How Russia Shapes What the World Thinks

Guaranteed human.

Valveline, instant oil change presents wisdom from the road.

Summer means wide open spaces in a whole lot of extra miles. Last place you want your engine to give out is halfway to nowhere. Out here, low oil or a weak battery is just an ambush way to happen.

“That's why every oil change at Valveline is the noil change of glutes at 18 point maintenance check.”

These text are trained to help spot issues early and give you a run easy. Valveline, instant oil change wasley. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carry Brownstein and Fred Armison here. The dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form.

We're launching "Podlandia" AO rewatch. Our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together. Breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped to bring it all to life. guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Christle, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Man and many more.

Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvise not just words, but a song about it. I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking about it. Listen to Podlandia, AO rewatch on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nick Tuturo. You probably know me from NYU PD Blue, the longest shot or Spike Lee's Black Plansman. And on my no podcast, delivering happiness with Nick Tuturo, I deliver pizza to a new guest. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins, where you're doing my belt. To Bill Burr! I don't think I've ever met somebody, so exactly out of the mind is I am.

And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tuturo. It's called happiness, delivering happiness. And many, many more. Open your free iHeart Radio app, search delivering happiness with Nick Tuturo! And listen now!

“Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.”

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's missing. We don't know where she is, it's possible. The Russians have her. At the very least, it's quite possible. The Russians have misled her in some way or another, and maybe they factor in believing when it was time to record. You cheeky boy, don't worry everybody, Jerry's just really on vacation, but that was a very

clever setup to this episode on, essentially on Russian propaganda, and how, you know, I think we all knew that their propaganda machine was big back in the Cold War and stuff, obviously. But it's, it's a really big problem now and has been for a while ever since the advent of the internet and especially social media. Yeah, because those two things are wide open setup for people to distribute misinformation,

deliberate misinformation. The Russians are far from the only ones that do it. They're just really, really good at it. And they've been doing it for a long time.

I would guess they were probably the first country to really start doing this on a wide scale.

But I mean, as far back, I think, is 2010, or at least the 2010s, at least 2013, at the absolute latest, the internet resurgency was the first kind of famous one that surfaced. And the whole premise back then, and now, is basically game social media and use whatever you can, whatever, like weaknesses it has in like the entire structure of it to to confuse people to so discord and disinformation and chaos and questioning what reality is.

Getting the media to start using words like post truths and stuff like that, that kind of stuff that might not have a specific aim where it's like we want to, say, get Trump elected. That's that was part of this, too. Like that was a Russian name as well. Or we want to stir America up over the border crisis, just creating a climate where people question what's real or what's true. That in and of itself is a huge triumph for these Russian operations that

have been going on for more than a decade. Yeah, I think that was one of the things that chilled me most was it wasn't like we really need to get people to believe this one thing about Ukraine, let's say. It's more like, no, let's just so chaos in confusion

“to where you doubt what you're reading. And you don't know what the truth is anymore. And that's”

just like, that feels even scarier, you know. It does because of ultimately, eventually,

most people would be like, it's not worth trying to get to the bottom of this, you know?

You know, we're, I'll just share something because like I read it. Yes, exactly. Sometimes

“I'll read it. Yeah, good point. All right. So maybe we should jump back a little bit and talk about”

the IRA, not the Irish Republican Army, but the Internet Research Agency, or the Russian troll farm, as it might, you might know it better as that was founded in 2013 by guy that was a former criminal, eventually a successful entrepreneur and kind of higher up oligarch and, and Russia, you know, confidante of Vladimir Putin. And he also founded, you know, confident up for a while because he also founded the Wagner group, which you may have read about the news, the Russian mercenary

organization that would eventually try and overthrow Putin. Yes. Do you watch the agency on Prime? No, I don't. It is magnificent. Yeah. It's one of the best spy shows of recent times. You love a spy show. You guys like to blackdubs, right? Yep. This is at least on that caliber, if not higher. Michael Fosbenders in it, Richard Geer, Jeffrey Wright, a bunch of other very talented

people, but it's all like spycraft stuff, and it's really worth it. They're just released their second

season. And I've got three episodes left. I started two days ago, and both seasons are well worth watching. Okay. I did not watch blackdubs, actually. I thought you were talking about the what's a Gary Elmond Show, Wild Wortses, something horses. I don't know. I know the one you're talking about. You watch that? Yeah. I watch that one. Is it good? Uh, yeah. That's really good. I mean, Gary Elmond's fantastic. Slow horses. Slow horses. I swear you watch blackdubs, because Emily

said she liked it. The one with um, she may have watched it. Bend it like Beckham. Yeah, care nightly. I didn't. Yeah. I didn't see it. I only may have watched that without me now, because she likes it. She likes it. Okay. Just watch it. Watch them both, but definitely watch the agency. Okay. It's much more likely to be in your wheelhouse if either one of them are going to be. All right. Okay. So back to the show. Oh, I know I brought that up. They battle essentially the

Wagner group, but it's a hall in the agency. Okay. Okay. Sorry about that. That's okay.

“Everyone loves a good recommendation from either one of us, I think. Yeah, I want to be clear here.”

This was not brought to you by prime. We're not trying to manipulate you or propaganda as you or market to you. This is just I watch it on prime. And it's on prime. And it's so good that I just took that time to share that with everybody. That's all exactly what it seemed like on face value. And do you know why I have to say that, Chuck? Oh, I don't know, Josh. Because of stuff like this operation that we're going to talk about. That's right. So the IRA that I spoke of,

the internet research agency that what they did, and this is like mid-2010s, they hired a ton of young people basically who could speak English and who knew a lot about politics to like, hey, why don't you start a troll farm, you know, get on board this troll farm, and just create fake stuff, create fake news stories, although I'm loved that you even say those words together, fake social media posts, YouTube videos, eventually, you know, as you'll see what would become like

deep fakes and AI and stuff like that, but this isn't before that. Yeah. And while this was going on,

“Sputnik and Russia today, or RT, these are, you know, I think legitimate, or at one point we're”

legitimate, Russian news outlets, right? They were always backed by the Kremlin. Oh, well,

okay, yeah. But yeah, I think that they were still, they still had journalists and stuff like that, but they were trying to get the Russian viewpoint across two Western audiences. Right. So they started distributing stories around the world. Basically, like we were saying, trying to get people to like, to believe whatever they wanted to them believe at the time, like politically. Right. And the 2016 United States election was a real big kind of debut. They've been kind of

added already, but the 2016 election, they really showed just how much they could monkey with stuff, or at least the potential of them monkeying with stuff. And this is where that, the allegations of Trump colluding with the Russians, this is what they were talking about. I'm proven, by the way, to Rachel, Matt, I was great this May. Right. Pizza gate. They didn't necessarily come up with these things, but they were able to amplify them and get people talking about them and make people questioning

what was what, you know, or the Democrats like really keeping child sex slaves in the basement of

Yeah, exactly. So once this sort of starts coming out in the United States and, you know, Oliver North American and Europe started realizing what was going on in February 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there started to be a little bit of action taken. The EU-Band Russian state media, including Sputnik and RT, other companies, Google News dropped

“them from aggregation service. I think Google Microsoft and Apple all started like pulling their apps.”

So that sort of started happening. And then in 23 was when that failed uprising it gets Putin

by the Wagner group happened. And the long ensured it is after all this, the IRA finally disbanded,

but this work continued among other groups. Yeah, this is a good example of the whack-a-mole that the West is playing. The Russian internet disinformation operations have the West on our heels. Clearly, there's basically no one who knows what they're talking about with this stuff, who would disagree with that. The West still is not figured out how to do it. Aside from piecemeal responses like taking Russia times app off of the Apple app store. That's the

kind of response we have to this still. And this has been going on for more than a decade. And one of the reasons why it's so hard to do anything about it is because they use what the

rant corporation researchers Christopher Paula and Miriam Matthews call a fire hose of falsehood,

just put everything out there. It's not, it's not the quality, it's the quantity that they focus on. Yeah, for sure. After Crimea was annexed in 2014, and then obviously after the invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, they really ramped up a lot of messaging to try and get sentiment. Sometimes on their side, but a lot more times like just against Ukraine and what was going on. And this eventually it would become known as a doppelganger. But to be clear, doppelganger isn't

like it wasn't Operation Doppelganger or there's not an organization called doppelganger. It's

“more of just sort of, I think the media sort of misread that and labeled it that. But it's really”

just sort of this method of doing what they're doing and how they're doing it. Yeah, to be specific, it's a way of cloning dummy websites that look like actual legitimate websites. So one, some of the ones that they targeted were limond and France, their website, Washington Post and the US, the Guardian and the UK, and they would essentially just take, they would have their bots,

start sending links or putting links all over the internet to basically share, right? Hey, look at

this crazy article, right? The Washington Post actually reported this so it seems like it would be legitimate. And you would click that and it would take you to a different series of domains that got smaller and smaller to where if you were in the area they were targeting say you were in the United States and you would click, you know, this thing to find out about whatever this fake Washington post thing was saying, it would, it would take you to this fake website like Washington Post dot

PM, just different enough that, that like you probably wouldn't notice, but it's a different domain name and the way that they were able to get away with this was some show companies and using shady kind of hosting services around the world and that was doppelganger, that technique that they used for getting this stuff out. There is no operation like this, these using bots are creating like fake accounts on Facebook or whatever, that wasn't doppelganger, that is constant.

It's so constant and so embedded that there's no name for that, doppelganger was just the technique of the way that they used the infrastructure of the internet to deliver misinformation for this short period of time. Yeah, sort of one of the main companies weren't, we're not going to go through all of these because it's a little mind numbing, but there's one called the social design agency, which is a PR firm that started up in 2022 found it by a political consultant

who had, you know, that was that was their business. So, you know, they know exactly how to do it and the Russian government, all of a sudden was like, wait a minute, we would love to hire you to

“do like all this stuff. It's literally, as I think a couple of years ago, run by the Kremlin”

and directed by the Putin administration. So, they're kind of in the middle of most of this doppelganger activity. Yes. And, you know, like you said, when you go to one of these websites, when you click

washingtimposed.com. It looks like it, it smells like it, it acts like it for the most part. So,

it's really easy to fool people. It is. I mean, if you really look closely and you look with a skeptical eye, you'll turn up some stuff. I saw one example is that the U.S. must not become the world's John Darm, which is police in French. Like, the Washington Post would not use a phrase,

“like that, right? Yeah, but you have to know that. Like, I think they count on just firehosing”

it such where they're like, well, who cares if most people don't. If we just get this percentage of people, that's great. Yes. And even more than that, I feel like going to the trouble of actually creating the article on the fake website is almost superfluous because so many people on the internet just share that share. Like, that line gotcha. Now, I think that this is going on. Not even bothering to click into this to read the actual article, all I need is the headline because it got me juiced up.

Yeah, for sure. And of course, they're amplifying this through the bot farms, Russian social media bots. We'll post links and then there are more bots that retweet these links. I think I mentioned on the show. I saw a picture of a bot farm one not too long ago. There was a big expo say. Were they out to you in grass? No. And that was terrifying. It was like a dude sitting at a desk

“on a computer and there were a thousand cellphones connected hardwired to the computer. And then”

there were dozens and dozens of these guys with hundreds and hundreds of smart phones. Wow. Can connect it on a big wall. So when you see how it actually works, like literally connecting to phones to send this stuff out and amplify it, it feels really dystopian and scary. Yeah, I feel like it's becoming clear that we're going to have to abandon the internet and come up with a new one because this one got cooked. Agreed. Should we take a break? Hmm. All right,

well, we're going to remanate that and I hope we can even come back after we remanate, but we'll be right back. Bye. Valdeline. Instant oil change presents wisdom from the road. Summer means wide open spaces in a whole lot of extra miles. The last place you want your engine to give out is halfway to nowhere.

“Out here, low oil or a weak battery is just an ambush way to happen. That's why every oil”

change at Baveline is the loyal change of glutes at 18 point maintenance check. These textures trained to help spot issues early and give you a run easy. Change wisely. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? Is she girl Sam Jay? And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports. A new podcast from together and I heart women's sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us

way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Fennler, she became the first female solo

rover to go from California to Hawaii. My first husband is like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what do we eat? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. In the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week, every week. We're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Namely Osaka showing out, she beat, sublinka, shots, you know me. You get the palm Naomi,

you get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened, we're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the burden of guild season three podcast. This is a story about a horrendous situation that destroyed two families. It started more than seven years ago when

Cindy and Kenny were two forty-somethings who had just gotten engaged. Days later, they walked into

a scorched earth war they never saw coming. Turn up as your hands find your back. The cops

given to my house and threw me in jail. And to Cindy's surprise, her fiance Kenny was charged with abuse in one of her children. I never once doubted Kenny and I always doubted the accusation. On season three of burden of guild, you'll hear a story about the length someone will go to in order to get what they want. This case has got to be one of the most despicable. Listen to season three of burden of guilds on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, so I mentioned after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, that's when things

that launched sort of like a snopes like site but a fake one called War on Fakes. And it was designed

“to discredit Ukraine and support Russia, obviously. And then another one called RRN, reliable recent”

news, which replace reliable Russian news. So on one side, you've got something that says, hey, this is reliable news. So this is real. On the other side, it's like, hey, we root out the fake stuff but it's fake. So it's almost like, you know, it's not almost like they've got all their bases covered. Yeah, I mean, if you pay too close attention to this, you'll start bleeding out of your ear. Gary, yeah, um, doppelganger got its name, um, from the EU's disinformation lab. One of the

disheartening things to me Chuck was figuring out that the people who are tracking this stuff, there's not a government agency involved anywhere. These are all like independent NGOs that are dedicated to tracking disinformation. Yeah, it's interesting. Journalists like, these are the people doing the actual work. And then seven years later, the government's like, oh, we're going to have our Department of Justice do something about this. Right. So that's where that's where

“doppelganger got its name from. I think it, um, it's basically it suggests that these are, or it”

points out that like the clone sites, they're like doppelgangers of the real thing. Yeah, exactly. But the, that war on Ukraine after the invasion of Ukraine, they really ramped up the misinformation flood that was coming. Like they targeted in 2024. And I think 2023, the, their main targets were France, Germany, the US, the UK and Ukraine. And essentially what they were trying to do was to make the people, the public in each of those countries, um, lose support or turn on the idea of

supporting Ukraine so that Russia could get them out of the Ukraine business and Russia could just get back to trying to take over Ukraine as best it could. Yeah. And they, you know, they did it in a lot of ways. Obviously, some ways were just fake articles about like, you know, stuff that Ukraine does, or maybe a fake article about, uh, that, uh, white washes, a Russian atrocity like the,

uh, buke massacre, like that never happened. Right. But cleverly, they're also going like through

celebrities and like, faking that, you know, Taylor, like a real influential celebrity, like Taylor Swift, or Kim Kardashian, um, like fake messages where they're supporting, uh, or they're criticizing

“America and Europe for supporting Ukraine, um, or didn't you find something about Oprah?”

Yeah. Do you want to read that quote? Uh, to go ahead. Oprah says supporting Ukraine is unacceptable. Their actions destroy lives and societies. Yeah. So, you know, especially if you're some, like young person who supports Taylor Swift or Kim Kardashian, you're probably, you know, not even aware that this kind of stuff even goes on. All you're thinking is like, well, Taylor Swift said Ukraine deserves what's coming. So that's probably true. That's exactly

right. That's exactly what they're trying to do. Or, or maybe not deserves what's coming, but like,

America, this is a big sort of, uh, angle for them is, um, America first, like we shouldn't get

involved in this, let Ukraine handle it themselves. Right. And so that is, you just hit the nail on the head as far as why Republicans typically get targeted with this stuff. Uh, it's not because, um, the Trump administration is colluding with the Russians. It's because the message that the Trump administration and MAGA in general and Republicans by extension are, are basically basing their platform on, it's like you said America first, um, focus on domestic issues, get ourselves out of

foreign, um, affairs. And that goes lockstep with what Putin wants. It's like, yes, America go, go mess with their own stuff. And by pointing out and creating turmoil about all the things that are going on in America at any given time, it makes it seem even that more urgent to just stop giving money to Ukraine when we've got all of these middle-class white people who need that money too in, like, tax breaks and stuff like that. That kind of messaging that's not necessarily wrong,

but is making it seem like the American public sentiment is behind that. That's the part that's wrong. They're manipulating that to kind of try to get the public to swing that way all because they just want to be able to invade Ukraine more easily. Yeah, they had a one project called the Good Old USA project, uh, which one of the SDA founders had come up with with some other people and it targeted

Ukraine. Like, why are we doing that when we have problems here? And they also spent about 10 million

“bucks encouraging right-wing influencers to get on board with pro Russia opinions. So that's why”

if you've, if you've ever been on, like, the the comment section of any social media side about anything political like this, first of all, we would both encourage you to stop doing that because it's just not good for your mental health and well-being. But if you do, and you see people saying, like, oh, yeah, thanks, Comrade, or whatever Russian, but like, that's that's what they're talking about here. Yeah. And to be fair, those right-wing influencers, the YouTubers that were hired to

disseminate Russian propaganda were not aware that that's what they were doing. They were hired by a front company called Tenet Media. Yeah. And they hired like six hardcore right-wing YouTubers.

And just basically said, hey, let's talk about this kind of thing. But they were not aware that

they were being paid by the Kremlin. They didn't know that. And then once that was exposed, that company dissolved in those people, well, I guess, had to eat some crow, I would guess. Yeah, for sure. Another thing, if you ever heard, you know, George Soros is paying those protesters by that, by the hour, like paid protesters, paid protesters. Yeah. That comes from a fake Washington Post article. Like, you know, from one of these, like, completely fake,

cloned websites. That's where that comes from. It was right after Israel invaded Gaza in spring of 2024. And that, you know, all the protesters were going on. And there was a fake Washington Post article that came out about the Soros Foundation and Rockefeller, like paying people 30 bucks an hour to go protest. Yeah. Well, the one I remember was that the Ukrainian government was actually like Nazis. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And really what Russia's doing is liberating the Ukrainian people.

“I remember that one for sure. That definitely came from this doppelganger era.”

Yeah. One of the weirder ones was Princess Kate when she sort of disappeared from the public guy. Yeah. And, you know, this is before she revealed it was because of a cancer diagnosis. But they jumped on that and sort of hijack that with all sorts of weird conspiracy theories. And again, I think that was one just to just to create tension and chaos in the UK. Yes. I don't remember I found this, but I saw that they're, um, they're involvement in conspiracy theories as topic

agnostic. They don't get about the subject. Whatever it is that we'll push people's buttons that we'll get emotional responses and get people worked up. They will get in there and amplify it

if they, if they didn't make it up themselves in the first place. Man. They also apparently,

according to, I think the good old USA project, that they, there was a whole group at the social design agency who, again, like you said, seemed to be the ones behind this. If all of a sudden you

“start to hear negative chatter about stuff you should know, I'm going to go ahead and say it was”

probably them after this episode comes out. I was a little worried about that. I am. Hopefully, we're still under the radar enough. Well, I'll like to think so. Um, yeah, and if all of a sudden Chuck and I died in a fiery car crash together, it was probably a crumbling. I'm not blinding, time soon. Um, you have to, although I don't want to say winner how. We should probably edit this part out. But there was a whole group at the social design agency that was, their job was to monitor

social media posts from GOP lawmakers to figure out what was on America's mind or what people were worried about or angry about. And then they would start making memes and stuff based on that and try to create like, I guess, mess from that. Just from like one tweet or something could do it. Yeah, for sure. Um, I don't know how much you want to get into this nuts and bolts section. We kind of already covered it early. Yeah, it gets sort of in the weeds, but like you sort of

mentioned earlier, we just want to be clear. It's like they'll use disposable domains that are owned by other companies. Um, they will use virtual offices and set up shell companies. They'll work with, you know, in places like, sometimes at the far reaches of the earth, well, they'll set up like, uh, some company in Malaysia where, uh, you know, it's then it goes to another shell company and Lithuania. And it's just, you know, it's also obfuscated. And that's the whole point,

you know, that you don't know. It's hard to even trace back to any origin. Right. And it's just very decentralized. And then the companies these shell companies are just legitimate enough to provide cover for the shady hosting companies to say like, well, they're legal. They're, it's a UK company. So, you know, we don't have any, um, obligation to check what they're doing, right? And the,

shady or, uh, and apparently they're not the one they didn't come up with this technique. It's

fairly common among bad actors. Yeah. Um, like Brad Pitt, I guess. I was trying to think of a bad

“actor, um, that I didn't want to be mean. I think you can be mean Brad Pitt at this point.”

Oh, yeah, because he's a fine actor. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And a fine piece, you know. Pea, a piece of what, you know, do you see, did you see he and Ed Norton at the soccer match? No, I heard about it. Yeah, it's kind of fun. The old fight club thing. What was I going to say? You were going to say we're going to take a break, right? Yeah, I think whatever I was saying just Peter doubt didn't matter. All right. Well Josh is going to

Peter back up and, uh, we'll be back right after this. 270 hours with zero complaining. They train under the hood. They train down in the pit. 270 hours means they're training's legit. It's the smart choice for smart folk and care for their steed. So trust the instant oil, change the starts with valuable. Now the way an instant oil change. Change wisely. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up,

y'all? Is she girl Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports. A new podcast from together and I heart women's sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us

way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey, if you learn, she became the first female solo

“rover to go from California to Hawaii. My first husband is like, what's up with the snacks?”

Like, what do we eat? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. In the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week, every week. We're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out she beat, sublinka. Show us you know me. You get the palm Naomi, you get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're

interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the burden of guild season three podcast. This is a story about a horrendous situation that destroyed two families. It started more than seven years ago when Cindy and Kenny were two forty-somethings who had just

gotten engaged. Days later, they walked into a scorched earth war they never saw coming.

Turn on the bus you hands find your back. The cops give it to my house and threw me the jail. And to Cindy's surprise, her fiance Kenny was charged with abusing one of her children. I never once doubted Kenny and I always doubted the accusation. Okay, so we're back. And we know about doppelganger. Like I said, thanks to journalists and non-governmental organizations that are dedicated to tracking and fighting disinformation.

“The first one where it came up even before it was called doppelganger. Because remember that was”

the EU's disempho lab, that title. But a full year before that, a German website T Online. That's fake. It does. It sounds super fake. They published an article where they were like, "Hey, there's a bunch of new Facebook accounts, all of Marcher and Women, and the weird thing is they all say that they work for Netflix. And even weirder, every single one of them seems to be really, really adamant about Germany not funding Ukraine and just leaving Russia alone."

I'm sure Netflix is like, seriously. Thanks. I know. Although Netflix is probably like, hey, any publicity is good. Well, yeah. That's a good point. I get, this is, this is not this, but I know you're not on social media a lot, but on Instagram, I will get, I will have to block a lot of people that come on to follow me because it's clear that it's some sort of a,

like, I'll leave a comment on some random, like Instagram posts that I think is cooler, whatever. And then someone will comment on that. Like, oh yeah, totally Brian or whatever. Chuck the podcaster. And then I'll look up like who is this? And it's, you know, it's clearly some fake

person. And I just, I don't know what the angle is. And I always block it. So obviously, I don't know,

but I wonder what the goal is. It's got to be separating me from money somehow. Somehow. Or yeah, or yeah, or getting money to somebody like an influencer or something or to boost whatever thing you said was cool. It's very strange, but it's always quite obvious what it is because they have like zero posts. Follow what ton of people, no one follows them. And it's usually some, you know, if I can be frank, it's usually some very, like, well endowed, you know, woman.

“Yeah, do you remember there was a period of time when AI Slop was really starting to gear up”

where it does not matter what video you were watching on like YouTuber whatever in the search.

It was like a very beautiful woman standing there like van a white right next to the video screen,

like learn all about C++ coding from me, you know, the 60 secretary, you know, like it was all videos were like that for a minute. And I was like, this is how it's going to be from now on. And then it seems to have vanished. Yeah. And you know, the only reason I bring all that up is because it's just sort of backs up this thing that we're talking about in this idea that I keep edging toward, which is like, God, maybe it's just best to get off in a way from all of that stuff,

all together. Is this really going in the wrong direction? No, definitely. There's this thing called the dead internet theory. I've been wanting to do at least a short stuff on it, but essentially it says that the internet has become a just a bunch of bots interacting with bots, trying to gain social media algorithms to make money for some dude and whatever country, Singapore or something like that, right? And some studies have found that perhaps a third of accounts on either Instagram

or Facebook, probably Facebook, our bots, a third. Oh, man. And that it's just gotten so far

out of hand that we're never going to get it back. And also like those long-tailed articles where

you make like five cents, but it costs nothing to have an AI right and publish that article, those have pushed actual human written research articles about any given thing from like page one Google search to like page 20. So there's no reason to go in and search for anything anymore unless you want some AI article broken into 50 different small paragraphs or sections that are basically

“repeat themselves over and over again. That's what that's what you have available. So it does seem”

like the internet is pretty dead. Yeah, I've noticed even on Instagram from some sites I like and follow like music sites or whatever. It's sort of a dead giveaway now if the caption instead of being like, you know, Led Zeppelin performs at this performance and it was awesome, right? It's now some really long like four paragraph thing with like this detailed history of like Led Zeppelin was abandoned bubble bought and it's just so obvious AI is doing it. Yeah. And it's just it's kind of

ruining what I used to like about Instagram along with a lot of other stuff. Yeah. Uh, like, you know, these fake busty women. It's like it just makes me want to run away. I'm stopping run run away. Something else is going to come along because there is like it's very clear that the internet in it's like ideally is really great and useful and important and we need it. It's just this version of it is no longer useful. So we need to figure out a different one and somebody will know. It'll well,

it's just it sucks because I don't like to support that company because they're part of Meta, which I hate and got off of Facebook, but I do like the connection with listeners and be able to

“chat stuff up. So it's, uh, yeah, it feels like it's it's a no-in situation sometimes. I think what”

will probably become is more of an emphasis on email. Maybe. Again, and then like they'll that'll get taken over and then it'll be handwritten letters. That'd be great. Uh, speaking of Meta, though, in 2022, and this was after that T online group that you mentioned sort of out of this whole thing. That's when like Meta and some other behind profile companies started saying like, "Oh, well, like we know this is going on. We're going to start removing pages and we're going to start

deleting this and we're going to take this super serious." And who knows what's going on in the inside? I sound like I'm being cynical because I probably feel like I am, but they have found that like a lot of it is coming through ads and like they're not even catching 95% of undeclared political

posts or bots creating posts or even commenting, it's buying ads. And so Facebook has a huge financial incentive to not root those things out because they make tons of cash off of it. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, they said that they're doing this, they're not actually doing it. And that's a, that's a good example of the whole whack-a-moal thing, too, is like a big company like that trying to to police their own social media site that's gotten out of their own control.

“That's not a good technique either, although I think all of us could probably agree that Meta”

could do way, way more than it does. So, the finally, in September, 2024, after this

and identified for two full years, the US Department of Justice is like, we're going to take charge here. Yeah, we'll take care of it. Get this. They took down 32 websites. Wow. That were related to doppelganger. And they were like, this is too risky before a US election. So, we're going to do, we're going to go the nuclear option and take down 32 websites. Yeah, I think the cynicism is coming through. It's, I mean, whack-a-moal didn't even

begin to describe it. But I'm sure, like, Russia hears this stuff and they're just like laughing into their vodka, you know. Yeah. Well, that's a point that a lot of people make is that

it might not even be changing people's minds, but just the fact that we know it exists

makes you question everything then. And so, you are questioning the legitimate stuff, too. So, you're not learning anything. Everything has an angle. Yeah. And now we're seeing, of course,

“and we've talked about, I think we did a whole episode on Deepfakes, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, on Deepfake,”

and obviously the advent of AI technology, which is now completely taken over already, where they have, you know, a fake video going up where it looks like Joe Biden doing something, where it looks like anybody doing something. And they will take, you know, they try to evade detection, so they'll post a video just a little differently in different iterations, like with just a few milliseconds trimmed out, so they can't be automatically rooted out

when, like, a company builds a system to root out this kind of stuff. Right. And we're already at the point, like, AI is moved so fast, we're already at the point where people all over the place for months now have been going, like, I don't even know if this is real, like, I don't know what what I can believe anymore. So, like, it's working. What they're doing is working. Right. The thing that got me is that they've figured out, because AI companies train their models on,

like the internet, and specific parts of the internet, the Russians have figured out that they can flood those parts of the internet with misinformation, and that's where the AI is going to learn and think is real, so the AI is going to just give out bad information or misinformation as

“well, because that's what it thinks is true. Yeah. I'm going to go live in a cave, right after we”

record this. Okay. I'll get in the Buddhism. Yeah. Let's do that. So, like, we said, I don't know if we gave our a hat tip to Olivia, who really did a good exalted job on explaining this, but one of the things she points out is that it's really unclear whether this actually weighs opinion. Yeah. There have been some studies, right? Yeah, but I mean, just I anecdotally, I think it does, but maybe it's one of the things where, like, okay, if it really comes down to

somebody saying, "Do you truly believe that?" Or you're going to be like, "Yes, there maybe it doesn't really weigh opinion." But there was a study that looked at disinformation efforts

by Russian, the 2016 US election, and it basically found that, like, it had almost no effect whatsoever.

Yeah. It's, they found that 1% of social media users got 70% of the exposures. So, a few people getting most of this stuff, but that's still 30% on the other 99%. And they also point out that, like, a lot of the people getting exposed to this are Republicans, because the Russian posts are, again, they're sort of targeting them about, like, hey, America first stuff, America first stuff, and they already believe that stuff anyway. So it's

not maybe like their changing minds, maybe that's the point, but they're reinforcing beliefs for sure. Yeah. Yeah. But again, that firehows are the firehows of misinformation or false information. That's the technique, and it seems to be working. The thing that stuck out to me was, I couldn't find anything about what they're doing now. It seems like they're still doing much the same, because it works really, really well, and it can just pop up anywhere. Like, there is a story I

found out, and I don't know if you saw it, where a 2016 disinformation campaign from Russia

was physically injured. Over the Islamification of Texas, which was just complete bunk made up by

the Stiff's disinformation group, and even more than that, they made up the group that the protesters joined. They also made up the group that the counter protesters joined. So the whole thing was totally fabricated and social engineered. So, like, that works. And at the time, these people were not thinking that they were being manipulated by Russians, right? They thought it was real. It's going to keep continuing to work. So there's no reason for them to stop. I'm curious about

what the next thing is that they're doing now that we're going to find out about three years from now, you know? Right. Yeah, for sure. The other thing that sort of would send a chill up your spine,

“is like, none of this is even secret anymore. Like, it's out, and they know it's out, and they don't care.”

They're out of the crowd. They're out in proud. They're out in proud, with what they call a high-reach low-impact campaign, which is, like you said, again, the fire hose and the volume of content doesn't really matter how much people believe it or not, as long as you're sewing chaos and getting people to eventually think, like, I don't even know, like, maybe I'll just disengage all together, because I don't know what's real. When widespread coverage of doppelganger came out,

the Russian government was like, awesome. Let's give more funding to the SDA, and there's even a suggestion that SDA deliberately leaked operation doppelganger, like information about that, just to get more media coverage about it. Right. Man, I really do want to go live in a cave after this. The best suggestion I saw was to fight fire with fire that the whole whack-a-mull thing

is never ever going to work, and it actually just helps Russia, like you said, just by giving it

“publicity, and that essentially the best thing the West could do is to create its own SDA, and”

just turn it on Russia, that that's basically the only option to get them to stop. That sounds like a great idea. For sure. Well, since Chuck and I are jaded, I think it's time for listener mail. This is beyond jaded. All right, guys, this is a nice lightweight end. Guys, for years my wife and I have had an argument over the pronunciation of the IOPIC, like when you make a movie about a person, like a biographical picture. We both been stubborn

to admit defeat. She's part of the biopic crowd, but I prefer biopic. Right. She of course claims she's right because she's a former elementary school teacher and a big study of English lit, and knows the truth blah, blah, blah. But it wasn't until Chuck said biopic in your recent Howard Hughes episode that I got the vindication emitted. Yeah. I don't care if Chuck and I are wrong. It doesn't matter all that matters, as I know I'm not alone anymore, and we'll continue with my

pronunciation, and I'll make sure to pass this down to my seven and four-year-old kids. That is from Kevin Croil in North Carolina, and I also got a really rude email from my very, I guess angry person, that I said it differently, and they were like,

a ghost should be like being wrong. I guess it is wrong. I don't even know. I never thought about it,

but I don't say biography, I say biography. So I say biopic, and I don't know, that's just how it flowed out of my mouth. So I may be wrong. I don't care. Yeah. You may be crazy. You say biopic, right? But that's just what I've always heard, and I'm so used to you saying biopic, now that's not even I think that they're both right. I think you managed to wedge it into reality. Well, maybe someday when someone writes the biography on our lives, it would make it during

a two-way biopic. Yeah. All right. Well, who is that from the nice one? That is from Kevin. Thanks, Kevin. That was very nice, and I'm glad you feel vindicated. Sorry to your wife. Although she and I share the same pronunciation. Okay. Yeah, we can all have an

“arm wrestling match one day or something. If you want to be like Kevin and right to us about”

feeling vindicated by me or Chuck or Jerry or whoever, we want to hear about it. Send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carry Brownstein and Fred Armison here. The dream of the 90s is alive in

podcast form. We're launching pod landia, a.o. rewatch. Our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people

Jonathan Chrysel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician, Amy Mann, and many more.

Kyle is going for it. You fully improvise, not just words, but a song about it. I thought you're

“all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to podlandia. A.o. rewatch on”

the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Seth Rollins, where you're doing my belt. I don't think I've ever met somebody. So exactly

“out of them like this. I am. And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great”

John Tuturo. Let's go with happiness. Delivering happiness. And many, many more. Open your free high-hard radio app, search delivering happiness with Nick Tuturo. And listen now. On Raiders of the Lost podcast, we explore cinema like no one else, including huge interviews with stars like

Ryan Gosling on Project Hail Mary. It was like the jalshard. Didn't always work, came with its own

“problems. That's what made it great. The cast of obsession. On set, there was so much magic happening”

with each scene we were putting together. Deep dives into classics like 2001 of Space Odyssey or Fight Club, plus weekly episodes on all industry news. Listen to Raiders of the Lost podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow @ Raiders of the Lost podcast, and @Tiktokpodcast Network on TikTok. This is an iHeart podcast. guaranteed human.