Engines of Outrage Pt. 3

This episode contains some strong language. Listener discretion is advised. By the way, here's the other moment I remember that we were really screwed. I'm talking to Haini Fareed, the Berkeley professor studying misinformation on the internet who you heard last episode, when he tells me a story. It's about Facebook. There was a study Facebook had done and you can't make this up, called Good for the World Bad for the World. This was back in 2020. Facebook had grown to more than two billion daily users, but COVID misinformation was running rampant. You could cure it with horse dewormer that it was part of an illuminati-like plot. There was fake news about the election. The QAnon conspiracy theory was crescendoing. They're getting heat for the hate that they are promoting. Alarmed. Researchers Facebook ran an experiment. They had people select a number of people on their news feeds. Every time something was promoted to them, would you say, just qualitatively, is this good for the world bad for the world? They found post-rated bad for the world, circulated fastest. They said, "Okay, we're going to promote things that are good for the world." They adjusted Facebook's algorithm, and then they went with the news feeds, and in fact, they were better. They were nicer, they were more decent, and they were less hateful. But you know what else happened? Those people spent less time on Facebook, and you know what Facebook did? They literally turned off the algorithm called Good for the World. For free, it's another example of the ruthlessness of the industry and the harm. Because why? They're not there to make the world better. They're there to make a lot of money. I would argue the Good for the World experiment shows something else too. It shows there are ways to curb the engines of outrage driving our misinformation and political division. Good for the world may not have succeeded, but it may hint at some answers. This is landslide, engines of outrage. I'm Ben Bradford. In this many series so far, we've examined how misinformation and polarizing content travel and divide us, encouraged by the incentives of an internet-focused on engagement. How that stacked on top of an existing right-wing media apparatus, which had developed over decades, posing as news, but with different intent. All that combined to create a self-reinforcing bubble where for millions of Americans politically motivated conspiracy theories and falsehoods circulate indistinguishable from truth. And so this episode is about what can be done. The answers I found range from the anodine to the unsavory, from reinforcing existing institutions to hotwiring the engines of outrage themselves. We'll explore all of it, starting by meeting someone who tried to fight this information and ended up feeling the full front of it herself. Back in 2014, reports began to filter out from the Crimea region of Ukraine about sightings of soldiers in the area with no insignia. At the same time, a growing chorus flooded Facebook and Twitter panning Ukraine's new government. The soldiers were Russian special forces. The posts came from trolls they'd paid. It was all designed to kick up dust and confusion as a precursor to an invasion. Russian troops moving swiftly to take control of military bases in Crimea. Armored Russian vehicles burst through the wall of Crimea's Belbek base today. This is where Nina Jankowicz cut her teeth. In Ukraine, fighting Russian influence campaigns in the years after the invasion of Crimea, this became her focus. It was just really clear to me that foreign interference was the thing already, even if we, in the United States, were thinking, "Oh, that's just something that's happening to those poor countries over there. We've got more robust institutions." Nina studied different countries that face disinformation campaigns, where they failed, and what it takes to succeed. She describes, and this is my takeaway, two foundational principles, starting with this. One of the things was just transparent communication and telling a good story. Government communications doesn't need to be something that's boring and stayed, and factsheets and press releases. Principle number one is tell a good story. Simply presenting true information cannot counter the pull of outrage, and needs to also be compelling. And then there's principle number two. Don't rely on people to find your accurate information. Particularly with these tools that we have now, there are ways to reach people where they are, you know, we should be trying to get out good information using social media. And Ukraine, to their credit, has really done a great job with telling its story on social media. You will hear these principles over and over again, stated in different ways. Tell a good story. Reach people where they are. They're probably the building blocks for any solution to what can be done. But they're hard to execute, especially because the engines of outrage will spin up in their own defense, as Nia found out. There's 222, you know, was hired by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to help shore up its internal processes, running a new panel called the Disinformation Governance Board. Can you just tell me what happened? Sure. So the Disinformation Governance Board was meant to be an advisory body, a kind of coordination group within the Department of Homeland Security, which it's kind of a Frankenstein of a government agency. DHS includes everything from airport security to disaster relief. Whole bunch of people doing different stuff, but a lot of their missions touched disinformation in some way, shape or form. And so there was an interest within the administration of making sure that everybody was kind of marching to the beat of the same drummer. And they brought me into lovingly heard those cats within the government. We just to be absolutely perfectly clear had no operational authority. Yeah, you were going to write reports and you were going to tell people, "Hey, here's what we think you should do. Here's some stuff to try out." Not even that. Really. It was going to be a convening body of the heads of all of those agencies. We would tee up questions for them, and they would make recommendations for the whole department about how to deal with stuff like this. It was wonky bureaucratic inside baseball, but also possibly useful. FEMA might have liked to have it last year after Hurricane when false rumors spread that the agency was stealing land from hurricane victims when, in fact, it was offering aid. But neither's group never got off the ground. And so when it was announced, the right wing jumped on it and said, "Oh, this is going to be a ministry of truth." And within 24 hours of it being announced, Tucker Carlson was saying that I was going to have men with guns at my disposal to get men with guns to tell you to shut up. Most Americans probably haven't thought of that because this isn't Africa or Eastern Europe. This is America. And we don't do things like that here and never have. More precisely, we haven't until now. The outrage engine flared, spitting out a world of fantasy about this walkie-government board. Joe Biden's partisan political enemies are now officially enemies of the state. Wondering if you can kind of map how you think that disinformation about you and what you were doing rose and spread and permeated. Yeah. So I can do that pretty, at a pretty fine point, which is one of the ironies of being a disinformation researcher who's subject to a disinformation campaign. There were a couple little tweets percolating the day of the announcement. People who were like, "What is this? This is weird." And eventually those tweets had tagged in Jack Pasobiac, who very infamously is the guy who amplified the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Pizzagate was the myth that a restaurant in DC was a front for top Democrats to perform satanic rituals on babies. Pasobiac tweeted that this was a ministry of truth. Pasobiac has more than a million Twitter followers. And then I remember I had just laid down to take a little nap because I was massively pregnant and was working from home. And I saw this on my phone and my husband was like, "Something's going on that you should probably get up and deal with." And then throughout the afternoon, it spiraled from there, it went from Pasobiac to members of Congress. Is something that sounds surreal? We can't believe that it would have come to this. It's effectively a ministry of truth. That was future house speaker, Mike Johnson. Here's the current director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. This is the kind of thing that you see in dictatorships. This ministry of truth, Fox picked it up. It was the leading news story. And when you're the leading news story on Fox News, the effect is instantaneous. You become the folk villain for the people who watch that network. Nina Jankowicz was one of the biggest perpetrators and purveyors of disinformation in the entire country. One of the most outspoken critics of free speech. Right-wing influencers, pundits and their audience dug up and distorted old tweets as proof. They also found that Nina in her private life is a musical theater nerd. And incorporated that. Part angry feminist, part frustrated karaoke singer, Jankowicz. She is pitch perfect for the Biden administration. A watchdog group found that over the course of the week, Fox mentioned Nina and the board on 70% of its hours. My family and I got a kind of really staggering amount of threats, nastiness, and vitriol. A private security consultant advised her to leave her home. We were doxed. Within weeks, the Department of Homeland Security folded to the pressure and paused the board. Nina resigned. The Minister of Truth has gone poof. Nina Jankowicz had become a case study in how the engines of outrage work. She says her story. also shows exactly what not to do to combat them. In not responding, that meant that the kind of prevailing truth out there was the lies that were being bandied about. Everyone involved in Joe Biden's new Ministry of Information is a buffoon. They may be evil, but they're also ridiculous. Nina Jankowitz is the most ridiculous of all. The attacks on Nina Jankowitz didn't stop even after she resigned from her government job. I'd like to joke that I can't sneeze without Fox News writing an article about it and that is true. They do try to reference me and stick me in whenever they can and it's because it's profitable for them, right? You remember the doom disinfo board that was led by crazy showtunes, Lady Nina Jankowitz? Profitable for them to be able to point to an enemy and say, "Oh yeah, remember that crazy woman?" and it's just changed my life. She was subpoenaed by House Republicans and spent five hours being deposed. And I at the time was still nursing my son, so I had to take pumping breaks and stuff. Like it was all very human, right? Nina thinks all of it, the backlash, the conspiracy theories, that disruption to her life could have been prevented early. The department should have been getting both supporters and adversaries in Congress on the phone ahead of time to let them know that this was coming and that it wouldn't be a surprise. She says the government should have been more transparent, more public about what her walkie board would do and then jumped quickly if lies began to circulate. Don't let them gain oxygen, and that's something all organizations can learn from. And I know it's difficult. These are, you know, huge hulking administrations that need several levels of clearance to even put a tweet out, but there's got to be a way to kind of keep up with the pace of communication and the tone and tenor as well. By seeking to tell a good story, pushing it out to reach people on the platforms they're on, Nina says instead, she was told not to comment even as the outrage built. The department got kind of caught flat footed, didn't know how to respond to such a massive uproar, and in not responding, that meant that the kind of prevailing truth out there was the lies that were being bandied about. There are reasons to think that once the outrage engines started, the actual truth never had a chance. All kinds of efforts to combat disinformation and forward election interference have been targeted with the same playbook. Stanford folded its center tracking online misinformation after being forced to defend against lawsuits and congressional subpoenas, the University of Washington, Clemson, and a variety of other centers trying to tell truth from fiction have faced the same. The backlash to these places is almost like an immune response from within the right-wing bubble. The idea is, you know, the disinformation has been incredibly profitable for them. It has shorn up their power, and so if any efforts are chipping away at their ability to spread that, that's, you know, a threat to their very existence. This ecosystem is premised on convincing its audience, it offers the truth, and anything that pushes back is lying. I'm not convinced there's any story the government could have provided to outcompete that message. No channels the agency communicated over would match the reach. And so it's not just about the platform or the message. Principle number three is to use trusted messengers. When Nina was in Ukraine, she saw a program that spread an effective, simple message against Russia's disinformation. That basic phrase, the most engaging content is the most enraging content. If you tell people that one of the tactics of disinformation is emotional manipulation, they are much more likely to be able to discern fact from fiction. Just that basic information literacy. And to spread that word, Ukraine recruited specific messengers. Librarians, highly trusted in their local communities, 10,000 of them all over the country who went and then trained other librarians. We're so much more likely to believe information that comes to us locally from within our communities, from people we trust, rather than faceless remote entities. I think it's all about the framing and the delivery of this stuff. I think that's a really great model. It's a model we can learn from, but not duplicate. Because that program, spreading was called information literacy through librarians, came from the government itself against an outside enemy. Here are biggest bubbles of distortion our home grown. We've got, you know, a call coming from inside the house. A national US information literacy program is out of the question, needs a attempt and it inflames. Academic centers are under siege and certainly not trusted within the bubble. There's no obvious cavalry to turn to. So that's the next question. We've explored the principles of fighting misinformation, tell a good story, reach people where they are, find trusted messengers. Is there any institution that can do it? So okay, the other question is, if you were a wealthy investor and could fund any venture, what would you do? Hmm, if I was a wealthy investor and could fund any venture, I'm talking to Matt Gertz, the media analyst who you heard last episode. I think I'm probably going to buy up a lot of local newspapers in rural areas. This is a not uncommon and I think compelling answer. Local newspapers are like librarians in a community easily visible, generally trusted, but they're vanishing. I think that's been really disastrous for the industry at large, both because of the loss of actual reporting, but also because of the loss of that sense that the reporters represent you and are looking out for you. More than a third of all local papers in the US have shuttered over the past 20 years. Much for remains is gutted. The old business models seem to be falling away. Papers used to make money not on the reporting, but movie times, weather reports, restaurant reviews, classifieds, things the internet took over and made free. In the whole left from their closure, the bubble is expanded. The right wing, Sinclair Media, now owns almost 200 TV stations and has forced their newsrooms to run talking points. The national media are using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. Fake outlets, known as Pink Slime, have also cropped up, posing as local news with AI-generated articles, sometimes actually printing papers. A company called Metric runs more than 1200 such sites. And restoring newspapers with philanthropic dollars or some other funding, reverse this growth of the bubble. I think that that is probably your best bet for trying to give people options to hear more credible information. But I wonder if that's enough to make a difference against the bubble. The problem is people have to want to choose to turn on your channel, right? And we have a lot of other options and competitions for our attention. Kate Starbird at the University of Washington who maps misinformation. To be honest, conspiracy theories are far more entertaining than the truth. Political speech that aligns with what we believe is much more enjoyable for us to consume. Adding a local paper doesn't mean someone will pick it up. Americans are already tuning out of traditional news. We have a lot of other options and competitions for our attention. And I remember our principles of what it takes to fight misinformation. Local newspapers could be a trusted messenger. They might be able to reach people where they are. But what about that final, critical piece? Facts based reporting may not resonate with people as well as stories. And so how do you tell the stories that engage people? I've had a worry growing in the back of my head. I worry an underlying assumption I've had this entire time is wrong. I just assumed that the obvious answer to misinformation is giving people good information. Delivering real news would be the solution. What if it's not? We often juxtapose sort of the disinformation economy, I guess. And fact-based news and information. What if these are just fundamentally different products? It uses design to inform, it's not designed to combat the things that make disinformation stick, right? It's not supposed to be emotionally manipulative for telecomforting story. What if the best options that I can find for providing useful, true information like local newspapers simply do not have what it takes to penetrate the bubble? I realize everyone I've interviewed for this series is in the profession of distinguishing truth from falsehood, whether as academics or journalists. And maybe that was a mistake. I don't have a confident answer here where I know this is the answer, but I think that is a very good comment, right? When I brought this up with Kate Starbird, she said something intriguing. There's a different way of thinking about solutions, but it doesn't necessarily look like my recommendations for how do we build a fax-based world. It would be a different set of recommendations. But that's not who I am, and that's not who I am, right? That's not what I'm doing. We're not necessarily investigating how do you get people back to traditional news. We're asking what can pierce the bubble, and that may have a different solution. I have been talking to a lot of people who are journalists or who are disinformation researchers and it just struck me that if my question is what can pierce this bubble? If we think this ecosystem is is churning up myths and falsehoods in a way that's really difficult for the country it has political advantage and so it's very sticky what can disrupt it and so I thought well let's talk to someone who is in campaigning because campaigns are not about informing in the sense that like not saying they can inform right but sort of what's the point the point is to win that's exactly right and I was going to say I'm laughing because you're talking to purveyors of truth where that's the objective and it's not necessarily that political consultants aren't practitioners of truth but we're not. This is Mike Madrid. I'm a Republican political consultant and an author now and I have a very unique role in American politics where I've worked at some of the highest levels of campaigns on both sides. What's been your personal relationship with the Republican Party over the last several years? Yeah I've been a Republican since the day I turned 18 and registered to vote it's one of those kids that was excited to register on my 18th birthday and I've seen the Republican Party obviously transform itself into something I would argue is the exact opposite of what I joined it for. I asked Mike to talk through how political strategists look to influence voters, how campaigns work and then we can consider what applies. He tells me that campaigns by and large do not try to change voters' minds. It's just too hard. The craft of the political consultant 30 years ago was to persuade that is not at all the case today. The entire practice is about mobilization. As the information silos have become more segmented and more sophisticated, we're not just watching three channels on broadcast TV anymore. It's so difficult to reach voters that what we have found is that it is much easier to use fear and anger as mobilizing tools. In other words, campaigns are more engines of outrage because fear and anger are easy buttons. And in this bottom line business of winning, they don't challenge their audiences beliefs. They tell stories that match them. I think what we're doing is saying, tell me what your mythology is and I'll let you know if I can agree with that. Mike says in our fractured information landscape, the message is to different audiences don't even need to be consistent. We used to believe that they had to have common values or overlapping interests, so that's not true. You just need to be able to communicate to a community of interests on their own terms. To reach them, campaigns look to ally with messengers, those communities already trust. Mike calls it building infrastructure. You have to find a whole wide cadre of third party validators, the Joe Rogans of the world, the, you know, those other audiences where there already exists a community and a culture and trust and use those to validate you and you have to inculcate yourself into them and lean into that mythology of whatever it is that is being espoused. If you've wondered why Joe Rogan, Barstool Sports, the Maniverse, the anti-vaccine movement have folded in with a GOP, this is a huge reason. What the right wing media ecosystem did was they created thousands of outlets to focus micro communities on Trump. Mike thinks trying to compete with this using traditional fact-based news is like the French building fortifications in the wrong place or World War II. You're building the marginal line against an invading force and that's not where the invaders are coming. So what would it take to push back the invaders? The response is you have to create that infrastructure of communities. Making messengers people trust who can reach them where they are. But also the political strategist thinks the story they tell can't just communicate truth, news. It's all about narrative and storytelling or mythology. Stories specifically crafted to make inroads with these audiences, playing off instead of refuting what they already believe. Where the truth is a better story than the lie and that is not easy. It's not easy because you can't monetize truth as much as you can monetize lies. Because conspiracy theories tend to be more gripping, more profitable. But as I think about this, and the infrastructure Mike is describing, there's a larger point about money too. Media businesses serve their users. If you subscribe to Vogue, you want to read about fashion. If you tune into NPR, it's because you're looking for that type of traditional reporting. And that's what they produce. Who is making a product designed to pierce the bubble, to speak to the audiences in it and to deliver facts? There's no business model for that. Political campaigns are interesting because they raise money for a different source than where they spend it. But they're short run with the goal of electing one candidate or a slate of them in a specific race. So they target low-hanging fruit. Yeah, the cost of actually getting new voters is so difficult. And so prohibitive, you don't engage in it much. And it's much, much better to mobilize your own base. Which fans are polarization. And I realize, as far as I can tell, there is no product combating the engines of outrage, at least large scale and running perpetually, using the tactics that we've heard work. That product does not exist. There aren't dollars oriented for that. Which is interesting. I think about the amount of money that, let's say, presidential candidate, Kamala Harris raised. You know, one and a half billion dollars. If you had one and a half billion dollars, would it be more effective to build infrastructure? Yeah. Yeah. That's all my clients know. All of my clients is we begin with what is your infrastructure and then how do we build it? Doesn't even matter what your message is. I don't really even care what your policy positions are. I don't need to know. It doesn't matter where you're at on this specific issue or that because I can continually drown you out if I keep talking to my people with the infrastructure that I have. I think that's fascinating. It's also cheaper, in some ways, to get your message out, to build a platform than ever before. I mentioned the pink slime outlets of AI-generated local news as an example. They're literally printing and sending AI-generated papers to people that just sort of are, you know, inserting Trump-talking points, the point being not, oh, do that. You can do that. You can do that. It's really easy. And cheap? Yeah. And I don't say you wouldn't do that. I don't know that that's probably a good tactic. And so I asked Mike what he would do if he was hired to run a campaign, not to elect someone, but to pierce the bubble. What would that look like? If I was brought on by the globalists to fight for truth in what's tactics and strategy that I'd develop, I would copy the tactics of what the disinformation campaign folks have done. You would raise money to build infrastructure. You need your own media. You need your own megaphone. It would target people in the bubble, not by seeking balance or informing, but outrage and playing off what they already believe. Start telling your own narrative and quit trying to dispel lies. Tell a better story about truths. And you would look to recruit and ally and incorporate existing messengers with inroads in those communities. You don't just create a Joe Rogan person. They already exist. They're already out there. You have to engage them and use them as the fire hose in response to what is already occurring. You would build his own engine, and suddenly I realized what we're talking about, a campaign reaching people where they are, stimulating their outrage, personalized to the causes they care about, linking them together with fiery messages. Is the model that 50 years ago a grassroots movement adopted? We have to go out there and polarize the electorate. The new right challenged the establishment, printers bust. The issue of court order, the subject was the Panama Canal and the state of school prayer. It provided the foundation for the right wing media ecosystem. It's uncomfortable to think of it as any kind of a template. But I also think about what we heard from experts about what it takes to fight disinformation. It's all about the framing and the delivery of this stuff. Fact-based reporting may not resonate with people as well as stories. If roughly half of American voters are caught in a media ecosystem that consistently misinforms and polarizes for profit and political gain, if traditional information cannot compete in front of this audience, cannot bring them back out of the bubble to a fact-based reality, and if that is destabilizing our democracy, then is the only answer to the engines of outrage to spin up another engine of outrage against them? There is one other question about our information divide, and our engines of outrage that I want to explore, which is how it affects you and me. Even if you're not in the right wing bubble, how have the shifts in our media environment caused by it. it or the incentives of the internet influenced our information diets. How can we tell? So next time on Landslide, Engines of Outrage, a little news you can use. 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 nuancedales.com. Landslide is a production of nuanced tales and partnership with WFAE and distributed by the NPR network. It is created, hosted, reported, and produced by me, edited by Noia Carr. J.C. Bold is the sound designer and engineer, music is by Matt Bradford. Thanks to everyone at WFAE and NPR, who's helped make the series possible. You can view key sources for this episode at nuancedales.com. Thank you for listening. But 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. 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 Landslide, detailing the most razor-closed presidential primary race in history and the way it reshaped political parties thereafter. The sounds of the extremely American podcast, where they tackle how extremist movements still shape America today, 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. 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