welcome. the national press club, the place news happens. i'm emily wilkins, a congressional reporter with bloomberg government. i am currently the treasurer of the national club. i'm so, so excited for this panel tonight. thank you so much for joining us

tonight. book event featuring joan donovan who is the research director for the harvard kennedy school shore science center and one of the foremost experts on media and disinformation emily dreyfuss. she's a journalist who covers the intersection of society and technology for publications such as wired the atlantic and the new york times, among others, and the co-lead of, the harvard short scene center's newsletter summit. and also brian fried friedberg, cool. close enough. who? all right. oh, shoot. now the sword is going me up. who's an f, f f? no golfer at demographer. yeah, i've got this guy's harvard kennedy school researching fringe political communities online and has published definitive and on explainers in wired and hill. together they on harvard kennedy school's technology and social change research project out of cambridge, massachusetts. we will be discussing their new book memoirs, the untold story,

the online battles deepening democ upending democracy in america. the book dives into how bad actors are using hate based means and social media to spread disinformation and to organize right wing communities that are threatening in the us. the authors explained the goal of. the book is to show the public the common tactics incentives driving these and why we have to act to defend ourselves if we want to protect our democracy, especially relevant as we head into the midterms. and while joan, emily and brian want to help the public understand why this an urgent issue, they also to highlight how social media's attention business model based on and personal data is enabling these bad actors and what policymakers the tech industry and the public can do to defend themselves against the meme wars. we're looking forward to a robust discussion today and we are taking questions from the audience. if you're here in person and have a question, please write

them on the cards at your seat and, pass them to the front or to my colleague hollister. she is over there in the beautiful white cardigan black outfit combo. if you are watching from elsewhere and want to submit a question, you can do that too. just go ahead and shoot your question in an email to headline news. that is plural at press dot org member the dot org in the plural headliners and you'll be fine subject line for that put me in the subject and kate will send your questions. me and if you see me looking at my phone just be assured that i'm reading your questions not checking tender. we are very grateful to have each of you with us tonight. i'll start. i will start by grabbing this might there there we go walking over here taking a seat and i just wanted to start off by asking each a little bit and feel free to provide any any background that i did not but a little bit about just your initial comments and thoughts on this book. how did it come together?

and really what was your main takeaway from writing it? you want to put hello. i think that our main takeaway was that it's kind of crazy to write a with three authors, but if you have a really relationship with, people who have different skill sets and knowledge and together you can write a book like highly recommend that you do it. the takeaway i mean for me i'm the journalist on the team so i came to this project having, you know, been a technology journalist for 15 years and having been the assignment editor on a lot of the stories. wired that are that happened during the decade that this book covers. and so i kind of thought i knew everything about, the events or a lot at least it wasn't until i joined, joan and brian in a research capacity that i realized there was a so much that i had missed in the moment when i was writing articles and assigning articles and like lost

in the chaos of what was trending and what was happening in the moment. i had had a chance to, really have deeper perspective on, everything. so my this book, for me writing it taught me a couple of things personally. it me i love writing books like who having time to actually write a book so much fun. i'm not sure if that was the same takeaway. my coauthors, but it also really my understanding of basically politics completely. i learned weirdly maybe this is odd to say, but i learned to have a lot more respect in some ways for some of the people who were behind some these shenanigans. there had been a sense in my media appetite and my read on certain things that had happened before, the trump era leading up to the trump era and during the trump era, that like the people who believed these things were,

not smart or were crazy in some way. and i got to say that looking into the actual subcultures of folks who had a very clear agenda and knew how to use the affordances of the internet and social that we were all living in to actually push their agenda was extremely they were extremely savvy and they had an understanding of these systems and the infrastructure in a way that i had not previously given them credit for. and i also learned a lot about how and i hope that this is what readers will learn is that the far right is not a monolith. the far online is not a monolith. and fringe communities online are all. they all have different grievances. they come these things from different perspectives, but they have found in the course of the decade that this book covers reasons convene together in order to work together to push a specific agenda.

a lot of other takeaways do, but. editor john yeah, i think in the process of writing this i started this book a decade earlier thinking about researching and trying to understand social movements online. when you study and become a sociologist and i got my phd in sociology, uc san diego. i also did a degree in science studies. you tend to have this overarching question. there's some kind of puzzle that racks your brain constant, and for me it was really about how do people use the internet to coordinate social action, to create social change, to create new opportunities, to have political movements or cultural revolutions and so my academic career was built on this big and broad about how do people get anything done? and so in my dissertation research, i was looking at the

occupy movement. i wasn't entirely satisfied with of the histories that had been written about the occupy movement because they focused on anarcho movements inside of occupy the left union up and as mackenzie walk has written, showed up and said it's that everybody's here because i'm your leader all right. but nobody had written history of occupy from the perspective of the right wing or or from the perspective of the kind of chaos of groups of people who were first and foremost a.k.a and anti-media. and so, as we were studying and thinking about the internet over the years, i have been continuous updating theories about that technology evolves. and so i met brian in 2017 when we were both working at data and

society research institute. and then he and i really fuzed brains because he's a cultural ethnographer and an anthropologist and in over the years we've just come to see the world through the social i'll say this the sort the organization the organization of communication infrastructure in many ways the socially organized version of our politics, of our economy of our educational systems and of course, our and so with brian by my side for years i've been able to think the depths and the details that and my major takeaway from book was essentially that by the time we seen a decade of technological adoption of social media, we had seen it move from being a technology heralded as the coming of a horizontal and democracy into to a tool of the

very, very powerful to politically oppressed. the masses. and i know i sound like, you know, the biggest karl marx, stan the planet when i say that. but technology capitalism they have a way of taking things that maybe were for one purpose and making them serve others and that moment of realizing that the thing that i was using day and the tools that activists adopted could be turned against them and very quickly used to erode our civil seemed to me deeply deeply flawed and so i really wanted to write about that process historically before we then build a theory of how to change it. sure for me my field my job in all of this is to sort of listen

and repeat. since 2017, i've pretty much most of my media intake with alternative media, a variety of sorts in particular what we're talking about here, far right media, which means listening over time, opposed to sort of waiting for the new york times or media matters or one of these other orgs that sort of surfaces the very worst. and i felt that was my job to sort of listen to them at work as well as when they were at play and sort hearing, sort of the specifics of their grievances, but also an understanding of the evolving of their tactics over time and something that we in the book as well is infighting of how someone like richard was synonymous with something, the alt right at one point and now in the low he voted for biden. he's a very, very fervent supporter of ukraine now. so these folks change over time. and part of that sort change is,

is through conflict. and that's one of the things we really wanted to try to by sort of listening back on, you know, ten years worth of sort of alternative media variety of sorts and distilling what actually mattered from that period of time. well, those all really good insights i wanted to dive into just the title of the book because, you know, i, i consider myself a pretty online person. i'm on twitter i'm on facebook occasionally instagram. i share memes. i like memes have created a meme or two. i not familiar or was not familiar. i read your book with the concept of a meme war and i'm wondering maybe john if you can just sort of give a description for what actually counts as a meme war, because i think most of us just see memes as these funny cute little things that we share. and war is just not funny nor cute nor little. yeah. so one of the ways in with this

book trades on contemporary language is not to actually chemically re-explain in everything that's happening and. so memoirs are can set that comes from online communities where people are battling with ideas. there are quippy tropes are ways using memes to embarrass and insult other people because the memes often will trade on pop culture or current news events. they can be time early and so we wanted to understand, okay, we have means and memes under 30 or so years of social theory have come to mean a unit of culture that's exchanged between people and groups or even intergender racially. so you could understand a meme as simply as something like the uncle sam iconic poster of

pointing and saying i want you that meme has been remixed hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of times be advertising and to be all kinds of different media and as well continues to come up in military recruitment. it didn't start in u.s., though not a lot of people know it actually starts in a in a uk newspaper. so what's interesting to us is, the way in which memes really shed their authorship and time they come to represent certain things to different in groups. if you don't understand meme, you will often just move past. you won't even notice it. and then there participatory and remix able. and so when we wanted to distill how the internet this is where you learn that this isn't really a book about memes the meme so the characters in a turgid

environment and the memes are the things carry along the movements or particular. and so when we talk about it a meme war yes people are trading but they're also trying to create polarization they're trying to win information in war. as i work at the kennedy school. so one of the things we teach our students is that, you know, war is often fought along for political dimensions or key dimensions of diplomacy information. the military and the economy. and so information wars are actually really important because they can start our stall you from having to apply economic resources or your military resources. they can also help you win the diplomacy fight. and so as we write this book, the means tend to take on these characters. they come into and out of the frame. so we start, of course, with occupy street as a kind of

campaign slogan and a meme that really arrived at a time to a moment when people were very upset with global the global elite and the mortgage crisis. and stock markets were crashing and, you know, it didn't really mean that much to me when i was that young because let's be honest, i didn't have any stocks. i didn't know what the economy was i made $8 an hour, you know, like but i to the movement because i cared about a future i cared about something that i wanted to have but knew that was going to be troubling. and then over the course of the book we we cut through different misogynistic the rise of online white supremacy through human biodiversity. we go through gamergate and all these things that have these keywords and these very quippy slogans attached to them that come to stand for key events in

our culture. and of course, the the end of the book is with showing you how the last ten years of meme wars and and culture wars were. we often say that meme wars are coda for the culture wars, how they end up in stop the steal and how stop the itself is is a phrase sheds any but if you know and you chant it and you repost it, it's really about believing in this loss of democracy as well as trump having won the election. and so that moment means become key coordinating. ephemera online that allow for what we call transactions between the wires and the weeds so they actually means i mean wars tend to in in this book

anyhow hate harassment incitement and so really try to understand relationship between the that are happening online that maybe it started as a prank or it started as a joke or it was really lousy and then it turns into a political movement where people are willing to commit crimes in order to keep someone in power. and it's wild to think that so much this happens. i think most of us can that we spend a lot of time on the internet, that there's this whole other world that is out there on the internet of folks who do kind of create these memes. and really, as you say, go from the wires to the weeds. brian i wanted to ask you this and of course, feel free to to jump in. joan and emily. but early on the book, you guys, an interesting distinction between the three of you. you note while you are all and i'm using your words extremely online weirdos that emily is ignore me. she's on sites like instagram

and twitter and not more niche sites like fortune and so i'm curious and brian all directed you would you ever get a sense during your research about what some folks to find these sites and to be more active these sites almost universally, it's some form of grievance that they don't feel being addressed institutionally once the grievance, it could be relatively innocuous. it could, in the case of eliot, unable to find a girlfriend. it could be feeling overlooked for promotion and and then chalking that up to being oh, i was discriminated and because i'm a white guy and all these sorts of individual you have systemically will you to these communities of grievance where those grievances will be reinforced in explained in ways that impossible to sort of error or to sort of compare to the outside and you get sort reinforced ideas of sociobiology

of sort of racial inferior authority that is has a scientific basis. all these ideas are sort of like kind of force fed and memes are a huge way of doing that because quite often they they find ways to make them quip your and in some cases funny and that whole idea of being something that really brought lot of the the memes of the far right into the mainstream during the 2015 2016 campaign an election seasons and a lot of folks ended up sort of staying in those communities past their support for trump in many cases as well and you have these communities out there, they have these means they are forming these groups are getting again i really the phrase from the wires to the weeds because it explains i think why it is important we pay attention to this because it does absolutely have real world i'm curious a lot of us, of course, were at the national press club, many of us are journalists and

communicators. and i'm wondering how have seen through your research, particularly how the media and reporters cover some of these movements? a lot of them seem to happen under the radar, joan. as you mentioned, sometimes folks will look a meme. and if you're not a part of the in-group, you go right past it. but we've seen how important this can be to our democracy see. and so, emily, i want to throw this one to you as a journalist. how do you think about when to cover and how to cover some of these sort of sub internet movements? yeah, i mean, writing book has changed my entire perspective on. so when i was at wired, i was during the 2015, 2016 election season, i was our political coverage and i was assigning stories based on memes like if there were memes trending, i didn't care if it was if it was trending on twitter. that didn't necessarily mean much to me. i'll give you an example. we had like election like probably a lot of, you know, not

that a lot of people were coming to wired to find their election results, but some people were and so on our home page, we had the equivalent of the new york times little thing except for instead of it being like nate silver or, whatever the new york times data people. it was this company that we had contracted with and they online sentiment. so they did social sentiment and that was how they actually tracked their polling. and so wired was offering an alternative polling option to our viewers and i have to say that as the editor of the section i was like, this seems fake. this seems not real. our our. you know, clock thing was saying that trump was going to win the the was saying trump was going to win and the new york was not saying that. and one else was saying that. and little dial was like, seems like a lot of the energy online is for trump. and i was frankly embarrassed. like we are really getting wrong. we are out on the limb and my

reporter was fantastic ap reporter he had the one with the egregiously upsetting of writing the pre right that trump won and didn't finish it. i don't know how many editors there are in the room, but he like could not bring himself to finish it. and i had to call him a few days before the election and say like marcus, you actually have to finish writing that in case trump we will have to publish. and he never did. so then the night of the election, he then was in a, you know, hall of despair. and i could not him i had to finish writing it and publish it. but when i tried to get him to write it, the point of what i meant to say is that when i tried to get him to write it, i was like, look, dude, finish. it'll never publish. i promise you we're not going to publish this. not going to win. but then he did and. i was on the opposite side of that fence. i made 700 bucks that night and

in bets with liberal friends, i was like, trump's got everything. he's all the guys, you know, i was going to say not to not to name names. at least four news organizations in did a rewrite. oh oh, i mean, i had to finish like in that moment kind of, you know, disassociating as was writing what had happened. but the thing was in that moment what that dial was telling us and what you knew, john, i mean, john knew that the insurrection was coming as well. like, i mean, you could but but but we couldn't the point of yeah the reason we wrote this book is because not everyone can tell. but actually i have a crystal ball, don't have the crystal ball. but what the crystal ball is, is just doing what brian and joan do, which is paying attention to what people are actually saying on the internet in these communities that have extreme influence, but whom we ignore. some cases i mean, i am a normie only on facebook and twitter. so what i see on and twitter and

instagram is, what is trending. but that is often influenced and the stories of this book have taught me this by planning and with tons of time on their hands to put into workshopping the best hashtag and figuring out the most appropriate meme so that they can distill. the idea that is going to make people think this is what america is and to put it out in this and to bomb the comment section on this thing and and make things happen and we we at wired, you know, we covered these folks, but we didn't there was a way in which we covered them, taking them seriously. i think that a lot of the press did that the stories that we wrote about quote unquote alt right at the time were like colorful features about weirdos that were interesting. seemed like they'd probably be irrelevant once. hillary clinton became president and like we can look back at what we published and say, well, at least we had written about it. but if you look at the tone of

what we'd written, we were not taking it seriously. and what i now know is that that kind of energy usually translates into the real world. so if i can just take a step back here, because i think the one thing that every journalist in dc and everywhere really they had was a crystal ball, right? so how do we want to think about coverage then for some of these niche online communities that aren't, you know, twitter and, facebook, but are really in terms shaping democracy, shaping public view. you have to handle it like a beat you have to pay a lot of attention. brian and i will watch and you'll realize there's a lot of a normal level of outrage, normal level of despicable, racist, transphobic,

misogynistic content. but then you'll start, see slowly them coalescing around us, saying or a slogan or an idea and. then they'll start to think about, well how do i plant that into? the into other spaces on twitter how do we get journalists to want to pay attention to this. there was this really weird. this isn't in the book, but it was something really bothered me about. there was a right a set of right wing actors, far right actors that were colluding. some of them had planned the deplorable in dc and really wanted to get the press talk about like the press to be more blatantly and to write about crime in a particular way. and so they started surfacing statistics about pit bull

attacks and started to talk about where put attacks were happening. and then that evolved into talking about violence in neighborhood kids. what neighborhoods were these? they're predominantly black neighborhoods, neighborhoods that have a lot of poverty. and they were really trying to build a narrative to get journalists to start thinking about the violence in these neighborhoods. now, of course, you see a very split in coverage about violence in certain purdum anthony black areas where you'll see on news almost every night be a segment on the scourge of sin. sanford, for instance, and, you know, thefts at pharmacy pharmacies and and whatnot. and, you know, those things are not on accident. the planting of those stories, the ginning up interest, outrage

online for some of these actors. it's a media manipulation. at the end of the day. they know that the press is the front line of what the public is going to understand one of the key three lines of the book is that when we talk about politics we're really talking about media, about politics and so for journalists, you have to pick and choose what you cover. you have pick and choose what that source material is. but what's really is that you don't just go straight to outrage and say, oh my goodness, how dare they there white supremacists on the internet because they've always been there. the point is to figure out, well, is your audience need to know. and then, of course, you want to be really savvy what you hyperlink as well as what key phrases you might utilize in your story. and for many, many, many.

reporters, we've asked acted as a bit of a gauge for them to figure out if this thing is newsworthy and and how they might cover it. and we continue as academics to write tip sheets and, things that you can find on media manipulation. org that will help journalists figure out the right way to. cover different hate campaigns. brian i know you said that you spend a lot of time alternate forms of of media or, you know, sort of very far to the right, very far to the left how do you balance between. sure. there are many statements designed to provoke outrage and anger. how do you really sort of put on the hat where are able to look at those statements through analytical lens check the sourcing. first of all with a lot of the claims if they're hyperbolic, but they're actually based on something that's really

happening. i'll give you a weird example the case of jussie smollett and his fabricated hate attack from 2019. and this is the actor claimed that he was the victim of a heart attack and turned out that he made the whole thing up. exactly. and so it was very frustrating for me to sort of watch a lot. my leftwing friends say, oh, this is a sign of, you know, where america going. and it's just like, oh, i don't think that really happened the way you think it did. and i would, you know, gotten a several arguments with very close friends of about the veracity of it the way that i knew it wasn't going to happen didn't happen the way it said it was was because i was listening to a bunch of right wing people who are that is that's not us. that was not us. we even know the name of the tv show he's on. we'd never heard of him before. and so as this sort of case came

together, the the that knowledge sort of being able to kind of gauge the temperature and see the see the the sort of just identification with that attack from elements of the right it kind of shows how sometimes there are facts that are reported on very early with various forms of alternative media that may not fit this sort of popular consensus at the time, but eventually it will come out. so i think it's important to sort of not only keep an open mind about sourcing, but motivations for why they may be talking about it early and sort of separating those from the actual facts of the matter. yeah. and i want add to that that you when looking at what people are saying what when you're a reporter, you're like, is this true? is it not we often will look at the other belief systems. what like the people who are saying it have said or like people are, they usually spread

conspiracy theories. we'll be like, oh, that's a a born conspiracist. let's discredit what going to say which you know, i understand why we do that it's a shortcut these people have lost credibility but what brings the communities our book together the one of the main things that they actually all agree on is that they hate the press, they hate us like they hate us, they distrust us. so much is actually shocking. and i didn't fully get that until. i lurked in the communities that and joan knew about and for such a long time and i realize they not only do they hate us. they watch what we write so closely because any error like that where they could see the jussie smollett in their opinion was probably not telling the truth because. they actually had been paying attention to a phenomenon of fake hate hoaxes that the media had not been reporting on in like a large ways. they had been talking about it in their communities and they

felt like this had all of the fingerprints of those same hoaxes. they then them seeing the mainstream media get that story wrong, confirmed for them. everything that they already thought about us. but they also like eat up and read so closely to all of those articles. so it it also they have weaponized any error that the media makes as proof of their preexisting narrative anti-media sentiment, which we have to think about that the only way to address is, well, there's a lot of different options. but one way is to teach people how journalism happens like to be first of all, take take responsibility for our mistakes like, say, woops, we got it wrong. that was we made that assumption like right now there's a story potentially bubbling up where it's being reported now that maybe it's true there were some real medical impacts of the covid on women's -- cycles that

came out, i think today or yesterday. and that's a kind of uncomfortable thing to be true because there was a ton of reporting for a year and a half saying that that was misinformation and this is this is something not for us to shy away from, but for the journalist and outlets who called it misinformation to outright, transparently say, woops, that was wrong. we thought it was misinformation because were only talking about it in anti-vaccine. so we made an assumption because many of the things in those groups are wrong, but it actually maybe had some more validity. i was i was going to ask if, there is anything else that reporters can do because you mentioned you have a couple of things to try to gain the trust of some of these groups. i feel like we're in this period, america, where a lot of institutions not trusted is there besides admitting our mistakes, doing the best that we can. is there anything else we can do

to try to reach these groups? say we are we are worthy of your trust and you should be paying to the things, to the facts that that we are reporting on. i think if we could show them that we were paying attention to them. right. like that we are listening to them. i would disagree with that reliance. yeah, because but you and you and brian bring attention to their to their communities then you know like their norms and what believe. so you also know what not to fall for. yeah i understand but also sharing with large audiences of people that are not in those groups can be really problematic especially take the normalization of the way in which the media has framed q on right so everybody it as you know uh these people believe that the dems are a bunch of satanists and that children's

hormones are being, you know, gather harvested at a, at a pizza parlor, etc. and like it's funny and like the way that the boys recovered to around them being like anti masturbation was like the number one thing that journalists would would you know, point out is had this no fapping rule and it was just ridiculous like at the heart of q and on and kelly we'll point out in her book about flat earthers and the heart of flat earth two is anti tropes right at the end of the day, they boil down and become distilled into the same kinds of hate in in rhetoric, supremacy of certain races, sexes. sexuality is a and so yeah the the show you're attention thing the trouble with both sides ism

it's it's really tricky and part of this for me i think comes down to how do you as a journalist or as an academic shed some light on that but also look at well then who's really harmed so one of our companion projects at the shorenstein center is on the true costs of misinformation right. how much is this costing society? how much does it cost society? every time you know, 25 news outlets have to write debunks the same story because they fell for the same hoax or the same manipulation campaign. and what we're seeing is that instead of thinking holistically about the entire media ecosystem and all different ways in which you could cover particular and beats and, you know, create a true diversity of of, of content

and, and forms of thought. what you see is twitter, the assigning editor for journalists. you see the same 15 articles get written day that have very difference between each other and and some of those are manipulated and some of them are not. i see the ladies from trek my ads in the audience here, and they do this all the time. they figure out, you know, who's using advertising to game these systems to make it look like you're just organ bumping into this kind of and my thought about this is less, you know, the individual reporter and more the structure of media itself, where if journalists don't fighting back against these platform companies and start insisting that these platform companies be much more transparent with how our media

ecosystem is filtered and monetized and drip drives outrage that it's not going to matter. they cover a story. it's not going to matter how they speak to anybody. and in our book memoirs, because these people will rule the day, it will their media. you know. and we see that splintering. we see that shift in of the people in here, in this book that do media that do punditry that that sort of weaponize hate and harassment all of their content is free. it's all and so have to really revolutionize the way press approaches freedom of timely accurate knowledge which is what i call talk and i definitely want to get into that in minute before i do. i know that we are well into the

panel, and i just want to remind everyone, if you do have questions and you're joining us here at the press club, please feel free to write your question on your piece of paper if you just want to pass that down to the end of row to to kate, the lovely in the lovely white cardigan. she get that up to us. and if, of course, you are watching online, you are feel free to send your questions to headliners plural at press start org ask your question you'll get it send it to me. i'll check my phone. i will ask the question and i will look at these in just one minute. but joan, that was that was too good of a of a point for us to not just explore a little bit further and i want to of course, open it up to brian and emily, if you'd like to respond as well. who is responsible for what we've seen with some these mediums and some of these communities? how much it going to be on sites like for channel, how much is it on sites like twitter? how much is it on reporters themselves and how much is on sort of the the overall media institutions and how much is on congress and lawmakers to really

be addressing what we're seeing. for channel was around a lot longer. this was considered a social problem and without that recommendation algorithm and sort of the affordances of the platforms to reach much, much larger than one could in small or comparative, much smaller site like portland, none of this really would be possible. you look back at like, you know, sort of what the platforms done in response to these events. it's always sort of, you know, oh, it's negative press. there was an act of violence that these sites used that that perpetrators use the sites to promote these acts of violence, etc., etc.. it's all they're always trying to take a step back and and, you know, correct what was perceived to be an error. there's plenty of alternative that have popped up.

folks have a much, much smaller reach there. there's something about the sort of nebulous scale that these groups attempt to put out that they're huge armies when it could be ten people that are sort of pushing these campaigns. so that's that idea of scale proportionality. it's very hard for journalists and, academics, because we have a very time seeing into these platforms actually gauging scale facebook, not an easy platform to study, you know, there's lots of necessary data sets in the public interest that journalists and researchers don't have access to. one of the the main questions when we help reporters work on stories of these spaces, they always want numbers like how many times something sure how how did it get here how did it get there? you know what what's the scale of it and? a lot of the times we have to say, you know, no way to actually impair, critically, measure the scale.

we can only sort of take you through the pathway that we've seen being taken. well. well, and i think that's kind of why we as journalists look to what's to report on things. right. if something goes viral that seems an indication in a signal that it's popular or that it is it has reached a certain scale. and i think that in a lot of cases that is true. but problem is that the way that these platforms are designed is you can actually also manipulate virality, you can manufacture virality. and so leading twitter become the assignment editor for a lot of journalism for much of like 2015, 16, 17 meant that the, like a small number of actors i in this book you'd be surprised how many times the same people come up again and again whether they're it's 2011 and 2012 and they are you know hawking and the fed type libertad and ron paul stuff or they show up again in like the manosphere and they

are they are then you know supporting trump not that many people. there are some real super influencers and they know how to make things go viral. and then the the media does have a role there in amplifying it. but it's not because the media is dumb it's largely because there's not a lot of ways to get those numbers. and we like one thing we could do as journalists. we're trying to figure out how the best is to advocate and like, work together as an industry to, get these platforms to give us that information because they have it and it's in the public for us to be able to report on it. yeah, but it's against the business interests to outline what the harms your does to society, which is where politicians come in. yeah. any policy in this or the public pressure would need to come. exactly. and like to your point about politicians, someone should make a meme, but the way to think

about this in the way that i think about this is, well, how did we get laws about tobacco use, right? because one of the the tricks the tobacco industry was they were like, okay, guys, we got a problem here. know we've got a problem. the lung cancer things getting out of control. so what we're to do is we're going to call everybody passive or active smokers. so every single person is either a passive or an active smoker. and they were really trying to push this rhetoric out into the world to make it seem like, well, there's not a problem with the product. everybody smokes, babies smoke. children smoke, you know, anybody, coworkers smoke. they're either active or passive. and it took a coalition of researchers and public health professionals to give us the concept of secondhand smoke. right they had to give that and they had to scientist it. they had to measure qualities of the air of secondhand smoke.

they had to demonstrate the harms. and that took decades. right. and so we are just at the beginning of trying to understand the harms by tech and not just the existential harm to the big d democracy, but also to the harms to our everyday lives, the the that. jeff horowitz in the wall street journal on the facebook leaks, the hogan papers a showed us what facebook already which is so deep meaning when the company is keeping these internal documents and isn't letting people know that there's demonstrated to young people and among other things that we're proving researchers without any of that internal.

and the last thing i'll say before i get off my soapbox because soapbox is where i like to stand is that it's going to take all of us working together. and we have to remember that the job of a tech corporate nation is pr. they don't have to tell the truth. they don't have to tell the truth to congress even. and we've seen time and, time again them being contradicted. congress makers, it is the role of government to protect us and our national security in in the public interest. and so there is no longer a time where government can step back and say, well, i mean, there's just these goofy kids on the internet and, everything's kind of crazy and we don't even know like our kids like they have these that we need to be aware and they need to start taking absolutely. i'm so delighted because when we ask for questions at events like this, get like, i don't know, maybe two, three. you guys are awesome.

yeah. which is also decidedly say we have a ton of questions, so it's a shorter and the more succinct the answers are, the more can get through. first of all, to the wrong girl, it's okay. i'll put i'll put my, put my aggressive moderator hat on. okay, try it, try it. we'll it. emily do try it. one of the big things that one of the things we've seen several iterations of this question, but i like this iteration the best. joan you have a crystal ball. does it say it's come? what does it say is coming next? i paraphrase, oh, chaos. chaos. we are really kind of chaos. we are really concerned about things that we're going to see happen in. the move up to 2024, i was particular irked and flummoxed the media coverage of the this is moving immigrants to martha's vineyard. that was a stunt engineered the

press and the press has be present then the point isn't to say oh this was a stunt point is then to go to martha's vineyard and cover from the perspective of the people who are and we're going to have to get into formation around those kinds of events that are going to circle events the capacity of the press to cover things going to happen fast and there's going to be more of them. and the thing about the internet that, it does it's not just that people are spreading information. they're trading resource, they're trading tactics. and so we are likely to see. in 2024, more and more. turning to social media, any kind of interest in even interacting with the press causing chaos, in having their own spin on it, in their own

media, about and it's going to take a serious. set of determined reporters to follow those things around and then start to link together. well, who is behind the scenes online pushing this stuff and, this kind of thing? it happen. this kind of plays back. your idea of newsrooms really need to have. reporter who is dedicated to beat coverage of this kind of thing. yeah. we also have another really good question as far as who do you think using teams effectively to enforce them, the public? and then how can journalists newsrooms use means to serve their mission and audience. this sounds like an emily question but feel free to can't i mean, i feel bad that i can't think of any great prosocial memes at the moment. are there some that we love that that are political in nature? feel free to jump to feel free to jump to the second question, which is, is there a way that newsrooms and reporters can use

these? me okay, well, so let's talk about like the meme reporter of of the mall, taylor lorenz who? taylor is a friend. friend, friend, you know, friend of the family. taylor has before others really treated the influencers on the internet as powerbrokers. and that is 100% true. i mean, what our book shows is that there's cycle from, you know, a forum where no one is seeing it that, then goes to the mainstream and influences the culture and part. that cycle is influencers commune it to other people and and amplify it and what the question now i have i have a good that if you are in the right wing now it is. a difficult thing to get any because you have to be weirder than the last weirdo and to get that national attention and we

were just discussing in our hotel today about how america has become a stronger than the candidates themselves. right so the people that are adopting america first are like getting you trying to reach for that national coverage. but then what it's doing is making them a toxic candidate because they are being shown in the light of, hanging out on a white supremacist type platform like gas where, you know, one of the taglines is diversity anti-white. or they're, you know, beings shown in the light of mtg won't say her name out loud because it's like. especially in dc. never know. sorry, i got it. i got to do the nonpartisan thing. congresswoman marjorie greene of georgia, nonpartisan. they were the mirror that people for the best people know. well, i remember when i was i

remember what the point was about taylor which is that taylor uses the internet and means to explain things that are happening. she goes on tiktok and she talks to the constituents who are watching on there, says like this is the news coverage or i'm going to i'm going to simplify it, which we could learn from as journalists, like our stories let's get jake tapper to come out with some memes. yeah let's do that has made me do that. we've got a question here. do you believe that the media or media platforms should be regulated with regards to popularizing or giving attention to alt right movements, if not, how do we disincentivize, given the drive from circles, the drive from critics? let's just that first part, should there be regulation? and if not, how do we incentivize sort of kind of getting wrapped up in the i mean, there can be no regulation that really gets at content

because of what we in the book so closely is our great. these players are and language games when say far right, we're talking about something very specific we're not talking necessarily about the right wing or republicans or conservatives, just like if we're talking about the far or anarchists. these are people who are in many ways anti established. i mean, one of the memes we go through around stop the steal is this notion of destroy the gop, right? a lot of what we chronicle in here is the infighting of the ownership of more mainstream political platforms, but it's happening at the fringes and many those at the fringes don't necessarily care what happens. right. they don't they don't have. a future oriented vision about how internet should be run. but we have seen over the years and brian and i have tracked this the and maybe you want to

say something more poignant about de-platforming but one of the major tools we've seen platform companies is removal of the right to use the service. and so i don't know if we'll ever get to govern in regulation, but i know within corporate terms of service this a highly impactful tool and potentially over tactic and maybe you want to talk about what de-platforming is that might well i think specifically the the idea that like these are all sort of like clean up work like someone gets famous enough and then they have a faction and that factions kicked off of a site like twitter or tik-tok. it's the these folks get famous for attacking marginalized people based around identity issues and the internet that we isn't calibrated for for equity of. so you get these insurgents who

constantly are sort of trying to push the terms of service and then eventually get off and then use being off to sort of reinforce a martyr position or that that there is a larger conspiracy to keep every conservative off these platforms when that's just simply not what's happening. it's that there's a handful of people who are sort of flying too close to the sun on purpose and, then making themselves part the story and that cat and mouse game is not a sustainable way to govern social media. and it's giving them because then censorship and the the idea that are being censored and that the platforms are censoring them and the media is also ignoring them becomes like a powerful meme that. they spread around and use to motivate people. so it's not going to be to make them quiet. i know that we're going a little bit over.

i also that we started a little bit late so i did time want to wrap it up maybe with one last question just because i know that this book focuses a lot on sort of the alt right. and i'm wondering obviously all of the tools that we've talked about, they're available, any political movement? is there any sense of what's happening, sort of the far left side when it to stuff like this? yeah. our colleague ferriss and yochai benkler wrote a in 20 i think it came out 2018 called network propaganda. and one of the things that they show that book is how a asymmetrical the media environment is a leftist progressives don't use social media in the same way that the right wing does. and i'll give you an example that probably resonates with all of us is that in 2011, the left. 2010, 2011, the left really own the internet in the sense indymedia there were a lot of left left of left politics.

you saw the rise of anarchist publication ends, you know, a big chunk of occupy was devoted to anarchist and and so you saw that happening in the adoption of live stream and and more gonzo media tactics at protests and what started to develop was a feeling of well that of behavior of just chronic things online is collective ism or slacktivism. we even invented words for what it was to just do things online and to just participate online without having stakes in the real world like were really an activist if you weren't shutting the highway down with everybody else. right and that idea collectivism and slacktivism really made and it continues to shape a lot of the ways in which the thinks

about social change, the role of media within it. now on the right you have a much more densely enforced, structured and resourced system. so you even with the invention 30, 35, 40 years ago of conservative media, you've seen the right develop up very small platforms with. am radio and then of course the rise of conservative media and, fox news in particular and online. the media ecosystem around the right particularly in 2010, 2012, 2013 around breitbart is, an incredibly tight knit. there are stories that happen on right that people on the left have never about, which is why it was surprising to see people then start to mobilize through right wing media and they don't carry the of click tourism or

slacktivism or a click like or a share or subscribe is political participation on the right. and you share these stories out of the out of the dedicate action to the movement and so in that even centrist media non partizan media is disadvantaged by by the way in which social media advantage those who are part of heavy participatory media ecosystems. and so right is really set up to take advantage of social media because their audiences are natural distributors and i was saying all the content is free, whereas on the left, you know, people are still trying to milk, you know, every, you know, minute of mass i almost called it media and see it's late now msnbc and you know you'll see

takedown orders for their content on on whereas on the right you know 40 people 4050 people a night are uploading carlson and hannity and and keeping that media ecosystem afloat and flowing and when we think about what the difference is here, it's not just about the actors or the content, but it's fundamentally about the design of these social platforms and what it's to news media ecosystems, general and one last thing i'll say about that related to rabbit holes is, that it's incredibly difficult once you've searched for a certain key phrase, to stop being recommended to that content and so if the center, the left aren't making content about q and on and people are just no, no, no, what's up? q and on, right? they're going to continue, to get content that's made for those made for and by the

supporters of that movement until such time that media starts to make of it. and then from there it's anybody's ballgame to how youtube, facebook or twitter is going structure those recommendations. so it sounds like there's a lot of things that are helping to drive some of these movements, a lot of things that might be open for for change in the future and certainly with with your fantastic book memoirs. you really outline and why it is so important and how these online communities these means can really grow into something much bigger much more serious. well i want to thank you all. but before i do, i need to thank just a couple other people and then we'll get there, i promise. i want to take headliners. katie. headliners, co team leaders donna, lehman ledger and lori russo, as well as club membership director. kate hollister. kate, thank you so much. and club executive director bill mccarron. and just a quick reminder, we do have copies of this book for

purchase as you today. so if you don't already have one, you can buy it. we also invite you to join us tomorrow, friday, september 30th at 10 a.m. for a special program have called newsrooms to boardrooms the mental health revolution arrives the national press club and project healthy minds are convening this important about mental health and well-being in journalism which it sounds like we might need after all of the really incredible information in this book. but joan, emily, brian thank you guys so much for joining us in the tradition of the press club and they're kind of hidden here we have mugs for each of you so you can always us as you drink coffee or whatever beverage of choice is. thank you so much, me, for being with us tonight. everyone here, you so much for coming for your excellent questions and thank you to c-span and everyone watching at home. thank you, guys so much.

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