Replay | The Early Internet & 9/11 Conspiracies | Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy

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Speaker 5 You're listening to Comedy Central.

Speaker 6 Think back 20 years. Maybe you were in school or college.
A friend comes up to you with a $20 bill. They say, check this out.

Speaker 6 And they start folding it in a kind of weird way, kind of in half, but then it comes to a point. Then you realize it's the shape of the Pentagon.

Speaker 6 And the image on the bill is now the Twin Towers with smoke coming out of them. What did the government know about 9-11 before it happened?

Speaker 6 If you ever experienced that or if you ever had that thought, then congrats, Alex Jones. You're a 9-11 conspiracy theorist.
This is Jordan Clapper Fingers, The Conspiracy.

Speaker 6 September 11th really was the ground zero of conspiracy theories. Chances are you can name one: jet fuel can't melt steel beams.
George Bush did it. What about building seven?

Speaker 6 Osama bin Laden is a CIA operative named Tim.

Speaker 6 What's that you don't know about that one? Well, someone told it to me just a few months ago at a Trump rally. People have been talking, is bin Laden still alive?

Speaker 6 Tim.

Speaker 6 Are you doing math right now? No, I'm trying to remember his real name, Tim. Osama.
Osama bin Laden. Yeah, Tim.

Speaker 6 Someone. I forgot his last name.
Tim is not the most sawdy name.

Speaker 7 And he wasn't saudi. He was from the CIA.

Speaker 6 Needless to say, when we heard about Tim Bin Laden, we were like, let's get to the bottom of this Huckleberry.

Speaker 6 And even though our unverified non-tipster couldn't remember Tim's real last name, we found it. His name is Tim Osman.
Totally fake guy, but his name is Tim Osman.

Speaker 6 So I want to go through this conspiracy theory with a person who is a specialist in media manipulation and the effects of disinformation. Dr.

Speaker 6 Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard. Joan, you ready to hear this story of a man named Tim?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I know a few Tims, so interested to find out if I knew them.

Speaker 6 You may know that this guy lives just down the street from you. Again, disclaimer, his name is not Tim.
Here we go. Let me walk through this for you guys.

Speaker 6 So, this nut or butter of a story starts in 1986 in Sherman Oaks, California. Classic, classic bin Laden.

Speaker 6 He's 28 at the time, wearing dockers, and he's representing the interests of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

Speaker 6 He's at a Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks to meet a couple of feds, and the name he's been assigned by the CIA is Tim Osman.

Speaker 6 Now, at the Hilton, Osama bin Tim Osman-Laden is told by the guys from the U.S. government that the CIA doesn't consider their group truly representative of Afghans.
And Tim gets pissed.

Speaker 6 He wants to lobby the DC Movers and Shakers for support. Now, the theory claims there is evidence that Tim tours U.S.

Speaker 6 military bases, other parts of the United States, including possibly the White House. He's even given special demonstrations of the latest equipment.
Pretty high-end stuff.

Speaker 6 Now, how do we know all this? And by know, I mean, how do we make it all up?

Speaker 6 Because one of the Americans there to meet Tim is a guy named Michael Rikin Shudo, a man linked to the Chinese Chinese industrial and military group Norinko, whose name is misspelled a dozen different times on the most official-looking website explaining this conspiracy theory.

Speaker 6 He was apparently a loose end and he had to be taken care of. So he gets arrested, accused by the U.S.

Speaker 6 government of being delusional, accusing him of modifying something called Promise software in the desert, which obviously doesn't make sense because, and I'm quoting from the website here, sand isn't good for computers.

Speaker 8 I mean, that's a fact.

Speaker 6 So, Rick and Shudo, which sounds like a delicious advertiser, is put in prison and accused of making all this stuff up.

Speaker 6 But if he were really making it up, then why is there evidence that the modifications to the computer software was made in an office in nearby Indio, California?

Speaker 9 Hmm?

Speaker 6 That's the story of Tim Osman, rest in power, fake king. To strange way into what is probably the original internet conspiracy theory, 9-11.
And that is why why Joan is here. First of all, Joan,

Speaker 6 any reactions to the tale of Tim Osman?

Speaker 7 I mean, it sounds legit.

Speaker 9 You buy it.

Speaker 7 Like, you know, clearly we've got a reputable news organization digging up facts and

Speaker 7 we've got, you know, layers of editors and others that have been activated. You know, hundreds of thousands of dollars must have been spent on this investigation.
So I'm on board.

Speaker 6 You buy it. And you're a pro here.
Had you?

Speaker 7 Well, of course, of course.

Speaker 7 You know,

Speaker 7 what's interesting about things like this is essentially when you're being told something that is illicit information, that you feel like you're getting information that nobody else has,

Speaker 7 it does make you listen closer. It makes you want to dig deeper.
And when it comes to the early internet,

Speaker 7 we,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 we think a lot about, well, what are, you know, what isn't government telling us, right? And, and you have all of this new information that you have access to.

Speaker 7 And so the moment when the attacks on 9-11 happened, we all were concerned, but none of us really knew what the internet was at that point.

Speaker 7 You didn't even have major news organizations taking, you know, their websites very seriously at that stage.

Speaker 7 And so if you were going online to find information about what happened during 9-11 and you were digging in, you would be drawn in by the novelty and the outrageousness of stories like this.

Speaker 7 And you may then find yourself moving between a network of websites and message boards discussing

Speaker 7 these theories and others. And so it's unsurprising,

Speaker 7 but also

Speaker 7 we've had 20 years of this now, and it still looks a lot like that.

Speaker 6 Well, when we look at 9-11 conspiracy theories, where do we start?

Speaker 6 Where do you begin to hone in?

Speaker 7 I recently published a book with my co-authors called Bean Wars. And in the book, we wanted to explain how basically

Speaker 7 the internet affects how people understand politics and communication. And so we decided to go back into looking at Occupy.

Speaker 7 And what we were interested in in Occupy was understanding the rise of Alex Jones.

Speaker 7 And as we were digging in, we couldn't ignore the fact that Alex Jones was also one of the major contributors to 9-11 conspiracy theories. But it wasn't the same then.

Speaker 7 It wasn't like he was online pushing this so much. He had a lot of television stations that were airing his show.

Speaker 7 And a few months, I think it was July 25th,

Speaker 7 before

Speaker 7 September 11th, he had a show where he was showing people the White House number and suggesting people call Congress and say, we know a terrorist attack is about to happen.

Speaker 7 We know that bin Laden is going to be involved. They're going to blame it on him.
And you, as a listener, have a role to play.

Speaker 11 And I won't want you to believe Alex Jones. I want you to go get these news stories off my website.
I want you to call these major newspapers.

Speaker 11 I want you to find out these statements were true by the White House about preparing for martial law.

Speaker 7 And I want you to let them know that if there is any terrorism we know who to blame and that participatory conspiracy being part of the action is something that Alex Jones has been able to to really hone in on and bring people into these

Speaker 7 worlds

Speaker 7 as part of his media making

Speaker 6 you're saying some and you're saying this is July of 2001 too so if there's people who are paying attention they're hearing this before it happens and see this happening and draw a connection that gives validity to a lot of his theories.

Speaker 6 Does that build his base?

Speaker 7 It builds his base, but what it does is it actually, he actually loses his television

Speaker 7 networks.

Speaker 7 People are, you know, this is kind of crazy. This is really out there.

Speaker 7 You know, it's very obviously xenophobic in some ways. Although cancel culture wasn't really a thing then,

Speaker 7 you could be openly xenophobic or Islamophobic.

Speaker 6 Oh, the good old days.

Speaker 7 The good old days, before, yeah, before you, when you could get away with it, right?

Speaker 7 But by and large, when we were trying to study the rise of other kinds of political communication online, we did keep coming back to 9-11 conspiracies and especially memes like

Speaker 7 jet fuel can't melt steel beams. Why do we even remember that turn of phrase? 9-11 is an inside job.

Speaker 7 You know, these turns of phrase can become very potent and popular and they're really sticky. And so those kinds of

Speaker 7 key phrases also became really important

Speaker 7 explainers or shorthand for groups of people that had started to come together on message boards and in email lists that eventually

Speaker 7 became to be called truthers.

Speaker 6 Now, I think what's interesting about this, you know, and on this podcast, we're looking at a bunch of different conspiracy theories, and we often talk about how these things spread on social media and the internet, looking at this as one of the

Speaker 6 birth of these types of conspiracy theories. It's also the birth of the internet at the time.

Speaker 6 Can you give us a little bit of background of how the internet is being used at this point and how people are using it to pass information, how people are getting information, understanding these theories?

Speaker 7 So, this is before social media. So, we're not in the era of social networks in the same way that we think about early Facebook or early Twitter.

Speaker 7 But we are finally starting to have high-speed internet in our homes, which allows for the transmission of video. And this is a really important aspect of how we understand

Speaker 7 the world around us, because it's no longer that you're getting your video from

Speaker 7 cable

Speaker 7 stations. It's no longer that strictly.
And this opens up a whole new world of broadcast, creativity, innovation.

Speaker 7 And at that moment, there were a lot of people who were going online, making videos, making content

Speaker 7 that were anti-mainstream media. And I would say that in that time, even when I was using the internet then, I was someone who would consume these kinds of videos.

Speaker 7 I wanted to know more about what was going on in the world. I didn't always trust mainstream outlets.
I certainly didn't trust the government.

Speaker 7 I mean, I'm a child of the rage against the machine generation, right? So, we always want to question and ask more. And so, but online, everything is done through hyperlinks at this point.

Speaker 7 So, you're on a website, there's a page on the website with a bunch of links. And so, you're really traveling through this very

Speaker 7 labyrinth-like information ecosystem where people are linking you to things or you're following sets of links and you never really know where you're going to end up. But

Speaker 7 you always take it

Speaker 7 with a grain of salt. You think about it.
There's no institutional power behind this message. You don't always know where you're getting the information from.

Speaker 7 So you approach it with a kind of radical skepticism at that stage. Back then,

Speaker 7 the internet was really a place for

Speaker 7 weirdos and geeks and people who wanted to understand more about the world and were sharing things for the love of one another.

Speaker 7 And I thought that was really, you know, it was actually kind of a nice time in a weird way

Speaker 7 because you could find your people.

Speaker 6 I remember entering in with skepticism around that time as well, and partially because of my lack of familiarity with this new tool, right?

Speaker 6 It feels as if everybody was skeptical in certain ways because we weren't experts on it.

Speaker 6 We didn't really know how this was working or what we were getting information on, but it was sort of like the Wild West in a very curious way.

Speaker 6 And perhaps I'm speaking more to myself of somebody who's always afraid of taking big steps into the unknown. So I was always cautious about those things.
I guess I'm curious about

Speaker 6 at that time, what kind of conversations or were there conversations about the internet and how it should be regulated and used?

Speaker 7 So in 1996, there's this landmark legislation that is essentially a legislation of decontrol.

Speaker 7 It says Section 230 essentially says that websites or computer services are able to moderate content as they wish, but they're not going to be held responsible for the content on their

Speaker 7 services. So that means that if you're a server, you're an

Speaker 7 email host or your domain registrar,

Speaker 7 if some crazy person puts up stuff that's illegal, it's not your fault, right? You're just providing this basic infrastructure. And

Speaker 7 so that law gets passed, and you start to see different web services blossom. And you see

Speaker 7 groups of people still feel like they have mastery over the means of communication. They are able to build their own servers.
They're able to register their domains.

Speaker 7 And so essentially at that time online, regulators and many people using the internet were very optimistic that there weren't going to be these major crimes committed.

Speaker 7 Most legislation or people were concerned with

Speaker 7 child pornography. As we know,

Speaker 7 or maybe people don't know, but the internet's backbone and the innovation around the internet actually came about as

Speaker 7 the pornography industry came online. And so

Speaker 7 the way in which we remember internet history

Speaker 7 as a professor, I'm always telling my students, you know, like it was really, you know, it matured around pornography.

Speaker 7 And so it's not like the we endeavored to build an internet that was going to be the place for,

Speaker 7 you know, this free and open library of information where everybody's getting access to the world's knowledge.

Speaker 7 Like, you remember AOL, right?

Speaker 6 Follow the porn. I mean, and that's always been the history, right? Isn't that also like the innovation towards home movies,

Speaker 9 like

Speaker 6 allowing people to watch it at home primarily came because people wanted to watch pornography at home. And so the technology follows.
the porn.

Speaker 6 If we could only aim pornography at a working democracy, that's what I mean. I mean, then we can technologically get to a good place.
And yes, it'd be like, oh, thank God.

Speaker 6 We have a lovely democracy that responds to the needs of its people. How do we get here? Well, people wanted to watch Democratic porn.
Fine. Okay.

Speaker 5 It's weird.

Speaker 6 It's a little strange.

Speaker 5 No kink shaming here.

Speaker 6 No kink shaming as long as my vote counts.

Speaker 7 But if you think about it, then as

Speaker 7 we describe the history of the internet, we're not talking about then, like, you know, we want people to have access to legal,

Speaker 7 you know, law libraries and we want people to have, you know, access to the greatest science. A lot of that stuff is still behind paywalls.
And so

Speaker 7 at that time, the early internet,

Speaker 7 you know, maybe the Wild West doesn't really even describe it,

Speaker 7 but it was a bit of a free-for-all and the major innovations weren't you know, necessarily tied to any particular like public interest or social good. And so

Speaker 7 conspiracy theories and conspiracy communities

Speaker 7 were not just a place where you could, you know, jump in and say things and contribute, but these were also communities where people thought that they were

Speaker 7 building some kind of knowledge, some kind of

Speaker 7 resistance to the establishment, right? And so the internet had in its infancy this

Speaker 7 relationship to liberation, this relationship to if we had the facts and we were able to communicate freely, we wouldn't need government, right? And so there is a kind of techno-libertarian

Speaker 7 ethic that undergirds the rise of these kinds of communities online.

Speaker 6 I love it. I want to take a quick break.
And when we come back, we'll be joined by Corey Rowe, a filmmaker who created one of the first viral conspiracy films about 9-11. We'll be right back.

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Speaker 6 Welcome back to Jordan Clapper Fingers the Conspiracy.

Speaker 6 This week we're talking about Osama bin Laden and his apparently rich history as a guy named Tim from California who turned into a CIA operative and we're also going to look at a few theories about what happened in the wake of 9-11.

Speaker 6 I'm here with Joan Donovan who you've been hearing from, but we also have Corey Rowe with us today. Corey's a filmmaker and a veteran.

Speaker 6 A few years after 9-11, he made a film that went crazy viral called Loose Change. It was one of the first conspiracy theory films on 9-11.

Speaker 6 And since then, a lot has happened, both for the aftermath of the film and for Corey himself. So we're going to talk about some of that.
Corey, thanks for being here.

Speaker 5 Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 6 Let's talk a little bit about Loose Change. How did you get involved in making this film?

Speaker 5 I was a soldier in Afghanistan and Iraq, and my best friend Dylan Avery.

Speaker 5 Him and I were communicating from, you know, him in the United States and myself overseas and, you know, just talking back and forth.

Speaker 5 And largely it kind of came from a place of Dylan didn't really know what was going on with me and different things of that nature and, you know, started to just kind of dig into things.

Speaker 6 Now, is it correct? It started out as a fictional narrative story and then morphed into becoming more of a documentary style film?

Speaker 5 Yes, that is correct. Dylan Avery, who is the director of the film, you know, he was always aspirational and he always wanted to make a movie.
And he started to write a script in the post-9-11 era.

Speaker 5 And then, in doing so, and writing that script, he was doing a lot of research about September 11th and

Speaker 5 on the internet, researching different things and coming across different information that the film started to split kind of from like a narrative. And then there were sections of documentary.

Speaker 5 And then he did his first screening. And the immediate response was like, this documentary is very interesting.

Speaker 5 You should drop all that narrative stuff because we had no ability to act or do anything of that nature. And our cameras were terrible.

Speaker 5 And, you know, it was basically still like pre-dslr days and and we had no money or equipment to actually make a movie uh but he did have the ability to kind of edit together you know small chunks of information on a laptop which was really uh new technology at that time the fact that we were even able to get a camera at all and a laptop and be able to shoot content and edit that on you know on a pc um was revolutionary at that time um and it was really intriguing for us as young men and as myself um coming out of the military it was technology technology that I was interested in and it was something that I enjoyed doing, you know, shooting footage.

Speaker 5 And I started to do it while I was in the military, making videos for my battalion and things of that nature.

Speaker 5 And then once I got out after my second tour, I joined Dylan in DC and he was already in the process of releasing Loose Change.

Speaker 5 And I just kind of came on board to help him produce that film and really get it out there as much as possible. And it just caught on to things that were really early on at that time.

Speaker 5 Google Video, which is kind of the predecessor to YouTube, was just coming online. And it was a way that we were able to share information.
And we didn't even really do it a lot.

Speaker 5 We uploaded like a version of the movie in English and then other people all around the world would download it and they would change it into their language, German, Korean, different things of that nature, and then re-upload it to Google Video.

Speaker 5 And during, I think it was 2005 and 2006, Loose Change held, you know, the first top video positions from 1 to 18 in all these different languages.

Speaker 5 And it was just, again, was taking off in a way that nobody expected and nobody really could have foreseen.

Speaker 5 It was just kind of the culmination of perfect circumstances between technology that was available to filmmakers early on, the growth of the internet, as you guys have been talking about,

Speaker 5 as well as, you know, and this is really, I think, the big thing is at that time, there was a huge response to the Bush administration.

Speaker 5 You know, you guys just talked a lot about why, you know, that these groups kind of came together and that 9-11 was the beginning of the digital conspiracy theory, which I agree with. It just kind of,

Speaker 5 it was all a response because the Bush administration wasn't investigating 9-11. At a certain point, the Jersey girls who were victims of the 9-11

Speaker 5 or family members of the 9-11 victims were demanding investigation into 9-11.

Speaker 5 And the Bush administration, who was already entrenched in war in Afghanistan, was like, no, we're not going to investigate this. We're focused on the war right now.

Speaker 5 And that's when there started to be this like huge uprising of people who are like, why won't you investigate it? You know, what are you trying to hide?

Speaker 5 And then, you know, for people like myself who are overseas and fighting these wars, it was, you know, also, you know, disheartening.

Speaker 5 And then you have movies like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9-11 that were coming out.

Speaker 5 And so there was a lot of anti-war, anti-Bush administration feelings within the nation that really caused these things to kind of culminate in different areas.

Speaker 5 And once they did investigate 9-11 and they came out with the 9-11 Commission Report, of course, there was a large uproar to that as well, because it really was an sufficient investigation and didn't answer most of the questions that the family members were asking for in the first place, which is, I believe, why society and members of that society like myself reacted in the way that we did to create media that was to educate people about things that could potentially be going on so they got more you know invested with uh the bush administration and what they were doing walk me through your headspace a little bit there corey because so uh we're talking you're you're getting involved around 2004 2005 is that correct yeah how old are you at the time uh i was 22 coming out of the military 22 and you're you're in iraq yeah actually i turned 19 in iraq i turned i was uh i turned 19 afghanistan and then i turned 20 iraq sorry uh that was the exact years you're in afghanistan and then you're in iraq how are are you feeling, soldier in Iraq?

Speaker 6 How are you feeling?

Speaker 5 You know, early on, like everybody, I drank the Kool-Aid. There's even news articles out there of my hometown paper saying, you know, terrorism's got to be dealt with.

Speaker 5 But it was in Afghanistan that we were told that we were going to Iraq well before the general. public was.

Speaker 5 And then I got to live that firsthand, you know, knowing that knowledge, coming back to the United States, seeing them drum up the war effort for Iraq with the false intelligence that we all know is false intelligence now, that we directly lied to the American people and murdered innocent people in Iraq.

Speaker 5 Let's say what it was.

Speaker 6 Are you feeling this and doubting that as you are in Iraq?

Speaker 5 You know, I remember a very specific conversation in the emergency room of medical city in Baghdad with a father whose daughter's head was blown off. And he was like, this is what's going to happen.

Speaker 5 He goes, you guys came in here and we have let you do what you're doing.

Speaker 5 And he's like, it's going to get worse and it's going to keep getting worse and until you guys leave because we will never stop.

Speaker 5 And this is what's happening is you're killing innocent people like my daughter. And guess what?

Speaker 5 Exactly what he described to me on the first wave of that invasion is what I saw not only on my invasion, but every subsequent one after that, as it just continuously got worse as one administration handed it to the next and things in that region of the world just turned into absolute garbage.

Speaker 5 So personally, for somebody who me, you know, who, you know, stepped forward and was fighting for the American government, and then to learn that they're just basically lying to the American people so that them and their buddies have a blank check to rip off American taxpayers.

Speaker 5 And then it's like, all right, well, we should probably have a conversation about this as citizens of our country, right? Because this is fucked up. I'm sorry.
I'm just going to say it for what it is.

Speaker 5 Like this was a terrible time in American history where the government was just running amok and citizens were genuinely upset and concerned.

Speaker 5 You know, and that's, that's where we, you know, what I'd like to really focus on is the fact of where these kind of things came from.

Speaker 6 It's fascinating to hear because this is the story we don't get to know. Like what you're walking into, where you're coming from as, as you start to put together loose change.
I guess, so.

Speaker 6 You have your experience in Iraq. It clearly affects your point of view and your opinion towards the American government.
Clearly, a lot of distrust in the information you're getting.

Speaker 6 And did you see the internet the way that Joan has kind of described it as a place to find community?

Speaker 5 To find porn?

Speaker 6 To find porn. Yeah, I guess first of all, do you first go and find porn and then like, oh, I could also use this as a place to find community and or to put out information, seek out information?

Speaker 6 Is your take on the internet at that time similar?

Speaker 5 What my take is on the internet is kind of a cause and reaction that we always see throughout human society as we continue to evolve, right? Information was growing and things were happening.

Speaker 5 And so this, this, these things started to go in one direction or the other.

Speaker 5 And it's really the largest question here is can human nature, can humans survive mass communication, which is what we're really at the beginning of here and at the beginning of the internet was.

Speaker 5 And so for me to just kind of see all this different stuff was crazy, but for us, it was definitely a way to what I would call weaponize information.

Speaker 5 We were able to use these new platforms to get stuff out there in a way that was never done before.

Speaker 6 So Dylan's a filmmaker, and even if the idea is let's create something narrative and successful in that sense, did things shift and you saw yourselves as activists as opposed to filmmakers at some point?

Speaker 5 Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, we were given a pretty big hat to wear.
It wasn't something that we asked for. We were young kids.
Were we the best messengers for that? Of course not.

Speaker 5 Dylan just made a great video that was, you know, very, that was caught by people. It was, you know, people could.

Speaker 5 receive it or they liked it or you know whatever whatever about it was something was new and like she said you know they felt like they were on the inside of information. And so it grew exponentially.

Speaker 5 And, you know, there was, you know, memes later on about, you know, college kids' pickup lines. Was have you seen loose change and that kind of thing? But it definitely morphed.

Speaker 5 Like we're talking about two very different eras of time here. We're talking about the creation of loose change in the base of the internet and then where we are today, which is wildly different.

Speaker 6 Right. We'll get into some of the content of loose change and also where we are today.
Joan, I want to bring you in here. Loose change becomes, some say, one of the first viral hits.

Speaker 6 Something like like 100 million people watched it, were affected by it. What was it that made it go viral from your perspective, Joan?

Speaker 6 Did we have even a concept of virality at the time when this was launched in 2006?

Speaker 7 No, well, the things that used to go viral online at that time were, you know, still what goes viral these days, which is pictures of animals, cats, you know, funny memes.

Speaker 7 And you have to remember that like

Speaker 7 video is new at that stage, right? And so,

Speaker 7 but what really

Speaker 7 was this groundswell of interest was small groups sharing this link,

Speaker 7 getting involved in discussions about

Speaker 7 this

Speaker 7 film and this documentary, and

Speaker 7 the community around it that were also digging out different pieces of information and putting them, putting this really big puzzle together

Speaker 7 on message boards where people were communicating with one another and trying to add to the story, right? And in that way,

Speaker 7 the early internet is highly participatory. And I think that one of the things you don't get with

Speaker 7 the kind of conspiracy that we would think of with JFK is the narratives come down, but there's not a lot of ways in which you can interact with the narrative. You can believe it or not.

Speaker 7 But with 9-11 conspiracism, you had this ongoing daily dialogue that you could participate in and that you could add to. And so

Speaker 7 that community building and even this idea that you were a truth seeker rather than someone that was merely just, you know, consuming what the mainstream media was telling you.

Speaker 7 And you were like this drone that was just living your life, right? You weren't going to look away. You were going to look further and further and deeper and deeper into this.

Speaker 7 And people were meeting each other. They were having,

Speaker 7 you know, conventions. They were

Speaker 7 making memes together and sharing them. And so it was a highly participatory moment for the culture.
And because

Speaker 7 you thought that you were finding things that government and other

Speaker 7 groups were keeping from you,

Speaker 7 that really made you want to dig in more and understand more.

Speaker 7 And the military component, I think, is really important here because when people feel like they're being lied to and the democracy is at stake, they're willing to do things that they otherwise wouldn't have been willing to do.

Speaker 7 And so, at the same time, not just online, you have these

Speaker 7 media that's traveling, but you also have

Speaker 7 a fairly intense anti-war movement that is consuming this information and then bringing it into the streets and trying as best as they can to stop U.S.

Speaker 7 imperialism.

Speaker 6 Corey, I know you don't think of yourself as a conspiracy theorist and that you have passionate views about right-wing conspirators like Alex Jones.

Speaker 6 What's the cleanest way to separate, in your view, what the difference is between you and someone like Alex Jones?

Speaker 5 Alex Jones is definitely someone who's turned this into a money-making operation. He's become very wealthy out of this, and he's gotten himself into very high political places.

Speaker 5 I mean, let's remember, and again, this is something I really need to harp on here because we've had a whole conversation about conspiracy theories, and we need to talk about when this really got out of control.

Speaker 5 Because for a long time, this 9-11 conspiracy stuff kind of really quieted down. My life had moved on.
People weren't talking about this anymore.

Speaker 5 I wasn't getting nearly the messages that I still get to this day until the candidate of Donald Trump came around. And that candidate of Donald Trump utilized

Speaker 5 Alex Jones' platform to promote himself and to align himself with this kind of base of people and then decided to use that in his presidential career with the assistance of Fox News to perpetuate these conspiracy theories on a level that's never been seen before.

Speaker 5 Again, you're talking, we're talking about two very different things here. Two 20-year-old kids who made a

Speaker 5 college-level movie and put it out for free on the internet.

Speaker 5 And then the president of the United States utilizing Fox News to weaponize conspiracy theories to ignite a base to try to overthrow the country. And then now we're in this kind of post-era.

Speaker 5 And they use this and they took this.

Speaker 5 And what's so ironic about it, it's the same group of people that hated us when we made this video because we were anti-war, we were leftists, we were liberals, we didn't want to, we were pacifists.

Speaker 5 I'm, you know, I'm not into guns and that kind of shit.

Speaker 5 And so now to have the same people that hated us using this material to propagate their own nonsense is kind of very interesting to me.

Speaker 5 And furthermore, on to Alex Jones, like, you know, obviously we're talking about him.

Speaker 5 He just got hit with about a billion dollar fine after you tie in legal fees and all those different things as he as he should. And so let's really focus on what that is.

Speaker 5 That's the shooting and the fact that he's claiming that the people were actors and all that nonsense, right? And so what's the difference between those two events, between 9-11 and Sandy Hook?

Speaker 5 9-11 was a response by family members in an era when there was information that wasn't being disseminated to the American public.

Speaker 5 And it was not only conspiracy theorists who were interested in that information.

Speaker 5 The American media was perpetuating 9-11 for decades afterwards with every little bit of new information that was coming out.

Speaker 5 But back to, you know, Sandy Hook, that kind of conspiracy came up within a couple of months, and it was generated on the internet by people who were not directly related to the event, which is very different than the 9-11 situation, where this took years to culminate.

Speaker 5 And so for us, we were coming from a place where we were trying to do what we believed was honorable

Speaker 5 using the things that we had available to us at the time. And we believed in what we were doing and we were trying to make it the most scholarly piece of evidence that we could put out there.

Speaker 5 And we always, that's why we did so many revisions. And that's why we kind of removed things and we admitted to our mistakes.

Speaker 5 And we consistently tried to just have a conversation about it so that we could always get a new investigation. And that was always our aim.

Speaker 5 And the reason we wanted that new investigation was to support. the family members who also wanted that new investigation into 9-11 and never they never got it.

Speaker 6 What is your relationship with it now?

Speaker 6 Knowing where we're at, obviously we're in a very different place than we were.

Speaker 6 Social media is very different now. And like, you're an older person.
Information has come out. There is distrust across the board.

Speaker 6 And I know you guys have revised the film, but there's even a cottage industry that sprung up to debunk theories that you guys were putting out there as well. Like, how do you see that film currently?

Speaker 5 I mean, I'm the producer of that film, and I will be for the rest of my life.

Speaker 5 So my job is to make sure that it doesn't disappear because it's such an important piece of information that we need to analyze and have a conversation about. And I also think that...

Speaker 6 You still have the same questions about

Speaker 6 9-11 that you had in that film? Do you have those today?

Speaker 5 There's definitely, you know, there's a lot. That film was put out 20 years ago, right?

Speaker 5 And during that time, so much more information has come out from the United States government with redacted documents and different things of that nature.

Speaker 5 But there's still some major questions for me that need to be answered.

Speaker 6 This brings brings up

Speaker 6 a lot of interesting questions, and it's a delicate conversation. I think, Corey, I can see,

Speaker 6 I think you bring up something that I think a lot of people on the left, on the right, are grappling with right now.

Speaker 6 We should be skeptical of our government and the institutions around us.

Speaker 6 And I think we're looking for what that line is of what is healthy skepticism and what is skepticism that is degrading faith in institutions.

Speaker 6 I think there are critics of

Speaker 6 something like Lose Change and some of these, the truther movement. There are critics that live within victims' families who feel like this

Speaker 6 takes the responsibility off of the people who perhaps perpetuated the horror of 9-11 and it adds disinformation out there, that it erodes faith in institutions. But I'm sure there's...

Speaker 6 We should be more skeptical of the institutions and the information that we have.

Speaker 6 I think there's an argument, too, of if some people would argue that what you're putting out there is misinformation, it's also in response to a government that is putting out misinformation.

Speaker 6 You're fighting a war in Iraq that is based on misinformation, which puts us in this fucking place right now where

Speaker 6 it doesn't feel like we're getting healthy. good information.
Joan, I think I look to you. When it comes to theories, where is the healthy line? How do we show distrust in

Speaker 6 positions of power without eroding distrust or eroding trust in sort of our society?

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 7 what's interesting about government or the state is: I don't think there's anybody that's ever been really satisfied with the state. I don't think that there's a

Speaker 7 utopia anywhere where people are like, you know, who's doing a good job? Our government, right? Like, it's just not something you hear, right? Especially as we get into different issues. But

Speaker 7 back in the early aughts, people were using, you know, there was a familiar meme going around, Bush lied, people died, right?

Speaker 7 And he had made these statements about, quote unquote, a massive stockpile of biological weapons.

Speaker 7 Others had argued that,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 well, we don't know if there are nuclear weapons, but we're pretty sure, you know, and so there was a lot of hedging back then about

Speaker 7 what to do and how to do it. But when you say massive stockpile

Speaker 7 and people are doubting that, it tends the governments tend to double down on that information. We've seen that meme repeated over and over, Obama lied, people died.

Speaker 7 you know, Trump lied, people died. It keeps coming up, right?

Speaker 7 And I think that as we imagine the role of governments in our lives and what governments should and could be responsible for, we're at another crossroads right now with the role of NATO in the Ukrainian and Russian war going on?

Speaker 7 And is it the fact that NATO is fighting a proxy war with

Speaker 7 Ukraine suffering all of the

Speaker 7 serious, serious casualties? And so I think that it's important for people to be skeptical of

Speaker 7 governments and very powerful people

Speaker 7 making these decisions when it comes to massive casualties. Now,

Speaker 7 that doesn't mean we should just throw our arms in the air and say everything is endlessly corrupt and there's nothing we can do.

Speaker 7 Because I do, at the end of the day, and I think maybe Corey agrees with me, I do believe in the power of people and the power of people to come together to formulate their own ideas, to dig in and look at what kind of evidence is out there.

Speaker 7 And we do need to have more facts and public interest information circulate throughout our society. And the last point I'll make on this,

Speaker 7 which is to say, I think we need a lot more journalism. I think we need a lot more investigation.

Speaker 7 I think when it comes to who's going to hold these people accountable, it's going to be journalists who are going to be able to get the goods. I don't think we can rely on

Speaker 7 law enforcement and those other kinds of institutions to get to the bottom of corrupt governments. It just doesn't really seem to be doing the job.

Speaker 7 Journalists have always played this role of digging in, finding, and piecing together different bits of information and creating that narrative.

Speaker 7 And so in many ways, Corey and those that made Loose Change

Speaker 7 weren't necessarily your traditional style journalists, but they do.

Speaker 7 They are the archetype of this early form of digital journalism where where people were

Speaker 7 doing more than asking questions, but really trying to make media to mobilize audiences and to get people to think differently.

Speaker 7 And hopefully what it does is it instills in people a skeptical attitude about how do you critique and understand information? How do you piece it together?

Speaker 7 And then

Speaker 7 further than that, how do you hold accountable people in power that are telling massive lies? And I think that that's where the big question about studying disinformation comes in right now is because

Speaker 7 we don't necessarily know who's going to hold the very, very rich and

Speaker 7 powerful

Speaker 7 to account for spreading lies at scale. I think the most recent example of that is trying to understand

Speaker 7 who is responsible for the January 6th insurrection and what does that mean to hold someone responsible for an event like that?

Speaker 6 Corey, when you look at the information on the internet, who should we trust to ask these questions? And what information should we be trusting on the internet?

Speaker 5 I think we're in such a gray zone right now that we don't have an answer to that. And I think what we need to kind of come to terms with is the fact that we as a society won't have an answer to that.

Speaker 5 But I think, and this is my idea, this is my solution, and this is where the line is for me, is that we need to educate our children better right from the start.

Speaker 5 If you ask any kid in America right now, what were Columbus's three ships, they'll tell you, right? And so we know how to teach our children good information.

Speaker 5 We just need, or we know how to teach our children information. We just need to make that good information.

Speaker 5 And so I think we need to kind of just accept the fact that where we are right now is kind of where we are. And of course, we need to tombstone engineer that as best we can.

Speaker 5 But we need to do our research on how this misinformation is affecting us and how it's driving us and the things like Joan is doing and trying to grapple with and then figure out a way that we can instill that information into our children early on so that they grow up with the right tools to be able to discern good information from bad.

Speaker 5 And I think that's a solution. Of course, it's not perfect, but it at least pushes in the right direction.
And it's very much what like Joan said, there's no utopia.

Speaker 5 Humans aren't perfect and we never will be. And so we need to just kind of keep working towards something better and leave it better than we found it.

Speaker 5 And so in this instance, with this new digital age, age, we have created this new weapon of mass communication and we need to figure out how it really adjusts to humans and how we can use it as a benefit instead of what we've created, which is this kind of individualistic society where everybody thinks they're the center of the universe and figure it and tool it, retool it into something that's more beneficial for society.

Speaker 5 You know, like, how is how is the societies of the 2100s going to be using the internet? Can we envision that?

Speaker 5 Can we envision how they transmit information, good information, factual information, and try to reverse engineer that for our own society and start to implement those rules so that we can get to that place for the next generation?

Speaker 5 Because as I see it right now, our current generations, we just got to let us go. We're done.
Like we don't even have a chance.

Speaker 7 Oh, come on. Come on.

Speaker 9 We're okay. We'll be okay.
I don't know.

Speaker 5 It's a very optimistic point of view. I've been watching Jordan's pieces and like, what I see out there is like scary.
So like, I'm not sure there's ever coming back from that, right?

Speaker 5 And we think Trump was so bad. Wait till the next one comes down.
Because when I was in the Army, the one thing I always had a new first sergeant, like every eight months.

Speaker 5 And I was hoping that the next first sergeant would be better than the last one. And he was never better.
He was always worse. And it always had new rules and restrictions.

Speaker 5 And, uh, and so, I mean, I hope, you know, I used to be optimistic, like 10 years ago, right? We all used to be optimistic, but then the last 10 years happened, and now we're a lot more pessimistic.

Speaker 6 We'll put a bow on this, and I want to, we're going to talk about a couple other things, but

Speaker 6 kind of a final question for both of you within this segment here.

Speaker 6 What do you think the legacy of loose change is, Corey?

Speaker 5 I think Loose Change is the first viral video of the internet. It's the only documentary that people are still talking about now, all these years later.
There's a lot of different stuff comes out.

Speaker 5 And I'm proud of that fact. Like, I helped make a piece of media that was like truly just long, is going to live past me probably.
And that's cool.

Speaker 5 And what I think it's turned into is the digital version of a banned book. And we need to, you know, and then the statement goes, any banned book, any banned book is worth reading, right?

Speaker 5 And so again, I think that loose change needs to exist on the internet so that we can have the conversations about it.

Speaker 5 Are humans going to continuously use pieces of information like loose change or anything else to

Speaker 5 push their own views? Of course, they are. That's human nature.
And it doesn't matter if it's loose change or zeitgeist or something they saw in Fox News.

Speaker 5 They're going to use whatever they need to use to propagate their point of view.

Speaker 5 But I like to look back at Loose Change as the culmination of an amazing series of events that nobody could have seen coming. And it really did rock the world.
Like it still goes on to this day.

Speaker 5 And what's super interesting about it is how it's morphed throughout these years.

Speaker 5 And to me, to see how it's been used incorrectly by other people, especially American presidents and Alex Jones and these different people, we need to latch onto that, not and not be afraid of it.

Speaker 5 We need to understand why it's happening and do the studies that she's talking about so that we can understand why these things happen.

Speaker 5 And then, again, equip our children to be able to deal with them better. I was not trained for the society that I was pushed into, right? In high school, I was like, oh, hey, we're going to do this.

Speaker 5 Nina Pinto Santa Rail is Columbus Day. And then, you know, on my 18th birthday, essentially, I'm invading Afghanistan.
And then on my 19th birthday, I'm invading

Speaker 5 Iraq. And I get to live firsthand at this early stage in my life, seeing the American

Speaker 5 foreign policy just as horrible as it really is. And I mean, imagine the psychological

Speaker 5 breakdown that I went through as a human being trying to understand that everything that you were raised to believe in is an utter lie.

Speaker 5 And that it's just a complete facade. And the thing that you think you were believing in is long, long gone.

Speaker 6 Joan, what do you see the legacy of lose change as?

Speaker 7 I think, you know, I think about it in a broader sense than it wasn't wasn't just the

Speaker 7 video and the evidence presented in it, but it's part of a moment where,

Speaker 7 you know, Corey, I appreciate you talking about how it was translated into many different languages.

Speaker 7 People felt that they could pick it up and take elements of it, translate elements of it and make it their own. And it really shows us how

Speaker 7 this kind of participatory internet culture was going to develop was that people were going to take information, they were going to remix it.

Speaker 7 In many ways, and,

Speaker 7 you know, no, no shade, Corey, but we don't even remember the authors of it, right? Like it's anonymous in that sense. It becomes a piece of the culture.

Speaker 7 And, you know, clips of it, people I'm sure will remember and memes that come out of it are definitely something that have lived on.

Speaker 7 But by and large, it was, you know, born of the internet and then created and became the infrastructure and the content on which many different kinds of communities base their

Speaker 7 worldviews. And I think that when you come into contact with those ideas very early on as you're making your identity, and

Speaker 7 I'm sure at 18, other people in your life were either going off to college or starting new businesses or,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 not going to war. But it was,

Speaker 7 you know, it was a really unique time in American culture with the technological shifts that people were grappling with and the uncertainty. We don't,

Speaker 7 the thing that 9-11 itself introduces to the American psyche is that

Speaker 7 it can happen here, that

Speaker 7 the war can be brought home. And as a result, you get this

Speaker 7 paranoia in society about the other and about being attacked. And you don't feel as if you have protection and security from the government.

Speaker 7 And so finding one another and using information and building knowledge together becomes an incredibly powerful mode of solidarity.

Speaker 7 And I think that, you know, as the internet has progressed and things have changed, those groups of people that found each other in those moments after 9-11 that were sharing

Speaker 7 these kinds of theories

Speaker 7 continue to be in community with one another and continue to be critical of the state. And the last thing I'll add about

Speaker 7 this moment, especially around conspiracy, is sometimes communities

Speaker 7 have to use conspiracy as a way to protect themselves from

Speaker 7 governments and government overreach. It's not uncommon for, if you take

Speaker 7 a situation like Flint, where people were saying there's something wrong with the water. There's something going on.

Speaker 7 And people were really dismissive at the beginning of the Flint water crisis because people hadn't really learned how to do science and to build science around the pollution in Flint.

Speaker 7 And so sometimes rumors and conspiracy can help communities come together and focus on a problem.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 sometimes it's true. And I think that elements of what came out of Loose Change or out of that moment that we would have called conspiracy end up challenging power and becoming an important

Speaker 7 way in which we resist tyranny and authoritarianism.

Speaker 6 Well, we need to take a quick break, but when we come back, I want to dive into how social media companies are dealing with disinformation in 2022, or if they even are at all.

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Speaker 6 Welcome back, everybody. Joan, if posting a conspiracy theory on YouTube is media manipulation, is the company that lets it remain posted participating in that manipulation?

Speaker 7 Well, it's a good question. Right now,

Speaker 7 legally, the answer is

Speaker 7 no.

Speaker 7 Although there is an interesting case that's being picked up by the Supreme Court where

Speaker 7 there was some terrorism content that was posted on YouTube and the terrorists made money off of it because it was monetized. And so now the Supreme Court is trying to figure out if YouTube was

Speaker 7 funding terrorism, essentially. And so that is a very unique unique thing, though.
But by and large, companies get a big pass on

Speaker 7 their products being used to spread conspiracy. It's only been since about 2018 that companies have decided that they're going to enforce terms of service around

Speaker 7 lies and disinformation. I think in 2018 was the first time we saw InfoWars and Alex Jones get deplatformed.
He's probably one of the most famous people that have been moved off of these platforms.

Speaker 7 And that had a lot to do with public pressure by activists and advertisers to ensure that the information that was being provided on these platforms, even if it was entertainment, was not defamatory, libelous, hate, harassment, or incitement.

Speaker 5 The question always becomes, you know, where is that line? And if you have to censor him for this, then you have to censor this person for this. And before long, no one can say anything.

Speaker 5 And I mean, I've dealt with this personally as well. Like, lose change lived on YouTube for years.
It's hundreds of millions of views. So many people have put it up.

Speaker 5 I had it on my own channel just because I needed a place to park it for free so that people could see it, analyze it, have conversations about it, what have you.

Speaker 5 And of course, over the years, people have complained to YouTube about it and they would send me warnings about it and things of that nature.

Speaker 5 But one day, essentially, right after around 2018, I just one day got an email from YouTube and it was like, we've taken down loose change for hate speech.

Speaker 5 You can't fight against this. This is just something we're going to do.
And I know, of course, I write back like, what exactly is the hate speech within loose change?

Speaker 5 Because there's nothing in loose change that's trying to incite a riot. There's nothing in it that's defamatory towards anybody.

Speaker 5 And it's just a piece of information after information that we're putting forward. And so YouTube has the ability as a content provider to not allow me to put my video on them.

Speaker 5 And that's their business. And that's...
That I understand. I think that's a great line for companies to have the ability to shut those things off.

Speaker 5 I think it was amazing that Twitter was able to turn off Donald Trump, right? And I hope he never comes back. But at the same time, these are all crazy people.
They're going to keep talking.

Speaker 5 It's our responsibility not to listen to them. There's, you know, I'm driving through Amsterdam, New York the other day, and there's a guy in the bus station just yelling at everybody that drives by.

Speaker 5 If I stop and listen to him and start broadcasting him on national television, well, that's more on me and the people watching than the person who's yelling at the bus station.

Speaker 5 And so at my point, we need to be able to live our life. We need to be a free person in a world and not because we're Americans, but because we're humans.
And you have the right to live your life.

Speaker 5 And as long as you don't hurt another person physically, alter, you know, change their life in any way, then you should have the ability to live your life however you want.

Speaker 5 And we're seeing that pushback between regulation, the state, and people who want to live their life and do their own thing and, you know, self-identify as a cat.

Speaker 6 But we're in a tricky spot, though, right now, right? Like, you keep talking about

Speaker 6 loose change or all these things as pieces of information. And you're right.
We should be able to have access to information, to have conversations around information.

Speaker 6 I'd love to live in a society that can have complicated, thoughtful conversations that can be extended and interesting. Sadly, it doesn't feel like we're in that society very often.

Speaker 6 But putting something controversial on an online space might not just be information anymore. I mean, it is an act that incites...
distrust.

Speaker 6 It's an act that could incite excitement and interest and curiosity for sure. But I don't know if it is neutral anymore.
And so, is it a cop-out to say it's just information?

Speaker 6 Alex Jones can put that out there. It's just information.
Like, this information has a reaction and causes a reaction.

Speaker 5 It is and people should be held accountable when that information takes things to the next level. And again, why? I was never invited on the daily show before Donald Trump, right?

Speaker 5 Even when loose change was at its heyday, like it wouldn't, you guys wouldn't even talk about it.

Speaker 5 And now, 20 years later, post-Donald Trump, we're having these conversations, not because a DVD was made 20 years ago, but because a a president used the national platform to propagate lies to the American people, which caused them to try to overthrow the United States Capitol.

Speaker 5 And every single person that was there should be held accountable and they should be put in jail and the president should be held accountable.

Speaker 5 And we should learn from that as a country and as a society. And that's the line, right?

Speaker 5 Because if you go over the line, you start to hurt other people, you take away their freedoms, or you're impeding them from living their free life. That's where the line is.

Speaker 5 And we were never there before. We were never having those conversations.
It wasn't even part of it.

Speaker 5 Now, post-Donald Trump, because we have this, now we live in a world where we have to deal with all this craziness.

Speaker 5 And it was there because corporations wanted to make money, because politicians want to be re-elected.

Speaker 5 And exactly like you highlighted in your last piece, how many people that are running for office right now believe that the election was stolen, right? And it's a ridiculous amount of them.

Speaker 5 And that's not because of loose change. That's because of a president who used Fox News to propagate lies to the American people.

Speaker 5 And this is a trend throughout current American history and new media where these administrations are using media to lie to the American people to propagate for their own profit and personal growth.

Speaker 5 And then they just get to retire and go do whatever they want to do. And so, of course, people are starting to get pissed.
And so, yes, it is information. Yes, it does stir stuff up.

Speaker 5 But I wasn't into conspiracy theories before Loose Change. I'm not into conspiracy theories afterwards because I don't believe it's a conspiracy theory.

Speaker 5 I believe these are things that we actually need to talk about. These are actually things that are happening in our country.

Speaker 5 And as Joan just supported me on, like, we know that the American government was lying to us about the war in Iraq and no one's been held accountable. So, where does that line go?

Speaker 5 Again, if people are hurt or people are killed and their freedoms are impeded in any way, then that has to be held accountable for it.

Speaker 5 But people having conversations and discussing free information, we can't limit that. Otherwise, nobody gets to say anything.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think, Corey, one of the things, and this is something that I think a lot about is the scale is different.

Speaker 7 So, social media introduces

Speaker 7 a different relationship between free speech and audiences or listening, right? There's no obligation to listen. There's also no right to broadcast.
There's no right

Speaker 7 in that sense of

Speaker 7 being the right to reach 80 million people.

Speaker 7 We don't have, we actually have laws against using broadcast to do

Speaker 7 inciting things.

Speaker 7 And so the so for me, you know, Alex Jones isn't necessarily just having conversations, but he's moving

Speaker 7 between that and mobilizing audiences.

Speaker 5 And he was held accountable, right? He went too far. He crossed the line.

Speaker 5 And so now we have

Speaker 5 a consequence to that, which is exactly the way it's going to be.

Speaker 7 And I wonder if that consequence is actually... you know, reflective of how out of scale with or out of touch with reality the internet and social media companies have become.

Speaker 7 Like finding someone a billion dollars, it almost seems comical. But when it comes to the scale of the internet, more is different.

Speaker 7 It's different when millions of people are doing a thing versus even a regional radio station.

Speaker 7 And we've never had broadcast rules attached to the internet in the same way that we have broadcast rules for television and radio. And so,

Speaker 7 you know, what I would love to see is us moving more towards accountability for people that have access to and are broadcasting to larger audiences.

Speaker 7 So, maybe it's the case that if someone's, you know, talking to their, you know, 25 friends on a Discord server,

Speaker 7 maybe that's not something we need to bother with. But when somebody is reaching a million people and they have these calls to action, and they are,

Speaker 7 especially in the case of profiting from political oppression, are profiting from lies and disinformation, that we should have some new

Speaker 7 regulations to ensure that they're not able to hurt people.

Speaker 7 And so I think ultimately, until we understand the scale question and how more is different, we're not going to be able to completely address, well, what does free speech mean in the context of the internet, especially when I could just say your name and say you did this dastardly thing.

Speaker 7 And there's really no retraction. There's no no way to

Speaker 5 yeah, but it's gotten so much worse than that, right?

Speaker 5 Like we're, we're, we're way beyond that at this point, too, because now you can have a kid walk into, or I'm sorry, a kid walk down the street with an AR-15, shoot and kill people, and you have half the country that supports that person, and you have political candidates, news stations who then fight for that person.

Speaker 5 And what's even worse is, again, it's not just about groups on the internet. Now we have CNN and Fox that no matter what the question is, it's going to be a debate from one side or the other.

Speaker 5 And it is sickening no matter what side of the conversation you are, right?

Speaker 5 If you're a conservative and you're watching Fox News and you see CNN, you're like, oh my God, this is just absolutely ridiculous.

Speaker 5 But if you're a liberal and you're watching Fox News, you're like, you're in the same position.

Speaker 7 There's a really interesting book one of my team members wrote called Networked Propaganda.

Speaker 7 And it's about these media ecosystems and how the media has developed over the last 20 years, but particularly looking at the 2016 election.

Speaker 7 And the right-wing media ecosystem is very different from left and center media.

Speaker 7 And what's interesting about the right-wing media ecosystem is how quickly they will coalesce around a story and a narrative. And if the facts don't fit, it's party over the news, right?

Speaker 7 You got to get the party line.

Speaker 7 And, you know, this isn't in the book, but the controversy around Dominion voting machines and how if you said negative things about Dominion on television, Dominion is able to sue you.

Speaker 7 If you were saying negative things about Dominion on the internet,

Speaker 7 it's going to be decided by the courts.

Speaker 7 And I think that that moment where we start to realize that these media companies are constricted in some ways by these different mediums and the regulatory systems around those mediums

Speaker 7 eventually are going to be tested in the courts. And, you know, when it comes to left and center media, they do not

Speaker 7 have the same same kind of

Speaker 7 infrastructure online. They don't have the same kind of motivated audiences in order to spread and distribute the news as the right does.

Speaker 7 The right has an incredible distribution muscle through Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.

Speaker 7 And so we're going to see

Speaker 7 over time how

Speaker 7 these different media ecosystems interact. And,

Speaker 7 but I don't know, you you know, like I'm a, you know, I'm a big joker. I get it.
Clinton News Network, MSDNC, I'm with you. I'm with you, you know,

Speaker 7 and I don't know if cable news is really going to survive the internet era.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 what we're dealing with is a difference of, well, do we want news or do we want partisan politics that looks like news? Right.

Speaker 7 And some of this is, I know I can tell, Corey, for you, it comes down to, well, who's getting paid out? And, you know, and I agree with you, we should follow the money, always follow the money.

Speaker 7 But also,

Speaker 7 I think the light for me or the optimism comes in where the internet is a huge international project.

Speaker 7 And we could reimagine some technology, some design, so that we have room for news. We have room for fact-based discussion.

Speaker 7 And right now, what we have is social media, which is essentially trying to monetize any bit of information that it can. And it's not designed specifically to spread

Speaker 7 public interest information. And I think that that's where we get into a lot of our problems because

Speaker 7 You know, we used to rely much more on traditional media to get information out there. Now the gates have shifted.

Speaker 7 And I wonder, you know, know, at the end of the day, are we going to be able to depend on Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and,

Speaker 7 you know, Kanye's buying parlor? We've got Trump with True Social. Are we going to be able to trust social networks to get this public information out there? And if not, what do we build? Right.

Speaker 7 And how do we get there? And that's those for me are the big questions moving forward.

Speaker 6 Well, let's, you know, I I want to ask one final question in that world because

Speaker 6 I know there's disagreements here, but it sounds like we want a similar thing, which is to have free-flowing information and conversations. The question is, where do those conversations live?

Speaker 6 And what you just described, Joan, is a sloppy social media system,

Speaker 6 doesn't know how to manage disinformation. It's now being run by Elon Musk, who's running Twitter, who is throwing stuff willy-nilly at the wall.

Speaker 6 Where are we supposed to have these conversations?

Speaker 6 One, what can these platforms do? Or is there a platform where this type of healthy discourse can live? Or are we just screwed?

Speaker 5 Corey, what do you think? Well, again, I mean, this stuff's always been around, right? It's just more visible now.

Speaker 5 KKK existed before the internet, and they had their little meetings, and they put on their costumes, and they did all those different things. For me,

Speaker 5 this is an an issue with information and the way that it's broadcast throughout American society is that we just broadcast hypotheticals.

Speaker 5 Like we'll broadcast information about a case before we know all the facts and we have immediate, like, you know, here's a car chase. We got to cover it.

Speaker 5 And so we've gotten away from kind of fact-based journalism where we're just broadcasting whatever we can do to keep people's attention.

Speaker 6 What do you trust? Where do you go? when you're looking for information?

Speaker 5 I don't trust anyone.

Speaker 5 I've blocked every major news application because I just can't handle it. It's all nonsense.

Speaker 12 What's on your phone?

Speaker 6 What do you click? You wake up and what do you click?

Speaker 5 I read stuff about cameras. I read stuff about New York State legalization.
I'm into just different articles.

Speaker 5 I let Google newsfeed give me stuff that's tailored to my interests, and I block anything about Biden or Trump because I just can't handle it.

Speaker 5 I think if you support a politician at this point, it's basically the same as supporting a football team. So it's just like they're just there so you can buy a jersey.
And so for me, I'm

Speaker 5 what was the question? I don't know. I feel I got lost again.

Speaker 8 Oh, that's what it was.

Speaker 5 Sorry. So we're broadcasting hypotheticals, right? And her question is, how do we fix this, right?

Speaker 5 So there's, I think the conversations can exist online, because even if they don't exist online, like I was saying, the KKK, they'll have their little meetings.

Speaker 5 And so, but it's up to the mainstream media to really grow a backbone here and start to, and again, it's part of the conversation that we need to go and how we evolutionize the mass communication.

Speaker 5 But the media, we need to trust the media again. And that's, I think, one of the major problems in America and the world right now is that people don't trust the media.

Speaker 5 And that's because they're reporting on hypotheticals.

Speaker 5 They're going to report for a political base and there's no true information that you can follow anymore where you would normally just clock into the 6 p.m. NBC news and get the world report.

Speaker 5 You can't do that anymore without hypocrisy. And that's again, what I said at the beginning, hypocrisy is more visible.

Speaker 5 People are upset because they know the government's been lying to us and it's proven at this point over major things for at least two decades now. It's in my life.

Speaker 5 And so like, you know, how do we hold people accountable? How do we adjust this? And again, like Joan said, let's focus on changing some regulations.

Speaker 5 Let's focus on, you know, putting information where it belongs. And like I said, let's focus on envisioning how the future societies communicate accurately.

Speaker 5 And let's try to reverse engineer that for our society and start to build those building blocks.

Speaker 6 But do you feel the same responsibility as somebody who put information out there as the mainstream networks do?

Speaker 5 I feel absolutely no responsibility over anything. No.
I mean, I'm living my own life. I'm living my own life.
If you want to do your thing, go do your thing.

Speaker 5 If you want to make it, because again, everybody makes videos.

Speaker 5 And what we're really talking about is a technological evolution where people are able to carry a camera and disseminate information online. And guess what? It's in everybody's hands right now.

Speaker 5 We have all of human knowledge in our pocket. We have a camera that can broadcast to everyone in the world at the same time.
And what do we do with it as a society? And we're seeing it.

Speaker 5 We're not doing the right thing. We're not growing as a society.
We're making things worse. So I don't know.

Speaker 6 But you have a clear distrust for the media ecosystem, but you yourself are a part of that.

Speaker 5 I mean, 20 years ago, I made a DVD.

Speaker 5 We don't post on Facebook. I'm not out there promoting loose change.
I don't talk about it unless somebody reaches out to me to ask about it.

Speaker 5 And I only do major news at this point because the littler guys just are normally tailored in one conspiratorial direction or the other for the right or to the left.

Speaker 5 And so I like to have real conversations with people like yourself so we can have a real conversation about this stuff and kind of push it in a direction so that people understand it.

Speaker 5 I've seen too much lazy journalism where they're just like, loose change is responsible for all the disinformation on the internet. And it's like.
That is the laziest thing you could do.

Speaker 5 You're not digging into the conversation at all. You're not even looking at the information.
You're just trying to get clicks. And that's where we are with reporting right now.

Speaker 5 We're just trying to get clicks. And you yourself know that you have to do crazy things.

Speaker 5 You have to go to Trump rallies and ask people insane questions that I would be terrified to ask them in person.

Speaker 6 Don't blow up my spot, Corey. Don't blow up my spot.
It's crazy.

Speaker 5 You're a crazy person, man. But I love you.
And I really support everything you're doing, too. And I just want to say I love the Daily Show.

Speaker 5 And Jon Stewart was my fucking hero and still is as a veteran to be standing up for my rights when no other political candidate is. Like, I would vote for him if he ran.

Speaker 5 That's the only person I'm interested in.

Speaker 6 I tell you, I think he'd have some backers for sure.

Speaker 6 Joe, if we can't trust the people running these platforms, how are we supposed to trust and use these platforms?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think it's up to us to work together. I think journalists have a huge role to play.
Journalism organizations have a huge role to play.

Speaker 7 Outside of news media and corporations, I think journalists still,

Speaker 7 like academics, have a passion for the truth, right? And I think that we are truth seekers.

Speaker 7 And I think that that's an important thing to hold on to in a time when people feel like there's no anchor, that there's no there's no truth out there that we can access.

Speaker 7 And in some ways, I think that that post-truth

Speaker 7 society really favors authoritarians. It really favors those who are willing to lie to us at scale and oppress us because we then deactivate, we then step aside and walk away from

Speaker 7 the responsibilities that we have to one another.

Speaker 7 So when it comes to someone like Elon Musk, you know, he's not your typical homo economicus rational actor. He didn't buy Twitter to make money, right?

Speaker 7 He spent 44 billion for a product that he probably could have built on his own for less than a billion dollars.

Speaker 7 But what he was buying were the networks that we're all part of he was buying the networks of journalists he was buying the networks of politicians he essentially bought the chessboard that global politics is being played on at this stage there's really not a lot of ways in which anyone else could

Speaker 7 um

Speaker 7 have that kind of influence rather than being the owner of a large platform. And I think that Musk's political aspirations in terms of being part of

Speaker 7 the global conversation about

Speaker 7 the war in Ukraine,

Speaker 7 what's going on in Taiwan, at the end of the day, are also being driven by

Speaker 7 his business decisions around selling cars and who the markets are that are going to buy these cars. And he is going to be able to,

Speaker 7 you know

Speaker 7 gain some kind of political favor with different governments if he uses Twitter in that way and so I think that there's a very big risk to allowing our communication commons to be owned by

Speaker 7 single individuals that don't have the public interest at the core uh especially when it comes to communication.

Speaker 7 You guys are old enough to remember long-distance calling. You know, you want want to call three towns over, it was going to cost you 25 cents a minute.

Speaker 7 You know, we have a remarkable new innovation here where we can call across the world. I'm calling you from Ireland right now.
I mean, we can call across the world for free and

Speaker 7 reach our family, reach our friends, reach our collaborators, colleagues. And that's something I don't want to lose

Speaker 7 in this moment where we're going to see this massive shakeup around what social media is, how much platforms cost, and eventually how

Speaker 7 these networks are going to change our society, especially our politics. And so, I think the time has come if we are going to fix this for regulation around

Speaker 7 truth in advertising, knowing your customers, political advertising online needs to have much more oversight.

Speaker 7 We do need to know exactly how much money these platform companies are making and where it's going, how much they're investing in content moderation. Can they actually enforce their terms of service?

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 as we move into understanding social media as an industry, I think we can start to fashion a public interest internet that will provide the kinds of information and forums that people need in order to participate in

Speaker 7 elections and to participate in our political systems. But right now, we're at a very, very early stage.

Speaker 7 And it's going to take a lot of work to build those institutions.

Speaker 6 Follow the money. Follow the pornography.
We'll get there.

Speaker 9 Got it.

Speaker 7 And follow me on Twitter.

Speaker 6 Oh, self-promotion.

Speaker 5 Don't follow me. Don't look for me.
I don't want you.

Speaker 9 Don't look for me.

Speaker 7 I'm not here.

Speaker 6 I was going to say, Corey, I can't imagine you're big on the TikTok.

Speaker 5 No,

Speaker 5 I watched it for like a week and then I got tired. I got an Instagram follower with 16 or Instagram account with 16 followers.
I don't do anything anyway. I own a business.
I make videos.

Speaker 5 That's my life.

Speaker 6 Well, Joe Donovan, Corey Rowe, thank you guys for great conversation on healthy skepticism, trust, and blowing all that shit up. I love it.

Speaker 6 Listen to to Jordan Clepper Figures, the conspiracy from The Daily Show on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 16 Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 16 Watch the Daily Show weeknights at 11, 10 Central on Comedy Central, and stream full episodes anytime on Fairmount Plus.

Speaker 16 This has been a Comedy Central podcast.

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