Reply All - #83 Voyage Into Pizzagate

Episode Date: December 8, 2016

A conspiracy theory, a pizza related map, and a website fighting for its very soul. Further Reading Bryan Menegus' great article, "Reddit is Tearing Itself Apart." An interview with Edgar Welch, the Pizzagate gunman. The Donald Subreddit If you have a question about a story we've reported this year, please email a voice memo of 30 seconds or less to [e-mail] with the subject line "updates." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman. And I'm PJVote. So last Friday, we sat down to do a segment that we do a lot on the show called Yes, Yes, No, with our boss, Alex Bloomberg. And at the time, it felt like we were talking about a facet of the sort of strange, tiny world that Reply All inhabits. Just this niche internet story that was never going to escape the orbit of the weird stuff that we are fixated on. And between Friday and today, the story has exploded. But we will get to that.

First, the yes, yes, no we recorded on Friday at 6 p.m. Welcome once again to yes, yes, no, the segment on our show where our boss, Alex Bloomberg, a card-carrying member of the AARP, as of a couple weeks ago. Well, a card, a registration card throwing out member of the AARP. I do not carry the card. I would carry the card, but my wife threw it away when I got it in the mail. Comes to us with stuff that he doesn't understand on the internet, and we do our best to explain it to him. So what do you have for us this week? All right, so I have a series of tweets.

I will read them. Okay. In the order they were tweeted. They are all from somebody named Tony Baby. At it's Tony now. First tweet, Giuseppe, we have a bigger problem. Pizza eats a no good to a call eat that. Eat, E, E, T, call eat that.

Something about e-mails. We got it to call them circular, pies now. That's the first tweet? That's the first tweet. Okay. Your accent is wonderful, by the way. Second tweet.

Giuseppe, all of the flyers about the circular pies, they are no good. It's a even worse. The designer made a the C and the P. Wait, made a da C and P too big. All right. Okay. And then final tweet. Giuseppe, the new flyers, we got to find and destroy

the design are big a mistake. Kids eat free, not eat kids free. We are ruined. Wow. Oh, God. So what fresh horror is buried in that ironic tweet? So let me just ask PJ. PJ, do you know what this is?

Somebody making, I guess, acceptably. racist jokes about Italian Americans. I have no idea what this is. Alex Bloomberg, do you understand this series of tweets at all? Uh, no. There's a reference to emails, which

I feel like when people reference emails, I feel like I know which emails they're referencing. Uh-huh. Alex Goldman, do you understand these tweets? Yes, and I'd like to apologize in advance for everything that you're about to learn. Are we going to a bad place? We're going to a very bad place.

Oh, okay, I might know 4% of this. Okay. Do you want to drop your 4% knowledge? There's a thing called Pizza Gate. Mm-hmm. Do you know what it is? No. I've actually, this has been one where I've seen it.

I've known that I don't want to know it, and I've avoided it, which is a new thing for me. And up until this moment, it's been working out really well. Sorry, bud. Okay. So it all started with the leaked John Podesta emails. Okay. Right. Okay, so John Podesta.

Leaked. Like they were hacked. They were hacked. Yes. The hacked, the, apparently Russian hackers broke into the DNC computers, right? They sent, actually, they sent Podesta, like, I think it was like one of those, like, password reset things. Oh. So it's like pretending to be from Gmail or whatever.

You click it, you enter your password, and then they get everything. He got fished. He got fished. John Podesta got fished. Yeah. So when the emails were hacked, you know, people who wanted to find scandals in them, a me. immediately started pouring over them and looking for clues. And there was stuff in there that was not great.

Like there was evidence that Donna Brazile from CNN had given the Clinton campaign debate questions before the debate. But beyond things like that, people started to see things that, well, were really there? I don't, well, you tell me. Listen, I will provide you with the evidence. Okay. You come up with the conclusion yourself. I'm very curious to see how this goes to pizza. So the first email that people really...

It's fun being in this chair, isn't it? Yeah, it's a lot nicer, actually. Okay, so let me bring up the Podesta emails on WikiLeaks. Hold on just a second. And the first email that like the right wing blogosphere got really wound up about and is part of the chain that leads to PizzaGate was this email that was written by the performance artist, Marina Abramovich. Wait, really? Yes.

Do we need to, I feel like this is one of the things we don't, but do we need to explain who Marina Abramovich is? Marina Abramovich is a... Yeah. I don't know who she is. Really? You don't? No.

That also fuck you. No. That was a big fuck here. That was a surprising snob direction, and I really enjoyed it. You don't know what the Marina Abramovich is? No, you do. You do. Yeah.

Okay. So Marina Abramovich is this performance artist. She's been around for about 40 years. So when you think about performance artists, you're probably thinking about her, basically. She does these, like, very confrontational, very physical performances that usually involve, like, a lot of nudity and direct interaction with the audience. Wow. Yes. Her work disturbs and provokes.

All great art does. So Marina Abramovich wrote this email to Tony Podesta, who is the brother of John Podesta, who is the brother of John Podesta, who is, like Hillary's right-hand man, like campaign manager guy. And Tony Podesta is a big-time lobbyist in D.C. Right. He runs the Podesta group. So it was an email that Tony had forwarded to John from Marina and it said, Dear Tony, I'm so looking forward to the spirit cooking dinner at my place.

Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother's joining? All my love, Marina. The end. Okay. What is spirit cooking? According to Marina Abramovich, Spirit cooking is just like this normal dinner that she was doing as a reward for people who donated to this Kickstarter campaign she did. But the name is a reference to this performance art piece she did like two decades ago that was also called spirit cooking in which she would write in pig's blood on walls like these kind of absurdist recipes. They would be like, fresh morning urine, sprinkle over nightmare dreams. That's one of them.

That sounds like something you would tweet. It does sound like something I would tweet. She was so ahead of her time. Here's another one. With a sharp knife, cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand, eat the pain. Ugh. I don't need that. So she did this performance art project called spirit cooking.

She claims that the spirit cooking she was referring to with the pedestives was just like a nice dinner they were having. Right. So she wasn't saying, come over to my house and eat the pain. Right. She was just like, come over to my house and. eat some sweet potatoes. It's like, come over to my house, and we will participate in bizarre,

left-wing, elitist performance art rituals together. Well, the way that places like Drudge and Breitbart and right-wing media places ran with it is that Marina Abramovich and the Podestas and probably the Clintons are performing occult rituals. Oh. Okay. Okay, so that is the first email.

That is the email that brings us into this fantastical world. The second email is the one that gets us into PizzaGate territory. Okay. I forgot we were even going anywhere. Right. This is nicer. All right. It's so fun, isn't it?

So let's presuppose for a minute that the Clintons, the pedestas are occultists who worship Satan or whatever. Like, just pre-prisci- They do rituals. They do rituals. They get together. rituals. Yes. Okay. This is an email from a guy named James Aliphantus to John Podesta and it says, great show, great speech. Raised over 40 grand. My only regret is that I didn't make you a nice pizza. When can I? Is this guy a chef or something? James Aliphantis is a guy who owns this pizza place

called Comet Pingpong, which is a rock venue and a ping pong place and a pizza place in Northwest D.C. Okay. And James Elephantis is connected to the the like the Washington D.C. liberal establishment by the fact that he used to date David Brock who founded media matters and who ran a pro-Hillary super PAC during the election this year. This is just like basically what we're getting is like the kind of like Facebook social graph of like the organized left. Like it's like artists and business owners and whatever, but like emailing about fundraisers and hanging out. Right. Okay. So the people who are trying to sniff out a conspiracy in the Podesta emails. They think they're onto something really big. And so they're all

sort of sharing information on sites like Fortune and Reddit. And there are a couple of sort of far right-wing blogs that are reporting on it. And they look into this guy, Aliphantus and his pizza place. And through a course of very big logical leaps, like the fact that there are a lot of children in his Instagram photos, even though he doesn't have a kid. Uh-huh. And the fact that apparently on the dark web, the word cheese pizza is slang for child pornography. Uh-huh. They decide that James Allifantus is running a gigantic child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of his pizza place. Whoa.

Okay. Wow. I knew I didn't want to know about this. Right. And here's the third email. This is the weirdest one and this is the one they always talk about. Okay. It's an email from a person named Susan who is a friend of John Podestas apparently.

And it says, the realtor found a handkerchief. I think it has a map that seems pizza related. Is it yours? They can send it if you want. I know you're busy. So feel free not to respond. If it's not yours or you don't want it. It's funny because that does sound.

Maybe now I've just been like. I'm convinced. Get the police over that place right now. But it sounds coded and weird. I know. Oh, God. The pizza-related napkin. Right.

Yeah. Like, what's a pizza-related napkin? Does that even mean? It's a handkerchief that has a map that seems pizza-related. A handkerchief that has a map that seems pizza-related, that is very mysterious. So in another email, a member of Susan's family says, I have a square cloth handkerchief white with black that was left on the kitchen island

and now that they've made the presupposition that anything pizza related has to do with child abuse they were like well handkerchiefs gay men in the 60s used to use what they called the handkerchief code which was a way where they would hang a handkerchief out of their back pockets

so that you could identify that they were gay and what kind of sex they were into. Okay. And they have decided that a white with black handkerchief means underage sadomasochistic sex. Wow. Yes. Underage sadomasochistic sex. All right.

So from these three emails and then a couple other pieces of evidence, they decided that there was a massive child trafficking ring, which has embroiled not only the pedestas, but Hillary Clinton's in on it. Barack Obama's in on it. A couple of other high-profile media people are on it. And once they decided that they identified this trafficking ring, the people who decided that this is a real thing, they see it. They've just collected like mountains of crazy evidence. Such as. James Allifant is his name. Sounds surprisingly like, I love children.

So the theory is that his parents just knew. Yeah. Or maybe he changed his name. The way that he would get away with having a secret pedophile ring was to have a name that was secretly encode the fact that he's a pedophile in his name. I mean, the thing about conspiracies is like the thing about conspiracies is like they want to point out how the people who are who are the masterminds behind it are operating with impunity or are trying to signal like how powerful they are. And so the other thing is that these ding-dongs who believe this conspiracy theory, they call it combat pizza, even though it's called comment pizza. even though it's called Comet Pingpong. And it's like, comet pizza, the acronym would be CP, same as child pornography. So this is, I mean, even for a conspiracy theory, this is like, this is crazy.

There was another document that was part of another WikiLeaks dump, which was a FBI document that was all about symbols that people who are involved in child pornography used to imply that they are involved in it. Okay, so this was a real thing. This was a real thing. So there's an actual FBI document that does use these sort of coded symbols that people are child pornography used. So there's one that's like a, that's like sort of like a triangle

that spirals in on itself. Okay. And there's a pizza place, two doors down from Comet called Besta Pizza. Until very recently, their logo looked similar to this triangle logo.

So people were like, oh, they have this triangle logo on their, on their... So now all the pizza places like on the block are part of this ring. Yes. And there's a,

bookstore across the street called politics and pros and the ampersand in between politics and pros. Sort of a famous bookstore. It's like kind of a spiral. And there's also a, isn't all, aren't all ampersand sort of spirals? Yes. But they thought that this one looked conspicuously like another logo that appears on this FBI document that is a code for little boy lover. Okay. Okay. They're believing in a world where there's kind of a business district where every business is actually just a front for child porn. Yeah. But there's also some, so covertly advertising that based on sort of like if you're in the

in the know by either the first letters of their names or by weird signs. Right. Essentially, they're trying to broadcast to other people who might be interested in child trafficking. Got it. This is the place to get your pizza and politics. And then also, you know, it's a venue. It's a music venue.

And they frequently have all ages shows. And to people who have never been to a rock concert before. Oh, all ages sounds deeply sinister. Wait, they are taking issue with all ages? Yeah, all ages to you and me

means like, it's a show where there's no alcohol. I didn't realize that that would be a weird turn. I thought that would be a term like, no turn on red or something that like pretty much everybody

everybody in America was familiar with like the concept of an all ages show but I guess not. So all ages was like a very sinister-sounding thing to them. Yeah, I mean, to them it sounded like

bring your children to this, to this whatever satanic ritual we might be. Right. So wait. So, so, okay. So there's like a couple of, there's a couple of committed people who are like determined to find a conspiracy where where there isn't one. I don't think it's just a couple of people. Does this go anywhere? Generally, when you think about an online conspiracy, it's like, oh, I believe in chemtrails, but, I mean, I just write about how I believe in chemtrails on my Twitter account.

Right. People are actually going to Comet Pingpong every day and protesting. How many people? Like half a dozen, but they're there every day. And they'd say Comet Pizza stop being a secret child pornography distribution center? Yes. And the way that I sort of found out about this is my friend John got in touch with me and he was like, Alex, I need to talk to you. My friend Amanda is in this band called Heavy Breathing.

and heavy breathing has played at this place comet ping pong. And people found videos of her band on the internet, and she uses like a voice modulator, and she wears like a balaclava. And they've decided that she's some kind of like high priestess of their satanic sex cult, and they're like harassing her. Oh, no. Yeah.

It's really nuts. And Amanda actually, Amanda sent an email to all of her friends and she basically said like I'm removing everything from the internet like I'm going to go dark I don't want to be a part of this I don't want people to misinterpret things we're doing I want to take down all our videos I want to get off Facebook

Does has hiding everything convince the people who are paranoid That she has nothing to hide Absolutely not the people who are paranoid think that every time someone does something Like James Aliphantas made his Instagram profile private every time something like that happens, they're like, aha, these people wouldn't do this if they had nothing to hide. So rather than calming down after the election,

it's just, it's like gathering ahead of steam. I looked on Twitter today, and there were PizzaGate tweets coming up every couple of seconds. And until very recently, there was a subreddit about PizzaGate, that had 22,000 people talking about this very thing. Okay.

All right. I have one question. Sure. What is up with the map on the napkin? Because it doesn't sound like everything... You haven't sold me, Goldman. I'm like, you haven't just proven that this... I mean, I don't know.

It sounds like code. Listen, if I could get John Podesta on the phone to ask him about the pizza-related map, I would. I mean, how hard is it? Did you try? I didn't try. Well, I could get it? Okay, so if I could try to get John Videsk on the phone, I would try.

And then maybe succeed, but I'm not going to. Well, I can try. That's the kind of, I guess that's the kind of talent we have around here. Oh, yeah. This is harsh. I know. Anyway, enough hijings, right? I think the time has come for me to perform my sacred duty.

And that sacred duty is to summarize. I'm glad that even as a no, I don't have to. summarize because like I don't think that I could do it at this point. Okay. And so I'm going to let my fellow passenger on the no train. PJ vote. No, what I was explicitly saying is I can't do it and don't want to. No, no, I heard you say.

I want to do it. Okay. Nope. That's, um, I'm very excited to hear you make this a yes, PJ. Oh, this feels bad. Oh, okay. Giuseppe, the new flyers, we got to find this, Strayam, the designer. Oh, wait, no, this is how it works.

Okay, so the original series of tweets from the user, It's Tony now, said, Giuseppe, the new flyers, we got to find and destroy them, the designer, big a mistake. I'm trying not to do the accent, but you can't read it without doing the accent. Kids eat free, not eat kids free, we are ruined.

Giuseppe, all of the flyers abouted to circular pies, they had no good. ETSA even worse, the designer made the C and P too big. Giuseppe, we have a bigger problem. Pizza eats a no good to a call eat that, something about the emails. We got to call him circular pies now. So the joke is that in this sort of like Simpsons world,

stereotypical, like Italian pizzeria owner has accidentally misprinted a bunch of promotional materials for his pizza restaurant implying that he is a pedophile. It's not funny. It is funny. And the reason this joke is funny is because in real life, political operative? What's the noun for John Podesta? Political insider. Political insider John Podesta had his emails hacked, probably by Russia. Those emails were disseminated to an internet that included a lot of people who wanted to find evidence of a vast and evil conspiracy in them. Some of them took a few ambiguous or not ambiguous emails. Chained them together and decide that they were evidence of a secret pedophile ring. It goes all the way to the top. It goes all the way to the top. And even though the democratic machine that they think runs this pedophile ring was defeated in the election, that has not stopped them in their quest to stop it.

Which is basically the plot of True Detective Season 1. Yeah, that's what I was thinking, too. Wait, but I still don't understand. is Tony Baby a believer in the conspiracy? No, he's making a joke. He's making a joke. At the expense of the believers. Yeah, he's making a joke about the idea of like a pizza place that would be,

that would realize suddenly that they can't use the word pizza anymore because it's a code word for pedophilia for child pornography. But now they're calling it circular pies now, which is also. Which is also problematic because circular pies is CP, child pornography. It's like, sketch comedy that only makes sense in the world of... Right. It's like SNL for conspiracy theorists or about conspiracy theorists. Yeah, so we're at yes, yes, yes.

We are? I'd like to apologize. Thank you. For bringing us to yes, yes, yes. So it's been three days since we recorded that yes, yes, no. How is everybody's weekend? And, you know, the tone of that yes, yes, no was sort of like, oh, we are covering something pretty niche, a very silly conspiracy.

theory that's kind of nuts but doesn't really touch the real world in any significant way and then this weekend happened yeah did you see did you follow the news at all no oh really you don't know anything about what happened no what happened this weekend uh a man with an assault rifle went into comet ping pong fired it um he uh held up in there for an indetermined period of time according to the news like it's unclear exactly how long um and he was there according to his own testimony to self-investigate the rumors of child abuse at this place wow and actually agreed to surrender peacefully to police when he was satisfied that there was no grounding to those rumors so holy yeah crap and um the first thing i wanted to do of course

courses like see what the reaction of the folks who believe this conspiracy was to a person going into a piece to this very pizza place and leaving when he was satisfied that there was no conspiracy and apparently people had dug into this guy's background seen that he'd done a couple of acting roles on internet movie database not even acting roles i looked at this too he was crew on a couple movies well he did play a victim in a movie called the bleeding, so he was an actor in one movie. He was vaguely associated with the film and TV industry. Right.

And the sort of consensus decision was that this person was a crisis actor or a false flag, like the government had coordinated this person going in there, it wasn't real, it hadn't actually happened, no one was in any real danger. That's the most terrifying

thing you've told me in this segment. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty grim. And it went from being this thing that we were like, oh, well, we can, this is so ridiculous that like we can make fun of it too. It's just not, it's just dangerous now. It just feels like toxic, not, not good. Yeah. I don't know how we got here.

Well, I've actually been doing some reporting on kind of how we got to this point. Like where everything's broken? I've been doing some reporting on how we got to this point where conspiracy theories that are propagated on places like Reddit and with a guy walking into a pizza place with an assault rifle. And I will tell you all about it. Okay. After the break. Welcome back to the show. All right, Alex.

What are we talking about? Okay, here we go. You ready? Yeah. So part of the reason that PizzaGate managed. to gain so much traction in spite of the fact that, like, on its face, it's totally ludicrous is because there was a lot of discussion around it on Reddit. For a while, Reddit was like one of the main places that people discussed this theory.

And like people would meet there, talk about it, push each other further and further down this sort of absurd rabbit hole. And the Pizza Gate community on Reddit actually spun off from a much larger community. A community that over the past year has managed to gain. a ton of influence over the way the site works. Essentially, they managed to game the site so that their ideas were always at the forefront.

So the way Reddit works, if you've never been there, is that Reddit is made up of many smaller sites, which are called subreddits. And during the primaries, this subreddit started that was called the Donald. And it started out actually pretty small. Originally, people were just posting Donald Trump news. And then at some point,

they decided to make it sort of have like the anarchic, insane spirit of the Donald Trump campaign. Here, let me play you some tape I got from a conversation I had with one of the moderators. He asked me not to use his name. So the Donald is pretty much an online 24-7 Trump rally. We have 314,000 plus subscribers. I always have to go back and check because we get a couple thousand a day now. And it's just, it's non-stop. It's a non-stop Trump train. So the members of the Donald basically used this subreddit as a base camp for activities like on and off the site. So for example, when Megan Kelly's book came out, they all went to Amazon and gave it one-star reviews.

When WikiLeaks was coming out, the Donald kind of spearheaded that effort where we crowdsourced the investigation. We said, okay, listen, they're dumping thousands of pages a day. No single person can go through this. So we essentially would post the WikiLeaks article on the top and say, okay, go through this and everyone post what you find. And within minutes, sometimes the things that we were finding were getting posted on the news. And the other thing that they started to do was that the front page of Reddit is called R All. And that's the page where everything that is most popular on the site shows up. And this is important because if something makes it to the front page of Reddit, that's kind of like having it reach the entire internet.

it will get shared everywhere. So the more something gets upvoted, the more popular it becomes. And if it gets upvoted enough times, it ends up on the front page of Reddit. But the people in the Donald figured out that if you start, if they just upvoted everything, no matter what it was that appeared in the Donald, it would just totally clutter up the front page with stuff from the Donald. Oh, so they could just like take over the front page. Right.

And most of it was just like goofy trolling stuff. Like, like I saw one just now that says Trump is here to MAGA, which means make America great again. And it's a picture of a pepe with Donald Trump hair and his fist is cocked back like he's about to punch someone. That's it. That's the entire thing. America? He's about to punch America, I guess. He's about to punch the people that made it not great.

Oh, okay. On the night. Us. on the night of the election, a post that made it to the front page, which was posted by a The Donald moderator. It's just text, not a link to anything. It says, hey, losers and SJWs,

that's social justice warriors, of Reddit. How does our dick taste? Go fuck yourselves. We're the future and you're a bunch of 100% losers. I openly laugh in your face. Whoa. It's not very useful. And another thing that The Donald would do is when people would

talk about Donald Trump in another subreddit, they would go to that subreddit and do what's called brigading. They'd flood the conversation completely shut it down, basically. Right. And the thing is that the folks in the Donald had this belief that moderators on other subredits, especially like other politics subredits, where anti-Trump stuff was being posted, were actually being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign to keep Donald Trump material off the page. So since they believe that, they felt totally righteous in like sending them.

harassing personal messages or threatening them or just abusing them. One person we spoke to actually said that she would get hundreds of messages, threats, abuse, people threatening to kill her dog. That's horrible. Yeah. So the Donald has established itself as kind of this toxic force on this website. And it was in the Donald subreddit that some of the first Pizza Gate stuff began. And it became big enough that it broke off and became its own community of it,

like amateur investigators who wanted to get the bottom of this sexual abuse ring. Yeah. And part of what they were doing on the subreddit was they were posting the personal information of people that they suspected to be a part of PizzaGate. And posting personal information is a bright line violation of Reddit's rules. So on November 22nd, right before Thanksgiving, they shut down the PizzaGate subreddit. And that's an event. Anytime Reddit shuts down an entire subreddit, it's a big deal. They turn it off.

All right. So the tens of thousands of people that are in the Pizza Gate subreddit, they go to Reddit. What happens? They try to go to the subreddit and says the subreddit has been banned. Whoa. They all. There's a term for that. What is it?

It's called kicking a hornet's nest. So they all immediately regroup on the Donald and start posting. threads with so the CEO of Reddit is named Steve Huffman he goes by the username spez online SPEZ and so they immediately go on to the Donald start posting threads that are like fuck you spes spes is a pedophile spes is a cuck spes let his wife fuck whoever which is kind of redundant to saying that he's a cuck right um fuck you spaz fuck you spaz on and on and on and on and on forever so they're doing this for they're doing this nonstop over and over and over again for 24 hours.

And after a day of this, Steve Hoffman, the CEO of Reddit, and did something that is totally that did not help his case at all, which is that he went in to Reddit.com's database and started editing other people's comments. To do what? Instead of saying fuck you, Spes, he changed all references to his name to the names of moderators of the Donald. Whoa. That is wildly unprofessional, but so satisfying.

It's like, but also just so bad. So bad. You can't do that. You really can't do that. But it's like, it's like, it's like, oh man, I so sympathize. I so sympathize. So I talked to Steve Hoffman and according to him, he just thought that he was like trolling the trolls and was just sort of.

of joking around in the spirit of the Donald. I almost felt like I was extending them in Olive Branch, which is like, hey, I'm a real person. Like, I can play this game. You know, we have something in common and that we, you know, can toy with people on the Internet. And I thought they would notice. They'd freak out a little bit.

We'd have a laugh. I'd change it back. And we move on. I was just like, oh, I was like, you kids, like, you're just being annoying and I can be annoying too. But the Donald didn't quite. have the sense of humor about it that he expected because very quickly they figured it out and they were super mad they immediately started calling for his resignation right I like this guy I really do that dude yeah you really can't do it but it's just like I think that what you don't what you're not thinking about is is these people people who are conspiratorially minded and believe that like yeah yeah yeah yeah people holding the levers of power but they like they also like like you're This is the thing that you're, this is the thing, this is what people who fear Hillary Clinton fear that she's going to do.

And this is what people who fear Donald Trump fear that he's going to do, which is to sort of like get into power and then fuck the rules and then just do things that you're not allowed to do. I understand. I understand that my love of this action is basically a love of fascism. Yes. But the reason I like it, the reason I appreciate it. It's because like what has frustrated me so much this year is that all these websites. that convey information and that have a job to do, they never present a human face. Like, Facebook is being used to disseminate fake news.

And they're like, well, we don't know how to fix the algorithms. And, like, they're never like, we're humans. We've made a decision. Like, WikiLeaks, like, never says, like, hey, I'm a guy with a grudge. And so I've decided to, like, completely destroy American democracy for a little bit. Like, I get that when someone chose a human face, you don't want it to be, like, a juvenile male misgrant human face. Is it?

But the problem is... I mean, is it more simple than that, though? Is it like literally the pleasure of seeing somebody with power stand up to bullies? Yes, that too. Mainly that. Wait, Alex. So what actually happens next in the story? Well, Steve Huffman, the CEO, he ends up apologizing, but he told me that editing the comments

was kind of a turning point. I think this whole event, you know, it was a big mistake on my part, but there are some silver linings, and one of which was that it's a big, it was a good wake-up call for the company. We removed hundreds of our most toxic users, and we made some technology changes that prevent communities like the Donald from kind of gaming the system and having a more dominant voice. It seems like a very mild fix to a not mild problem. Yeah, well, you and I think that this sounds pretty mild. Steve Huffman thinks that he's cracking down on abuse on the site.

And the Donald moderator that I talked to, he just feels like they're being censored. I see in Reddit the same thing that liberals are grappling with around the country. And in Reddit, I don't think the problem is the comments and the post themselves, but the realization that holy crap, this stuff's more popular than we thought it was. people went into the election genuinely thinking that Donald Trump had zero chance of winning. Yep. What you're seeing on Reddit is not the realization that, holy crap, we've been living in a bubble. We need to accept that there are people that disagree with us. We're not seeing that.

Instead, we're seeing an effort to push us out of the conversation and reconstitute the bubble. So he basically argues that like, but the problem is nobody has said we have a problem with their message. What people have said is we have a problem with their tactics. Like we have a problem with the specific way they manipulate the sites engineering to force themselves in the conversation. And like we have a specific problem with the way that they target individuals for abuse. It's like when you're, you know, have you ever been on the subway car and then like somebody comes on and starts loudly, loudly, loudly preaching? Yeah. From the gospel from a Bible.

And like you're just like taking over the space for your. position that you hold very, very strongly. But like, and now you're making everybody else hear it. And nobody, nobody listens to that. And whether they agree with you or don't agree with you, it's not about the words anymore. It's just about, like, you're right to yell. And, like, I don't know what you do with this.

Because it's like we're going to have, in the next year, two years, five years, whatever, we're going to have a lot of conversations about, like, how we want to. argue on the internet. And like this fight that is happening right here is also just like a fight we're going to have as a culture. And like I don't see anything to be optimistic about here. I don't see anything to like like it just feels like the same stuck we are everywhere else. Well, I asked the moderator of the Donald that I spoke to. I said, you know, like basically there is a pretty ugly divide right now. And I'm curious how we are going to talk to each other and. make this divide feel less ugly. I want to play you the answer.

Sure. Well, in that question, there's kind of an inherent question of how are we going to mend these relationships. That's why I get you're kind of asking, how do we bring people together? And I don't think we need to. It's really funny how Trump won the presidency. The Republicans retained the House and the Congress. And now it's, oh, we need to come together. Well, no, Donald Trump won the presidency because he flipped blue states that hadn't voted for Republicans since 1988.

When you flip those states and you win like that, the first agenda item is not compromise everything you're fighting for. for and seek middle ground. There's nothing to apologize for. That's a, that's a, that's a very liberal way of thinking, apologizing for winning. The American people are tired of identity politics. They are tired of being forced to tow the line with political correctness. And they don't see the, they don't see value in the argument that words are as damaging as actions.

So what I heard was like, we, we don't talk and things don't get better. But, you know, Steve, the Reddit CEO for all that he's been through, for all of the times he's been called a cuck and called a pedophile, like he has a much, much, much more positive view about discourse in America and on Reddit specifically than I expected. Like, I asked him, what would it take for you to decide to shut down the Donald subreddit? Like, how toxic would it have to get? And he basically said, I don't want to do that. Full stop. So when we take a step back and look at the entire country, and we saw this play out through the last election, there's about half the country that feels alienated and unheard. And they elected a candidate, despite many flaws, that felt like, that they felt like was giving

them a voice. And the last thing we want to do is take away that voice. We will do the best we can to provide them that voice and do our best to prevent the toxic minority of users from undermining it. So the position of Reddit is it's like we want to hear what everybody says and we want to preserve everybody's right to say it. Sort of like he's trying to preserve the voice of somebody who doesn't want to engage other people's views. Yeah, weirdly it's a really similar attention to what is happening in the real world, which is that a lot of people feel like a lot of Trump's, like Trump has said a lot of things that suggest he wants to do things that are like basically anti-democratic, but he's a guy who won in a democratic process. And so you somehow

have to like, the system has to incorporate somebody who's like antagonistic to the system. And every impulse like I always have is to be like, well, kick those people out because if you let them in, they're going to break it. But if you kick them out, then you've broken the system. Yeah. It's really tricky. Yeah, it's really hard to know what a proportional response is. And I asked Steve, like, do you feel responsible for even allowing this conversation to appear on your website? That results in somebody going into like a, you know, a pizza parlor with a gun. Right. Yeah.

And surprisingly, he said, yeah, to some degree. And even though the PizzaGate subreddit wasn't up that long, he still wishes that they'd gotten to it sooner. But see, I guess that's what I, that is what I wonder, is like, is the problem Reddit or is the problem people? Like if there wasn't a Reddit, would people have found some other place together and convince them, works themselves into a frenzy? This to me feels like the question of like, well, if you put fences up on the Golden Gate Bridge, people will find other things to jump off of. It's like, yeah, that's true, but it's a big landmark that people typically go to to jump off of. Right. It's funny, though, talking about this, like, the thing that makes me realize, and I did not expect to feel, I don't know, I have a feeling which I did not expect to feel, which is like, if you did, if, like, Reddit had, if we lived in an alternate universe where two months ago, Reddit had been like, you know what, we feel like we're doing more hard than good in the world, we're just going to close up shop. There'd still be bright bar, there'd still be info wars. There'd be, like, a section of the internet for people who believe that Hillary Clinton is a pedophile who hanged. out at a pizza place to do her pedophilia. And you'd still have, you know, people in the Trump

transition team who were tweeting links to those places. Like, you'd have a more closed loop of conspiracy shenanigans. And, like, as Reddit actually is, like, the one place where, even though they're behaving horribly, the people who believe things that are dangerous and scary and not true are hanging out with like people who are there to post pictures of their pets or talk about like anime or whatever like they're all in one place and so like if reddit can find a way to get people to behave enough to talk to each other like that's the one place where people who believe in pizagate and people who think it's absurd might run into each other and have a conversation right yeah i guess that's like as close to optimism as i can get reply all's hosted by pj vote and me

of them. We were produced by Shruthy Pinnamineni, Fia Benin, Chloe Prasinos, and Damiano Marquetti. Our executive producer is Tim Howard. We were edited by Jorge Just, production assistance from Thane Faye. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Matt Lieber is a space heater on cold feet. Our theme songs by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and our ad music is by Build Buildings. You can find more episodes of the show at iTunes.com slash reply all or wherever else you get your podcasts. Our website is replyall.soy. We're going to revisit a bunch of stories that we reported this year

to find out what happened to the people in them since the stories aired. And if there's someone that you're wondering about or if you just had some random question that a story of ours didn't answer, you should record a 30-second voice memo and email it to Reply All at gimletmedia.com and use the subject line updates. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. Hi, this is Reply All. You're on the air.

Hey, this is Eric. How's it going, Eric? Pretty good, pretty good. My question is, like, 90 degrees here in Indianapolis. Okay. And every time I turn on my AC, it blast, like, fog or something that is, like, something foggy out of there. What should I do? When's the last time you changed your filter?

Like, my air filter? Like... Like, ACs have air filters in them, that you're supposed to change periodically, and nobody does, but they fill up with weird stuff. Oh. Some of them have air filters that you can just take out and you can just rinse them out, but a lot of times you need to actually buy a replacement for the specific model. Go online and download the instructions for it and change your air filter. Okay, that was surprisingly helpful, I'll be honest with you.

I was really not expecting that to, like, happen. Super tech support. But, yeah, solve my problem completely, and if it does, I'll just sit you guys up and be like, thanks. All right, call us back and let us know how it goes. Take care. So great. Thanks. Bye.

We could be wrong. It could be like poison radiation. There's frion leaking. Toxic frion leaking into your face. Let us know how that goes too. Yeah, totally.