Episode 78: Cheapfakes on the Campaign Trail '20 feat Parker Molloy
Forget deepfakes. All we can afford in this economy? Freeware video apps and enterprise edition windows vista. Welcome to the era of cheapfakes. Parker Molloy, editor at large for Media Matters joins us to discuss a recent Buttigieg campaign video, a manipulated sample of a Biden rant, and the primaries in the context of conspiracy theorizing.
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Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/07/psychiatrist-struck-off-for-posting-bizarre-qanon-conspiracy-theories
https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Releases/Release/Article/1879340/dod-announces-250m-to-ukraine/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-02-14-mn-420-story.html
https://datasociety.net/output/deepfakes-and-cheap-fakes/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/23/faked-pelosi-videos-slowed-make-her-appear-drunk-spread-across-social-media/
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/new-approach-to-synthetic-and-manipulated-media.html
https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/viral-and-misleading-biden-clip-shows-dangers-democratizing-disinformation
Welcome, listener, to the 78th chapter of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Cheap Fakes episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we are dealing with cheap fakes, or videos edited deceptively, without the use of machine learning, artificial intelligence, or other advanced techniques.
It turns out, we don't need technology to effectively lie and manipulate the public.
You can do it from Windows Movie Maker, despite your arthritis.
Travis is going to walk us through the concept and show us some recent examples of cheap fakes that have made splashes.
We'll then be joined by Parker Malloy, editor-at-large for Media Matters, who's been covering cheap fakes for a little while now.
She'll help us understand what it all means.
But before all that, I guess I just wanted to acknowledge that last night was the live show and it was incredible.
We had such a great time.
Thank you to everybody for coming out.
Yeah, it was a blast.
All of our listeners At first I would say fans, and then I was like,
nah, it's not that, it's listeners.
But then I'd be like, no, it's our friends.
Like, all of our friends were really fucking awesome to meet,
and it was great.
Love hanging out in the gym at the Jewish Community Center with my friends.
Yes.
Yeah, that's what it felt like.
Everybody was so touching.
It was such a pleasure to do the performance.
I thought, you know, with all the technical hurdles of bringing this show live and doing some of the posts
that I usually do up front and have it happen.
It was a really funny and interesting experience for sure, which we really enjoyed.
And that'll be the premium episode this week.
But if we're feeling a little bit hoarse, hoarse in the voice... Yeah, it's because we were screaming into the microphones.
It's because we may have been screaming.
So, before all that, we've got some news from Down Under!
First up, Australian psychiatrists deemed mentally unfit to treat patients for promoting
QAnon.
So, can we agree that Australia is officially the second QAnon country?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
100%.
There's no other country that has gone this far.
Like, the President!
It's a cystic country.
Prime Minister.
Prime Minister is...
is like friends with the QAnon guy.
They have just the wildest, most deranged QAnon people trying to rival us, trying to beat us.
If you want to understand...
America's still number one.
If you want to understand what's really eating at the soul of the Australians,
you have to watch a movie from the 70s called Wake and Fright.
Really?
Yeah, content warning for kangaroos being hurt.
But it's also one of the finest movies about descending into madness and a very specific Australian small town madness.
And it rules.
It's insane.
It's very shocking and beautiful and good.
I'll take your word for it.
So here you are, you make fun of us for bringing up obscure movies.
What the fuck is this bullshit?
I'm gonna start using I'll take your word for it a lot more.
That's a nice, it's a real nice quick gut punch without letting somebody know that you're dissing them.
You telling me that is not ideal.
So this is a wild story that was reported in The Guardian.
A psychiatrist named Russell Everard McGregor What?
Based in Sydney.
Come on, really?
Yeah, he was struck from the medical register in part for promoting QAnon.
So this was a result of a series of events that started with Dr. McGregor being suspicious that his partner was having an affair with another doctor.
So he filed a complaint with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, or
AHPRA, against that other doctor and sent details of the complaint to a colleague.
That colleague, in turn, made a complaint to that board about Dr. McGregor's conduct.
While investigating the complaint, investigators looked at Dr. McGregor's website and found
blog posts about QAnon.
Okay, so someone's having sex with his wife.
Yeah, yeah.
Someone's having sex with his wife.
A fellow doctor.
And so he filed, like, an ethics complaint against that doctor.
Against that person.
So it's not... You don't address this, perhaps, by talking to your wife.
You go and you do weird professional battling with other doctors?
Like, you think they're cucking you?
Well, maybe he also did that, but this is weird.
He's trying to stick it to that doctor professionally for fucking his wife.
I can understand that.
Wait, so the doctor who was fucking his wife, was he the QAnon believer?
No, it's the guy who accused- The guy who accused?
Oh, the guy who accused.
The guy simultaneously exposed to the world that he was being cucked and also that he was a conspiracy theorist after being already, you know, cheated on, which probably doesn't feel good.
So the QAnon guy got cucked.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes he did.
And he basically what he did is he tripped over his own penis and fell and his Q-Anon like just emerged all over the sidewalk and everybody could see it and it was too late.
All of his fucking like plastic Q's fell out of a shopping bag.
All of his pockets were emptied.
So now he's not just cucked but also disgraced and unemployed.
Oh my god it's like in Sonic when you fucking get hit and all the rings come out but it's just plastic Q's and Oh my god.
Cue Christmas ornaments and- Oh fuck, dude.
Since 2018, Dr. McGregor has published several hundred posts about QAnon on his practices website.
Oh my god.
To give you an idea of the tenor of the posts.
His practices website?
Yeah, that's right.
I'm gonna read- Oh, but he doesn't have other doctors.
It's a single person practice, right?
Yes, yes.
It's a single person practice, yeah.
It's just a community blog.
So I'm going to read, I'm going to have Jake here read one of the published posts from January 29th, 2018.
This message is to all patriotic Australians.
Our world is at a historic inflection point where our freedom is at stake.
The next few weeks and months will be critical.
Please spread the word to our blue-pilled friends.
We must stand up and support President Trump in his fight against the global deep state.
Educate yourself with the above.
Follow Q and tweet slash talk slash message.
Once the Devin Nunes memo is released, in the next few days there will be a CIA deep state backlash on the MSN.
They will ramp up propaganda, and it will be ceaseless.
You will encounter much resistance.
Fight with your keyboard, knowledge, and pen.
Just fight.
Watch Dr. Jerome Corsi on YouTube slash InfoWars.
Follow Q's Breadcrumbs, understand the Pfizer wiretapping, MI6 connection, assassination plots, and brace yourself for an unmentionable satanic ritual evidence to follow.
This is the guy, by the way, he gets to give out medication for people's mental illness, right?
That's right.
That's fantastic.
The evil truth will be hard for most to bear.
Be brave.
Seek loved ones and offer compassion to friends and family.
Bad move, bad move.
of and have researched the deep state for decades. All that which is stated by Q is
generally in keeping with my prior knowledge. Indeed, there is a great deal
more to the story than Q may wish to tell. It may remain untold. However, trust Q as
Q speaks the truth. I place my reputation at Q's disposal.
Bad move. You don't even know who it is.
Dr. Russell McGregor.
Oh, I place my reput- I mean, I don't understand.
This sounds like a joke!
It's like a cartoon character somehow drawing the rake and then stepping on it.
I don't even hear people, like, place their reputation at the feet of, like, something that's true.
Like, when somebody believes something, like, the sky is blue, like, I don't hear people be like, I place my reputation at the feet of the sky being blue.
Better bet, though.
So, a complaint was made on the basis that Dr. McGregor was not fit to practice medicine because of that.
Dr. McGregor failed to take part in the initial hearings into his fitness to practice, and he refused to attend an interview with a psychiatrist that the medical council required him to attend.
Well, he knows that psychiatrists are all corrupt quacks and in the pocket of TSA.
Yeah, they're gonna turn him into a fuckin' Manchurian candidate.
He knows what's up.
He's actually the Serpico for psychiatrists.
During a hearing into his mental state, McGregor told the medical council that if they had any understanding of politics, you would understand that the beliefs that are actually put on the blog are actually directives from President Trump.
So he's blogging directives?
Yeah.
From Trump, but he's just an Australian who's practicing saying- Because he thinks he's getting information from Q, which is from Trump, and that's what he's blogging.
Wait, so he's saying if you guys knew anything about politics, you would know that the stuff that's written on my public practices site is just straight from Trump's mouth.
Yeah, that's what he's saying.
Which is a net positive for Australians.
Australians are all like, hey, amazing.
I love Trump.
Immediately after the presiding member of the council told Dr. McGregor by phone that they had decided to suspend his registration, the following exchange occurred.
And I'm going to, I'm going to have, yeah, Jake should be Dr. McGregor and Julian, would you please have the female presiding member?
You dirty bitch.
You dirty bitch.
You're from New Zealand, aren't you?
You have no right to do this to me.
This is a political decision because you have a different political opinion to me.
Doctor McGregor, it's not about politics.
You, you, you are repulsive.
You are repulsive, you are.
Look, look, look, this is going to bankrupt me.
I'm dead.
Dr. McGregor, can I just say for a moment, we don't want this to bankrupt you.
Could you please consider a locum?
Could you please consider- You filthy, dirty, fuckin' bitch.
Yeah, could you please consider speaking to your medical defense organization about- You filthy left-wing fuckhead.
You filthy, dirty, fuckin' left-wing slut.
You think you can just do this because I'm right-wing?
You fuckin' dirty bitch.
You take away my fuckin'- I'm hanging up, Dr. McGregor.
That's inappropriate.
You fuckin' take away my career.
Oh my god!
Just fucking unhinged.
Wow!
He sounds like Gibson when Gibson got fucking super wasted and said all that horrible shit.
Filthy, dirty, fucking left-wing slut.
Yeah, I mean, the Australians are good at swearing.
She waited before she was like, um, okay, I'm hanging up.
Like, this is inappropriate.
She made it through a couple of his fucking tirades.
He had called her a filthy, dirty, fucking bitch and she was still like, would you please consider speaking to your medical defense organization?
He's already, like, just gone.
Just on a whiskey rant.
Oh my god, for some reason I imagine that this guy looks like John Hammond from Jurassic Park.
Like, just like, in kind of like a white pantsuit with like a big flat brim, like, white hat.
After that article in The Guardian was published, McGregor responded to it with a 51 tweet long rant.
Yes, of Seth Abrams shit.
Yes.
In it, he says that he asked the Australian Liberal Party to tell the Medical Council that QAnon is real.
I wrote in detail to my constituent Liberal Party members, begging them to convey to the Council that hashtag QAnon was not a quite paranoid conspiracy.
I provided multiple documents, over 600 pages of evidence.
I also outlined the Spygate crimes by Australia against hashtag POTUS and also the Russiagate hoax.
These politicians abrogated their responsibility to stop the council's prosecution of me for political purposes.
So, it's not going well with the medical council, so he's like, please, I would like this political party to contact the medical council to tell them that in fact I'm right and QAnon is real.
That's right.
And he just thought that that was gonna work.
Yes, he seems pretty confident.
He is so God.
Even American QAnon people don't write their congressman.
Could you please tell my wife that QAnon is real?
She thinks I'm crazy.
Incredible stuff.
Wow, congratulations.
Really, Australia, we're going to have to do a Boonta Vista crossover every month and a half?
At this fucking rate?
So McGregor will be permitted to reapply for his registration in a year.
However, he will need to prove he has recovered significantly should he wish to practice again.
And I really do not see that happening.
He's too far gone.
You don't think he can build a nice clientele of Q people?
Well, imagine they come to him, you know, for what ails them, which is MSM.
Yeah.
But he can cure MSM.
Yeah.
With MMS.
Yes, gotcha.
That's right.
Oh, I see.
See?
I get it.
That's a male-male serpent threesome.
No, it's definitely a miracle medical solution, which is bleach.
Also, we have some new Q-drops this past week.
They were actually quite a few, and I gotta say, Q was in top form.
He was playing kind of the old hits, like Uranium One, he was bringing up George Soros.
Wait, didn't Saliza just do exactly this about Trump, Travis?
The same kind of cheerleading and giving them a big prize for the way they're acting?
It feels wrong.
I've dunked on Q when it's like, oh, this is lazy.
You should honor when the content is good!
You should honor when it's good!
It's bad.
Everything is deranged and kind of anti-Semitic, but high effort.
Higher effort.
I'll say that.
That's not a compliment.
It's not a compliment to say they're high effort as to doing something horrifying.
So, in one Q drop, Q amplified a false tweet by Ian Miles Cheong about Shadow Inc.
Now, Shadow Inc.
is, of course, the company behind the app that caused so much chaos during the Iowa caucus.
The tweet, which is wrong, says this.
And there it is.
The single largest donor of Shadow, Inc., the company behind the failed Iowa caucus app, is George Soros.
So, that's false.
George Soros has not donated to Shadow, Inc.
In reality, George Soros is the largest donor to the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, and that committee donated to the Super PAC, PACRADEM, as do dozens of other entities and people.
The largest donor to PACRIDM is actually the hedge fund manager, Seth Klarman.
And PACRIDM is the super PAC, hold on, for the non-profit ACRIDM.
And ACRIDM either launched or invested in Shadow Wink.
If you want to take a look at the money behind Shadow Wink, that's great, that's fantastic.
I would encourage it, even.
That's a positive thing.
But there's no reason to go straight for George Soros.
With Ian Miles Chong, I just think of like a big box that I would take out of my attic and it's filled with rusty old cookie cutters.
Yeah.
Right.
And so there's different shapes, stars, Christmas tree, whatever.
And so you would want to kind of find a way to projectile multiple of them at him all at once and create cookies through him as he is inevitably just There was another Q-drop that kind of threw me for a loop because it seemed to be promoting this vague conspiracy theory that involved Obama and USAID to Ukraine and some sort of mysterious bank.
But during my research into it, I came across a Glenn Beck live stream on Blaze TV.
It was called Glenn Beck Presents Ukraine, The Final Piece.
Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.
I'm Hunter Biden.
I'm such a loser.
Give me all the money.
Fire the prosecutor.
So it appears what happened was that whoever's behind Q at the moment, they watched that live stream on February the 6th, the day it aired.
And then that evening, During the impeachment, do you remember the Democrats, how they just kept saying Trump was putting them, the Ukrainians, in danger?
It was our responsibility to help fight the war with Russia.
But I said the whole time, where were you?
You literally refused to give them anything but blankets.
Now, first of all, regardless of how you might feel about foreign military aid, it's untrue that Democrats literally only gave the Ukraine blankets.
Since 2014, U.S.
security assistance to Ukraine has totaled $1.5 billion.
Ukraine, they ran out of blankets.
We had to send them blankets.
They don't have blankets in the Ukraine.
There's that talking point.
And with that in mind, here is a part of a Q-drop posted just a few hours later.
Think Hussein Whitehouse's refusal to send weapons to Ukraine?
Our Congress pushed to assist, but instead sent only blankets?
Think D's attack?
Repotus for failure to protect Ukraine against Russian aggression?
Impeachment?
So it's very cryptic, but basically he's pushing the exact same point that Glenn Beck was making and that live stream that he made the exact same day.
So here's another clip from that Glenn Beck special.
At the same time all of this was happening, Biden, as the point man for Ukraine and Secretary of State John Kerry, They began lobbying for 1.8 billion dollars, an aid package to Ukraine specifically to stabilize their banking system.
And here is part of that queue drop from that same evening.
Think 1.8 billion, Hussein Whitehouse leads to Ukraine, which bank?
So, I've discovered Q's super secret intel source, and apparently it's BlazeTV on YouTube.
Oh man, now we can start doing our own drops!
Right.
So, I think this is kind of like revealing how Q operates.
Q is apparently just plugged into the general sort of right-wing conspiracy world, sees what's trending, liked this material, and realized he could just co-opt it in sort of QDrop style.
Well, that's best case scenario.
Other case scenario is literally posting an American flag on YouTube.
Yeah, that's true, that's true.
You know, I mean, this is Q at their best, so I understand what you meant.
Yeah, that's what I was saying.
Better material.
I didn't mean to disparage your character.
Alright.
Wasn't my intention.
So the conspiracy theory that Beck and subsequently Q was trying to promote is that the Obama administration engaged in a secret proxy war with Russia by financing a Ukrainian oligarch via a $1.8 billion aid package to the Nationalized Ukraine Bank private bank.
There's obviously no real evidence of this, as Glenn Beck even admits in the special.
And if Obama was involved in a scandal more outrageous than Iran-Contra, I feel like Trump would have mentioned it by
now.
♪♪♪ Cheap fakes.
So today we're going to be talking about video disinformation.
And I think it's important because as the presidential race has officially kicked off,
we're going to see just insane barrage of disinformation over the next nine months.
It's going to be mind-bending.
I can't wait for it, honestly.
I can't wait.
I am so excited for all of the content to rush into my brain and convince me to vote for President Trump again.
Jake is going to be sweating conspiracy theories and I'm going to be using a little basting thing to like reinsert them into him.
I already tried.
So that he stays hydrated.
I already tried to pill these guys earlier on my coronavirus, my coronavirus conspiracy theory.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He has, he has a lot of- I've got video to back it up.
It's way worse.
It's way worse than you think.
It's way worse.
Yeah.
80,000 bodies.
A billionaire is tweeting about the truth.
So when people talk about a manipulated video, they're usually talking about, like, deep fakes.
And that is videos that appear to be authentic recordings of a person, such as, hypothetically, a presidential candidate, but were actually created by sophisticated machine learning systems, such as, like, a generative adversarial network.
Imagine, like, a completely fabricated video of Bernie Sanders saying that he's dropping out of the race and endorsing Tom Steyer.
So it would cause chaos before, like, the Bernie campaign could respond to say that is fake.
Yes, but it would produce the best shipping material for decades to come.
But despite all the worry that deepfakes seem to generate, there really hasn't been a genuinely viral deepfake video that was used for political disinformation.
There's usually deepfake porn or videos of Nicolas Cage's face put on other actors' faces, that kind of stuff, but not a video of a politician seeming to say something that fooled everyone.
Now, that might be due to the fact that the barrier for entry on creating deepfakes is still pretty high.
You need to be kind of techy to do it.
So, the videos that currently fool people are less sophisticated.
They rely on less technical knowledge.
This might involve, like, slowing a video, or removing certain frames, or just taking a clip out of context.
And these are the cheap fakes.
Interestingly, cheat fakes are hardly a new thing.
In fact, a simple manipulation of video may have been what led to the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King.
For those who don't recall that incident, that was a time in 1991 in which four LAPD officers beat a black construction worker following a high-speed chase.
That incident may have been totally forgotten, but the beating happened to be recorded by a man named George Holliday, who filmed the incident from his nearby balcony.
He sent footage to the local news station, KTLA, and it shocked the world.
So this was significant because it was like before everyone had a camera in their pocket and they could upload videos to YouTube to spread it everywhere.
And the black community had long said that they were subjected to sadistic police brutality.
You know, and finally, like, we had this irrefutable documentary evidence of it.
Despite that, the four officers were tried in a very high-profile trial, and despite the video evidence, they were ultimately acquitted in an incident that helped spark the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
And that riot was also obviously the product of long-standing tensions and grievances, to be clear.
But what a lot of people don't know about that incident is that the jurors in the Rodney King trial did not see the video as George Holliday filmed it.
God dammit.
Holy shit.
I didn't know this.
I didn't know this.
The version that the jurors saw was actually manipulated by quote-unquote FBI video experts.
According to an LA Times article headlined, King Video Enhancement Blurs Reality Experts Say, They Slowed Down the Tape, Enhanced the Sound, Stabilized the Picture, and Experimented with a Variety of Digitally Enhanced Exposures.
So, the slowing down of the video was... It turns out it was four black guys beating a cop on the ground.
The FBI figured out.
So, the slowing down of the video was especially significant.
At full speed, King appears to be helpless through much of the incident.
But in slow motion, small movements of a leg or an arm could make it appear to some viewers like he's trying to stand up.
Like he's trying to stand up!
That's the standard in America!
I know, it's so horrifying.
They're like, oh yeah, no, the cops didn't do anything wrong.
I mean, yeah, it looks like he was trying to fight back or get up.
I know, I know.
Love it.
Four guys beat you.
Four guys beat you.
You tried to stand up.
I know.
America rules!
But still, that perception fed into the officer's case.
That made the difference!
Which was based in part on the argument that King was resisting arrest throughout the beating, and that as soon as he complied with our orders, the officers stopped hitting him.
Damn, that FBI person probably gained some ranks after that.
I guess so.
Because that is quite a fucking unopped right there.
Yeah, we have documentary evidence of it.
That is sick.
I did not know the FBI.
Oh, my lord.
Yep, it's horrifying.
They're actually good people instead of the bad stuff I've been saying about them.
So Norman Garland, a law professor at Southwestern University School of Law, said this about
the slowed down video.
Until I saw the tape played in slow motion, I couldn't see how there was any defense.
It definitely affects the way you judge the officer's actions.
Here we have an example of a cheat fake video back in the early 90s, possibly changing the
result of a historically significant criminal trial.
Yeah.
Like if those four officers had been convicted, then that would have made a lot of people have faith in the justice system again.
Of course, nowadays, you don't need to be an FBI video expert to manipulate video in simple ways.
Perhaps the most notable recent example of a cheat fake video going viral was the drunk Pelosi video.
So this was a video that appeared to depict Speaker Nancy Pelosi slurring her words while speaking, but was in fact the product of very simple video manipulation.
So this video was filmed when Pelosi spoke at the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference on May 22, 2019.
The altered video was shared on the Facebook page, it was viewed over 4 million times, and it went viral on other social media platforms.
It was even promoted by Rudy Giuliani.
Here's what the clip from the manipulated slowdown video sounds like.
We want to give this president the opportunity to do something historic.
For our country.
Well, the thing is, she does have a bit of like a drunk edge to her voice in the first place.
So they could they saw they could just push it a little further.
Yeah.
She sounds but she sounds more like like a very old person who's on like Adderall or something.
Yeah.
You know, just the kind of quiet.
OK.
Yes.
But the full speed unaltered video sounds like this.
We want to give this president the opportunity Do something historic for our country.
It's a little bit faster, a little bit more clear, but she does sound so a little bit.
Yeah.
No, no, of course they just push something that was already there.
That's so here the video editor actually made two alterations to the clip you just heard.
First, they, uh, they slowed down the video to 75% speed that resulted in audio that's distorted in a more obvious way like this.
We want to give this president the opportunity to do something historic for our country.
That's the nicest overlord dinosaur I've ever heard.
Then they brought the pitch down to make it sound like Pelosi's natural tone, only slower.
Facebook allowed the doctored video to stay up, even though it was manipulated.
And the reason that is that Facebook has a policy against allowing deep fakes on their platform, but they're actually totally cool with cheap fakes.
Yeah.
So here's what Facebook said in a statement.
The doctored video of Speaker Pelosi does not meet the standards of this policy and would not be removed.
Only videos generated by artificial intelligence to depict people saying fictional things will be taken down.
What?
The-the-the-the-I think there's an issue here that we should address.
Like, for example, if you look at Vic Berger, right?
He makes these fantastic videos, very funny.
He does shit exactly like this, slows stuff down, makes people sound fucked up, drunk.
He zooms in.
But the difference is that the left doesn't treat him as a source of information.
We just appreciate his funny comedy work.
We know it's satire.
On the right, they're like, no, no, this is the truth.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
So it's not the practice, it's the fucking way that you're, like, I guess, portraying it for the people you're trying to convince, and it's how they then process it.
And on the right, that is vastly different than the left.
I mean, there is, like, lib versions of this kind of weird loop.
Yeah, I just think it's really weird.
Like, apparently, like, deepfakes, which apparently haven't really fooled people in a really significant, profound way, that's, they're not allowed that.
But like, cheatfakes, which have repeatedly fooled people in a significant way, that's allowed.
So they only allow the effective method of disinformation.
Yeah, because they, again, they strip everything of, like, politics and intention and context.
So again, they can only kind of say yes or no to a method or a practice.
So for them, it would be like, well, we're not going to take down Vic Berger.
Because we're not going to take down this.
So they do the false equivalency because they are ghouls that have no, they have a void where any kind of politics and morality is.
So for them it's just like a mathematics game.
So of course we couldn't even go more low-tech than slowing down footage and just plain take clips out of context.
There was a recent example of when a Twitter account called At Moon Cult published a video that falsely made it seem like Joe Biden was pushing a white nationalist talking point.
So what really happened was that Biden was asked at an event in Derry, New Hampshire on December 30th to discuss his efforts to fight domestic violence and sexual assault.
Biden talked about how in his view the United States had a cultural problem Folks, this is about changing the culture.
Our culture.
the US has been influenced by the permissive common law established by judges in England
hundreds of years ago.
And therefore, we need to change our culture in order to combat that kind of violence.
Folks, this is about changing the culture.
Our culture.
Our culture.
It's not imported from some African nation or some Asian nation.
It's our English jurisprudential culture.
Our European culture.
He says it's all right.
So in the clip that actually Moon Cult published made even shorter version of that, it removed the beginning where it talks about it's about changing our culture.
And it also removed the end part when it's talking about that says it's all right.
And like, out of context, it sounds like Joe Biden is basically straight up pushing the 14 words.
This is like straight up white nationalism bullshit, but it wasn't that at all.
Bob Solera, deputy communications director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said baselessly about that video.
So apparently Joe Biden is a white nationalist.
Oh boy.
Yeah.
Whoops.
Then the right got it.
Yeah, exactly.
Here's my thing.
I don't think you can beat fascists in the disinformation war.
Like, that's their home turf.
Yeah, you're just kind of feeding the, it's going to end up feeding the bigger, bigger unreality.
They will profit from the greater unreality.
They want to destroy reality.
It's not fighting fire with fire, it's just making a bigger fire.
I can't wait for the inevitable Twitter war that this leads to.
This is the first time that we're not trying to do that.
So, in anticipation of the coming disinformation offense, Twitter is actually rolling out a new rule that will take effect March 5th.
You may not deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm.
In addition, we may label tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media to help people understand the media's authenticity and to provide additional context.
So, here are some factors that Twitter says it will use to determine whether media has been deceptively altered or fabricated.
Whether the content has been substantially edited in a manner that fundamentally alters its composition, sequence, timing, or framing.
You love to read all this.
information such as new video frames, overdubbed audio, or modified subtitles
that has been added or removed, and whether media depicting a real person
has been fabricated or simulated. You love to read all this.
It doesn't at all make you feel like you're slowly losing your grip on the
basics. Yeah, this is the best we can hope for.
Maybe...
Maybe in retrospect it wasn't a good idea to let these tech oligarchs decide what is real or not.
Fuck.
There's currently those little like vision deforming like heat waves coming off the top of my head.
Yeah.
I do not feel all right.
No, it's not great.
So Twitter is sort of like a, I guess, criteria for determining, you know, manipulated video does seem to include cheap fakes.
But it's not going to take effect for a few more weeks here.
And I guess we just don't know how well they're going to enforce it.
But here's hoping here's hoping reality doesn't collapse in the coming months.
I mean, the flip side is that we're giving dominion to private companies over, like, incredibly important nationwide speech between human beings.
You know?
I mean, that is a very worrying idea, because we have no control over who writes these.
You just read us this Twitter thing, it could have read the opposite, and we'd have no control over that.
So it's completely up to their whims and what happens when it changes direction.
Oh, they bring in a new guy and the new CEO wants to do it this way.
It's an absolute nightmare, the idea that we're going to have any kind of system that regulates what is real or fake based on private interests.
And people are fucking cheering for this shit.
They're like, oh, good.
Good to see Twitter finally stepping up and cracking down.
Fuck you!
Like, this is dead down, like, God damn it!
These fucking people, these fucking people invite this shit in because they read this shit and they're like, they read it and they're like, oh good, well, like they never even think that it could be used against them because right now it aligns with what they believe.
And just like you said, if some asshole fucking comes in like, you know, one of the Rockstar guys or whatever becomes the fucking head of Twitter and all of a sudden they're like, oh, We can take it in this, like, fucking super shitty direction, and everybody's already hit accept and signed on to the fucking terms, and it's like, what then?
What then, Julian?
I don't know, Jake.
You're mighty worked up about it, but I hope- Sorry.
Did you get censored again for doing- posting the 14 words, or?
No, you're right.
It's an intractable problem.
But also, what's the alternative?
I always turn it back to my experience of growing up in Usenet groups in the 90s or these cheap web forums.
You could get the ban hammer if the mod's girlfriend dumped him that day.
Yeah, but the president wasn't in your group.
Like the president of other nations wasn't in your group.
This is a scale that is too large.
We can now call it infrastructure, but we refuse to because it continues to profit private interest to not call it infrastructure that we rely on, which is exactly what it is.
So we will continue to be at their fucking mercy if we continue to treat it that way.
So whatever.
I'm stoked, you know?
Yeah, looking forward to it.
The alternative was like, you like read something on a chat board that you were like, oh, that's interesting.
But then like your internet privileges got taken away and you had to be like outside for the next couple weeks.
And when like that prediction didn't happen or whatever, you go, I guess that was just something I read.
Yeah.
Anyways, they should really let Alex Jones back on Twitter.
Yeah.
It's what we're trying to say.
It's what the podcast is officially trying to say.
Got a bad, bad rap.
Yeah, Alex Jones should be allowed back on Twitter and Julian Field should be banned.
What?
Banned for life.
I don't like this.
Interview with Parker Malloy.
Parker Malloy is the editor-at-large for Media Matters.
Welcome to the show, Parker.
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Well, thanks for joining us.
As you know, we're covering cheap fakes this week, and you've done quite a bit of work writing about them.
Yeah.
The very recent New Hampshire Democratic primary, Pete Buttigieg's video, basically a statement he made from the debate stage, and you tweeted about this.
It's a short clip and it ends with audience clapping after Pete finishes what he's saying in the clip.
But something's wrong.
So can you tell us what happened?
Yeah.
So in this clip, which was tweeted out by his campaign, it's a clip from a CNN town hall from last year.
But they were tweeting it out to promote the town hall that was happening last week.
So what happens was he's answering a question and at the very end, it's like a 15 second clip like you were saying, it just goes into an audience applause and it shows his name on the screen kind of to close it out.
Just as, you know, any sort of commercial has music or some sort of sound effect to kind of make the transition less abrupt.
Sure.
But someone pointed out that if you watch the whole thing his answer is much longer and it didn't make sense for the crowd to be like cheering that loud because it was one of those things that he said something that was pretty generic and you know twirling towards freedom sort of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was one of those things where it would have been kind of weird if people reacted the way that that clip made it seem.
So once I saw someone else post that this was actually a longer clip and the crowd wasn't Cheering and all.
The first thing that popped in my head was, wait, was this just straight up invented applause that they put in there?
Is that this a, you know, pulling from like a sitcom laugh track or anything?
Or is this applause from elsewhere in that appearance?
And so I sat down and I was like, I'm going to watch this whole thing, see if I can find that applause.
And luckily it was in the intro.
So it was right after he was introduced, you hear this crowd cheer and, you know, kind of woo!
It wasn't just like they applauded at the end and they shortened it.
They took applause from a totally different part of his speech and put it at the end of a statement that didn't even contain applause at all.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
So this is like type of editing you could do in the era of the Frères Lumière or something.
It's not hard to do.
So that's what makes it, I guess, a cheap fake.
But this is even more worrying in a way because it's misrepresenting, I guess, the audience and America's reaction to a candidate and then representing that in a statement.
Yeah.
To me, this is a case of an editor who cut the original clip without the applause, and a couple people watched it were like, eh, I'm missing something.
And he goes, wait a minute, I've got a great idea.
And he goes to the beginning of the thing, takes the applause, and puts it back in, and everybody in the room nods and smiles and high-fives.
Yeah, because his campaign is basically functioning like a marketing agency.
But Parker, please tell us your perspective on this, because you've been studying this stuff for longer than we have.
I mean, honestly, when I saw that, it kind of seems to me more like it wasn't done to fool people, but as you guys were kind of saying, how it was kind of meant to just to make it seem cohesive, because what he said in that clip was I mean, I can't even remember exactly what he said in the clip because it wasn't memorable.
It wasn't some big, sweeping, memorable statement.
So I feel like it was something that was... The meaning of hope is the exit of the democratic process when it becomes about the individual and what makes us Americans.
The future of democracy is ours for now.
That is so fucking menacing!
In that space though, I feel like they could have put music or something to kind of take it from the clip to the little, like, his name or his campaign, whatever, at the very end.
But instead they went with the applause and it was just kind of, it just shows how easy it is to put these sort of things together that, you know, you can create these powerful Visual audio visual images, you know, but sometimes they just don't exist.
It would seem to me like one of the issues, you know, with this kind of thing is that if you put yourself in the feet of the editor, if you've edited any video in politics, you know that this is wrong, that it's unethical to edit in this manner.
So it makes you wonder, did they do it because they don't give a shit if it's unethical, or did they do it because he's selling his team that they have a startup, basically, and that he's a product?
Yeah, well, did you see that his campaign was nominated for like a Shorty Award or something like that for being a brand?
That was interesting.
That was different.
Wow.
He's going to get all the Razzies this year.
You're right.
It might be like a manager who is like more experienced in like marketing or film or something.
And like, you know, whenever you work in those sorts of fields, you know, you take a clip, you spice it up with a little bit.
You make it work.
Yeah, exactly.
You make it work.
Yeah, and that's the thing.
If you take it out of the context of being a politician, it makes perfect sense.
Absolutely.
If it's a product, of course.
Yeah, because we expect marketing to basically be disingenuous and to lie to us, to try to convince us of something that we might not even need.
So yeah, I guess I'm feeling that way about Pete now, for some reason.
Sorry, Pete, there's other brands on the market, and yours just isn't cutting it.
Yeah, man, I'm really looking for that more authentic content, you know?
Vote for the planters, the new Mr. Peanut.
Yeah, soon they're gonna fuckin' launch a Baby Pete, and it's gonna be this fuckin' doe-eyed little cartoon boy.
I don't like what has to come before the launch of Baby Pete.
Still has the top hat, for some reason.
Oh, God.
Oh, they're gonna do like a Jimmy Hoffa on Pete, but to make him like a legend and then run a baby in his place.
Yeah.
Oh, fuck.
Yeah, I'm ready for that.
Yeah, that sounds good.
The most terrifying thing I've ever like edited as far as photos was remember when when Pete first launched his campaign and Trump's Trump called him Alfred E. Newman, the Mad Magazine character.
And I thought about that.
I was like, it's kind of perfect.
And there's this old Mad Magazine poster that's, you know, vote Alfred E. Newman for president.
And I decided to edit it to try to make it look like Pete.
And I did.
And it's terrifying.
I'll send it to you guys.
So you're doing similar work to like a carpidonkdom?
Yeah, I do that, but with a lot less prestige somehow.
Yeah, but we need that.
We need meme warriors on our side.
We don't have enough.
We have too many, like, kind of generic, you know, Ivanka in an orange jumpsuit.
Like, we need really spicier content.
I support this.
Yeah, it's true.
Come on.
You know, we're just doing selective color on Trump's weird, like, mask face now, and that's supposed to be, like, critique?
I also think my boss might own, like, the original artwork of that Alfred E. Newman for Prez poster.
He's a huge fucking Mad Magazine, like, art guy.
So, Travis, you had a bit of a takeaway, no?
Oh, yeah.
I was considering that.
Maybe Jeb Bush would have done better that if, instead of saying, please clap at that particular town hall, he just added in some clapping.
He takes out a little boombox and presses play.
It would have been funny to do that in a live setting.
Just have applause come through the speakers.
Everyone's looking around, seeing no one else laughing.
It sounds like a crowd is roaring somewhere around them.
Yeah, and that's when you feel the cattle prod.
So, you know, I'm also interested in the article you wrote about a cheap fake that was made of Biden.
Now, we played it earlier in the episode.
So take it on face value.
Like, I watched the clip.
I already knew that it was deceitful, like, by the time I got to it.
So, you know, but nonetheless, it was, you know, pretty damning for Biden when you just see it.
If you think this is, you know, real.
But can you kind of walk us through the issue here?
I know the account is this weird lefty account, just to give some kind of context, called Moon Cult, and they do extreme irony to the point where it's become like, I guess, a kind of exercise in disinformation, and they claim it's, I guess, performance art.
But yeah, can you kind of explain what happened here?
Yeah, which, and again, those kinds of accounts are fine until you get like reporters treating them as sources and retweeting them, you know?
But yeah, in this case with Biden, it was him saying something that the video said, the culture, our culture, it's not imported from some African nation or Asian nation.
It's our English jurisprudential culture, our European culture.
And that sounds like something that's like straight-up white nationalist kind of stuff.
But it was a 19-second clip, and the context of it, when you listen to it, he was talking about the culture of sexual assault on college campuses, and basically what he was trying to say was he was saying it's, you know, tying all the way back to this legal system that we more or less inherited from Western Europe, but also trying to just say that, like, This is something.
This is this is us.
This is not other countries.
This is us.
This is an us problem.
And it, of course, came off horribly, as a lot of things Biden says did.
You know, today there was just just today, right before this, I saw a clip of he got asked about why he performed so poorly in the Iowa caucuses.
And he called a woman like a dog face Pony soldier?
I don't know what that is.
A dog-faced pony soldier?
What?
Yeah, let me- I have not caught up on this.
What the fuck?
I was not- Parker, I was not prepared for the story to take that kind
of fucking turn.
Just a series of balls from Minority Report and that's his speech.
Just with words on each one.
Rolling down a fucking spiral.
So that is really very bad.
This happened just today.
I've got the New York Times headline up.
In exchange over Iowa results, Biden calls voter a lying dog-faced pony soldier.
So basically a woman asked him a question about like, hey, you didn't do so great in Iowa.
And he responded that basically he's like, it was a caucus.
Have you ever been to a caucus?
And she said, yes.
And he said, no, you haven't.
You lying dog-faced pony soldier!
This is better than the fucking cord pop thing.
And so here's how the New York Times wrote it up.
No, you haven't, you lying dog-faced pony soldier, he told her, using an unusual phrase
that he has deployed before on occasion and that he has attributed to a John Wayne movie.
Is it true?
I don't know.
Is it true?
It doesn't say, but yeah.
Either way, you probably don't want to be like saying what John Wayne says to like his
enemy before he shoots him to some random woman who's asking you a question.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, just going, oh, it's from a movie that doesn't make it.
But if you're just like, oh, don't worry, that string of profanity, I was just quoting a Quentin Tarantino movie.
That wouldn't hold up.
Mr. Biden, could you just please elaborate on what you're going to do in relation to Medicare for All?
Do you feel lucky?
Well, do you, punk?
Yeah, that's so... The Daily Show put together a compilation of all the times that Biden just told people not to vote for him.
It's pretty funny.
Well, the funny thing is the whole quote is absolutely stupid anyways.
If you think about the idea of saying that rape culture is a profoundly single-handedly Western thing, that's dumb too.
So really with Biden, it's such a mess because you basically have to edit Like, word salad, to then make him sound, I guess, like someone coherent enough to have white supremacist ideology today.
Which just, I just don't think he has the capacity to formulate it, to be fair.
No, it's incoherent, you know, for the most part.
Like, a lot of these things are just...
You know, just especially anytime any of these candidates are just kind of speaking off the cuff, it's a lot of times you just get this like filler of, you know, American hope kind of sort of rhetoric, and you get a lot of nonsense phrases that kind of come out of there.
Yeah, I mean with Biden.
The same reason that Trump is so interesting to me is that he says all of these things that make it, they're just outrageous.
It makes pulling examples, pulling like these most extreme examples a lot easier.
One thing that happened was in that article that I wrote about, That Biden quote, there's one where Trump was speaking at, I think it was Veterans Day Parade or something like that.
And he was telling the story of a U.S.
soldier who stood up to the Nazis and to defend a Jewish soldier.
It was it was a whole thing.
And someone clipped this video of him talking where Trump goes, you can shoot me, but you'll have to kill us all.
And I mean, that sounds kind of kind of insane.
But when you put it back in context, he was quoting this soldier who supposedly said that.
It wasn't Trump just being super paranoid, saying that you would have to kill him and all of his... Although it's fairly on brand for him.
Yeah, well exactly, and so people started sharing it.
Yeah, like what's the point of doing a cheap fake or even a deep fake on Trump?
He does all the stuff you would want him, like you would try to catch him doing.
Yeah, and the same goes for Biden, you know?
It's that they both say actually outrageous things.
By inventing new ones, by inventing things and taking them out of context, all you do is you just create this feeling of doubt that surrounds their actual terrible things they've said.
In your article you use the phrase, the democratization of disinformation.
Can you give us a little bit of depth on that?
Because I found that very interesting.
Yeah, so when I talk about the democratization of disinformation, which is a lot easier to write than it is to say, I just realized, you know, I'm talking about the way things, you know, sort of used to be limited to campaigns and high level political operatives.
You know, as far as cutting, deceptively editing videos and spreading them to a wide audience.
You know, now anyone can do it.
You know, the thing that Moon Cult put out, if that was put out by the RNC, that would not surprise me.
But now literally anyone can do that.
And the reason that this is sort of...
You know, it's sort of different to things that have happened before, is that, you know, if you have someone who is a trusted reporter who's spreading misinformation, it might come back to harm their reputation.
If you have someone who is, you know, associated with a campaign, you can kind of add like a grain of salt to it.
But if it's just a random person on Twitter who you've never seen before and you really don't have any reason to doubt what they put out there, you might see a video and it might just kind of stick with you.
You know, the same thing happened with those Pelosi videos where they slowed him down to make her sound drunk.
And I've done that, like, as a joke.
I've slowed down Trump statements to 70% speed, and it's like, yeah, he sounds like everyone's drunk uncle.
Because, like, what he's saying, the words don't kind of line up.
But it's funny when it's just kind of a joke, but not trying to mislead people, essentially.
So when I talk about the democratization of disinformation, it's this idea that anyone can have this gigantic impact.
Anyone can spread a message of disinformation to millions of people, and often without really doing more than five or ten minutes worth of work.
Yeah.
I mean, cutting that Biden clip probably took two minutes, you know, and it was seen millions of times.
Yeah, we even talk about it in the context of video, but if you look at, like, cheap fakes, I mean, essentially it's just editing a statement by somebody, manipulating it, whether it's text, video, or audio, to mislead the audience about the original meaning of what was captured there.
But these techniques, like, they've been around for a long time, but now we have, I guess, processors, and everybody has a personal computer they can edit on and stuff.
Do you think that is what has kind of ushered in the democratization of disinformation?
Yeah, I think social media has played just a gigantic role in all of this.
You know, these sorts of things have always existed.
This is not unique to the internet, but like a lot of things, when it comes to the internet, it's made things worse.
The internet promised us all of these great promises of being able to pull up any bit of information in the world, but instead we kind of silo ourselves off into these little bubbles to confirm what we already thought, which is how you end up with people believing in things like QAnon, because they're able to find information that already confirms what they're thinking.
So in the case of this, with, you know, taking things out of context, that's happened forever.
And I mean, you know, even in presidential campaigns, you still have things like, remember, there's that quote of Obama saying, when he accidentally said 57 states instead of when he meant to say 47 states, like that's something that keeps getting pulled up and taken out of context.
There was the, you didn't build it, someone else did that.
Yeah, that was another big one.
The other example that I used in there was Mitt Romney saying, I like to fire people.
He wasn't saying that he enjoys firing people.
He was saying he likes to have the ability to choose different providers if need be.
I can believe that he would take a visceral pleasure from firing someone, though.
I mean, he might.
That's just not what he was saying.
That's not what he was saying.
You know?
So yeah, so that stuff's existed forever, but now anyone can do it.
Anyone can pull that clip.
Anyone can make that.
Which, you know, maybe it's good that people can level the playing field.
Maybe it's, you know, in some ways.
But in others, it kind of, it takes this level of accountability out of that.
Because before, when you would rely on an editor or a newspaper to kind of act as like a guardrail, a gatekeeper to spreading that spreading misinformation.
There were repercussions to that, you know, and that's why you wouldn't see just
straight up conspiracy theories promoted or, you know, slowed down videos that
supposedly show a candidate having a seizure or something.
Whatever wacky thing we're going to see next week, you know.
Right.
So, and I mean, one of the big aspects is also that there's there are refs in the
game, like the social media platforms get to kind of change their approach to this
on a whim without telling anybody, without consulting anybody.
And usually, you know, in the service, I guess, of profit.
And, you know, I know that conservatives have often felt, you know, and they have a big messaging campaign to make you feel like they're victims of this censorship online.
And then in 2019, Donald Trump organized the kind of social media summit, or that's what he called it, at least.
And then you you wrote that this was a way to, quote, work the refs.
I'm interested in what you meant by that.
Sure.
Yeah.
So this this social media summit he had he had just basically it was all of these trolls, you know, more or less kind of kind of showing up there.
And the reason I thought that it was it was kind of a way to to work the refs, you know, he had people like this Will Chamberlain guy from Human Events.
You know, he had Tim Tim Pool.
Charlie Kirk.
There was this kind of wide range of very popular people on the right.
Obviously, Tim Pool doesn't consider himself on the right, whatever.
So they all go there.
And the idea of working the refs is to constantly complain that they're being censored or shut down.
You'll see someone with 2 million followers saying, I've been shadow banned.
And if you look at their actual stats, they'll be gaining followers just as fast as they always have.
But they'll say, I didn't get enough likes on that tweet.
I've clearly been shadow banned.
Or one of my tweets showed up as having sensitive content.
And then 90% of the time, it did have sensitive content.
And so it's this idea that people are just kind of complaining about being oppressed when they are not and are being underrepresented.
You see this in – this is something that started with just regular mainstream media.
You would see conservatives kind of say, oh, the liberal media.
It's how you get this idea that there's a liberal bias in media.
But then you end up in a situation which we're where we're at today, where if you turn on any sort of cabled news, you'll see there might be a panel of a left of center person, a never Trump conservative, and then a Trump super fan kind of kind of taking up these these spots.
They had Rahm Emanuel and Chris Christie on ABC explaining what the candidates for the Democratic nomination should be doing to win.
I'd love to see them reaching across the aisle and doing bipartisanship.
So it's inspiring.
This concept of, you know, accusing the left of having an advantage in things, it kind of went from mainstream media to now the tech companies.
They claim that Google is censoring them.
They claim that Twitter is censoring them, that Facebook is censoring them.
And one thing that happened in 2016 was that, I think it was Gizmodo, had this article that basically said, is Facebook shutting down or is Facebook censoring conservative ideas?
And it wasn't really backed up by fact, it was just kind of, it was supported by one guy's opinion, because they didn't let him treat like Stephen Crowder as trustworthy of a source as the Associated Press.
Fair enough.
But the GOP just kind of ran with that and went all out saying, this is clearly a conspiracy to stop us, to censor us.
And so Mark Zuckerberg had to have these meetings with a bunch of far-right people.
And what came of it was that they ended up getting rid of their trending section on their homepage.
But first, they tried getting rid of just all the people who work there and replace them with an algorithm, which that's where all the fake stories started trending suddenly, and it didn't make any sense.
But if you look at the people that Facebook has hired since 2016 to head up a lot of their political stuff, It's a lot of people who have very intense ties to right-wing politics.
And that honestly has to have something to do with the fact that these people are constantly saying, we are being oppressed.
We do not have representation.
We are being silenced.
There's bias against us constantly, even if there's not.
At Media Matters, one of the things we've done is we've looked at the traffic to pages.
You know, kind of breaking them down by political leanings.
And time and again, there's no sign that conservative pages are in any way being slowed down or treated differently than liberal pages.
But they keep saying it, and it doesn't matter that they don't have any sort of facts on their side.
It just matters that they have this sense of entitlement, sense of victimhood.
I mean, it certainly doesn't help that their supposed enemy are the kind of CEOs of these companies like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, and they don't seem to understand.
How disinformation really works on tech platforms and how it influences people.
Can you try to help us track the source of their misunderstanding?
How could they approach this in a more sensical way?
I mean, that's a good question.
It's a hard question.
Yeah, it's something that I honestly wish I had a great answer to, but really what Olive kind of got is that people just have to understand, and I've written several articles about this, just saying that people like Mark Zuckerberg need to understand that these complaints are not being made in good faith.
When Charlie Kirk went on Fox in 2016, he said, conservatives are targeted, blocked, and silenced on social media.
The left runs social networks with a political leftist agenda.
So he tweeted about that appearance, and at the time he had 75,000 Twitter followers.
But as of right now, he has more than 1.2 million Twitter followers.
So clearly he has not been silenced, but he still tweets about this.
He still tweets about how he's been silenced when really his profile has just blown up since then.
It's completely divorced from reality.
And like a lot of things, people are just afraid to come off as having a bias against conservatives.
So they kind of pull punches because they don't want to upset them.
And no one's afraid of ever upsetting the left.
You know, no one in media is ever afraid of upsetting the left.
And I think that that's sort of a problem overall in that there's this sort of asymmetric structure out there where people aren't afraid to do something that maybe favors conservatives.
But if there's even a chance that someone could interpret something as favoring the left, you will see outrage on, you know, Fox News will have
someone on to say, Facebook took down my post and I think that that means that
they are liberals and it is terrible and blah blah blah and they are trying to rig the election,
donate to us, you know, that sort of thing.
I think also maybe it could be that these guys, guys like Charlie Kirk,
you know, sort of have wildly unrealistic expectations of how popular that they should be.
So like, when they've got, you know, when they're like at 1.4 million followers, they're like, well fuck, I should be at like 10 million, I'm so awesome!
Like, they're definitely shadow banning me.
Like, I could see like pure hubris just being like, Well, also, it's because, genuinely, on the side of the tech companies, they do not tell you what the algorithm does.
They do not tell you when it's changing.
So it is true that your reach can fluctuate wildly and be all over the place because these fuckers are tooling in the back shed, just changing shit up.
So, of course, then it makes people paranoid.
It feeds conspiracy theories because, for some fucking reason, one day Charlie Kirk got like 15 likes instead of, you know, a thousand or something.
That right there, that's something that... So before I worked at Media Matters, for a while I worked at the website Upworthy, which was famous for its clickbait headlines that everyone hated, which that was something.
I never quite fit in there.
But so anyway, Upworthy's whole thing was that they just happened to figure out the way to game the algorithm that Facebook had at the time, back in like 2013 or whatever, 2012, 2013.
And then Facebook changed it and traffic just went off a cliff.
And that's kind of what happens.
If someone figures out how to game your algorithm, the social media companies will kind of tweak it to make it so that you are not gaming it.
Exactly.
Because no one wants to see 15 posts from one source in their feed all day.
That's something that creates a bad user experience.
While it's possible to go and say that this is unfair, that you've changed this on us, it's kind of their right to do that, to change it, and they can't be super upfront about what...
You know, they can't be super upfront about what the algorithm does, otherwise people will just immediately change their entire strategy to try to game it.
Because anything like that can be gamed, can be, you know, beat.
And that's, it's a challenge.
I think a lot of people on that side also just want the Bill Mitchell 2016 model to work, where it's like, tweet absolutely every other minute, all fucking day, and become massive.
Be rewarded.
It's amazing.
He just non-stop tweeted, I am 100% certain Trump will win.
Then Trump just happened to win.
Bill Mitchell's like, yep, see, my system worked.
No, your system did not work.
You were just saying something that, you know, had a chance of being right.
It's like, dude, you bet on fucking red.
That's what you did.
You had a 50-50 shot, you know?
It's like, you bet on red and you won big time, and now you're going around telling everybody that you're old money.
So, you know, the Democratic presidential primaries are happening this year, and at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I'm already seeing, well, let's say, irregularities, to be generous, on the part of Democratic institutions and certain campaigns.
Can you tell me, Parker, am I fucked or do I have a chance of making it through the year without becoming a full-blown that guy?
Oh, I mean, I don't know if any of us are going to make it through the year, period.
That's a big fact.
But yeah, what happened in Iowa with the caucus being a disaster.
It's, I really don't have faith in anything working out.
Nice.
Nice.
We're right there.
I know.
I'm just, yeah, you know, just the pessimistic cynic over here.
But when it comes to like a lot of the irregularities and stuff like that, I think that there's this line that people have to kind of really try to Make sure that they're walking narrowly.
When it comes to figuring out whether something is a conspiracy to... Because I've seen people say, oh, the Iowa caucuses were rigged.
It's like, no, that's not what rigged means.
They'll say it's rigged because they wanted it to...
They wanted it to be drawn out for two weeks or whatever the case is, or someone tried to change it in favor of a certain candidate or against a certain candidate.
But really, I think it's important to always put things in context and to remember that caucuses are a mess.
It involves people counting Hands that were raised in doing complicated math problems for no reason on a piece of paper to follow rules that no one really understands.
But, you know, I mean, it's hard because obviously there are a lot of people who Feel very passionate about the candidates that they support.
I mean, naturally.
And you have a lot of people who are maybe very, very involved in, you know, institutional sort of establishment politics who might not like certain candidates and might, you know, kind of speak about them in aggressive ways or kind of try to tailor things to, you know, to help other candidates.
Or like break down crying and say that they're gonna execute you in Central Park, you know?
Like Chris Matthews did.
God, that's something.
That's something. My genuine theory is that if Bernie won the nomination and went on to,
or even just if he wins the nomination, I think that you're going to see, remember how in 2016 there was kind of the rise of Never Trumpers who were this kind of insufferable group of people who really all they were doing was they were betting that he would lose, you know, but really they agreed with everything he did, which is why you have a bunch of them kind of backtracking immediately.
But I think you're going to have a lot of the same kind of people doing that for Democrats when it comes to, you know, if Bernie wins the nomination.
And it's going to be terrible and insufferable, and I hate it.
Just thinking about every possible situation, I think that we all just need to stop listening to as much pundit Garbage.
Damn, that is a big truth.
Agreed.
I saw photos of you canvassing, and that is the kind of physical involvement that is really like, you know, citizenship at its finest, I think.
And it's true that online discourse can become pretty shitty.
But to be clear, I do want to come back just for one moment to the idea of rigging or not rigging, right?
Or around this stuff.
When the kind of information was coming out about the caucuses and the irregularities of like, you know, partially reporting something like Polk, Yes.
I think the argument with Rigging was more, if you control the information rollout well enough, you can never let Bernie have a poll that goes in his favor the night before.
You can never allow Bernie to make the victory speech in earnest.
And you can kind of generally and broadly muddy the waters.
Are you saying that you don't think that they did some kind of concerted information rollout that was weighted against that candidate?
I mean, I honestly have no idea with that, but I understand that point of view, and I understand why people feel suspicious about that sort of thing.
What needs to happen is that the people with information, with the data, they need to understand how the world works around them.
And if you put out something and you're like, I'm gonna put out 62% of the results of something, That's going to make people, that's just going to make people even more, you know, concerned about what's going on.
And that was kind of, I think, I think the mistake is that the Iowa Democratic Party, who was running the caucuses, they didn't seem to have things really figured out.
They didn't set expectations correctly.
We are so used to getting this information immediately.
But had they said up front, hey, You know, caucuses are today, but tomorrow or Wednesday we'll know exactly what's, you know, how that all worked out.
I think that things probably would have went fine for them, but instead they had this sort of, you know, this mad rush to say who won.
And I still think it was kind of...
It's kind of gross for Mayor Pete to go out there and basically give what amounted to a victory speech when no one knew.
It was just bizarre that he did that.
And I'm kind of shocked that news outlets really didn't hammer him on it.
They were just kind of like, well, he thinks he won, so we're going to treat him like that.
It's such a Trump move, you know, to just kind of be like, I won, and just like dare people to say you didn't.
Yeah, it's blatantly anti-democratic in its manipulation of information, for sure.
And what do you think?
We just throw in some international observers?
Do you think America could stoop to that level?
Or is that for third world countries?
Honestly, I have very little faith in November, just generally.
But I think that it wouldn't hurt to have stuff like that.
I think it's good to keep a healthy level of paranoia, but just to always hold back just a tiny bit before just kind of running with your first thought and posting it on Twitter or whatever.
Well, and I think for us too, for us lefties, all the Trump supporters have had so many of their own great conspiracies, all their deep state shit over the last three years, so now I think some of us are like, oh, we get one too now, and it gets to be this, and so everybody's so quick to just be like, I had so many friends text me the night of the primaries to be like, oh man, CNN fucking cancelled their shit, they cancelled their hour-long thing.
They're fucking over Bernie, you know?
We still have to acknowledge that conspiracy theories are sometimes proven true.
Well, yes, of course.
I mean, I of course wholeheartedly believe in everything Julian laid out on the table, of course.
Oh, man.
But yeah, yeah, I mean, like, well, with that, with the poll and the CNN cancelling its hour-long special or whatever, I mean, that poll has been around for a long, long time, and it's highly respected.
It's very accurate.
It has a history of being accurate, even though it was wrong in 2016 on, I think, the Republican side.
They thought Trump was going to win, but he lost to Iowa.
But it's one of those things where I just can't picture that poll being like, we're gonna spike it because we specifically don't like Bernie.
You know, like that seems to be a bit much.
But could you see like a general anti-Bernie sentiment allowing them to cave to someone like Pete coming with a more strategic... I mean...
You know, it's like anything's possible.
Anything's possible!
Yeah.
We don't have the proof, but... The answer is always going to be more information, more transparency.
And I think that's crucial in reporting and in media generally, is that if people really show their work, and that's something that David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post did really, really great in 2016 when he was reporting on all the The Trump charity stuff was that he would like share his notes on Twitter and he would say exactly how he was working through things and I thought that that was very interesting and it's it's one way to to reestablish trust and I think that that sort of transparency it would do a lot of people a lot of a lot of good especially if they're trying to restore trust which if you're the you know if you're the DNC and you're you know trying to restore trust especially with
With, like, Sanders supporters who feel in 2016 they were treated poorly, you know, I think that that's something that they could benefit from is to just be as open about things as humanly possible.
And, you know, obviously you can't be like, hey, here's our email archives or whatever.
That's for WikiLeaks to do.
But, you know, you've got to just kind of put out as much info as possible, and it hopefully will help more than it hurts.
I wholeheartedly agree that we need the Podesta emails, but for the Buttigieg campaign.
We need some new symbols, some new food types, if you know what I'm saying.
You're like, we need a spin-off podcast.
Well, people can find you on Twitter at Parker Malloy.
That's M-O-L-L-O-Y.
Is there anything else you'd like to plug, Parker?
No, I mean, just follow me on Twitter.
I post ridiculous things all the time.
I write things at Media Matters.
MediaMatters.org.
So check that out.
Check me out on Twitter.
It's always a wild ride over there.
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Parker.
Yes, thank you.
Thanks, Parker.
Yeah, thanks.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Oh shit, we're over 60 now.
Oh yeah, definitely over 60.
Well over.
It'll be number 62, the MKUltra episode.
Yeah, nice.
Look forward to releasing that one.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
You can't focus on the big fish when all the small fish aren't swimming together, right?
You see a big ol' pack of small fish.
Looks scary.
Looks menacing.
Looks a lot different than a few of them singled out.
When a citizenry has no collective power, they can no longer control the levers that govern them.
Levers of control.
The illusion of democracy.
The illusion of choice that we have here, right?
You know, McDonald's, Burger King, Big Mac Whopper.
You think they're different.
Same damn shit.
It's all poison.
Pepsi, soda, great.
You think you have choice?
Nope.
It's all poison.
CNN, NBC, New York Times, WaPo.
Looks like you have choice.
Looks like there's differences and, you know, this cultural variety between all this stuff.
It's just the same shit.
Just the same shit.
It's all lies, man!
That's why you really gotta, uh, You gotta research and make the effort to spend a few extra minutes to search for what's
What has substance these days?
And that goes for anything.
You know, that might be why I'm so good at researching for information is because of how much research I've done for music that doesn't suck.
Ha!
You won't find music that doesn't suck on the radio these days.
On the mainstream.
You gotta search for it.
You gotta spend a few extra minutes lurking around YouTube or blogs or whatever the case and downloading it for yourself.
