work. And yeah, thanks for coming on. Thank you, guys. Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. For everything else, we've got a website, QAAPodcast.com.

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