1054: Renee DiResta | The Puppet Masters of Public Opinion

1054: Renee DiResta | The Puppet Masters of Public Opinion

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:03] Renee DiResta: What starts to happen in the age of social media is you no longer have to persuade people when MH 17 gets shot down. Russia doesn't have to convince people that somebody else did it. They just have to create 30 different explanations, push them all out at the same time, and make it too hard to know what's actually true.

[00:00:28] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional extreme athlete, music mogul, special operator, or hostage negotiator.

And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are a great place to begin. These are some of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more.

It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start research for us in your Spotify app. To get started today on the show, my friend Renee Dur Resta, an expert on disinformation and influence operations, especially in the digital realm. Today we're discussing the phenomenon of audience capture.

Why is it that online influencers, YouTubers, podcasters, social media influencers, these types of people, why do they always seem to get more extreme in their beliefs in the information that they spread? This is actually a very specific process of audience capture. They figure out if they're more extreme, they get a more.

Engaged set of audience, and they in turn make those people more extreme in their beliefs. Why is online discourse so deliberately polarizing? We'll explain how this works and why it is so hard to find normal centrist viewpoints that don't dramatize every single event, news item, idea, or ideology. That's what we're gonna explore here today on the show.

Also, why disinformation and information itself is no longer top down. It used to be like came from the newspapers, it came from the authorities. Now it's bottom up aided and actually only made possible by algorithms and what the algorithms say we should all see, which is extremely dangerous for reasons that you'll hear more about here in our conversation today.

We live in a world where the internet and everything in it essentially wants you to have extreme beliefs, tribal affiliations, so that you deliver clicks and attention to people who pedal those beliefs. Much of it, as we're seeing in recent events, is all bought and paid for by America's enemies as well, which makes it even more pernicious.

This episode will make you more aware of what is happening, how it works, how to counteract it, and we'll also try to increase your media literacy along the way. Alright, here we go with Renee Dur Resta.

I know you've been on the show before, but for those of us who haven't heard your previous appearance on this podcast, just tell us what got you interested in disinformation or misinformation and disinformation in the first place.

[00:02:59] Renee DiResta: Yeah, so in 2013, I had my first baby and I was a frequent user of Facebook as I think most of us were at the time, and I started getting a lot of recommendations for groups.

I had joined a bunch of groups 'cause none of my friends had kids. I wanted to learn how you put the baby to sleep, what you feed him, all of these complicated things. Yeah.

[00:03:17] Jordan Harbinger: We learned that from Instagram now

[00:03:20] Renee DiResta: in 2013. Yeah. It was Facebook groups. With Facebook, once you follow one group, it starts recommending you more.

And for me, as I started joining, like make your own baby food groups or cloth diapering groups and these sorts of things, I started getting recommended a lot of anti-vaccine groups. And I found the entire thing kind of bizarre because if anything I was like sort of like stridently pro-vaccine. I actually found the entire anti-vaccine movement, like egregious and odious and I, I found it very, very frustrating.

So it was weird to me to get the stuff pushed to me, but I started getting very interested as the measles outbreak started about eight, nine months later. I was very curious about that connection. As you have social platforms that are pushing you to join groups. How does that change, you know, how many people actually go and join?

How many people find it persuasive? What is the offline impact of that online nudge? And I just got very interested in studying those dynamics right. How do algorithms inadvertently connect people? What is the role of people versus algorithms in that system? How do people form beliefs and decide to become anti-vaxxers or vaccine hesitant or what have you?

And then what happens when they in turn go on to become evangelists? And as I was looking at that, at the same time, there was all this work that was starting to be done on isis. You might remember there was this, the whole terrorist organization was using social media platforms quite visibly. You know, they weren't really being taken down all that aggressively at the time.

And so as I was looking at this question of how do people use these tools to call attention to what used to be very, very niche opinions in my own sort of like personal experience in the anti-vaccine movement, was looking at how that worked was then I felt very, very much mirrored by what was happening with this other organization that was using social media for propaganda, for recruitment.

For me, then I was kind of hooked. I was like, oh, it's a system thing. Okay, let's learn more.

[00:05:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The episode four 20 was your first appearance on this show, which sounds like a long time ago, given that we're at well past episode 1000 at this point. So your entrance into that anti-vax disinformation culture, this is a, uh, one of those, I don't even know what you'd call it, a subculture where difference of opinion is essentially not allowed.

And it's the same on both sides. That's what these people always say, right? It's like your information different than mine. Even when you're talking about flat earth, for example. Not that I do a whole lot of that, but it's the same thing. It's like, oh, I wanted to read about this scientific thing, and then it's like, dot, dot, dot.

Well, I don't know about this moon. Could the moon landing be fake? No. Well, here's why. And then someone else is like, Hey, not only is moon landing fake buddy, this is gonna blow your mind. The earth is flat. And you're like, what? But then it starts as if you don't agree with it. It's not like, well, here, let me send you some info.

It's like, well, you are a bad person and you are in on the conspiracy. So it's not like. You just didn't know. It's like you refuse to believe it. It turns into this weird sort of faith-based kind of thing. Yeah. It's like a cult.

[00:06:09] Renee DiResta: It becomes their entire identity. Right. And you see that evangelism component to it.

The flat earth folks, they really, really, really wanna tell you about the ball Earth conspiracy. Yeah. And you know, and like how NASA is a, you know, is like a movie studio and all of these other kind of components that go into it. And this is true with a lot of people who are really deep believers in some of these conspiratorial stories.

And that's because it, they feel like they've been awakened and then they have an obligation to awaken you, right? To awaken others to kind of spread the gospel almost. And that dynamic, that evangelism, that mechanism by which it becomes their identity. We used to see it happen at small scale with some of these more niche conspiracy theories, like the ones you're describing, these quaint old ones that have been around for quite some time.

But what you start to see on social media is things like Q Anon, right? Yeah. Then begin to emerge, and Q Anon has all of these other folks that kind of become component constituent communities within it. And the whole draw of Q Anon is not even necessarily the story, it's this process by which you make friends, right?

This is your community. You're all digging in looking for the truth together. You're all decoding these things, and the flat Earthers feel like they can contribute because this Q drop relates to this thing that they've always said. You know? And you start to see this kind of co-creation of reality that happens and people get very, very into it.

It really becomes their community. It becomes a source of entertainment and friendship and comradery for them.

[00:07:31] Jordan Harbinger: They have so many memes. Memes for people who are not familiar are, I'm gonna define this poorly, but it's like you take a picture that's a screenshot from a really popular movie like Princess Bride, and then you change the text over it.

So it looks like one does not simply assume the world is round or whatever. Right? And they share these constantly. You reminded me of one, because there's a meme phrase that's something like the real insurrection was the friends we made along the way, or the real conspiracy is the friends we made along the way.

And I can't, I don't know what the original is even from. But they say that kind of thing all the time because it really is about the friends you make along the way. Like Pizzagate really is about the friends you made along the way, believing that there was a basement at the pizza place where Hillary Clinton was drinking kids' blood or whatever the hell that thing was about.

It just gets unhinged really, really fast. Now everybody knows what it's like to be a podcaster. There's a little more empathy for the stuff that ends up in our inbox. Like you think your Twitter feed's bad. That's what my inbox looks like. You have a really good example in the book, and by the way, if people buy the books, please use our links in the show notes to help support the show.

You have a really good example in the book of this guitar guy who's just playing the guitar, and I thought this was a brilliant illustration of what you call audience capture, which is another new term that's gonna sound really old by the time your book is a year or two old, right? It's gonna sound really cliche.

[00:08:50] Renee DiResta: I know. Well, we should totally talk about this 'cause I'm actually really curious to hear how influencers think about it. Yeah. I was trying to tell the story of how people go down rabbit holes and I, I didn't wanna use a specific person, right? You don't wanna like impute motive or mind state to somebody.

So I decided I was gonna create this character, admittedly, sort of, kind of an archetype, a stereotypical figure, but a man who starts off just kind of like posting content, you know, posting himself playing guitar, same way people do on TikTok all the time. Right? Or on Instagram all the time. And then gradually he AMAs a fandom.

They're originally there to hear him talk about guitar, but then one day he makes a comment about Eric Clapton. And this actually happened during Covid. Eric Clapton became something of a hero because I think he was vaccinated, said he was injured by it, then became sort of an outspoken advocate against it.

And then also tied that into a lot of the narratives around livelihoods and people who were not earning a living at the time. Right. Which was a very real thing that people very acutely felt, you know? So I, I described this character kind of mentioning Eric Clapton and saying, you know, what do you guys think of this?

And then all of a sudden the narrative and the tone of the community shift to talking about a. Vaccines and politics and lockdowns. And then you, you can see this happen. I saw this happen with a lot of wellness influencers actually during the pandemic where there's this trajectory where they're originally very much staying in their space, right?

The sort of niches they've carved out for themselves. But as they realize that by talking about certain topics or using certain rhetoric, being very provocative, they get more attention and it creates an incentive for them to do more of it. And what you start to see happen in these cases, they're rewarded by their audience, they're rewarded by the algorithm, they're getting more attention, they're earning more money, and this becomes a cycle.

And so this is the phenomenon of audience capture where you see people as they begin to move more and more into that space where they're engaging with their audience on a particular topic, they don't wanna then alienate their audience by disagreeing with them or by challenging them on other topics. I.

And so that I think is one of the interesting dynamics of influencers today, right? It's a business for them. It's their livelihood. It's not just a, a source of chattering on the internet, right? And so how do you balance that authenticity and staying true to your actual ideas with what you're actually rewarded for producing?

[00:11:05] Jordan Harbinger: So yeah, this is super interesting to me because I've watched this happen with other shows all the time, and I'm, I would be a fool if I thought it didn't happen to my own show. So I'm constantly asking myself, am I doing this? How am I, because it can be subconscious at times. So for me it's, I've been really diligent, I think about being conscious about not doing this right.

So I'll have someone on, they'll be controversial. I'll challenge them in a way, or if it's not gonna be that kind of conversation, I sort of let it rip and then have an opposite perspective on another episode. And I've noticed that it can be a. Extremely lucrative to have one hyperpartisan opinion and then just keep hitting it over and over and over.

So I had a guy on here who is, his father founded Hamas and now he's very anti Hamas and he worked with the Israelis to take down a bunch of people. Of course his family has disowned him and he is like kind of on the run from Islamic Jihadists 'cause they want to kill him. And he was really fired up.

He hadn't spoken about the October 7th thing in public yet. Really? And I've known him for a really long time. 'cause I had him on years and years ago. I had to track him down in Asia to get him on here. It was just like a whole thing. So he did my show first and he basically just yelled the whole time about October 7th.

And I put that on YouTube and it got millions of views and my YouTube team was like, bro, have this guy on again. We need to pull, we're gonna make clips of this. This is so awesome. And. I immediately screwed everything up. And I put that into air quotes because I had another guy on the following week who was Israeli but was very anti-Israel, and it was a really unique perspective from him too as an extremist on the other side that worked really well.

And my podcast, my audience was like, wow, these two guys back to back, like my mind is expanded. They've been pushing at the edges of my opinions on each side of this issue. Thank you for doing that. We had this weird post in the pro-Palestine subreddit on Reddit, which is like, thank you for doing this really interesting dichotomy.

You didn't put your opinion in here. Really incredible on YouTube. However, it was like my most disliked video was right after the Hamas video. It had so many negative comments. My team turned off the comments for a while and then deleted a bunch of the 'cause they were just horrific and mean. And my channel hit this weird lull where I, the algorithm like wasn't showing my stuff and my YouTube team was like, what happened?

They looked into it and they went, you had a crazy, passionate Zionist audience when you had that Hamas guy on. 'cause it went viral and half of Israel probably watched it. And then you had this other guy on and they hated him. They hated him and they hated him. And they watched him for like a minute and they were like, this guy's terrible.

Dislike, never showed me this again. It doesn't work. So if you are a podcaster and you just have your audio podcast, you can talk about whatever you want for the most part with some caveats. But if you are a YouTuber or you are on TikTok or whatever, you have to play to your audience or the algorithm will mercilessly punish you.

And if it's 99% of your income because you sell T-shirts outside of that or something, you are never gonna want to jeopardize that. You're never gonna wanna jeopardize that. So of course if you find that your audience likes something on YouTube, you try to play to that audience no matter what. And I, I see this with other influencers all the time.

They'll start a show about science. They'll notice that they do a show where something gets like mildly political once, right? It gets more views. Then they're like, huh, what worked about that? They test a few things. They had Sam Harris on. He's not too controversial, but he's still political. Well, that did really well.

Let me have this other more insane person on more, more extreme person on that did really well. And then they're knocking on Alex Jones' door trying to get this guy on the podcast because, or the YouTube channel, because it's like, well, this is just what works. Look at this audience that I built. This one has 1.75 million views, and my interviews about science have 30,000 views.

What's paying your bills? And more importantly, a lot of these guys are already rich. Not only what's paying your bills, what is making you feel good about yourself, you're famous now. People love you. You are speaking truth to power by having all these people on. Yeah, man, that feels really good. It's addictive.

I deliberately, sorry, I'm talking on your episode. This is so selfish again. No,

[00:15:26] Renee DiResta: I'm really glad you are. Actually, I went, a friend of mine's a, a YouTuber and he invited me to this conference last, I think it was August. And I was the only one there who wasn't, well I know there were a couple of people who weren't content creators, but I was really very much like an academic.

Yeah. You know, he was like, it'd be great to have you kind of lead a session on audience capture. You know, I, I think you'd be curious to hear how these folks actually talk about it. And it was fascinating to me. 'cause they're basically all just saying exactly what you said. Right. This is my livelihood, this is what the algorithm will reward.

I know what it's going to boost. I understand the, the shocked face with the big white letters that I have to put in the thumbnail arena. And then the entire thing is a production. And that's why in the book I try to talk about influencers, algorithms, and crowds. Right. So I try to lay out the three component parts.

The crowd is basically the audience, and so I'm describing how the influencer creates content for the crowd, right? You're making it for the people who are listening, but you're also doing it for the algorithm. And then the algorithm in turn is looking at the signal like you're describing the likes and dislikes you get from the crowd, from the audience, and it's deciding whether to push it out to more people.

And then the influencer makes or loses money and audience and mindshare and clout by virtue of how that system comes together in that moment. And so I absolutely get it. I mean, you hear influencers talk about it quite a lot, but more behind the scenes in a way. And so one of the goals I had with the book was trying to get that idea out there, which is influencers are awesome, right?

There's a lot of fantastic influencers making incredible content out there. It's a really rich and interesting media environment. And also this is how the incentive structure works and here's why. Some of those people tend to, you know, go down rabbit holes at some point and how you should think about what is happening when that happens.

[00:17:04] Jordan Harbinger: I call this, it's the one thing I've invented in my career, I think holy wholly myself, I call it the Jerry Springer effect. Okay? You remember Geraldo Rivera had the Nazis on?

[00:17:13] Renee DiResta: Oh yeah.

[00:17:14] Jordan Harbinger: If you're younger than 40, people are like, who is that? This is a talk show, host daytime tv. He was kind of like. A serious ish journalist at one point, or at least the talk show was like, I'm gonna have real conversations with people.

It was like Donahue, it was like Oprah, whatever. And then he was like, I'm gonna do something wild one day. And he had, I think it was like Black Panthers and Ku Klux Klan members or some crazy, some just insane mix that you should never have on. And his original intent was to see supposedly if they could come to some sort of understanding or like get both sides out in one show.

Anyway, of course they start fighting, Geraldo gets hit with a chair, breaks his nose, he has to go to the hospital, they get the whole thing on film. He was originally like, I've made a huge mistake. But then people saw the ratings and everybody wanted to see that clip and it made the news. And then he was on there with this like bandage on his nose for the next few episodes.

And people were like, what the actual F is this? So then all these other talk show hosts during daytime tv, they were like, oh, we're screwed because now Geraldo's trying to find the next Black Panther's Ku Klux Klan mixed episode. And I'm sitting over here like. Should we teach physical education and art in our schools or should we stick to academics?

And it's like, that was fine until it wasn't. And we realized that people actually wanted wrestling. Yeah. But in talk show format, so YouTubers, they have this exact same problem. And I have a lot of friends that are big YouTubers and many of them are quite miserable because they have to do this to make money.

So they go from, I just wanna have conversations about the latest technology and how it's gonna affect us. ai, brain machine interfaces, blockchain, whatever. And then it's like two years later you look at their feed and you go, why are you talking with this person about 5G towers possibly causing covid?

And you think, has this guy lost his mind? And then you know, you go, you have a beer with him, and they go, nah, this is just like what the team's analytics say is gonna do. Well I don't believe any of this idiotic bullshit. I just sort of suffer through the interview. They gimme a sheet. What to ask the guy.

We wind him up and let it go. I'm thinking, so you've just willingly capitulated to this disinformation landscape because it gets more clicks and they're like, yeah, kind of. It's really depressing, but it's the Jerry Springer effect because they all think when this blows over and I get big enough, I'm gonna go back to what I originally wanted to do.

A hundred

[00:19:32] Renee DiResta: percent. But guess what?

[00:19:33] Jordan Harbinger: That's never gonna happen because the second you try to go, you know what, I'm not gonna be Judge Jerry. I'm gonna go back to being the serious journalist I was. Everyone's like you. You're a clown. All I want to see from you is buffoonery. So if you are gonna go and try to be a serious brain machine interface guy again, one, I can't take you seriously because you're up here doing stupid crap for the last three years.

And two, I'm not gonna watch this. This is not why I'm here. So your algorithm, the algorithm says your career is now over. You have changed tack. We are not going to push this to your existing audience and we don't know who wants to watch this. And then your business goes down the toilet. So what are you naturally gonna do?

You're gonna stick with what works because you have to feed your kids or your dogs. In the case of my friend, yeah. So there's no way that you're gonna do this. The algorithm giveth and the algorithm taketh away. And that's why I think podcasting in audio format, it's so much slower to grow. 'cause there's no discovery algorithm, there's no discovery ability at all.

But it is superior because I can have you on here and then I can have somebody on who does deep ocean exploration and they get the same amount of downloads and some people say, oh, that Rene rest episode was so interesting. And other people say, wow, that ocean episode was so interesting. And I keep my audience, I don't alienate them because I had different things on.

They appreciate that. That is not the case in YouTube and TikTok and other channels mostly.

[00:20:50] Renee DiResta: This is an interesting thing that Substack has talked about a little bit. Have you followed that discourse? But it's, I know the

[00:20:55] Jordan Harbinger: founder, he is a well-meaning guy.

[00:20:57] Renee DiResta: I agree. I think that they're Well-meaning, I think there's also a little bit of an element of naivety.

So let me let kind of poke on this.

[00:21:03] Crosstalk: Sure.

[00:21:03] Renee DiResta: For a long time they framed it as like, this is a recommendation free zone, right? We are going to allow people to create newsletters. You recruit your own audiences. We give an advance to some people who are talented as like a draw to the platform. Then there's cross-promotion, right?

Newsletter A recommends newsletter B. You know, you do wind up with a little bit maybe of an echo chamber at times when newsletter A, B, C, D, E, F, G are all like ideologically homogenous and that's the, you know, and they cross recommend each other and everybody who's paying their $5 really only has maybe 10 newsletters that they're actually gonna pay for.

And so, you know, you do start to see ways in which the unfortunate dynamics like the human nature component of people liking to see the things that reinforce their beliefs. Plays out again. But what they were not doing was this algorithmic curation, right? It was not, when they started, they were not doing that.

And so it was seen as this question of like, could you grow new media? Could you grow an audience and just have people follow you? Like, but then it also required a whole lot of. People to commit to producing content constantly. And so then you did start to see people starting to form these groups anyway.

And then Substack had to keep up its own revenue. And so you do start to see those recommendations and notes and the sort of social layer on top of it being built. And that's because ultimately that model, that engagement driven model is the incentive of the platform too. So you have the platform incentives, the influencer incentives, the audience incentives and all that stuff intersects in some pretty weird ways at this point.

And that's why I think you are seeing a lot of that. Audience capture reinforcement. My entire identity is what I read and who I listen to dynamic. That starts to happen on the internet.

[00:22:40] Jordan Harbinger: It's true. I want to caveat this 'cause someone's gonna go, Joe Rogan is a big audience and he has a lot of of variety on his show.

You can do this sometimes, especially if you're like so massive. You have your own gravity kind of as a creator, but otherwise you cannot. So if you're new-ish or you've been in the middle of the pack, or even if you're sort of big, but the algorithm doesn't favor your stuff for whatever reason, you can't do it.

So like, yes, Joe Rogan can have an ocean guy on and he can have you on, and it'll do well. He's probably not gonna get punished by that because people are watching so much of his stuff and have for so long. However, another new-ish creator, they just don't have the same benefit. And I don't exactly know why.

My YouTube team has tons of really big channels under their control. They have their own big channels and they're just like, eh. You get to a certain size, you can do whatever you want, but we don't know what that size is. And also, it's different for everybody. Like we have some channels that have 5 million subs.

They can do whatever they want. We have some channels that have a million subs. They can do whatever they want. Some channels, they have 2 million subs, they screw it up, it's over, and they have to spend weeks rebuilding. So the algorithm favors them again. And it's just kind of like, nobody's telling us why this happens because even people who work at YouTube don't know.

It's like the robots know and that's it. You know, another thing that I find that happens with the, the Jerry Springer effect, as I call it, and I, you talk about this in the book, is it gets easier to make money when you don't respect your audience. So if you build an audience of people that you also think are morons, you can fleece them.

I'll shill a mattress that I love on this podcast, just like any other podcaster. But I will not she a fake white labeled vitamin that I say is a magical cure for covid or something along those lines. Or is like Chinese sawdust that I get a hundred percent, you know, almost a hundred percent margins on.

I won't do that because I care about the people that listen to this show. I gotta sleep at night. My kids are gonna remember me in some kind of way. And if there's an ad on there for like Uncle Jordan's, Chinese sawdust pills, they're gonna be like, what the hell, man? So I don't do that. There's a definite line.

And I really think it's easier to fleece an audience that you just don't care about because you also think these people are all stupid who gives a shit.

[00:24:52] Renee DiResta: Yeah. I think this is one of the areas where, for me, as an observer, you know, I study how narratives move around the internet, but I don't have very much visibility into the sort of inner head space of a lot of the people who put stuff out.

And there's a word we use that, uh, bullshit, right? Yeah. That's a word. It's a technical term. I'm from New York. Many, we've used that word for decades. Yeah. Right. So

[00:25:10] Jordan Harbinger: let's keep it strictly in layman's terms if you'll Yeah.

[00:25:13] Renee DiResta: There is actually now an academic book called on Bullshit, and it frames it as information without regard for the truth.

Right. And I actually kind of love that, first of all, because it gave us that word, right? It legitimized it, and now you can put it in papers. But it is a, it's a way of expressing that notion of like. There are people who just don't actually care. And I used to sit there and think like, well, surely they know they're wrong.

And if you just tell them that they're wrong, they're gonna want to know that they're wrong and then they're going to make that correction, do that fact check, we're gonna correct the record and move forward. And then they realize that they actually just don't care. And this is exactly it. I think that their incentives are not necessarily producing truth.

Their incentives are driving people to take an action, particularly the political influencers. The game is not to tell the truth. The game is not to give the most accurate information. The game is to make your people do the thing that you need them to do for your candidate. And so that understanding of incentives and how it kind of drives the game, it was really the thing I wanted to get across in the book, most of all, because I feel like it's obvious, but not something that you actually talk about much.

We spend a lot of time talking about, like quote the algorithm, this idea that social media magically does things to us, but there is this component where I. People are really active participants in that process, and the incentives of the individual people actually are much more important. When you're thinking about why does disinformation spread, why does a rumor go viral?

Uh, it's because it resonates with human beings, and that is what is actually happening.

[00:26:38] Jordan Harbinger: If you put enough whiskey in a YouTuber, they'll tell you some version of this. They'll say like, I don't really care to do all the anti woke videos that I do, or whatever their sort of niche is. I'm thinking of one person in sort of in particular.

So he told me, Hey, you know, I really like having some of these conversations, but the majority of them I'm kind of like, eh, whatever. It's more of the same and he can push back a little, but you can't push back too hard because then it looks like you don't respect the opinion of this exalted guru that you have.

On your channel and if your status is kind of lower than their status, 'cause they're like a really big deal in whatever sort of niche that you're in. Like you don't wanna look like you disagree with them. And certainly you don't want them to think, God, that guy was kind of a prick. I don't wanna do that show again.

Or, wow, they guy really took me to task and made me look a little bit bad. I definitely don't wanna do that show again. You have to be kind of like, thank you for joining me. I agree with every single thing you say. Even if you're just like, except for, you know, half of what you just said was totally verifiable nonsense.

But okay, they have to do it because one of my friends went from making like $3,000 a month to making $30,000 a month. Is he gonna stop doing this? Because it's a little bit against his personal ideology and it's a little bit more work. I mean, no, he's not. He's not going to, and I'm sympathetic to that in a way, right?

He's not platforming conspiracy theorists, but he also doesn't agree with the politics of what he's talking about. But it's also just like, well. I gotta make a living, man. 3000 bucks a month to 30,000 is a massive difference. Look, 30,000 to 60,000, probably he could, you know, you're just gonna die with more money at that point.

He told me, he's like, man, I don't mean anything by this, but you're in a privileged position. You can afford to have morals and integrity. And it's true. It's expensive, but I can afford to do it. 'cause if I lose half my audience, I still have half my audience. So I'm doing all right. He's not gonna do all right.

He's not gonna be able to send his kids to private school in London or whatever. Right. It's not gonna work. Anyway, I'm talking way too much on my show. People love or hate that, and I promise I am done ranting on this. Tell me how consensus reality has been shattered recently. I love this term consensus reality.

We used to just call it reality, but here we are.

[00:28:48] Renee DiResta: I know. So the idea of consensus reality is that people. Decide what is true amongst themselves. There are certain things, you know, you see money talked about as one example. Like why do we all agree that pieces of paper carry value? Why do we all agree that if we exchange something where you know, we can trust that that money is gonna have value in the next story down the street?

We've all kind of agreed to certain types of ideas that come about, not because they are inherently true, but because we kind of as a group decide that they are true. What I was looking at over the years was the notion that I think disinformation or misinformation is often misconstrued as a thing, like a problem of facts.

Again, if you just give people the right facts, they will realize that they're wrong and we will all kind of go on our merry way. And what is actually happening is that you have people who don't trust that the same thing is a fact, right? So we're really very foundational at that point. So they have no first person experience.

Of an event in the world. If you were to ask somebody what happened in Israel on October 7th, for example, right? You are not there personally, yourself. Maybe you don't have a person that you actually know who was there. So you're really reliant on what does the news media say? What are the people who are saying that they're there live streaming with videos?

Say, what does, how does the reporting tell the story? And this is just one particular example that's semi recent and that was a little bit contested as far as what people wanted to believe. At which point, what you find is people's opinion of what happened in that moment. What reality actually was around that set of events is really shaped by who they trust, what they see, whether they think that they can trust what they see, right?

'cause now, AI generated content is a part of this as well. And what their friends and family and community think is true. So all of those things go into the idea of this is what I believe happened on that day. This is what I believe happened around that event. This person, this cure that vaccine, you know, whatever it is, the sources of trust have fragmented the types of entities that count as media or reporting or real, even if you will have really fragmented people have very different beliefs of whether they can trust a New York Times reporter on the scene, an Al Jazeera reporter on the scene.

Again, just to stick with the same example. And so what you have is this set of highly divergent inputs. The commentary that's written around those inputs is very, very different. People who are primarily consuming the commentary are seeing things framed for their particular identity, their particular set of beliefs, right?

They trust a certain set of podcasters, influencers, newsletters, media. So the net effectiveness is that you have a completely divergent set of inputs around an event that actually happened in the real world. But getting to that ground truth, getting to that consensus about what has actually happened becomes increasingly impossible.

Bridging those gaps feels increasingly untenable. You see it happen more and more at this point. 'cause again, there is such a proliferation of content, proliferation of people that you can listen to, proliferation of communities that people spend all of their time in. We mentioned Q Anon a little bit earlier, right?

That idea that you're digging into the clues and coming up with what happened altogether as a group, and that is the group of people that you trust and that you are essentially creating this idea of reality along with. So the, the notion of the objective fact is not quite as cut and dry at this point, as we might have previously.

Thought it was

[00:32:18] Jordan Harbinger: during Covid, there was a friend of mine and he was desperately it just sending me one thing from Russia today, or rt, I guess it was called, one thing after another. And I was like, Hey man, are you okay? And he is like, I really just want you to know this because every other news source is basically just spouting nonsense and RT is the only real credible news source.

And I was just like. My God, that is an inversion of reality. Like this is Kremlin propaganda. It's funded by the Kremlin. They tried to hire me to do something. They told me I had to write these specific kind of stories, like it's just not journalism at all, let alone the only real credible news source when one news source that is government funded is telling you something and every other news source in the world is not, why would you choose that one as your most reliable news source?

Right? But he was genuinely concerned because I read like The Economist instead, I'm wondering what broke for people like this because is it just that they're surrounded in online communities that where everybody looks at that news source or 'cause both sides think the other side is going crazy, right?

I think he's going crazy and he's looking at me like, Jordan, I just wish I could get through to you and I'm thinking, but you're in a cult. That's like a Scientologist telling me they just wish they could get through to me because the alien z no blows all up with a nuclear bomb.

[00:33:36] Renee DiResta: I've had friends be like, well, Renee, you know, you're an institutionalist, so of course you would still think that the Associated Press is telling you the truth.

I think didn't, I think Elon tweeted the other day something about like the Associated Press is a psyop or something along those lines. It was one of these, you know, these sorts of things where, yeah, maybe in some ways that is, I think the most, if there is a single source of ground truth, like the AP might be it.

Yeah, a bunch of different journalists

[00:34:00] Jordan Harbinger: from different outlets posting things on a Newswire. It's like, it doesn't get more sort of

[00:34:04] Renee DiResta: right like this as raw as it gets. Like nobody is really, you have nothing has been layered on top of it in quite the same way yet. I always thought that we kind of thought the AP was the most legit, but now that's a matter of some debate too, and I think it is really that there are a couple components here.

One, it becomes very much a component of people's identity, like what they listen to and who they trust. And you know, people take great pride in being. Either attuned to the imperialist narratives of mainstream media, right? As something that you see. I see my friends who are more on the far left share these sorts of things where I'm like, good Lord.

[00:34:38] Crosstalk: Yeah.

[00:34:38] Renee DiResta: That is not a source, but here we are, you know? And you know, and it's because in their alignment and their worldview, the sort of Chomsky I view of media, right? The sort of mainstream media is manufacturing consent. But these sort of niche global leftist outlets are telling the truth. And that's where you do see people who are like, no, RT is a really great source.

They'll point to Iranian media at times. So you see that start to happen. You have the same thing happening over on the far right. This is how Fox built an empire, right? Mainstream media is biased. You should listen to us. And then there is that sense of loyalty, and then an identity starts to develop around it.

Particularly as you are spending all of your time in the crowd with your friends, you find quote unquote, your people. I felt for me personally during Covid, you know, I was in quite a few group chats. I had a baby in August of 2020, so I was doing the, the new baby thing. I was up at all hours, like nursing and stuff hanging out in these, in these group chats.

I felt like at the start of Covid, or even before Covid group chats that were ideologically diverse, there was still a lot of grace, right? Like there was arguing like, Hey, here's your source, here's my source. Like, let's fight about this. But I felt like by the end of Covid, some of those communities had really just absolutely collapsed.

Just a complete splintering. It became such a marker of who you were as a person, whether or not you trusted what the government told you about a vaccine or a disease or lockdowns or you know, you name it. It was the sort of thing that really did drive people apart in a much more fundamental way. That idea of you're a sheep who still listens to institutions and media versus you're a crank who's reading these nut job sub stackers over here.

You know, that was the sort of divergent frames of, of where people went in the camps that we were treated into. But it very much is a thing that happened. And the question is now how do you bridge it and get back? That is not a technological problem. That is very much a problem of people.

[00:36:34] Jordan Harbinger: Well, folks, since I won't shill conspiracy theories in Kremlin nonsense, I have to shill the fine products and services that support this show.

We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in Heart by Hero Bread. This is a sponsor where they sent me a loaf of this and we ate it in like a day. And I called the agency back and I was like, can I get, can I get like a pallet of this? And they're, they're just like, okay. He, he likes the hero bread.

Honestly, there's nothing better, of course than indulging in some comfort food, right? Sandwiches, wraps, burgers, you name it. But if you're watching your carbs like I am, you might think you have to pass on the bread. Well, not anymore because hero bread has somehow solved this problem, which is, you know, thank God for that hero bread.

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Six grams of protein and a freaking slice of bread. And so when friends came by, she served up jalapeno chicken sausage hot dogs using heroes hotdog buns, which have 11 grams of protein in a hotdog bun. And they taste good. I know. It's like, you don't believe me because how is that possible? They have zero to one grams of net carbs per serving.

It's actually just kind of crazy. They got burger buns, tortillas. They even a croissants with two grams of net carbs. You gotta try it out,

[00:38:13] Jen Harbinger: ready to taste it for yourself. Use code Jordan for 10% off@hero.co. That's code Jordan at HER Co. Enjoy.

[00:38:22] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by Shopify, so let's talk about where real success comes from in business.

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[00:39:15] Jen Harbinger: Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Mattel uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period@shopify.com slash Jordan. In all our case, go to shopify.com/jordan to upgrade your selling today, shopify.com/jordan.

[00:39:29] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every week, it is because of my network, the circle of people that I know, like, and trust. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over@sixminutenetworking.com. The course is really easy. It takes a few minutes a day.

Really, it's not awkward, it's not cheesy. I know a lot of people are like, oh man, I know. I keep saying every time I hear this, I need to do it. Just go to six minute networking.com. It's free. It's not annoying. I'm not gonna ask you for your phone number. I don't want your credit card. None of that, and many of the guests on the show subscribing, contribute to this course.

Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Again, six minute networking.com. Now back to Renee Dur Resta. Now we have this bespoke reality as you've termed it, which I love this term. You can always find confirmation of info. You want to be true. You can always. I mean, you could find yourself in a YouTube rabbit hole.

You start off like, how do cold spread? Is it just about washing your hands? I got these two kids. I'm getting sick all the time. What if I just wash their hands? Am I gonna get sick less or do I need to also, I don't know, whatever. And then I get distracted. YouTube's on on my office computer. I get distracted, I go bathe them.

I come back, maybe I even fall asleep. And in the morning it's still playing, except now there's a guy yelling at the screen about how 5G towers caused the covid epidemic and colloidal silver. If you take that, which Ahhe just happens to have hiss own brand, if you take that, it will stop it. And I'm thinking.

This is what auto play, like what was between that, the joke before Covid, the joke was you would end up with Nazi stuff or like Holocaust denial videos. Right, right Now it's like, you know, it can go either way. It depends what you're looking for, I guess. But it, it illustrates your point, which is years ago, invisible rulers were disseminating propaganda, right?

That not like the president, but a media mogul, maybe a newspaper or somebody who's publishing some sort of fringe newsletter. Now it's podcasters and influencers, which reminds me, this podcast is sponsored by Philip Morris, isn't it? Time your kids started smoking? Uh, but it's, it's really, you can find any, anybody out there who will tell you that you are right, or that your hunch about something was not only right, but also, and then it's like six degrees more kooky right in that direction.

[00:41:38] Renee DiResta: For me, the personal feeling I have really gone back and forth on like, how do you actually engage with friends? How do you, how do I repair in my own life some of those relationships? And you know, what I've come down on is that it has to be very much. One-on-one, I think you can really, you can do it at an individual level, right?

You can reach out, you know, I've started occasionally reaching out to say, Hey, you know, just FYI, um, we should grab a drink. The world has reopened. I actually moved, I moved across the country during Covid, so I, I'm having this sort of funny experience of like, reconnecting with people where I, I feel like I just kinda like ghosted.

I just like disappeared. I don't live in that city anymore. I have a whole other life now. And, and then feeling like it's actually a, it's just a really weird experience how that feels like it ended and something new began and I'm very happy with the new, but I do acutely feel like I myself. Let the world get away from me in, in certain ways and like now is probably the time to repair some of those friendships, repair some of those relationships.

And so, you know, I've tried to prioritize it lately, but it's hard to do that at scale. That's the issue, right? I feel like we can all do it individually, but what do you do when you're trying to bridge reality back writ large? And that, I think, becomes the area where, as long as people are incentivized to continue propagating the bullshit, you know, in the ways that we've described, you are bumping up against a system of incentives that is really, really intractable.

What I liked about Invisible Rulers, the reason I picked that for the title of the book, I. As you note, like it's a reference to the 1920s, this idea that it's a quote from Edward Bernay is the sort of father of modern pr actually, and what he's saying is there are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions, meaning they are steering people, they're, they're moving them in particular directions, and he talks about it in a very matter of fact way.

This was not seen as some sort of ethically dubious thing to do. It was, it's funny you mentioned Philip Morris. Edward Bernas actually winds up trying to create demand for women to smoke, right? This is something that he's actually sort of firsthand involved in at the time, again, in the 1920s, 1930s, and he does it by appealing to the individual, but also recognizing that you have to appeal to them in their identity as a member of a group.

And if you convince them that not only should you smoke, but you know as an extremely classy, very affluent woman, you know of a certain social standing, all of your peers are smoking, so you too should smoke. And so you kind of create demand and you really reinforce it through those social ties. What I loved about it, what I loved about the book and the idea and the concept was the way in which it was so applicable back for media ecosystem iterations ago because it recognizes that it is just a core component of human nature.

It is the way that we think, it's the way that we understand ourselves and our place in the world.

[00:44:26] Jordan Harbinger: It's a wild to look back at that old stuff and some of those old ads, they didn't need smooth language back then. They could be like, if you smoke, you'll stay thin and pretty and it's like, wow, that's literally what they say.

[00:44:37] Renee DiResta: Yes, exactly. Attractive women smoke Virginia Slims or whatever.

[00:44:41] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, and it's like, oh gosh, that's really just right out there. Just very blunt. Later on it became like, oh, Joe Camel, look how he's cool. He wears a leather jacket, he plays pool. That's what cool people do, rides, motorcycles. Look at that cigarette hanging out of his mouth and it's like, okay, all right.

You have to read between the lines back then you really didn't. So those old ads are just hilarious. But it's also like, it is interesting that that eventually stopped working because people went, ah, stay thin and pretty from smoking. That's terrible. You can't say that. So instead they just show thin and pretty people smoking and that was okay.

And then we got sort of sick of that. And then it, the evolution of this stuff is really interesting. And here we are in the current iteration where we have influencers that I guess have a para. Tell us about the parasocial relationship. By the way, I love this term as well. It's such a fun thing for me to have, but it could be dangerous.

[00:45:32] Renee DiResta: It's an interesting one. So that term, it's not mine. It comes out of like fandom culture, right? The idea that, so if you are influential, usually a celebrity was sort of the canonical example of this until the last 20 years or so. Your fans believe they have a relationship with you in some way, right? They see the influencer or celebrity all the time.

You know, she's posting her whole life. These are my kids. This is what I ate today. Here's my vacation. Here I am doing laundry. Here I am as a relatable person in my car talking to you. You know, all that kind of stuff. And then people kind of follow along. They're really following along with this person's life.

So the, you know, it becomes entertainment. But they also feel like they know a lot about this person. They know their kids' names, they know what they like to do. They know all of these different details about them. So the idea of para sociality is they start to believe, you know, start to feel like that relationship is real.

And more importantly, sometimes that it's like kind of bi-directional. And so they start to have this at times, expectations of what an influencer should do, meaning should in the sense of like would do to meet the idea of them that they have in their head. And so if the influencer were to do or say something that does not fit the idea of them, this person with a parasocial relationship feels, they feel almost betrayed.

[00:46:45] Crosstalk: Yeah.

[00:46:45] Renee DiResta: They've been like, let down by this person that they consider to be almost a friend. And that is where you do start to see influencers trying to balance that, right? Because it is very, very lucrative for them at times. It keeps the fandom there, it keeps people engaged. But then at the same time, when things start to go south where they feel like, that's where you get it, that sense of like, I have disappointed my fandom by not having this opinion about this issue.

And you'll occasionally see it manifest where it's now considered a perfectly reasonable thing to do for a fan, to demand that an influencer make a statement about a world event that they care about. Yeah. Right. And so there's a, so you see that that idea that the influencer is supposed to be almost like.

Just like you, but maybe a little bit better just like you, but maybe a little bit more famous. And that manifests in some really weird ways when it comes to the audience starting to demand something, you know, demand things of the person.

[00:47:42] Jordan Harbinger: This happens to me all the time. I'll keep this short, but I answer all my dms in email.

It takes me a while, but whatever. Like, it's not immediate response, but whenever there's big world events, like October 7th, people will go, we need your voice. And I'm like, oh gosh, here it goes. When it was Masha, Amini and Iran, that was easy. Nobody's pro killing teenage girls because they didn't have their headscarf on, right?

That one was really easy. It's really easy to say, Hey, AYA, who are totally out of touch and disconnected with their entire population and kill people all the time because of political crimes and execution. Like that's an easy one. But October 7th was tough, right? Because I would say, oh my gosh, this terrorist attack is horrific.

Look at what Hamas did. And you think like, well, no one's gonna support Hamas. And then you get these otherwise reasonable people that are like, no, you're just pro genocide. And it's like, where would you get that idea? Where would you get the idea that I want all Palestinians dead when I said something?

Nothing of the sort. Right? And it's because they're surrounded with people who are like, well, anybody who doesn't agree with us is just on the absolute wrong side of history and cannot be reasoned with in any way. It's very tough. It's hard to thread that needle. And so I, I really endeavor on this show to not get political and to cover things from as neutral an angle as possible.

But that's also a problem. You're not supposed to be neutral. Jordan, you're supposed to agree with me, said the 100,000 people on each side of this particular event.

[00:49:06] Renee DiResta: Yeah. I, I think, you know, this is not something that I personally experience. This is the nice thing about being in academia is like, well, you know, there's very important nuance that we should consider in these things.

Um, but mostly people just don't ask for, people don't ask for my opinion on this. And that is something that I feel is. It's the price I think of having that, that relationship with a very, very large audience, right? People think like there's an expectation that comes along with it, and then the influencer has to live up to that.

[00:49:32] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's tough. You, I really enjoyed the section of the book on archetypes of influencers, right? There's entertainers, okay. The guy who does the comedy videos and skits, whatever. That guy's, those guys are fun. There's plenty of them. Explainers. I think that might be where I'm at. I'm not totally sure. The bestie.

That would be such a fun one that I would be terrible at, right? Where you're doing your makeup in your car and you're just like, oh my God, my kid today did this thing and I wanna tell my audience about it. My wife loves those. She's like, I follow this mom. And she's so funny. Right. And I'm here for it.

It's great. Idols. I'm not sure. I guess that's like Taylor Swift or something like that on social media.

[00:50:07] Renee DiResta: Yeah. The ones who are, you know, they've kind of crossed into that upper echelon of almost celebrity, what we would've called a celebrity back in the day, but they're first internet made. It's the people who are selling you an aspirational lifestyle, right?

Yeah. They're not even pretending that you can achieve this thing. It's much more like, look at my insane shoes that my, my sugar daddy just gifted me. You know? I mean the content, you know, she's a hardworking lady, Renee. No. There's an entire subset of TikTok that is just people talking about how to sugar date

[00:50:37] Crosstalk: sugar.

Daddy,

[00:50:38] Renee DiResta: one thing that is absolutely fascinating about TikTok is you start somewhere and for your point, you just, my God, do you wind up in some weird places?

[00:50:45] Jordan Harbinger: It sounds like you're throwing, you're fishing out there, you're throwing some fish hoops out there, Renee. If anybody wants an academic sugar, baby Renee de Resta might be on the market.

[00:50:54] Renee DiResta: Oh man, I was doing this project. Oh, you know what it was? It was, there was a whole slew of TikTok posts about birth control, right? And how it was terrible for you. This is a really interesting thing because. The New York Times wound up looking deeply into it a couple months later and finding that there didn't seem to be a discernible drop in fulfillment of birth control prescriptions.

Ah,

[00:51:14] Crosstalk: good.

[00:51:14] Renee DiResta: But there was this massive sort of set of narratives around birth control. I'm not an expert when it comes to birth control. I was just sort of following along to get a sense of like, what are the stories people are telling when you watch one, how many more do you get? And sort of my, uh, what I pay attention to.

But what's interesting is, you know, you start with birth control, you get into PCOS, then they get into weight loss. Then you're in ozempic land, then you're in liposuction land. Then you get to plastic surgery, TikTok. And I was like, man, I have gone on a journey.

[00:51:44] Crosstalk: Yeah, you're in the rabbit hole, you're in the orbit.

And

[00:51:46] Renee DiResta: that's how it happens. It's just this series of connections and each time, even if you hate watch it or a GOG watch it where you're like, what is this? Yeah. You get more of it. And it is definitely a, um. A whole trajectory. So going into the different types of influencers though, that notion of the idol was that there is this component of the people who are aspirational versus the people who are just like you.

And it's a different style of communicating, but it's like, you know, different kind of classes of content creators. And I wanted to try to tease apart what are the different styles by which these relationships form.

[00:52:21] Jordan Harbinger: It was really interesting to see these different types. There's also gurus, there's political influencers, activists, political influencers I guess are just hyper-partisan.

It's interesting 'cause while I might be an explainer and email and dms, like I'm kind of doing the best he thing, right? But on feedback Friday, there might be a guru element 'cause I'm giving advice to people that have asked for it. Yeah. And so it's like, oh, okay. I don't fit neatly into one category. So it's just kind of fun for me to see how this this happens.

But maybe that's also really good because it allows me to do different things. I think if you're doing it in a manipulative way, then it's kind of scary to look at these. 'cause you see like. A political influencer, but then they're a guru because they have a health cure that's a bunch of crap that you can only get from them, and it's like some of these blend together in particularly devious ways.

You've got a concept called complex contagion. Tell me what this is.

[00:53:09] Renee DiResta: That's Staman Ola. That's his concept. He's a social scientist at U Penn, if I'm not mistaken. It's a really interesting idea. So people think about information passing almost like a virus from person to person, and there's a belief that if you hear something, you're going to be attuned to it, right?

You might believe it all of a sudden, and that's not quite how the world works. And so what Damon writes about is this idea of complex contagion where there are certain types of either significant shifts in ways communities think about a thing, and how does that happen? Well, somebody has to be essentially the gatekeeper that normalizes that idea for a lot of people.

So the question is, does the influencer come up with the idea or do they pull it out of the community? Right? Is it something that is, you know, the influencer is very, very closely tied oftentimes to the community that they are part of, and they just have more followers. They just are better networked. But the influencer sees the things that the people in the community are saying.

Maybe he reads the subreddit, maybe he sees the tweets. And the way that an idea goes from being in the ether to reaching more people is actually the influencer acts in many ways as the gatekeeper deciding to take the idea that is percolating around the edges from the fringe and move it into the mainstream.

So rather than this idea of people are absorbing their ideas because somebody sort of from on high has decreed them and pushed them out into the world, what you're actually seeing is the influencer looking around, taking stock of where are the acceptable opinions in my community, and then gradually deciding when something kind of hits a particular threshold, that it's actually okay to bring that out and push that out to the community.

Because when the influencer says a thing, he's kind of staking his. Reputation on the idea that the thing is true. So how do you hit a point where you decide that enough people all think like you, that it's okay for you to express that idea or that arguing for a particular type of behavior is something that now there's enough people that you see repeating it, that then you decide that you too can put your reputation on it and push it out into the world.

So the idea of complex contagion and how behavior spreads, he has a whole book called How Behavior Spreads that actually kind of walks through this process in a bunch of different ways.

[00:55:22] Jordan Harbinger: I see influencers on Twitter. I uh, it's weird 'cause I never use the word influencers, but I guess I'll use it a hundred times in the next hour.

But they say, you comment on this in the book, and I, I never noticed that this was a thing really. But they say big if true, they'll make some outlandish claim and they'll say big if true, which it's kind of genius when you think about it, right? Because it can be complete nonsense. And if enough people are like, yeah, oh my God, they're like, well, I guess my audience thinks it's true.

And now I broke this to them. But if they're like, dude, this is a bunch of bs, why would you spread that? Well, look, I said big if true.

[00:55:54] Renee DiResta: Exactly. I didn't say

[00:55:55] Jordan Harbinger: it was true.

[00:55:55] Renee DiResta: It's like the insurance policy. It's the fig leaf. You, you get to say the thing without regally saying the thing. So you're doing that, right?

You're taking that idea, you're putting it out to your audience, but you're doing it almost like a trial balloon, which is exactly like you're saying. If they love it, then great. You were just the person who, you know, had the balls to say what nobody was saying. And if they hate it, well then, you know, you move back into, oh, I if true.

And okay, well now I know this is not the thing and I'm gonna move on. And one thing that became really wild was watching it happen during election 2020, where that became the way that we would see these random stories. During the election, there were all of these allegations of fraud, and most of them turned out to be completely not true, but somebody would say, I see ballots in a dumpster in Sonoma County was one of them.

And this man takes a photograph, random guy takes a photograph of these ballots and then begins to tag in the influencers because he's been told that there is going to be massive voter fraud. This is what he hears from all the influencers around him. A lot of the media and the, you know, kind of right wing media at the time was saying this.

Donald Trump was saying this. And so he sees this thing in his community. He takes a photograph, he tags in the influencers, and that's when the biggest true starts right now. It turns out that those were ballots from two years prior that were being disposed of in accordance with, I think it was California state law.

And so the actual facts of the matter are these are some envelopes from prior things. This is not current ballots. There's no evidence of fraud. There's nothing untoward here. But the influencers, after they've done the big if true thing with this moment that they've pulled from this random guy on the internet, they don't ever actually go back and do the, actually guys, we totally got that wrong.

This is the real story. Mm-Hmm. They kind of, and so the big of true, you know, you never, they never go back to tell you what happens if it was false. And that becomes a dynamic by which, like you see that repetitive process happening over and over and over again multiple times a day in some cases where big if true, big if true, just lets the rumor mill push bullshit out constantly.

And then there's never an accounting for what happens when it's false. They don't even have to tell their audiences about that because everybody's already moved on to the next thing.

[00:58:05] Jordan Harbinger: Honestly, I feel like even if they did, aren't people just gonna reject information that doesn't fit their identity and their core beliefs?

Like you could say, turns out my friend was working at this election thing and he showed me why these ballots were disposed of and it was totally proper. People are gonna go, Hmm, are you in on it now? Or are, maybe your friend is lying to you and you're just being naive. You need to do better. They're not gonna go.

Oh, exactly. I guess we were all wrong about that. Whoops. Right. That's not gonna happen.

[00:58:33] Renee DiResta: No, it isn't. That is getting back to the kind of bespoke realities problem we were talking about earlier. Depending on who you trust, you're gonna make a determination because you yourself are not ever gonna be in a position to examine those ballots yourself.

Right. So you have to decide based on what the people around you say, and if you yourself are a committed member of the community. Even if in the back of your mind you're thinking, yeah, I don't know. I mean, the ballot explanation sure does seem plausible, you know? Yeah. I mean, old ballots go in the garbage at some point, you're not necessarily gonna wanna be the person to stick your head up and say, no, no, no guys, we're all wrong.

[00:59:07] Jordan Harbinger: Have you seen what happens to people who say, actually this is totally makes sense. I found the law that says you should just throw old ballots away. I mean, have you seen what happens to those people? You do not wanna check your Twitter feed for the next 12 hours if you're the person who sits, puts that one in the thread.

Twitter, you had a great point in your book about why Twitter is combative. And truth social is not as active as Twitter. The combat is the point. Yeah. Right. Like the idea is you are out there shredding everyone where truth, social I, I guess is all sort of right-leaning so they don't fight. So it's less fun, I guess.

I don't know. Fun. Is that the right word? Less entertaining?

[00:59:42] Renee DiResta: Well, I think it actually is fun, right? This is the, you know, I've gotten involved in like local political issues where I have really strong points of view and I'm like, God dammit, I'm gonna fight for this thing and I'm gonna be out there and I'm gonna be tweeting and I'm gonna, well, I used to be tweeting.

I'm gonna be. Truing or whatever, and not truthing, um, threads. Threading,

[00:59:59] Crosstalk: threading, threading.

[01:00:01] Renee DiResta: And you know, you decide like, okay, I am going to get in the arena and, and mix it up. One thing that we saw, I'll use the ballot example again actually. 'cause it was interesting. I remember on election day of 2020, we were looking at the story of Sharpie Gate.

Do you remember that one Sharpie gate that was the, um, no, that was like the, it was this theory that in Arizona, Sharpie markers had been given to Trump voters specifically because then the machines wouldn't read the ballot. So the argument was that because the Sharpie machine bled through, you know, when you filled in your Scantron with Sharpie, and if you're a certain age, you probably remember this too, right?

You would never fill in a Scantron on a school test with a Sharpie. Like Scantron machines don't read sharpies. So there's this rumor that these Sharpie markers are being given out only to Trump supporters to invalidate their ballots. This goes wildly viral on Twitter. What was really interesting was that I was looking at Parler at the time.

Oh yeah. Parler was almost a different sort of, right-wing social network. And what you see is on Parler where everybody is largely ideologically homogenous. People are saying like, look, these Sharpie markers, they're, you know, they're doing their thing. This is how they stole the election. But people on Parler are pushing back.

They're saying, no, no, no. I vote in Maricopa County. I had this receipt, my ballot was read. I used a Sharpie marker, but my ballot got read. And so you actually see this conversation where, where when people feel like they don't have to perform and they don't have to fight, then they actually do engage very, very honestly about it.

And so in a lot of ways what we were seeing on Parlor, which is very homogenous, was that back and forth? No, no. Guys, like we're coming to consensus here. It turns out like I and my three family members used a Sharpie and everything was actually fine. And then what you start to see though, is the more it becomes a thing on Twitter where it is like the rage meter is like up at a hundred instantaneously.

When people start sharing the content from Twitter back to Parler, you start to see people no longer wanting to stick their necks out. Right? They no longer wanna have that conversation, and so that's how you wind up with then this sort of viral conspiracy theory that there was a vast plot to give Sharpie markers to Trump supporters in Maricopa County, Arizona.

[01:02:05] Jordan Harbinger: There's a lot of disinformation tactics like that. You mentioned one, which is called Flooding the Zone. Tell me about this. This is, unfortunately, this is something I see constantly. We all see it constantly from the Syrian war to Saudi Arabia just trying to distract us from murdering Jamal Khashoggi to, what is it, MH 17, that flight that got maybe shot down.

I made 17. Yeah. Biolabs in Ukraine. I mean, everything is, the zones are all flooded.

[01:02:31] Renee DiResta: One thing that's really in, so if you look at propaganda in decades past, going back to like Brene's in the 1920s or whatever. They're trying to persuade people. There's a belief that a people are persuadable. The mechanisms of how you do it are up for debate, but there is a belief that people are persuadable.

And two, you have to kind of reinforce things over time. Like you have to beat the same drum. You're gonna tell people the same message, maybe in 30 different ways, but roughly saying the same thing. And that's the process of persuasion. But what starts to happen in the age of social media is you no longer have to persuade people when MH 17 gets shot down.

Russia doesn't have to convince people that somebody else did it. They just have to create 30 different explanations, push them all out at the same time, and make it too hard to know what's actually true. So when you go to Twitter and you type in the hashtag of the point of concern of the day, hashtag MH 17, or the ones related to Khashoggi, or, again, pick your crisis, this happens all the time.

Now what you're gonna see is 30 different kind of contested explanations for it, and they're not gonna bother trying to persuade you. They're just going to make it so that it is too hard to figure out what actually happened. We see China doing this quite a lot. They're not necessarily good at it all the time, but you'll see all of a sudden a hundred thousand fake accounts will appear.

And the a hundred thousand fake accounts will have a lot to say about whatever the, I remember it was, uh, the Hong Kong protests, I think it was the Hong Kong protest. There was a woman who was shot in the eye with a beanbag. And it became an international meme, right? This protestor who had been shot, and this is what you see happen, right?

You start to see, as the attention of the world turns to this moment, there's this sort of person emerges as a figure. All of a sudden the protests have a face, the government has an oh shit moment where it realizes it's gotta do something about that. And so all of these accounts begin to cast doubt on the story of what happened.

Well, maybe it was this, maybe her own people did it. Maybe she was really bad, you know? And so you find yourself in this situation where if you're just searching for information in that moment, you're gonna be confronted with so many different types of things that you have to decide what's true.

[01:04:41] Jordan Harbinger: I saw tons of this on October 7th.

Like, hey. They said Hamas did it. And yes, there's a bunch of film that these people actually film themselves killing all these people. But here's a random video of a helicopter shooting. Maybe Israel killed all their own people. And somebody like some truth researcher, anti conspiracy guy on Twitter's like, actually that's an old video.

It's a French thing, and here's the context, but no one cared. 'cause then you heard, oh, well I saw a video where Israel shot their own people with a helicopter. So maybe Hamas didn't do it. And it was interesting because you have Hamas people being like, we filmed it. We want you to know that we did this.

And they're like, no, Israel didn't. And it's like, guys, maybe we've overshot the goal here a little bit. Like they don't even believe us anymore. They wanna make an ex. And I understand the impulse to not wanna believe that that happened because it's horrific. Yes. Right. But I guess the explanation that you're coming up with, which is that Israel killed its own people for sympathy purposes is also horrific, but whatever, that's not where I wanna go with this.

This strategy, though, is really unfortunate, right? 'cause it spreads to other authoritarian states, which use the same propaganda techniques against our own people. You see it in South America, but now we're seeing it all over the United States. It's not really a good indicator of a healthy public discourse.

[01:05:49] Renee DiResta: No. It relies on people having infinite attention spans and time to spend on figuring out what has happened. Twitter in particular has gotten really weird on it lately because the other thing you see is that going back to the incentives now people get compensated for their tweets. It's all things, this was not true even two years ago.

I remember when exactly that policy rolled out. But what you start to see now all of a sudden is these random accounts that recognize that they can, all of a sudden they're gonna clout chase on any random catastrophe that happens. And all they're gonna do is they're gonna go to Telegram, they're gonna type in a phrase they're gonna Telegram is where the unfiltered video is going to be.

They're then gonna go and they're gonna take that video from Telegram, they're gonna stick it up on Twitter. They have absolutely no idea what they're looking at half the time. These are not people who are experts in the conflict, know anything about the region can differentiate between Syria and and Israel.

And what you start to see though, is like they grab the video, they put it up, they say something about it, and then it goes viral. And that's because people are kind of scrolling in that moment. They're looking for information in that moment. And so if you are a paid blue check, your content is privileged.

If you have a certain follower account, your content is privileged, right? If you know how to engage with other influencers to get those sort of mutual retweets going, your content is gonna be seen, and now you also are gonna be able to monetize it. So it creates an incentive for people to go and grab this stuff and just put it up on that platform.

And that idea of, is it true or not? You kind of hope that eventually somebody, some community note person will get to it, but by that point it will have been seen 2 million times. Again. Can you correct the record? Can you get that community note out to all the people who saw the misleading content? That isn't always what happens,

[01:07:35] Jordan Harbinger: right?

It's cat and mouse, and it's so low cost to produce this. The benefit to the bad actors really high. And it's monetized now. So if people are like, I don't even care if this is true. I'm just trying to earn a thousand dollars a month off Twitter. 'cause I live in a country where that goes pretty far. Or I like the attention.

What is it? A shit stir? I like the attention from doing this and so I'm gonna do it. Tell me about the Liar's dividend. This is kind of what we're, we've been dancing around with the October 7th stuff.

[01:08:00] Renee DiResta: Yeah, so that's a term that a law professor named Danielle Citron came up with a couple years back. So back in 2018, it became pretty clear that what is now called generative AI was going to be able, that there were gonna be certain technologies that were gonna be able to produce indistinguishable video, audio, text, and images, right, where you would not be able to tell that it was not either produced by a person in the context of text or that it was showing you unreality, right?

A completely generated reality as opposed to a real thing that had happened in the world. And what is interesting about that is that there's two things that happen as a result of it. One, it creates even more doubt as the content begins to get better again. Those of us who study social media start talking about this in 20 18, 20 20, kind of watching the technology evolve and writing about, you know, what's coming.

As it becomes mainstreamed. Last year in 2023, what you start to see happen is anybody can go and create this stuff. Now. It's very democratized. It's very easy to get your hands on back in 2020. Those of us who had access to it were more academics who had research accounts, but now anybody can do it. And then you have that fragmentation of trust as well.

So if an account that you like and trust tweets an image. It is generated. You might still believe it, even if somebody else is telling you, no, no, that's generated. But the other thing that starts to happen, the Liar's dividend, is that the existence of the technology to create unreality also creates an opportunity to deny things that are real.

Meaning what you see will use, feel like October 7th in Israel's become the, the recurring example.

[01:09:37] Crosstalk: Yeah.

[01:09:38] Renee DiResta: But the example of it, in this particular case, what you started to see was creations of fake images from the conflict zone, right? Images of children, you know, sometimes gore images that were in fact fake being pushed out as real.

But then there was a particularly kind of terrible moment where. Images of the corpse of a baby were shown by the Israeli government, and some of the image was blurred, and somebody ran it through an AI image detector. I think Ben Shapiro tweeted it, right? He kind of boosted this image, the sort of horrors of the conflict.

Somebody ran it through an AI image generator and because of some of the pixelated blurs, the AI image generator. Returns that the image was fake.

[01:10:19] Crosstalk: Ah,

[01:10:19] Renee DiResta: so now all of a sudden you had a, a false positive fake meaning the image was very real, and it was in fact actually the body of a child, but it was able to be dismissed because they had this sort of corroborating screenshot where they're like, no, no, no.

Look, this AI checker tool tells me that it's fake. Then all of a sudden you see a narrative begin to emerge about how the Israeli government has fabricated images of dead children to generate support. And so then people actually begin attacking Ben Shapiro for sharing a generated image. It becomes a whole social media moment, and again, you know, a bit later it'll kind of get sorted out, but you will still see people.

Referencing this as, and they made images of fake babies, and that becomes, you know, you can deny the real, because the capacity to create the fake exists

[01:11:08] Jordan Harbinger: now allow me to leverage our Parasocial relationship to promote some of the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

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Now for the rest of my conversation with Renee Dur Resta. We have done episodes on deep fakes and things like that. I think it was episode 4 86 with Nina Schick. About how generative AI can make disinformation so much worse. Right now you have fake profile photos, AI generated content instead of copy paste, cost of content creation approaches, zero deep fake photos, deep fake videos.

There's deep fake audio now. I mean, it's just, we're eventually gonna hit this inflection point where you just literally cannot tell what is real and what's not, which is really kind of scary. And we're almost there, right? Like there's tons of stuff where I go, is that real? That looks real. And then, yeah, the comments that a bunch of younger sort of like more switched on.

People are like, if this is ai, look at the profile picture. It's the same style as all the other fake AI profile pictures. The coloration's a little bit off and like their hand has six fingers. And I'm like, oh my God. Yeah, it does. I would never have noticed that. And then I go, oh, I'm old now. Shit. And so your media literacy has to be at like black belt level.

To notice this stuff without just massive amounts of investigation. That's not good.

[01:15:48] Renee DiResta: It speaks again to this idea that the user, like the average person, has to be able to tell the difference. This is something I've had a hard time with. 'cause we do a lot of work on like spam and scams, you know, SIO studies, all kinds of different types of things.

Disinformation is part of it, but spammers and scammers actually start to, they're early adopters, right? They wanna make a buck. And so the idea you can generate a whole bunch of images of like sweaters that cannot exist in the real world, but hey, here's my website with my sweaters. Let me sell them to you.

Right? So we spend a lot of time looking at that and you really, you know, you do see people engaging with this content thinking that it is real. They are being scammed. The question is, what do you do about it? Because putting the, you know, the finger things, for example. With each new iteration of a model, new capacity emerges.

Right. Or they, they get better with something like the generated fingers, the gnarly fingers. You used to see that quite a lot a year ago. You don't see that so much now. Right. So I remember I used to do work explaining, I had the whole this thing with like NPR on, like how to tell an AI generated face on LinkedIn.

And that's because at the time there was a grid and you could be like, look, the eyes are gonna be kind of looking this direction. The teeth are gonna be wrong. The ears will blend into the hairline. You know, you give people the tools, but then the next iteration of the technology, all of those signals are gone.

And then you've kind of told them these are the things to look for. So then when they don't see them, right, you've actually kind of inadvertently created this idea where they're like, oh, I know I checked the teeth, I checked the earrings, I checked the collar. And you're like, yeah, none of that works anymore actually.

[01:17:17] Crosstalk: Ah man. Now

[01:17:18] Renee DiResta: you have to look at the pupils. Right. You know?

[01:17:21] Crosstalk: Yikes. That's scary.

[01:17:23] Renee DiResta: That is, I think, you know, somebody who works in the field when we're like, I get asked a lot. Every magazine editor, like I, I, I mostly write, that's the kind of content I create. And they're like, well, you have to give guidance for people at the end, right?

You have to tell them what they can do about this. And I feel increasingly, like, it's an unrealistic expectation for me because I'm like, well, honestly, it's really, really hard and I can tell you to do these things, but it's not gonna work. At some point. That question of like, how do we engage in the world where the adversary is improving, if you will, or the, the model is improving, the technology is improving.

Telling people like, yeah, yeah, I just checked the fingers within six months. That's just not, it doesn't work anymore.

[01:18:02] Jordan Harbinger: I think even OpenAI had said recently, China and Russia have been using our tools to create disinformation. Yeah, yeah. They thankfully came out and said that so that people go, oh, okay.

That's not just a conspiracy theory. They admitted that that's happening. It just sort of proves the idea that it takes an order of magnitude, more effort to debunk nonsense than to distribute it or invent it in the first place. And now as the cost of creating it approaches zero. The cost of debunking it.

Well, it's more complex and difficult to debunk. That gap is widening, which is really kind of scary.

[01:18:34] Renee DiResta: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:18:35] Jordan Harbinger: Tell me about the majority illusion. I thought this was such an interesting concept as well.

[01:18:39] Renee DiResta: This goes back to, um, heuristics, right? Ways in which you get misled by your perception of the world.

So a majority illusion is the idea that if you wanted to try to figure out what the majority is thinking, you might say like, oh, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna type a word into Twitter and just see like where people are on both sides of the conversation. Or there's an example in the, in the Washington Post where they're like, do you think people think baseball caps are fashionable?

I think was what the example was. And if you know a couple of very, very well connected people who think that baseball caps are fashionable, you're gonna be hearing from all these people who have that opinion, even though the actual majority, the people who only know a handful of people are not represented in your experience of that conversation.

So. Let's say there are like a hundred people in the town. You're talking to 15 of them. You're talking to people who are kind of like super connected. They are telling you their opinion. You're hearing from those 15 people, you are under your, your conception of the prevalence of that belief is shaped by what you hear and what you see.

You'll see this play out where you feel like everybody you know, has an opinion, but then polling tells you something completely different, right? And then you might be like, well, the poll must be wrong, right? It's not, yes. Oh, well I only know a certain small subset of people. And so you start to see this.

Debate takes shape about where is the real majority opinion on this issue because you can have an illusory experience of it based on the people who are in close proximity to you or the loudest voices in the case of social networks.

[01:20:11] Jordan Harbinger: That's so interesting. I get emails like this explains some emails that I get where people are like, I live in a small town and I listen to your show and they just talk about something that everyone believes in the town that they now know from the episode is just not true at all.

And they'll be like, I researched this 'cause I didn't believe you. And it's very interesting to hear, and some of the examples that I hear are, my parents don't believe in political polls because every single person they know votes for the exact same candidate, every single person. They have no diverging opinions.

On politics at all in this area where this person lives and they all go to like, I think there's like two churches in some of these towns or one, so of course it's very homogenous and it's all older folks and there's some younger folks, but like there's only a handful and a lot of 'em become clergy.

And then there's this like one weirdo kid who listens to my podcast and is like, get me the heck outta here. They feel like they live in the Twilight Zone. But you can understand, I feel sympathetic towards people who live in that kind of bubble because it's very natural to live in a tribal kind of thing where everybody believes the same stuff and everybody who doesn't isn't a fricking alien or lying.

Right? I mean that's a comfortable way to live, I think.

[01:21:24] Renee DiResta: Yeah, I think it is. I think. This is why then people have os moments where,

[01:21:28] Crosstalk: yeah. Where

[01:21:29] Renee DiResta: they're like, whoa, this is this landslide victory for this person that I don't know, a single person who voted for. And then you get again, where it kind of intersects with the conspiracy theory.

Well, it must have been rigged, right? Because nobody I know thinks that, right. And that's where you start to see that intersection between majority illusion and these sort of misperceptions of where opinions may be. And what you also see though, I think I use majority illusion, I, I've referenced it a couple times, but I know I talked about it in cases where you do see automated accounts or fake accounts all trying to push out a very particular point of view because they wanna create the impression that.

It is normal to have Belief X. They have these accounts that will be very identitarian, right? We are all the sort of blue team. We're all the sort of red team. And then what they'll say is, like in my role as a person with this identity, I think that, so it creates the impression that if you're a Democrat, this is the belief that all Democrats hold, which means that if you yourself don't hold that opinion.

You know, you feel a little bit weird, right? Where you're like, oh, okay, maybe everybody's sort of moved over there and I'm still over here. Uh oh. Maybe I should not speak up on that issue. And that's how you start to see attempts to nudge public opinion by manipulating that perception of what is the majority or one of the ways that sort of political campaigns and influence campaigns get carried out today.

[01:22:48] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You see politicians becoming influencers. That's a trend, I think is quite dangerous.

[01:22:52] Renee DiResta: I hate it.

[01:22:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

[01:22:55] Renee DiResta: I understand it. Like this is what you have to do to get elected. For the chat we were having earlier about this is how you earn your livelihood. It's very similar. This is how you get elected.

You get your fandom, particularly politicians, where the primary is gonna be the thing that determines right. They don't have to tack to the center. They actually have to, they're gonna quote unquote, win their race in the primary because the way that the district is aligned politically, they might run against a Democrat, but there's no way that Democrat is ever gonna win.

So the thing that matters is that primary. So then they really have to appeal to that strong identitarian base by creating a fandom for themselves, by making them the avatar of the absolute most strident opinions of that point of view. No nuance whatsoever. That's how you do it. That's how you get elected.

And then if you wanna continue to get attention once you're one of the several hundred people who are in Congress, the way that you continue to get attention is to do these sorts of shenanigans and get attention for yourself. But the problem is then the hearings become theatrics. There's no incentive, right.

To govern. And, and that's where, in a funny world, I feel like my central, um, conflict on this is. In some parts, I advocate for communicators to behave more like influencers, right? You should be thinking about resonance, you should be thinking about storytelling. You should be thinking about how to engage with people beyond just dropping some facts.

But then you get to the realm of politics and I'm like, man, I wanna elect nice boring people who are gonna focus themselves on governing a country, not on performing for, uh, yeah.

[01:24:31] Jordan Harbinger: The science equivalent is Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Knight, a science guy. Like those guys, great science communicators, they, oh man, it's so engaging and fun.

We don't need them doing the hard research. Right. They can do the presentation. When it comes to politicians though, the people who are in Congress or whatever, it would be really great if we didn't have to see dick pics of Joe Biden's kids or whatever. Oh yeah. I could do without that. Right. And I think everyone could.

It's not necessary. It doesn't matter whose kid it is, it's just not professional. It makes a mockery of the whole government. It's just the problem is with science, going back to the science example, quacks have far more reach and followers than actual scientists do. Right? The person who says, I have a home remedy for X disease, that person has hundreds of thousands of followers.

Whereas the researcher who's been heads down in the lab and is like, actually, you can't cure this with Play-Doh and flower and whatever, flowers you grew in your garden, like that's not real. That person is just. Screaming into the void because they haven't built a following online. It's no longer a battle of good information or correct information, but of online persuasion and marketing skills, and that is dangerous.

[01:25:36] Renee DiResta: That was something we saw a lot in the early days of Covid. I don't know if you remember this, but Twitter in early 2020, you know, there was no vaccine at this point. It's still just the very, very, very early days. What they start trying to do is they start trying to blue check doctors, frontline doctors.

And that's because what they were struggling with was like when people are sitting on their phones doom scrolling, there's like more trucks in New York City, how do you make sure that people are actually hearing from actual doctors as opposed to people who create a social media account like Dr. John 2, 2 6 or whatever.

And so you start to see them trying to give blue checks and amplify in searches. People that they've just essentially credentialed on the platform as having some sort of base of knowledge. And then this becomes hugely controversial because then you get the people who are like, well, the platform is putting its thumb on the scale.

Mm-Hmm.

[01:26:28] Crosstalk: Yeah.

[01:26:28] Renee DiResta: And it's not neutral anymore. And it's showing these doctors, but I like these other doctors. Facebook starts doing this too. They start trying to surface Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Uh, think the World Health Organization, the CDC Singaporean Health Authority, depending on where you are in the world.

And that question of what do you amplify? Who do you amplify? And when, when it is a matter of life and death actually becomes like a hotly contested debate as the people who feel that institutional credentials are group think, whereas these, these fresh thinkers over here need to be heard more and the platforms find themselves in that situation of trying to balance that.

[01:27:10] Jordan Harbinger: I know we're running outta time. Let's talk about how to combat propaganda, right? We have to give people the ability to recognize it in the first place. Maybe we don't rush to judgment quite as fast when we see something that is an audacious claim. What else can we have people be on the lookout for here?

[01:27:26] Renee DiResta: So the way I always think about it is, um, does the thing that I've seen really piss me off? Right? Am I very angry about it? Do I feel really amped up about it? Do I feel like this is something I absolutely must retweet or respond to? And I think that the best response to that feeling is actually to stop.

I think it is very counterintuitive. You really feel like, okay, I need to share this thing because my enemy, who I hate has just been owned, you know?

[01:27:51] Crosstalk: Mm-Hmm. Yeah.

[01:27:52] Renee DiResta: And I too should get in on that moment, or you know, when you hear things that sound. Absolutely insanely unethical or this sort of like, it almost beggars belief how a person could be that evil kind of stories.

Those are the ones where I'm actually like, okay, lemme go find this in a bunch more places. Lemme actually go figure out before I hit that button, lemme go. Actually take a look. There was a program that tried to do this in the 1930s, and I talk about it in the book. It was called The Institute for Propaganda Analysis.

And it was just these professors, these civil societies, some journalists and professors, and what they started doing was making pamphlets. Where they would take, this is in the 1930s as the rise of fascism is happening in, in Italy and in Germany and other places, there are some sort of fascist sympathizers on the radio in the United States, father Coughlin is the largest, and these people start trying to not debunk the claims, but explain how the rhetoric works.

So what they're teaching in these pamphlets is they're not saying Father Coughlin got points A, B, C, D, and E wrong. What they're saying instead is when he uses language like they. This is why you feel something in that moment. And so what they're trying to do is actually expose the rhetoric and the tropes for what they are so that people can recognize the rhetoric and the tropes.

And then that sends up a kind of internal red flag where then they're like, oh, well if you use that rhetoric, let me look at that claim a little bit more carefully. And this is how they're handling it in the 1930s. And again, they're doing this with printed pamphlets handed out at the local, like bowling league.

[01:29:21] Crosstalk: Mm-Hmm.

[01:29:21] Renee DiResta: Card playing halls and things like this. It's like a community driven effort to educate people. Not on what is the fact of this random speech over here, but rather here is why that speech works. Here's how demagoguery works. This is why you feel that swell of rage or pride or anger when you hear wording in these terms.

And I kind of think that there's actually value to trying that again today. I think that when you have that feeling of, man, that person I really hate has just been owned, yeah, that actually should be the moment to do that extra check because it is what plays on your feelings and your biases and your beliefs and that's where you have to be a little bit more careful.

[01:30:03] Jordan Harbinger: In the book you, you have quite a few tricks of the trade, right? Transfer of authority. Card stacking Bandwagoning. Can we touch on a couple of these? I feel like these are useful.

[01:30:12] Renee DiResta: Yeah. I, I wish I had them up in front of me. Oh yeah. Um, I feel like I'm not gonna, you could get it wrong. Definitely. I'm not gonna do it justice.

Yeah. Um, no, it's more things like glittering generality is one that they use where they're talking about just this idea that all people believe this. All Italians think that all Jews think this, you know, these sorts of ways in which people are scapegoated as a community. That sort of rhetoric of us versus them becomes very interesting.

Bandwagoning, you get into this notion of everybody's doing it. Everybody believes this. Why don't you, of course, if everybody believes it, you don't wanna be left out. You don't wanna be the only Democrat or Republican or what have you, that doesn't believe what all of your kind of ideological cohort believes.

And so you start to see them articulating these different tools. And what I actually loved about it. Was that when they make these pamphlets, they annotate them with these little images. And so they assign, like, I think the glittering generality, if I'm not mistaken, had like a diamond. Literally it looks like an emoji diamond.

And this is in the 1930s. I do a lot of academic talks and stuff, a lot of lectures, corporate lectures too. And I started using emojis like almost as like bullet points when I was misinformation. Let's use this picture disinformation. Here's a little devil. It's more deliberate, right? There's like an intent to be deceptive.

Conspiracy theories, like can I use emojis almost as like an anchor to break up the words to make it more receptive. And then I'm doing this research for the book and I'm opening these pamphlets from the 1930s and I was like, man, I thought it was original. Yeah, here's the emojis. Here they are right here in the 1930s.

Why don't we have this curriculum in the United States today? Why aren't we talking about things in these terms? So I kind of loved that as just this little fine from a set of archives that made me very happy and made me think we should try this again.

[01:31:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I wish there was something like this where you could train middle school kids with it, maybe because those are the ones that are gonna get wrapped into, like, that's a skillset they would start using there and then just take throughout the rest of their lives.

Like media literacy should be like a required class in middle school.

[01:32:14] Renee DiResta: It is for, I don't know how old you're, I know you have kids also. My oldest, oldest two and four.

[01:32:17] Jordan Harbinger: They're not even in school. Yeah. Oh, okay. So

[01:32:18] Renee DiResta: you're not there yet. So my oldest is 10 and he does get media literacy. And I remember in kindergarten he came home with this lesson on not everything on YouTube is real.

[01:32:30] Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah. My son asks me about that, like, this is not real. And I'm like, no, he, this person cannot fly. 'cause they drank a can of Red Bull.

[01:32:38] Renee DiResta: Right, right, right. This was like a Canadian company that had produced the lesson or something and it was Prime Minister Trudeau has a house hippo, I think, if I remember was the story.

And it was like a new story about how he kept a hippo in his house. My kid is obsessed with YouTube. It is the thing for middle schoolers. And so it was very much, they did in fact do that. I feel like the kids get it. I would like to get it like into AARP's hands.

[01:33:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's so funny. My son does say, that's not real, and I'm like, you're right.

It's not real. But I can show that to my dad and he's like, they got flying cars now. And I'm like, dad. Come on man.

[01:33:14] Renee DiResta: No, my kid uses AI image generators himself now, which is also sort of a funny thing, right? So he understands that you make this thing on mid journey. And I remember having a conversation with him 'cause he was doing some art and he was like, yeah, so I generated five or six pictures of black beard for my report on pirates and then I picked the one that didn't have any deformities and then dah, dah, dah.

And I was like, wow,

[01:33:36] Jordan Harbinger: that's amazing. I don't even know how to do that. That's so fun. How awesome is that They that they're learning that. Alright, I know we are outta time. You've been super generous with your time. I'm gonna end with this. Why do we think Covid broke so many people's brains online? What happened?

It seemed like everything was okay in the beginning. We were kind of all in it together and then it was like towards the end and afterwards it has just been, it's like, what happened to you? You're a crazy person now.

[01:34:01] Renee DiResta: So there, first of all, there were real institutional screw ups. This is where I feel like some of them deserve grace.

There was the idea of you cannot know this in this moment. And you really have, do you remember the, the conversation around masking in San Francisco? Yeah, I was in San Francisco at the time. Huge thing. And actually you had very influential people in tech tweeting about how everybody should be wearing masks long before the CDC was telling people that they should be wearing masks.

And I thought this was interesting. I was like, well, you know, like they're getting this from the guidance over here. And everyone's like, the guidance is shit. You know? They need to get on top of it. They're leading from behind. And then they change their guidance. And then it reinforces the idea that they have been slow to act, that they have not taken the series of events into account.

Of course, then you have the blowback that then happens a year later where then people decide that masks never did anything anyway. And so then they're outraged that they did change their minds. So you have two things that are happening. One, you have institutions that are reticent to communicate. They are not very good at being transparent.

They're not saying, this is our best guess of what is true in this moment, at this time. You do have things where the decisions are politicized. I remember the, um, decisions about whether people should protest. There was about a thousand epidemiologists for public health officials who signed a letter saying, well, social justice is something we should, there's a public health crisis too, and you should feel free to go out and protest.

Meanwhile, people are also being told, don't go to your grandmother's funeral. So this creates. There's a sense that some group of people all of a sudden have become representative of public health as a whole. They have expressed their opinion. It is then processed as the all of public health believes this thing.

It's seen as very partisan. And then you start to see the erosion of trust in this notion of, these people don't speak to me, they don't speak for me. Another thing that starts to happen in Covid is people are experiencing both sometimes the death of family members, right? So the disease is very, very real, or nobody in their family, or nobody that they know has caught covid.

They can actually, again, they feel like nobody has this, this isn't a thing that's in my community. And so what they're experiencing is the loss of community, the loss of livelihood. Their jobs are shut down. They can't work. And so they're having a, a particular experience. And then with all of that, with all the sort of good faith problems that begin to happen, you then have, of course the bad faith actors who then pick up these things, spin them up, and then push them out to more of the communities where they're like.

Not only did the CDC get this wrong, they got it wrong on purpose. On purpose,

[01:36:38] Crosstalk: right. And

[01:36:39] Renee DiResta: then there's some conspiracy theory that goes along with that. You know, they're bought by China or so and so wanted to conceal such and such or what have you. So that I think becomes then where people fall on those lines, what they trust, who they trust, how they live their life.

And then how opinionated they are and how vocal they are about those opinions, about what other people should be doing starts to create those rifts and divisions. And that, I think is what you start to see happen. People really have a very personal lived experience of this crisis, and it does feel very isolating.

It does not necessarily feel like you're all in it together. It feels like maybe your small family is, maybe the people in your group chat are, maybe the people in your church are, but then there's all those other people out there who are doing things to interfere with. The way that you want to handle this in some way.

So it begins to feel very adversarial also.

[01:37:29] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Interesting. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and your work on fighting disinformation misinformation. I mean, you are really, it's gotta feel like there's those cartoons where you plug the, the whole water comes outta the barrel and they, they put their finger in it, but then the whole dam starts doing it and you're putting your toes in.

Yeah. That's gotta be what you feel like doing something like this.

[01:37:48] Renee DiResta: Yeah. It's a, it's a weird job, I'll say that. Well,

[01:37:51] Jordan Harbinger: thank you very much for sharing with us. Much appreciated.

[01:37:53] Renee DiResta: No, thanks for having me. It was great to chat with you.

[01:37:56] Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with the one and only Dr.

Drew Pinsky of Loveline fame. Always love that guy. It's like a movie script. This person was saying a bunch of crap didn't make any sense. Yeah. And then you said something along the lines of, is there someone else in there I can talk to? And then they were like, sure. Oh

[01:38:14] Clip: yeah. I could tell it was a multiple.

Yeah, that's a pretty easy thing for me to tell you. Listen, with your whole body, okay. You don't listen with your ears. And that really started happening with dealing with drug addicts out in the clinic because. They pull you into a vortex. If I hear the sound, you know the little cartoon with these guard?

Yoga. Yoga. Yeah, sure. I know I'm with a drug addict. Okay. When I hear that YY yoga sound in my head, I go, uh, somebody's doing drugs. I just know it. I'm just gonna be sitting here listening to somebody going, ha ha ha. And all of a sudden I go, yoga y and I go, oh, okay, I got it. I get to stop listening now and just start asking what they're taking, how much they're on, that kind of stuff.

I'm thinking right now of this guy that, uh. Called us and wanted to know. Women always freak out when they find out what I was in jail for. And all of a sudden Adam goes, wait a minute. Find out that you were in jail or find out what you were in jail for. He goes, what I was in jail for? And we go, oh, well what were you in jail for?

I broke into a mausoleum and I twisted off the head of an old lady and boiled it to a skull 'cause I needed it for my little brother's Snakes Aquarium. And I thought, wow. Wow. And you don't understand. That might be a little disturbing to people. Why?

[01:39:20] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So he

[01:39:21] Clip: was psychopath. Psychopath. Yeah.

[01:39:24] Jordan Harbinger: Self-esteem obviously doesn't care if you're successful.

[01:39:26] Clip: Right. Self-esteem is something established, I think by eight five. I mean, you can enhance it and you can move it a little bit, but most of it is set early and mine was bad. Yeah. That's okay. That's all right. I, I, you know, it just, if it gives you trouble, if it makes you. Feel bad if it gives you symptoms as it pairs your functioning, that's therapy time.

Okay. Did you ever try therapy for that 11 years? Oh my God, not for that per se. I was having overwhelming anxiety. That was my main reason. At least that's my wife's reason for.

[01:39:55] Jordan Harbinger: For more with Dr. Drew, including what experiencing imposter syndrome usually reveals about you and how we can spot the behaviors of addiction and others as well as in ourselves.

Check out episode 72 right here on the Jordan Harbinger show. Great conversation. I feel. I always feel like I could talk to her for just hours longer. Influencers now show not only products, you're welcome, but ideologies, which is dangerous because I'll be honest, most of these people, they don't think that hard about what they're selling you.

They just want the clicks, hashtags, viral content, online, crowds and mobs. They can force something to trend. Trying to moderate. This, of course, turned into accusations that platforms are biased against certain ideologies or agendas. We're seeing that with literally every platform that tries to do something about this.

It really does seem like the rumor mill and the propaganda machine have essentially collided. And the problem is people, when we talk about something that the mobs don't like, I. We get canceled, we lose income. So then people go to independent media like Substack. Nothing wrong with that, but then they have to cater to what their audience wants or they won't get paid by the audience or get donations.

So people's survival starts to depend on catering to the audience, not just serving the audience, catering to what the audience already wants to hear. So now they're playing instead of a role of journalist or investigator, they're just placating and pandering to that audience and the audience that's engaged the most.

And that usually ends up being people in one extreme or another. This is audience capture. Small timers like me, you know, we started as anti elite. Ah, the big media. They're never gonna air the things we want to talk about. And I guess now we kind of are the elite. There's responsibility that comes with this.

News shows versus podcast and YouTube. The most popular show on CNN is basically about as popular as this podcast. So if you add the amount of podcasters and YouTubers together in our impact, we are way bigger than newscasters with basically none of the oversight. Now, sometimes that's good. We can talk about things we want to talk about, we can go off topic, we can manage our show in the way we want, but unfortunately, it also means we can just make up a lot of crap or platform complete nin income poops without checking anything that they say because they're popular or they get clicks.

That's really it. That's a real problem. And again, as discussed, a lot of this is bought and paid for by America's enemies, especially Russia. The internet research agency was founded by Yevgeni Prego. He's dead now. Remember the Wagner guy who got shot down out of the sky? Well, their job was essentially to create a bunch of fake Americans and fake international accounts that would engage on stuff and get stuff trending online.

They got exposed. Obviously, different organizations doing the exact same thing exists. They were highly effective. RT and foreign propaganda outlets. Well, very timely, isn't it? I recorded this episode a while ago, but now we see that Russia Today, or RT, is essentially Kremlin backed, nonsense bought and paid for.

What they do is essentially create anti-American, or anti, I should say, democratic propaganda by hiring well useful idiots. They tried to hire me, I'm a, and I said no. So I don't know if I'm an idiot for turning down the money, but I refuse to be useful to the Kremlin. My goal is actually quite the opposite.

It might start with animals or disaster videos, right? They play some real news, then they change to propaganda once they've recruited an audience. We see this not only on rt, but we see this on Facebook pages, social media accounts. Now we see fake influencers writing to support agendas, but they can also run coordinated amplification operations.

There was an example a couple years ago where influence farms ran a Promus protest and an anti-Muslim protest across the street with one another. I can't help but think that was a stunt or a test. They're doing this at a large scale right here in the us, Canada, Australia, everywhere else, everywhere in the free world essentially.

And the irony is that platforms designed to connect the world have essentially made it impossible to agree. On a shared reality. And yes, there's foreign influence on those US social media platforms, but the real misinformation is done absolutely willingly by local American influencers, sometimes paid. I know that's the big scandal right now, but honestly, it's quite rarely the case.

I think a lot of these people are just happy with the clicks. They're happy that their ego is being placated. Even I got offered to spread a fake covid nonsense by an agency working for China. They wanted me to say, post a video saying it was from the American white-tailed deer. I ended up exposing this on the China show.

They did an episode about this 'cause they were getting the same crap as well during C and after COI. We are really facing the paradox of tolerance. Free societies tolerate authoritarian propaganda because of our values. Even though this messaging is actually against our values and the solution is media literacy, knowing this happens, being able to decipher nonsense.

Uh, unfortunately, crazy Uncle Frank at Thanksgiving is rarely that person, and for me, it's just a shame to see influencers and podcasters helping spread disinformation at an frankly, an alarming rate. They say, oh, I'm just asking questions now. That's the sort of hack nonsense journalist excuse too. I'm just asking questions.

We're just having a conversation. They know what they're doing. This is deliberate, and they're paid to do it either directly by Russia as we're seeing in the news lately, or simply by sponsors because they're getting clicks by making you angry and spreading absolute bs. It's a shame. I wish it weren't the case, but again, the solution is media literacy and knowing how to identify this stuff in the first place.

All things Renee arrested will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, and ways to support this show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter, wee bit wiser. The idea behind this is to give you something specific, something practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes, and if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

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So if you know somebody who could use a little media literacy or is interested in this phenomenon of audience capture and why everything seems so extreme online, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.