The Real Election Threat with Casey Newton and Renée DiResta

a lot of times people watch me at home and they'd be like, "Are you on the bear?" And I'd be like, "Well, I could see how you made that mistake." I like to throw down for a little bit of the mantra, but, you know, for me, the one problem I have is, you know, the olive oil, I'm actually used is the proper olive oil, I used to have an olive oil fountain in the house, like a chocolate fountain.

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it keeps it fresh. So head to graza.co and use TWS to get 10% off and get to cook in your next chef quality meal. Hi, how are you? Hello, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stuart, and I will be your audio guide to this week's podcast. It is TWS Day. It is March 17th. It is St. Patrick's

Day. And I am, oh, that's, it's all blue and gray. I'm in blue and gray. Does that signify anything? I'm just saying today. It probably doesn't. We are still, I guess, entering week three of our war with Iran. But I want to talk about a different threat to the

“country. The Senate this week, I believe, is going to be trying to figure out bureaucratic”

loopholes to try and get their save America act through, even though they don't really

have the votes for it because they could never pass the thresholds of filibuster and certainly

not passage. But they want to get it done because they want to introduce the safeguards to the American electorate because so many undocumented people, so many non-Americans, skewer elections so brutally, even though they don't, even though there's no evidence of it. Other than that, this is an incredibly crucial piece of legislation that must be passed. So today, what I would like this episode to be focused on, is the real threat

ironically to American democracy in our election. And that is the algorithms and social media

“platforms that push this bullshit and get it out into the electorate so that it becomes”

canon, even though it lacks the evidence for that. And so to get into that topic, we bring in experts in this field, so let's get to them now. Very excited as we talk about the real threats to the American electoral system to the American democratic system. We're delighted with our two guests today. We've got Renee Doresta. She's a associate research professor at

Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy. You always know how good something is by how

long its name is, and that's the longest name. There is also the author of invisible rule that's the people who turn lies into reality. And Casey Newton, who's the editor of platformer, and of course, you all know him as a co-host, a hard fork, which is the New York Times podcast about technology and future and hello. Hello, John. What is happening with the both, listen, the reason why we're doing this now. So I don't know if you're familiar with the save act.

It's the Save America Act. And as you know, we all that's where we live. America. And they're going to save it by voting on it. And what it's going to do is it's going to protect our electoral system and our democracy from the scourge, scourge, scourge of non-citizen voting, which, as you know, is in the, I think billions. Or either of you, and let's just start by

that most people can get behind. Voting is for American citizens. Yes. Let me ask you both now. Generally, our elections decided by American citizens. Absolutely. Yeah. So we have an agreement. We have, you and I are, we are all in agreement. So why is it? And this gets maybe to the heart of the issue. 70% of Americans support the save act because it's going to make sure that citizens vote.

“But generally citizens vote, but 50% I think, somewhere along that line, believe that undocumented”

voting is an enormous problem. And he's done in by the thousands and millions. It is, why is that? And I'll start with Renee. Yeah. So there's been rumors about that for ages. And you can look

back to, I mean, we can go back to the 2016 election. You can go prior to that. Do you basically see

these stories? We call them troops in election, rumor research. And I use the word rumor on purpose. Right? A rumor is something where it sounds like it could be true. It resonates with people. They think, oh, this might be something that is happening. They heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who saw it on the internet. Right? There's a sort of trace back to a claim that some guy said somewhere. And with this rumor of non-citizens voting, what you hear is the theory that

your vote is going to be stolen from you. Your candidate might lose because somebody who is not supposed to be doing a thing is doing that thing. So there's a sense that you might be wronged.

“And that's why it lands so hard emotionally. And if you look back, you see the same types of”

stories, the same types of tropes landing over and over and over again. You have the bust in

voter. You have the person voting with their maiden name. You have the person who is here illegally voting. These are stories that recur over and over and over again. And the reason they recur is because they seem plausible. They seem believable. And most people are not persuaded by statistics. They don't go and say, oh, you know, Kato says that this is a small problem. Heritage says this is a small problem. Brennan Center. Two conservative potatoes. Libertarian heritage is

I mentioned those on purpose. Exactly. Yes. So when you go and you look at even the Libertarian and the right-wing studies of a voter fraud, you find repeatedly that when you are looking at honest statistics, when you're looking at the actual studies of the problem, it is infinitesimally small. But when you go and you look at social media and you hear people who are sharing these stories

“that they relate to that they feel true. That's why these rumors continue to propagate.”

When we're talking about social media and those kinds of things and they propagate along that way, is that happenstance? Is that because the rumor mill or how does it propagate? Why does it propagate? How does a video of an election worker in Georgia reaching under the table to pull out a bucket of votes that is not in any way nefarious become the centerpiece of these larger conspiracies, etc. Sure. Well, you know, as Renee just pointed out, there's something really

emotional about seeing something like that on social media, right? Somebody's just pulling out a bucket of votes and it seems like something nefarious is happening here and depending on what caption, the sort of you know, agreed user might put underneath it. All of a sudden it's going to start getting that engagement, right? The algorithm is going to say, hey, this seems like it's pretty interesting. We're going to show this to a lot more people. And over time, the elites of the

the Republican Party, whoever can sort of use this to their advantage is going to say, aha, this is something that I can use to sort of make my case. And so that's that kind of, you know, the algorithms and the elites are kind of working hand in hand to spread whatever kind of

emotional rumor might serve their cause. And these causes, I mean, ultimately the aim

genuine or or disingenuous of protecting the electoral system, you would consider it to be, you know, an honorable one, you don't want. And there are times that it does it, I think. There was a study done since 1982 that there were almost 1,500 people. Right, total. Now, you could say like, well, in small elections, even one vote, two votes, three votes can make a difference. And which is true. But it's very clear that the irony of this is that the larger threat to our electoral system

and our American democracy is the manner in which social media can spread these tropes and these inaccuracies to a really much wider group of people and light these fires. And it's that the type of thing, we're utterly ignoring the actual threat to our democracy. Would that be accurate, Renee? Well, yes, the challenge is that there's not a lot you can do about that because the way that

worked on the product called the election integrity partnership where we just traced rumor after rumor after rumor and we wrote in real time what was happening, how it started, where it started, what to the best of our knowledge, what the truth was. And you're doing this, this was at Stanford University. This was when I was at Stanford. This was in 2020. We did this in 2020, which was of course the year of stopped the steel, right? Remember. And so as we would, we would trace these stories.

And in what cases describing is true, you have the influencers and the algorithms. But the third piece

of that is the crowd, right? The online community that surrounds the influencer, that believes it, that amplifies it and that moves it from platform to platform, right? People are the glue between the online platforms, just because one platform maybe has a policy that says we're going to moderate this content doesn't mean that all platforms have that first of all. And second of all, again, like I said, you can't fact check your way out of this stuff. When you try to do that,

people just feel that their voices are being suppressed. If you try to silence the rumor, right? If you, if you kind of nuke it and stop it from trending as happened occasionally in 2020, then they believe that there is, you know, they are trying to prevent you from knowing the truth.

And then that becomes kind of a second order, you know, we call it the stress and effect, right?

This idea that you are actually amplifying the theory by trying to suppress it. So one of the things

“that you have to try to do then is counter-speak against it. But the problem is, oftentimes election”

officials, they are not influencers, right? They do not have very, I mean, let's be honest. They are sometimes just male people and nurses and things and shame on them. They have other jobs. They have jobs. They have elections to run. They haven't been weaponized by dark money that goes into the system. But they've got small followings. But also there is, as they have small followings, right? They're out there. Again, they're trying to put out facts, facts do not land

against an emotional story. And the way that that rumor mill works, one influencer says it,

another one boosts it, big if true, have you heard, you know, it's viral by the time the guy with

200 followers is like, actually, let me tell you about how those ballots actually work. Let me tell you why this rumor isn't true. That guy is not going to get amplification. So unless the platform is actively trying to up-rank and surface good information, which is something they were trying to do in 2020 and no longer are, we can talk about why that is. Unless they are trying to actively up-rank good information, the good information is not making

it out there. And then the other piece of that is that the deeply distrustful crowds that have been taught to that the election is going to be stolen, right? They have heard this over and over again, are not inclined to believe the fact check or the information that the election worker is going to put out. Right. Well, we see that case in, you know, 2020 was stopped the steel and there was all this fraud and the Democrats had rigged the election and we're going to have to get the cyber

ninjas in there to figure out exactly what went wrong and it routed through Venezuela and China sent in elections and then suddenly in 2024, note, that one actually was pretty good. That one, everybody forgot to do that. That one worked pretty well and so it really does seem to be an argument of convenience. Yes, absolutely. It's an argument of convenience. I also think that another thing that this report to highlight here is just the demand for these narratives, right? In a moment in 2020

when Donald Trump had clearly lost, there was a huge demand on the right for that not to be true. Once he won in 2024, that demand sort of went away. Right. And so that energy was able to go elsewhere.

“But I think it's really important to talk about the demand side because the algorithms,”

the elite, they're super important. But as Renee said, the people are what's gluing that together and they just sort of want certain things to be true and then the media environment that we have now, they can just kind of go out and pick their own reality based on what they want. Talk about that for a moment. So if we want to think about this in sort of economic theory, you're saying that there are supplies side, I'll say misinformation. People get it wrong.

That just happens sometimes out of good faith. But the more defarious one that's been weaponized is disinformation. So what are the elements of supply side disinformation? And then we'll talk about demand side. But supply side disinformation. What would be considered the elements of that? That's where you start to see people who, again, are incentivized to seed content to try to put out plausible theories to keep hope alive. But really more importantly to to cast doubt on the integrity

“of the election. And that's what you saw a lot in 2020. The idea that you could just offer yet one”

more justification, one more reason, one more variant on a theory, one more. The reason we use rumor actually is because you don't even have to know what the intent is. It's just a story that is

foreign actors who are in the mix too. You have these agitators, these people who are in there

because they see an opportunity to advance their own cause. Donald Trump is talking about Iran. That blew me away. Because, you know, of course disinformation was a word that we couldn't say for a period of about, you know, three, four years there. But now we're talking about it again, because it was a thing that didn't fact happen. It was not particularly major or significant in 2020 or in 2024 far less than what we saw in 2016. But, you know, you do have foreign actors in

the mix. And these are bots. And so they're they're seeding the narrative with paid bots or is this the kind of thing where they talked about, you know, there's a 16 year old in Uzbekistan.

And he's being given money to invent stories that sound plausible. And then seeding the turf,

you know, Maria Reza talks about this often. The idea that a live spread seven times faster than the truth. So these are people absolutely with intention and purpose, showing the seeds of confusion and misinformation. That, that would be the supply side actor in league with the paid influencers whose profiles are boosted by algorithms. Would that be accurate? That's pretty accurate. So again, you have, you have a different, the accounts that are

content creators and the accounts that are amplifiers are not the same. The amplifiers are, this is where you see bots usually, right? And an amplifier would be the search of accounts that just click the like button or click the retweet button on Twitter, click the share button.

“And the reason is you need to have engagement in order to trigger the algorithm to share it out”

to more real people. So the reason that you have automated accounts, the reason that you can use fakes or rent networks of accounts that are used in commercial spam. The reason you see those accounts come into the on the supply side is that you need to have engagement. Something has to get those like counts up. And that's where you see those automated accounts. And then the, as you're describing, accounts that are actually writing the content or saying the thing,

you do want to have some sort of legitimacy or trust there. And that's where again, you'll see sometimes they'll be paid and sometimes they'll be an account. That's where the, the cat turds of the world will step in and I mean, I think that people sometimes underestimate with some of those folks just how ideologically motivated they actually are. Oh, I don't know. I don't underestimate

“that at all. I think they are absolutely purely ideological warriors, but are, are sometimes”

shaped by the financial incentives that go in there. They've become that. It becomes their identity. They start to earn money on it, which brings us to the point in case you know, this will, I think be kind of in your wheelhouse. Let's talk about the artist formerly known as Twitter. So, and this gets us to the crux of the irony, Elon Musk for a long time and really incredibly consistently and vehemently has pushed this idea that undocumented non-citizen voting

is rampant. It is so in the seeds of our destruction and we cannot do it. He's, he's tweeted about it. I think 1,300 times or interacted with stories about it. The irony of it all is that this guy's platform, this guy's algorithm, which he is in charge of. I see his shit on my feet all the time. I don't ever interact with it. There's no reason for it to be there. That he is a far more relevant actor in the warping of our democracy through his money and his algorithm than any measure

of undocumented non-citizen voting will ever be. Absolutely. I mean, there was a paper public in nature in February and they did a study where they had two groups and they showed one the sort of ranked algorithmic feed and then they showed one group just sort of a chronological feed and they found that people that saw the algorithmic feed on X moved further to the right than the control group. By like a very significant measure. Right. So if you're actively using X,

you are probably subconsciously moving a little bit to the right over time. And as you point out John, that is just a far greater effect than what are essentially these mythical cases of an undocumented immigrant voting in one election somewhere. Let's break that down because it's very easy to cast those questions. What his argument and I think his people's argument would be

it's well, now that we're getting uncensored material, now that the first amendment has

“primacy, people move to the right because they learn the truth. But the truth is that”

algorithm incentivizes the misinformation from the right and he designs it. Absolutely. And like

did not get as much engagement as Joe Biden's during the Super Bowl, he went back to his

“engine years and he said, "You need to re-engineer this so that my tweets are getting more”

prominent." And so they did. And so that is the reason why even if you don't follow the guy and you're using X all the time, you're going to see his views which contain so many just your various like right-wing ideas and conspiracies. Like he built the algorithm this way. And like if you're like me and Renee and you've been covering this stuff for a decade, in 2020

conservatives were holding hearings saying platforms must be ideologically neutral. You must never

suppress any sort of speech. Why aren't the right and the left should be equal on these platforms? That's for today. Exodus are right-wing political projects will stop. Look, the algorithm is killing us. The algorithm that the way that it incentivizes the hostility and weaponizes ideology and all these, it's not right. But the antidote, the antidote is information. And that's where ground news comes in. Ground news. It's this website map.

It's designed to give readers a better way. It needs your way to navigate the news. It pulls together every article about the same news story from all outlets all over the world and puts them in one place. And not not incentivize for like the worst, most hostile, most partisan take. It tells you where it's coming from. You, you can see starkly in black and white how these different organizations and algorithms are manipulating the

information that we get. They show you how reliable the source isn't who's fun to get. Who's finding it? Followed the money. Know who's behind the headline. Oh, who is this Rupert Murdoch fella? He seems delightful. He seems to have a somewhat pointed view of the world. Telling you, man. The Nobel Peace Center has even mentioned the ground news in the next little way to stay informed. Noble Peace Center. That's, I think, the one that Trump started.

I think it, the 3D Prince Nobel Peace Prize is just hands amount. The platforms independently operated supported by its subscribers, so they stay independent and they stay mission driven.

“They don't get sucked into this slot. If you want to see the full picture, go to ground news.”

They can help you through the noise and get to the heart of the news. Go to groundnews.com/stored. Subscribe for 40% off the unlimited access vantage subscription. Just count available only for a limited time. This brings the price down to like $5 a month. That's groundnews.com/stored. Or scan the QR code on the screen. Now, Renee, that they actually came after your group pretty hard. Yeah. Tell the story of that. So,

your group is studying how these things work. And by the way, later on, we'll get into the balance

between, because I do think there are first amendment concerns with a lot of these different things.

And that's maybe why it makes it more difficult to do that. But Renee, what happened with the Stanford Research Group that you were a part of? Yeah. So, we ran that project in 2020. And what we did in 2020 was we were tracking these election rumors. And we had a, we said a tipline. Right. And we sent an email to the RNC. We sent an email to the DNC. We sent it to endWACPA. Our P, bunch of these civil society groups saying, hey, we want to help. Because one of the things

we can do is we can trace where rumors come from where they're going. And we can try to get fact checks out. And per the point about the election officials, they have an election to run. Their job is not to be sitting on social media trying to triage and figure out if rumors are

disinformation. You know, this was the first major election since Russia in 2016. We thought we were

going to see a lot of state actor stuff. That was one of the reasons why we did the project. I turned out that most of the rumors about election theft, most of the rumors about the illegitimization, most of the stuff trying to suppress the vote, came from the sitting president of the United States, which we wrote about, you know, that's reality. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, right? So, so we write about that. And as we go through this project, there's

four different research centers that are participating in this 120 undergraduate and, you know, graduate students that are the main analysts on this project. And we have a JIRA ticketing system. If you've ever called in with a, you know, customer service hotline, somebody like makes a ticket for you and that ticket kind of goes around the, you know, the organization and the building

“and they like, you know, different people will come on your ticket. That's how we traced these things.”

So, what is the attempt that you're trying to map? What, what are you mapping? Yes, so we're tracking rumors as they go viral and then we're trying to get them to people who can respond to them. So, that might be the platform. Sometimes we would tag a platform in and say, hey, Facebook, OK, Twitter, you have this thing that's going viral on your platform. It violates

ticketing tags. They would say, thank you very much for looking. And about 60% of the time, actually,

they would do nothing. 30% of the time, they would slap a label on it, saying, this content is disputed. You know, Donald Trump would say something about mail and ballots being fraudulent. They would say this content is disputed. Get the facts about mail and ballots and they would link you out to an information site about 10% of the time they would take something down. They would decide that it rose to the threshold of actually actioning it with a takedown. So, in the course of the full

period of the election, we sent about 3,000 URLs in total, right? So, 3,000, that's actually

“very important that number. So, we also communicated with state and local election officials.”

They had access to our tip line. So, a local election official in Kentucky, for example, sent in a tip saying, there is an account pretending to be an election worker. I don't know who this person is. They're claiming that they're destroying ballots. That was the kind of thing that we could then go and look at. See, hey, does this look like it's foreign? Does this look domestic? Is this something that a platform should be tagging? Just like a triage center. You're like an election

observer, but rather than existing kind of in the practical world, you're doing this virtually. In the online world and virtually, and trying to point out inconsistencies and things that may be troublesome to be investigated. Correct. It seems a bubble. And so, fast forward to, so we did this project, by the way, there was a 200-page report that sat on the internet after it was all done.

“We wrote about it and we made a table where after the election was over, we did a data poll on Twitter”

and we pulled in the total number of tweets of the most viral election rumors. Things that everybody has heard of. Dominion, right? That Dominion machines were flipping votes. That there were Italian, yeah, these Italian space laser theories, right? That the Sharpie markers in Arizona had changed ballots. So, the top 10 most viral rumors that everybody saw, we added up the number of

tweets, it was 22 million tweets. Jim Jordan, 22 million. 22 million viral tweets, and this was

the number that we put out. They're just showing the scope and the scale of how much stuff had been making the rounds on these very, very viral stories. Jim Jordan, Jim Jordan is a congressman from Ohio, very respected. Extremely honest man. Extremely honest, legendary. There's not a piece of legislation that has passed in American the last 20 years that does not bear that man's name. As a co-sponsor, couldn't have a grander reputation. Sportscoach, sportscoach really,

really cares about the youth. There's some issues about his time as a wrestling coach that maybe slightly on it, but has completely turned it around and is now a paragon of American

“sensibility and legislation, continue. Also, happened to be an election to nire, all right?”

So many girls, so the election deniers, you know, the house flips and Jim Jordan gets his gavel and starts this committee called the, I forget the proper name. We just short-hand is the weaponization committee, but it's the subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee to investigate the weaponization of the federal government. He decides there has been a Biden censorship regime, and even though the agencies that we engaged with during the 2020 election

were run by Trump appointees, again, run by Trump appointees, that despite the fact that we were talking to state and local election officials, and occasionally when we did speak to federal government agencies, like when the Iranians ran an influence operation pretending to be the proud boys, we did talk to the FBI about that because our team saw that early on. We did speak to the FBI. Trump appointees, you know, but these are real. These are real. These are real things that are happening.

The Iranians literally tried to pretend that they actually did that. Yes, and Trump was very upset about this like a week ago. That was one of the justifications apparently for why we just, you know, bombed Iran. But as we're doing all of this work, as we're doing all of this work, we're talking to the DHS system occasionally also. As this is all happening, Jim Jordan gets his

gavel two years later and accuses us of censoring 22 million tweets that we were part of a

vast plot by the Biden regime to steal the election by censoring 22 million tweets. So again, they claim that we that that number that we added up after the fact of the things that everybody saw, they claim was really the stuff that we censored. They're saying that and forgive me if this is, but I'm just going to try and think of their theory, the case. Is their theory of the case and case you weigh in on this as well? Yeah. That by pointing that out that you are in league

that you are intimidating these social media platforms to go through and call things you consider misinformation or disinformation. And by doing so, you are unleveling the playing field.

thing to actually have that conversation about the 22 million number was published in March of 2021.

So long after January 6th even, right? So long after long after that would have had an impact.

“The way that platforms engage with researchers, which I think is worth the public understanding,”

is that platforms will reach out and then will periodically say, "Hey, we're considering doing a policy about this. What do you think?" And then you can weigh in on that policy as an academic researcher who works in a particular field. This is not a secret, right? Twitter had a council of 60 different civil society organizations. We were not on that council by the way, but Twitter had civil society organizations council and so whenever they were writing a policy about hate speech or

about harassment or whatever their, you know, that issue that those councils dealt with, they would reach out to those entities and they would say, "Hey, we're going to launch a new policy about this. You guys have an opportunity to provide some feedback." And the reason for this is because back in 2016, 2015 timeframe, nobody on the outside was engaging with them at all, right? All of their policies were developed entirely internally. And that didn't make people happy either,

because then it was just one guy, basically, the CEO of the company, Zuckerberg, Dorsey,

whoever it was at the time, making that determination. And so the idea behind coming up with councils or reaching out to academics is that you have an opportunity to say your piece. And again, as I mentioned, just because you say something, doesn't mean that they listen to you, which is why when we published that report and we said, "We sent in 3,000 tweets." We were absolutely transparent about this. Again, it's sitting up there on the internet for two years. And we also said, they ignored

they did not act on 60% of those 3,000 tweets, right? So what you see from that, again, is they did not feel pressured to do anything in response to what we were saying or what we were suggesting. They took things under advisement and they occasionally acted, but more often than not, they did nothing. Only when it rose to a certain standard. Right. And most of the time, they put a label on things.

“And that I think is also important to understand. So we were essentially scapegoated because”

Jim Jordan and the election deniers needed to come up with some justification after the fact for how the 2020 election was stolen. Yes. The irony of investigating you for weaponization was weaponization. So that goes. But Casey. Yeah. Well, I mean, it absolutely was. You know, they, you know, they wound up shutting down the center at Stanford where Renee worked or at least, you know, prevented them from doing the kind of research that they were doing. You know, they're filing

lawsuits against undergraduates who, like, dared to study what was happening during the 2020 election. So the weaponization was truly coming from inside the house. But also like, I really do not want to give these guys too much credit and say, like, you know, there was some like principle that they had to defend. Like, if you've watched these hearings, it truly is just about creating a spectacle and manufacturing this sense of grievance

that will then enable Republicans to take further steps to disenfranchise American voters. Like, it really is that simple. Well, let's see if, though, if we can play devil's advocate and try and figure out in the interest of fairness, what is the glimmer of truth within whatever it is that they're using to do the weaponization. So let's go back to, I don't think you would say that the culture of the social media platforms had a liberal slant to it. I think we all

probably agree it did. If you think about Facebook and Twitter and those companies, they are steeped in probably at least an aesthetic amongst the workers that leans maybe liberal. Would that be fair? I think so. Or did. I mean, I think like the most liberal that they got was like if you looked at the content policies they had, they were like steeped in the tradition of human rights. You know, like they believed that hate speech was bad

“and that you should try to stop people from seeing that if they were part of a protected group.”

But also in part of in the culture when much more people were on the ramparts about the usage of certain words or various things, I'm just trying to get at like the psychology of where this is.

So Elon, they recognize that these are powerful tools. So we're going to walk back a little bit

just to get to kind of the genesis of this. Mark Zuckerberg does his Zuckerbox spends $400 million ostensibly to beef up resources. This is during COVID. So maybe they're putting up plexiglass on things. They're getting people more access. But he has the misfortune of spending $400 million on an election Donald Trump lost. Right. So that also becomes part of the narrative.

spends all this money. He doesn't do it ideologically. Combine that with then Musk, who is having during COVID and ideological rebirth, getting in touch with his South African roots, if you will. And we get into this idea of the Twitter files. He buys it because he's so disgusted by their censorship. And to be fair, during COVID, there was information that the government put pressure on the social media groups to remove and that information they asked to be removed

did not necessarily turn out to be wrong. Yeah. Would that be fair? Yeah. There was definitely pressure and just sort of like, you know, things like government said related to like, you know, masking and how is the virus transmitted? There were things that the government said that turned down not to be true. I think it's also one thing on that on that on that front. There's the reality and then again, there's the exaggeration. Yes. I'm trying to get to the reality as well, but

go ahead. Yeah. So there is, there is, so there's a court case that you're possibly familiar with. Right. The Murphy V. Missouri case, Missouri Biden, where you see this litigated and it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court to explain very briefly just that the genesis of the case in the background. So two election deniers, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed.

“No, I think it's really important again. No, I don't know. It's just so wild to like two election”

deniers, he had turned generals. Missouri and Louisiana, one of whom is now the sitting senator of Missouri, Eric Schmidt, right? So, let's, let's be, look, I think it's really, again, I think getting at the motivation is something that I feel like mainstream media dropped the ball on candidly, and I'm going to be angry about that for a long time. Understand, as you should be. But so they file this lawsuit alleging that again, there is a Biden censorship regime,

which somehow started in the Trump administration, but holding that aside, that that they they eventually stopped focusing on the election because they have to deal with the inconvenient reality that at the time, these appointees were Trump appointees. So what they do to get around that in convenient reality is they alleged the deep state, right? The unfalseifiable claim of the deep state. If you worked there at the time and something went inconveniently for Trump,

it was the deep state, but then holding that aside, we're just going to jump ahead into the future and now it's Biden during COVID. And so you do see, again, you do see the government reaching out

and communicating with the platforms. Now, the government has first amendment rights and the

government communicates with the platform as well. Now, very clearly, did the government under Trump

“also reach out to the, yes, in other words, is that something that happened 100% across the board?”

Except so that's an important thing to remember. Right. And they're still doing it, right? They're still reaching out today, complaining about platform moderation of ice-related content, right? So, again, platforms and governments have had back and forth. This tension for, since since platforms have existed, right? And not to put too fine, a point on it is, but in all the complaints about Zuckerberg being intimidated by Biden, Donald Trump threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg if he ever did

anything like that again. So, if we're ever going to be talking about government intervention and intimidation to a social platform, let's be fair that it's one thing for the government to reach out. It's another thing for the president of the United States to say, and I will put you in jail. Yeah. Imagine if Joe Biden had said, "I'm going to jail Elon Musk if I lose the election," right? Like, you know, conservatives would have lost their minds.

So, and in 2018, you also saw threats by Trump in an executive order, even, to try to revoke platform liability protection, right? So, platforms have liability protection.

That's that rule, too, third. CDH230. Yeah.

Two-thirty, yes, yes. Yes. So, what happens in this lawsuit is that the attorney's general of Missouri and Louisiana, Sue, with a judge, I'm currently being sued in front of that judge. So, what? What? Well, Stephen Miller sued me in front of that judge. We can talk about that after all. Yes. Wait. Because this is a machine, you understand it. Cool, Stephen Miller. That's Stephen Miller. Yeah, yeah, yes, yes.

Dead eyes, Stephen Miller. Yes. Stephen Miller that walks by plants and they die. That's Stephen Miller. Yes. It's an honor, but yes. Wow. Wow. All right. We'll get into that later. Yes. So, he don't. Don't let me forget that. They pick this judge, right? They pick this judge. And they file this lawsuit. And they alleged that the Biden administration did what's called

job owning. So, again, because the government has first amendment rights, the government can

“communicate with the platforms. The question is, does it rise to the level of coercion?”

Does it rise to the level of the government saying, for example, nice platform. You've got their shame if anything happened to it, if you don't do this. Or if I have to jail you, if you provide this adequately, hypothetically. And so they do all these depositions, right? And they're

agents. Because what they're trying to find is evidence that the government was secretly

demanding that platforms take down content. And what they see, what they do encounter, are they have these emails from, for example, Rob Flarity, the White House Digital Director,

“where he is sending emails saying, like, what the hell happened here? You need to explain yourself.”

If you actually dig in, a lot of those emails that become very notorious are Rob Flarity, asking about the White House's own Instagram account. So, again, you have the grain of truth, where the White House is occasionally communicating with the platforms using strong language. But the stuff that they really blow up, the stuff that they really make, you know, these huge media moments, this is the Twitter files and the whole thing. Right, if you actually kind of

delve down into it, what you find is that it's like the Twitter files, literally they were taking emails and cutting them in half and pretending the top half of the email said something it didn't. So, it's just the most incredibly dishonest misrepresentation of the actual evidence as they walk through these, uh, these cases. And this is reflected then in the Supreme Court finding, which is that

“the judge that they kind of cherry pick in Louisiana says, this is the biggest censorship effort.”

The world has ever seen issues in injunction, actually issues in injunction, um, you know, this is very broad spectrum injunction saying the government can't possibly talk to platforms. This becomes a problem, the fifth circuit court of appeals, which is very conservative, actually walks back that injunction, which is a remarkable thing to see. It eventually makes it up to Scotus, Amy Coney Barrett writes the opinion and she says,

there are clearly erroneous findings by the lower court. The evidence just doesn't stand up here and she tosses it for standing because what she says is that none of the plaintiffs in the case, for example, Jay Bautucharia, right, who is now the, um, what does he, she's the CDC, had it the mess. CDC had yes. I can use a girl chairs with these guys in the health officials these days, but so the, uh, so NIH had CDC had wherever his current role is, uh, both, um, he is then, uh,

he is, he, you know, he accuses the administration of censoring him, but there's not a single email in which the White House so much as mentions him, and so Amy Coney Barrett tosses this back,

tosses it for standing and says the lower courts have these erroneous findings and, and so it's basically

kind of, you know, kick back down. But that's the kind of thing you get from the soy latte drink and justice is this, Amy Coney Barrett, if I see her anymore with the little kitten ear hat and the resist signs, I'll lose my mind. Uh, Casey, this points to a really interesting dichotomy. Yeah. The difference between the court of social media and the court. Yeah. And you find often that a lot of these, uh, weaponized complaints and all these things don't bear,

let's let's go back to the, uh, 2020 election. None of their complaints with stood the scrutiny of courts with stood the scrutiny of bodies that have evidentiary standards. But in many respects,

“that's not really what matters here is it? No, I mean, when you are just a, you know, browsing your”

social media feed, your evidentiary standard is this, is does this feel true to me? Does this justify whatever I thought before I opened the feed? If so, I'm going to share it. And I think what's really scary about that is that the particular kinds of things that we're talking about today are being used as pretext to disenfranchise American voters, right? Like that's the ballgame. Do we get to pick our leaders or not? Well, talk about that for a moment because the idea is so this is not benign.

No. The idea of just saying like, oh, people need to present ID on its surface sounds wildly reasonable, but underneath it are a lot of issues like women who did not change their, you know, made a name to their married name would have to then somehow find their birth certificate and go get a passport. Like there's a lot of hoops to this. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I saw one study that said

that there may be as many as 69 million women who took their spouse's name and don't have a

birth certificate matching their current legal name. You know, women may be likely are on balance to vote for Democrats then Republicans. And so if you're a Republican and you're pushing this, like you probably don't care that married women may be less likely to vote in the next election, right? We also know this is probably going to affect a lot of trans voters. If you're a Republican, you'd be happy if probably if no trans voters voted in the next election, right? So when

you look at the groups that are affected here, it is just generally people that Republicans could stand to live without ever voting again. And let's just to put a fine point out, the reason why we're talking about this today is the Republicans are considering blowing up the filibuster,

to pass this act that's going to raise identification standards so that only American citizens vote, which does not appear to be a problem of any substance, while protecting the actual mechanism that seems to be distorting American democracy. And I want to get into and Renee, I'll ask you this because when you can say like, well, what's the game for them? The game is, let's look at Elon Musk's net worth by creating this algorithm on this platform by donating $350

million to Donald Trump and Republicans. His net worth has skyrocketed and the AI tech guys,

they've all benefited in a wildly disproportionate manner through their coziness to this

“administration, would that be a fair statement? That is a fair statement. It's about maintaining power, right?”

One of the things with social media is that they are, and their tools have reached their tools of persuasion, their tools for organizing and gathering and activating. And when you have the capacity, particularly with something like Twitter, which is very, very good at activation, you are controlling an incredibly potent infrastructure. One of the things that happened after Elon bought Twitter is that you saw influential accounts on the left leave, right? And so there's

been this fragmentation to a bunch of different platforms. You've got, please, guy, you've got threads, but there hasn't really been any kind of cohesion. There's no real competitor, even as of now. Yeah. There is no competitor in that regard, particularly for things like breaking news or shaping information in the moment. Their Instagram is great. You can grow very large accounts, very large

“reach. There's a lot of political influencers on threads who are reaching left-leaning audiences,”

but it is not the same type of algorithm and just not the same structural function in the political discourse. And that is the thing that is significantly different. And in terms of, I mean, we're talking about every one of these guys. And that's the other thing. It's not just the algorithm that skews our democracy. It's the money. And since citizens united, I've just got a little list here. Elon Musk donated 250 plus million, right? And it's gained 234 billion pesos,

paid $40 million for a Melania documentary and another $40 million, probably advertising and everything else, cut down on the Washington Post. He's up, you know, 15 billion dollars. Zuckerberg,

whose Zuckerbox was, you know, so crucial to stealing the election, did an investment pledge of,

you know, and even said, you saw the meeting when he said to Donald Trump, how much should I say, I'm giving? Yeah. All of these guys are, are they mercenaries? Are they just closing up to an administration, or are they ideological brethren now with them? So this is really important to

“talk about because I think the true ideology is capitalism, right? Like you go back into the 2010s,”

most of the people that you met with the exception of Musk, they were essentially good liberals. Although, of course, you know, Musk sort of had his dislocations with liberal causes as well. And shouldn't we have complained about them then, though? Shouldn't we have just because we thought their aesthetic and their mentality was that shouldn't we have been complaining about their algorithms and their influence and their money then? I think like going back to rural lot of

complaints about algorithms that these places were increasingly becoming these centralized, like centers of speech that did not have a lot of democratic oversight or control. Like Mark Zuckerberg has total control over meta, even his own board doesn't get a say, right? And so all these guys give a lot of money to democratic presidents and democratic causes. And in the end, they just don't get that much for it, right? Joe Biden tries to break up meta. He tries to break up Amazon.

He creates various regulatory problems for Elon Musk. And at the end of the day, these guys are transactional. The higher leaner con. Yes, the audacity of that, right? Then Trump comes along and you can just agree to build part of his ballroom and he gives you whatever you want. That's a very recognizable character to a business person, right? It's like we can just kind of strike a deal. So that is what you're seeing across American politics now. It's just a bunch of

oligarchs who've grown impossibly rich and powerful who are just able to buy what they want.

And protecting the term, where do you put Sam Altman and all this? He's another one that he just seems to be kind of this weird character that shapeshifts for whatever the moment called, you know, he'll stand up and say, and Thropic is doing the right thing. And then vacuum up their contracts when DOD cuts them loose. He is a shapeshifter. Like when you talk to people who have

telling you what you want to hear. It's why he's actually quite charming in person. Politically,

he has probably been a little bit more like liberally aligned. Like me, he's a gay guy. And I think that's where his natural sympathies are. But if you ask him about Trump today, he's incredibly careful. You know, I asked him on stage about Trump last year and he said, well, you know,

“I think he's really, really thoughtful about AI. It was news to me, John, but that's what that's what he told me.”

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"So how do you support Donald Trump?" Who clearly has said he wants to censor content he disagrees with. He threatens to throw Mark Zuckerberg and Joe, and he said to me, "Flat out. All that's just bluster." But now you see they're weaponizing that censorship for FCC approval and all kinds of other things. Is he just utterly full of shit? And he himself has said, "He himself has said, those people are treasonous and should be throwing a jail for saying things he disagrees with."

So he's just utterly full of shit. Yeah, this is a man who when he took over Twitter, he started banning journalists because they put their Instagram bio in their Twitter bio, you know, he rewrote an algorithm to privilege his own speech over that of others. He banned people from Twitter for publishing the whereabouts of his private jet. Like, the list goes on and on.

The guy has never cared about free speech except in so far is that benefits him. His own speech.

“Yeah. René, you were going to say something. I was going to say I think it's really important to”

understand the word censorship, not a something that free speech activists on the web have cared about this for a very, very long time, right? I mean, we saw the freedom of speech, not freedom of reaching that sits on top of his content moderation policy was something is a raskin and I came up within 2018, right? That argument that you should be able to maximize content. You should want as much to stay up as possible. And then at that point, you think about like, how do you

tell you decide what to curate? How do you decide what to preferentially amplify? When you have a crisis like COVID, it is not bad for a platform to decide, hey, maybe we should in response to search queries have a little knowledge panel up at the top that returns something from the CDC, right? Because people are looking for accurate information. They need perfectly reasonable decisions to uprank stuff. Did they take too much down? Yes, you can make the argument that they absolutely

“did. No, I think that's fair. I think they did. I mean, and I think they would even maybe”

cop to that now. I think that they would say that, I think that they would say that, again, when you get to certain types of content moderation policies, like the lab leak hypothesis that became such a thing, I thought that was a stupid one. I thought that was a very dumb policy. But I also want to say, I also want to say, because I think people don't realize it, that was a meta-only policy. Twitter didn't do that. YouTube didn't do that. Only meta had that policy,

and they had it for three months. So it sounds like a thing that was in place for two years, and it actually wasn't. So when you actually look at, and I encourage anybody to do this, because the one thing is the policy documents are there. You can go look at them, right? That aspect of the transparency thing is there. What you see from Elon, though, is that he borrows the moral weight of the word censorship while emptying it of moral content.

And that's why I think. Mars. Mars. Oh, Mars. Oh, Mars.

And nobody would kill me. Casey and I were on Cara's pod together when Elon started arguing that his

“AI had the right to notify children, right? And then if you said that his AI didn't have the right”

to notify children, I just want to say that again, that you were censoring him, that that was an act of censorship. And at the same time, he in Turkey just took down the opposition in Twitter, completely under the guise of like, hey, that's the law that they have, so I just have to follow that. Like, what are you going to do? Yeah, it's all nonsense. So it becomes a shield, right? It becomes a mental stop word, where the minute you say that word, people hear it, and they stop thinking about what

is it he's actually justifying with that word? He used it to justify the notification of children. The notification, the non-consensual notification of women. Now that that's based on his AI or something, right? Yeah, I'm a AI model that teaches. Yes. And so if that kind of, you know, if we say that moderation of that kind of content is censorship, then that concept has just lost all meaning, right? And that's where you can't you can't cry free speech absolutism and and make

that claim in my opinion. I also want to get into there's a distinction here, and I think it's a really important. There's a difference between free speech and algorithmic speech. algorithmic speech is ultra-processed. And I generally do the distinction of, you know, Twitter speech is free speech in the way that Doritos are food. Like, it's not really, it's processed. You know, the free speech isn't we let everybody know when you're tweet and we incentivize them to hostility and outrage,

and we monetize their ability to argue. And the algorithm is not free speech. It's just not. It puts it through an opaque process that elevates certain speech. Speech that you deem more important or speech that your business model deems more monetarily beneficial. And so how do we draw the distinction between this idea of free speech and the algorithmic speech, which is a perversion

“of speech? Well, I think it's also important for people to understand that on a social media platform”

the first amendment right is the platforms. It is not the users. It is the platforms first amendment

right to decide what it editorially curates. That's what algorithmic curation is. This has been reinforced legally over and over and over again. This is why ironically, the conservatives lose their must carry law cases, right? That is why platforms are allowed to take things down. And on the flip side, it is why, you know, again, it allows platforms to leave everything up or take everything down. It allows them to pendulum swing in accordance with new leadership coming in,

right? Because the first amendment right on a private platform belongs to the platform that is to the company that is making the editorial curation decision. It doesn't belong to the user. And this is a thing that frustrates a lot of people. This is where you, you know, you hear the complaints that the platform is censoring me. In reality, the platform is deciding what to up-rank, what to down-rank, and how to set the policies. And by the way, if Elon Musk, if, you know,

if somebody came after him for, you know, whatever it is, downloading something or constricting

that thing or making those decisions, the Republicans would be the first one to say, "Hey,

that's his platform." That's his first amendment right. Yeah, this was why they started to

“avoid regulation, right? To have these self-regulatory mechanisms, that's what all those councils”

and, you know, the periodic outreach to academics, the periodic outreach to government, that's what all of those things were. It was the, "Hey, you guys, you know, you can weigh and you can give us some feedback so that it doesn't look like we're making these decisions you in a lot early." And then in a way, you could argue that, um, for, you know, for a time, I think that they were trying to be good citizens, maybe, maybe I'm giving them too much

good advice. No, they've been unleashed with what they consider animal spirits now. I would assume, in case you won't be going to say. You know, the thing that I just want, uh, people to remember whenever they're looking at a feed, whether it is acts, Instagram, anything that is ranked in this way, you are staring at something that has been engineered to hypnotize you. And what, you know what I mean? Like, and what hypnotizes you, conflict, outrage,

weird stuff, sexist stuff, stuff that's going to produce a really strong emotional response. So what I try to train myself to do, and I struggle with this too, is like, when I see something online that makes me feel a very strong emotion, that is the moment that I'm trying to be the most skeptical. That is what I'm saying. Wait, who is posting this? Why are they posting it? What

are they trying to get me to feel? And that is the kind of core tension that you're just always

going to experience when you're looking at that like this. So as we as we sort of break it down there, you know, the Republican focus is on this so-called Save America Act, which is going to safeguard

of our speech, combined with the unceasing amount of money that can be thrown into the pot by these new, gilded age, whatever they are, you know, robber barons. How do we find our way? Is it, you know,

“if we take the analogy of algorithms to process food, is there an ingredient's list of speech?”

How do we label that, you know, community notes, I think, does a very nice, I actually agree with that. But I, I also think community notes is still weaponized politically. I would like to see a community note for good faith and bad faith. I'd like to see some kind of good faith, bad faith, like the way they do in restaurants in New York City. If you see a sea in the window, you are not eating their soup. What are some of the, are there tools that can be in this arena for us?

I mean, to me, I think the sort of fast food analogy is a really good one. But like the solution

to McDonald's is not like be really careful inside the McDonald's and always try to order the

salad. It's don't go to McDonald's too much. And I think we need a slow food movement for the media. The good news is I think we already have one. I think podcasts are actually a pillar of this slow food movement when you hear a, you know, three people talking about something for an hour. You're probably going to get a richer and more nuanced picture. You really haven't listened to this

“podcast much. That is, that is not my milieu. I think I did a lot of good here, John.”

But newsletters are also part of this, right? Not every newsletter. But I think there's a lot of like really smart people that are just kind of like sharing their thoughts and this like very long form way. So I just think we need to find other strategies like that. The strategy is not what will make Instagram better because I just think that's like probably a losing it. Oh, that's interesting. We're going to do agree that that's, you know, the idea of kind of urging them to become better citizens

is not going to be bare any fruit. I think people have been trying to do it for a decade now. I feel a little bit discouraged on that front too. You know, I have kids. My oldest is 12 and YouTube is there, man. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, no, we really are. I mean, it's not, I feel like the cusp is like fourth grade. Now it's like nine. Oh, yeah, you know, it's not, he's not on social media. But, you know, you see these kids, they realize that like they can turn Google Docs into a chat app

because everybody's on a Chromebook. And then they can take a YouTube link, throw it into Google Docs. And it'll play embedded in Google Docs. And you're like fighting with your kid to

“not go far ahead of a shot. You're like trying to make your kid like maybe you should pay attention”

and math instead of watching some degenerate streamer, right? You know, you know, with kids,

you always feel like you're the Iranian regime and there if you get. Yeah, they just get around

everything. Oh, I mean, the reason I, the reason I was thinking about this is Casey was talking though is I just, you know, you try to emphasize like make good decisions, right? The, you know, look, I'm not going to, I can't, I can't, I can't keep him off it, right? I can say like, I'm not going to let you have a social media account. I understand you're going to want to YouTube. Let me explain to you where some of the stuff comes from. Because a lot of, a lot of what's

really interesting with with middle schoolers is like meme culture for us in 2016 is so normalized for them. A lot of the stuff, even like Manispere content, it's just so in the water at this point, it's just there. Does that help it lose its effect in some respects? Like when it first comes out, it's novel. Like, look, this is a relatively new form of communication and television and radio created disruption. Hell, the printing press created disruption. Everybody thinks, oh, the printing

press haven't, and that ushered in the Enlightenment. It really didn't. It ushered in 200 years play. There's more, killing, killing people and going, you know, burning witches. Are we in a period of adjustment where your kids won't be affected in the same way? Because it's native to them. I think they, I think that they know that it's not good. I think that, you know, for a lot of them, they don't want social media. They're not looking for it. I used to hear this. We would have

high school students over to Stanford actually fair bit. And there would actually be a lot of high school students who are like, I just don't want to be on it. I just don't see the point. I just, I don't feel good about myself when I spend hours scrolling a feed. And so I don't do it anymore. Right. And so do hear a little bit of that. You know, and nothing is more humbling than having your five-year-old say, is that a no-mom or is that a you're distracted on your phone? No.

Great. How is it that they always see right through us? How is it? I made that about them.

Right. Yeah. My kids are 12, 9 and 5. You know, and the five-year-old recognizes that, sometimes she's getting a distraction response as opposed to an actual response. And they,

And it's very humbling moment. You know, realizing that you were just as addicted, probably more so. They are. So I think that, is it, is it normalized? I think I struggle with how do I, knowing what I know. I mean, this is, you know, this is my job as to look at the worst stuff on the internet. But, how do you keep your kids away from it? Or at least keep it from penetrating. But I think, and I want to ask you, you know, Casey, you talked about sort of that relating it to the slow food

movement. And, and I've seen things like that or formative. And they always become New York Times style section columns.

Yeah. But they never actually become ubiquitous within the culture. And I wonder, are we thinking about it the wrong way? Because in some respects, this is a battle. And what I see a lot on the left is, we got, that guy's given misinformation. So we've got to stop that. Or we've got to take that guy out. And I always view it very differently, which is no, you fight information with information.

“And you have to fight it as tenetiously. You know, I've been locked in battles with it. You know,”

I remember when we were trying to do Pact Act for, it was a burn pit bill for veterans. You would think, you know, who's going to be against that. But there was a very strong group of weaponized right-wing influencers who spread misinformation about that bill. And we could have gone the root of you've got to take this down. You've got to put a community note. But what we did is we went right at them as tenetiously as we could. And is there a model in that? You know, it's been shocking to me

that it's malpractice in terms of social media companies that nobody has created a viable competitor yet for Twitter. Like that blows my mind. And people are trying, like, blue skies trying, threads is trying. I think these networks get really entrenched and they're difficult to disrupt. You know, what you just said, it made me think of like what Gavin Newsom is doing. I thought that's been very effective. Yeah. I mean, I think people have like, like, a lot of

different feelings about it. But you cannot deny that the guy is like down in the trenches and he's fighting the fight on the terms that Trump has created. And I do think it has worth, you know, someone doing that to kind of see what happens. I wrote this article. I think it was, I wrote it actually. I mean, candidly, it was after Stanford shut down the internet observatory

“and I was pissed. But it was, it was an article basically saying, like, you have to fight.”

I mean, for the point, right? It was, there was such a capitulation on that front where what happened when Steven Miller sued us and all the subpoenas came down. Oh, yeah. Wait, I forgot about that. Let's get a look. But in all the hubbub, I forgot that the undead has filed a lawsuit against Renee. Talk to us a little bit about what? Why? Well, it's pending litigation. So I can't go into the details. But it's, I mean, I mean, the basics I can cover, which it basically is the same lawsuit.

It alleges that we, so they found a plaintiff. Somebody would never heard of, never, you know,

never talked about, but she lives in that district. So that's how they get their judge rate. But we, they alleged that in our communication with the platforms, when we said, for example, gateway pundit wrote a false story. If we tagged it, a gateway pundit wrote a lot of false stories in the 2020 election. I'm just going to say that. Kind of kind of daily pundits thing.

“That's, that's what, yeah. But as they said that that was us acting as like, you know,”

basically de facto agents of the government, right? That we were, they alleged that DHS was secretly puppet mastering us to do it. And so we were violating the civil rights of the people that we talked about or that we wrote about or that we flagged or that we talked to platforms about. I mean, this is going to get dismissed eventually. This is such a stupid theory that it makes no sense at all. But the point is to tie you up in legal bills for three years and to shut you up.

Because again, like I said, I can't really go into the details of it. Just had a curiosity, though. Yeah. I guarantee you, Stephen Miller and DHS are in touch with those platforms. Directly. I want to present, yes, absolutely there. They don't even hide it. So wouldn't that be somewhat of a defense? Well, John, you're assuming that like hypocrisy matters. You have to, I mean, again, like you said before, right, eventually the courts come down in the realm of reality. But in

the meantime, the way that the, the way that they institutions, this is the point I'm trying to make, the way that the institutions decide whether to persist is in the court of public opinion. Do they feel pressure? Do they feel like you're going to constantly get, you know, are they going to be constantly sued? Are they going to be constantly harassed? Are people going to be constantly complaining about the university? Is there going to be reputational harm? Is there going to be reputational

damage? And that is what ultimately makes a lot of these institutions decide that the best

linker them to do is to shut up and say nothing. It is the wrong approach. It has been the wrong

is a foundationally different shift because they're hearing from their PR people who were trained

in the 1990s era of crisis comms or comms that you shut up and you let the media cycle move past. And they don't understand that there's no such thing as like the media cycle and the age of social media when they can just, you know, kick it back up again once they've made you a character in a cinematic universe. And there's no such thing as a frictionless existence. This idea that they think if they just make themselves small enough they can live in a frictionless existence is ridiculous

because what you end up making yourself is a tasteless Pablom so inoffensive that it serves no one and does nothing. Yes. Casey, maybe you have a sense of this. Yes. How is it that? And I don't think there's any question that this is a bio-engineered product that is designed to escape whatever it is that is self-protective within the human brain to continue it is monetizing your attention and your life. They care about nothing. It is a parasite while it can be viable and good.

It is nefarious in its intent and monetizing its intent. How the hell is a product that

powerful that dangerous go utterly unregulated for any of its effects and how do these companies

“escape any liability? It's a great question and I think there has been a lot of progress lately”

actually in trying to shift that discussion. I would say that prior to 2020 we didn't really think of these products in the same way that you would think about other regulated goods like alcohol or tobacco and people try to pressure them to make different sort of content moderation decisions and well maybe the algorithm worked a little bit differently. We would all be happy again. But you fast forward to today and what people are saying is like actually your product is just broken.

Actually it's not safe for anyone to use if they're under 16. It's probably not safe for us

either but let's at least start with the children and so you look around the world and country

after country is now saying we're actually just gonna ban this stuff until you turn 16 because again well it's probably too like very bad for adults. We are increasingly confident that it's bad for children and so I just think that's like kind of the start and you know maybe like maybe this is just cop but part of me wants to think that in the same way that like banning children from smoking eventually let a lot of adults to stop smoking too. I wonder if we're not going to see something

“similar for social media. Right. No I think that's that's quite possible. Is there a warning label”

Renee that we could possibly come up with? This is your brain on Facebook. The surgeon general appetite is for that. Oh wow. That this was actually an idea that was that was making the rounds for a while because again like what are the I feel like Center for Humane Tech had some ideas around like switching your phone to gray scale so it was less appealing a lot of these I mean I think there's actually studies that show that people you know well I think that there's actually some

advocacy scientific basis to that yeah like it's just less appealing. Well Renee I switched my face to gray scale and it's clearly less appealing. Well guys I very much appreciate you taking a time this has been absolutely fascinating and and really helpful in understanding it. Renee Doressa associate research professor Doressa McCord School public policy and also the author of invisible rulers the people who turn lies in reality in Casey Newton. He's got platformer and of

course co-hosts of hard fork. So guys thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having us. Thank you John. It's great to be here. Man I enjoy a nice expert panel. Those guys know they're shit. I must apologize to all of you are a wonderful panel Lauren Walker bringing the MetaVic Gillian Square. We'll not be joining me today. We had can all be described as a technical malfunction which as many of you know is also my nickname. So it we weren't quite able to

to work it all through. I'm going to say the cloud even though I know I'm pulling that out of my ass but I really appreciate it and they will obviously be back next week and I want to shout them out again because of their work giving me the information to allow me to have a cogent coherent conversation with people who are expert in their field. So Lee producer Lauren Walker producer Brittany Mamedoic producer Gillian Spear video editor and engineer Robert Tola who

did Yomens work even getting this thing done audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyz.

“There I don't know that I think they're pulling all nighters just to get this thing out by one”

thing. In our executive producer's Chris McShane and Katie Gray we will see you guys next week.

The weekly show with John Stewart is a comedy central podcast that's produced by Paramount Audio

and Boss Boy Productions.

“-Fair twice. -No, I want to do it right now.”

I'm not going to do it now.

I'm going to do it right now. We are going to do it right now.

I want to do it right now.

Father, what do you want to say about your wife? I want to do what I really want to do. I want to become a father-in-law.

“If you want to become a father-in-law, you can do it right now.”

I want to be a father-in-law. All of them work with me. I want others to love what I want to do. I want to stay alive, I want to do it.

“Of course, I want to do it. But no, no, no.”

I want to be a father-in-law. No, I want to be a real father-in-law. I'm not going to do it right now. I'm going to do it right now. We are going to do it right now.

With a father-in-law, that's a father-in-law.