Tobias Rose-Stockwell is a media researcher, writer, designer, and author of the new book, Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It. The book deals with tough questions about who we are as individuals and a society, reminding us that we all help shape our surroundings by what we pay attention to, how we understand and process the information we ingest, and perhaps most importantly, what we do with it.
Tobias joins Derek for an in-depth conversation about the history of news and the future of media literacy.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris, piloting solo this week to feature an interview with media researcher Tobias Rose Stockwell.
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This is Conspiratuality 165, Outrage Machine, with Tobias Rose Stockwell.
From the very first instances of what we've come to call news, dating back some seven centuries
ago in Europe, news and monetizing that information were inseparable.
Well before the printing press, merchants had an extensive network of informants stationed in faraway outposts in order to discover what they were getting into or avoiding.
Over time, some intrepid entrepreneurs realized they could curate that information coming in and going out and sell it to those merchants.
And so they centralized the power of what was formerly gossip into reliable sourcing of information.
Now, gossip is powerful.
It's very important to us as a species.
We help each other understand one another by trading information about one another.
In this instance, you had landlords and kings, basically the elite of different regions, wanting to know what was going on as well.
They saw what was happening with the merchants and they wanted in.
They could easily do business in war if they could take the temperature of their surroundings.
And so they started paying these curators quite well for the information that they provided.
And this was really the first instance of monetized gossip, or, as we now call it, news.
But news as an industry still took some time.
The first came the printing press, and then the viral tweet storm that was spun up by an indignant priest named Martin Luther, and that really showed the power of controversial messaging and what that could do.
The burgeoning printing presses were in a unique situation at that time.
They were making a killing printing indulgences, which were those expensive little get-out-of-hell, not-so-free cards that the Catholic Church was selling, and then they were printing Luther's theses, which were going viral all over Europe.
The kings, who wanted to capitalize on this industry, made a deal with the printing presses.
If you want to stay in business, we'll feed the news to you.
So maybe that battle that we lost over there, well actually maybe we really won it because that's what we want our people to know about.
But it wasn't until some crafty Italians formalized the news into what became newspapers that something more modern took shape.
And these new reporters realized something then that we're still experiencing today.
Fake news sells a whole lot more copies than actual investigative journalism.
That brings us to Edward Day, a Massachusetts native who launched the New York Sun in Manhattan in the early 19th century.
And he knew a few things from that European model.
He knew that sensationalist stories sold the most.
I mean, this guy was the originator of the infamous Bat People on the Moon story.
Bidet also knew what hungry eyeballs wanted, and he knew that businesses wanted hungry eyeballs, and so the ad model that we all know and disdain and have to deal with right now, well, that integrated with the news fully, and an industry was launched.
It took a few decades for the New York Daily Times to start to put an end to all the fake news.
They would eventually lose the Delhi in their name, but they do have a podcast by that name now and it's excellent.
But this paper really did set the standard for separating the newsroom from the ad sellers.
Now it wasn't and it's never been a perfect model and there has never been an ideal media outlet.
They are and have always been dealing with monetized gossip and trying to balance what sells and who's really paying for it is as much an art and science and it also takes a lot of work.
Many of my Gen X peers and the older and slightly younger generations might recall a time when it seemed that unbiased news dominated the social consciousness.
An era when we all agreed on basic facts, even when our political leanings tilted in different directions.
But in truth, that memory is a myth.
News has always been biased.
It's always been subject to corporate pressures and, more specifically, cognitive and social biases.
When I was growing up, we had, what, three stations?
And we look at that as a golden era.
But in truth, those three stations were leaving a lot out of what was happening, especially in minority communities and what was happening with gender roles.
So I wouldn't call it a perfect time.
But don't get me wrong, a number of people really did give it a shot, and some continue to aim for unbiased news today.
Like I said, it's really tough.
We simply can't pretend that news gathering and telling is completely free of bias.
It's not who we are as animals or as societies.
That said, there were times when reliable, vetted, and confirmed information was easier to source and understand.
A number of media organizations strove to deliver as factually relevant reporting as possible.
These companies tried to maintain separation between their advertising and editorial departments so that money didn't influence journalism.
These reporters and editors held a healthy skepticism over governmental and corporate press releases, finding multiple, sometimes dozens of sources to confirm stated claims before going to print.
It wasn't perfect, but we tried.
And then the internet happened.
To be fair, I really believe there are still media organizations that continue to hold fast to the original intent of journalistic standards, delivering straight, unbiased, understandable, corroborated news.
But as we know, those companies are now far and few between.
Funding is always a problem.
The insane race to break news has usurped the slow necessities of fact-checking and corroboration.
And the patience required to read We have to take some responsibility too, right, as consumers.
That patience required to read detailed, nuanced, and complex stories has nearly been eradicated by an infinite scroll of words and images that are available to every one of us, every day, every hour, every second.
News that was developed for the mediums of newspapers, magazines, and television doesn't fit the medium of the internet.
That medium is much more suited to gossip.
And yes, that gossip is often monetized, as we point out, at least in the wellness industry, very often.
As the institutions that provided unbiased information have caved to the pressures of these new mediums, readers have come to expect information in a way that suits the medium.
Quick, easily digestible, and tailored to their biases.
And I mean my biases and your biases and everyone's biases.
I do think there is a scale, but we all suffer from it.
And that's really tough to do good news But we can try.
And despite my misgivings of the media landscape and my 30-year history and various roles working within it, I do have faith in institutions.
Mostly because I have faith in some of the people within it.
Trust proxies.
And that's a name that came up by today's guest, Tobias Rose Stockwell.
Tobias is a media researcher, writer, and designer who's been very influential in the tech world.
He monitors and tries to quiet the polarization in social media platforms, and he's worked in this field for quite a number of years.
I devoured his new book.
It's called Outrage Machine, How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy, and What We Can Do About It.
And I devoured it quickly because it spoke to so many issues I care deeply about and that I believe we should all care deeply about.
The book is personal and honest and deals with tough questions that we need to ask ourselves about who we are as individuals and as a society.
And it reminds us that we all help shape our society by what we pay attention to, how we understand and process the information we ingest, and perhaps most importantly, what we do with that information.
Tobias also has a cat named Waffles, which I just love.
Now, we've spent over three years on this podcast talking about how to identify, resist, and push back against misinformation.
And Tobias' book is an important piece of this giant jigsaw puzzle we've been constructing over this time.
I was really happy I got to talk to him about an industry that means the world to me and
that challenges me on a daily basis and that I plan on working within, struggling with,
and contemplating until the day that I'm gone.
One thing that I've noticed is that legacy organizations have real difficulty in identifying
how social networks operate and how they work.
And this especially happens, I find, in more progressive spaces.
I feel personally like, and you kind of identify this in the book a bit too, that the right Doesn't fact-check as much.
That's something you do cite in the book.
But I also feel like they have a better grasp on how to utilize social networks and really get out whatever they want to put to their audiences, whereas I feel like, in general, the left has a little bit more trouble with it.
What have you found in the research of the book about, generally, media organizations and their relationship to understanding how media travels today?
Yeah, I think the last 10 years has been this very fascinating kind of wake-up call for traditional media.
A lot of mainstream institutions previously could rely upon the single narrative that
comes from a collection of different outlets reporting and fact-checking each other inside
of this kind of institutional framework of traditional journalism.
For us as average consumers, that felt a lot like a monopoly on information and news, right?
So the front page of every major news organization would be roughly the same thing.
I think we've all grown up in a world in which that was the case.
And that changed very dramatically in the middle of the last decade as soon
as we got this hyper-fragmentation of our media environment.
Legacy media has been caught flat-footed by the transition to narrowcast.
media through social media.
And they have really deeply struggled with this what was at one point in time
hubris about them being the authorities on facts and no longer are they the authorities really
for a majority of Americans.
A majority of Americans get news through social media, at least some news through social media.
And there's not a monopoly on narratives anymore.
So that changes the dynamic dramatically on the types of problems we focus on.
As a culture, as a society, as a nation.
And I think that's a huge fundamental problem.
I'm optimistic seeing that there are certain attempts at being willing to call out bullshit
when it's in straight lies, rather than trying to give the both sides argument
on some stuff that has already been settled.
Science, for instance.
But it's an uphill battle because most media organizations were really caught very unaware and flatfooted by this transition.
Put a pin in that because we will get back to perhaps some of the use cases we can talk about of maybe organizations you think are doing it well.
But what I really appreciate about your book is the historical aspect.
I'm a geek for history because I want to both understand how we got where we are, but also often what we think is so new isn't necessarily that new.
It's a repetitive theme through different modes of communication.
And as you mentioned, I'm 48.
I think I'm a few years older than you.
We grew up with the idea that there's this objective journalism, but there were very few sources.
But if you go back to, say, the 13th, 14th century, when news really was beginning to form as a concept, There really wasn't an objective journalism for a very long time, correct?
Right, yeah.
Journalism as we know it was actually, it's a pretty modern invention.
It's something that emerged in earnest in the middle of of the 1800s as the result of a cacophony of new
perspectives and information that was coming from what is colloquially
known as the penny press here in New York City, when a whole bunch of news producers,
there was these cheap presses that came over from Europe, the designs for these cheap presses,
and people started printing newspapers readily.
Before that point, news cost about $20 for a newspaper, which is extremely expensive to be informed by things.
Today, we kind of assume news should be free or at least cheap.
The news that we got before this point was actually It tended to be very partisan and very niche.
It tended to be mercantile news or the party press, right?
So if you were a Republican or a Democrat, just like the equivalent today, if you're a Republican or a Democrat, you would get the Republican paper or the Democrat paper, and your representative would send you that paper and subsidize it, subsidize the sale and the mailing costs of that paper to you if you were a party representative.
And that was kind of the news that we got, and it was kind of the best that we had at that point.
So your average consumer just didn't really have access to good information, good news.
And the penny presses, they did two things simultaneously, which were kind of at odds.
They caused this tremendous explosion of new information, right?
And the innovation there was selling your eyeballs.
along with the news.
So they actually put advertising all over the paper compared to what it
was previously.
So they subsidized the cost of printing by using advertising.
So that created this huge new opportunity for capturing attention.
But they needed to they had this tremendous need to
pull in a larger audience in order to make the news
worthwhile for them to print and to sell those advertisements.
So they actually refocused their their kind of editorial
lens towards a new type of reporting, which was crime reporting.
It was salacious news.
It was gossip.
It was fake news.
A lot of the early penny presses actually would literally print
Just fake news.
There was this famous story of one of these papers printing a series of, quote, factual articles about bat people that had been found on the moon.
And it took months for that hoax to be unearthed.
And people were talking about it.
It sold a lot of papers.
academic institutions in the Northeast to send scientists down to talk to the reporters
because they're like, this is amazing.
How do we figure this out?
And they actually quoted a real astronomer that they fake quoted a real astronomer
saying that he had found these bat people on the moon.
So that kind of stuff was actually really commonplace.
And, you know, there was this kind of levity or humor and entertainment
that was a big part of it as well.
Early newspapers were as much entertainment as they were news.
But in this process of capturing our attention with the salacious, with the gossip, with the crime reporting, even with the fake news, they actually created a new market for news and information that didn't exist before.
Your average person just didn't read the paper before.
And all of a sudden they could because they were paying a penny for a paper instead of $20, the equivalent of $20, right?
That allowed for them to suddenly have this subsidized perspective on the world that previously wasn't there.
That was a wild time and I kind of equate that time in the book to this current time in a way because anyone could basically start a blog, the equivalent of a newspaper, you know, a couple guys in a basement with a printing press and like put whatever out they wanted to.
And that emerged and became really chaotic over the course of latter half of the 1800s.
And there was a lot of chaos.
There was a lot of just a lot of harms that came from fake news during that time.
But what happened was there was this kind of prisoner's dilemma with the readers of a newspaper and the producers of the news in that if they got fooled once, the reputation of the newspaper was on the line.
If they read a story, it turned out to be fake.
Next time they went to the newspaper stand, they'd be like, you can't trust that paper.
And the reputational brand, the brand would take a hit of that newspaper, and would subsequently lose readership and potentially go out of business as a result.
You know, month over month, year over year, there was this process of trust that was built across these different news organizations.
And one of the The news organizations that came up during this time was the New York Daily Times.
It competed with a lot of these other salacious, headline-grabbing newspapers, including the Yellow Papers, which were kind of famously the Hearst empire.
These papers that would write these really crazy stories and that arguably brought us into the Spanish-American War as well, as a result of their kind of sensationalism.
But New York Daily Times came along and was like, we're going to just tell you the truth.
Also, we're a high society paper, so we are fancy.
And as a result, people started kind of flocking to that.
Halfway through their run, a little bit later, they took out the Daily and became the New York Times.
And they're still around today.
But it was a process, a very kind of ugly and chaotic process of building of truth.
And the important thing was the reputations of the papers were on the line.
In an earlier incarnation of my career, I was a theater writer for Backstage in New York City,
and I covered a play called Bat Boy, which was an off-Broadway production of that story of the Bat
Boy that was in papers like, if I remember correctly, The Sun.
Which may have been a version of the original paper in New York City that you write about, which is the New York Sun, that predated the New York Times.
I love that you point out, and this is very relevant to our podcast, that the New York Times in its early days, when it transitioned from the Daily Times to the Times, called the New York Herald the organ of quack doctors.
So it seems like pseudoscience has been a part of that genre of false information for a long time as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's this weird thing.
We look at the news today and you go to any particular news website, whatever your preference
is, and you have the straight news on top.
And then as you go down below the fold and kind of lower down, you start to see these
weird ads a lot of the time, like the taboo ads, for instance, that are all about, you
know, you might see erectile dysfunction ads.
You might see just really explicit ads, depending on the site that you're on, for ridiculous cures for X, Y, and Z. And you see that today all over the place.
And that wasn't so different then.
At that point in time, it was, you know, literally snake oil salesmen that would sell their wares alongside the news.
And there is this kind of interesting carve out for advertising, right?
Because clearly advertising is an important subsidizer for news like, you know, NPR laid 10% of its staff this year because of drops in advertising revenue.
And it's always historically been a really, you know, profoundly important subsidizer of the news.
But what is advertised is also an editorial decision.
And depending on how squishy your kind of morals and standards are there, you can end up with a lot of garbage getting advertised on this paper that might have You know, it might be trying to reach elevated audience with its editorial tenor and, you know, with the stories it covers, which I think, Ian, you see this algorithmically happening online right now, which is, I think, very strange and very weird where, you know, you see straight news and, like, really important reporting and then, you know, penis enlargement stuff.
Well, rest assured that snake oil is still being sold today.
That is one of the things that I focus on on this podcast.
I want to get to the modern era, but one thing I absolutely love is that you kind of identify Martin Luther as the first person for going viral.
Yeah.
I can speak about that for a sec.
Yeah.
Martin Luther was a funny guy.
You know, he was a backwater priest in Wittenberg in what would become Germany.
He was a very kind of pedantic fellow, and he was very interested in people.
He was a lawyer at first, and then he became a priest.
kind of closely followed the law and he was really deeply annoyed by the Catholic Church and particularly by the way the Catholic Church used this brand new invention called the printing press.
The first users that kind of the first movers in this space was actually Catholic Church and what they would do is they use the printing press to print off reels of paper that had little stamps on them called indulgences.
They were basically hall passes to heaven.
So, if you paid enough money, they were very expensive.
If you paid enough money, you could pay your priest and get this little slip of paper that was previously prohibitively expensive to produce, but all of a sudden with the printing press, you could make a whole bunch of these indulgences.
They were raising money for the basilica, the new basilica in Rome at that time, which
was extremely expensive.
So they had to make it somewhere.
And so they're like, actually, you know, we can, you can basically sin now if you're willing
to pay for it.
And Martin Luther thought this was ridiculous.
He thought it was totally against the doctrine of the church and was clearly a problem.
And he ended up writing these 95 theses, you know, apocryphally pounding the wall of the
or the door of the of the church.
If you look at these today, it's really amazing because they resemble a modern Twitter thread.
They're character delimited.
Each one is a specific outrage.
There's 95 of them.
It's a 95 tweet Twitter thread that he happened to write, you know, 500 years ago.
He went.
Extremely viral, like shockingly viral for the time.
You know, if he had been alive 30 years before and done this exact same thing, he would have been burned at the stake and excommunicated.
He would have been he'd been just completely deleted by the church.
People talked about him.
People were were were shocked by them.
The fact that you could actually say this kind of thing publicly all of a sudden.
And so there is this there's really fascinating kind of interplay between controversy and and media and that these print shops that These newly minted print shops that have these brand new printing presses, they were profit oriented companies and they needed to make money.
So the same print shops that would print indulgences would also be like, OK, yeah, we will also print these 95 pieces because they'll sell.
The controversy actually drove the traffic and then drove the media creation.
and created this kind of cascade of outrage that wasn't previously possible against the church
and the institutions at the time.
Now, Martin Luther didn't stop there.
He went on and printed, he translated the Bible from Latin in the common tongue.
That was the real kind of moment of chaotic detonation and chaos that came from the printing press
because all of a sudden, and he really believed this at the time,
he's like, oh, if we democratize access to the Bible, then everyone will see the same biblical truth
that it was written by God.
And of course, that's not what happened.
There was this huge, huge explosion of new preachers, new readings of the Bible, new prophets,
huge, huge explosion of new preachers, new readings of the Bible, new prophets, and this
and this just complete fragmentation of people's beliefs as they followed new readings of the Bible
just complete fragmentation of people's beliefs as they followed new readings of the Bible and
started their own religions and sub-splinters and subgroups of subgroups of subgroups of different
Protestant religions. Now, the interesting thing about this, I think, just to put this in broader
context is that you could argue that the printing press was one of the most violent inventions to
hit Europe. This was not just like, oh, a new tool that everyone used. It would actually,
it reformatted society so substantially it turned every major institution on its head.
It resulted in nearly 100 years of civil wars that rocked the continent and really did just
divide the entire spectrum of European society at that moment in time. You know, as someone that
used to work in Silicon Valley and was very aware of these narratives of
Technology is great, you know, disrupt everything.
There's a kind of a deeper history lesson there that unfortunately hasn't been told, I think, about the real problems associated with new technology, new media technology specifically.
You know, in the early days of Facebook, you can still hear the people If you read back to some of the op-eds at that moment in time, it's like, oh, democratizing information.
It's great for everyone.
This is universally good.
It's actually good for democracy.
Arab Spring, XYZ, you know, everyone had a positive opinion about it at that moment in time.
But of course, you know, when you democratize things, they're not always used the way you expect.
And and we saw that, you know, from Arab Spring, you can draw a pretty direct line to January 6 as well.
It's the same same dynamics of people getting really riled up about something online and kind of finding their own truth in the reading of of new media.
Well, yes.
And we'll definitely be talking about what the tech does.
I've worked for a number of tech companies as well.
So I'm very familiar with the language and the aspirations that go there.
And then What happens when those companies buffer up against shrinking bank accounts?
So the aspirations meet, you know, the financial realities.
I've been a victim of that a number of times.
We're at this place now in the middle of the 19th, early 20th century, and journalism is starting to become a craft and something really spearheaded by the New York Times and the other organizations.
And you write about the three C's, corroboration, curation, and critical opinion.
The big question I started asking when I was researching this book was, like, what is this idea of objectivity?
Where does it come from?
Does it actually exist?
Is it a myth?
Is it kind of just an aspirational goal?
Is it something that, you know, is talked about but not understood?
Like, what is this kind of frame of objectivity?
And, you know, as a kind of standard news consumer throughout my entire life, I think I had very limited visibility, you know, until I So I started working with media organizations as a strategist.
I didn't know what went into the process of news gathering and what the key pieces are that make news better than just any blog on the internet, right?
Any piece of viral information you might get on social media.
So I really went deep into the kind of the The history of journalism as well as just the tenets of modern journalism.
I talked to a lot of reporters, I talked to a lot of journalism professors to try to understand, like, what, like, what is this protocol?
Like, what are you running?
What is this code you're running inside your head and your organizations that is actually making news?
And how is that actually different from what you read online?
And it turns out you can basically break it down into these three, these three areas.
It's the three C's, as you call it, as I said in the book, curation, corroboration and critical opinion.
You can think about it as kind of opinion, or sorry, a pyramid with the most important thing at the bottom being corroboration.
Just the fact that there's the process of verifying information before you transmit it on to a larger audience.
And there's a handful of different tools and heuristics that different journalists use to make sure that they're actually reporting something that's accurate, right?
If it's a new event, then there's this kind of natural tension between being first and reporting on the thing that happened as quickly as possible, getting the scoop, and also being right.
So there's this journalistic saying, like, if you are first, or if you're wrong, you're not first.
So if you get it wrong, you're actually not the first person to a scoop because you're actually putting the reputation of the entire organization at risk when that happens.
So that basic process of verification and corroboration is a core piece of news gathering and it's fact checking.
It's going to get primary and secondary sources and making sure that those are reliable people.
What's really important about this is like there's tremendous reputations on the line for the individual reporters and also for the papers themselves, right?
So the one of the reasons why the media is such an important piece of our kind of collective sensemaking apparatus is because it includes many different organizations competing to call each other
out on bullshit.
If I'm the New York Times and I publish something with a factual inaccuracy,
I am leaving myself open and liable for another paper.
They're in a competition for our attention, too.
So so it's not just like, you know, smoky boardrooms and handshakes.
And these guys aren't all drinking buddies.
There's a professional competition going on for our attention.
So, other newspapers will call out the New York Times when they are wrong, and they will write about it, and the New York Times will have a soul-searching moment.
They'll issue a retraction.
They will try to do better next time.
They might fire the reporter or the editor that was responsible for Running that bit, but there is this hyper competitive knowledge network at play which includes Organizations calling each other out on on bullshit and so that corroboration is really critical and that that emerged towards the end of the 1800s as a result of a bunch of Professionalizing news organizations and this like competitive market as we're talking about with reputations on the line to just speak for a second about how it's different now compared to then the goal of
The journalists then, and like I would say still now to some degree, but then mostly, was to call each other out on biases and inaccuracies, right?
And so there was a real reputational cost to being wrong about those things.
Today, there's actually reputational reward to appeal to the biases of your audience because there's not the same level of reputational risk if you can just capture 100% of your audience and there's not the selection process that consumers are going through.
So that's a real key difference.
So that's corroboration, really important base kind of base foundation of the of the pyramid of of of journalism.
The second is curation, which is the process of figuring out what is important.
Which are these objects?
There's like 50 news items today.
What are the five we're going to show you?
Which are the five they're going to go on top of the above the fold on the paper?
That process is a strange process of editorial control.
You know, it is actually just basically determining what we pay attention to as a society or as an audience.
News is a very expensive thing to do.
It's a very expensive activity to have reporters stationed all over the world.
They need to write things that are interesting.
They need to be capturing news.
They need to be making news.
At one point in time, basically a bunch of newspapers got together and they said, we're going to share the cost of figuring out what to cover.
We're going to basically bankroll this association to collect accurate information.
And then we're all going to pull from this common source of news that is coming from this association that we're all
paying for.
And that was the origin of the Associated Press, which is basically an association of
big news organizations that pay a bunch of reporters based on a whole clear set of standards
and rules to gather news and capture information accurately and corroborate it.
And then they can collectively, this is one of the reasons why we saw over the course
of the last 50 years, we've seen the same headline on every single newspaper because
they were all pulling from the Associated Press or from Reuters.
That was the top line.
It's like, okay, this is the most important news of the day.
And they could agree upon it.
And it did feel a little bit like a monopoly.
But that was that was that was that was a piece of it.
The final bit at the top is is critical opinion.
That is something that Most news consumers don't know the difference about it.
They don't understand that opinion, analysis, op-eds, those are very different from straight news.
Straight news lives in its own room.
And the reporting that's done there is actually very different from the analysis opinion editorials.
That is where you can have bias on display.
That's where you can basically make a case for something being right or wrong in the world.
That is where opinion lives.
And today, a lot of news consumers, they would say that, oh, no, I love, you know, I love Anderson Cooper because he has a strong opinion about this, right?
He's actually participating in the critical opinion.
He's not actually, you know, he's adding analysis and fluff on top of a straight news story.
So I think it's really important for your average news consumer to understand that straight news is fundamentally different and that that happens in a different room.
From the other two C's, from the corroboration and curation.
As we, you know, as we kind of enter into this very strange space of lacking trust in news organizations, there's a really big difference between news and the opinion you might just see online from your average person, you know, between corroborated information.
You know, Fox News, as an example of this, Fox News actually has a pretty good straight news department.
They actually have some very good reporters whose job it is to source good news and make sure that it is accurate and verifiable.
The problem is, most people watch the opinion and most people respond to the opinion, so you end up with 90% opinion programming and then 10% straight news.
Right, I subscribe to Apple News and Fox News is in there and I regularly read articles from there that could have been from any number of other newspapers because there isn't opinion there, it is straight reporting.
I wish people would understand the differences between those, obviously there are many things that we would want to see best practices on in social media.
The three Cs, I had made a short video.
I know you're not on social media that much, but you are on there on Twitter and other places.
But I had made this video saying I was going to be interviewing you for the podcast and I briefly explained the three Cs.
And then a friend of mine, Jeff Krasno, had posted a fourth C, Corrigendum.
Being able to admit when you're wrong, which you hinted at before.
And I thought that was really interesting because in the book, and I said this before, but in the book you said that there have been studies done that have shown that conservative or right-leaning organizations are less willing to fact check, so that foundation is kind of gone.
And I would imagine, I'm not positive on this though, but they're less willing to admit There are mistakes when they're made.
How do you operate in a media environment where that's happening?
That's hard.
I think you can look back at this, and I love that, that Corrigento, there's a fourth C, that's fantastic.
If you are to think about this in terms of the problems of audience capture, If you have a mainline direct appeal to the biases, the
biases and the kind of inherent anger, outrage and discontent of your audience, if you are
telling them enough stuff that makes them mad, it basically short circuits a lot of our
our natural defense mechanisms for critical thinking.
Someone asked me last night during a Q&A after a talk if there was any correlation between
intelligence and being outraged online.
And I haven't seen any studies explicitly on this, but I can tell you anecdotally, like
Some of my smartest friends, you know, genius-level IQ friends that can find, you know, sources of discontent online and it will short-circuit their brain in the same way it short-circuits everyone's brain.
Unfortunately, there is this disposition and the studies show that there tends to be less appeal and interest in fact-checking amongst conservative listeners and viewers than there is on people on the left.
I'm a little wary to try to draw these lines so substantially across political groups, just because we're already in such a kind of us versus them dynamic.
I think that what is happening there is probably also very much happening for people on the left as well.
It's just happening in a slightly different way.
What I will say is that, you know, if you want to understand where Donald Trump's appeal comes from, you can draw a straight line back from him to a shock jock, you know, a small regional shock jock in Sacramento that started a radio station that ended up being the Rush Limbaugh Show.
He created a new type of opinion punditry that turned into the most profitable kind of platform for entertainment.
It's also outrage.
It is a very interesting mix of emotionality and rigidity.
Slightly fashy, a little, you know, very charismatic for his audience and very successful.
He came from the result of some deregulation that happened in the 80s
when the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated and deregulated radio.
That's why I opened up in the very first question when you asked for a clarifying question is I
didn't want to assume sides, but that's also because obviously this podcast is progressive
on the left side of things for the most part.
But in the book, you go through the idea of minority opinions and how they reach mainstream attention.
And I really appreciated this point because you go through what you just expressed, which is Here are some lists of minority opinions you bring up.
The small but vocal minorities, as you frame it.
People who really are VAX injured and have something to say about this, which often gets pushed aside.
You talk about 9-11 truthers.
You talk about people who want very specific Pronouns used that aren't in circulation but demand it.
You talk about neo-Nazis who believe the Holocaust was invented.
You talk about people who've lost family members from police violence who want the police completely defunded.
And all of these are truly minority opinions.
But the broader point that I got from this is that you're talking about overall operating in a spirit of universal inclusiveness, and if we listened to these minority opinions all the time, we'd hit a brick wall.
And I found that extremely important point because being someone who is more of a progressive and more on the left, but still understanding that this process of misinformation and these echo chambers that are being formed, they are really everywhere.
And how do you kind of wade through that if you actually want to make progress with people who don't agree with you?
One of the things that's so hard about the internet is just recognizing that you yourself are a strange individual in a very strange land, right?
And that you are probably a minority in some respect, right?
You probably have some unique opinions and ideas that are not represented.
We're exposed to so many of those regularly online that it becomes very difficult to kind of feel like we understand what consensus is.
You know, one of the things that the internet has done is it's allowed for any minority group, and I mean this, you know, really as kind of definitionally as possible, people that just hold a minority opinion.
Any of those groups can, if they play the right notes and if they push the right buttons
and if they get organized in the right way, they can capture an inordinate share of the attention.
Old media tried to give, I salute them historically for trying to give minority opinions
just some degree of mind share for us collectively.
It's like, you know, you'd have the occasional interest story written about a particular minority that's struggling with X, Y, and Z. You know, that was rare, I would say, in general.
But today, we end up with what seems to be just a cacophony of really extreme minority opinions.
And that's largely a result of the way our social media environment is geared towards prioritizing affective engagement.
So that is stuff that gets us emotionally riled up.
There was an obscure libertarian strategist back in the day named Overton who came up with this theory called the Overton Window, which is basically This is kind of a shorthand way of saying if you ask for a lot, if you start your negotiating with the most extreme position, then you're going to change the entire discourse around what is acceptable.
And you can kind of slide the entire window of discourse over if you began with an extreme position.
A lot of minority groups with pretty extreme minority opinions figured this out on social media rather early.
Andrew Marantz's book, Antisocial, does a good job of unpacking this.
He was very present in a lot of these communities in real life, a bunch of right-wing neo-Nazi communities and otherwise.
He was there when they when he was when they were like, OK, cool.
Now we're going to we're going to do this hashtag and we're going to mobilize this network and we're going to make sure this particular issue is now trending on Twitter and then we can get these 17 mainstream journalists to write about it because other people are angry about it.
And so they just really understood that you can change the entire focus of our discourse
if you follow a set of procedural waypoints and you can get everyone talking about your issue.
And I think that's one of the biggest problems with social media is that it's incoherence, right?
It keeps us from cohering around a common cause.
Instead, we kind of lurch from extreme to extreme, trying to make sense of what is in the zeitgeist.
What is the real problem right now?
Is the problem this?
Is the problem that?
Is the problem global warming?
Or is the problem police violence?
It's just very difficult for us to cohere when we have so many urgent points of view.
Antisocial is right over my shoulder there on one of those shelves.
Fantastic book.
Great book.
Also, you mentioned police violence, and then you said climate change, and within those, there's also so many different, so one thing I've been unpacking is recently one of the influencers we cover put out a post, and it's the confusion within these domains.
So he brings up factory farming, absolutely a problem.
He brings up microplastics, huge problem.
But then there's chemtrails, and then there's EMF, you know, electromagnetic frequencies.
And oh, guess what?
He has 15 products that are EMF blockers on his website.
So he has this technique where he can take some things that are true and then some pseudoscience bullshit, and then he's selling you, he's really selling you the products For the pseudoscience bullshit, because at the end of whatever's going on, you're so disassociated or disoriented by all of these different huge topics, and then here, here's one solution I have for you.
You can buy it from me.
That technique, I think, is very manipulative and egregious.
I agree.
You know, I think it's important to have compassion for people who struggle to make sense of this stuff.
Sure.
If you're an average consumer of information, we're not taught critical thinking in school.
You know, these aren't easy things to parse.
And yeah, if, you know, a bunch of influential people or people that you follow are saying chemtrails aren't as important or this, you know, kind of the same issue as microplastics, then like, yeah, you're going to be like, okay, cool.
That's important.
And wait, they don't want me to know about that.
So maybe it is even more important because there's a government conspiracy to cover this up.
So there is this kind of additional layer of weaving interest and entertainment into the narrative
if it's not a mainstream issue, or if it's something that especially
gets demoted online, right?
I'm sure you've spoken about that pretty extensively, but there's this kind of splash effect of casualty effect
when content is aggressively demoted.
Sometimes people feel censored.
And when that happens, and there's plenty of examples of this, the ones that are the loudest
are oftentimes the ones that actually deserve the most, I will admit, but you will get oftentimes
these very real issues in which someone that reasonable mainstream scientific perspective
was maybe demoted or shadow banned or pushed down the feed or blocked or banned entirely
because they said the wrong thing, or they stepped on one of these content moderation
Yeah, we did an episode called Censorship Megaphone, and that focused on Russell Brand, but here you have someone with 6 million YouTube followers constantly saying, I'm being censored!
And you're like, you have 6 million people listening, you're monetizing the advertising, you're bringing people to Rumble where you have a deal, all of this.
Let's talk some solutions, or at least possible paths forward.
You have a section in the book called Conspiratuality.
It's not about us, but it is about the broader idea of what we do.
I will admit, though, that I think that entered into my brain via your podcast.
So yeah, you can take responsibility for that.
I'm sorry you didn't get a citation.
Awesome.
No, no, that's awesome.
That's great to hear.
But actually in that section, you bring up the reason we started this podcast, which is Plandemic, the pseudo documentary.
And that is when we all said we have to talk about this.
And so that is the origin point of this.
And just after that section, you write about this pseudoscience going on and you were in a, it might've been a telegram group or a text chain of friends.
Yeah.
What's that WhatsApp group?
You became a trust proxy.
So can you unpack a little bit about what that is?
Yeah.
So I think this is happening more broadly across the board to everyone these days.
But, you know, these these kind of historical top down systems of information dissemination that went through some kind of filters and through Through some kind of institutional proxy, and then got to us, right?
We used to trust the CDC, we trust, we used to trust the government, we used to trust any, you know, any agency that was responsible for some component of our kind of public life, we used to actually have more trust in those things.
Since social media exploded our information ecosystem, it's turned that on that on its head.
And so yeah, so during COVID, I was in New York in the very beginnings of it.
So right when The city was shut down like very, you know, very, very beginnings.
And I was a little bit, I was a little bit early.
I follow a bunch of public health professionals.
And so I, you know, my, my trust proxies are these public health professionals who were, who were basically saying that this is not, this is not bird flu.
This is not H1N1.
This is actually potentially something that, that is bigger and it has a sizable chance of getting out and being a big problem.
So I was, you know, just a little bit ahead of everyone going out and buying my pasta and getting my 95s and doing all that.
When my broader community, I have a kind of a pretty extensive network here in New York of friends and friends of friends, realized that something was happening.
I was just sharing the information that I could share, being this kind of this central source of information where I could to people that were interested in that process.
A WhatsApp group formed around COVID information.
And it was truly just a kind of a microcosm of exactly how chaotic, problematic, and misinformed we can be when fastest form of information and the easiest form of information comes through chat groups, through tools like WhatsApp.
The group balloons.
It was it hit the maximum number of WhatsApp users in the in like two days.
And it was just cacophony of garbage information.
Everyone was sharing rumors.
Everyone was sharing screenshots from knowing someone at City Hall who was going to shut down the bridges and lock down the city.
And also maybe there was going to be a run on the bank and you should maybe get a gun.
And it was it was like pretty gnarly and got really scary really fast.
Everyone was hyperventilating and text form to sharing information left, right and center.
And it was all frictionless.
And that everyone, you know, everyone had some some piece of kind of privileged information
from someone else and was passing it on.
And I was doing my best in service of my community and my extended friend group to just keep
this information accurate.
So I go through every post and be like, OK, this is what we know.
This is what we don't know.
No, this is like this is probably garbage, right?
We're probably not going to shut.
It's probably not to be martial law tomorrow.
This has not been cited.
We're not going to we're not going to entertain this.
And so I just try to be kind of a little bit of a referee in that process.
Not asking for that job, but just being interested.
I was in the process of researching this book and I'm like, information is very important.
How do we cite and source information correctly?
I woke up one morning and one of the group admins, one of the people who started the group, had made me the primary admin and turned off everyone else's admin privileges and was like, Tobias, just figure this out.
So I just had to come up with some basic moderation rules for this chaos.
Quickly became a full-time job of just trying to figure out what simple rules, what
are the simplest possible rules to get the greatest quantity of good information flowing
through the system.
And how can we police this to make this better?
I just instituted a rule which was like, no memes.
This is only for COVID information.
And more importantly, I said, everything that is posted here needs to have a primary source.
If it's not a question, if you have a question, that's fine.
Ask a question.
There's a bunch of doctors on here.
There's a bunch of really smart public health people on here.
There's smart people.
We can figure this out together.
But if you're posting something on here that is a statement, you need to have a link to a primary source.
And that source needs to be something with an established reputation.
It can't be just your uncle's blog or Bob's Facebook page.
It needs to be something with an established reputation.
And we'll see what comes from this.
And it instantly cleared up 80% of the garbage.
Just literally overnight, the WhatsApp group went from this true panic shitstorm to a place where you're like, oh, okay, there's actually Good information here.
We can actually rely upon this.
It's not just people hyperventilating.
We can start to figure out what is real and what is not real.
How bad is this going to be?
Do N95s work better than your average mask?
What does this research say?
What does this study say?
And it just elevated the entire conversation into a different form of exchange.
And it went from a terrible place to be to being actually kind of a useful place.
Now, what I will say about that is like, it was very hard to keep it that way.
And the design, the affordances, like the way that WhatsApp is built, it's basically a big room with a single microphone.
And anyone in the room can walk up and be like, hello, hello, hello.
I have an opinion about this.
Um, and that is, that's bad, right?
That's bad because you, if you, one bad person in the room who just is either very confused or has, uh, you know, a bad opinion about something or thinks that maybe Plandemic should be a viable source of COVID information, then, uh, then it kind of, it forces everyone to pay attention to that person.
Right.
And so and you know, this is a perfect microcosm of what happens on social media at large, right?
It's like everyone is paying attention to that one person with that one weird theory that wants to make us think or make a noise and maybe educate themselves in the process.
Right.
I'm just asking questions, which I'm sure you hear all the time.
Right.
Pandemic didn't make it, right?
Pandemic was not it was not a well-cited piece of work.
And a bunch of people in the group were like, actually, we think it is and we don't like this.
So we're going to form our own WhatsApp group.
And we're going to and we're going to explore this on our own over here.
And this group is called It's OK to Ask Questions.
And people and that just ended up being its own little channel of and again, like I have
actual real compassion because these are friends of mine, right?
These are people who have degrees from from from Ivy League institutions, some of them.
And so they're and they're not idiots.
They just were using a different form of proxy for determining what is true.
And so what I talk about in my book is that we used to think that institutions were these trusted things, right?
But I think it turns out that we actually just trusted other people who trusted those institutions.
And it was kind of this bigger network of trust proxies that we had that also looked at the institutions as the primary source.
And the reality is we actually all, in our communities, it's our natural disposition as tribal social animals.
It's like we want to know the people that know the things.
And if there's someone that seems like they're smart, they talk with authority, and they are part of our in-group, then that's good enough for a lot of us, right?
That's good enough for a lot of us to tell us the quote-unquote truth.
This idea of trust proxies, which I outlined in the book, which is like, I actually, you know, I think about journalism, and I think about trusting the entire institution of journalism, it's because I did all this research, and I know a bunch of journalists personally, and I know the process that they go through, and I can model them in my head when I am thinking about what a journalist does.
I know a bunch of public health people that have worked on vaccine safety issues, and so I can model them in my head when I am trying to figure out Whether or not to trust a vaccine.
I know a couple people that know people.
It doesn't even have to be first degree.
I know people that know people that are in Congress.
That is enough.
That secondary connection is enough for me to be like, okay, cool.
I actually think I trust this institution of Congress enough to be like, okay, it's something that's working over there.
But this is how we relate to all institutions in our life.
You don't know if the IRS is really taking your money and putting it towards the government.
We literally don't know that.
There's not you yourself don't have that information.
We have to rely upon these kind of networks of trust that have been established.
And we most of us are born into specific networks of trust that we had no part in creating.
But today, these very specific connections are kind of on display in their weaknesses and their strengths.
It's important to note your distance from these Particular nodes of trust, too.
So talking about the vaccines, for instance, I know, you know, I guess I know people that work in public health.
I know that they're very good at focusing on safety.
I know that they care very deeply about vaccine safety and those kinds of things.
If I was, you know, five degrees removed from one of these people in terms of being a trust proxy, They might as well be aliens to me.
There's this problem and all of a sudden these aliens are telling me to put a vaccine into my body.
That's hard, right?
That's kind of hard information to take in.
The last two things I want to touch on are part of your solutions.
I don't want to give anything away because everyone should read this book because the journey you take them on from the fields of Cambodia all the way up through what we're talking about is fantastic.
But you do mention three things that allow for cooperation and trust, and if you could unpack these just briefly.
Repeat interactions, possible win-wins, and low miscommunication.
Great question around this.
It turns out that trust is not an amorphous thing that trust actually follows a very clear set of mathematical rules in our society, in our species.
And you can map it out by playing a series of games.
The classic game for mapping trust is called the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which you can put two people in kind of opposing chambers and give them an opportunity to defect against each other.
and an opportunity to work or collaborate together.
The gist of the prisoner's dilemma is basically that you can put two people
in different rooms and give them a set of rules in which they know exactly
what the right good, the right good thing is to do for the most benefit.
And they will still do the wrong thing because the points for defection
are actually greater than or the points for defection and saving your own skin are greater than the points for
collaborating with your with the person in the room.
But that really is a game about trust.
And it turns out if you play the game many times, it's called an iterated prisoner's dilemma.
And you can start to see which strategies from version over version of version over, like day over day over day of playing this game, which strategies actually engender the most trust and lead to the best outcomes for both parties.
This came from a famous series of experiments done by Robert Axelrod during the Cold War, trying to figure out what was the best strategy for beating the prisoner's dilemma.
What can you do to make people trust each other?
What are the actual core elements of trust?
And what he did was he did this competition in which he asked a whole bunch of people to submit programs, like actual computer programs, to beat the Prisoner's Dilemma, to get the most number of points in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma over and over again, over cycles.
What he found was that the programs that actually did the best at generating trust, at generating good outcomes for all parties, tended to be actually very simple.
It tended to be programs that allowed for, basically, you to do the thing that the person opposite of you did, so that you wouldn't be messed with the next time around.
It's called TIF or TAT, is the primary program.
And that actually equalizes trust on the playing field.
You have one party that can do the same thing to you.
So all of a sudden there's trust.
I actually trust in place because you can, you know, there's not one party that has an advantage.
But Tiffertat has a problem in that if you start on a bad note with someone,
you can end up in these cycles of both parties are playing tit for tat.
And you have these cycles of negative outcomes.
And these basically like these downgraded cycles from negative outcomes
in which everyone is taking an eye and eye and eye.
And everyone just is like basically, you know, defecting on each other over and over and over again.
Anyway, the result of the study showed that, yeah, there are these conditions for trust that are actually
really critical.
These particular conditions are important for understanding because in the context of social media, you actually see exactly how social media breaks these conditions.
You can see exactly how it causes us to trust each other less, right?
So we don't have a lot of repeat interactions with other people.
It's a big, messy space in which there's a lot of random people that we're exposed to on a regular basis, especially with algorithmic feeds and the way that people from outside of your network might be able to jump into your feed and your brain that way.
So you might end up with someone that is saying something you have no idea who they are.
Another piece is low miscommunication.
If you have levels of miscommunication, then You can see, like, basically, if there's any kind of miscommunication, if you think someone defected when they actually were good and they were actually trying to be on your side, it breaks the prisoner's dilemma.
Basically, you end up with these negative cascades downward as well.
So you can see how on social media, which is a place that is built, you know, not for good communication, but for kind of small bite-sized chunks of information.
I unpack a couple of these very specific dynamics on social media and what happens.
One is context collapse.
When you say something or you do something or someone posts an event, something that happened in your life, right?
They take like, say we're having this conversation here and I say something about minority opinions before, right?
And someone takes that clip and they put it on social media and they say, I can't believe these two guys are talking about minority opinions.
What do they have to say about minority opinions?
This is crazy.
They shouldn't be talking about minority opinions.
They have no right to, right?
All of a sudden this becomes, a meme, right? All of a sudden it becomes a problem in
which other people can can pile on and say, oh, this is like, oh, these guys are actually, you know,
these guys are talking about something else entirely. And they can add their own context to that
interaction. And so suddenly this initial conversation in which we're talking about universal
minority opinions end up being about a very specific type of minority opinion, which we absolutely
weren't talking about.
And that ends up being its own kind of cascade of misinformed outrage as a result.
So when these things start to fall apart, trust starts to fall apart.
And social media was not built with these key components in mind.
And if we are, if we were to think about fixing those, those specific elements, like ways of adding nuance to a conversation, ways of fact checking and mediating conversations.
I don't mean like top down fact checking, like from professional fact checkers necessarily.
I mean, that there are knowledge structures that we already employ throughout huge portions
of the internet that we actually use on a regular basis that are built to help us verify information
before it gets to us, right?
So we use Google on a regular basis because it has a system called PageRank
that has citation embedded in its design, right?
It actually, it uses the social connection between sites to determine what you should see
on the top of your search results, right?
And that in itself is a much more complicated algorithm than that since PageRank was first invented, but that's the basic tenets of it.
It's basically like who else has linked to your site about this particular topic and informationally valid.
And if enough people think this is a good source of information, then you get served on Google and social
media is designed the opposite way.
Right. It's like it's like how much emotionally valiant content can we get to you and how much
engagement can we get from this piece of content?
And so that's that's very different.
Another one is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is actually a fantastic tool.
I know a lot of people there's actually, you know, Wikipedia has had these kind of strategic attacks
against it in recent in recent months because it is one of these like bastions of of citation
and reference. But it's a fantastic tool that is incredibly important and it is actually
Studies show it's actually more accurate than a lot of traditional encyclopedias.
And it's free and available to everyone.
And it has a basic system of citation embedded in its design.
It's not a walled garden.
You can actually go on Wikipedia and edit articles, but they go through a filtration process before they're posted a lot of the time, right?
They have editors that go through and make sure that you're actually someone that's adding something and not just, you know, hacking an article and trying to make something weird.
So we know what good information looks like.
It has a fingerprint.
And I think that social media could be designed to be better.
Yeah, I've contributed to Wikipedia for years and it's amazing how quickly if you put up something that isn't properly cited, they will get back to you.
Which is a good thing, especially because I post a lot about like world music artists because that was my field for a long time.
and someone dies and you want to like, oh, you updated, and then they're like,
well, this site from Africa isn't really that reliable to us, we need something
and you have to wait till the BBC reports on it.
And in some sense, you're like, well, yeah, we knew he did, but at the same time,
that's actually a good process.
Another thing social media wasn't designed for that I've noticed for a long time is debate.
I think it's really important as an intellectual skill.
It keeps you humble.
It makes you smarter.
It opens up those minority opinions and shows them to you.
And whether or not you agree with them, you can at least assess them and turn them over in your mind, which is really important.
And so the last thing I want to ask about, which is something you conclude with, is disagree better, not less.
How do you do that in this environment?
Yeah, great question.
Yeah, so I think that disagreement in itself is one of the best things we have, right?
It's one of the best tools we have.
If we didn't have kind of disagreements and disagreements and opinions, I think we would just have just garbage information left and right, right?
The most valuable piece of the Constitution in many ways is as the First Amendment is the ability to to and like I'm be clear about this.
This is a reason why I never spent in the first place is that we are actually very bad on our own at seeing the faults in our own arguments.
Right?
In our own claims.
We are actually very bad at discerning our own biases and our own, you know, our own failures in our arguments.
As a species, what we do very well is we can see when someone else gives you a claim, you can see their flaws better than you can see your own.
When you disagree with someone's opinion, if it's a disagreement that's done in good faith and there's not just, you know, trying to kneecap the person and Kind of gain an upper hand, necessarily.
And if it's not trying to just like appeal to the masses, then you can actually get tremendous positive value from disagreement.
And if you if so, like there's this interaction, this impact between your claim and the good faith refutation, right, that actually creates in that explosion and that impact, better information as a result.
That's why we have freedom of speech is so that we can actually call out each other's bullshit.
And that's that's how our society has operated for a very long time.
You know, I guess the water we're swimming in, so we don't necessarily think about it that much.
But that's a huge, huge part of why we've come so far as a species.
So you can look to different places in which disagreement, good faith, disagreement, and is a real virtue.
It is considered kind of a cultural virtue.
And you can see why those particular places end up being so successful.
So one of those places historically has been academia, right, where you
can get into a room with a bunch of other academics who are all interested in the truth, who
are willing to call each other out on their bullshit and be like, I don't like, you know, you made that claim.
I'm skeptical.
I don't know.
Like, that doesn't seem totally right to me.
I think you should consider this this and this, right?
And it's painful.
It kind of sucks, especially if you've spent, you know, four years on a PhD trying to figure this one
particular thing out.
And someone's like, no, that's not right.
I think you're wrong.
And then you have to go back and you have to.
Try it again from a different angle and, you know, and or prove them wrong.
And and this is a very foreign thing to us naturally, right?
Because we're not we're not good at that straight out the gate.
It requires some real important cultural means to do that well and some really kind of important kind of cultural preconditions for us to to understand what that looks like.
But yeah, so another place that this was, this is this kind of culture of disagreement
and refutation has found a home is in journalism.
And, you know, we talked about earlier, journalism is this great culture
of calling people out when they're wrong.
When they're, you know, if someone gets the fact wrong, you call them out.
And that disagreement actually creates better, better awareness for everyone.
You can see, you know, again, as we go back to social media,
you can see how social media is actually not designed for as a place for good faith refutation
and for disagreement in that particular way, it's actually designed to appeal to your widest
and for disagreement in that particular way.
It's actually designed to appeal to your widest audience, right?
audience, right?
Because the people that are, that when you're disagreeing with someone online,
Because the people that are, that when you're disagreeing with someone online, you're oftentimes
you're oftentimes disagreeing not to get to the truth, not to refute the central point,
disagreeing not to get to the truth, not to refute the central point, but to appeal to
the audience that has been built on alongside your whole argument, right?
We basically erected bleachers around each one of our online disagreements in which we
have our followers who are looking at us have this disagreement.
And we know in the back of our heads, we're running a protocol, which is like, I need
to win this argument for my followers, not to get to the truth, right?
And that is a big part of the problem with social media, is that we don't have rewards for seeking the truth.
We have rewards for appealing to the biases of our followers.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
