The Dispatch Podcast - Narrative Laundering

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

How do journalists and tech platforms determine what information is verifiable online? How can news consumers determine which media outlets to trust when the line between partisan bias and disinformation becomes hazier and hazier? On today’s episode, David and Sarah are joined by Renée DiResta—a technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and a writer at Wired and the Atlantic—for a conversation about disinformation online. “Anybody with a laptop can make themselves look like a media organization, can use a variety of social media marketing techniques to grow an audience, and then can push out whatever they want to say to that audience,” DiResta warns. Where do we go from here? Tune in to learn about journalistic ethics surrounding the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story and what to expect from disinformation actors this election cycle. Show Notes: -“Emails reveal how Hunter Biden tried to cash in big on behalf of family with Chinese firm” by Emma Jo-Morris Gabriel Fonrouge in the New York Post, “The Conspiracies Are Coming From Inside the House” by Renée DiResta Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another special Friday dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, and we've got David French subbing in for Steve Hayes as my partner today. This podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. Visit The Dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcasts. Very excited. We're joined today by Renee DeResta. She is the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy. And for the study of abuse in current information technologies. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social networks and assist policymakers in devising responses to the problem. Who better to talk to this week than Renee DeResta? She also writes plenty in the Atlantic and Wired. You can find her stuff there. Let's dive right in.

Joining us now, Renee DeResta, we are thrilled to have you given this week. I just want to start off right away with how you think the tech companies handled the Hunter Biden story as an expert in disinformation. Yeah, I mean, it's a really, really challenging case. And this shows us that even with. policies laid down so much of the implementation, the actual execution of the policy and also how the policy is communicated are, you know, critical areas that, you know, could stand to be improved as we saw yesterday, but into why. But also how politicized the implementation of the policy is.

So when there is a scenario for which there is a policy, the response by, you know, the particular partisan side that feels itself, you know, to have been weakened in some way or impacted, negatively impacted by the policy, it becomes a sort of second order story. Tell us what happened yesterday. So there was a story that the New York Post broke in which a individual obtained a laptop through sort of spurious circumstances and, you know, there were several kind of areas related to the story itself that made it sound sketchy, made it sound like the provenance of the information may not have been what the post, you know, what the post reported. And so the challenge there for the tech companies, everybody is concerned

about a hack and leak. Everybody is concerned about a redux of Goethefer 2 and the DNC hacks in which not a sufficient amount of attention was paid necessarily to the provenance of the information, how it came out. One of the things that we've seen with the GRU, with Russian military intelligence in its hack and league operations, is it often includes either forged documents or manipulated documents kind of inside the body of a real hack, right? So there's a real need to verify that information to make sure that what has been put out is authenticated in some way. And it wasn't clear from the story that any of that had been done. And so what the platforms did was they had come up with these policies that said that in a case of a hack and leak or dumped

materials, they didn't want their platforms to be used to achieve the kind of instantaneous virality in which false or manipulated or misleading documents go viral or to have a situation where dumping things on Twitter is in any way incentivized because that leads to other problems with doxing and, you know, a range of other kind of issues. So what they created were policies that said, okay, if this happens, we're going to throttle it. We're going to have our fact checkers and authenticators, you know, people who can look at the story and try to get to the bottom of what's happened before it, you know, to kind of, you know, add some friction to the virality cycle.

So that's the ideal policy, I think, where what they're basically saying is this is an important story, and rather than having the wild falsehood or, you know, misleading documents go viral, let's take a second. and try to investigate what's happening here and then, you know, decide what comes next. David, why don't we get you in? Yeah. So as somebody who's been,

I spent most of my career as a lawyer and it kind of relatively new to the world of analysis and journalism. And but I already, I found out almost as soon as I jumped ship from the legal world that you become a rumor magnet when you're in journalism, that people are always peddling to you, salacious, unverified allegations. And in this case, you know, and, you know, my response has always been,

well, what's the evidence? What's the evidence? And so I put on your hat, put on it, let's imagine for a minute that the New York Post gets this hard drive and coming to, from the sources, the sort of nefarious sources, it's from a computer repair shop in Delaware through Rudy Giuliani's lawyer through Rudy to the New York Post. And they call you and they say, what should we do now? What would be the best practices if you obtain what purports to be a hard drive possessed or owned by an important political figure? I know 100 by.

Biden's not running, but he's got information, certainly relevant to American politics. What would be best practices? What should the New York Post do in that circumstance? Well, I'm not a journalist either. So the kind of process of journalistic... Well, how about this? If they said to you, not what should we do as journalists, how could we authenticate this? We don't want to be a vehicle for Russian misinformation. How can we authenticate this as valid? What should we be looking for to determine whether or not this is part of a disinformation campaign? I think in that case, it's working with forensic researchers, working with cybersecurity experts and people who have gone through these troves of documents

previously, reaching out to the relevant government agencies potentially as well who are examining these things. I think it's also taking that critical view and saying this is an area where people have actually been expecting to see a leak specifically related to Burisma. That's one of the things that's so interesting about this is that a few months back there was a story that broke saying that the Russians had hacked Burisma. I think that even in that particular story, the attribution was a little hazy. Nobody knew exactly to what extent even that was an accurate kind of reporting of what had happened. But to then have this figure where, you know, there had been kind of almost like a telegraphing that this would be the type of narrative that

would come out, that this would be the type of documents that would be released, that this would be the time frame in which those documents are released, should have been a pretty significant red flag for anybody looking at that material to think about it in that context and then to go through all of the relevant proper forensic authentication procedures with relevant outside experts who, you know, where that's their, that's their business. What do we do as news consumers to determine for ourselves? You know, if we can't count on the platforms and we can't count on the news organizations necessarily, as consumers, the difference between bias news, fake news, and disinformation

seem to be getting hazier and hazier. And one of the pieces you wrote even said that the disinformation of the future won't even need human effort. It can be done by artificial intelligence. This is not good. Well, there's a, I mean, there's a lot of real challenges, right? So I think it's important to, you know, if you take a step back and look in historically, there's always been disinformation. There's always been misinformation, right, inadvertent mistakes

where wrong information is published. There's always been just human error in how stories evolve, particularly today where the speed of, you know, the news cycle, I haven't been on Twitter since this morning, and I feel like I'm unprepared to even comment on this because I'm sure 60 different things have happened in those two hours. But the real challenges is actually the speed, I think, at which this happens now, and that's one of the key challenges for individuals. We've developed an expectation that when we open our social media platforms, you know, Twitter in particular, if there's a breaking new situation, we'll have reputable information. You know, new information will have been made public and we can get that information on Twitter.

And the challenge there is that these stories as they break, you know, any journalist knows that a lot of, you know, there's sort of a fog there, particularly if there's a significant story or something that is breaking. And so we're not going to get the most reputable information instantaneously, like news, you know, news journalism, investigations in particular process that takes time. And so we're looking for the kind of high quality, you know, verified information. of the past, but we're expecting it to come to us in the timeline of today. And that, I think, is a thing where we do need sort of a social shift in our understanding that things that are going viral are often the most sensational things. The velocity at which they go viral means that there potentially has not been the kind of sophisticated analysis or, you know, fact verification that might have happened in a slower time frame. So it's that velocity and virality that I think are some of the real challenges here. And then I would say in combination with the fact that anyone can create content and anyone can

disseminate it. And so that democratization piece in that process of creation and dissemination also means that anyone with an agenda and anyone with a sufficient number of people who can support that agenda, have the ability to make a story go viral. And what that means is that it's really democratized access to running disinformation campaigns. So whereas previously, in historical periods, there was a, there was almost an infrastructure that was needed. You needed your content creator. You needed your plants at front media organizations. You needed to own front media organizations. There was a process by which you had to amass an audience and launder a narrative through to make it reach the public, whereas now that has really been flattened. Anybody with a

laptop can make themselves look like a media organization, can use a variety of social media marketing techniques to grow an audience, and then can push out whatever they want to say to that audience. So we've really kind of rendered anyone able to carry out the kind of campaigns that used to be a little bit more in the purview of the extraordinarily well-resourced. So when we're looking at disinformation campaigns, I mean, I think that, you know, most people are familiar with sort of purely partisan fake news that you will see generated and spread and go viral on places like, you know, on virtually every social media platform. And we're familiar with the social media platforms kind of campaign to get rid of outright misinformation.

in specific areas, but let's delve a little bit into Russian, for example, foreign interference. If you have a, if you have an, could you talk a bit about what is the intent behind, say, a Russian interference? What is the strategic intent? What is the intent behind a Russian interference program? Is it just purely to sow chaos to sort of just turn ourselves against each other? Is it that blunt of an instrument or is it more of a scalpel? whole than we might realize. It's very interesting. So to stay focused on Russia in particular, what we see is a remarkable commitment to a long

game, right? And this is something that very, very few other actors that we've seen, you know, my team looks at disinformation campaigns by, you know, any nation state you can imagine at this point. And one thing that Russia does is they lay the groundwork early. They build relationships with their own. audiences. So they're not just running social media marketing campaigns. It's not just a bunch of memes, which is how it's often described. They're using different tactics to reach different

targets. And so there are the narrative laundering, that sort of story planting, you know, run a fake narrative up the chain. Operation Denver, the story that the CIA created AIDS is kind of the canonical example that everybody's heard. So the GRU, military intelligence, is still running that strategy updated for the age of the internet. Then there is the memetic propaganda, you know, the memes, the, you know, everybody's seen Hillary fighting Jesus, you know, that kind of stuff. And that's, it's funny and it's very, very easy to disparage because it's memes, but what they're doing is that allows them to go social first, right, to reach ordinary people by pretending to be ordinary people. So while narrative laundering is targeting the media and trying to work a

longer-term story, which is really aligned to achieving a particular geopolitical goal, right? They really want to shape the way the world thinks of, you know, for example, U.S. policy versus Russian policy in Syria. For the social stuff, that's where you see much more of this, like, exploit fault lines in American society. So by creating these fake media properties like Black Matters, for example, in 2016, they created a community that was really rooted fundamentally in pride in being a Black American and in frustration at police brutality.

Again, two very, very real sentiments, to very justifiable and understandable, you know, pride in who you are and frustration in how, you know, how you're treated. And they took that same model that sort of pride and frustration. and they made micro communities for a whole range of segments of American society. So they did one for Confederate, supporters of the Confederacy, the Southern Heritage folks as well. And what they did was they entrenched people in those identities. And then very subtly, you see them begin to point out how other groups are different. So it's never done as explicitly, you know, post just saying we should hate X or we should not like X.

it's arguing about sort of the who is America for is the kind of one of the dominant themes and here is why it should be for us and here's how those other people are taking resources away from us. And once they have those communities established, then you see them begin to nudge to use that influence, that goodwill that they've built up by establishing this trust with their audience. That's when you see them begin to nudge into things like voter suppression. or vote for Trump, right? So we saw them use the, the goodwill they'd built up with the right-leaning communities in the Republican primary to denigrate Ted Cruz. So they had a page that was for tea-partiers. And, you know, Ted Cruz was the darling of the tea party, but they still are in there. And you see them very subtly saying, hey, you know, I kind of feel like Ted was the old and Trump is the new. And I mean, you know, I kind of feel like Ted's actually a rhino now. And maybe

we should be going for this new guy. So there is this shift, right, where, you know, once you have established that trust, once you've presented yourself as a member of that group, that's where you do see the nudge come into play. So just saying social division is an oversimplification, social division is, you know, kind of an overarching theme. It's very effective to have this chaos. But there is some element of persuasion. And more importantly, there's an element of this agents of influence model where you also see once they have that trust, once they're in those communities, they galvanize people to do things in the real world as well, whether that's turned out for a protest or write for one of their fake publications. So that same model of

infiltration has also been ported to the internet. Can you talk a little bit about how what you just described and the goals of the Russian intelligence agencies are different than how China is supposedly supporting Joe Biden, for instance. We had that report out of the intelligence communities that the Russians would like Donald Trump to win and that the China state government would like Joe Biden to win. But everyone on both sides was quick to point out,

they're using very different tactics. They are using very different tactics. So we were not, you know, we haven't seen the same information that the IC has on that claim about China supporting Biden. But what we do see, Chinese influence operations, there's a lot of similarity between what China puts out and it's extremely overt state media, right? So what you see from CGTN, you know, the narratives about telling China's story, right? telling China's story well, ways in which presenting a particular picture of China is so core

to the way that they work their influence operations. You really don't see this extreme outward focused, long game manipulation type tactics like you see from Russia. Instead, what you see is social media, the influencers, and then the sort of secret bots, which are mostly garbage, to be perfectly honest. Their accounts are just not very sophisticated. They're oftentimes created, you know, a couple months before they need to be used or they're purchased or, you know, taken over from some either black market entity or, you know, compromised accounts. But they, they weren't even clearing out the history, actually. So you can see that these were accounts that had been, you know, UK pop fan group account gets compromised and begins to talk about

Hong Kong, right? So there's a just, it's, it's not, as, it's not as well executed. I mean, so much so that actually when we, when we saw the first proper attribution to Beijing back in, I think it was August of 2019, a lot of us who'd been waiting to see, you know, when this was happening, everybody was expecting it to happen, really thought that maybe it was almost like a deflection, like here's these crap accounts while the real ones are off doing something else, you know? Yeah. Because they were so bad. But I think that what you see from China is much more focused on presenting a positive picture of China. The conversations that you see the Chinese bots and sock puppets, troll accounts having,

is really related to areas that China feels it needs to create a particular perception of China's behavior. So the Hong Kong protests with fake Hong Kongers talking about how great China is. But ultimately it comes back down to telling China's story. You know, it's funny you mentioned that Russian pattern if you start something that seems facially reasonable and then you tweak and tweak and tweak until I actually, I have to confess, I fell for a Russian troll account

shortly after 2016, in the sense fell for it, in the sense of I retweeted it. And it was called Tennessee GOP. Ah, TGOP. Yeah. Oh, so you know it. Oh, yeah. And, yeah.

And it said something kind of anodyne and reasonable, and I just thoughtlessly retweeted it. I mean, I never would have occurred to me that 10 GOP would have been a Russian account. And immediately, I got some DMs from folks that follow me who are, you know, highly clued in. And they said, that's Russian. What? you know and what it what it was interesting to me is it taught me a little bit about their sophistication because Tennessee is not a internationally famous place it's not a it's not a place that if you're thinking I'm going to penetrate the United States of America how do I

get to those Tennessee Republicans and it but it taught me that there's a is a lot of intention here. There's a lot of thought here. And it was quite frankly, sobering. I think you're absolutely right. There is a remarkable understanding of American society, American culture, very, very, you know, subcultures. So I did the, I did, I led one of the research teams for the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the data that the social platforms turned over. And so I had all, you know, sort of 400 gigs worth of this stuff. And and I actually went through the memes, you know, one at a time, a couple hundred thousand of them. But I felt, you know, we can do a lot of technical analysis. We can extract, you know,

what the images are and so on and so forth. But I wanted to look at them. And so I would just sit there and I just arrow through. And some of them were very funny, which I think, you know, people see the ones that have been made public. There's also a lot that have not been made public because they use pictures of real people. But some of them were very funny. Some of them were very kind of in jokes. They're speaking to the community. They had an understanding, you know, among the conservative pages, for example, there was one called being patriotic. And that had a lot of Ronald Reagan, kind of, you know, lots of flags, lots of, you know, waving grain and, you know, the beauty of America and so on and so forth. Very much more,

trying to appeal to kind of an older conservative audience. And then they had an Instagram page called Angry Eagle. And that account was basically just a lot of times they were grabbing Turning Point USA memes slapping their own logo on top of them. And that's where you saw the like, you know, the more kind of like edge lord type stuff, right? The more, you know, words I'm probably not allowed to say. But it just really kind of got down into the, you know, the vernacular. And it was, it was really something to see like their understanding the sophistication and you know not all conservatives are the same

not all conservatives of a particular age are going to be receptive you know want to see the same content within the black community they had about 33 I think different Facebook pages and they were segmenting according to you know here's a page for black women talking about beauty

and then all of a sudden voter suppression here's a page for families with incarcerated family members here's a black liberation theology versus black Baptist page right there were just so many different segments of American society that were reflected in each of these different pages and accounts I mean I even felt like me as an American who has you know born here I am extremely online you know I follow tons and tons of different types of people and there were things where I would have to go Google to try to figure out you know okay here's this claim that's being

made they you know I think Mozart was black was one of the memes that they were sort of pushing out and I was like well that's interesting now I've never heard that is this true I'm going to have to go Google for that is this seems to be a thing that speaks to the community that they're targeting it at that there's a whole lot of likes on this thing is this a prevailing belief among among the particular targeted community and I just felt like I was seeing all of these facets of American society that normally, I think unless you're part of that community, you're not seeing. And it was remarkable to me that they had actually zeroed in to that extent and a little bit disconcerting. Let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsor today,

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That's gabby.com slash dispatch. Gabby.com slash dispatch. You wrote this fantastic piece in March of this year called The Conspiracies are Coming from Inside the House for the Atlantic. And, you know, the thesis was in 2016, we were so concerned, post-2016, so concerned about Russian interference. And fast forward to 2020, and a lot of these conspiracy theories and division are coming from real people, real influencers,

there's occasionally blue check marks, right? Like, this is not a foreign disinformation campaign. Is there a sense among the Russians that their work here is done, that we're now just doing it to ourselves? Or is there a real difference you're seeing between the homegrown conspiracy theorists and foreign disinformation campaigns? Yeah, I think that's a great question.

I don't think that they think their work is done. No, I mean, we're still seeing a count. There was this piece data operation and then a conservative counterpart where they were still trying to make fake content and share it and hire real journalists to byline their new fake properties. But a lot of that's very small, right? I think they did take a pretty significant hit when a lot of their old infrastructure and accounts kind of were taken down. But per your point, a lot of what we're seeing is domestic. And so there are these little Russian operations, but they're not having an impact. They're just, you know, very, very tiny. What is having an impact now, though, and what is very, very, I think, extremely frightening, actually,

is that a lot of the narratives that we saw Russian trolls pushing in 2016, the election is compromised, the voting machines are rigged, the election is going to be stolen from Donald Trump, the, you know, these kind of wild claims, the oathkeepers need to show up to the polling places. will you join them and defend the vote, right? These were all narratives that they were pushing the two weeks before Election Day in 2016. It was very small then. That wasn't a thing that was, you know, that many Americans felt, right? We all still went into the election in 2016, as, you know, vitriolic as the campaign might have been.

Nobody was out there thinking that the questioning the legitimacy of the process itself. And now, now that is every. The delegitimization is coming from prominent blue check influencers, right? We have stories of, you know, people going on Tucker Carlson talking about how there's a color revolution happening here. We have prominent blue check influencers, you know, tweeting dire warnings about some random ballot in a garbage somewhere before figuring out what the actual story behind that really is.

It's not limited to conservatives either. You know, the article in the Atlantic was me writing about what happened. during the night of the Iowa caucus, right, the Twitter conversation immediately devolving into somebody somewhere, you know, rigged the app to, you know, to steal Bernie's victory on caucus night, right? You know, through six degrees of separation, Pete Buttigieg's team was connected to Robbie Mook, who was, you know, theoretically checking the cybersecurity, you know, kind of like doing a security check on the app, ergo the Hillary Cabal was stealing it from Bernie, right?

So there are these wild, outrageous accusations that are framed, you know, by the hyperpartisans, they're just framed a statements of fact. But then you see people who should know better, like journalists, who come in and retweet that stuff with a kind of some people are saying or, you know, just asking questions, is it possible that, you know? And so then these folks who have remarkable followings, trusted followings,

and they've been kind of given the seal of approval of, you know, authoritative figures by the blue check go on and perpetuate it themselves. So in that particular case, the reach of those claims, even if there are some Russian trolls in there hitting, you know, hitting a retweet button and, you know, jumping for joy at the chaos, ultimately, it's our own influencers that have now become an integral part of pushing this stuff out because we're in an environment of such low trust and in so many people feeling that they have to weigh in on these breaking, emerging kind of conspiratorial accusations as they happen, as opposed to stepping back from the keyboard and waiting for the facts to come

out. Now, you know, going back to your earlier answer, it was really fascinating to me. Again, I just keep being fascinated by the extent to which there seems to be this granular knowledge on the part of, we're bouncing back and forth between domestic and foreign here on the part of these Russian influence operations. Now, it strikes me as extremely difficult for a an intelligence operation to gain that level of granular knowledge without domestic assistance. I mean, you were saying you're extremely online and there are things that you don't know. Do we have evidence that this is really sort of, is this level of granular knowledge just gained by external study of the United States of America? Is there evidence? Is there any indication

that there is domestic assistance? It's really fascinating to see that level. level of knowledge being implied into an attempt to influence our own political system. Yeah, and I think that perception in some ways led to a lot of the research that I was doing being interpreted by folks, kind of tying it into the collusion narrative, right? The collusion stories. And that was frustrating for me, honestly, because I felt like I was telling a story of interference rooted in, you know, 400 gigs of data. right right and it was somehow like you know mishmashed into this like rushagate hoaxer you know like no

this really happened whatever is going on with the muller investigation whatever is going on over there with how much the campaign knew the undeniable truth is that this did happen and here's what it looked like and here's what we can learn from it and i felt like i was you know fighting this like geeky almost you know i wasn't an academic at the time but like kind of geeky um researcher point of view, like, you know, these two things can be true. There can be absolutely no collusion and this still happened. But one of the things that we were trying to understand was we looked very closely at the ad targeting, right? Because at the time the Cambridge Analytica story was also unfolding. And we, those of us who, you know, we had visibility into the targeting data

and what they were using. And they actually weren't using very sophisticated targeting. And that was really remarkable to me. So there was some geographical stuff that was linked to things like the, you know, if there was an incident of officer involved violence and there were protests related to that, you would see them, they would actually add these cities onto their targeting list. So it started with, you know, Ferguson and places where there were sort of early atrocities. And then gradually, as there were new cases that would emerge, they would just add that city onto the targeting data so that whenever there was a new incident, they would promote the story to all of the old communities as well. So there was some sophistication in terms of that tactic.

But they weren't using what are called lookalike audiences. They weren't using anything that indicated that they had access to, you know, past voting records or campaign type targeting materials. So one thing that we were seeing, though, and that I was kind of curious about is On Facebook, this was before some of the reforms were made to how Facebook's ad targeting tool worked, you could really get in there and find granular interest based. And they had, gosh, I'm forgetting the exact words, but it was, you know, like, they had a sort of, I think they called it a behavior almost. It was like interest in African American content. It was a little bit of a weird wording. And so you could actually target people who were interested. interested in Malcolm X, people who were interested in Martin Luther King, like they had these historical figures as interests, and so you could target particular types of content to people who had indicated an interest in certain specific historical figures. That kind of thing I think you can get through research. The other thing they did is they did send a team here to do a kind

of, you know, tour, a little tour of the U.S. It was a road trip, I think, was how it was reported out by Russian press, where they actually kind of went around, spent a bunch of time in Texas, you know, excuse me, traveled the country and tried to, you know, take in America and all of its, you know, interesting cultural quirk. So they did actually send people here. The other thing is people put out a lot of information about themselves on the internet, both individual, but also in terms of communities. And I think if you were to go and join a Facebook group in which people are already self-declaring who they are, you know, what interests they have, how they identify. Within a couple weeks of kind of consuming that content, reading it, getting a sense

of what's happening, you know, what getting a sense also at that point of like, what's getting a lot of clicks, what's getting a lot of shares, you do see that informing not only Russian intelligence, but we've seen like, you know, spammers in Macedonia and elsewhere who also managed to kind of pick out what narrative seemed to work based on participation in groups where they just kind of learn as it goes by. Renee, what will we say we missed on November 4th? What will we look back and say that we didn't concentrate enough on, we didn't know enough about, we didn't focus on, and we'll regret later?

You want the unknown unknowns? Yeah, yeah. Um, I mean, I, uh, I feel like if I knew the answer, I mean, if I, just by verge of answering that, you know, they're no longer on known unknowns. But, um, you know, I have absolutely no doubt that there will be some sort of surprise. I'm, I am consistently amazed at the ingenuity of people who want to manipulate systems, right? Um, not so much in the fact that they exist, like that I'm pretty jaded on. But in the incredible unique ways in which new product and feature fronts were used, we spend a lot of time on what's called like adversarial thinking, right? Exactly this. You know, there's a lot of different groups are doing these kind of red teaming scenario planning, you know, war game type exercises related to the election.

And that really runs the gamut, a lot of just political folks doing that. we think about it in the context of how is the technical front going to be manipulated or misused on those nights? And so I see this as this is a communication infrastructure and it operates as a system. Every single one of these platforms has some sort of different affordance, right? If you want to post a video, you go to YouTube. If you want to do something live and attract a ton of attention for demographic X, maybe you go to Facebook. Maybe you go to Facebook. Maybe you to TikTok. There's different ways to use the ecosystem as a whole to reach the people you want to reach. We are constantly seeing new and exciting ways in which things like live video are

misused and manipulated. During the Floyd protests, there was a Pakistani spam ring. Wall Street Journal reporter actually sent us a tip and asked us to look into it, and we spent about a day actually doing the investigation in which this group of enterprising economically motivated folks overseas decided to use gaming technology, live streaming technology to pretend to be streaming live from the Floyd protests. And they just ran this sort of like 24-7 stream in which they were pushing stolen video from activists who had actually been there. But pushing it out as like things that were happening right now. And they expanded from originally taking actual protest footage that had at least happened, you know, that day or within the week to going and grabbing

incidents of officers arresting people in, you know, in violent or physically active ways, right? And so I remember this. Yeah. Yeah. So all of a sudden you had a domestic violence arrest being, you know, in which the guy is on the front lawn with, you know, somebody kind of, um, uh, mealing on his back to cuff him, that arrest all of a sudden becomes recast as this is a thing that is happening right now to kind of feed into the outrage. But really what they wanted was just the clicks. They just wanted people to like and follow their page, right? Because if you can amass that audience, you can theoretically potentially monetize it later, right? And so this, or you can sell your page to somebody who does want to monetize it later, even though that's a violation of terms of service,

it does happen. So these are the sorts of things where, you know, using gaming tech to fake out Facebook's live video streaming tool to dominate the hashtag justice for Floyd, you know, the sort of thing where it wasn't really on the radar. You know, I think we thought more, we didn't realize the extent to which live made that possible, meaning, you know, we thought at least lives would be live. So this was a new new and exciting way to to use technology for for evil

and a quick break to hear from our sponsor the Bradley Foundation Americans are navigating through several unanticipated crises this year We the People is a new Bradley speaker series that offers insights and ideas on the current challenges we face from some of the remarkable organizations

the Bradley Foundation supports visit BradleyFDN dot org slash Liberty to watch their most recent video episode on the Electoral College featuring Trent England. England is the founder and executive director of Save Our States, a group dedicated to educating Americans about the Electoral College and defending it from the national popular vote campaign. In this episode, he explains the history of the electoral college, how it works, and what happens if the rules change. The discussion is an insightful

analysis of the many merits to the way the president is elected. That's Bradley with an L-E-Y at the end, F-D-N.org slash Liberty to watch the video. New episodes will debut weekly, so come back often and subscribe to their YouTube channel to be notified whenever a new one is posted. Well, Renee, I just want to thank you so much for joining us for this pod. This has been really informative and so important, you know, two and a half weeks out from Election Day,

but I do have a really important final question for you. Okay. earlier this month, you stated that your six-year-old was listening to a kid's book on the Bermuda Triangle and watching unexplained mystery series for first graders, including one on Bigfoot. I am curious how the child of a disinformation expert approaches such things as unexplained mystery shows and which, if any, have been most persuasive? He really is. We go camping a lot. It's like our thing to do as a family. We just kind of get in the van and go. And he does occasionally, as we're walking around the woods, ask me like, are you sure there's no big foot?

That's definitely been the one that for some reason he's latched onto and things is plausible. But it was, you know, I was really proud. I was, you know, we're homeschooling. Of course, we've got three kids, the oldest is the six-year-old. So the other two were more trying to just keep the chaos to a manageable level. But with him, he has to actually learn something. And so I was sitting next to him and he started laughing because, you know, the Bermuda Triangle person was going on about in this book, this audiobook, you know, some people say that spirits are involved. Some people say it's a portal to another universe. And he started laughing and he said, maybe the, maybe the boat captains just can't Dale very well. And I thought, like, yes.

Proud mother. Very proud mother. So hope for at least a couple generations, you know, hence. He'll be able to vote in, you know, 12 years. David, did your kids have any special disinformation activities they enjoyed stories? I think my oldest two kids eventually at some point became convinced that some of their Lego minifigures were alive and had personalities. But no, no, the thing that I was convinced about as a kid was UFOs. And you're not now?

Well, I suddenly have done almost a 180, maybe a 179. But yeah, I would lay awake at night reading these comic books about real-life UFO sightings. And it would literally keep me up. I was so terrified of UFOs. But, yeah, I'm almost back where we started. I'm really rooting for the Loch Ness monster. I really want to believe that one dinosaur made it. That would be so amazing.

That'd be unbelievable. But hope is fading, Sarah. Hope is fading. Renee, what's your pet one? I was always interested in the past live stuff. So not so much, you know, physical, external thing, but these stories of, you know, people in India who seem to remember having children in another village and then they go there and the children really exist and stuff

like that. And so, yeah, so that was sort of my rabbit hole. I like it. Well, thank you listeners for joining us. We hope that this has been informative on disinformation that can affect our country, our campaigns, our elections, but that you still have some joy in your own personal little disinformation loves like mine for Nessie. We will see you again next week. I'm going to be able to be.