The Daily Beast Podcast - YouTube’s Alt-Right Propaganda Is Gonna Get People ‘Killed’

Episode Date: August 6, 2023

Alex Winter has a warning about YouTube that he makes loud and clear in this episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast. He breaks down for Andy how easy it is for users to see right-wing propagan...da on the site, especially from the right, as well as one of his biggest fears as a consequence of it: People getting killed. Winter also shares whether we will be having this conversation about TikTok soon and why Google, YouTube’s parent company, isn’t doing anything about it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.
Starting point is 00:00:37 Hello, and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with director Alex Winter. You of course know from amazing documentaries like Zappa and Deep Web. And today he's going to talk to us all about his new documentary that really blew me away personally, the YouTube effect. He's going to talk to us all about the hidden effects YouTube. is having on our society.
Starting point is 00:01:01 But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clip. Vacation clips. So I have to say, I've heard the complaints about how all my clips are from the depths of hell. And this week we're on vacation. So what I assembled here is a few clips of Dems doing really, really good messaging. Oh.
Starting point is 00:01:22 And I figured we could discuss that. I don't believe you at all. He's like so lying right now. You are straight up lying. What have I done to ever think I'm not trustworthy? Everything. Say, are you ready to listen to some clips and then tell us they're good? Yes.
Starting point is 00:01:41 Okay. Well, since this is audio only, I can't play puppies getting adopted. But what I have for you instead is here's Elizabeth Warren back before she was a senator saying something I often think about when I hear all the John Galt shit of the Republican Party these days. part of looking at this whole. We got in this whole $1 trillion on tax cuts for the rich under George Bush. We got into this whole $2 trillion on two wars that we put on a credit card for our children and grandchildren to pay off. And we got into this whole $1 trillion on a Medicare drug program that A was not paid for and B is 40% more expensive than it needs to be because it was a giveaway to the drug company. So we just have, I mean, that's just four trillion right there. So part of the way you fix this problem is like, don't do those things. I hear all this, you know, well, this is class, warfare, this, whatever. No, there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.
Starting point is 00:02:49 Nobody. You built a factory out there. Good for you. But I want to be clear, you moved your goods to market. on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers, the rest of us, paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.
Starting point is 00:03:12 You didn't have to worry that marauding bans would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something to or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along. I like Liz.
Starting point is 00:03:46 Mm-hmm. Yeah. I feel like she got dealt dirty in 2020. I don't really know how, but... Because America doesn't like smart women. Yeah, and I just, yeah. They don't like smart women. And the... capitalistic greed of billionaires was going to make sure that somebody like her who was going to take direct attack on their ability to have five, six, seven homes, a fucking helicopter, two yachts, you know, was going to make sure that she wasn't going to get in the way. I liked Elizabeth Warren a lot. She was one of my top choices. But like that's not how our society works. Yeah. And I just thought the whole democratic infighting between her supporters and Bernie supporters
Starting point is 00:04:30 was stupid. Really stupid, I thought. On both sides, I'm not, I do not at all think this was just an example of, you know, quote unquote, Bernie bros being assholes. This was an absolute both sides thing for me. And I just thought it was, you know, that's how we got Joe Biden. But whatever. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:04:49 But I think she is one of the more effective communicators. And it really is a shame that she's sometimes not out there as much as she could be. Yeah. Okay. Now we're going to take it all the way back. to the 2008 Democratic primary where we were just getting to meet a young man named Barack Obama. And on the debate stage, we had now President Joe Biden, and he had an annihilation of Rudy Giuliani, many consider it was a nail in Rudy's career as a politician.
Starting point is 00:05:19 And whenever I hear Ron DeSantis talk about woke, I just wish someone would do something similar to this to him. And the irony is Rudy Giuliani, probably the most underqualified, man since George Bush to seek the presidency is here talking about any of the people here. Rudy Giuliani. I mean, think about it. Rudy Giuliani, there's only three things he mentioned in the sentence, a noun and a verb in 9-11. I mean, there's nothing else. There's nothing else. And I mean it sincerely, he is genuinely not qualified to be president. Boom. That was great. That was fantastic. Yeah, that was a really, really, really good moment. And yes, I wish,
Starting point is 00:06:00 somebody would do that with Ron DeSantis. It would be a very easy fucking takedown. That's it. I don't even know if he uses the noun and the verb. I think that it is just actually fucking woke, woke, woke, woke, woke, woke, woke, woke. He's like a fucking woodpecker when it like, that's all it is. Yeah, he uses woke as the noun and the verb and the adjective. Yeah, yet again, like, a thing I keep coming back to is that there's so little confrontation
Starting point is 00:06:26 these days in our politics. and so no one's able to effectively say that stuff. But I'm really hoping on a debate stage they really come for him. Yeah, that would be nice. Look, and the thing is, assuming Trump is not on the Republican debate stage, I do think DeSantis would be the number one target. Curious, do you guys think that it'll be verboten to go after Trump since he won't be there, most likely.
Starting point is 00:06:50 I mean, you would do that, but if only you could pull your head out of his ass. You know what I'm saying? Like, they won't be able to do that. You won't hear it of the muffled. sounds. They're not going after Trump at all, period. Yeah. So I don't know why that would be any different if he's on the stage or off the stage. Like they're all just so scared of him that they won't say anything. Well, sounds like we're going to be roasting some meatballs then. Okay. So here, now we have Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorro, who I think is one of the best up and coming
Starting point is 00:07:21 communicators in the party. Here's her viral speech. Thank you, Mr. President. I didn't expect to wake up yesterday to the news that the senator from the 22nd District had overnight accused me by name of grooming and sexualizing children in an email fundraising for herself. So I sat on it for a while wondering why me? And then I realized because I am the biggest threat to your hollow hateful scheme because you can't claim that you are targeting marginalized kids in the name of quote parental rights if another parent is standing up to say no.
Starting point is 00:08:02 So then what? Then you dehumanize and marginalize me. You say that I'm one of them. You say she's a groomer. She supports pedophilia. She wants children to believe that they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they're white. Well, here's a little bit of background
Starting point is 00:08:18 about who I really am. Growing up, my family was very active in our church. I sang in the choir. My mom taught CCD. One day our priest called a meeting with my mom and told her that she was not living up to the church's expectations and that she was disappointing. My mom asked why. Among other reasons, she was told it was because she was divorced and because the priest didn't see her at mass every Sunday. So where was my mom on Sundays?
Starting point is 00:08:44 She was at the soup kitchen with me. My mom taught me at a very young age that Christianity and faith was about being part of a community, about recognizing our privilege and blessings and doing what we can to be of service to us. others, especially people who are marginalized, targeted, and who had less, often unfairly. I learned that service was far more important than performative nonsense, like being seen in the same pew every Sunday, or writing Christian in your Twitter bio, and using that as a shield to target and marginalize already marginalized people. I mean.
Starting point is 00:09:20 I love her? Let me tell. Yeah. Yeah. Like, um, she is, that was. a masterclass. Yeah. Like that was a do not put your head down. Do not apologize. Do not use their fucking talking points as a way to like talk back. Like tell people who the fuck you are so that they don't have the opportunity to define you was exactly what she did. I, I loved it. I loved it. I loved it.
Starting point is 00:09:49 And I would like to see her. That's another person run for higher, higher office. Yeah, absolutely. And I completely agree with what Danielle said. The thing about, you know, the constantly calling people groomers and stuff like that is if you get into a situation where you're sitting there saying, I'm not a groomer, then they've won. Yep. That's what they want. And the only response to that is basically go fuck yourself, which she said just in a very much more eloquently than that. But that's what she said. She said go fuck yourself.
Starting point is 00:10:22 And, you know, God bless her. Now we have a Kentucky state representative. if he says he's going to marry a six-year-old. No, I'm just kidding. You're a terrible human being. You know that, right? The sad thing is, I believed you. Yeah, so did I.
Starting point is 00:10:36 I was just like, oh, really? I missed that one. I was like, oh, Kentucky this time? Here's AOC earlier this year discussing how stupid the Republicans' woke hearings are. We're having a hearing right now, and it's about what the, that the federal government is too woke. I mean, that's seriously what we're hearing. And then there's no definition of what woke is that we want wildland firefighters who are putting their lives at risk increasingly so year after year that we want to make sure that they stay on the job and have dignified conditions and not leave because they can earn more money as a greeter at Walmart. This is what this whole term woke means.
Starting point is 00:11:21 or diversity and inclusion so that the people who work in our federal workforce are actually in proportion to the people that live in this country. This is this horrifying, woke agenda that the other side is trying so hard to block. Yeah. AOC, come on the new abnormal. Please.
Starting point is 00:11:39 You have an open invitation. You need us. We can get your message out. I mean... She's great. I just think she's great. It's like when you look at how she utilizes those committee hearings to just spit fire and tell the truth and just obliterate Republicans, it's like she is at the Ph.D. fucking level and they are like eating Plato. Do you don't like it is just, it's so fucking clear.
Starting point is 00:12:16 I might give it a little bit of pushback. My people led paint chips. 30 years. Oh, well, there you go. Well, they're using lead paint chips like as chips to put the Plato on. Oh, I like this. Yeah, like salsa and chips. Play-Doh and paint. Yeah. All right. We got it done. Alex Winter is a recognizable face from acting in movies, including the Lost Boys and the Bill and Ted trilogy, and he's become at least equally well known as the director of documentaries such as Deep Web, the Panama Papers, showbiz kids, Zappa, and his latest, the YouTube effect, which
Starting point is 00:12:59 looks at the rise of the ubiquitous streaming platform and what it's meant for society. Alex, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you, Andy. Good to be here. I watched the movie last night, and as I said, to you before we started recording, I thought it was both fascinating and completely scary. And there's a telling quote early on in the film from, I think it was from tech reporter Natasha Tiku. She says, younger millennials in Gen Z use YouTube the way the rest of the rest of
Starting point is 00:13:23 of us use Google search. That's where they go to find information. And as an unrepentant Gen Xer, I know this is true. It's inarguably true, but it's also totally wild to me, going to a video site for information. Yeah, I think that really speaks to why I wanted to make this film and the general misunderstanding about what YouTube is. And as a result, that's one of the reasons it's managed to fly under the radar of scrutiny, despite being by far the largest media platform, on the planet. And it's often described as a social media site, which it really isn't, or as a, you know, just a source of cat videos or DIY videos or where you can find an influencer. I think Natasha's point really speaks to what YouTube actually is, which is Google's media front end,
Starting point is 00:14:11 Google owns YouTube. And the Google website is the number one viewed website in the world. And the number two most viewed is YouTube. So essentially, this is a story about the largest tech company on the planet in terms of how many users engage with it that owns the largest media platform on the planet. What are the implications of that? Yeah. And the film really does chart the rise of the platform from its beginning. But obviously, since we have limited time, I'm going to jump around a bit. 2011 is the birth of the YouTube algorithm. And there's another quote in the film, 70% of the videos that are watched are recommended by YouTube, i.e. by the algorithm. And 10% of those recommendations are conspiratorial. You know, if you think about that at first, it's like,
Starting point is 00:14:51 Well, that's not a lot. And then you think about just how many videos that is. Four billion views a day. Amazing. Probably more now. I mean, because that stat is a few months old. So it's probably like, probably like nine billion, I don't. Not really. But it would have grown. It's an enormous amount of eyeballs. And it's global. So this is not just a, you know, a Western issue or just a U.S. issue. This is a global issue. And again, you know, not to be just a complete doomsayer. This is not all, by any means, all negative. They have done.
Starting point is 00:15:21 because of that reach, they've done a world of good in many ways, including, I would say, leading the charge on diversity initiatives that were eventually picked up by the entertainment industry, you know, giving voice to LGBTQ and to people of color and to people all over the world and sort of democratizing or flattening, we're removing the gates into having access to the entire planet for what you want to say. I think that can't be undersold. I think it's a huge step forward and has done an enormous amount of good. But obviously, you have something at that scale, the negatives are also going to be huge. And, you know, I think that as we head into 2024 and we've begun this election cycle and everyone's campaigns are ramping up,
Starting point is 00:16:02 I think we're going to see sort of a form of chaos similar and in some ways worse to what we saw in 2020. And I think that YouTube is going to play a role in that. And I think that it's not currently really being discussed, which I think is not a good thing. Yeah. So let's talk about YouTube and the alt-right as a blanket term, but other unsavory characters as well. Talk to me about Caleb Kane because he was just fascinating to me. In 2014, in his words, he falls down the alt-right rabbit hole on YouTube. And he talks about his on-ramp. Explain what that is to folks. It's been studied quite a bit. I think the rabbit hole effect has been studied a great deal as it should have been. The essential process, especially around that time when the recommender algorithm, was
Starting point is 00:16:46 really active. It is less active today. It has been, to be fair to YouTube, it is significantly more difficult to get rabbit hole in that way as it was when Caleb came was on YouTube at that time. You could go online looking for general discourse or influencers around certain things that interested you and be very quickly led down a rabbit hole into extreme propaganda, hate speech, incitement to violence. You know, that was the terrain of Stefan Molinou and Alex Jones and Stephen Crowder, who's still very active there, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, I mean, people whose names we know who are backed by very large donors. So these appear on YouTube to be just some schmo on their webcam in their living room talking to you eyeball to eyeball when they are funded by huge,
Starting point is 00:17:30 often dark money political donors with a very specific agenda. So it's a kind of a lightning rod for activating propaganda. And the reason I was interested in Caleb was really to get past the radical was to look at where we are today, which is a very different place than where we were at that time. And I would say it's more dangerous because it isn't so screamingly obvious what the hazards are. And you don't get so quickly rabbit hold. And yet, you know, the Bellingap study showed that more of the January 6th insurrection, the people who attack the Capitol, more of those people had been radicalized on YouTube than any other single platform. And that's because the pervasive pariscial nature of YouTube is extremely attractive and galvanizing. And that really does not require a rabbit
Starting point is 00:18:22 hole. It doesn't even require an algorithm. It's more about the scale of that platform, how many people are on it, and how attractive and alluring that content is and the power of video. Yeah. And just to continue, Kane's story, as you mentioned in, I think it's 2019, he has maybe a little bit of what you might call a come to Jesus moment after the Christchurch mosque massacre. He doesn't call it this, but I viewed it almost like an off ramp. And that was by watching other YouTubers like Natalie Wyn, also known as ContraPoint. And he watched people like that, people like her, dismantle the arguments of the alt-right. And I thought that was really interesting also. Caleb really personifies the arc of our story because I think that it's too easy to talk about
Starting point is 00:19:08 rabbit holes. It's too easy to talk about algorithms. I think that those are kind of fadish terms that are bygone and we need to get past them. The movie is really about how we live today and how we get ourselves out of the sort of conspiratorial propaganda and begin to define for ourselves what is truth and what is not truth. And to be able to see someone who was completely buying wholesale, the propaganda, come around to understanding what is truth by way of other people on the platform. is extremely interesting to me. Natalie Wynn is very bright and has, I would say, one of the most extraordinary presence online that exists and has done an amazing job of unpacking Flashpoint cultural moments and making them clear. And it gives one hope for the future of journalism and the
Starting point is 00:19:56 belief that, you know what, there are such thing as facts and there are such thing as lies and one can aim oneself towards facts. So Caleb was really, I think, in many ways his life was saved by her, even though they'd never met. And to my knowledge, it's still never met. So she says something interesting in the documentary. She says she started viewing her channel as sort of an intervention. And she said this because she says she never assumed that YouTube was going to step in and save things and that the bad people would be banned. And that sort of takes me to my next question. Does anyone ever take the blame for anything? Do they even think there's something to take the blame for? You talked to Stephen Chen, who was an original co-founder of YouTube. He hasn't even
Starting point is 00:20:35 been involved with the company for a decade. And even he is like, oh, no, they're just prioritizing what the users want. Susan Wigiski, who was the YouTube CEO from 2014 until earlier this year when she stepped down, she won't even say that the algorithm is designed solely to keep you on YouTube to max advertising revenue. She says they want to be on the right side of history. And yet all this stuff is still there. So what's the answer here? Well, I think there's two questions. And I think the first is why aren't people within the company speaking more honestly about a blazingly obvious situation that has been inarguable since the Christchurch shooting? I think many of us have known the issues there before that, but I think after Christchurch in 2019, it was inarguable because that shooter
Starting point is 00:21:19 had a manifesto that was directly related to YouTube and would not have committed that crime without YouTube. And so the social implications of the platform and of these technologies, I think was inarguable after that. However, it is an argument. an ad-based platform that has shareholders. These companies are shackled by their inability to counter their business model. So I think that they tow the party line. And that was what I wanted to show was that they are towing the party line. Recently, there was an article about a meeting with Biden and Harris where the seven big tech companies said, don't worry about AI. Don't worry about the rapidly accelerating dangers that are happening online. We're going to police ourselves. It won't be
Starting point is 00:22:02 legally binding, but we're just offering you that. And our administration, love them as I do, said, great, go with God. And that's because the lobbying power of these companies is massive, and they own both sides of the aisle. And so no one can do anything about them. So I think that's the conundrum. The tech companies are absolutely 100 percent not going to police themselves. We heard in our doc how they view publicly the potential harms of their platform, they deny them outright. The government currently, while talking about crafting legislation around AI and harms from the internet, is not really doing anything tangible, in my opinion, other than paying lip service to a public that is growing more ill at ease. So I don't think there's a lot of short-term
Starting point is 00:22:45 progress to be made. I think the long-term will be eventually younger people will grow up and enter government and they will fight harder for legislation and antitrust regulation and begin to address these issues more seriously. So just jumping through the movie, in 2020, we obviously have COVID. And as journalist, Talia Lavin puts it, this is the perfect storm for radicalizing people. People are sort of trapped in their homes. They're looking for things to do. And then sure enough, you know, that's followed possibly not coincidentally by January 6th. And that's where Lavin quotes Bellingcat with that stat that you mentioned earlier, that YouTube seems to be the single most frequently discussed websites among fascist activists that they study. This is not getting any better,
Starting point is 00:23:31 and if anything, it's getting worse, at least as of 2020, 2021, correct? It's getting worse. It's going to get worse in many ways, some of which are less obvious, which in my view makes them more dangerous. Obviously, we have Trump running, so there's going to be the Trump carnival is returning. You know, we have Bannon and other actors in full effect already cranking up their machinery to make noise. We have a public that I think has been lulled into a sense of false comfort that a lot of these issues have been taken care of and they're not going to fall for them again in the same way. But I also think we live in a culture now that pervasively is suspicious of facts and the news. And I think that's very dangerous. I think that
Starting point is 00:24:13 we live in a culture now where even someone who's left of center may say to you, yeah, but I know, I'm going to research this for myself because I don't trust the newspaper or the government or or whatever. The sort of seeds were planted in the more extreme period that Tali is referring to during COVID and the major noise of that Trump campaign of 2020. But I think the 2024, these platforms are embedded. I think people feel they have a kind of mastery over them, which is not true. And I think that there's AI video and other types of propaganda that's going to be hard to have attribution with, given the way they work. That's going to make it a very dangerous election cycle. And I don't mean to be unduly gloomy or hyperbolic, but people are going to get hurt and possibly killed because of this
Starting point is 00:24:57 type of propaganda. And I think that we should be working a little harder to counteractive. And not just saying to the tech companies, oh, by all means, go police yourself. And we'll just sit over here and not do anything. Yeah. And there was something you said in that answer, which was that, you know, a lot of the public maybe has been sort of lulled or has taken comfort in the idea that, well, we've been through 2016, which was really the original, like, fake news cycle. We've been through 2020, and maybe some of us even think, well, we're immune to it now. We get it. We can recognize it. And others, I'm sure, think, well, certainly the companies themselves, you know, they've got two election cycles worth of experience now. They must have a handle on this. But it really doesn't feel like they do, does it? No, I don't think that anyone has a handle on it. I think that the tech companies have spent lobbying money to keep legislation away from them, keep themselves unencumbered. I think that they are making.
Starting point is 00:25:51 hand over fist profits because of the amount of eyeballs they have and the amount of data that they are in control of. So all of this is accelerating. And I honestly think we'll accelerate for a while. I think we're looking at years of it in front of us. So I think that it's incumbent and there are great journalists out there really doing the frontline work on outing these issues and staying on top of them. The question is, are they going to be heard? Are people going to pay attention to them? And that, I think, is what is a little worrying. And the other thing is, I think that there's a narrative now of this sort of like, oh, there's an algorithm. I don't really understand what algorithms are. I don't understand what AI is. So I'm just going to ignore all of it because it's like black boxy and like
Starting point is 00:26:33 magic beans. Those narratives have been put forward by the tech companies specifically to divert attention and to get people to look away because these are not technological issues. They're purely human issues of business models to a large extent greed and ad-based models that really need to be remedied and told people look at these platforms in that way as being run by people with very specific and human agendas. I don't see any of it getting fixed. By the end, I started thinking, do you think you'll need to make a sequel called the TikTok effect? I don't know. I've thought about this in terms of what other pervasive platforms, but really none of these platforms have anything close to the reach of YouTube, not even by a mile. The daily views of four
Starting point is 00:27:15 and a half billion plus that YouTube has is not matched by any other platform. It doesn't even come close. So I think the thing I'm most concerned about is scale. I think that most of these other platforms will be somewhat fattish. They'll come and go. But I think that we have to have our eyes on those too. I think we have to be critical of TikTok and we have to be critical of meta and whatever Musk's thing is called today. It'll probably be different by the time this airs. Yeah. I mean, it's such a mess. And I think that, yes, I think scrutiny is needed for all of them, but it worries me greatly that there's so little scrutiny on Google. And so I think there has to be greater focus on what is far and away the largest of these
Starting point is 00:27:54 companies. No, absolutely. I'm curious, was there anything you learned while making the film that surprised you or made you go, oh my God, I had no idea? I mean, there were a few things. One was the attachment of YouTube to Google. I think it's really been represented as a separate company, which it really isn't. It's really their front end, and they really do run it.
Starting point is 00:28:12 And I think that's important in terms of the scale of, of Google and its agenda in terms of its growth, which again is not all nefarious by any means, but it is what it is, a giant. And then things that are giant, industrially need scrutiny, right? So that was a bit of a jaw dropper for me, because the more I dug, the more I realized that how much that was the case. And I really scratched my head and wondered why it was so vehemently represented as a separate entity. The other thing is what I've already mentioned, which I really came out of making this film realizing that this whole idea of talking about algorithms is kind of a bait and switch by these companies to get people to go away and leave them
Starting point is 00:28:49 alone. You know, most of the engineers I know can barely explain what an algorithm is to a layman, much less someone who isn't, you know, a tech expert. And it really just shuts everyone down. And I think that that's very dangerous. And I think it's also inaccurate. I don't think at the end of the day, the issue with YouTube is algorithmic at all. I don't really think people are being rabbit hole at all anymore. I think that it would be a pervasive media platform that has that many people looking at it every day where the parasycial connections are as strong as they are, you don't need an algorithm for that to be wreaking havoc. We'll do it all by itself. Yeah, that's incredible. As I was watching the film, I started thinking to myself,
Starting point is 00:29:25 this reminds me a lot of the plot of Fight Club. And then one of the people, it might have been Caleb Kane. I can't remember. Someone in the movie actually says that because I was thinking, you know, and I'll talk about the movie, not the book. In the movie, Brad Pitt starts out, you know, the narrator or Jack, whatever you want to call him. Brad Pitt seems really cool and he's getting you to do interesting things and whatever. And then before you know it, you're blowing up buildings and stuff like that. And I thought, well, that sounds exactly like almost what the algorithm does here is you start off looking at like a moderate kind of thing that seems fun. And it slowly drags you to the extreme.
Starting point is 00:30:02 Yes. I think that's also the intentional journey that you're taken on by a far right or an extremist influencer. That is their intentional and very human on-ramp. You know, you come onto these sites where they present themselves almost, I mean, Stephen Crowder will talk about himself as an entertainer or even a comedian. I think we're beginning to see that, you know, off a platform with what's going on on Fox and some of the anchors there that are sort of using kind of what they view as humor, which is questionable. But to lure you in with a sort of golly gee whiz, you know, we're all friends here through the relationship to their audience that
Starting point is 00:30:36 then becomes more extreme. And I think Crowder's a really good example because, again, that's not algorithm. That Crowder will kind of lead you in with, he's got millions or millions of followers will lead you home with a sort of like, hey, we're all buds. Let's gather around and talk about fun stuff. And the next thing, you know, he's inciting people to civil war. That is very dangerous. Melanie did the same and was thankfully deplatformed. Alex, thank you so much for being here. The movie is the YouTube effect. It's in theaters now. Like I said earlier, it's a fascinating thing to watch and to chart the growth of this company into this absolute behemoth that it is now. And it's also frightening. And I left the movie
Starting point is 00:31:12 kind of thinking that it should be shown in high schools or junior highs across the country. We are doing that. Yeah, we've been in high schools all over the world, and we're taking it to Cambridge University this month for Disinformation Summit and Harvard and Berkeley and many other universities. We're doing summits around the film all over the world. That's absolutely awesome. Alex, thank you so much again for being here, and everyone go out and see this movie. Thanks, Andy. It was great to be here. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday.
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