In July 2020, just as we were finding our sea legs with this podcast, Imran Ahmed joined to discuss the state of disinformation occurring around the world. As the founder of the UK’s Center for Countering Digital Hate, he had just produced a report that found anti-vax organizations were reaching 58 million people on social media—and this was well before the COVID vaccines were developed. The total amount of money spent by anti-vax groups and advertisers targeting their followers on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube turned out to be roughly $1 billion.Imran’s group kept reporting and we kept covering them. You probably remember the Center thanks to its Disinformation Dozen report, which profoundly impacted awareness of just how much anti-vax leaders were monetizing their supplements, seminars, and other supposed COVID “interventions.” The report even reached the White House where Joe Biden called out the Disinformation Dozen during a press conference. What’s changed in the nearly two years since we had Imran on? Well, a lot—and in some ways, not much at all. Julian interviews Imran this time around after having met up in person at the Defeat the Mandates rally in downtown Los Angeles. Imran discusses what’s changed, what hasn’t, and how the bottom line remains the same: namely, the conspiritualist’s bottom line. They also talk about the nature of free speech in an internet filled with disinformation. Before hearing from Imran, Derek and Julian briefly discuss the state of disinformation and free speech online, which Derek frames in terms of urban planning and the concept of legibility.
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew is working hard on the final touches of our book right now, so we are going to handle this Semi-solo duo, I guess you can say.
So you can stay up to date with us on all of our social media channels.
Independently, we are all on Twitter at basically our names.
Derek Barris and Julian M. Walker is your new handle.
most recent handle.
We are also on Instagram where we mostly post occasionally up on YouTube and TikTok.
And of course we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month you can help support us as well as get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
Conspirituality 100, state of disinformation with Imran Ahmed.
In July 2020, just as we were finding our sea legs with this podcast, Imran Ahmed joined to discuss the state of disinformation occurring around the world.
As the founder of UK's Center for Countering Digital Hate, he had just produced a report that found anti-vax organizations were reaching 58 million people on social media.
And this was well before the COVID vaccines were developed.
The total amount of money spent by anti-vax groups and advertisers targeting their followers on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube turned out to be roughly $1 billion.
Imran's group kept reporting, and we kept covering them.
You probably remember the Center thanks to its Disinformation Dozen report, which profoundly impacted awareness of just how much anti-vax leaders were monetizing their supplements, seminars, and other supposed COVID interventions.
The report even reached the White House, where Joe Biden called out the Disinformation Dozen during a press conference.
So what's changed in the nearly two years since we had Imran on?
Well, a lot, and in some ways not much at all.
I interviewed Imran this time around after having met up in person at the Defeat the Mandates rally in downtown LA.
Imran discusses what's changed, what hasn't, and how the bottom line remains the same, namely the conspiritualist's bottom line.
We also talked about the nature of free speech in an internet filled with disinformation.
Now, before we get to that interview, Derek and I are going to discuss the state of disinformation and free speech online, which Derek is about to frame in terms of urban planning and the concept of legibility.
Okay, first of all, Julian, congratulations.
We've made episode 100.
Episode 100.
It's amazing.
So we'll celebrate for Matthew as well as he's heads down.
But I want to start off this conversation with what might seem like a weird angle to take when talking about free speech.
But we're going to discuss urban planning because your excellent interview with Imrod touches upon something very important that we'll talk about for a few minutes about how Free speech manifests, but if you think about it, it has to occur within the structure of a society.
In fact, the construction of society very much dictates the rules of engagement in terms of speech, and this includes the actual physical design, not only the political philosophy of the governing powers.
So I want to briefly discuss the concept of legibility and how the more you try to control the physical spaces we inhabit, the more speech is going to be limited, and on top of that, the more the population is going to rebel against what those spaces are dictating.
So we turn to Swiss-French architect and urban planner Charles-Édouard Généré, or better known as Le Corbusier, and he's remembered as a founder of modern architecture.
But unfortunately, his enduring belief in science, and I'm talking about a very precise and specific science that demanded, we can think of, right angles and universal adherence, And his belief in it was so profound that it led him to believe that function trumps form in every regard.
And this mindset led to fascist impulses because he treated the chaos of poor neighborhoods as an affront to civility.
And in fact, he was not above cleansing poor neighborhoods in the name of progress.
So the cities that implemented his plans, such as Brasilia in Brazil and Chandigarh in India, are seen today as sterile examples of bureaucratic states attempting to impose control at every level of society.
In these regions, they lack the natural chaos that one of his main critics, the journalist Jane Jacobs, consistently called for in urban design.
Now, James C. Scott points this out in his book, which is called Seeing Like a State, which is very intense but amazing.
And he points out that thriving cities are not intentionally designed as much as they emerge from numerous singular contributions that ultimately create the vibe that causes citizens to want to live and work there.
And in her classic work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs pointed out how the Manhattan of her time had a natural rhythm that included an emergent system of checks and balances that was not intentionally planned, such as grandmothers looking out of the first floor stoop of their brownstones to ensure that the neighborhood children were safe.
I personally experienced something similar when I was walking through the medinas in a number of different Moroccan cities, where no matter where I turned, some shopkeeper's eye would spot me if they needed to.
And that ensured that these heavily trafficked areas would be kept in check.
Everyone had everyone's back and it was sort of an unwritten rule.
But Le Corbusier believed that design usurped nature, and so he quite literally removed the human element from his blueprints.
And he was very influential.
He actually had plans and was in discussion about redesigning sections of Paris and Moscow, but the bureaucracies there never implemented his work.
Interestingly, if he had been a few years earlier, one certain Russian leader might have been open to his suggestion.
I'm going to take this from Scott's book, Seeing Like a State.
While the scientific pretensions of each may seem implausible to us, Le Corbusier and Lenin both believed in the existence of a master science that served as the claim to authority of a small planning elite.
Le Corbusier believed that the scientific truths of modern construction and efficient design entitled him to replace the discordant, chaotic historical deposit of urbanism with a utopian city.
And Lenin believed that the science of dialectical materialism gave the party unique insight into the revolutionary process and entitled it to claim the leadership of an otherwise disorganized and ideologically misled working class.
It's a big, big statement there, but as we've talked about before on this podcast, the fascist impulses of physical fitness culture is over a century old at least, and we can attribute this in part to Lenin actually.
Because he was one leader who partook in this mindset because he created mass exercise rituals that thousands of Russians were required to partake in.
In fact you might have heard of this because in 2014 Putin tried to reinstate this initiative.
And of course in India, we have Modi who recently tried to copyright yoga as an inherently Indian practice and has also led mass classes.
Kim Jong-un, he has his own mixed martial art concrete smashing that he loves.
So the authoritarian impulse transcends physique though.
We're talking physique, urban planning.
Scott points out that fascism creeps in whenever a government wants to make every aspect of society legible.
And that's actually the focus of his book.
He uses the cadastral maps of forestry to show how humans have destroyed the seemingly purposeless chaos out of sheer ignorance.
Again, a lot of big words there, but we call plants that affect the fields that we plant monocrops in, weeds.
And animals that exploit these systems that destroy big fields of corn, we call them pests.
Yet, these plants, or weeds, and animals, or pests, are actually necessary for the survival of the ecosystems they inhabit.
The problem isn't them, it's humans trying to force nature to bend to our demands.
I've mentioned this on the podcast before, one of the worst things you can do is have a lawn.
Like, a monocrop is never good in nature just as one race is never good for the genetic gene pool.
So just because we don't know how a forest operates doesn't mean that a balance doesn't exist.
And if anything, it's humans that destroy these wildlands due to our quest for legibility, to bring every aspect of nature under control, or to be able to make sense of things in the ways that we can understand them, but that don't necessarily reflect how nature actually works.
And the thing is, that never actually works.
Now, to be clear, Scott isn't advocating for a lack of legibility.
We have to make things legible for ourselves in order to survive.
I mean, so he understands that.
But he recognized that legibility, while it's necessary for certain civil functions, like keeping resources distributed across the span of the society, that can very quickly lead to a police state.
And the same holds true for science, and this is where we get into what we're talking about today.
I believe it's part of the impulse for rebelling against public health mandates.
So Lenin's eugenic bias was influential on the creation of gulags, and we know what Germans at the time were thinking in terms of scientific mandates.
So however misguided modernist architecture and authoritarian impulses are, We also have to recognize that they've left a long trail of problems that have caused many people to be wary of any top-down legislation when it comes to science.
We're often accused of binaries on this podcast and I just wanted to step back in terms of free speech this week and really look at What mandates create in the public imagination?
And that's honestly why I appreciate this interview so much, Julian.
Imran isn't ignorant of people's pain.
He points that out because you were at the Defeat the Mandates rally with him here in downtown Los Angeles.
And he knows that there are reasons why people are angry and confused that are not rooted in conspiracies.
We always say there are many problems with the systems we live in.
The for-profit healthcare model is disastrous, and so it makes sense that people would be infuriated by the medical system at large.
But he also brings this up and I agree with him.
I would argue that conspiritualists are focused on the wrong battles.
And as he points out so succinctly, it's likely because the anti-vax and anti-mandate leaders that we see and cover so much of, they're making a ton of money from what they're doing.
And they wouldn't be able to monetize the quest for socialized medicine in the same way.
And more importantly, Imran points out that regardless of their good intentions, even if only in their own minds, they're still dangerous people, and the grifting anti-vaxxers and disinformation spreaders are doing a lot of real-world damage.
And because they're hiding under the cover of free speech, They're able to manipulate algorithms and minds.
So they're making the playing field legible for themselves in a way that I think is very disorienting and distracting to people who are really and genuinely confused by the systems we're discussing at large.
We know that these digital spaces are spilling over into real spaces with increasing frequency, and that truly has dangerous implications for free speech.
And while we were discussing this episode on Slack, you mentioned that your views on free speech have changed since starting the podcast, and might have too, but I want you to go first on this.
There's so much that you just said that I want to comment on as well.
It's really interesting.
This idea of legibility dovetails with something that we only touched on briefly in the interview that folks are about to hear, but it's surveillance capitalism, right?
And talk about legibility, right?
That every single aspect of your online habits and how your online life intersects with your real life are being surveilled in real time.
to be used for advertising.
And one of the things that I've heard Emron say before, and probably some others, people like Tristan Harris, that on social media, you're not the customer, you're the product.
And that's terrifying in terms of everything I also want to strongly suggest that anytime the word science was used in many of those references, it was in quotes, right?
Because this is not really science.
This is, this is some weird like notion of, of precise.
It's a pseudoscientific notion that through some sort of precise adherence, for example, to right angle design elements, you can gain control over people because that, that has some sort of superior function.
Yeah, and even looking at Le Corbusier's architecture, which Scott includes pictures in his book, and you can find plenty online because he is very influential, it's very ugly.
It's very sterile.
It's cold.
If you look at the downtown squares of like Chandikar or Brasilia, you would be like, why would anyone ever hang out in these spaces?
And they don't, and that's part of the impact.
And so you actually have an increase in crime in those areas because they're not trafficked, even though they're the city squares.
Whereas when you have places that might seem a little bit chaotic, like Flatiron in New York City, right?
They made a great park there.
But it's very vibrant, even though it doesn't make legible sense in the same way.
People are able to traffic and have interactions there, which is going to make it a lot safer.
And I think we can extrapolate from that ideology and apply it very much to the digital spaces we're discussing.
Yeah, it's sort of the confusion, but it's like confusing rich cultural spaces where there are chaotic, but chaotic in the good sense of that word, right?
Improvised interactions going on in overdetermined ways.
It's confusing that for some kind of dangerous criminality or out of control quality when actually we need that.
Societies are healthier and less likely to fall prey to the various vices that I think they're trying to limit if you have those kinds of culturally rich environments.
If they're emergent from the actual people who live in that society, then yes, it will be healthy and it will maintain a balance.
Yeah, I also want to just make one quick correction in case anyone is concerned about me either.
I was not actually at the Defeat the Mandates rally.
I met Imran in the same park where the rally had happened the day before.
And he was there.
And I know you were live streaming the whole thing on Twitter as it was happening, or like you were commenting on it.
Oh, I saw you pumping your fist.
I saw you out there in the crowd.
Imran was at there because we were tweeting back and forth at each other, so sorry if I confused anyone.
Yeah, no, no, I just wanted to make that clear.
So I was in that park, getting to meet him and chat with him.
But, you know, before we get into this very difficult free speech topic, I want to just congratulate you, Derek.
You had this excellent piece published by Rolling Stone, and I think they reached out to you like Tuesday morning and it was published late Tuesday afternoon or something?
Yes, correct.
Yeah, and it's excellent.
You know, it was a direct response to the trending trailer that I'm sure everyone has seen on social media for Tucker Carlson's new docuseries titled The End of Men, and the trailer teases the viewer with footage of shirtless workouts alongside claims of testicle tanning as a strategy for massively boosting testosterone so that men don't come to an untimely end.
In your article, I was very pleased to see that you link this current conservative cultural artifact back to the fascist and eugenic aesthetics that you were actually just referencing, right?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I didn't say it explicitly in the intro section, but these are all male ideas predominantly.
They all have to do with power.
And in that article, since we've been working so much on this book and one of the sections of our book looks at the past century and a half and how we've come to where we are, so that's why I was able to turn it around so quickly because we've been doing this research.
But it was nice.
I used to write for Rolling Stone Middle East years ago about world music, but it was a random reach out.
Someone suggested me for this piece, and I'll probably do more for them.
But it is so absurd, and I made fun of it on Twitter when I posted it because testicle tanning, it's another one of those things.
What is it going to be?
We had injecting urine this week and we had testicle tanning.
But I think Jared Yates Sexton who, former guest on The Pod a long time ago, amazing history writer, he had a long thread in Substack discussing why This is so dangerous.
And I think we would both agree that as much as we laugh, we laugh because we have to make light of it because it is so absurd.
But the fact that there is so much emphasis on this hyper masculinity right now and the influence that someone like Carlson has.
So in this series, he has an episode where he goes to Hungary to talk to Viktor Orban.
He has an episode where he's talking about all health methods for masculinity.
And he has an episode I saw about The downfall of Los Angeles and how we're basically living in a dystopian hell here in Los Angeles.
Yeah, I hadn't noticed.
So anyway, I don't want to get caught in the masculinity.
We'll cover that more in other sections, but yeah, it does connect to what we're talking about this week as well.
Well, and I think we'd be remiss if we don't just flag the coining of this new term, Yeah, that was obviously bro science and homeopathy coming together.
I interviewed Jonathan Jarry for the Rolling Stone piece and he just points out again and again how, as you playfully noted, junk science fitting that homeopathy actually is and the fact that they're even using the term homeopathy in that context wrong.
So it's par for the course.
Well, they have the right to use their free speech in idiotic ways, should they so choose.
But let's go back to free speech.
Yeah, I think both of us have, we've really had to grapple with this.
You know, honestly, I've always been a proponent of that famous quote from the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire, which is usually paraphrased as, though I detest what you say, I'm willing to die for your right to say it.
A Buddhist said that, I thought.
I saw an Instagram card.
Oh, Einstein.
Yeah.
Jesus.
It comes from somewhere.
Anyway, you know, enlightenment values have always appealed to me as the principles of liberal democracy, as opposed, of course, to monarchy or theocracy, in which authoritarian controls on speech maintain a kind of unjust power.
So in that sense, I've always been a free speech absolutist, I think partially because I grew up under a police state.
I also have those sort of strong roots and the importance of being able to speak up.
I think people should be able to burn flags.
I think the American flag, in a way, stands for your right to set it on fire, should you want to express yourself in that way, should you have those intense feelings.
I am in favor of people tearing up pictures of the Pope on television if they're making an artistic and political statement.
I think symbolically desecrating religious texts is fine.
I don't think any of these things should be protected against people's feelings or opinions.
And I sort of cheer on all of those kinds of actions precisely because they're forbidden under bona fide tyrannical and anti-human regimes.
And in the same sort of breath, I also accept the argument that the ACLU made in terms of supporting the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1978.
I think that that was the correct decision.
Because sunlight is the best disinfectant to atrocious ideas, And that in turn we can then use our own free speech to argue against these ideas rather than banishing them to some sort of edgy shadow where young people can find them appealing and forbidden.
So that's the whole sort of standard free speech argument that I've always agreed with.
But here's the main thing that I've sort of come to recently.
I feel like historically, free speech has been protected as a way to preserve democracy and to limit the worst aspects of power from asserting itself against marginalized people who otherwise have been silenced.
But with the advent of the internet and social media, the stakes and the way the pieces are placed on the board has created some terrifying unforeseen circumstances.
Like it's its own beast and I think it now endangers completely unregulated speech on social media, endangers the most marginalized people rather than giving them a voice.
And Imran and I kind of get into the reasons for that in a lot more depth later.
The free exchange of public ideas in the public square used to still have some healthy constraints.
I think some of that has to do with the speed of how these mediums function.
So facts, evidence, and reason could, to a greater extent, carry the day when slower technologies allowed journalistic, political, and intellectual centers of gravity within a society to maintain basic standards of truth and even human decency.
And I feel like with social media today, the power of the worst ideas, the most incendiary falsehoods, the most lurid and fantastical conspiracies can gain greater traction than anything else and then are spread via these sort of self-cannibalizing algorithms that select the very worst genes in that meme stew to keep evolving to new levels.
So I just have to say at this point, I'm not in favor of actual censorship, and I'm not in favor of the worst aspects of cancel culture, which I think is a thing.
But I do think now that it makes sense to de-platform people with huge audiences who are spreading medical misinformation and baseless conspiracy theories online that endanger people's lives and that perpetuate this crisis we're in around post-truth dynamics.
And the one caveat I'll offer here is I think it's of crucial importance that there's some kind of eventually here as we keep figuring this out some sort of impartial oversight and that on the left we avoid the process of concept creep.
Over what counts as legitimate misinformation or disinformation, or the kind of hate speech that incites violence and radicalizes vulnerable people, because we're always in danger of being mischaracterized as ourselves becoming sort of tyrannical, censorious ideologues.
And I think that is an important thing to avoid.
Sinead O'Connor ripping up the picture of the Pope, and she was really blacklisted because of that.
That was a moment.
And I fully agree with the flag burning and Sinead.
It brings to mind a criticism we've gotten and we've addressed before, but you guys on this podcast, you criticize these people and yet you have a Patreon.
And I've gone before about the transparency model.
It's why we keep the numbers up there.
We do try to instill safeguards and guardrails in terms of what we're doing to make it as transparent as possible.
But the free speech thing is very similar in the sense that when we criticize people, they'll be like, well, they have the right to believe.
I hesitate to even say the word science in this context because science is a set of disciplines.
It's not one thing.
But I really worry about what happens when people are gaming the system and the algorithms to monetize knowing full well that it's disinformation, and I want to separate misinformation with disinformation.
Intentional on a level that the other one is not.
And I don't have an answer because we are not built to handle these digital spaces and operate within them.
But we do know the kind of damage that it causes.
I mean, we're living through it right now in so many ways.
And during the interview, I want to ask you about this because Imran, you know, discusses the history problem.
We've said before that the winners write history, but in 100 years, if humans are still around and have electricity and haven't burned everything out, how do you suss out what is historically true?
Because the more disinformation floods into people's consciousness, The more stunted our ability to understand the ramifications of history are, and we're seeing that right now with these 58 books being banned in a Florida district that happen to touch on one element of critical race theory and they don't even really, but people can't suss out history.
But as we're seeing, it's making us unable to make sense of the present.
Yeah, and that question of history is such a, it's a really interesting sort of bellwether because one of the things that I, and I have this perspective because I grew up under a real police state, I grew up with real state censored media, one official TV channel run by the government, all of that kind of thing, right?
Government controlled education, propagation of apartheid ideology in the schools.
One thing that I think a lot of people in the Democratic West, as problematic as so much of the history of the Democratic West is, one of the things that I think people take for granted or fail to be aware of, because it's the water that they've been swimming in for so long, Is the delicate balance around so many of these things, right?
The delicate balance around democracy, the delicate balance around having a free press, the delicate balance around academic institutions where there is some sense of objectivity and some sense that you can actually know things like history in a way that people can, you know, really like have solid ground under their feet and say, here, here's the history.
Here are some biased perspectives on the history.
Here's what we know for sure.
And then here's some of what we probably need to incorporate that has been left out due to old bigotry or wanting to cover with glory people who are actually pretty despicable.
But when you get into totalitarian regimes and theocracies, that's one of the first things, that's one of the first casualties, is not only truth and facts and a free press, but it's also the history.
If you talk to people who have lived in societies under totalitarian dictatorships, it's what Stalin did, it's what happens in North Korea, it's what happens in China, it's what happens in the Middle East, that there are just these blatant false narratives that are spread about the nature of history.
You get things like Holocaust denial, but you also get, within specific cultures, a complete revisionist sort of story told so as to glorify the totalitarian regime.
Just yesterday, Putin declared victory in Maripol, right?
And there hasn't been victory, but it also brings to mind the fact that there's been an entire generation of Chinese students who have grown up not knowing about Tiananmen Square.
And I think part of our challenge as Americans, where As much as some people say that there is a lack of freedom right now, we sit in such a privileged pace, so it's like, how do they not know?
And then you don't realize the systems that are in place to make you not know in those places.
And sure, we have some forms of them, but not to the degree that other people have to endure at all times.
But you touch upon a lot of important things.
I want to get to the conversation.
I just have two questions I wanted to ask for your thoughts on because Imran gives his answers, but I think it'd be interesting to hear what you take from that conversation.
And he brings up the idea that anti-vaxxers, you know, the one thing that he said to me when we were DMing while he was at the rally was, it just feels sad.
It feels kind of like they're having their Vegas moment.
You know, like it's the end of the career and these are the people left who are willing to give us their money.
We're just gonna sing the hits, right?
But do you think that anti-vaxxers will have to look for a new grift once the vaccine fervor dies down? - I wish that was the case.
I think Imran and I have slightly different opinions on this.
Because, yeah, I think that, I fear, I don't know if I'm right or not, and he's the one who's really looking at the data as it comes in, so I really respect that that's what he bases his opinions on, and I try to do that as well, but he's got his finger on the pulse.
My fear is that Childhood vaccinations in general are going to become the next battleground.
As long as there have been vaccines, there have been anti-vaxxers.
I think it's a kind of religion that thrives on scientific illiteracy.
The only real solution for it is widespread education.
And that education, I don't think, needs to necessarily be front and center about what the actual scientific consensus is, because that's where the quote-unquote debate happens.
But I think more it's about education on how to understand how scientific consensus has arrived at, and to be able to logically follow the set of steps and sort of understand, you know, what the research shows by getting inside of that way of thinking.
What if a vaccine was developed that can inoculate children against critical race theory?
I think that's a great idea.
I think it's a great idea.
So that's number one.
And then the second one that will bundle with that is to inoculate kids against being trans.
But really, these will be the real vaccines that are vaccinating them against actual deadly diseases, but we can sell them that way.
I think it's a brilliant idea.
Put a lot of thimerosal in there just to really disorient them.
That's fascinating.
So Imran also talks about wanting our side to get better at communicating.
How would you define what that side is, and what are your thoughts on creating better communication skills for that side?
I mean, I think our side is the side that generally has liberal values, that believes in the Enlightenment, that believes that science and reason Whenever possible should be your go-to that believes there are ways of finding out objective facts about the world that there is such a thing as reality and that you can base your moral calculus on some of that data to some extent, right?
You can have this worldview that is informed by sort of enlightenment principles.
I think that's our side.
It's certainly my side and I believe it's your side.
I know that a lot of people on the progressive side of the aisle, where I know we count ourselves, will hate some of what I'm about to say, but more than ever it seems to me that we need education.
We need in education as much objectivity and non-partisan perspectives as possible, or perspectives that sort of teach about multiple different points of view without necessarily prescribing any of them.
Teach the facts, teach people how to use critical thinking, how to be informed by science, how to make sense of the world through intelligent and diverse perspectives.
And then also, like, teach kids how to debate honestly and with a passion for the arguments themselves rather than a kind of tribal allegiance or just demonizing their opponent for having the wrong point of view.
Personally, I think we need a generation of young adults who can meet this deluge of disinformation with good media literacy.
I think that's often really lacking.
It's certainly been lacking in our generation and with regard to how to deal with this stuff.
So media literacy, critical thinking skills, understanding how evidence works.
But also a resilience in the face of healthy disagreement, like to be able to actually have those debates and not feel like, you know, it's a horribly traumatic experience.
We need to be having robust conversations.
I also happen to think that it's important for people on our side to take time to consume some of the more thoughtful content that comes from the right, so as to understand how our own positions are being misperceived or distorted, like what strategies are being used against us, but also where we might actually be weak, or we might be wrong, or we might actually be like, you know what, they have a good point there, that's too strong of a point for me to go up against, I think I might want to reconsider some things.
Uh, we can make better distinctions without being afraid that we're going to lose the moral high ground.
Uh, I feel like in the culture war climate, that kind of healthy self critique very rarely happens publicly.
And the reason is that often those trying to do it, uh, either do it badly, you know, in a, in a way that is easy to critique or they, even if they're doing it well, they get accused of a kind of Relativism or both sides-ing the issue or thinking that the truth must be somewhere in the middle.
And that's not it either, right?
So it's, yeah, it's just, it's all very tricky.
I think, I think we stand, with regard to disinformation and culture war and intense polarization, we stand at a very crucial crossroads.
And I wish I had a definitive answer, but those are some thoughts.
It is great to have Imran Ahmed, the founding CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, back on Conspirituality Podcasts. the founding CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Welcome, Imran.
Thanks, Julian.
Good to be back with you.
Great to see you.
Now, when you visited us last, I just want to refresh everybody's memory.
It was July of 2020, still early days in the pandemic, but QAnon had already jumped the rails from the dark underbelly of the internet onto mainstream social media platforms.
And you and I were talking the other day, I was saying how I saw the pandemic as being like this earthquake that exposed the fault lines in the global psyche where people are vulnerable to pseudoscience, to conspiracy theories, but also economic anxiety, political manipulation.
And that the earthquake then created this tidal wave, this tsunami of digital propaganda.
So I just want to say off the top that in a very real way, I see your work as being like a lifeboat for all of us as we navigate the disinformation age and really try to salvage liberal democracy.
So thank you for everything that you're doing.
Well, Well, thank you for elevating our voice very early on in the pandemic and providing us with that opportunity to talk to people about an issue which we saw that parallel pandemic of misinformation as being particularly dangerous when it was instrumentalized thank you for elevating our voice very early on in the pandemic and providing us with that
And we knew that, you know, I think that one of the things that you and Derek and others really got was that the wellness space would be rapidly colonized by people seeking to sort of drag people into much darker spaces of misinformation.
Yeah, I'm really glad we were able to get you on so early.
I think it was episode 10 for us, and you had probably just been doing this particular incarnation of your work for seven or eight months, I would imagine, at that point.
Well, I mean, CCDH had been around for around a year.
Okay, at that point.
And I'd been working on it for four years.
Really, this started for us in the summer of 2016 when, you know, things were happening in British politics on the left and on the right.
You know, my colleague, Joanna Cox MP, A mother of two was killed by a far-right white supremacist who was radicalized online and we looked overseas and we could see Orban rising, Modi, Duterte, Bolsonaro and of course the conspiracism in the Trump movement and it was I mean in in the Christmas of 2019 and in the holiday season we'd written a paper on anti-vaxxers as it happened personally
I mean, the funny thing is that when I was at med school in 96, that was around the time that Andrew Wakefield wrote the famous paper on MMR and autism up the road from my med school in London.
And so it's been with me for a long time, and I think that's why we were really well positioned and primed to see the way that anti-vaxxers were jumping into the space and think, crumbs, this could end up being very bad.
We pivoted every single member of staff just to work on that for two years.
Wow, prescient.
Look, I want to ask you about Twitter and Elon Musk in a minute.
I don't want to bury that lead.
But before we go there, I had a couple questions for you.
Since we talked in 2020, do you think that digital disinformation has damaged liberal democracy?
Well, I don't think there can be any doubt that the damage it is causing is continuing because it's additive.
And every person who can be siphoned off to a conspiracist, a rabbit hole, a warren of disinformation, the more it damages our ability to create common narratives, to understand our history, our problems, our solutions.
and our values collectively.
And, you know, you and I have talked quite a lot over the last couple of years, whether it's emails or tweets and DMs and everything else.
And, you know, the fundamental analysis at the centre of CCDH is that we are in a fight between science, tolerance, the enlightenment, and hate, misinformation, lies,
And darkness and in that battle that the whip hand has been given on particular on social media to the bad guys and I think one of the most powerful things that's happened in the past two years in between these two appearances is of course Francis Haugen coming forwards and saying you know this contention that you've got The campaigners like CCDH have got.
Not only are you right, but Facebook know it themselves, but they're hiding it.
And that's one of the things that's changed in the past two years for me, is I no longer doubt myself, which is a very healthy emotion.
It's a very healthy thing to do, is to doubt yourself constantly.
Push yourself.
But I don't have to doubt myself in the core analysis, which is that liberal democracy, and I mean small L liberalism, in the sense of, you know, basic fundamental tenets of the Enlightenment that underpin the American project, for example, liberal democracy is under fundamental assault by a change in the information ecosystem that makes it more difficult for us to sustain the values that underpin democracy.
Has anything over these last two years surprised you or have there been things that you've observed that have evolved since last we talked in terms of how this is all happening?
So keep in mind that in the last two years I mean one of the things that that Two years ago we were a new organisation, we were 6-8 months, we'd been public as an organisation, by then it would have been 10-11 months.
And look, here's the thing, in that time we've picked up not just allies, but there's been a rapid reshaping of the understanding of the problem by legislators in particular.
Not least because January the 6th 2021 happened, the assault on the Capitol that is, which is just up the road from where I live as it happens in Washington DC.
You had the pandemic misinformation because of course we were talking in May 2020 the vaccine didn't drop until later and once the vaccine had dropped and we've seen the problems that we've had with uptake of the vaccine not just in the United States Let's remember the rest of the world is having an even more serious problem.
I speak to colleagues of mine who work on trying to vaccinate in Africa and the vaccination rates are very low there.
Not now because of a lack of vaccines, it's because of the problem of vaccine hesitancy.
And these things as well as, you know, the final thing was of course the fact that the war in Ukraine By Putin, the invasion of Ukraine by Putin, you know, as I've said many times, the first weapons the Russians used weren't tanks or missiles.
They were lies and disinformation on social media.
And I think that these things have really driven a change in the awareness amongst legislators of the scale, the nature, the precise dynamics of the problem, and have also induced the creation of a series of solution sets.
So the UK is now legislating.
I'm actually flying back to London next week.
I'll be meeting with the Prime Minister's staff in No.
10 Downing Street, which is the British White House, to talk about their new legislation.
We've got legislation in Brussels and the EU In Washington, I gave evidence to the House Energy and Commerce Committee before Christmas, and I had the chance to say to the main legislative committee on regulation of social media companies, you know, the vaccine misinformation has proven to you that the cost of not acting could be tens of thousands of American lives, because you've already lost that many.
Well, I'm glad that those efforts are starting to bear fruit.
You're making incredible progress.
It feels like so often when, at least in the US, when there are these kinds of hearings, the legislators very often are just incredibly behind the times in terms of understanding how any of this stuff works. - I mean, I think President Biden has actually, the legislators very often are just incredibly behind the times in terms of understanding how any of this stuff works. - I mean, I think President Biden has actually, But for very different reasons, both the Republicans and Democrats get that there is a serious problem here.
Yeah.
And President Biden last year, you know, he responded to our disinformation.
So the study that we put out after our podcast, the disinformation dozen looking at the 12 leading anti-vaxxers, you know, President Biden cited that.
And he said, he said to Facebook and Google executives, but he did this publicly.
He said, you know, like 12 people are killing thousands of your fellow citizens.
Think about if one of those people is your sister, your brother, your friend, a loved one, you know, you need to take action now.
So we've seen legislators really stepping up all the way up to the most powerful man in the world, the president of the United States.
Yeah, we definitely flagged that moment when it happened.
It was very important.
So the cliffhanger right now in the social media sphere is over Elon Musk's attempts to gain control over Twitter.
And the speculation, of course, is that he would sort of turn it back into a Wild West landscape of so-called free speech.
We can only imagine that this kind of trends toward being like an 8chan cesspool.
There's a lot to tease apart here, and I want to sort of pick your brain about it.
How we tease apart private and public spaces, surveillance capitalism, what counts as free speech and what counts as dangerous or hateful misinformation, how to regulate the extraordinary cultural influence of social media, which is still sort of a new phenomenon that I don't think we've quite got our heads around.
And then, of course, your activism that moves towards deplatforming the most egregious offenders, but then free speech absolutists will cry that this is censorship.
So let's start here.
What are your top line thoughts about the Elon Musk situation?
I mean my absolute genuine top line thoughts are that he doesn't actually have the money for it and so this is just a a game for him and let's not let's remember that in the past few days what he's done is done Twitter polls on whether or not they should rename Twitter Titter Yeah.
and take the W out, whether or not, you know, he tweeted a picture of himself smoking marijuana and saying, you know, the next board meeting for Twitter is going to look like this.
And there's been also, for him, he is, he's sort of, you know, You know, he's a phenomenally intelligent guy who's done some really amazing engineering feats and driven them forward in his company in part through pretty appalling work conditions.
But like, nevertheless, he's managed to force this through through sheer will.
He landed a rocket.
I mean, that is incredible, right?
amazing guy like he's he's advanced humanity in one sense that does not mean that his sophomoric abridged version of Ayn Rand you know libertarianism are worth anything when it comes to a complex area like speech and the power that speech gives people and the way that speech is used to exert
to reinforce power disparities and inequalities and in part and especially about abuse and this is a man who has been known to be deeply abusive on social media to use it as a way to terrorize his enemies you know he's a man who's accused people of being paedophiles of this of that whether he's doing so in jest or not I don't know but he's someone who
is able to use the inherent power of being a white male straight cis billionaire to intimidate others
I don't think he understands the nature of power and oppression and the way in which the geography of social media, the spaces that are safe within that for, say, women, is diminished by creating safe spaces for abusers.
At a very simple level I explain it this way that if I opened my door in Washington every morning someone shouted you dirty brown something or other you know I would be more reluctant to open my door every morning and I'd be more likely to be a shut-in and there's a reason why women for example don't engage in online debates on politics as much as men do and this is one of the findings that we've done our research in UK and US political discourse is because, like, there's abuse that comes with it.
Our most recent report is on abuse by DMs which is used to terrorize women into not engaging in spaces that, you know, rolling back again, like, centuries of effort to bring voices into public discourse.
And, you know, the same is true in the workplace as well.
I mean, is he saying, for example, that in the workplace, in his company, that he would like there to be absolute free speech?
Because I guarantee to you he doesn't believe that to be true.
So, I mean, I think a lot of it is, you know, I encourage people not to be, sort of, given that he doesn't have the money, I think it's a moot point anyway, but I encourage people not to be sort of swayed by the fact that he's clearly a very clever man, but his grasp of the politics of speech and the power dynamics of speech are frankly, like, baboon-like.
Tell me what you really think.
I ironically like his dancing, which is baboon-like.
Have you ever seen him dance?
I have.
It's worse on YouTube.
Oh no, I've certainly seen that.
Of my countrymen, I should say.
He is!
He is!
I just went for lunch with a friend of mine who runs a big civil rights organization and she tweeted about it and someone has said, I can't believe you're attacking an African American.
I'm like, I don't think you should be using that term.
That's pretty offside.
So how do we think about this?
There's something about the digital information age and how we think about free speech, how we think about these privately owned tech companies who have essentially colonized the commons.
They've I've heard you say this.
They've turned us into their products.
Right.
You are that you they're not selling to you.
They are selling you.
They're using you for their advertising.
It's it's such a it's such a mess because a lot of the principles of free speech that people will invoke make sense in a different domain.
But but there's there's something else going on in this domain.
You know, one of the problems, and I think illustrated by the conversation we just had, is that we are basically There's been this weird experiment in the privatization of public spaces for discourse in which democracy is no longer able to exert any influence because
And in particular on internet spaces, because of legislation, specifically Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996, which says that social media companies cannot be held liable for the content on their website put there by third parties.
It was instituted in 1996 to try and protect news sites from being liable for what forum commenters did.
But it's allowed for the creation of business models which are about the accrual of content, monetising that content and then washing your hands of that content and the impact of that content on society.
And we've left the rule sets in the hands.
The Judge, Jury and Executioner on Facebook is a completely out-of-touch billionaire.
The Judge, Jury and Executioner on Twitter is one out-of-touch billionaire who another out-of-touch billionaire is seeking to replace.
Who are immunized from democracy or the popular will because they're so rich, they're so fabulously rich.
A hundred billion dollars is what Mark Zuckerberg is worth.
You know, more than a small country, more than a medium-sized country.
And they are immunized from those sorts of pressures.
They're immunized from democracy itself.
And it's time for democracy to reassert itself.
We live fundamentally in spaces in which we do not have kings.
I've never liked the idea of a monarch who's all-powerful.
And the United States, in the US, it's anathemos, one of the things I love most about this country.
How about reasserting our democratic controls over, you know, the democratic voice within these critical platforms that are used for Establishing our brands, sharing information, setting our social mores, the norms of attitudes and behavior, negotiating our values, even negotiating the corpus of information that comprises what we call facts.
And these spaces are so important now.
I think it's time that we have some democratic voice within those spaces because otherwise we're essentially living at the whim of A small coterie of billionaires, of latter-day Nero's, Caesar's, and in the case of some of them, Kim Jong Un's.
And you've pointed out before that they only get richer From exploiting the outrage, the intense emotional reactions, the hateful sentiments that drive keeping people engaged on their websites.
This is now well established through Francis Haugen's brave revelations from within Facebook.
They know themselves that their engagement, so engagement and how much people click and engage with content is highly correlated to how much time they spend on the platform.
The time you spend on the platform is how much time you spend watching adverts as well as content.
That's how they make their money.
They found that you click for longer, you scroll for longer, the more emotionally engaged you are.
And so their algorithms have sought to raise the temperature of debate on those platforms, to highlight you have an individualized feed now, which basically is there to irritate you, quite specifically you, Julian, me, Imran.
Like, my feed is designed to make me go, God, that's disgusting!
and then to look further because that's what we do when we're angry we kind of we want to know what other people are saying about it and we want to share our outrage and we want to signal that we don't agree and of course we now I describe it sometimes as you know you've got that one friend who's always stirring it and he's always creating trouble I've got a sister a bit like that I love her to bits but she's a pain And, you know, you've now got that person constantly whispering in your ear.
In fact, you now get the news through that person as well.
So they're just giving the news that annoys you.
And, you know, that raises the overall temperature of how we feel about our society.
It makes us perceive our society as angrier, more brittle, more vociferous, more fragile, more fractured.
More angry and hateful and more hostile and that induces, that has fundamentally changed the way that our societies work.
When every single person is experiencing their own angry lens, you know, through which to see the world, that has a net effect on our society.
How do we respond to the compelling counter-argument, right?
So it would go something like this.
What do we do or are we setting ourselves up for a situation when, for example, conservative religious people Hold power and use the precedent that we might be calling for around de-platforming and trying to, you know, limit certain forms of speech when they then use that to silence gay people or to silence pro-choice advocates.
Make the case for me about why de-platforming is a good strategy and what kinds of checks and balances would allow some measure of objectivity around how we assess what is dangerous misinformation.
I think it's really important to remember here that religious people and gay people have the absolute right to express their values, their opinions in social media spaces and that's what makes our democracy so wonderful is that there is a constant debate on values, on policy, but the policy needs to be based on a common set of facts that we can agree on.
And that's what's vital, and that's why platform... I've always argued that non-falsifiable hypotheses, lies and misinformation are designed to gum up speech, not to actually make it more productive and more socially valuable.
And that's why every single platform, every single platform, in the rules they set, say you can't be hateful, you can't dehumanize other people, You can't spread misinformation deliberately and regularly and that's why, and no one, no one is offended by those rules.
What people are offended by is the unequal application of those rules.
And the fact that the rules tend to be applied by human, instead of being applied almost as a, within a quasi-judicial system, which is emotionless and tries to apply the law uniformly, that the laws are applied on a very, very political and self-interested basis by the executives there.
So if they need to be seen to be taking action, they might take action against, say, President Trump.
Um, which I always thought, you know, that he'd been spreading misinformation for years.
What made them decide, just as President Biden was coming into power to take action against Trump, it was of course a deeply political decision.
And so, ironically, that particular decision was a very good example of the bad way in which the rules are applied more generally, and in which they're applied to gain political favour for Facebook, not to actually create, to make a better platform or a more enjoyable experience for users.
I think the rules are very clear on those platforms, and if anyone really fundamentally agrees with the rule, they have to argue why they disagree with the rule in the first instance.
Why do they think they should have the right to be abusive to gay people on Twitter?
Make the argument!
I dare you, because they don't.
What they say instead is that there is an anti-religious agenda there.
That's just not true.
It's just that you can't be discriminatory against gay people and that's a decision that we've collectively taken.
Those are the rules of those platforms that you sign up to in the first instance.
So go and build your own platform where you can be an ass to gay people somewhere else.
Well, that was actually my next question.
One thing that we've seen happen in response to deplatforming and other measures has then been the rise of these right-wing alt-tech platforms, Parler, Telegram, Rumble, etc.
What do you think about that?
I mean, is it that these will now become sort of the haven for people who want to be hateful and want to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation?
I mean in one respect I don't care because they are contained environments and the whole point of Facebook is that they've got 2.5 billion normal people they can access.
That's right.
And generally speaking like you look at what happens with these platforms and they become very small, they're very small spaces.
One of my hobbies is reading the lawsuits that anti-vaxxers and neo-Nazis bring against Facebook and Google when they're de-platformed and they say, and of course in a lawsuit you have to explain the tort, the damage, and so they say it's ruined our ability to communicate, it's taken lots of money away, it's stopped us from fundraising, and that's a good thing.
And that's when they tell the truth.
Of course, and you know, in the courts they have to tell the truth.
And of course, what Facebook say in the courts is not that these people have got a right to speech.
Facebook say they don't have a First Amendment right to speak on our platform.
We have a First Amendment right as platforms to decide what's on our platform.
And so judges find every single time in favor of Facebook, which is that they do have a right to decide what's on their platform and to administer it as they wish.
I think the absolute key here is to remember that when it comes to the way that the rules work on those platforms, generally speaking their rules are very good.
It is the lack of transparency on the enforcement, like what rules are they assessing people against?
Why do they take decisions they come to?
It's the lack of as well visibility of algorithms and amplification and that Julian we talk about this all the time the way that misinformation is amplified because it's high engagement but that necessarily means that something loses and that's the truth it's the truth that loses every time The CDC doesn't get as much algorithmic weight as Joe McCullough, and that's a banana's platform.
The fact that that's true, not because Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or Sundar Pichai prefers Joe McCullough, I don't believe they do.
I just think it's just the best way they know to make money is to amplify that which is most controversial.
And so therefore their platforms run to that logic too.
Yeah, I mean that then starts to get into almost a deep philosophical question, right, which is that What we're talking about is an enterprise, a capitalist enterprise that is exploiting the worst sort of innate biases, cognitive distortions, most sort of primal urges that we actually should be learning how to temper rather than exploiting and encouraging, right?
That's it.
The origins of the Facebook News Feed come from the Persuasive Technologies Lab at Stanford.
That was a lab that was designed to exploit human psychology to create addiction, essentially.
How do you keep people on platforms?
How do you make them want to engage with content?
How do you make them make as much money for you as possible and I think that that, you know, the philosophy that comes out of that is so, it's not even techno-utopian, it's just pure techno-capitalism and it's devoid of any philosophical basis.
I mean, you know, It's devoid of any humanity, it's devoid of any ethics and empathy for other human beings.
And I did, I heard in the plaintive words of the President Joe Biden when he talked about You know, when he pleaded with those executives, think about if the person consuming misinformation is someone you love and they're lost to conspiracism.
Let's imagine that they find themselves catching COVID and choking to death in a hospital.
Please think about them because every single one of those people that's died over this pandemic, they were loved by someone.
And that person is mourning their loss even now.
And doubly so when they know that it was avoidable, that the vaccine could have protected them.
And triply so when they know that the dumb reason that they didn't take the vaccine was because they were fed some nonsense which made them hesitate.
It's a human tragedy upon tragedy as a result of this stultifying, desiccated view of humanity as just a means to monetize the content they produce, using our minds as batteries to power their bank accounts.
It's deeply problematic and that's what Shoshana Zuboff who wrote about surveillance capitalism and others have opined on over the past few years and I think it's deeply important that we The means by which we reassert that common humanity is actually through the political process.
It's about time that our legislators got off their bums, stopped talking about taking action, and took some action to protect not just people, their lives, but also our values and our democracy itself.
Yeah, it's especially maddening when, as you say, when it suits them, the platforms will argue in court that they're the ones who have the right to, they have the First Amendment right to decide what gets said, and then in practice, when it really matters, they're not taking action.
I mean, it is amazing.
And of course, I remember when Joe McCullough was put on the disinformation dozen list, he tweeted something about how if you strike me down, I'll become more powerful.
Essentially, if you de-platform me, I'll become more powerful.
This is a man that has taken every step possible to avoid being de-platformed, including taking down... I'm really proud that CCDH achieved this.
You know, he had to take down every single one of his nonsense articles because he knew that there was a danger he'd be deplatformed.
He took down videos, he took down content, he did everything he could to avoid being deplatformed.
Yeah, we covered how he sent out that big announcement and he made a video about it with, you know, evocative sad piano music behind it about how he was being oppressed and so his answer was that everything he posted would only be up for 48 hours and then it would disappear.
I mean he's a particularly egregious example of someone who desperately, sweatily makes money out of misinformation on a regular basis and has done everything he can to avoid losing access to the platforms that he's got while at the same time pretending that he doesn't care.
I got into a lot of trouble at Christmas because I did something for Vice News and my My in-laws were watching, and my partner's family, and in it I may have accidentally, when I was on camera, been caught calling him some very, very, very naughty words.
What did you call him?
I called him an effing POS and I did it I thought I was off camera but I wasn't and then it's Vice News and Vice like that sort of language and then suddenly I'm sitting there with my other half's mother and I'm like yes it turns out I'm not such a nice young British addition to the family after all.
It's really embarrassing.
So you are in L.A.
right now.
Yes.
We got to meet at Grand Park in downtown L.A.
a few days ago at the site of the Defeat the Mandates rally.
It was great getting to spend some time with you.
What were your impressions of that protest event?
It was so interesting because when I was flying into LA I was being told by people there's going to be 60,000 people there, that's the estimates, and there weren't even a thousand.
And I keep saying to people, there's not that many true, true, true believers.
This is a small movement.
That has been able to use the mathematics of digital platforms to make themselves look bigger.
The fact that they produce controversial content, which is given algorithmic amplification, which means you see it more frequently, which means you think it's more normal.
So, you know, frequency bias, which is a fundamental part of our psychology, the more times we see something, the more likely we are to think it's normal, the more likely we are to think it's true.
And so, you know, this is actually a very small movement that everyone thinks is very big, but it isn't.
But also, it reminded me how disciplined they are because, look, even if there's only, say, 500 of them that turn up and these are highly active, densely interconnected networks of fellow travelers, of trolls, of fake amplifiers of misinformation, But these people can create an enormous amount of noise online.
It's only when you see them in real life, this kind of pathetic, sad group of people, all of whom had weird fringe... They weren't there because of mandates, Julian.
I mean, like, what mandates?
Right, I've been in LA for a week now.
I haven't worn a mask once.
You know, I haven't had to.
I've taken Ubers, I've been for dinners, I've been hanging out with people, I've been out for drinks.
I've not worn a mask and I've not been asked for a vaccine card, you know, I think once actually.
And so in that respect there is, you know, what mandates?
They're all there because they're angry about something but they're very motivated to make other people as You know, I know this to be true from my own life of seeing other people and how they behave, but hurt people hurt people, and a lot of those people I saw were hurting.
They were hurting not because of the vaccine, they were hurting for something quite different.
And the truth is, they were sad, but I felt terrible for them.
And I emotionally, you know, I felt great sympathy for How angry they are and I felt I felt like I wanted to help them But I know I can't because they are actually causing an enormous amount of harm So, you know for me to see them in real life.
It was really emotionally complex for me Unpacking it will take you know some time.
But yeah, those are my initial thoughts on what I saw Do you have hunches about what they're what they're angry about and what how they've been hurt?
Yeah, there was so many different types of people there.
There was people from the left who wanted to tell us, like, I'm a Democrat, I'm for this.
There was Proud Boys there.
I know because there was posters of black people being punched in the face.
There was a whole range of people.
I think for whatever reason and legitimately a lot of people are left behind.
We know what has energized things like Brexit in the UK, the Rust Belt fury that led to the rage that led to Trump's win.
We know that there are people who are hurting because they're left behind by societies which are societies which aren't fully inclusive.
And I You know, giving them this weapon of social media to cause harm, I really, it's the people that should know better are the people that have turned them into social media megastars, which is the companies themselves, the platforms themselves.
Allow them to spew lies and misinformation and cause and allow them to become so harmful.
Because these people are, I might feel sympathy for them, but believe me I understand that they are incredibly dangerous.
Cunning, sly, active, committed liars and misinformers.
Yeah.
Well, when you believe that your cause is noble and you make the rationalization that therefore it's okay to do whatever it takes, that's usually not a good combination.
Do you have a sense that it's fizzling out?
I mean, you say there's less than a thousand people there.
I mean, look, their impact, certainly their movement is running out of oxygen and it's running out of ideas.
There is a big question we've got to ask about whether or not the vaccine hesitancy that we've seen over the past two years is limited to just the COVID vaccine or that it will have an enduring effect on other vaccinations.
We'll see that in the data in the coming years on MMR and other vaccines that we take as part of childhood When we're children, we're going to see as well whether or not the economics of the companies that these people run, the charities that they run, you know, we'll be able to see from their 990s whether or not they're able to sustain the economic... This has been Christmas, Hanukkah and Eid rolled into one for them.
They've made tons of money.
They're going to continue making tons of money over the coming years when there's not the exigent crisis of COVID that drives that deep anxiety that has made people look for crazy solutions and crazy answers to the sort of fear that they feel.
This fear that anti-vaxxers exploit so effectively.
And you know I think as well like that They've been found out.
Let's not forget that over the pandemic we managed to get over 70% of the Disinformation Dozens accounts and followers taken off them.
Like, we have diminished their capacity because there were people who were campaigning against them.
CCDH, I think, at the forefront of that work, and I'm really proud to be leading the organization that kind of has led the charge.
But there have been tons of other people involved in it as well.
UltraViolet, Color of Change, yourselves, you know, content creators.
I mean, some really, really good allies in this fight.
Yeah, I wanted to come back around to your team's fantastic work.
I mean, we've obviously been paying close attention.
We found the disinformation dozen and the pandemic profiteers reports especially powerful.
And I know you have new reports that have one that's still coming and one that just dropped in the last week or so, right?
Yeah, so our most recent report was a study of abuse and the way that abuse is used.
Abuse by DMs is the way that it's used to cleanse social media of women in particular.
So we worked with five high-profile women, one of whom was the Hollywood actor Amber Heard.
One of them is a South Asian magazine editor, one of them is a Jewish British celebrity TV presenter and we downloaded all of their DMs over several months and analyzed them for how much hate there was.
We found that about 1 in 15 DMs they get is a video, audio or text or an image
of either one word misogynist abuse the worst word possible either that or graphic sexual content or death threats and we then reported we used as those women we reported the hate to Instagram and found that in nine out of ten cases Instagram did nothing about someone sending a video of them
Performing a graphic sexual act unsolicited to a woman.
And of course, what a lot of women in response to our research have said, journalists, just normal women producing content online.
I spoke to a couple of moms today who were saying that their daughters get this stuff.
They said that it makes them feel unsafe on those spaces.
One of them said it's a tax.
for being a woman on social media is that you have to face a wall of abuse every time you're on there.
And that's what we were trying to illustrate was that, you know, this is going back full circle to what we said earlier, that, you know, free speech, a safe space for abusers is an unsafe space for women.
And it creates a barrier, an impediment to women's full involvement in a critical way in which we transact commerce, we build brands in the modern world.
And that's unacceptable.
And so that's a really... It's a massive step backwards, essentially.
It is.
And you know, the funny thing is that, of course, vaccinologists have been telling us the same things and scientists have been telling us the same things during the pandemic, that the fact that they get abuse, that when they report it to the platform, nothing happens.
It makes them feel unsafe in communicating crucial scientific facts.
So believe me, this is a bigger problem than just women, than scientists, than gay people.
All of us should be worried about this.
We've got more research coming up in the coming months.
I'm really excited by what my team is producing now.
We're two and a half years old as an organisation, which is very young for a charity.
We're now 22 people.
We were, I think, three or four when I first met you.
We've grown massively.
Last year our revenues were 2.7 million dollars.
In the UK, US, we have a significant body of work.
We're talking to legislators all over the world.
On May the 19th we're hosting a conference in Washington DC of the Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, UK, EU and US lawmakers to talk about what the legislative solutions being considered around the world are and how we can bring some de minimis alignment to the principles that underpin that legislation of transparency and accountability.
Fantastic.
And we're doing a ton of really cool work.
As you know, we do a load of work with celebrities who help to amplify our voices.
And that's why I'm in LA at the moment, to talk to some of those folks as well.
I mean, you know, I should, I know it's my job to say this and of course if people support our work then please go to counterhate.com slash donate and think about giving to support that work because we will make every dollar count in this fight for the enlightenment.
Trust me.
So based on the disinformation dozen and the pandemic profiteers reports, I wanted to mention that the last time we talked to you, you were a little bit cautious about mind reading the motivations behind disseminating false conspiracy theories.
It does seem now that you've reported in enough research that we can see sort of the presence of quite ubiquitous financial opportunism amongst those who circulate disinformation.
And I also wanted to ask you, I want to ask you about that.
So your opinion there, but also how do you think about the distinction between misinformation and disinformation?
The impression I've always had is that disinformation indicates deliberately lying so as to confuse and mislead others.
On the economics and what motivates these people, look, it is curious how much money these people make and how everything they produce is monetized in the most aggressive ways possible.
I mean, you've heard me speak for an hour now and then I kind of half embarrassed, in part because I'm British, but in part because it really isn't the focus of my life, mention that people can donate if they want to.
But I mean, everything for them is like, it's always like, what's my take?
What's my take?
What's my take?
And I still can't read human beings' hearts, unfortunately.
I wish I could sometimes.
But, you know, it is curious how much money they've made from this.
And they pay themselves insane amounts of money.
You know, one of the things that we reported in our research is that McCulloch claimed in court filings that he's worth $100 million.
That's a man who's never found a scam that he isn't willing to monetize and sell to people.
So there we go.
I do think, though, the distinction between misinformation and disinformation is, in one extent, important in terms of when we're deciding where to focus our work.
I think when it comes to the pandemic, look, there's been a lot of passive sharing of misinformation and I don't blame people for not knowing the science.
I blame the people that elevate bullshit.
The platforms that elevate bullshit.
The people that write it and distribute it and disseminate it with the aim of deceiving as many people as possible.
And for me, I'm very much an actor based.
So I say our job is to take on bad actors on bad platforms.
and to help our side be less bad at communicating.
So, you know, the bad actors are the people who systematically produce, super-produce, super-distribute the misinformation that has caused so much chaos, which is why we focused, for example, on the disinformation dozen, the 12 people who produce the content which comprises 65% of the shared content on social media.
You've focused on a wide range of disinformation and hate speech campaigns, right, across sort of different domains, different issues, different agendas.
Have you noticed any rhetorical or strategic similarities that show up across the board?
Well, yeah, there are, because they're taking advantage of the same rules of physics.
So, you know, one of the first, the first inkling that we got there was a problem was six years ago when we realized that, you know, that the language of antisemites was changing very rapidly, evolving, and there was homogeneity in the approaches being used by left-wing antisemites in particular.
On the right we were seeing homogeneity in the conspiracy theories that were being promulgated about Muslims, black people, Jews and the EU during the referendum.
We saw the same thing, you know, you see now the emergence of master conspiracy theories at pace, evolving rapidly with QAnon, with the Great Reset and others.
And so, The way in which platforms work, the way in which they elevate certain ideas, the way in which they can be used...
Tense to sort of elevate a particular type of misinformation Which is the most controversial?
It's the most controversial the one that gets the most engagement and in part you see that You know, there are certain features like humor in particular like very very negative emotion attacking individuals and highlighting an individual as behind something Bill Gates gets more play than say Jews it has to be a so there's There's things that we see work and not work.
But I think fundamentally, I mean, yeah, the one thing that underpins all of CCDH's work is an understanding that the primary space that we now use for information exchange For setting our norms of behavior and attitude, negotiating our values, negotiating what we decide are facts, has shifted to online spaces.
And that's accelerated by a pandemic in which we've been forced to use those online spaces for human connection.
And that means that there are new rules for the epistemic environment in which we live, like how we manage knowledge and information.
has changed in this fundamental way.
Two-thirds of the world population use social media and that is a phenomenal change in our species and how we operate.
So that's what really unifies them all is this fundamental shift of our discourse into spaces which advantage misinformation, controversy, hate, negative affect more than they do tolerance and facts.
Yeah, and that it sounds like what you're saying is that when that is focused on individuals who are sort of being scapegoated or slandered, that that is even more effective in terms of eliciting the desired response.
So, and one of the things that I say is that, like, that's why our first ever report was Don't Feed the Trolls, which said that if you want to not give the algorithmic amplification to hate actors, when you see someone being hateful, ignore them, block them, and go and move on fast, and say something tolerant, say something positive.
to the victim rather than talking about the negative thing that was said because you know in saying something positive you don't literally repeat and therefore re you know force that person to go through that negative emotion again but also that you know going in to support someone by engaging with abuse just makes that abuse more visible so you are literally re-traumatizing you're re-exposing them to that hatred on a regular basis you're making it bigger and making it I feel worse.
Nothing's changed with our analysis.
Like, unfortunately, we tend to jump in to, you know, if it's going after someone that we love, we will tend to jump in to protect that person.
But, you know, as I keep saying, if you're trying to protect that person, in inverted commas, by jumping in and elevating the original conspiracy theory then you are actually just re-traumatizing.
You're re-victimizing them all over again. - You're adding your own sort of boost to the visibility, essentially. - Correct.
And so you compound the harm being done to them.
You know what I find so awful about it, Julian, is that of course that's a really human, it's a good human instinct when we see our friend We're like, no!
Screw you!
You don't get to say that to my friend.
And the thing is, on social media, that actually elevates the original harm.
And it's so, it's part of why social media is so devious in the way that it operates.
Keep in mind, these companies are capable of telling anger from positivity.
They've done experiments in which they've reconstituted the newsfeed.
After the 2020 election, Facebook, for a short period of time, changed everyone's newsfeeds to be less negative.
But they found it reduced engagement because they knew that the temperature of America was so high that civil war was possible.
And, you know, that would really hurt their bank balances.
So they changed their news feed and then they switched it back in time.
These are companies that can tell the difference between positive and negative.
If they wanted to, they could choose to bring down, they could choose to make engagement that's angry, bring down the visibility of bad information.
They choose not to do that.
They choose to instead say, Find the stuff that gets everyone screaming at each other.
Put that on the front page.
It's a terrible, terrible business model, morally.
Even if it's a fantastic business model when it comes to making money.
That was infuriating.
You've got me angry now.
Imran, I want to thank you for your time.
I know this has been an exhausting trip for you.
And I also know that you're getting married soon and you're taking some well-deserved time off to honeymoon.
So congratulations on that.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Well, I actually, my now wife and I got married in the pandemic in November, but we haven't had the chance to celebrate with friends.
We're having our wedding in a month.
Nearly exactly a month.
And it's pizza and beer in a barn in a state that I shan't mention because I don't want Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
turning up.
Sounds fantastic.
It's going to be fun.
And then we're going to be honeymooning in California.
We're going to be hugging trees and stuff.
I don't know, something like that.
Gorgeous, gorgeous.
I know, because I just got to experience this with you a few days ago, you've had a film crew following you around for the last two years.
Do you want to tell us anything about this forthcoming film?
Yes.
Well, this is a documentary I've been filming for about a year and a half, but Paradise Pictures, who made The Oscar winning movies are Searching for Sugar Man and One Day in September and they're an amazing production outfit and they've been filming this documentary which should be coming out later this year but I'm not at liberty to tell you the name or anything more than that but...
As you know, I do tons of stuff like this and I've done stuff with you folks and we've been in documentaries together.
I think our friends Charles Creel did one recently.
It's an increasingly relevant space, it's increasingly talked about.
Talk about it with your friends and family.
The most important thing that we can do is start to elevate this as an issue.
The decay of truth, truth decay, the advantage given to hate over love and tolerance, the ways in which surveillance capitalism means a small number of people are able to dominate our public discourse and set the rules and enforce them badly.
It's having a manifest impact on our society and it's such a privilege to be in a position where I can talk about it, to communicate that to lots of people and to get change because we need it.
Yeah, well we really appreciate your work.
Is there one thing that you want to tell me that you're looking forward to?
Oh gosh, yes, winning.
You know me, I'm super positive, I do believe.
People say to me, you're up against these big companies that spend 120 million a year on lobbying in Washington and how are you going to win?
But I'm right, and I believe in it, and I know I meet these executives and they don't believe in it themselves.
They might sleep on expensive linen sheets, but they don't have conviction, nor do they genuinely believe in the rightness of what they do.
And I think that in the end, the history of humanity has been a more effective union, a more effective use of our collective resources, our collective imagination, our collective goodness.
