There Are No Girls on the Internet - DISINFORMED: Immigrant communities are facing a flood of disinformation

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

Meghna Mahadevan is Chief Disinformation Defense Strategist at United We Dream, the country’s largest immigrant youth led organization. She explains how dis and mis information is threatening immigrant communities and how immigrant youth are fighting for a more just digital media landscape.Learn more about United We Dream:Join me on Clubhouse Friday, Feb 26th: https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/PYzarD1z Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call

844-844-I-Hart. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. And nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear.

Listen to Sports Slice on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. If you're on Clubhouse, join me for a virtual happy. hour this Friday, February 26. I'll be hosting a dynamic group of black women technologists, researchers, and digital organizers for a conversation on disinformation and the internet. All are welcome. So grab a Bev and meet us there. More info in the show description. You're listening to Disinformed, a mini series from there are no girls on the internet. I'm Bridget Todd. Let's go back to 2020. The first wave of COVID is forcing people to stay in their homes.

So we're all spending a lot more time sitting in front of our computers. and most of us are miserable. California is literally on fire. Trump is president, still on Twitter, using the platform to whip his supporters into a violent frenzy by peddling conspiracy theories about the election. Waves of racial justice protests

are happening all over the globe. And bad actors are working overtime to exploit these uncertain times and inflame existing tensions between communities of color, like the Latinx and black community. That fall, a viral video showed three black women flipping over a table at an outdoor birthday party. Black Lives Matter

destroys Hispanic Child's birthday party, the caption reads. Only, that's not true. Fact checkers found that it was just a dispute between two neighbors. It had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter or protest. Big pages who shared the video just linked it to Black Lives Matter to further inflamed tensions between the two communities, to drive home the idea that Black folks and the Latinx community shouldn't trust each other. Dis and misinformation prey on people's base emotions. And when it comes to certain identities, disinformers can be very good at exploiting very real traumas or existing fears.

Ahead of the 2020 election, immigrant communities are being flooded by inaccurate information about voting. And now, our country's very real legacy of racism, coupled with a media landscape that allows COVID misinformation to spread, is threatening immigrant communities' access to the vaccine at a time when those same communities are among the most impacted by COVID. Megna Mahadevan is the chief disinformation defense strategist at United v. Dream, the country's largest immigrant youth-led organization. She fights the harmful spread of dis and misinformation in immigrant communities. But before that, she was just a frustrated tech employee in the Bay Area.

I moved out to the Bay, was working at Facebook during 2016 and the 2016 elections, and had a pretty interesting experience working there with the way that the election unfolded and kind of the way that people reacted in tech. It was really concerning to me. I had this whole image and idea of being from Georgia and the South. I thought that the Bay in California would be this super liberal place with really progressive values. And instead what I found was that in response to the elections, people were really drinking the Kool-Aid at Facebook in a way that was super concerning to me. No one was willing to acknowledge the role that Facebook had on the elections, and there were just a lot of performative and surface-level reactions to what had happened.

And I was pretty disturbed by the way that that went down. Megna left Facebook and started working at Google. In 2017, Google engineer James DeMore wrote what was commonly called the Google memo, where he called Google a, quote, ideological echo chamber and blasted the company for putting two much emphasis on diversity in tech. It was pretty alienating. I don't know if I remember the James DeMore memo came out then. Oh, yes. I hadn't thought about that asshole in so long. You just took me back. Like, I forgot about that. I also was on an all-male team of all-male engineers, and I was only female. And I brought it to my manager and was like, I really think we should discuss this. I want to talk about this with the team. And just the rejection that I got in discussing it,

talking about it and acknowledgement of it was so frustrating. And it was just kind of experience after experience. So Megna had a lot of experiences like this. Experiences that followed her from company to company, confirming that working in Silicon Valley just wasn't where she was supposed to be. Like how when she was working at Snapchat, they featured an advertisement game where users were asked if they wanted to punch Chris Brown or slap Rihanna, a survivor of domestic violence.

Snapchat has now removed the ad with this statement. The ad was reviewed and approved in error. We are sorry that this happened. It was almost just my entire time of working in Silicon Valley and Tech. I tried to attribute it to the tech company. I tried to attribute it to different environmental factors, but I really just felt an avalanche of so many different things constantly happening, that I really felt the tech industry was just deeply problematic.

And so I pivoted from there to the Cape War Center. I really focused on diversifying the tech. tech industry and bringing in specifically black folks as well as indigenous Latinx folks and just more people of color, more women into the tech industry. And after working there for about two and a half years, I came into this work earlier this year actually with everything happening with the uprisings and the way that tech continued to handle and react all of these things at such a surface level. I knew I wanted to go deeper in fighting a lot of these things.

systems. And there's a lot of different places in resistance against tech. I've tried and believed in resistance in the tech company. I've believed in tried resistance at the level where you're working directly with them, working at the foundational level and partnering with tech companies. And I am really enjoying this space that I'm in now of being in movement against and resisting against tech companies because I think that there needs to just be a different power shift in the way that all of these actions take place, which is what brought me to a lot of disinformation work. So I'm very passionate about tech company, accountability, tech culture, but at the same time, I'm also very passionate about the power of communities of color and the power of building

with community. And that's what brought me to my work at United Way Dream. So how have you seen disinformation playing out in immigrant communities? Right. So disinformation, to be clear, has been around since the beginning, the age of the internet. And we've experienced it in so many different ways. But with this particular year, something has shifted. With 2020, we're all, many of us are socially isolated. We are on the internet more than ever, using our devices more than ever. And these disinformation campaigns are really coming in to take advantage of a lot of people's

emotional vulnerabilities, their financial vulnerabilities, our unhappiness with the way that society has been upholding us. And particularly within the Latinx and the immigrant community, there is a way that disinformation and misinformation campaigns have preyed on immigrant communities' general fear of political instability, right?

So my family moved to the United States seeking a better life than what we were previously offered. And that's how most immigrant families come to the United States, is just hoping for a better situation for our families, for our children, and et cetera. There's a lot of fear there in being associated or brought back to a previous situation or political instability or corruption. And the U.S. does a really good job of playing up

this facade of being a very stable, almost perfect utopian society, particularly in the immigrant eyes. So ways that this does come out or transpire is these affiliations with socialism and creating false associations with socialism that instill fear in people, trying to create this image that America has been great, will be great, and just needs to continue on a certain trajectory. Particularly with the Latinx community, there's also a lot of work being done by white supremacists

to create a wedge racially with the Latinx community and other communities of color. And the way who this is done is very strategically, almost creating a race hierarchy of affiliating Latinx with more whiteness and kind of trying to create a separation from blackness. It also is a full erasure of the Afro-Latinx identity. So by using race as this wedge issue to divide communities and create the superiority among some Latinx folks, there is really a way to misinform people that by accepting and siding with white supremacy, you are now all. offered the privilege of being white.

When I have dug into different types of disinformation I've seen, especially around the uprisings, I definitely saw, particularly on Facebook, these images of attacks on Latinx businesses or churches and clearly meant to be giving this impression that, oh, this, you know, wave of violence and instability is coming. and the sort of thing that they, the logical next step is like,

so vote for Trump, so be afraid. So, you know, whatever it is that they're trying to get, like, you know, get you to feel or get you to believe. And it's really just so insidious how it taps into these deeply held fears and deeply held emotions. It really, they so expertly exploit it. It really is like, I hate to say this, but I have found myself saying this,

over and over again during the series, like, these disinformers are just really good. You know, it's like they really are effective. They know these things that are going to tap into something that really can, like, trigger you to feel this emotion. Well, the thing is, is we've set up an infrastructure for them to be good, right? Like, we've really made it easy because we almost thirst for the kind of information that they're providing. And I think something really important to acknowledge, because, again, this disinformation

work has been led by, um, by, so many black researchers, by so many female researchers who've been doing this work for a very long time. But this year has provided a very different opportunity, just in the same way that social media and internet algorithms have kind of been snowballing out of control, right? There's a lot of ways that our attention is commodified, a lot of ways that our attention is driven towards these really wild news headlines. And that's been the case for years and years. And of course, there's been many different political situations for the past years. But 2020 is something different, right?

There's a pandemic, the recession, uprisings, the climate change. I mean, there were the few days when, I mean, I've been living in Oakland for the past five years, and the sky was orange. You know, it's a kind of different sensation happening right now where a lot of things are coming to a head. To the point where the news headlines are pretty wild, but they've been wild for the best. five, six years because that's what gets attention. That's what gets engagement with the algorithm. And I really like to frame it as a sort of gaslighting, honestly. My friends and I have this radio show called Dystopia now that we do on a local Oakland station for fun. And something we talk about very often is how confusing it is to live in a society that gaslights you constantly,

that tells you that COVID isn't real, even though you're staying at home and you're isolating. your friends in weeks or months, but then you're being told that this disease or this virus isn't that serious. There's so much gaslighting around just accepting the unknown, right? There are so many things that we just need to be okay with. We don't know what's going to happen. And some of that's just okay. It's okay to not know the answer. And on top of that, a lot of these situations and political situations, climate situations are really, really complex and they're nuanced. And you can't just generalize about them. But what happens is these headlines and these articles and these different types of information, they create an outlet. They create almost this really easy gesture of if I just

accept this information or this theory, then everything makes sense. Then I understand exactly what's happening, why these things are happening, and how they all come together. And so it's almost an escape route from just having to sit with the unknown and sit with the reality of what this year is. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odin Kirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an

an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle age, one erection. Listen to humor me with

Robert Smygel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Human be, I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened.

That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise. Breaking down the plays, the controversy. and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear.

The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaders to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports slice brings you closer to the action

with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slica Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going from the WMBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards.

If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never asked. I've never, understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladecki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world, like, I can do anything. I can, like, I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle

with Emily Abadi on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. And we're back. So if I sound a little harried throughout this conversation, it's because Megna and I were speaking in the fall of 2020, and I was definitely on edge. I can hear it in my voice. In pre-election meetings at work, We were both preparing for various election outcomes, including the potential for violence. I didn't know what would happen at the Capitol on January 6th, but it's clear we felt like something bad was coming. So there's a really funny example. Earlier this week, I was working with a colleague in writing a memo on what we'll do if there's a coup.

And it was funny because we were framing it in the reality of the situation, right? Like, if this happens, we all need to move now. We need you to sign up for these things. And I said to my colleague, like, this kind of sounds like boilerplate email because we've been talking in this tone for so long. But in reality, this email is like a pretty crazy email. If I receive this email, I would be like, wow, where are we at? And at the same time, it just feels like we've been in this state for so long that there's almost no emotional capacity to reckon with what's happening or process what's going on. Absolutely.

I had a very similar moment earlier this week. So as you know, I worked with ultraviolet and we were doing our election, post-election scenario planning. And I realized, I looked at my notebook and I realized the thing I was planning for was like a mass violence, like a mass violent event triggered by the election. And I just had this moment where I was like, what is this? I am in a meeting right now planning for our contingency plan for what will happen if our election triggers some sort of like big, scary thing. And truly, it was a real moment that I could

not wrap my head around. On the one hand, it seems very dystopian that I would be, you know, preparing for this. But on the other hand, it's something that we needed to prepare for. And I just I truly like never thought that I would, the things that we are talking about and preparing for and dealing with, I never in a million years thought I would find myself dealing with them. Yeah, and I think that's also kind of attributed to, again, going back to this gaslighting feeling of the way that we have accepted a normalcy or we're still expecting people to work eight to five when all of these different things are happening around us, it's pretty wild. And I think the way that disinformation also allows a place for people to put blame on

really specific people, really specific parties, instead of understanding the way that all of this is so systemic. It's something that's rooted in the way that we move every single day. You know, we're still attuned to, yes, there's a pandemic and these different things happening, but I still need to be productive. I still need to output all of these things. It's so rooted into all of our behavior. And it's part of, I think, the way that we do consume this information and disinformation and conspiracies as almost a pacifier in these moments. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I find myself, like I was not to get too much, but like I was talking to my therapist

about this. And I was like, you know, maybe we shouldn't be like the fact that we are all continuing to work and like trying to be productive on the backdrop of what's happening to our country, maybe we shouldn't be productive right now, right? Like maybe we should be a little less okay. with, you know, what's happening. Maybe things shouldn't be business as usual. And really kind of having to come to terms with the fact that we are working and living and living our lives in what feels like a hellscape.

Yeah. First of all, never too much talk quite conversationary therapist. Honestly, that's a podcast I would listen to. But, yeah, it's really weird. And then there's just this added element of not being in community with people, which is another thing that's offered by disinformation and particularly with conspiracy theories that really prey on people who are lonely because there's so much isolation happening right now, but there's so much online community around certain conspiracies that it is, again, a place where you can go to talk about what's happening because there's not many outlets. And it's also, again, hard to reckon with political differences with loved ones in these times. And, like, you know, I mean, my friend are talking. And she made this great point of, like, we're just in this moment where we're getting to know everything about everyone we know and love.

And it's almost a little bit too much information. You know, I didn't need to know this extent of where your values fall and like where your lines are drawn. And, you know, it's a lot of exposure to every single political opinion of another person and their values. Now, when we talk about disinformation, we're often talking about technical things like AI and algorithms. But it's important to remember that disinformation is also about relationships. Just listen to anyone who's lost a loved one to an all-encompassing online conspiracy theory like QAnon. It tears apart families and creates deep divisions. Last fall, Megna and United States.

be dream held a healing space for people harmed by its impact. Something that I've really found is that disinformation, it really can impact relationships, you know, finding out that you're someone that you have looked, like your cousin or your aunt, someone that you love and trust and you, you know, you think like this is a smart, thoughtful person and a, like a thoughtful addition to my life and to my community, finding out that they have been really misled by a conspiracy theory or different, disinformation can be jarring. And I think that's something that I love about what you're doing with United Be Dream. You know, you actually held a healing space around disinformation yesterday. Can you tell me about

like why that made sense for your organization to be framing it in that way, like not a webinar or a training, but a healing space? I think the thing with immigrant communities to understand is that there's a lot of cultural difference that happens. And especially being a child of immigrants in the United States, I can definitely attest to feeling like you come from two different worlds. My family immigrated from India. I feel like I have this Indian world at home, and then I also am this other not quite American person, and it's very difficult to merge the two. On top of that, being an immigrant, there's also a lot of value to coming to America. You know, there's a whole narrative with your folks and your family back home that you made it. You know what it took for you. You

know that you beat the odds. You were one of very few people who were able to make it to America. It's a huge accomplishment. So to then come to America and question its political stability, its ability and power to be the life that you have always dreamed for your generations to follow and your children. It's a really hard thing to do to question the infrastructure. Whereas, I mean, even if I look at my own family, right? So my grandmother was married. at age nine and she had 10 children. And my parents come from the villages. They didn't have running water or electricity really until they were in their mid-20s.

And then my sister and I, who live a pretty liberal life in the United States. So the cultural difference is very vast or can be very vast. And what we've seen with a lot of our staff is a lot of confusion and difficulty explaining what's going on with family and getting to realize that there's a lot of political differences in what's happening right now. And it's not necessarily that the values are different, right? As I was saying earlier, a lot of people believe in racial solidarity. They are folks of color. But what happens? And it's actually pretty concerning the way that misinformation campaigns are being run. But they are truly understanding or believing the misinformation in a way

where it is fully indoctrinated into their understanding, or they're so deep in the conspiracy theory, that it's very difficult to pull someone out. And especially with topics that are so close to the heart, so things where we're talking about who we're voting for or for president, to understand that suddenly you're realizing that your parents are Trump supporters is extremely painful. It's extremely emotional to realize,

that your parents are also uplifting and sharing the wrong videos of different contexts of birthday parties that are showing racial conflict or like Black Lives Matter issues and they are picking the wrong side. It's extremely personal. So what we're finding, there's been a lot of different situations I can talk about, but some of our staff have had to fully divorce from their families at this time because when you're doing movement work or you're even trying to be in this space, it's really difficult to reckon with kind of having to explain who you are and your core values.

Because in some way, it's almost trying to explain your vision of this world, and it's scary with your family to feel invalidated with your vision for the world. It really is that serious when people start to reveal the thoughts behind their politics. But the reason we're holding healing space, and we had an amazing time yesterday with our partner of Listening Works, to really talk about the malicious actors behind the disinformation. And I think it's important here to also call out the distinction between disinformation and misinformation in that everyone's really looking for the truth right now.

Like what's actually happening with the government? What's actually happening with the pandemic? And in doing that, a lot of people are spreading misinformation where they're just trying to keep others informed. Then there's actors who have a malicious goal beneath what they're doing. And for most of us, our family and friends don't have a malicious goal, but they have become caught and were targeted by people who are spreading disinformation. And we need to understand how this is really a racialized effort that's preying on some of the biggest vulnerabilities of immigrant communities, of communities of color. And that's where they're really getting into the heads of people who are vulnerable and who do need basic societal things.

And that's what's important for us to find ways to heal as a community, because, yes, we can look at tech companies and tell them that they need to have more accountability. Yes, we can ask journalists to change their headlines. But at the end of the day, are they really going to do it? It'll take time. So it's really up to us as a community to be empowered and to take power in these moments to rebuild and unify our communities. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yarn herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming. music from Spotify and Pandora.

And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com.

Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending. opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise. Breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories,

their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slic Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness,

professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel like. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it.

An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ledecki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face like. up and smile. That means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can, like, I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports.

Let's get right back into it. Disinformers prey on people who are already underrepresented. For instance, because there aren't enough places to get Spanish language news coverage, bad actors can exploit that gap and fill it with harmful and accurate information. Disinformers are really exploiting a group of people who have been traditionally like underserved and underrepresented. You know, I know that one of the reasons why in the Latinx community, why Spanish language disinformation is so insidious, because disinformation are seizing on a, like a news gap,

there aren't that many, there aren't enough, you know, news sources in Spanish. And so they know, okay, well, we can swoop in and fill that gap. Like, this is a community that is currently underserved. We can serve them, but we'll serve them up harmful lies. There's an accountability gap of checking Spanish sources, of checking Spanish articles. And that just really leaves the door open for people to prey on communities of color and Latinx communities in that way and manipulate the power that we all have as communities of color and Latinx communities have to really shape their own agenda.

Yeah, that's really what I see these. I mean, like, if we were to like zoom out on these conversations, I want to build a world where disinformation is not profitable. where, you know, I think that would be the only thing that gets platforms to really act. If we built a world where this was not a profitable thing to do and not a profitable thing to have on your platform, I think that would be the way to actually solve it. I don't see any other way. I think that is, yes, Bridget, you have a nail in the head. There's so many issues with the way that we make money off of disinformation, right?

One, it's just the general social media algorithm because I think at this point, we're already here, right? The disinformation is rampant. People are deeply manipulated. Every single time that we hold a session, whenever I get into the weeds of getting on the ground floor of the way that Florida, Arizona, Texas, all these battleground states, people have been deeply targeted and are getting deeply manipulated in a way where we really need to make a significant effort to pull people out of this information

that has fully entrenched and confused them. But a big part of it is our social media algorithm makes money off of the engagement of articles. And the articles that get the most engagement and the news that gets the most engagement is the news that's disinformation and misinformation in the way that it's framed, the way that it's created.

So we're already at this point in 2020, but these algorithms are learning on their own and the Internet's learning on its own. So we're only going to fall deeper unless we have a serious intervention and unless we teach people how to protect themselves from the vulnerabilities on the Internet.

Well, that's a great segue to my next question. How can folks protect themselves in their communities? So I think part of this is kind of going back to healing, but we need to be understanding of one another. And this is something I'm personally working on, a really fun success story, I think, of healing that I've been working on with my Indian community is me and a bunch of the other children. We all kind of immigrated here together from India.

We have been trying to hold our family accountable. So we have monthly meetings where we bring up different topics and we talk about what's going on. And it's really, really hard. It's hard to sit and listen to someone's opinion no matter what it is. And that's something I think we've only had an increasing intolerance for or decreasing tolerance for with the way that we have these comfortable internet silos where we can live within only people who have our own opinion. But we need to make a call to unity. this country, no matter what the election outcome is, no matter what happens, we are so divided. Our families are so divided. Our communities are so divided. We need to make time and effort to listen

and bring our communities together on the same page and heal. I think that's something I really want to uplift as an effort to push against disinformation and misinformation. And I think that also creates a stronger support system for people who do fall deep into the web, of conspiracy theories and disinformation. Another piece of that is whenever we're seeing things on the internet, before we share them and amplify them, we need to just learn to pause. They're such an emotional experience and even an embodied experience

when we're on the internet, right? Most people, when they're on their phones, are bent over, neck down, pretty disassociated from their physical existence and lost in the internet. We need to learn to reconnect with. our physical selves, even when we're on our devices, and notice if something is making you feel uncomfortable, if it's making you anxious, think twice before you share it, fact check it, think about why might someone have put this article out there? Why is this news being created?

Who made it? What's the agency? What am I trying to do by resharing this? And really thinking through the part that we all play in the chain of information. Oh my God, I have to tell you, But right before we got on this call, I had that moment myself, right? So I train on disinformation. I give people that same advice, right? Don't amplify it. If you think something is fake, if you think something is disinformation, misinformation, take a beat.

Don't amplify it. I saw a video of TI, the rapper from Atlanta. Oh, my gosh, we love. We stand not really. So I saw this video of the rapper TI on a pretty big hip-hop and culture website. And in it, he says that he can't get COVID because he drinks hot tea. Now, we know that is completely inaccurate and ridiculous. Hot beverages like tea do not cure COVID.

And when I saw this video, you know, my heart was racing. I was thinking about all the different black people who have died of COVID, the harm that COVID has done to our communities in particular, and all the different black people who probably think of TI as a leader in our communities, as a voice of someone that they look up to or should listen to. And I got more and more angry. my first instinct was to retweet it and call him out and call the video out and force him to be accountable for it. But then I was like, do I really want more people seeing this video?

Do I really want more people seeing this completely inaccurate, dangerous information? So I had to go through that process of kind of taking a minute, taking your breath, sitting with my emotions and really just taking a step back. But in that moment, it was a real moment of emotional and cognitive surge. And that's what they're so good at because, What they're looking for is that engagement. And even if you like it, if you look at it for a long time, all these media companies are tracking that, how long you're looking at it, how many times you're watching the video, and that's what brings it engagement.

And I think actually what comes to mind when you share that story is the amazing guide that you made at Ultraviolet when Kamala Harris was selected as a vice presidential candidate. And I thought that was really powerful. So this guide about what are the tropes that? happen most commonly in the way that we talk about female political candidates and black female political candidates and interracial immigrant female candidates. So I think the way that you frame that of here are things not to uplift. Don't talk too much about the way that she's dressed or her makeup or her facial expressions or her family role. And that was super helpful to me.

And I wish we even thought through that on a broader level in general about social media, the internet, and the way that we engage with any talking points, to really decolonize and understand the way that we are uplifting racism by talking so much about what's Little Wayne doing, what T.I. doing, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, we were on a panel together, you and I, where you made this great point that disinformation, it keeps us from seeing who we really are, right? It keeps us from seeing each other fully. And I think, you know, it's important to have those conversations, when we talk about disinformation.

But I would love to have that conversation more broadly. What are the things that keep us from being able to fully see each other for who we really are? And, you know, it's like we have these filters on that when you see a woman like Harris, it's like, oh, family role, oh, complexion, oh, speak, like the way that she speaks, all of these little things that keep us from really seeing each other and engaging with each other for who we really are and like seeing each other fully. Yeah, what a beautiful question to ask, Bridget. You know, I was actually reading again last night.

I think Asada Shakur is that you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tool. You know what I'm talking about? Yes, a classic. I was like, I need something uplifting. And I think it's really interesting in these times. So, first of all, yeah, I want to credit that these are ideas that came from her. But I think it's a really great question in this moment where we are starting. to finally begin to scratch the surface of the Black Lives Matter movement and talking about race

in a more nuanced way, talking about intersectionality. For the first time, I mean, I was pretty shocked to hear this, that I think it was a Biden that said, you know, black trans women are dying. And I thought that was really powerful. One, it was very late in the game to start realizing it. But at the same time, we are finally beginning to scratch the surface of intersectional identities and racial identities. And at the same time,

the way that people want to talk about it is still by generalizing to the black experience, to the trans experience, to very particular things, and still try to categorize people into boxes. And I think in the same way, the reason that disinformation

offers so much to people is because we don't want to really get nuanced. And at the end of the day, I'm talking all these things about unifying and we need to unify, but at the same time, part of unifying is also celebrating our differences. We need to understand and acknowledge the differences that we have and really figure out ways

to define and understand the complexity of those experiences and uplift them because that's really where our creativity lies and that's where our power lies and that's why we're stronger together is because we're different. And I think it takes a lot of work. It's really easy to be lazy. and I mean, I think that there's a lot of different narratives around race that can be lazy, that can be kind of follow up into like a quick tweet, but it really shouldn't be that short or pithy of a statement.

It is very nuanced. And the more comfortable we get with the nuance, with the nuance, with the unknown, with patience, I think that's what it'll take for us to really start to see each other and uplift one another. If you enjoyed this podcast, please help us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi. We'd love to hear from you at hello at tangoty.com. Disinformed was brought to you by There Are No Girls on the Internet.

It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends.

Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.

get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions, about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world.

Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of I Heart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened.

That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, in every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headlines. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to SportsSlic on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

And for more, follow Timbo Slical Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on. A Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman. Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you must. know. Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.