In preparation for the upcoming midterms, we talk about lies. This is the true story of the fake world created in disinformation campaigns. The voting populace spreads it like there's no tomorrow, without ever knowing what's real. We tell you what it is and how to avoid it. Our guests today are Samantha Lai of the Brookings Institute and Peter Adams of the News Literacy Project.
Transcript
This transcript was created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human editors. There may be slight discrepancies between the audio and the text.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:01] I either have a cold or this is a really bad deepfake.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:05] I'm Anna McCarthy.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:10] Do you know what genuinely chills me? Maybe I fervently believe something that is not true, and I probably do. I'm probably guilty of that and I don't even know it. Like, what have I defended in my life that is simply false? Or worse, what have I defended that is indefensible? [00:00:30] You know, that is a mortifying thought.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:33] Yeah, it shakes me to the core when I'm disabused of myths that I believed were true like that people's names got changed at Ellis Island, for.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:41] Example, or something, you know, way more serious, like saying there's a human trafficking ring led out of the basement of a pizza place.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:50] Yeah, like that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:51] Which we're going to talk a bit about all in good time, because the name of the game today? It's lies.
News archival: [00:01:02] Some [00:01:00] of the most brazen acts of voter fraud to date. Sworn affidavit saying people are forging signatures, growing examples and frankly, affidavits of ballot irregularities and outright illegality, tampering allegations to the the dead people voting. We don't know how many votes were stolen on Tuesday night. We don't know anything about the software that many say was rigged. We don't know. We ought to find out.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:28] This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy. [00:01:30]
Nick Capodice: [00:01:30] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:31] And today we are talking about one of the most insidious and uncontainable obstacles facing any American who wishes to vote their conscience in this year's midterm election. We're talking about misinformation.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:44] And just to be crystal clear, because sometimes I feel like the word misinformation actually sort of skirts the truth of the matter. Misinformation is false information, like you said, lies.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:58] Okay. I did use the word lies. [00:02:00] And honestly, that was a little misinformation, because in truth, doesn't a lie imply intention?
Nick Capodice: [00:02:09] Yes, a lie implies an active choice. There is an intent to mislead somebody else.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:15] So misinformation is actually a little bit different.
Samantha Lai: [00:02:19] I'm going to take a second to just set up some definitions. So I'm going to use both misinformation and disinformation during these podcasts.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:26] This is Samantha.
Samantha Lai: [00:02:27] My full name is Samantha Lai L-A-I. I [00:02:30] am a research analyst at the Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:36] Okay. And I've heard the term disinformation, but I've always pretty much equated the two misinformation and disinformation as being kind of the same thing.
Samantha Lai: [00:02:44] These are slightly different terms. So misinformation refers to false information that people might promote or spread, not intentionally to deceive someone, because often a lot of us might see things on the Internet and think that it's real. But turns out it's not disinformation. [00:03:00] However, people who spread it often spread it intentionally to deceive people. So that's the key difference between these two terms.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:06] So disinformation is the lie part of the information chain, correct.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:12] And probably the bad actor part, especially when it comes to elections. Disinformation is the purposefully misleading statement or claim that is conjured up and shared in order to make people believe something other than the truth, and often to make them believe it [00:03:30] fervently. So when that has to do with an election, the end goal tends to be to influence the election's outcome.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:37] Okay. And then misinformation is when other people encounter that disinformation lie and spread it around thinking it's actually real.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:45] Yeah, believe it's real or think that maybe it has some credence to it or, you know, it sort of smacks of truth. That is the simple, ugly way that it works.
Samantha Lai: [00:03:57] There are a couple of kinds of disinformation that bad actors [00:04:00] can post to confuse or discourage voters. So one approach would be to spread false information on voting dates and polling locations. So, for example, during the 2020 elections, a tweet on Super Tuesday targeted supporters of Kentucky candidate Matt Bevin and said inaccurately, Bevin supporters don't forget to vote on Wednesday, November sith, which is the day after the election.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:24] And that wasn't a mistake.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:25] Nope.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:25] And I'll take it that tweet wasn't from the people who wanted Bevin elected.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:30] You [00:04:30] take it correctly. This tactic comes in many forms. It's subtle tweaking a single piece of information, often in a way that seems helpful in an attempt to keep people away from the polls. Sometimes it's Hey, text this number to vote by text. You text that number. Your vote you probably get your vote has been submitted. Good for you. Text back. Easy. It's done. Now, I want to make very clear right here, right now that there is not a state in the nation [00:05:00] that permits voting by text. This is not real. You may also see news that you know Candidate X has dropped out of the election last minute. Oh, what a shame. Or Candidate Y has already won. There's no need to vote. All of it is made up, all of it designed to keep you from voting.
Samantha Lai: [00:05:16] Another approach here in terms of messaging is intimidation, which often primarily targets historically marginalized groups. So this includes threats of people bringing guns to the polls or law enforcement presence [00:05:30] at polling places. So, for example, before the 2018 elections, ICE had to publicly refute rumors on social media that they would be conducting enforcement operations at polling places. We also have messaging, exploiting common doubts, particularly among black and Latino voters, on the efficacy of the political process. So this can include messages on how the system doesn't work for you, your vote doesn't matter, and other attempts to just disenfranchise voters of color. And this echoes interference strategies deployed in 2016 [00:06:00] by the Kremlin backed Internet Research Agency, who disproportionately targeted African Americans during their interference in the 2016 US presidential elections.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:09] I feel like you covered this in our episode on election security. There's a difference between how messed up the system actually is and how messed up bad actors want you to believe the system is.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:20] And like Samantha said, for many people or groups, this type of disinformation is specifically designed to play on totally legitimate [00:06:30] and experience based fears and concerns.
Samantha Lai: [00:06:33] Because you have to have some doubt in order to be convinced. Like, if I looked at you and was like, Did you know that the sky is actually green? You would simply say No, because you can verify with your own eyes. That is not the case. Misinformation. The reason why is what makes it so effective. It's because it exploits people's common doubts and common fears. For example, looking at misinformation, targeting historically marginalized groups, why is it so effective and why is it so devastating? And why is that a civil [00:07:00] rights concern? Because historically marginalized groups have been historically disenfranchised, and there are a lot of narratives that also carry some grain of truth in it, in sense of their underrepresentation.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:09] In other words, disinformation aimed at discouraging groups who already feel discouraged by voting.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:14] Exactly. Voters who are in seemingly gerrymandered districts, or for whom it is difficult to obtain an ID or to get time off work or to even make it to their polling place. Or, you know, people who have to stand in absurdly [00:07:30] long lines. These are chronic real obstacles, and bad actors will exploit this sense that those voters have of being disenfranchised disinformation will say, You know what, you're right and it's worse than you think. Why don't you just stay home?
Samantha Lai: [00:07:48] We see right now that there is a heightened level of distrust towards our government, towards news agencies. There's a lot of resentment and polarization where you have people turning to alternative news sources, not trusting mainstream [00:08:00] news sources that allows misinformation and disinformation to thrive because of a lot of fears and uncertainties people have about how what is actually going on.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:09] It's so insidious, Hannah, this idea that you might be targeted with disinformation that carries a grain of truth, and then that little grain of truth is rooted in historic disenfranchisement, right?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:22] Among groups of color groups who might have barriers to physically accessing the polls. Now, I want to introduce someone here. This [00:08:30] is Peter Adams.
Peter Adams: [00:08:30] You can introduce me as the either the head of research and design at NLP or the senior Vice President of Research and Design.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:39] NLP?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:40] The News Literacy Project, which is a company entirely dedicated to teaching people how to separate fact from fiction. So those people who already feel underserved by the system, they are going to be increasingly vulnerable as we near Election Day.
Peter Adams: [00:08:58] Someone telling you that your vote is [00:09:00] going to be changed or lost or subverted if you vote by mail. I've got some particularly pernicious rumor because it winds up disenfranchising people who maybe can't vote that day decide not to vote by mail, or they think they're going to vote on Election Day and they don't make it to the polls. There are also rumors that localized rumors like the lines are impossibly long at this polling place when they're not, you know, just view all that with a grain of salt. There are bad actors out there who will try to dissuade people from voting, targeting certain [00:09:30] districts that tend to vote one way or another, and trying to dissuade people in that district from even turning out in the first place by circulating rumors. So just don't take election information from social media and, you know, do your very best to vote on Election Day, I think is sound advice.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:47] All right. That is sound advice. And I want to talk about social media in a minute here, Hannah, but what about the other kind of lie? Like not the lie designed to further disenfranchise marginalized groups, but the lie designed [00:10:00] to stoke a different kind of fear and anger?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:02] Yeah, well, let's start with a major fear and major anger. One that plays on the deepest sense of good and evil. In 2016, just before the presidential election, a conspiracy theory made its way around social media, claiming that several people high up in the Democratic Party were running a human trafficking ring out of several restaurants. One of these was a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.
Peter Adams: [00:10:30] There [00:10:30] are lots of stories about people losing loved ones to QAnon beliefs that are entirely baseless. But I think the incidents like the one in Cincinnati or at Comet Ping Pong back in 2016, I think the pizzeria in Washington are tragic and alarming and good reminders that even though they're not exceedingly common, that this kind of stuff is very serious and it can result in people taking real action. Edgar [00:11:00] Welch, who went to the pizzeria based on QAnon falsehoods. Right. Thinking that there was something nefarious happening in the basement there, when in fact, there's no basement in the building, you know, brought a rifle shot at once and figured out there was no basement and surrendered. It was much more tragic in Cincinnati. Right. But this person took action at an FBI office based on something they believe about the recent raid on Mar a Lago.
News archival: [00:11:25] A deadly end to a standoff in Clinton County. This story started hours earlier at [00:11:30] 915. And Sycamore Township police say a man tried to break into the FBI building.
Peter Adams: [00:11:35] You know, again, I think these are reminders of how serious it can be, but we shouldn't lose sight of the everyday impact on ordinary folks who sort of fall down rabbit holes with the best of intentions, looking for answers, trying to interpret complex realities. But they fall for four simplified narratives. Conspiracy theories are very attractive because they give people kind of a good, bad version of the world as complicated as they can be. They're very simple at their base. [00:12:00]
Nick Capodice: [00:12:00] That is an interesting point, because conspiracy theories can be wildly complicated. In this case, it wasn't just a nonexistent trafficking ring in a nonexistent basement of a pizza joint. It was a Hillary Clinton run trafficking ring. So what the theory did was take the person who many people politically and socially disagreed with and made that person pure, unadulterated evil. Disagreeing is nuanced. It's how we do politics. [00:12:30] Condemning evil is not.
Peter Adams: [00:12:33] They're very simple at their base, right? There are bad people trying to just, you know, dupe everyone and subvert our democracy is basically the the storyline of QAnon. And it's attractive to think that that things are that simple and that there is some enemy cabal that you could that you could just root out. But the reality is much messier.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:51] So what about other examples of conspiracy theories like a stolen election, or even the idea of a poll worker tampering with ballots [00:13:00] or widespread voter fraud?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:02] These are still examples of conspiracies born of disinformation, which is then followed by the spreading of misinformation. And a lot of them involve being unhappy with election results and or not understanding how elections work. Lo and behold, the simple answer is provided to you on a silver platter the disinformation that vindicates you and gives an appealing explanation for why things seem a [00:13:30] certain way.
Peter Adams: [00:13:31] I think, you know, the biggest concern is just just misperceptions about fraud or mis-recognized things that are totally normal parts of of elections being perceived as fraud, because people have now been primed to believe that fraud is common when it's not.
News archival: [00:13:47] Just make sure your vote gets counted. Make sure. Because the only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.
Peter Adams: [00:13:56] Remember that they are primed to believe it's easier to [00:14:00] pull off than it is, and it has an impact on election workers. It has an impact on people who might be designated agents, who deliver ballots to boxes from, say, nursing homes, who might be confronted by people who have decided they're going to monitor those boxes for anyone dropping more than one ballot.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:19] And Peter says you also have to consider the motivation of the bad actor, the person at the top of the disinformation to misinformation pipeline.
Peter Adams: [00:14:28] Of all the allegations [00:14:30] of improprieties. None of them were really borne out by evidence, you know, case by case by case, especially in I mean, again, these tended to cluster in swing states, right? So number one, that was an attempt to to sort of move electoral votes in key places. There's zero evidence at the end of the day that there was any kind of significant voter fraud that could come anywhere close to changing the outcome in any given state, much less the election overall. All [00:15:00] the audits that have taken place, all of the reviews, all of the accusations have all come to naught. And the evidence is just not there and evidence matters.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:13] And all of this accusations of tampering, of destruction, of ballots, of devious poll workers, etc., Peter says it's coming for us again in 2022.
Peter Adams: [00:15:25] You know, most experts who are looking at election disinformation believe that we're just going [00:15:30] to see a lot of the same narratives get pushed because they've now taken root almost as conventional wisdom among among some folks. And so they're still very effective.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:41] Alright. So we've got bad actors with appealing ideas running rampant, and you're telling me it only gets worse around an election? So what are we supposed to do? What are we supposed to look for? How do we separate the lies from the truth?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:55] That's coming up after the break.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:58] But first, we cannot tell a lie. [00:16:00] We need you know, really, we do civics. One on one is public radio. It's yours, it's your radio. And we're sustained by the public, which is you if you have some spare change and a willing heart. Head on over to Civics one one podcast at npr.org and click the donate button to contribute to the show or just click the link in the show notes. It doesn't just keep us going. It tells us you're out there and this show means something to you.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:28] We're back. This is Civics [00:16:30] 101. And we're talking disinformation and misinformation.
Nick Capodice: [00:16:33] Which, as Samantha Lai told us earlier, disinformation is the lie purposefully spread by a bad actor who's trying to interfere with things. And misinformation is what we call other people spreading that lie, often believing it's true or thinking, Huh, this sounds like it could be true. One is an evil act. The other is relatively innocent.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:55] A lot of this, Nick, it is, of course, going down on social media. Speaking [00:17:00] of Samantha, here she is again.
Samantha Lai: [00:17:02] Social media is a wild, wild west. So even really drawing the line, sometimes it's really hard. Like maybe the first person who posted this intended for this to be disinformation and the other people spreading it are misinformed and they don't intend to deceive people, but they very genuinely believe that this is the case. So it's a little bit of both. In a lot of cases, it's often kind of hard to be completely clear about how it happens, but both can be damaging and hurtful [00:17:30] and could mislead people into making certain decisions or not showing up on the right day to vote. And that's a problem.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:37] And here's Peter Adams from the News Literacy Project.
Peter Adams: [00:17:40] Again, influencers will take individual incidents or make a claim, and that will spread down to their followers, obviously. And those followers then look for that. Right. So if you're following somebody with who's massively influential on social media and they say this is happening at polling places, you may go to polling places and look for that, but also people [00:18:00] who provide that at the grassroots level and share it, those are filtering up and having an influence on the influencers. So it's not just a top down influencer to people on the ground dynamic, it's also folks in polling places all across the country creating videos that are then filtering up and forming these sort of false evidence collages, if you will, on the part of influencers who then strengthen their their false claims and convictions.
Nick Capodice: [00:18:27] So there's a whole ecosystem of sustaining and [00:18:30] growing the lies, like a little garden.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:31] And the kind of lie you run into, it has all to do with what corner of the internet you inhabit. For example, I am a certain type of millennial, so I am on Instagram, and Instagram has figured out that I will engage with content involving East and South Asian cooking, running and moody bodies of water during the fall.
Nick Capodice: [00:18:55] What?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:56] So I get a lot of information specific to say dumpling recipes, [00:19:00] running posture and where to camp in New England. So it feels like I am an expert on that niche. But in actual fact, I have no idea whether these people are cooks, running experts or have ever been camping. I think I know a lot because I consume their content, but what's the source of that information?
Samantha Lai: [00:19:20] There are a lot of people who sometimes believe certain things because they're like, Oh, I've seen this on social media 20 times, 30 times. It's not just one thing and that's another problem altogether [00:19:30] with just the information ecosystem at large where you can be very solidly convinced or because of the way social media algorithms work, they give you what you generally want to see, that you end up seeing a lot of the same content. So you might end up doing as much research as you would for buying a new computer. And as far as you're concerned, you're doing a lot of research. But if you're stuck in a certain corner of the Internet, that experience can be very, very different from someone else.
Nick Capodice: [00:19:57] And then you, Hannah, rather innocently, [00:20:00] might go out and tell people how to make their dumplings and run around and where to find the best lakes. But it could literally be the worst advice ever.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:07] Yeah, and I've actually I've probably done that honestly. The same goes for election information, except in that case it is far, far more likely to be purposeful disinformation that you are consuming because so many people stand to gain from influencing who votes and who gets elected.
News archival: [00:20:29] Welcome [00:20:30] to the Washington Week Extra.
News archival: [00:20:31] I'm Robert Costa. The role of social media in the 2020 election has come under scrutiny as bipartisan voices have sought to address the spread of disinformation on their platforms. Democratic.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:42] And that disinformation will seek you out based on what the social media platform knows about you. It's all about that algorithm.
Samantha Lai: [00:20:51] These algorithms collect a lot of data about your online activity, your browsing activity, purchasing history, location data, how long you [00:21:00] spend on everything. So in terms of micro-targeting, when someone like a campaign or even like a commercial actor sets up an ad campaign, you can choose certain things that you can target someone with. So for example, zip code, gender, so on and so forth.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:17] Peter reminded me, as obvious as it may seem, what social media is, it is a by and large free platform that monetizes engagement designed to [00:21:30] get instant reaction, as in, Hey, oh, cool running tip. I'll take that and I'll share that. And then instant scrolling done with that tip onto the next see the stuff you like engage go scroll for more stuff you like like engage, scroll like engage, scroll a little fraud here, a little ballot stuffing there.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:51] You know what they say, Hannah. If something's free, you're the product.
Peter Adams: [00:21:59] That's [00:22:00] their business model. It's what they do. But it can be sort of invisible, right? We can sort of lose track of of. How that all works. And it's tempting to like and share recklessly or too quickly. And it's also easy to think, well, this is just a tap on a screen, right? It's a like it's a share. I'm not, you know, and I think a lot of people share things that they're they're sort of thinking, I'm not sure if this is true or not, but, you know, whatever, it's interesting. It might be true. The downstream effect of that two, three, four layers out you share [00:22:30] with someone who shares with someone and they take action based on something that's false, you know, can can have a real impact.
News archival: [00:22:36] Good morning, Robin. This case shows how fake news can lead to a dangerous situation. Edgar Welch, 28, of Salisbury, North Carolina, has been arrested and charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. And police say that Welch told them that he showed up at the D.C. pizza restaurant to get to the bottom of what appears to be an utterly bogus story about child abuse promoted on the Internet. How scary was the situation? He allegedly pointed the gun in the direction of [00:23:00] an employee and fired the weapon inside the restaurant.
Nick Capodice: [00:23:08] Now I'm thinking, too, Hannah, about the disinformation that looks and sounds real, like a step beyond the clickbait meme or headline, the picture or the video of something happening. That kind of thing must be harder to be skeptical about.
Peter Adams: [00:23:26] We're all sort of evolutionarily hardwired to believe our senses, [00:23:30] to believe what we see in here. It can be hard to resist that that allure, especially if you're inclined to to believe that or you want to believe it already. You know, video based evidence or photographic evidence that feels compelling and feels convincing often may not be, especially when it's from a user generated source.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:49] Sometimes it's a real doctored image or video with a misleading caption. Sometimes it is a little more than that.
Samantha Lai: [00:23:57] Deepfakes, which use artificial intelligence technology [00:24:00] or even just basic video editing like any thing to like make images or videos of fake events that haven't actually happened with politicians faces like put on them. And you can see how that would cause that would enable the spread of fake information.
Tom Cruise Deep Fake: [00:24:14] I'm going to show you some magic. It's the real thing. I mean, it's all the real thing.
News archival: [00:24:31] It [00:24:30] looked a lot like Tom Cruise, but it was not. Tom Cruise, he's not in that video in any way. It's what's called a deepfake.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:39] And it doesn't stop at deepfakes. There are the bots.
Samantha Lai: [00:24:42] Bots and trolls. So bots are automated and trolls are real users and they can just generally be used to spread fake news about candidates or election details.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:51] There's the geofencing.
Nick Capodice: [00:24:53] What's geofencing.
Samantha Lai: [00:24:54] So how this works is that when a mobile device enters or exits a virtual boundary [00:25:00] set up around a geographic location, that information will be collected. So if you have physically won in and out of a place and it has, there's like a virtual boundary set, they will know that you have been there. So that technology was used for the 2020 elections by a private company called Catholic Vote, which set up this boundary around a church to target churchgoers with pro-Trump messaging.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:23] Oh, yeah. And then there's every other way people can influence you.
Samantha Lai: [00:25:28] There are TV networks, [00:25:30] there is radio, there are podcasts on Spotify, depending on the social groups people are in, depending on their personal experiences and the communities they live in. All of this interacts together in a perfect storm, which is why it's incredibly difficult to disassemble in some ways, even in a perfect world where we can suddenly take down all COVID related misinformation, for example, from the Internet, just like press a magic button, get rid of all of it. There are still going to be anti-vaxxers. [00:26:00] They're still going to people who might not believe that COVID is real because of who they are. So really, all of this is not just a question of social media content regulation. It's also about people and the way we think, which is what makes this both so worrying and so fascinating.
Nick Capodice: [00:26:23] All right, Hannah, you have thoroughly flooded this episode with your information campaign.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:27] That's my job.
Nick Capodice: [00:26:28] Now give [00:26:30] me the antidote. What are we supposed to do about misinformation and disinformation.
Samantha Lai: [00:26:35] In terms of on a personal level, what you can do? I think to inoculate yourself against myths and disinformation is to first keep in mind that confirmation bias is a thing. We're all people. We have opinions. We are all vulnerable to thinking certain ways, especially if we see certain information that aligns with our worldviews. So it's like whenever you see something online that you're like, Oh my gosh, like before spreading it. Take [00:27:00] a second. Take a look. Google it. See if any other reputable news source has reported on it. If it's a one off tweet or if it's a meme, make sure to double check and see who else is talking about this. And you can kind of tell from who else is talking about this and who else is reporting on this, what's going on there? Another useful part, especially in the context of voting, is always relying on official information on government websites as to details of where you're going to vote, what's [00:27:30] open, what's closed, what are the hours? Don't rely on someone else's information. Always make sure to go back to the source and always recognize that every source has a motive to convince you of something.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:42] Which I'll acknowledge is more work. It is more work than scrolling and liking and sharing and consuming exactly what you're fed. Which is why I appreciate Peter's take on this. His whole thing is, hey, [00:28:00] people are actively trying to take away your right. So isn't it worth putting in a little more work?
Peter Adams: [00:28:07] Don't let someone sort of hijack your civic voice by misinforming you and misinforming you. You know, no one wants to be misled. No one wants to hold false beliefs. And I think we all have to be more vigilant than ever on those fronts, because there are more ways for people to to try to manipulate us than ever before.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:28:27] And I should mention the whole point of the company that Peter works for, [00:28:30] the News Literacy Project, is to make free resources for people who want to sift out the truth from the lies and just know the truth, especially leading up to the election. We're going to put a link to that in the show notes and on our website. Civics one one podcast dot org so you can prepare ye.
Nick Capodice: [00:28:47] I feel like there's an elephant in the room here, Hanna.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:28:49] Can we make it like a nonpolitical animal?
Nick Capodice: [00:28:51] I feel there's a right whale here in the room, Hanna.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:28:54] Let's talk about it.
Nick Capodice: [00:28:56] Disinformation, misinformation, social media targeting, geo fencing. [00:29:00] Now, it sounds like these are effective vaccines we can all access. But what about just eradicating the disease itself?
Samantha Lai: [00:29:09] Because there are no data privacy laws. Anything and everything you do on the Internet can be collected. And there are data brokers who are buying massive amounts of information about your address, your online activity, your purchasing history. Every everything. It's out there.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:29] On June [00:29:30] 21st, 2022, the Data Privacy Act was introduced in Congress. Now, this bill doesn't say no more lies on the Internet, everybody. Because. Yeah, right. But if passed, it would limit the way businesses can use your information, allow you to opt in or opt out, revise or delete collected information, among other things.
Nick Capodice: [00:29:53] And then how does our government in practice actually help to stop election lies?
Samantha Lai: [00:29:57] There are a couple of government agencies dedicated [00:30:00] to combating dissent, misinformation. Most of this was pretty recent. There is the US Department of State's Global Engagement Center that proactively monitors and addresses foreign adversaries, disinformation attempts. The Department of Homeland Security's Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency during the last 2020 election cycle did invaluable work protecting America's election infrastructure and finding ways to centralize information and make sure to keep tabs on what kind of rumors and misinformation is going on. Earlier [00:30:30] this year, there was a creation of the very short lived Disinformation Governance Board whose work was put on hold after a public backlash. We have Congress that's also working hard on bills to combat social media, algorithms, amplification of fake news, taking, for example, the Banning Micro-targeting Political Ads Act, the Social Media Nudge Act calls to reform Section 230. A lot of these are still in progress because there's a lot of bipartisan disagreement over the definitions of disinformation and who should be the one to say what [00:31:00] is and is not disinformation. So that's another can of worms altogether. But there is work being done.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:31:14] So the agencies are being created. Nonprofits are addressing the problem. The public is constantly being warned about disinformation from those who are fighting the good fight. There are conversations happening about how to handle this and misinformation. [00:31:30] What I find really interesting about all of this, Nick, is that these disinformation campaigns wouldn't work unless people really cared about these issues, really cared about politics, really cared about elections. And that's the tricky thing, because from where I stand, getting people to care can be half the battle. I don't see it as a bad thing that people care.
Peter Adams: [00:31:56] People want to share important things with friends [00:32:00] and family. So elections are important. Politics are, you know, very polarized right now. People are hyper engaged and paying a lot of attention to to these these races and their hometowns. And it's good for people to want to be civically engaged. But, you know, again, have to be really careful that, you know, civic engagement only works if we have a common set of facts. And, you know, civic engagement is really driven authentically by accurate information so that everybody can can make authentic [00:32:30] civic decisions for themselves, for their family members and for their community.
Nick Capodice: [00:32:42] There might not be a lot that all of America agrees on right now. But but deep down, I think I can safely say we are all Holden Caulfield when it comes to being lied to. Nobody likes a no good phony or wants to be one for that matter.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:32:58] Fortunately, the [00:33:00] truth is out there, but it probably isn't on Instagram or TikTok. Tiktok is too much for me. I've accepted slow descent into the out of Tech Touch three and I'm fine with it. Has it occurred to you, Nick, that there are social media platforms out there that neither of us even know exist?
Nick Capodice: [00:33:17] This may be the only time I'm going to say this on the show, Hannah, but sometimes ignorance is bliss.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:33:41] This [00:33:30] episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with help from Nick Capodice. Our senior producer is Christina Phillips. Our producer is Jacqui Fulton. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. A very special thanks to Retro Report, who has been partnering with us throughout this mid-term series. We're working together on a Teach the Midterms webinar coming up on Wednesday, September [00:34:00] 14th. You can check that out and register at Retroreport.org Music in this episode by Anemoia, Spring Gang, Nul Tiel Records, HoliznaCo, Kirk Osemayo, Metre and Martin Clem. You can get the transcript for this episode and listen to, well, everything else we have ever made at Civics101podcast.org Civics 101 is a production of HPR New Hampshire Public Radio.
Nick Capodice: [00:34:24] The story where the call was coming from your own house.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:34:28] That's never I mean, like, it's [00:34:30] never really. Oh, actually, there was this one time I was on AIM, AOL Instant Messenger and my friend made up a fake screen name and pretended that she was someone who was seeing me inside.
News archival: [00:34:43] Oh, that's.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:34:44] The computer room.
Nick Capodice: [00:34:46] I don't have that. That's too creepy. Let me think. What else chills you to the bone?
