The internet has changed not only how we communicate with each other, but how we understand the world. All technologies reorient how we navigate the world. This one just feels, at times, so disorienting—especially if you are, like the three of us today, extremely online.
That’s the title of Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz’s recent book. Taylor has been covering internet culture since starting in social media for the Daily Mail in 2011, which led to positions as a technology reporter for Business Insider, the Daily Beast, and the NY Times. In her insightful book, she details the history of internet culture, and she joins us today to discuss reporting in an age of conspiracy theories and online trolling, the challenges of covering long Covid in an age of overwhelming health misinformation, and what it’s like to be extremely online.
Show Notes
Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet
Taylor Lorenz on YouTube
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
My biggest qualm is not so much with people on the internet, and I couldn't get into this as much in Marie Claire as I wanted to, but my issue is with the media itself and the abhorrent way they cover these harassment campaigns.
They often re-victimize women.
they often reveal highly personal information.
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.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Taylor Behrens.
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The internet has changed not only how we communicate with each other, but how we understand the world.
All technologies reorient how we navigate our shared spaces.
This one just feels at times so disorienting, especially if you are, like the three of us here today, extremely online.
And that's the title of Washington Post columnist Taylor Loren's recent book.
Taylor has been covering internet culture since starting in social media for the Daily Mail in 2011, which led to positions as a technology reporter for Business Insider, the Daily Beast, and the New York Times.
In her insightful and excellent book, she details the history of internet culture, and she joins us today to discuss reporting in an age of conspiracy theories and online trolling, the challenges of covering long COVID in an age of overwhelming health misinformation, and what it's like to be extremely online.
So welcome, Taylor.
And I have to say that I do still spend some time on Twitter.
I kind of have to.
I'm sure like you do for our jobs.
And every day when I open it up, I'm kind of like, are you trending this day?
Because very often you are.
So very happy that you're here.
I'm keeping Elon in business, honestly.
Yeah, I actually, after getting banned from Twitter, you know, Elon banned myself and a bunch of other journalists, let all of us back on, and after that, I put my account on private, and I'm never taking it off private again, honestly.
You know, I wanted to start, Taylor, by asking you for your elevator pitch, or maybe, let's say, TikTok script, about what it means to be extremely online.
Oh my gosh, good question.
I would say being extremely online means spending an enormous amount of time, I guess, consuming media on the internet and being up with culture, online culture.
I feel like there's not a huge distinction between online culture and culture now, but sort of speaking the language of the internet, I guess.
Right.
You've posted about this, and I think it's very big in our general journalism circles, which is the Ezra Klein op-ed about the middle collapsing in journalism recently.
So the instinct has long been to blame the internet for the collapse of journalism, and that's true for some publications that haven't caught up.
I remember I was a magazine editor and they didn't want to go online at first and all of this.
But media scholars have pointed out that the middle started collapsing in the early 90s when private equity started buying up news organizations, and recent data bear that out.
So Klein's case is that you have these top-tier entities like the New York Times, which he wrote the piece for and works for, and then you have independent media creators, some of them who are doing very well or just surviving, but there's an entire class of knowledge work and valuable information from those organizations that has flatlined or is really struggling.
Now, given that you've written an excellent book about the evolution of social media and our online spaces in general, what impact has social media had on this process and how do you foresee it going a bit in the future?
Yeah, I agreed with Ezra's piece and I think private equity has been corrosive and horrible in the media industry.
What I argue kind of in my book is that Social media has accelerated the demise of sort of legacy media and other legacy institutions, and specifically this sort of content creator class, which is essentially independent media operating online.
I think they've kind of rushed in to fill the information void that's been left by the death of local media, niche media, you know, that whole like middle ground of digital media, like as all of those News organizations have gone out of business or, you know, shut down.
I think now you see the only people sometimes covering specific areas or industries or genres of sort of coverage are these content creators on the Internet.
Right, well, I mean, we're not just talking about industry shifts and erosions and collapses.
We're also talking about people in so many ways.
Your own career has, like, navigated this chaos in real time, I think.
I mean, you're still on staff at WAPO, where you have access to, like, all of this editorial, fact-checking, legal resources, you know, everything that would go along traditionally with a fourth estate.
But, you know, we're seeing those walls crumble.
We're seeing a job loss bloodbath for so many of our colleagues.
And at the same time, it seems like you're increasing, along with a lot of other people, your independent creator footprint on TikTok and Substack.
I started as an independent creator.
I started in 2009 as a blogger.
Right.
The only reason I got that job years later at the Daily Mail and social media is because I had been blogging and I became popular on the internet.
And so, at that time, you couldn't monetize your social media presence very well.
I had a couple of friends that were running banner ads on their Tumblrs and I had a ton of viral Tumblrs,
but like there was the sort of like the only on-ramp to like monetizing was to sort of like go in-house
in an agency, which I went, I started working, doing social media for brands
and then got into media that way.
But yeah, a hundred percent.
And I think it's important to have that.
I always wonder sort of if I had been, instead of a blogger, like, you know,
started five years later, I don't think I would have ever ended up
in traditional media because I would have been able to monetize, like the monetization ecosystem
So it's really strange that you're actually coming back to independent creator status in some ways.
Yeah.
Right.
At the end of a long, strange trip.
Yeah.
Maybe I made the wrong choice.
But I mean, my feeling is always like, and part of the reason I wanted to, like, Work at these like old school institutions, I guess, is that I feel like journalism is incredibly valuable.
And I think there's even though I'm a huge critic of the mainstream media, there's there's like there's a reason to preserve it.
And I think if it's people don't realize the sort of importance of news coverage until it's.
Gone and hollowed out, so.
I am seeing some hope with journalists banding together.
You know, you have Platformer, which is smaller, but Casey does great work.
You have 404 Media, you have Defector.
I just learned about somewhere called 4th.News today, which is also another group of journalists.
So, I think there hopefully will be some hope with the journalists being able to get some sort of resources, maybe nonprofit status.
Are you aware of any other organizations that are doing this that you're appreciating?
Yeah, I mean, Amir Al-Khattabi, who runs the Instagram account at Muslim, he runs Muslim News.
It's a big podcast and, you know, he has a daily newsletter.
He's an independent journalist.
I think he's like 24, 25 years old, but he has been You know, leading the way on so much coverage of Gaza.
He's actually in touch with the Muslim journalists on the ground.
And I think he's done a great job of building this independent media company.
And I think he has a couple of staffers now, too, that's filled a void, which the mainstream media was not covering Muslim issues very well.
A lot of it had very racist and problematic undertones.
And he stepped in and I think has done just such an amazing job.
But this is a kid that graduated from journalism school, basically couldn't get a job in traditional journalism, ended up sort of
building these viral accounts and now is kind of like trying to figure it all out. I mean, can barely figure
out how to monetize, basically is relying on like piecemeal grants from people. So I don't
like love that that is the, you know, I wish we had more infrastructure in place to support
people like Amir and others.
You know, I think that it's great to see.
I mean, I'm a huge fan of 404.
I'm obsessed with them.
Like, you know, and a lot of these other independent sites.
But that's great for more of like the mid-career journalists that already have the following that then can then like take their institutional knowledge and spin out.
I'm worried about this generation of journalists that's upcoming.
Yeah.
You know, because they'll never get that newsroom experience, which is incredibly valuable.
Yeah, yeah.
There's one story that you tell in Extremely Online that I want to flesh out because it's very pertinent to our beat, and that's the Gamergate to Trump pipeline.
So, you mark Gamergate as being the point where this extremely crude, predominantly right-wing trolling emerged and then accelerated.
So, what happened with that event to give rise to such a jarring phenomenon that we now have to deal with on a daily basis?
As I talk about in my book, Gamergate was sort of this blueprint for online harassment and how to exploit the media.
It's kind of like served as this test case almost of how to mainstream reactionary ideology, weaponize the internet to promote your views, and essentially You know, exploit the media's tendency to kind of like both sides issues to kind of like mainstream a lot of really horrible, regressive ideas and generate controversy, manufacture controversy around women, marginalized groups, and sort of oust them from prominent positions.
Literally, I mean, we just saw this happen with Claudine Gay recently in the whole Harvard fiasco.
And this playbook has been run a million times over, but I think that that was very much like the genesis of it.
And I think that that moment of Gamergate 2 provided a lot of awareness, where like suddenly I think other people watching, like trolls, bad actors, were like, oh, this is a successful formula that we can just run up endlessly.
And now we're caught in these endless sort of like manufactured culture wars because of it.
You know, at the heart of that story was this territorial, misogynistic resentment over a woman game developer, Zoe Quinn, who she dared to use game tech to explore depression instead of single-shooter violence, and so it became this A microcosm of the gendered and political ground war between 4chan and Tumblr over what the internet is for and like who gets to be listened to.
So, you know, my question is, we all know who won in terms of political influence, but I'm wondering if you think it could have at some point been possible for the left to mobilize Tumblr in the same way that the right mobilized the Manosphere?
I mean, a hundred percent, I say that as a former Tumblr person.
Tumblr gave me everything.
But I think Tumblr, you know, and I talk about this a little bit in the book, but I think, I mean, you could write a whole book on sort of like Tumblr's role in sort of political ideology.
Tumblr was so progressive in so many ways to the point that it's a joke.
I mean, people make memes about it of like your brain poisoned self on, you know, Tumblr in 2011 hearing the worst takes imaginable.
But, you know, that was where a lot of the sort of body positivity movement came from.
It's where a lot of sort of, you know, LGBTQ sort of changing notions of gender identity and how we think about gender constructs came from Tumblr.
So much sort of leftist thinking came from those spaces.
I think the fact that is that the platform itself was, was not built to support it.
I mean, I wish that more people had taken it seriously.
I think it was dismissed institutionally by a lot of journalists who just immediately hopped over to Twitter once Twitter started to gain traction.
And also just the platform, like the people running it when it was acquired by Yahoo 2013, they just didn't understand what they had.
And I think that they, you know, certainly didn't Build any sort of like tools or features that could have allowed it to be a better place for activism.
It wasn't a place of aggressive, externalized campaigning either, right?
Yeah, yeah.
It was a place of developing ideas, debating ideas, self-reflection, self-criticism, sometimes to a fault.
But the function of that space, as far as I understand it, was just not parallel to the function of 4chan and you know the sites that wound up creating these
waves of online aggression.
Right.
And also, I mean, 4chan specifically, and I talk about this a little bit in my book, they had been sort of increasingly exerting their power on the internet for years by the time GamerGate came around.
I mean, they were instrumental in all of those early YouTube viral videos that we all know and love.
I talk about Tay Zonday's Chocolate Rain in my book.
And, you know, this is a song by a, you know, An autistic black man who was writing about systemic racism and but it was because he was sort of so awkward and stuff 4chan would make these people famous and they would manipulate the YouTube you know system to kind of get him on the homepage and amass views and I think I think that sort of like gave them a taste of power almost like that community um and they would get things upvoted on dig and other things like they sort of really realized early that the internet is built for this sort of collective action and I think soon they went from sort of
So one thing I just missed is Vine.
As you can see behind me, I read.
I read a lot.
And I like videos, but like six seconds, I was always like, ignore.
more political campaigns.
So one thing I just missed is Vine.
As you can see behind me, I read.
I read a lot.
And I like videos, but like six seconds, I was always like, ignore.
And you write about the way that the Viners game the algorithm and how much attention
they spent to creating the six seconds.
That part blew my mind.
I had no idea.
I mean, Vine was so interesting because I think it's probably one of the most culturally
relevant apps to exist in the past decade.
And it was really only around for a couple years in its peak.
It was really 2014 and 2015.
By the end of 2016, it had shut down.
In 2013, it was just beginning to emerge.
And yeah, and it launched the careers of some of the biggest names on YouTube today.
I think the downfall of that platform was ultimately Twitter and mismanagement and the fact that they didn't respect content creators.
I talk about this sort of pivotal moment in my book when the content creators actually recognized their power collectively and sort of took collective action against the platform, ultimately leading to its demise.
And, you know, I wish we saw more of that today from some content creators.
I think they don't generally have that sort of solidarity.
It was a smaller group, you know.
So we have a legacy of some Vine creators who made it to YouTube and created a kind of career continuity there.
But was there also like a formal or a technical, I don't know, echo that the platform left?
Do we see the influence of Vine on TikTok now?
Oh yeah.
Just in terms of speed and edits?
A hundred percent.
I mean, Vine was the first mainstream mobile video editing app.
You could not post video easily on the internet before Vine.
It's hard to remember, but Instagram was only photos.
Twitter did not have video support.
You had to sort of like upload through this website, WhyFrog or whatever.
It was like, there was all these like third party kind of tools that sometimes will let you upload a clip and it took like 20 minutes.
Vine, it was very easy.
You just point and shoot.
You just press down, you know, on the screen to record.
Um, and you could just very easily post content.
And so, um, I think it, the ripple effects are felt, you know, enormously.
And also, um, as I've read about in my book, that sort of the death of Vine led to the birth of Musical.ly.
And Musical.ly of course is what eventually became TikTok and is probably the undeniably the most influential social media app of the last several years.
Um, But I think there's so much roots of Vine and Vine culture
in all video editing platforms today, but especially TikTok.
Now, you do such a good job of contextualizing the internet and media and social media and how
it's evolved.
But last year, I talked to Tobias Rose Stockwell about the history of media in general, which got me on this trip of reading multiple books about where media comes from.
And honestly, if you go back 500 years, you have subscription model and you have the ad model.
The first really successful American newspaper was the New York Sun.
It sold ads to support the fact that it was always telling stories about Batboys on the moon, right?
But as you write about, then you get to this space where Logan Paul is live streaming a dead body in Japan, and Elle Mills is marrying her sister's boyfriend for clicks, and then discovers it's really hard to get a legal divorce.
And so what I'm wondering, from your perspective, We talk a little bit about the middle, but then these newer people who want to create and monetize and be able to survive doing what they do.
Do social media creators have to live by the same principles as traditional journalists?
No, I mean, I think what's different is that you're working for the incentives of these algorithms and platforms rather than the incentives of your employer.
And look, undeniably, these larger media companies are also built off subscription models and views, but they have their own, they're not living in a distributed manner across platforms.
They have their own website generally or product that they put out, magazine, whatever.
And so, They're not beholden as much to those platforms.
Of course, they still rely on those platforms for audience growth, but you could take the Washington Post off social media tomorrow and you would still have the WashingtonPost.com and our print paper and all of that.
Social media content creators don't generally own their audience, so they might have a newsletter.
That's like the closest thing that they would have to something that probably can't be deleted, but most of their content lives across these social platforms, so they really have to optimize for each platform.
And that leads to very, very warped incentives, as you mentioned, like this like views culture.
It leads to sort of extremism, this like eye catching.
It's all about sort of like grabbing attention.
And look, I'm not going to say that news organizations don't engage in clickbait and, you know, SEO, like type of trickery and all of that.
Fundamentally, the structure of the organization is set up for that a lot of journalists to just be able to work without worrying about that stuff.
Whereas there's no world that a social media content creator can work without worrying about those algorithms because their work fundamentally depends on it.
Following up on that, I find that you and Derek are both super adaptable journalists in ways that I really envy.
You know, and you have always, it seems, brought your chops and integrity to a variety of platforms. And now, there's an even
accelerated or raised demand for quick attention capture. I'm looking through your TikTok material.
And at this point, you know, you have to make a lot of that happen on your own as you're
talking about the withdrawal of various supports, you know, and that's of course running
according to the logic of the algorithm.
So I wanted to know just in terms of, you know, professional consideration and standards and how you feel your work is changing or maybe not changing.
What are the pros and cons of your reporting beginning to mirror the forms of creator class media?
Yeah.
Well, I think starting as a blogger, like I've always kind of written for the internet.
And I've always said, I mean, part of the way that I got jobs in traditional media, every single place I'd interview, I'd be like, I do not care about writing for print.
So many places, I think when you interview at these legacy places, the people want to be in the magazine or whatever.
And I was always just like, put my work on the internet.
It's the only thing I care about.
And I, you know, so in that sense, it's not anything like new, I would say.
I always think about sort of how my work is perceived online.
And by the way, as we all should, in the sense that that is where our audience is, and that is where our readers are, and we want to ultimately serve our readers.
I think it's been a double-edged sword, though.
I mean, it is frustrating when you work incredibly hard and then you post something and it doesn't get traction online and you're like, oh my God, this reporting took me like six months or whatever, right?
Right.
But in those stories, often you're hoping for impact in other ways, whether it's changing legislation or sort of affecting key decision makers in certain areas, whatever.
I think overall, though, at least the way I feel about creating content online and social media is that it helps build trust.
You know, people don't trust journalists at all, generally, because we have a lot of distrust in the mainstream media.
And I do think that being out there and being present and being accountable and responding to people, obviously not trolls, but, you know, like, it can be a good thing.
It can be a good thing to engage the public and kind of test ideas.
For someone like me that writes about a very consumer-y kind of beat, it's good.
Now, do I think our national security reporters need to be doing that?
No, and they shouldn't have to be, you know?
But for someone that covers the internet, I want as much sort of real-time feedback on my story ideation as possible because I'm writing about communities often that I'm not even a part of, you know?
So I'm usually very open with my ideas and develop my stories in tandem with the audience.
Well, I mean, you do get a lot of feedback and you also get an incredible amount of blowback.
And so I wanted to ask you about one particular, you know, famous now scenario.
I think that somebody had to unmask Chaya Raychik.
And, you know, I think it makes sense, maybe even on kind of like a mythological level that it was you.
But looking at how she has, you know, ascended to a position of political power now, you know, recently having accepted a public post in Oklahoma, what are your reflections on what this tells us about, like, the premises of investigating and unmasking characters like this?
She's always had political power, and that was one of the bars.
You know, I had been watching her for a long time since Rogan first mentioned her, and she started to sort of gain a lot of traction online.
I feel like from covering content creators, you always can see who's going to blow up.
Always.
I mean, I did the first post on Charli D'Amelio.
Like, anytime someone's blowing up, like, I start to notice, and usually they get on my radar and I start monitoring them.
With her, She, so, you know, she was very weird about her identity.
As you said, she was like obscuring her identity.
And there was this increasing sort of influence that she was amassing.
At the point that I had written about her, she was being constantly mentioned on Joe Rogan.
She had appeared multiple times on Fox.
Without her face being shown, but through voice.
Right.
She was giving interviews, saying quite inflammatory things to right-wing media outlets like the New York Post and others.
She was essentially acting as an assignment producer for all of the right-wing media where she was like, you know, determining what the stories would be of the day and stuff and like really affecting news coverage that then would trickle out into the New York Times and elsewhere.
And she, Ron DeSantis' press secretary, said that she was directly informing the anti-LGBTQ legislation that was being passed in Florida.
In my opinion, at that point, and she was, by the way, the trajectory of her growth continued to escalate.
In my opinion, that makes you a public figure and worthy of scrutiny.
And I didn't believe that she should be able to operate in that way, affecting our laws, affecting our education system, affecting our media climate anonymously.
And so I, I mean, I talked to Dave Weigel about it at the time.
I remember when I started the post and I was like, I'm, if she keeps going like this, I'm going to report about it.
Because the thing is her identity would have come out probably eventually.
I mean, I know Travis Brown had exposed a bunch of stuff.
Like there were these researchers talking about her, but nobody had really interrogated her and looked into her.
And by the way, she had also accepted millions of dollars of funding from Seth Dillon, by the way, at that point too.
So.
In no way was this woman some random private figure in any capacity.
And I totally don't regret that story at all.
Oh, I'm thrilled that you did it.
I guess one of the premises that everybody has as investigators is this belief that sunlight is the best disinfectant, that if a person is fully exposed and interrogated for who they are, that nature will heal.
And I'm wondering what your experience has been with that.
Well, I mean, here's the thing.
And I've had this with so many content creators that I've written about that are kind of bad, that have done bad things.
And in some ways, you know, people always say, oh, don't give them attention.
Don't give them attention.
We need to give these people scrutiny.
And by the way, me writing about her did not make, she was already, she was already on a rocket ship.
Like, and with the funding that she had gotten and the backers that she had gotten and the political influence she had amassed by the time I wrote about her, there's no world where I didn't write that story and then she goes away.
No, that was not, that's a huge calculation that I take into account.
And there's a lot of people that I write about that I'm like, you know what?
I'm not going to give this person oxygen because I do think they are, Floundering and might be on the downturn.
Right.
Not with her.
She was always sort of like, you know, the right manufacturers, these personalities and stars, and they had sort of chosen her.
I think it's always a weird sort of balance, and I knew the backlash that I was going to get, and that's why I made such an effort to reach out to her for comment, famously knocking on her door, which, you know, is something that, by the way, journalists do all the time.
Like, just We're constantly knocking on doors for comment or chasing someone down for comment.
You know, like, especially if you're going to reveal someone's identity, I wanted to sort of like, you know, give her the chance to comment on the record.
We had Jeff Charlotte on recently and he talks about that because his job involves driving across country into MAGA land and knocking on people's doors when he sees MAGA flags.
And he's like, you have to be comfortable as a journalist doing that or else you're not going to actually succeed in that career.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
One thing I think is hilarious is that I revealed absolutely no information in my article that could be used to find Haya's address.
Zero.
Zero.
All I said in my article is that she lived in Los Angeles.
I absolutely did not link to or show anything that even remotely could be used to find where she lived.
However, she tweeted a photo of me on her doorstep, which showed not only the street in LA that she lived on, but the exact house that she lived in.
Yeah, she doxxed herself, basically.
And that was before my article even went up.
So I don't want to hear for a second That I doxxed this woman.
Wow.
So you mentioned watching people's trajectories and identifying them.
So we have to briefly discuss one of my least favorite people in the world, Chris Ruffo.
You shared a New York Times article about America being under attack from anti-DEI activists.
I'm doing a brief on this next week.
One of my best friends is a longtime DEI facilitator.
It's just nonsense.
It was a great piece, but as you pointed out, the New York Times is responsible for promoting the message of the people like Rufo in the first place.
Now, I'm not trying to throw the Times under the bus.
I've been subscribing for a long time.
Okay, but so can you have it both ways in today's political environment?
What are your thoughts on that example, but more broadly, what that represents?
Yeah, what it represents is exactly what got us into this problem in the first place.
The reason that bad actors like Chris Rufo are so effective is because they leverage places like the New York Times that will launder their extremist ideology for a liberal audience.
And they do this constantly.
They do this with trans issues.
They do this with, you know, the war right now.
They do this with everything.
They do this with COVID.
They just, they constantly sort of mainstream these really extreme thoughts and campaigns.
For this allegedly sort of progressive mainstream, you know, liberal audience.
And it's so incredibly irresponsible.
And for them to then turn around and kind of like write about it in this way just shows that they are very aware of what they're doing.
I mean, I was appalled to see the New York Times essentially reblogging the Free Beacon in one of their articles, like quoting it without... And this is a website where there is an entire article claiming that I am a lizard person on You know, like, this is not a legitimate news outlet in any sense of the word.
And yet, by treating it as one and by citing it in the New York Times, I mean...
It's so incredibly irresponsible, and I can say, having worked there for years, it's from the top.
It's the editors at the top that just fundamentally, you know, I think, frankly, are sympathetic to a lot of these extreme sort of ideologies, and they like to play both sides of the coin.
And it's so harmful.
Yeah, I mean, the vibe is definitely not afflict the comfortable, but kind of generalized, like, moving along attitude towards all of these compounding and accelerating human tragedies.
And as you say, we see it in a lot of issues.
There's COVID revisionism, like, should we have really closed schools, to climate apathy, to the trend of writing about death in Gaza and the passive voice.
So, I guess I wanted to ask whether, you know, even if the industry wasn't Contracting.
Do you think that these center-right, very top-down trends would be pushing you personally towards freelancing anyway?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I've... I'm... Yeah.
I'm not... I... It's never been my aspiration to work at any of these mainstream places.
I mean, I remember when The Times was recruiting me very aggressively.
I was like, why would I don't...
See myself as part of that.
And this is before, I would now knowing what they've published recently and being more familiar with their work, I honestly don't know morally how I would feel about working there, seeing what they've done the past few years.
But, you know, I still work for another institution that publishes a lot of stuff I don't agree with.
It's a trade-off.
I think, I think You know, every journalist kind of has to make that decision for themselves.
My whole thing was like, I really wanted to sort of bring online culture to the mainstream media, make people care, make internet culture reporting a real beat that people hire for and is taken seriously, as seriously as traditional tech reporting.
And I think I've accomplished most of that.
But, you know, I don't know.
I think that I'm glad that we have the internet in cases when the New York Times publishes all of this crazy stuff, because I remember sort of a little bit after September 11th in the Iraq War.
I mean, I was a kid.
I remember how extreme it was.
Like I do remember a teacher or something saying they were against the war and there was like a huge, that was like a huge problem at our school.
Right.
And so, you know, I'm glad that we have spaces where people can sort of challenge mainstream narratives.
The problem is, is then like those are also full of bad actors that are like leveraging that, you know, to push even more extreme bad ideas.
Well, speaking about mainstream narratives, you have been posting quite a bit about COVID and long COVID.
And my bet is that the visibility of long COVID as a public health crisis will increase through the activism of people who are suffering with it.
And that's going to be, you know, against the grain of all of the back to work repressions of the state.
And many of the most prominent long COVID advocates I follow on socials are women.
And so I'm wondering if you see at this point a kind of higher stakes raperies of that, you know, 2010's rise of women bloggers who were willing to talk about mental health and parenting struggles in ways that MSM outlets weren't willing to cover.
Is that happening again?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's so incredible to have these amazing patient advocates that are primarily women.
I mean, we know that long COVID overwhelmingly affects women more.
Women have very different immune profiles than men.
That's why women are more likely to get autoimmune disease generally and, you know, for so many reasons.
Also, like, you know, the way that women's immune system behaves during pregnancy is very different.
You know, women are very high risk for long COVID compared to men, although obviously it still affects countless men and COVID will harm anybody that it infects.
It's, you know, nobody is free from that.
But I think it's made it actually much easier for the establishment to dismiss it.
I mean, you look at, for instance, you know, the journalists that cover this stuff and even My sort of vocal activism around it, like it's constantly referred to as hysteria and women.
And look at, you know, there's so many parallels as many people have pointed out that half, you know, of people with long COVID meet the diagnostic criteria for ME-CFS.
I don't know if people know about ME-CFS, but it is one of the most debilitating, horrific diseases that you can have.
It is sort of like basically like zaps your I don't know how to put it, but it's like you're moving through molasses every day.
Millions and millions of people, primarily women, have suffered with ME-CFS for years.
There's no coverage of it.
There's no investment in fixing it.
And I think that's primarily because it affects women.
And when you're doing activism, it's very hard when you have no energy.
That's the whole problem.
And that's why, you know, you see these activists within Long COVID as well, just at the recent Senate hearing on it, you know, having to recover.
It's enormously taxing on their bodies.
And so you're asking disabled people.
And by the way, at least one person attended those hearings and then was reinfected with COVID.
you know, potentially endangering their lives because people like Bernie Sanders and others
Yeah.
couldn't even be bothered to mask throughout the whole hearing.
Crazy, but, you know, it's at great cost to their bodies and it's horrible.
And I, you know, I was very heavily involved in sort of AIDS activism growing up
and did a lot in that area.
And a lot of it's sort of like reminiscent of that, you know, of the sort of just like the state abandonment,
the normalization of infection, the refusal to sort of adapt protective measures.
And, you know, that took decades.
But I'm hopeful that the internet can sort of accelerate change
and people can start to realize this is a workers' rights issue, you know.
Those people that are working these manual labor or service jobs, they are the ones being forcibly affected.
You know, let's not forget, In-N-Out banned masks.
They won't even let their employees protect themselves.
So I just think this is a mass disabling event, and I hope that leftists could have some solidarity.
It's been very disappointing to see a lot of them not, basically.
Well, and then on a sort of more mainstream, left-leaning level, it's extraordinary that in the aftermath of the greatest public health crisis in the last 100 years, things like Medicare for All aren't even on the agenda, right?
They're not even talking about it.
They're not even talking about it.
I know.
I remember when the pandemic hit, and I was like, wow, this is horrible, but maybe we're gonna get healthcare, you know?
Sure.
And in fact, we have, Big leftist organizations, you know, shouting down disabled people who are, who are talking about these things.
And that is incredibly problematic, especially when the most marginalized people, it's not just women, it's people of color are more likely to be affected by COVID, you know, like, it's all of these, all of it sort of exacerbates all of these inequalities.
And by the way, the majority, like people, it's, I obviously, you know, I have seven shots myself.
I'm severely immunocompromised.
I don't even generate antibodies to the vaccines, but you know, it's great to be, it's great to be vaccinated, but long COVID is very common in breakthrough infections.
Being vaccinated does not mean that you can't get long COVID in any sense of the word.
And it might help reduce, you know, the severity and the symptoms and things.
So definitely great, you know, get all of your vaccines and boosters.
But, you know, I think far too many people drank up the Kool-Aid and the, you know, back-to-work
messaging of, you know, this sort of vaxxed and raxed approach where they don't realize
that they're in danger until they're disabled and then no one's there to help them.
Health information is obviously a foundational reason of why we started the podcast with
the anti-vax movement, but its tentacles spread out into so many different directions.
I'm writing a piece about health misinformation and AI from Mother Jones right now, and it's something that's fascinating to me because I go to the chatbots to ask the same questions I would traditionally do search on, and the amount of collated misinformation that I'm fed, especially in co-pilot and sometimes chat GPT, It kind of blew my mind, so I pitched this story.
A lot of the focus right now in media is on election interference through AI, which we should be focusing on, but I'm telling you the health stuff.
Copilot will literally tell me one thing and then sell me the products under it that it just said not to take.
So we're moving into very... It's like, don't take turmeric supplements, just eat the actual turmeric if you want these anti-inflammatory benefits.
Oh, and buy all these supplements.
That's what I'm looking at right here.
So I'm just wondering your general thoughts, because we've kind of talked about media up until now and what people are trying to do.
But given that Google might make their search page just information Collected from all these new sites without actually referencing them anymore.
That to me is another existential, I don't want to say crisis, but we're definitely dealing with something new here.
And I'm wondering your thoughts about how AI is affecting media from your perspective.
Yeah, I think it's, I mean, AI is just an accelerant of a lot of these trends that we're already seeing emerging of sort of like the fracturing of media and the rising distrust and misinformation being so rampant.
But I think it's going to make it, yeah, I think it's going to make it significantly worse.
Also because people, people treat AI, as you know, as this like all-knowing, all-powerful thing.
I think some people have a skepticism of it, but even the most skeptical people will still rely on information or not even think to question information.
And I mean, we already know that media literacy is at an incredible low.
I mean, most people can't even distinguish between An opinion article in a reported news article.
So they're certainly not going to be able to parse the nuances of a sort of chat GPT given answer at all.
They're probably just going to read it and skim it and absorb it.
And even if they're kind of skeptical of some of it, it doesn't matter.
That misinformation has been repeated and sort of put into your brain and now it's Something that you probably might think about even if you don't necessarily fully believe.
So I think it's a really bad thing.
I think that somebody should fix that.
I have a couple of questions maybe as we round up here about this personal account that you published back in October in Marie Claire about dealing with levels of online harassment that I think Most people, and certainly men, just can't even imagine.
So I'm not going to ask you to recite any of the horrible details, but there's two things that stood out to me.
One of them was that I was reminded of interviewing Kathleen Hale.
I don't know if you remember her story, but she was a young adult fiction author who was
also doing a lot of personal essays back in the 2010s.
And she made the choice to write a long disclosure of how she had actually stalked somebody on
Goodreads who had given her a bad review.
And then that actually led to this full-on sort of cancellation campaign against her.
But what she was saying was that she had grown up in this environment in which women were set up for a kind of exploitation by this early blogging culture that commodified honesty and transparency and, you know, personal confession.
And a lot of that overlaps with the wellness influencers and creators who are women that we cover who have to market and sell their internal lives in order to inspire people.
But that same process is then weaponized against them.
But then you have this quote in Marie Claire where you say, we've been conditioned to share to be authentic and real, but doing that makes everything feel personal.
And when people spread lies about me on the internet, I used to think, if only if they knew me, if only I could explain myself, if I just gave them a little bit more information, they would understand me.
So I gave them more and more of my real self, trying to correct the record and seize control of my own story.
But all it did was give them more and more to take.
And so I just wanted to ask about that experience and about how you protect yourself against it at this point.
Well, at this point, I'm at, I don't know, the state of zen where I've stopped trying to kind of like fix all the crazy misinformation on my Wikipedia page.
It's just such a losing battle.
It's really, really disorienting.
And I've talked to, you know, obviously covering the content creator industry.
See people go through these sort of transitions from private to public figure and sort of the scrutiny that comes with it and how disturbing it can be to see this, this totally like warped version of yourself represented in the media specifically.
I mean, My biggest qualm is not so much with people on the internet, and I couldn't get into this as much in Marie Claire as I wanted to, but my issue is with the media itself and the abhorrent way they cover these harassment campaigns.
They often re-victimize women.
They often reveal highly personal information.
I mean, one of the worst mistakes I think I've ever made in my career is trusting an MSNBC journalist named Morgan Radford, who I do not think should be able to practice journalism.
She produced One of the worst segments I've ever seen about online harassment where she not only misgendered, um, you know, Kate, who was also in the segment with me, but, um, totally misrepresented everything I said in that interview to kind of make it seem like I gave a shit about like Twitter, people saying things about me on Twitter.
And it, and it ultimately what she did, she clipped this part right at the end of a three and a half hour long interview where I like, for one moment, like, Break.
And right after that, I say, like, let's stop the interview because I was upset.
I had actually just lost a friend, whatever.
And of course, what do they do?
They clip that and replay it a zillion times on cable news.
And that sort of exploitation is what so many women, I mean, it just gave me so much empathy for what these other women have gone through that are victims of stalking, harassment, internet attacks, people like Zoe and others, you know, that live through Gamergate, like just watching the media.
Exploit these women and re sort of traumatize them and cause immense harm because they also accelerate these harassment campaigns.
Or they ask you to like justify yourself.
And yeah, it's disturbing.
And at this point now I see this version of myself sort of this what I was writing about in that piece is like you just sort of see this version of yourself represented in the public consciousness or the media environment, especially like on Fox News.
Like I think my version of me that exists in the minds of like the Right-wing media consumers is just not based in reality, and there's no amount of information or debunking that I can do to convince these people that
I'm not like the second coming of the devil or something.
I don't know.
You know, you made a joke about being in a Zen place about it, but I think that's kind of a profound moment to recognize that there's a lot of aggression pointed at your name and your image, and that has nothing to do with you as a person.
And I'm wondering, like, is that something that is with you now?
Does that give you a certain amount of, I don't know, peace or confidence?
But I think to get to that place, I had to develop the most insanely strong sort of sense of self.
And that's the only way to get through it.
I mean, I think as somebody that also has the benefit of writing about online harassment and sort of like speaking to women for years, I mean, I joined a support group when I was going through the worst of it.
And to me, it's also, it wasn't so much the worst of it on me.
I can handle a lot.
I can handle being swatted or whatever.
Like, but it was what was being done to my family members that was really upsetting.
And having my parents driven out of their home in the middle of the night multiple times at gunpoint.
And, you know, all of the horrible stuff that my family members extended, aunts and uncles had to endure.
And the lies and conspiracies spread about them that have affected their careers.
And, you know, Feeling like you're a liability.
I felt like I was like poison and anybody that, you know, and so I really self-isolated and that was really bad.
And yeah, I think that the only way is through and I was like, whatever, okay, just going to get through it.
And I think actually living in LA Has helped because there's a lot of, I mean, I, celebrity culture sucks and I'm not like, you know, a fan of it, but I think there's a lot of people in LA, at least the people that I talked to that really helped me through it that were, had been through like really bad, like tabloid news cycles because they're famous in some way and sort of had got through it and, and yeah, it's hard.
But of course those people are multimillionaires who also have endless assistants and people to like help them sort of like get to that better place.
Um, Most journalists don't.
I'm more well-resourced than most people, but most of the people that are targets in these types of campaigns don't have that kind of support, and so they remove themselves.
They retract and remove themselves.
Taylor, thank you so much for sharing all of that.
But I'm good, don't worry.
Thank you for sharing and thank you for joining us today.
I highly recommend your book to everyone.
I really enjoyed it, even as someone who has been extremely online.
My father was a computer programmer.
I've been with computers since the 80s and I still learn so much.
So I really appreciate you and your reporting and your book.
So again, thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
This was so fun.
And I also just want to let people know I have a YouTube channel now.
So please, please, please subscribe.
I'm trying to get to the 10,000 subscriber mark right now.
It's just Taylor Lorenz on YouTube.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
Join us next Thursday when Mallory DeMille returns to talk about the sordid world of coffee enemas.
