Engines of Outrage Pt. 2

This episode contains some strong language, listeners discretion is advised. In a catastrophe, there's always a fog of war, rumors fly, events get misreported. In 2012, a wildfire raged in Boulder, Colorado, and Kate Starbird, a PhD student at the University of Colorado, fought through the fog to provide clarity. We would like make maps of what was going on, of who needed what in what area. Partner colleagues made maps not of geography, but social media posts. Where people could pick up donations, where they could make donations, who needed what, who was injured, who needed help. And it was uplifting in a way. All of the best of human behavior during the worst of times. Kate continued this work, but noticed the fog of war during disasters growing thicker, untrue information, and conspiracy theories swirled more widely. In 2015, she was confronted with a pair of horrific events, a mass shooting in Oregon. It happened on the campus of Oomquah Community College, at least seven people were killed. A month later, suicide bombers and shooters killed more than 100 people in Paris. Chaos on the streets of Paris tonight, gunfire ringing out. Rumors swirled online that the events had been staged by governments. And we were starting to see the same conspiracy theories over and over again in these shooting events. Kate, now a professor at the University of Washington taught her students to make maps. They found a diverse array of groups intentionally helping conspiracy theories pinball around the internet. They're wired together, and they consistently post about these conspiracy theories. They've got these audiences, their shared audiences, their building. It included gunnerites activists, white nationalists, the Russian government, an army of bots. And students when I began to realize we're not looking at accidental rumors, we're looking at pervasive disinformation. Kate had stumbled on how the internet, profit motives, human psychology and political benefit are fusing together to widen our political divide. I felt like we went from studying the best of human behaviors to studying some of the worst of human behavior in the worst of times. This is Landslide, Engines of Outrage. A mini series about our information divide, and what, if anything, can bring us back to a shared reality. Last episode, I told you about a split widening slowly over the final decades of 20th century. Americans began to diverge in where they got their news. A right-wing media ecosystem rose to challenge TV networks and mainstream news sources, with a very different intent. From the beginning, it's always been an ideological project. We fax Rush Limbalm with 24 hours a day. Where do you think he gets after the stuff that he puts on the radio program? The rapidly expanding right-wing bubble was premised, not on news gathering, but advocacy, entertainment, outrage. Then, a new technology expanded its power exponentially. This episode is about the internet, social media. If you wondered why they seemed jam-packed with anger, how wild lies and conspiracy theories like Kate found flourish, or just the reason looking up a recipe for chicken means you have to read someone's life story, well, so have I. And it turns out the answers to all of these questions are tied together. And at the heart of it is the reason that so many of the most successful internet businesses also became the great force multipliers of our division. So, if you'll just give me your name and what you do here at Berkeley, yeah. My name is Honey Fareed, and I specialize in everything from detecting, manipulated and malicious media to studying disinformation and misinformation campaigns online. I'm in Honey Fareed's office, and I saw him out because he's been working on this problem of people being wrong on the internet, especially since its advent. I don't think any of us saw where we are today, but we knew something was coming, and I started thinking about this 25 years ago. You said where we are today, where do you think we are today? So, when we started thinking about this problem, and we looked at who believed the earth was flat, who believed that the moon landing was fake, we measured those in single digits, 1%, 2%, 3%, and I may be used to thinking, this is sort of dumb, I don't care about this. But here's what I got wrong, is when you believe the earth is flat, when you believe the moon landing was fake, when you believe 9/11 didn't happen, and the long litany of things that are unfounded, you don't just believe something that's factually incorrect. You also believe what, but the media, you, the scientific experts, me, and the government is keeping information from you, and there's the actual problem, because then when COVID hits and climate change hits, and we have an election, you don't trust those very institutions that you need to trust to move forward, and that's how we went from 1%, 2%, to 10%, to 20%, to 50%, believing things that are factually incorrect, right? This isn't fun in games, you know, we're not making fun of people who think that the earth is flat anymore, this is a serious consequence for our society. How did we get to this? How did the internet become a super spreader for lies and conspiracy theories? How did it deepen our division? The answer, of course, is complicated, but Farid sketches out a relatively simple story that starts with an early decision which shaped our entire internet. So let's rewind to the early knots. Facebook and Google were the early players here, and do you remember what people were saying about Facebook and Google? There's no way you can make money. Nobody saw it. You're giving everything away for free. Email is free. Search is free. Drive it. Everything is free. Facebook and everybody laughed at these companies. How are you ever going to make money? Farid says at the time in the early and mid-2000s, tech entrepreneurs felt like their products had to be free. People didn't like putting their credit cards online. Even Amazon was struggling to get people to buy online because we were not comfortable with it, and so the only business model that seemed to work was ad-driven economy. And so that wasn't the original sin. We take for granted that this is just how the internet works. If you're asked today to buy music, news, or an app, you might balk, but that model of free led to a cascade of effects. Services needed advertisers, and advertisers needed eyeballs. The business model is attention-driven economy. And so early internet media, and especially social media, were looking for users. As many users as they could get, who would use their services without wanting to leave. Skip 2007 for its says. Yeah, I'll tell you what the tipping point was. Facebook saturated. The darling of the tech world, the social media company Facebook had grown in just three years, from a million users to five million to 50 million. But internally, there was fear. They maxed out the universities, and they really sort of maxed out basically usage. And there was these series of articles that like Facebook, all hands, everybody's panicking because they knew that there was going to be one winner in the space. There aren't two winners in the space, right? Just like Google, right? There's Google, and then there's what's next. And I remember seeing those articles thinking this is going to be bad. Do you remember what they chose? So they're there at that moment, and then what was the what was the strategy? What was the change? The newsfeed. Facebook's newsfeed was its big innovation. You could see what your friends on the service were up to, all in one place, without clicking around. Both days, relationship statuses, there are posts about how they were feeling. The posts were roughly reverse chronological, most recent first. But then for each says, Facebook tweaked the newsfeed in a way that seemed innocuous, or maybe even exciting. What did it do when they did that? Yeah, so then it started algorithmically choosing what you got to see. They reach into the billions of pieces of content that are uploaded, and they pick winners and losers. They say, we're going to promote this. We're going to demote this. We're going to ban this. We're going to allow this. And so they were making decisions based on what engaged people. Well, what engaged people? Now, this is where we become jerks. Fried says Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his team quickly discovered an ugly truth about what motivated people to keep clicking. The most outrageous, the most salacious, the most hateful, the most conspiratorial, and so whatever engaged us, no matter how good, bad, ugly, dishonest, illegal it was, that's what the algorithm's pushed. Facebook continued to iterate. It introduced a like button, another way of measuring engagement, that also gave users an incentive to post their most gripping content. And then it's a feedback loop. The algorithms start to promote things that are awful, and the humans responding like, well, I want my stuff to get promoted, so I'm simply going to learn what the algorithm wants. Over time, Facebook tweaked its algorithm in a whole bunch of ways, all with engagement as its north star. It began recommending news stories, and the source or veracity weren't always important. But it wasn't just Facebook. Fried says algorithms became central to nearly every major social media site, including Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and onward. Google started Facebook perfected it and then TikTok really, really perfected it. But I think if you look across the boards, they all sort of landed in the same place. Even sites you wouldn't think of as social media. For instance, go to Amazon to find a biography of Ronald Reagan. And you might also get recommended The Democrat Party Hates America by conservative talk radio host Mark 11. I was. By the way, this is the reason recipe websites have huge long personal intros. The pages are optimized not for us, but for Google's algorithm, which prefers longer posts, and the name of the recipe and its ingredients popping up over and over. Fareed says the combination of apps seeking engagement, algorithms delivering what they think we want, and human nature created a toxic brew. So what happened in the internet? Well a couple of things happened. One is that news, if you can call it generously that, was not about informing. It was about likes and retreats and making money, right, and becoming internet famous. And so suddenly, getting it right wasn't what it was about. It was being fast, being funny, being an asshole, and getting engagement. And on these sites, totalized, wild-eyed conspiracy theories and breathless fear-mogoring look exactly the same as real measured information, same font, same formatting, same placement, or better, if it incites enough engagement. There are no editorial standards. There are no journalistic standards. There's no consequence for getting it wrong, in fact quite the opposite. One other point, these algorithms didn't just supply outrage. They supplied what would individually outrage you. So while everybody could traditionally look at the front page of the New York Times and see the same thing, on Facebook or Twitter, we could all vanish into entirely separate worlds. And that's what happened. Some 20% of Americans believe that there was a conspiracy to create COVID by, for example, Bill Gates. Roughly one in five Americans believe climate change is the hoax. Not how to respond to it, not that it's not created by man, that it's a hoax. One in two Republicans believe that Donald Trump won the previous election. Our free internet, the ad-based internet, the engagement internet has become an engine of outrage and division. We're all subject to its influence, but it also happens that the elements so intrinsic to internet success, outrage, conspiracy, self-free enforcement, were the same elements already propelling a rapidly burgeoning right-wing media ecosystem. Those platforms are good for far-right voices. Far-right voices dominate social media. When the two synced up, the engines of outrage roared. You said you've been doing it for 17 years. How much worse has it gotten and how quickly? Yeah, so I don't want to fall too much victim to reasons you buy as one of those. Matt Gertz is a media analyst who monitors Fox News and other right-wing outlets for the progressive watchdog group Media Matters. I would write about major right-wing media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, Stoking Conspiracy Theories about the Clinton's murdering a former White House aid Vince Foster. This is what we explored in our previous episode. The key pillars of conservative media operated with a different purpose from traditional newsrooms. Gertz tracked Fox and conservative talk radio hosts as they stoked conspiracy theories and outrage for profit and political gain. I was writing back the early days of the birth and her movement, the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and so was not eligible to be president. But then, you watched this idea spread more widely, expanding through newly popular social media apps. Algorithms from, for instance, Facebook picked up the idea that maybe the president wasn't born here, circulated it to users most primed to engage with it. They liked it, shared it, commented on posts about it, and so people created more posts and articles that could be shared. And the myth that our president was illegitimate and the government was covering it up, gained traction, talk radio hosts, and Fox News guests spread it further, there was profit and political gain. And a key proponent of the birth or myth became perhaps the most prominent voice for these audiences. He doesn't have a birth certificate. Now, he may have one, but there's something on that person, maybe religion, maybe it says he's a Muslim. I don't know, maybe he doesn't want that, or he may not have one. You can see these conspiracy theories move very quickly from random people posting on social media to Donald Trump in virtually no time at all. By 2011, a poll found more Republicans believed the president was not born in the country than believed he was. There's an early demonstration of how the internet and incentives would sync up with right wing media. And Gertz says it's only gotten worse. I mean, we're basically in an environment where the information ecosystem is totally bifurcated. You have a completely separate, more or less sealed bubble. And within that bubble, anything goes. The bubble is sealed. A Harvard study several years ago examined parts and outlets and social media posts from across the political spectrum right and left. And then it looked at what those media sources were linking out to. I use that in presentation. Sometimes it's a very, very good reading. You have left wing outlets that are to some extent feeding off of mainstream reporting that is credible. And you have right wing outlets that are kind of making up their own stuff often with significantly lower standards and often leading to the circulation of fairly wild conspiracy theories. Inside the bubble, Fox remains the main source cited by conservatives. Surrounding it are a world of pundits, other right wing outlets and influencers, batting back and forth messages, but with little actual traditional reporting to ground it. It's relatively easy to get pulled in by the outrage engine, by culture war, by content that seems to confirm a world view someone already holds. And to get out is very difficult. Kate Starbert, the University of Washington professor who makes maps tracing how misinformation travels describes the power of the bubble with a story. It was 2020 in the lead up to that year's presidential election. Present Trump at the time and his supporters, media pundits and others, had set a frame and an expectation that the election was going to be rigged. She says every day people thought they were going to be cheated because they'd been told they were going to be cheated. They went to their mailboxes. They went to their voting booth and they witnessed things that they thought were evidence of this cheating and they would record it. In Arizona, some voters arrived to cast their ballots and were puzzled when election workers handed them permanent markers. Sharpies. And the Sharpie pens fled through the ballot, this thing called Sharpie Gate. And people protested in Arizona claiming some ballots have not been properly counted. It's being called Sharpie Gate. Their votes were counting. The the Sharpie pen, the ballots were designed to be used with Sharpie pen. It didn't matter if they've left through. Starbert says it's actually good to use permanent marker because the ink won't smear on the lens of vote counting machines. But people didn't understand this and so people became convinced that their votes weren't counting and at first you just see like this tiny little conversation on Twitter. We have a couple of thousand posts and retweets on election day. And that was it. A relatively small pocket of confusion. Until later on election night. Arizona gets called for Biden instead of Trump, which really disrupts a plan for Donald Trump to win and to claim a rapid victory. The call came from the generally well-respected election analysts at Fox News to the dismay of the cable channel's anchors. Are you 100% sure of that call? The answer was yes. I'm sorry. The president is not going to be able to take over and win enough votes to eliminate that. Suddenly, Starbert says the cries about Sharpie Gate grew louder. And so within hours you see influencers including both of Donald Trump's adult sons at the time begin to retweet and repose claims that they went back and found of people in Arizona who think that their Sharpie pens affected their ballot. In the days that followed, Fox, even though its elections team had called Arizona, platformed Trump campaign officials and pundits to so doubt. And you mentioned dead people voting. In Arizona, it looks to be focusing on the sharpies. Protesters rallied outside ballot counting centers. Sharpie Gate, the myth of election fraud by permanent marker was spread by influencers and Fox. But also their audiences. We see the same pattern over and over and over again. Within the bubble, people believe the election was stolen, not just because they heard it. They thought they saw it. And even if someone shows them that they're vote counts, I didn't undo this feeling that they had been cheated. There are so many other details I heard from Kate Starbird and Matt Gertz about how partisanship, polarization, and misinformation operate within the bubble. How it's leading to its own culture and products. I mean, you have all sorts of right wing businesses that are sort of springing up as counters to liberal razors. How it's caught political leaders and the same web of misinformation they've helped spin. Which is now their own source for information. And how, as the internet creates more choices, Americans across the political spectrum are favoring style over substance for their news. Turns out that right now, trustworthiness has less to do with accuracy and more to do with authenticity. But most of all, I'm struck by the growing size. and power of this ecosystem, the shrillness of its messages, and the alarm of people who monitor it, such as Matt Kurtz. It's a constant bombardment in which this audience is being told day in and day out that they are under attack in a real way, from Democrats, from liberals, from the media, that their very lives are in jeopardy, that their children are endangered, that the American project is being sold down the river, it really does not stop ever. The engines of outrage spin, louder and louder, hotter and hotter, and what can defuse them? I keep waiting for people to wake up, being like, "Oh my God, we're being manipulated." This is Honey Fareed, who you heard earlier. But the problem is to wake up, you have to get trusted information and now we're back full circle, right? We're back full circle. And I don't know how to get out of this death spiral that we're in. Are you angrier? I am angry, I'm scared, I'm depressed, and I'm pessimistic about the future. And I don't know that I would have said that four years ago. This is a daunting topic. As I've talked to experts who study our information environment, the word I've heard constantly is bleak. That doesn't mean there aren't answers. We're going to find them. To do that, we need to understand why the engines of outrage work so well on us. If there are hostile coalitions coming over the hillside, that is going to get people to act. We've examined the key characteristics that built and drive today's right-wing bubble. Simmering distrust in traditional news. They try to make it appear that we're biggest, that we're prejudiced, that we're biased, that we are immoral. Alternative products that wedged in focused on activism and entertainment using outrage. I thought white men were the new pigs of society. And then the internet turned up the heat and hardened the walls. It's a constant bombardment in which this audience is being told day in and day out that they are under attack. When you run someone through an outrage engine through the constant bombardment, what's happening? Why does it work? And what does it do? I call it "danical young" at the University of Delaware. I'm just writing some things down that I just want to make sure that I don't forget to touch on. Young is kind of the perfect person to talk to. Her field is psychology and politics and media. And how they interact together. She says of all the emotions we humans can feel. Politicians and activists choose outrage for a reason. It is naturally mobilizing. It causes people to act. Because there's a sense that there is a threat, not that I need to run from, but a threat that I need to stop from doing what it's doing. She says outrage is often used to create a sense of us first them. We are the moral group, what we do is morally good and what they do is morally bad. But it's this real sense that there is a looming out group threat. And that's outrage. And it can be driven very effectively even by conspiracy theories. Like its truth value is besides the point? Because they become a shared story. It's all about identifying the out group threat, getting people to feel that negative emotion, to identify the target and to move at the same time at the thing. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the thought is, if there are hostile coalitions coming over the hillside, that is going to get people to act. Outrage perks up our ears, points us in the same direction. And young says that's why it's so effective. And all you have to do to activate it is say, "Ooh, you know that other side, they want to get you." That's it. Think about how that is the special sauce of our media environment. Activation. Engagement. The goal of the key outlets of the right wing media ecosystem and so many of our internet businesses. It really is, it's almost like a match made in heaven. If you are one of these platforms, it's a match made in hell if your democracy. Young says the reliance on outrage to motivate people, whether to click or to vote, is dangerous. And dangerous in a way that goes beyond the obvious problems of rampant misinformation, a way that left me chilled. If you trigger these kinds of feelings, especially in the context of that moral evaluation where the out group is acting immorally, we are not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people who are acting immorally and sometimes we're not even inclined to give the status of human to people who are acting immorally. Well, maybe think of them as vermin or animals or, you know, less than human, which we know from years of social psychological research that if you can get people to see an out group as less than human, you basically have changed the calculus in how they're going to treat those people. It means that you're going to then have unlocked their inhibitions. Now, perhaps they'll be willing to engage in violence against these people. Engage in and speakable acts that they otherwise wouldn't. The engines about rage spin and their poll grows. And Young says that's especially true on one group. People that don't realize it's happening. We are witnessing even more and more and more people who are taking all their political hats off and they are just like, I don't do politics at all. Once again, Americans are opting out of news. The problem with those folks is that guess what? All of our media spaces, they're political. A video game might star a woman as a protagonist among a diverse cast of characters that YouTube reviewer might criticize it for being too woke. Messages about gender roles, that's political. A listener might tune into the most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, to hear him talk to comics or mixed martial artists and absorb conspiracy theories. Joe Rivers said that Michelle Obama was a man. I thought it was a joke. I thought it was a joke too, but the way she said it wasn't like, "Jokey." She was like, "What?" That's political. There was a poll by NBC in mid-2024, which gave a glimpse of this information divide. And it's a fact, a rough glimpse. It asked people where they got their news and who they were voting for for president. The connection was clear. Among people who primarily watched traditional news, the eventual winner President Trump was down by 20 points. Among newspaper readers, the gap was even larger, a staggering 49 points. But among cable viewers, where Fox leads, Trump was up by eight. The YouTube viewers favored him by 16. And among people who said they did not follow political news, Trump led by 28 percentage points. What does that mean? You could argue that just reflects the obvious. Democrats generally rely more on traditional news and Republicans distrust it. I would suggest it shows more. The poll shows our information divide and how what's in the bubble drives today's politics. Consider it the media sources where conspiracy theories and misinformation have flourished. It's being called a sharp engage on the internet through YouTube, on Fox. Apparatuses designed to engage, to activate rather than to inform. And these sources buoyed the winner, a candidate who got his own political start leveraging the same forces. And that poll shows how news, real news, traditional reported news, as eroded, and been replaced by engines of outrage. As more people have tuned out or tried, the right wing bubble has grown. The engines within it spin hotter, bolstering and encouraging actions that seemed beyond the pale not too long ago. Hardening some 1500 January 6 rioters. Appearing to freeze federal funding for programs across the government. Greenland is a wonderful place. We need for international security. Without a change in trajectory, what stops the bubble from continuing to expand? What stops the outrage? There's hope. There's hope. Now that we understand the characteristics of the bubble, the outrage, the engines, and the psychology, we're going to look at solutions. What can be done? That's next time on Landslide Engines of Outrage. [Music] If you think this May series is helpful, you want more people to know about it or you're interested in more from Landslide. Please pass it along. Tell even more people about it. You can stay up to date by signing up for our mailing list at nuancedhails.com. Landslide is a production of nuanced hails and partnership with WFAE and distributed by the NPR Network. It is created, hosted, reported, and produced by me Ben Bradford, edited by Noia Carr. J.C. Bold is the sound designer and engineer. Music is by Matt Bradford. Thanks to everyone at WFAE NPR who's helped make the series possible. You can view the key sources for this episode at nuancedales.com. Thanks for listening. The State of the Union is not good. The energy crisis has developed into a money crisis. Yeah, we know. It's a lot. And it's everywhere. Your phone, your feed, your dinner table, and probably your blood pressure. The politics is also the human story behind the headlines. Our hopes, disagreements, choices, and visions for what comes next. This fall, the American storytelling collection brings together six podcasts from the NPR network that take a closer look at the people, power, conflicts, and turning points behind American politics from every angle. It's going to be carpet bombing, take note prisoners, you name total warfare. You'll hear it in a show called The Speaker tracing the course of Nancy Pelosi's rise from local volunteer to national power broker to lightning rod of American politics. You'll sense the real stakes in a show called Land Slide detailing the most razor-close presidential primary race in history and the way it reshaped political parties thereafter. To the 19th Amendment mistake. The sounds of the extremely American podcast where they tackle how extremist movements still shape America today. We would not have one Democrat president in the last 50 years if only men could go. But the series is about politics in our backyards too. Take a podcast like Swing State of the Union, a show exploring the hot button issues in Wisconsin, and how they're motivating voters nationwide. There's lots of money at stake. And if you're getting the AI data center game before you're a competitor, you're going to be in a better position. And scandalized, we're unpacking political scandals from history to learn more about what happened. If you were to pay me, is there any way the media can find out where it came from and how much? How the scandals aftermath changed American politics and what on earth they were thinking. I'm probably never ever going to see a story like this again. In a whole other country, a podcast traveling the bumpy roads of West Texas to explore the shocking, almost mythic story of the Republic of Texas, a real secessionist nation in the Lone Star State. All of the shows in the collection reached beyond the headlines. To explore how political action is the messy, deeply human business of deciding how we want to live together. So take a breath. Here are the stories behind the soundbikes. After all, it's human to get political. Listen to all the shows now by searching American storytelling from NPR on the NPR app or on Apple podcasts.