ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more. One of the most ambitious projects in human history. It's almost like the atomic bomb at Rose's Transformation Effect. For decades, the breakthrough has been just around the corner. That would bring our financial markets and electronic commerce to a grinding halt. Wheel quantum computers change everything. I'm Jacinta Bola, search for science fiction, dead and alive on ABC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Natasha Mitchell joining you. You probably originally signed up to social media to stay in touch with friends and family. It was a great way to connect with others. Then came the cat memes and videos. Or pretty happy, harmless things. Now though, something very different is at work in your social media feed. Leading communication strategist Ed Coper calls it anger-tainment. And here's just one example of what he means by that. And the hell that breaks loose because of it. It's the story of a 48-hour frenzy over gas stove tops in the US and the gobsmacking consequences for our collective commons. I love the example of the gas stoves because it is spookily neat, tidy little 48-hour window into the world of anger-tainment. A couple of years ago in the US there was a federal body called the Consumer Product Safety Commission. They look after product recalls and public information campaigns around them as you would expect. One of the commissioners sat down for an interview with Bloomberg. And they asked him, "Oh, there's new research. It's come out on gas stoves, emitting harmful toxins into the household. What are you going to do about that?" And the commissioner said off the cuff, "Oh, we'll take a look at that." And everything's on the table, everything ranging from doing nothing to a full band. We'll look at everything. Now the internet just needs a little tease of an idea to take it and run. And so what is well organised and well-oiled machine exists waiting for an outrage to weaponise? And they were ready to go and they took that little notion. And of course Bloomberg being a journalist, they sensationalized the headline into CPSC is considering a full band on gas stoves. But they went into full hysterical overdrive. And so the very next day all of the internet was a wash with things like celebrity chefs taping them to their stoves saying, "I'm going to stay taped to this stove forever." Or you had, you know, you rim a chart in the Heston at the NRA, you know, take my gun from my cold dead hand. They were all out there saying, "You will take my gas stove from my cold dead hand." And my favourite was a forward tweet from one Republican congressman who just said, "God guns, gas stoves." You know. And all of a sudden, you know, from nowhere, gas stoves became this icon of the culture wars for a 24-hour period. And everyone in that ecosystem on social media grabbed it with both hands and just, you know, not just your political leaders, but every common person out there was all of a sudden in a frenzy about gas stoves. Now, what happened the next day is why this story matters, and that is the Biden administration, whose president at the time came out and said, "We will not ban gas stoves." And we are not thinking about banning gas stoves. And the CPSC had to come out and say, "Well, we weren't going to ban gas stoves. Don't worry about that." Now, what's the problem is we should have a rational and evidence-based policy discussion about the presence of gas stoves in our homes. The science is clear that it actually causes kids to have asthma and is actually quite unhealthy. We should talk about that. We should ask our political decision-makers what are you going to do about that? But we can't. And America will not ban gas stoves, and they won't even think about it. And they could not have that discussion because for one day, social media was in a frenzy. And that's the power of this. You know, it seems funny when it's happening online. But if you know that you can kill a policy idea dead with 24 hours of social media outrage that you probably don't actually care about, that's really scary. That's power. That is raw political power. And so a large part of the motivation to write this book was the idea that we need to understand how this power works. If this has complete control over our political discourse, it has complete control over our lives. And I don't think it's well understood. And Ed Cobra's new book is called "Angertainment. How social media outrage ruined everything." Yes, is it too late to escape the rage-bait machine before it eats us all alive? Why logging off is not enough, and why anger-tainment has deep evolutionary roots. That's today on Big Ideas on ABC Radio National. Ed Cobra's also author of "Facts and Other Lives." Welcome to the disinformation age. He's a pioneering expert in political communications, campaigns, the Internet and democracy. Both in Australia and internationally, he's advised changemakers like Sir Richard Branson, Shakira, Greta Tunberg, Nobel laureates, including Malala Yusufsai. He's CEO of the agency "Populares," but he cut his teeth early on, growing Australia's first online political movement, "Get Up" and established the Center for Impact Communications in the US. He joins award-winning British Australian journalist and lecturer in journalism at RMIT University, Sushi Das, with an audience at the Wheeler Centre in Nam Melbourne today on Cool and Nation Country. So let's pick up where Ed left that guest of Sarger. So that outrage machine is about making people angry through social media entertainment, and then leveraging their attention into either making money or political power. Is that right? That's right, attention is power. And it's not just political power. I think it's obvious for us when we see political outrage and political rage-bait. And that's a big topic we need to talk about. But it's also a form of financial power now. And it's also a form of cultural power now. The fact is if we are all migrating to get our information and opinions from social media, and all of our advertising is migrating to capitalise on that, then people who get attention on social media amass all forms of power in politics attention is power. But if you get a lot of engagement on social media platforms now, they will pay you directly for that engagement. You can also amass hundreds of thousands of followers, you can get them to financially support you directly, or you can have paid partnerships with brands saying, "Yeah, I'll talk about your sunscreen on my Instagram account if you pay me $5,000." So there's all sorts of ways that there are rewards out there for people who get attention on social media. And the reason the book is called "angotainment" not just "emotion-tainment" is the easiest way to get attention on social media is through anger. So let's just break this down. So what you're saying is platforms rev up the outrage with their algorithms and to get people's attention and they then monetise that attention with advertising. But influencers and campaigners and everybody else on social media and bad people as well. Also manufacture outrage to get attention to make money for themselves. And then politicians maybe they leverage the attention to push their own agendas, is that how it works? Yeah, since time immemorial politics has relied on gaining the public's attention. But the way you used to have to do that was difficult. And you had to engage in journalists such as yourself or outlets that broadcast, not narrowcasts. And so you would have to do the work of having an opinion and a worldview and information to back it out and try and get that to people in order to get attention. Now of course you could always have the cheap gimmicks and stunts and tricks and we've always seen stunts in politics and God knows I've done a few myself. Great way to get attention. But the way you get attention now on social media is fundamentally different and we should not assume that this has been just an evolution online of the same thing. It is very different. The things that get attention on social media are generally harmful to society. They are things that are generally not true that incite us to hate each other, that divide and polarise us politically. That are really bad for our mental health, that are driving young men into really dark misogynistic places. These are all the results of a platform that choose to elevate the wrong things. So if you want to get attention, what do you have to do? You have to say the wrong things. Don't hate the player, hate the game. They have to term in the rules and everyone else is obviously going to rush out to make bad content. So that kind of stuff is not just happening in America. We are seeing that kind of stuff in Australia too. Can you just tell us, because I'd like to hear an Australian example of this, just tell us what happened with Great Norther and Beer.
Great Northern Beer is brand is kind of outdoorsy. You might have seen their campaigns, maybe your camping on a beach with impossibly beautiful people, drinking an eski full of great Northern. And so they did a promotion that you could be part of a campaign and they would donate to a charity that bought back privately held bush and gave it to national parks. Because it seems like a great idea and we all have national parks. Ah, not the internet. They had a very different opinion. They would latch onto this and say the crazy woke beer brands are trying to lock up our land and stop us for-wheel drive lovers from being able to drive where we want. And you know, just the usual kind of hallmarks of all these sorts of outrages. And of course, great Northern Council depromotion. The parent company CEO was swiftly moved on. You know, and there's all these real world consequences. Amazing. But when you forensically analyse the outrage, there was only a handful of accounts that were saying this. And this is another important feature to understand that people weren't generally outraged by this promotion. But when you can take it, put it onto social media, amplify it, it appears a lot larger than it is. And of course, what happens then? The legacy media starts reporting on it. So a lot of mainstream outlets were saying Australians outraged and a boycott in great Northern. But they weren't. But then the companies are set up to respond to this kind of outrage. So it means if you know the tricks of how to just amplify a little bit of outrage, you can make brands, you cower in fear that they might be boycott it. Well, you can get your political way if you are a far-right populist who are doing very well globally at the moment. They've gotten on to amplifying the size of their outrage to be all out of disproportion. These objects in the mirror are larger than they appear. That kind of warning on the side mirror. That's how it works on social media. The problem with this when you start polarising people and then they go off into their camps and start hating each other, one of the worst things about polarisation in society is that ultimately, it can lead to violence. That's the sort of end point there. In fact, you actually liken the manufacturing of angry entertainment with professional wrestling, which you say is like a pantomime, a bit like the ultimate fight championship that President Trump has just hosted at the White House to celebrate America's 250th anniversary. Can you just explain the parallels here with them? I love this analogy because it's a really useful way for people to view this new form of politics that we live in at the moment. Because whenever I see Donald Trump say something really outrageous or someone who supports Donald Trump say something really outrageous and then all the people who disagree say, "Well, that's not true. How can you believe that?" You must be an idiot for thinking that if you're a bad person and I can't believe you would fall for all of this and they deal with the substance of it. But imagine the professional wrestling and I'm talking about the Hulk Hogan WWE style and I'm sorry to spoil this for anyone listening, it is fake. Those are paid actors and it's scripted and it's fake. But all of the supporters who go and pay a ticket and go and see those wrestling matches, they know it's fake and they willingly suspend their disbelief and they have a term for this in wrestling. It's called K-Fape and it means the fact that everyone knows this isn't real but they suspend that disbelief and they engage with it and allow themselves to be incited as if it's real because it's great theatre and it's great spectacle. Now the same thing is happening with the Trump supporter. They know what he's saying isn't real. They know that he's just saying it to outrage and shock and they know that if they support it you will be outraged and shock as well. But they love the spectacle and they love the theatre. It is pantomime. We boo the villain and hiss the villain and cheer the hero and we allow ourselves to be carried away with that emotional incitement and that's exactly what happens online when we mistake this as an issue about truth and content and verifiability and you know yourself or one of Australia's foremost fact checkers. The idea that you would correct a fact and someone would say oh you're right is a kin to going and waving your arms in the wrestling wing and say hang on guys you should know this isn't real. These are just actors. They would throw chairs at you. Of course we know it's actors. Of course we know it's a spectacle. So I think if we understand that people are in this for the theatre, the cheer their guy, the cheer their team then it makes us much more attuned to the fact that is professional wrestling a good way to conduct politics? No. It's a form of entertainment. Well let's not do politics in the wrestling ring. Let's go move it into other more suitable spaces and that's exactly what we should do because at the moment politics is conducted in the in the professional wrestling ring. Yeah so this but you see the thing what gets me is that we've got people sort of manufacturing this anger. K-Faib people know that this is all a game and all the rest of it. Meanwhile all the intelligentsia and they're all getting very whipped up about it. Oh my god how could Trump do that? How could he be putting memes out there where he's putting feces on protesters and whatnot? But we all get very angry. We go off into our camps and the issue just sort of takes on a momentum and bang before you know it people are sort of hating each other. Okay why do humans do this? Well for that we have to go back a million years. We parts of this story are ancient and parts of a modern. The technology is modern but the humans are ancient and we have not changed in hundreds of thousands of years and the way we are wired has not changed in hundreds of thousands of years and we are group creatures that are designed to get together in small groups and then defend ourselves against other groups or animals or woolly mammoths or whatever the threat may be. And so what do you need to do evolutionarily because we don't have claws and teeth and can't defend ourselves physically against most big animals. You have to find a way to communicate the correct response to threats to others. And the way we do that is we have emotions that are loaded onto us that force us to pay attention to certain things and then we have the ability to communicate those emotions where others will adopt them. So anger is contagious. It spreads from person to person. That's really important because if I see a woolly mammoth coming over the ridge I need to reboot whatever I'm doing pay attention to that threat and say hey Ogg go and grab your pointy stick we need to we need to face this threat together. Now that hasn't changed our wiring hasn't changed but the modern thing is that we now get bombarded with threats constantly in the form of social media content and information that we see all the time. And so our instincts do the same thing. We get angry and we communicate that anger and we share that anger with others. And all of the you know neuroscientist psychologists and others who study this will tell you that when groups get together and share negative emotions it our reward centres our dopamine lights up we have a wonderful time hating other people together. It's just how we are wired unfortunately. It's one of the challenges we have to address collectively is how do we suppress those primal parts and the problem is social media is really really good at activating those parts. We get together and form groups and hate the other groups and we have a bloody good time doing it and that's the challenge. Our ancient wiring is not matched to our modern information system and that's what we have to address. Yes social media might be new but the way it's algorithms work to change our minds has an ancient and evolutionary explanation. There's a biological story here. Political communication strategist Ed Coker interrogates this and more in his new book Anger Tainment. How social media outrage ruined everything. I'm Natasha Mitchell. Talk to me while you're listening. The ABC Radio National Textline 0418-226-576. That's 0418-226-576. The big ideas inbox. The ideas at abc.net.au. Ed is in conversation today at the Wheeler Centre with journalist Sushi Das from RMIT University where she was former Chief of Staff of its Fact Check team which the ABC partnered on until 2024. You say we've got to the point where evidence based debate is not even possible anymore because the new balance of power lies with people who just want to drown out decent debate. So it's a bit like Steve Bannon wanting to flood the zone with shit. You say that people quote "who can hijack and then weaponize our attention through social media outrage are the new kings and queens of our shared destinies." So who
is manufacturing this outrage, and exactly how they're doing it. Well, one good clue to look at at the moment is who's doing well politically? And this is not an Australian phenomenon. Why is it that Paul Enhancin has been saying the same thing for 30 plus years, and all of a sudden she's polling at 30%, not 5%. Why is it that simultaneously, as she's doing that, there are characters in Europe, the UK, the US, elsewhere, who are all experiencing the same rise. You know, it cannot be coincidence. So these are the people that have figured out how our new information ecosystem works and how to game it for their own benefit. And it's not just political actors who do this as well. If you are able to enrage someone on social media, then engagement will follow, and you can turn that into clout or money or political power. But it's where there are political actors who've figured how to weaponize this most effectively. I think we should pay most attention to, because our systems to monitor and analyze and combat that are old, and they're suited to a different world that had a different playbook where we engaged on the merits of their ideas, and we reflected thoughtfully and formed our opinions, you know, rationally and debated them on a policy level. How can you be polling at 30% without any policies? Because we don't operate like that anymore. We operate on feelings and emotions. And only one side of politics is really getting that. And you look at someone like Trump who, you know, I'm not saying he's a very stable genius who figured this out all by himself. I think he just found that these information networks really suited for someone who had a reality TV background who had those entertaining impulses and who is completely disinhibited and says really entertaining things. That's a boon for people like that. When you're talking to people who get their information on platforms who like entertaining, unfiltered, disinhibited content, then you're going to do really well. We're going to get into the right and the left if I can use those horrible ugly big terms in a minute and who's better at it and who's worse. But in Australia, we did see a lot of outrage being whipped up. And certainly as a fact checker, I never saw as much outrage being whipped up as we did over the voice referendum antebator. It was just out of control at the time. You talk about the voice in your book. Perhaps you could just use the voice debate as an example to explain how this attention economy is actually being gameed. Yeah, it's a great example to talk about because you saw the mechanics of how it worked. You can see all the elements of how these networks of outrage are working globally. And I think for a lot of Australians, it was really confronting to all of a sudden. Maybe we've followed it overseas. We've seen it in the Philippines and the US in Europe and we've read about it from a distance. But to actually have that experience of seeing our own feeds filled with this hysterical, emotive, inciting content that was largely based on fiction, not fact. And it was certainly less about the topic of a constitutional reform than it was about all these culture war, boogie men of grievances that are much older than social media. We saw how the much more effective those same grievances were when you can manufacture a very effective campaign. And of course, it wasn't a level playing field because all it needed to do was to enter a little doubt into the conversation and people will always default to the status quo. So what were the features that we saw during the voice to parliament? Some of them to pay attention to are on the style of the information that was presented. It was very emotive. It was very fear-based, introducing ideas like, you're going to need a permit for your fence. You abolish Australia day, they're going to change the flag. You won't be able to buy land or even veering as far as this is a UN conspiracy to take over the Australian government. So those types of narratives do very well on social media. They had nothing to do with the topic. But the other thing to pay more attention to was the mechanics. And what people mistook for Australians being really outraged about a very specific topic was actually a machine that can be pointed at any topic at any time. And we saw examples of tens of thousands of bots, which have fake social media accounts, all boosting and amplifying certain anti-voice posts that would appear. Or if you went there and gave a provost comment, someone would be there to shout you down immediately in the comment thread. And they looked like real people and they weren't. And you can pay for these bots to do this. This is for hire. This is big business around the world. If I am an aspiring Ghanaian presidential aspirant, I can go to one of these companies around the world and say, you know what, I was going to run a political campaign. But why don't I just give you a bucket of cash and you can create one of these social media systems for me? And they create thousands of fake accounts. They know exactly how to push the hot button issues and they're all networked and coordinated with each other. And of course, what do you get? The sum total effect you see on social media it feels like everyone is outraged about the voice to parliament. All of a sudden, am I in the minority opinion? You know everyone I talk to, you know, the cafe seemed to be, you know, this doubt creeps in across Australia. And nobody could see how that doubt arrives in your feed. And they boost it with paid promotion. They boost it with real accounts and don't get me wrong. This bled into real genuine human concern as well. They start manufactured and then people adopt them as their real opinions, because that's where we get our opinions. And there was a conservative legacy media ecosystem that would come up in those narratives. There were political actors who would be there to say, well, everyone's outraged on social media. You saw this is such a good idea. And it's just very quickly that if you ask the pollsters, the turnaround in public opinion from somewhere between 60 to 70% support for the voice to less than 40% of a yes vote less than a year later, that is very hard to get that kind of turnaround that quickly. And that machine that is operating out there, which at the time pointed at the voice, can be pointed at anything. Apart from writing books, your daytime job is to tell people how to influence political opinion in the digital era at your political strategist. Talking about building social movements like Get Up, in your book you say, quote, "I couldn't have convinced people to care about something they weren't interested in. But if I whipped them into a frenzy about their current passion, I could subsequently steer their focus to a more under-served issue." Now, apologies for putting it so bluntly, Ed, but aren't you part of the problem? 100%. My day job is to whip people into emotive frenzies using social media networks, which is coincidentally what I'm warning people against here. It gives me a unique view. People should, I'm not a researcher. I'm practitioner. I'm in the trenches. I've done this for decades. And the ability to do it recently has changed fundamentally. And that's why I'm ringing the alarm bell, because it used to be a contest of ideas. And it used to be a much more level playing field. And what we are experiencing now is so much more dystopian and disruptor than anyone really realises. It is not a level playing field. And it's impossible to get heard throughout these networks that are manufactured. And so when I talk about how do you whip people into a frenzy, we should be angry as a mob about some things. That is very important to the human experiment. There are plenty of real grievances and real crises that we should be collectively angry about. And we should be leveraging tools like social media in order to address those things. The question we have to ask ourselves is how do we know now if we are getting angry at the right thing to the right degree, if we are blaming the right cause of our grievances? And it is very, very hard for people to do that on social media when our instincts are triggered so effectively. It's very hard to suppress our instinctual reaction to things. And so we need to open the box and look at the system and say, hang on a minute, we have built something that makes people angry at all the wrong things. That makes them blame the specter, not the cause of their problems. That makes them direct their anger in bucket loads to things like migrants and women or transgender kids or whatever minority is the punching bag at the time, and completely diverts their attention to the political, economic and technological causes of what they should be rightly forming angry mobs about. So as an angry mob farmer, I am
putting my hand up and saying, "Please, we need to fix this system." The confessions of a political strategist. He's used all the tools of social media to deliver campaigns. But now, Ed Coper is ringing the alarm bell. He is the big thinker on big ideas today on ABC Radio National and ABC Listen. [music] Welcome back to Season Journalist Sushi Das on Who Is Using The Tools? Most effectively in the political arena. Also coming up the crucial difference between critical thinking and skeptical thinking. And can we put a leash on all that Ed's describing? Look, there's one side of politics that appears to be very good at manufacturing this outrage, which is the political right. There is no doubt, but it all research shows that a lot of this is coming from the right. Why are they so good at it? Why are they so good at manufacturing this anger? What is left doing that's not right? Well, the first thing to note is it's not about ideology or policy or worldview. There is nothing inherent about a far-right policy platform or worldview that makes it more suited to social media. It's just that in general, the way that they communicate and tell their stories are more suited. The style is more suited. The substance doesn't matter. It's ideologically agnostic. You could take someone from the complete opposite political spectrum and get the style right. It will do just as well. Because it's not about the substance. And that's what people, that's a mistake a lot of people make, they think. Well, I guess the internet favors certain ideas over others. No, it favors certain style over others. And when you are largely a political movement that is about feelings, not reality, then you will automatically have a leg up. So what do I mean by feelings versus reality? People, far-right populists are really great at making people feel like they're not doing well in life at the moment, or that someone else is to blame, even when the reality might be different. And we see this in the economy all the time, when people feel worse off all the time. And then economists will say, well, technically on the numbers, you're actually much better off. We are better off at the moment in human history than any other time in human history, but we feel worse off all the time. So if you are a movement that deals in feelings, then you will win on social media. If you are a movement who deals in the reality of the situation, then you're going to have a much harder time. And what do we see traditionally? The left generally talks in terms of facts and figures and policy and nuance and complexity and the right are much better at talking about feelings. Amazing. Although having said that, people like Zoram Maldonay and AOC have actually worked out. There is a way of getting attention through social media. So a lot of content on social media, as we talked about, aims to create this outrage and often incorrect information. So let's just talk about fact checking for a moment. You say facts are not an antidote to falsehoods. In fact, you say it's like taking painkillers to treat an infection. And you say that teaching media literacy, like teaching people how to spot fake news, misses the point as well. In fact, misinformation is not the, it's not a problem of content, you say. It's a problem of systems. Tell us what you mean by that. Well, first of all, I think facts are very important. And I think we rightly need to correct wrongs when they're in the public record. And I don't just say that to you as a fact checker. I think it's incredibly important that people have access to accurate information about the world around them. We can't let. So I'm not wasting my time. We were not wasting your time. I'm wondering if I should check it again. What I am saying is that thinking that that will solve this problem alone is a false errand. We must do it. It's important to do it, but we're missing the forest for the trees. This is a systems problem, not a content problem. And we've approached it as a content problem. And you've seen regulation of big tech has been approached as a content problem. And that gets really problematic because all of a sudden people are saying, well, I don't want the government saying what I can say and what I can't say. Why are we not allowed to talk about vaccines during the pandemic? Why do we not allow to talk about it? All of a sudden you're having the wrong argument. The argument we should be having is why is the thumb on the scale of really of emotion driven networks that polarize and incite and radicalize people? What is wrong with the system that delivers that information? And what are the systemic solutions that can address that problem? And so I wrote my last book on misinformation and disinformation. And I realized after then spending a subsequent years talking about it a lot, I realized, well, at the end of the day, that's only part of the problem. Whether something is true or false is immaterial about it, the harm that it causes, because you can weaponize true information. And you can weaponize false information. Let's focus on the weaponization bit. And that's what Angotaman is about. It is about saying that we have moved our town square from somewhere that was governed by journalistic rigor and standards and ethics. And we've put it over here, which is much more like that UFC octagon that was on the White House lawn for the 250th anniversary. And that's not the best place for our town square to be. So let's look at what are the features of that octagon that are right or wrong? What is it about that that makes it unsuitable? And let's address those rather than saying, well, you can say this and you can't say that in the octagon. Look, I actually agree with you. If you're just constantly fact checking, you just whack a mole. How we solve this problem, I don't know, but it can't be regulating what you can and can't say. What about the use of AI? Because we have to talk about that. It's just going to get worse, isn't it? How are we going to resolve this problem? If you've got Trump here, you know, pilot dropping pieces, as I said earlier, then he's Jesus one minute. And we were seeing it on the other side too, because organisations like explosive media who put out all those sort of memes about Iran. They're an Iranian outfit, as you would know. You know, they put all those videos out lampooning Trump. So it's happening everywhere. I mean, can we get this thing under control, ever? And that Iranian content was great content, by the way. If you haven't seen these animated Lego videos, do mocking Trump and Vance and others during the Iran War, they run one that information war. Sure did. By using young creators who use AI to make great content, the songs are bangers. I would pay for that music. Yeah, same. Yeah. And that's instructive too, because to the victors go the spoils. And America is the biggest military mind in the world, dropping billions of dollars worth of these technologically advanced bombs on Iranian bunkers. And then a couple of kids at their keyboards with some AI can completely outflank them in a security sense. And so what will be the impact of AI? Very far ranging across society. And it's not just, again, it's not just about the content. So yes, it is getting easier to make this sort of content. And yes, AI will make the volume of what we see out there. AI is also very good at informing us on how people work. You can outsource to an AI to say, I am trying to engineer this geopolitical outcome using a motive content. What should I do? And it will tell you probably a pretty good answer. But the other impact that AI is going to have is just in our trust in information in general. And this is going to be really consequential, because it is very important for a democracy for us to be able to get information about the world and assess it accurately. And sometimes really important information has to come through. I would say the pandemic was a good example where health authorities and governments were saying, hey, guys, there is something happening and here is some important information to know. Will people believe that in the future? It's not just about being fooled by the wrong stuff. It's about will you believe the right stuff? And how do you know the difference? If you're a young person now, everyone you know is a creator. If you're an old person, if you saw someone on a screen, they had some right to be there. They had some qualification likely. If you're a young person, all of your friends are on screens. They are broadcasters. They are newscasters. Every single person is, even without AI. But AI is going to supercharge that. So where are they going to go for their quality information? How are they going to assess, well, this person on a screen is legit. That person's generated by AI and that person's real, but they're trying to fool me or scam me. That's tough. We don't teach those skills. It's scary. I mean, do you think young people, Jen said, are they critical thinkers? I think they're skeptical thinkers. So there's a big difference between critical thinking and skeptical thinking. It does, we mean. So critical thinking is super important. And these are the skills we have to teach. Critical thinking is your ability to assess the quality of information that you see. Skeptical thinking is questioning all information you see. Questioning.
everything will lead us to accept nothing. And that's the problem. We're not teaching critical thinking skills. They are developing their own skeptical thinking skills as a natural response to the information environment that they live in. And this is an urgent crisis for us to address. It's hard. I didn't grow up with these technologies. It's hard for me to know how to parent my kids in regards to these technologies or to teach them that type of systems literacy if I never got that information and that education. So this is an really urgent crisis. And I fear for the kids who are entering the world now as the guinea pig generation who had no skills, no media literacy education, no systems literacy curricula, and then have to figure this stuff out by themselves. And they're the ones who then get to have to solve these problems that we created for them. And no memory of legacy media. Exactly. I'm not going to let you go without you giving us some idea of what you think the solutions might be to this. So what do we do? Where are we going to go? Well, please, everyone go and buy the book, because it is more optimistic than the tone of a doctor tonight. And we have to be optimistic. And if I don't make you care about the problem, you're not going to be motivated to be part of the solution. And unfortunately, there's no silver bullet. This is a big society-wide problem, which has a lot of features. And so the solutions have to be across a bunch of different spaces as well. And obviously, the big one is regulatory, right? The technology that delivers this information, we have to fix those systems. They will not do it by themselves. They need to be forced to build healthy systems. And we know we tried to do it from the content approach. We can't regulate content. We have to give the platforms a duty of care to not build harmful products and not design harmful products. They did not set out in Silicon Valley to destroy society through this viral advertising machine. That's an unintended consequence. But now that we're here, we need to give them that legal duty to undo the mess that-- So come at it for a consumer point of view. Exactly. And we have this in consumer law. I cannot build a roller coaster made from Rickety Bolselwood, right? Because I have a duty of care for my roller coaster, not to crash. Why do we let big tech build these fiery roller coaster crashes and seem to think that they're exempt from that consumer protection? So there are ways to regulate it and we need to do those. But there's also problems-- Our own behavior as well. Yes, there are problems on an individual level. There are problems on a political level. There are problems on a cultural level. Our own behavior is really important because we drive these machines. And as I say, we do so instinctually. And a lot of people think, well, I'm not the type of person who falls for rage bait or I'm never going to fall for that kind of thing. Or I know right from wrong and fact from fiction. And all the studies show that there's not a certain type of people who fall for this. It's human. These triggers are human. So if you are a human-- and I don't see any bots out there-- but I'm going to assume that you are-- then you are susceptible to this. And your behavior is a cog in this machine. And it actually, the good news is, once we put our brain into gear, it's actually relatively easy to see what the information we're getting is this a scam? Is this rage bait? Is this trying to make me hate my neighbor? Is this trying to just monetize my reaction? It's quite easy to do that. But you need to put your brain in gear. And we also need to acknowledge that we will not build bridges in online spaces in the way that we do in the real world. We have to see each other as-- and those that we disagree with as humans, not just as their tribal avatars that we see online. And that happens in the real world. So we have to maintain real world connections. And then there are also political solutions here in terms of how do we not go down these really harmful rabbit holes where we're not talking about policy anymore? How do we restore the features of Australian democracy that are really beneficial? And we can look at America and say, well, why are they so much further devolved towards this rage bait to the point of civil war than Australia is? We have political things like preferential voting, compulsory voting, independent election authorities that set fair boundaries, all of these things we must preserve. And of course, in the meantime, while we are stuck with these systems the way we are, if you have a good idea, we must get much better at communicating them in a way that is fit for social media. Because otherwise, if we all just switch off, and everyone says, why I don't use the app, so I'm going to put my phone in the bin, that's great for you. But society will still suffer because everyone else is still using these systems. And so-- and this is a challenge for people like me, who mobilise people politically. How do we do that in a healthy way where good ideas that are grounded in evidence and science and the mutual benefit in society that we should all strive for? How do we get them through this noise? And the style has to change there as much as the substance. We'll ask you one more question, and then we'll go to questions from the audience, I think. Your book has a degree of urgency. It's the "Cool to Arms." And behind all the great research you've done and the wonderful, relatable writing, it's a very readable book. It seems to me that there is great compassion for your fellow human beings and a deep desire to make the world a better place. That certainly comes through the book. What message do you want your readers and the audience tonight to take away? By the book? No, I'm kidding. I think that I'd be shocked if everyone in the room he didn't really roundly agree with my diagnosis of the problem and the significance of it. I think what I really want people to know is that we're all not just passive spectators of this. It really is incumbent on all of us to understand that we can both make things worse if we decide to buy into the way that these systems operate or shout down those we disagree with or fall for the rage bait and cut ourselves off from society or start only talking to AI chatbots and not real humans. And we can make these things better. We can reach out across the divide and have healthy conversations and share good content and agitate for political solutions to big tech regulation and all of these things. I never lived through the industrial revolution or all these great changing periods in history where things change really quickly. We've got to recognise we're in one of those now and the scale of the problems are really big and the pace that they're happening is really quick. And we might not get a second chance at some of these problems. And so we really need to get up to speed quickly and then agitate for solutions and support people who are pushing those solutions as well. Fantastic. I have got a million more questions. I'd like to ask you. It's only fair to let the audience have a chance to ask their questions. And the mic will come to you. Hi, I'd like to know what language we can use to support and encourage people that have fallen down the rabbit hole of angertainment. Aramake. No. It's really hard. And I've had this question for years because the last word was written during the pandemic and every time I would talk someone would put their hand up and say, I have a cousin or a friend or a family member or colleague or something. What do I do? And it's really hard. And the first thing to acknowledge is that it's very unlikely to happen successfully online. Being able to have these conversations in the real world or even if it's a phone call, when you are face to face with someone, the consensus is to find commonality and to find shared value. And that is the best place to start. I can find common value with anyone. And the people who send me death threats on social media. If I was sitting face to face with them, well, why did you send me that death threat? What is it about? What experience did you have that made you hate this system so much that you would be compelled to do that? And probably some of the concerns that led that person to threaten to string me up to the nearest lamppost, I would share. But what do we do online? We go to the differences. We've got to start at the commonality. It's really hard to do. And all the science says that if you have long open ended conversations with people who have fallen down rabbit holes, then you will find that common ground. And you will understand their position in a way where you can much more effectively communicate to them. So just know that your job in that communication is not to convince them. You are not the salesperson for your ideas. You want to draw out of them as much context as to why they feel that way as possible. And I guarantee you, with enough open ended context, you will find something that you agree with and share with them. And that's what you have to do. Can I just add that if you go to a website called cool.org, this has actually been designed for teachers and parents and whatnot. There is a sort of an online course on how to talk to people who have fallen down a conspiracy theories. I'm just letting you know because I wrote that. If it's free, you don't have to pay. But if you go there, cool.org, and then just look up conspiracy theories or whatever, you'll find the course there. You might find that useful. Brilliant presentation. Ed, I know you've convinced me to buy the book. I want to ask you a bit more about evidence-based policy, which I've had a career largely based around developing evidence-based policy advice.
analysis and have become a bit depressed about its ability to cut through against anger, attainment. Towards the end you sort of said that there's actually hope for evidence-based policy using the same devices. Can you give us a bit of a flavour for that because turning evidence-based policy in us into anger, attainment is not a simple task, I don't think. It's not a simple task and then thank you for your career in evidence-based policy because you and others like it. We need to continue that and we need to maintain that long enough together through this information crisis so we still have evidence-based policy. It must be what we build out our political system around. In order for the ideas to win over the ideas that are against whatever the evidence-based policy is, we need to find ways to communicate them much more effectively. I can sit here and say, well, migrants aren't causing this economic inequality and someone else can sit there on social media with a really powerful story saying they're up to blame for all of our eels. But unless I can come up with a story about that, that is as powerful as the people who are opposed to that idea, they will always win the day. The good news is it doesn't have to be about anger and you don't have to make someone angry about the issue, but it does have to appeal to their emotions and their values. We can do that. We think about climate change as the big crisis that you would think the mountain of evidence enough to compel us to act. Yet, we don't. Why is that? We're not telling a compelling story about the hopeful vision for the future if we do, the opportunity that we have if we act. That's not the job of the evidence-based policy people. But it is the job of the political class and the media class who are respectively in charge of solving those problems and then communicating those problems effectively. We can support them as individuals. What are you doing to ensure that those who are investigative journalists or good science communicators or the ABC or SPS, which may be abolished or put behind a paywall if Paul Enhancin becomes prime minister? What are we doing to support those institutions and individuals who do have to communicate that evidence-based policy? Because the business model for noise and misinformation is booming and the business model for faxes is in the toilet. Hi, I am a high school media teacher and this is one of the things that I've been grappling with is developing that media literacy amongst students and helping them identify in such forth with deep fakes and misinformation and disinformation out there. I guess my question is how do we combat teaching that when we see things like the policies around regulation around limiting social banning social media for under 16s, which I have the belief that the main thing that's going to achieve is push those kids even deeper into the dark web and create an even more dangerous environment for them as they navigate these aspects. I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on that sort of factor. Well, first of all, thank you. I think that the job of a high school media literacy teacher is more important than the job of prime minister right now. I think this is so fundamentally important and thank you for doing that work. I think when I was in high school, I loved history and I did a study a lot of history and I was given a really good education in information literacy when it came to history because I was taught frameworks to evaluate sources of information. All right, well, if this is, here's a bit of text saying that the Spartans are great guys and really good at war. Who wrote it? Was it a Spartan? Or was it, you know, an Athenian, you know, and we do do that in history. Like we learn the frameworks to evaluate information for its biases, for its motives and where it appeared and all those sorts of things. And I think it's a similar framework for this. And the systems literacy that I talk about, which is more than just evaluating if something is true or false, is saying, why am I seeing this information? Why what route did this information reach my feed? What reaction is this trying to garner? Why would they want that reaction? Who benefits from this reaction? What are the incentives behind? Yeah. And also, is my reaction proportionate to what I'm saying? One of the worrying studies about information on social media has found that we assume other people are more angry than they are and more extreme than they are. So there's something about the way we receive information on social media that makes us more angry and extreme because of that. So that's the types of literacy that we need to give people. Can we have this question over here? My question is about truth. Truth can be just sorted on an equal level, possibly 100 different variations. When I grew up, I only believed there was one truth. Why is there now 100 variants on the truth? I can't see very well. You look about 24, 25 years old. I would go and posit that you may have grown up in an era where there was a much more finite amount of information and a lot fewer gatekeepers, a handful of gatekeepers who said, we're all going to get the same information and then you can diverge about your opinions about it. So when I was a child, that would be things like the six o'clock news that was the half hour of TV news that everyone would get, or the one newspaper in the town that everyone would read and everyone had the same information. This is what has changed. There are infinite sources of information now, all simultaneously. And also, we are presented that information in a way where we don't have to see the rest of the information. So we can only see the information that we already agree with and have no diversity of information as well. And so that's what's led to the splintering of truths has been a splintering of information sources. And so for very, very vast majority of human history, we didn't have this problem that we all had different information sources. So all of our social and evolutionary cues are built around one truth. In the same way that your era of information is built around one truth, that doesn't exist anymore. I have quite a simple question. So many of the people on the extreme right want to have simple answers to very difficult questions. And they're, it's quite understandable that need and that desire because things are now so complex. In part, thanks to the internet and the fact that the world has become to all intents and purposes of village. And how do we, how do we deal with that without either having to talk down to people or to make them feel that they are just too stupid to understand what's going on. So just shut up and sit down. Yeah, great question. Great question. And that's been the folly of a lot of the approaches recently have been, you know, to make if you wanted to correct someone's belief that you had to force them to admit they were stupid in order to accept your information. Of course, that's not going to work. And to your point about the simplicity of the political solutions that have been offered, that's exactly right. You know, this is the old maxim, you know, if something is too good to be true, it probably is. And this is generally how our political discourse is working at the moment with far right populists are saying, yep, you have very legitimate grievances and we can just make wave a magic wand and everything will go away if you just get collectively angry with us. And we found that that will work in the short term. That will work to a point. Reform, which is the equivalent of Magger and One Nation in the UK recently swept the table in all the council elections, fueled by these grievances and a dissatisfaction with the major parties. And then what happened just a couple of months later? Well, some of them got into the council and said, I don't really want to do this. And they've stepped aside and there's been all these bi-elections and guess what? It reverts to the mainstream. Once we run these kind of angry short term simplistic solutions as an experiment. And we might have to go through some pain here as well, but I fundamentally believe that even if people like Trump and Farage and Paul Enhanced and succeed in the short term, they can never succeed in the long term because they are fueled by an explosive rage that does not burn very efficiently. And it is anemic. There are no ideas. There are no vision. There is no solutions. And we must have those things. So if you wanted to defeat those simplistic things, then stick to your guns in terms of the vision and the ideas and the solution because they cannot compete. And the simple answer is like the cheap sugar hit. You know, it's tempting, but it's
It doesn't burn efficiently and all of a sudden we feel really tired and run down and we, oh maybe I should eat some broccoli instead. That's hopefully we'll get there sooner rather than later. Thank you. Please join me in thanking Ed Cooper. You are brimming with ideas, Ed. You are a joy to chat with and I'm sure your book will spark. Many, many conversations over drinks or around dinner tables tonight and for a lot longer. Thank you very much. [Applause] [Music] Ed Cooper is author of Anger Entertainment, House Social Media Outrage, ruined everything and he is the CEO of the Agency Populaers. Thanks to the Willis Centre for this event and you can catch more discussions on the Willis Centre podcast. Find this and other big ideas episodes on ABC Listen, all your favourite podcast app 2 and both ABC Radio National and the Willis Centre are on Facebook and Instagram with content that will not wreck your brain or democracy. I'm Natasha Mitchell, our email address,
[email protected]. I'll catch you next time for more big ideas. [Music] You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.
PodcastTranscript AI