Bonus Interview: Alexander Heffner of PBS's The Open Mind
Travis View sits down with Alexander Heffner, host of PBS's The Open Mind — the longest running interview program on American public television. They chat about QAnon and the movement's roots and repercussions.
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Welcome, listeners, to a bonus edition of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Interview with Alexander Heffner episode.
As always, I am your host, Travis View.
Today, I'm speaking with Alexander Heffner, the host of The Open Mind, the longest-running interview program on public television.
Alexander has spoken with people from all corners of business, journalism, politics, and the arts, and that includes interviews with me, Jake, and Julian, which you can listen to on the Open Mind Podcast.
He is also someone who has spoken a lot about disinformation, discourse, and democracy, and I invited him on to get his perspective on how he got to this point and the best way to restore trust moving forward.
Alexander, I'm going to start off with a broad question, which is how did QAnon happen?
And I know that this is a question we often struggle with on the show, and there are answers that are both systemic and specific.
And personally, I think that the rise of QAnon reveals something especially rotten about American culture.
But how would you diagnose the reason why Nonsense Online became so popular?
So I don't know about when you were at the checkout counter As a young man, or even as a child, of your local supermarket.
But I have distinct memory, not in one supermarket visit, but in a plethora of visits to supermarkets, bodegas, your outdoor stands in metropolitan areas, of the National Enquirer hanging from the exit aisle And it struck me being someone who was informed by mainstream newspapers, broadcast television, but who grew up aware that primarily you were getting reliable information about your community, about your state, about your nation from magazines, from newspapers, and then gradually from the internet as well.
But it was always imparted to me.
from an early age that those publications were for other people.
They weren't for you.
They weren't for you if you wanted to be informed.
And I don't know when this became intellectualized for me from the point of view that I recognized that, in effect, There were publications that read like newspaper headlines from a Superman movie or, you know, any kind of movie where you'd see an Inquirer or a Gazette, a Times, but it was instilled in me the value of discerning between what were manufactured headlines about
Popular figures, politicians, celebrities, and their alien children.
And I always understood that that existed as an undercurrent where people were tantalized, in some cases by what they knew to be false, but they were consuming anyway under the umbrella of news because you had your Time magazine.
Your Cincinnati Inquirer, if you're in a supermarket in Ohio, and then your National Inquirer, or wherever you are, you always had the option at that checkout counter of something that was going to dis or misinform you.
And I don't think, to answer your fundamental question, we ever got at the root of why people We're continuing to consume that misinformation.
It's the question that I asked you, being the historian of QAnon that you are, when you came on my program, The Open Mind.
Whether people were knowingly being duped.
But to answer your basic question of was there something rotten about our culture, there was.
And I think it dates back even before the advent of your local supermarket.
But that's when it really crystallized for me as a young adult and even as a kid.
Here, look, there's something that is misinformation.
These magazines belong in the fiction aisle, not next to Time magazine or the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.
Okay, but what role do social media companies have in this?
I mean, like, they enabled and profited from this awful stuff.
So, like, I know that you personally have spoken to tech executives about, like, platform moderation.
So why were they so slow to act when it was obvious that they were accelerating a very serious misinformation and extremism problem?
I think that it is the leadership of Twitter circa 2015 That failed to understand that if they were the water cooler or checkout counter of the contemporary public square, that they were amplifying the most egregious examples of it and giving them life, not as an alternative to other fiction, but as an alternative to truth.
And so I recall hosting Biz Stone, one of the three co-founders of Twitter, back in 2014 on my program, The Open Mind.
And I profoundly remember a specific exchange in which I asked him, you know, do you ever envision the need to impose the values of your brother's keeper?
On the platform.
In other words, do you ever envision a scenario where it is a moral or ethical obligation to ensure that users are behaving in a way that is decent, that is honest, that is conducive to public health?
And he said, in effect, no.
He said you can't force it on people.
You have to make them feel like doing the good thing as a good Samaritan is the right thing to do.
And the rest is history, folks, because we know what transpired on the platform of Twitter from 2014 through just about weeks ago.
In essence, damaging civil society or unmaking civil society.
And they decided that either for their profit as a publicly traded company and their shareholders, Or just out of fear that the President of the United States was an ally of this community.
That if they pulled the plug, or even if they classified this community as fictional or conspiratorial, that they would run into either economic or political problems.
And so there was definitely a lack of courage on the part of senior leadership from Twitter.
The other thing that I'll recount, just shortly after that interview with Biz Stone, so that was I think in 2013-2014, and then in 2016, I remember having an email dialogue with Biz.
In 2016, I remember having an email dialogue with Biz.
I remember pointing out to him accounts that the president was retweeting were clearly inauthentic with stock images as profile pictures.
And, um, you know, it, it, it was evident while the particular one that I pointed out in my logging, the concern to him was removed.
It was evident to me that this was a constellation.
Of inauthentic activity on Twitter, and that Donald Trump really was exploiting a fake base, right?
He likes to call, you know, fake news the mainstream media.
We know that's his tactic to delegitimize honest reporting.
But what was going on was a massive campaign of viral disinformation that I still don't think the extent of which is understood by the American people, which was that his entire coalition Gain traction as a result of troll farms, you know, bots that were made up from fake accounts with inauthentic identification, stock images from, you know, anywhere that they could find them.
And these weren't necessarily deepfakes.
They were just images associated with Twitter handles that were not authentic and that were pulling it from catalogs selling merchandise online and so it was it was so clear to me that My question to biz a year earlier two years earlier was Was was naive Because it wasn't just about people doing things that are entertainment to keep people You know amused
What was going on was something far more pernicious and it was endangering our entire our democracy and our ability, our capacity to have A shared truth, a shared reality.
Twitter said, as I like to quote Bob Barker, now Drew Carey, come on down.
The Price is Right.
They said, come on down with your misinformation.
Come on down with your viral deception.
Come on down with your white supremacists.
Come on down.
And that is what the incentives became.
It didn't have to be this way.
You know, you're going to have some rotten element of any society.
But to incentivize the way that Twitter and of course Facebook did was what has caused the moral dilemma of 2021, of our time.
That kind of touches on the fact that there are two sides to this issue.
There is the supply problem of disinformation, but there's also the demand problem of disinformation.
So any kind of deplatforming isn't going to change the fact that there is a demand for this kind of ugly content.
It seems as though that there's simply lots of people who are excited by these lies and alternate realities more than the sober truth.
I would even go a step further, Travis, to say that The supply and demand problem is even more insipid and even more systemic, specifically the demand for not just alternative universes, but we continue to operate on social, even though I've been calling them out on TV for years, right?
Exist in this orbit in order to survive and to have the kind of robust listenership and avenues for listenership.
It's the expectation of any media property today.
You're available in multiple platforms and multiple devices at any time of day.
And so the demand for scathing tit for tat in Facebook columns, right, of commenters, It's still going on.
The sniping at each other.
And it always did occur to me when we would read the comments section of articles and see them descend into chaos and rancor and, you know, foment the kind of incivility that is not conducive to You know, any kind of constructive exchange among readers or the reporter and his or her readers.
So what primarily was going on in the comments section of websites, and this is pre Breitbart, I mean, this was going on on any platform.
And then journalists and their ownership started to respond and say, you know, if we're going Have comment sections, we need to moderate the discussion.
You could be right that the origin of the problem is not Facebook, but Facebook's realization that you had all this activity occurring, the supplying of the platforms where you could comment And then it was wiped.
You know, most mainstream outlets removed the comments section or highly moderated them.
And that kind of activity has been imported into Facebook comments and tweets.
And so it's not even just the demand for alternate universes, which in some ways is understandable for people who have concerns, whether that's psychological issues or just discontent with the status quo of American life.
But on the other hand, like you said, being the accelerant, their business model continues to be to motivate people based on animosity.
But I think you're absolutely right about the destructive parasite in the system and the fact that people are wanting, anonymously in most cases, to go after each other on these platforms.
And it hasn't stopped.
Anyone who thinks it has stopped is under a real illusion.
The kind of hyper-partisan Dispute and bitter, bitter argumentation, if you will.
That's putting it politely.
That's still going on on Facebook and probably to a huge extent on every social platform.
But specifically, we know on Facebook and Twitter.
That brings us to the topic of platform moderation.
Now, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with platform moderation.
Virtually every online platform in history has been moderated to some degree.
But at the same time, isn't there danger in allowing social media companies to have an outsized influence on the kind of discourse that is permitted online?
If you have a multi-billion dollar company with a particular interest in society and the economy setting the scope of permitted dialogue, don't they have a dangerous amount of control over how people openly talk to each other?
Well, I think that there is a risk if internet governance becomes a political weapon, right?
But private sector companies making decisions about how folks ought to comport themselves on their platforms is not the dictate from above.
It's not the final word.
And no one is being thrown off the internet now It's been documented that more and more corporate stewardship has gained a conscience about not wanting to platform anti-Semitism, white supremacy, the kind of racism and bigotry that ran like a flood, like a tsunami over these past years.
So, I think it's a bit of a hard turn, but it shouldn't be misconstrued as censorship because the Internet, as it exists, and as I hope it will exist forever, is a place where you can set up an email account and write a note to a friend or a family member or to the president of a company or the President of the United States And be responsible for that content.
But you still have the opportunity to express yourself.
And if there are technology companies, whether that's servers that are an alternative to Amazon Web Service or domain sites that Don't want to have a conscience and believe that the First Amendment on their platforms like the gabs and parlors of the world ought to be unrestricted, then it is ultimately the marketplace that will determine whether or not those platforms can succeed.
But I don't think that there's anything Um, more restrictive about someone's right to access the internet.
It is about monetizing that right.
So there's a difference between the right itself.
And if you are a white supremacist, even if you were an insurrectionist or a domestic terrorist, those people, we know some of those who were captured, you know, or indicted were then set loose.
And, you know, one had their their Internet privileges monitored, but they didn't even lose access to the internet, much less be behind bars awaiting sentencing, or in this case, trial.
So the rights of all strata of society to use the internet entrepreneurially, to try to gain traction and following for your ideas, that still exists.
What Twitter and Facebook and these social monopolies were doing were amplifying the most conspiratorial and often the most bigoted and racist content.
And that was a decision of conscience of these private companies to remove that content or to start Assessing, you know, more standards for practices on their platforms.
But I don't think the Internet is more restrictive or will become more restrictive as a result, but society may have more, you know, emphasis on what it means in 2021 to, you know, comport yourself as a You know, sort of recognized ethical member of society.
And if those companies want to try to mitigate the crises on their platforms of disinformation and hate, then that was the only way they would ever accomplish that.
It doesn't mean that they will be without competition in the future and that there will be alternative sites that are established.
And, you know, that remains to be seen, but I don't think the Internet is any more restrictive than it was prior to those decisions.
It might just be that the Internet is sort of bending more towards having some standards, some sort of social standards of how we talk to each other.
I'm going to try and end this on a positive note.
So we are in the beginning of the post-Trump era.
So do you think there's any hope for the development of a productive political culture and national discourse?
And what is the most constructive thing that can be done to achieve those ends?
You ask about what it's most constructive to do.
I think it's a tough question.
The, you know, we know that the The social platforms have had those immense challenges in that I don't think as individuals we put their feet, these social companies, to the fire enough in demanding that if they are going to be the water coolers of this age that
You know, that we have some decency.
So, I think that we should recognize the power of the election that we just experienced, because it wasn't just electing a new president, it was precipitating the acts that we have alluded to, which is the understanding from Social media companies that what I've called the blue feed, red feed phenomenon and more problematically the dis and misinformation had to be identified and the problem had to get and still has to be resolved.
So I think the franchise is enormously constructive in You know, just asserting your right and your peers' right to make changes to the democracy.
And we don't have so much to be hopeful about because of the pandemic, because of the way our democracy was tested.
I mean, we want people to see the power Of our example, of the vote.
And for those people who did not want to respect the outcome of the election, wanted to insist that they were wrong, then it was not the accurate results.
I think that the most constructive thing that can come out of it is a commitment to truth And truth telling, and that we have the opportunity to continue to tell those truths.
And I think that also means keeping President Biden honest about the pandemic being the most significant public policy challenge of this century, maybe of two centuries of America.
And so maybe one way to You know, restore the trust amongst people is for all those who were very critical of Donald Trump to be tested themselves in keeping honest Biden and the Biden administration.
And as someone who hosted my program, The Open Mind, when President Obama was still in office, I have said I'd like to be considered an equal opportunity Critic, because you could have watched the show for the Obama presidency and found criticisms left and right, and then you could have watched it during the Trump presidency and found criticisms left and right, different criticisms and maybe at a different level.
With President Obama, I think we're talking more in the conventional policy sense of effective governance.
And with President Trump, we're talking about a personality and actions that were challenging our form of Republican government.
And so we weren't talking about public policy in the sense of, you know, health care.
We're talking about public policy from the sense of authoritarianism versus democracy and the kind of Discourse that we were living in the last four years.
So I would say I think just the most important and constructive thing people can do right now is be intellectually honest about the first months and years of the Biden administration.
And and, you know, maybe you will prove to people that the so-called cabal of journalists who were Donald Trump's Loss are really, really concerned right now about the effectiveness of the pandemic response.
And I think President Biden is going to eventually have to own whatever the American response is for the next two years, even though, you know, you let the genie out of the bottle.
There is the recognition.
Look, look at the hand that he was dealt.
But, you know, just as the recession In 2008 became President Obama's economy and he was criticized and responsible for decisions that were made from 2009 January through election day 2012.
President Biden is going to be responsible with all the multiplicity of COVID variants that are out there that are going to keep infecting people and vaccines that have to be recalibrated and boosters that have to be jabbed, you know, for a long time.
And so to answer the long answer to your question, that the most constructive thing to do is to be intellectually honest and to show that you can be an equal opportunity critic and hold people accountable right now.
And it doesn't matter if they're Democrat, Republican, Joe Biden, Donald Trump.
And that's my hope, that we can kind of show deference and decency to each other as human beings and empathy.
and respect, but recognize that there ought to be accountability, not based on conspiracy theory.
There ought to be accountability based on realities.
And I do have some hope that the restoration of accountability can bring some people together.
I think when you have a president who kind of comports himself in a way that recognizes you are accountable to the American people, the buck does stop with you, then maybe that resetting can help charge this sort of new political culture, or at least the hope that we can get the political culture back on track in this way.
That's a good place to leave off, I think.
I'm speaking with Alexander Heffner, host of The Open Mind.
Is there anything else you'd like to plug before I let you go?
No, Travis.
I really appreciate what you do on the podcast and the way that you brought attention to this issue to our viewers, you know, many months ago.
And I felt like you were really Precocious and that people, whether they were learning about QAnon for the first time or just absorbing the fact that domestic terrorism hadn't gone away just because we hadn't experienced an Oklahoma City bombing.
And I think your insights were really appreciated by our audience.
