Speaker 1: There's a lot of misinformation that's developed for these extremely
Speaker 1: cynical reasons. I mean, part of why we're here is
Speaker 1: to talk about climate change, and here we see industries
Speaker 1: spending massive amounts of money so that they can make
Speaker 1: more money, and doing it purposely to confuse people, and
Speaker 1: doing it in a way where they know they're going
Speaker 1: to kill people and potentially wreck theater.
Speaker 2: Oh fucked.
Speaker 3: Welcome to I'm Fucking the Future, the show where we
Speaker 3: learn about surprising and innovative ways of scientists, entrepreneurs, activists,
Speaker 3: and even philosophers are fighting for climate crisis. I'm your house,
Speaker 3: Chris Turney, and I believe that together we can unfuck
Speaker 3: this mess. Let's get started.
Speaker 4: Weird Fucking the Future.
Speaker 3: Okay, you've been here a while. You've heard about the
Speaker 3: bad a.
Speaker 1: Mass evacuation this morning along Australia's southeastern coast, with bushfires
Speaker 1: looming and extreme danger ahead.
Speaker 5: A fierce heat wave is gripping parts of Europe, with
Speaker 5: temperatures reaching more than forty degrees celsius after.
Speaker 3: Twenty four hours.
Speaker 2: All that remains our flooded homes and floating debris. On
Speaker 2: Sunday and Monday, Mediterranean storm Daniel swept through eastern Libya,
Speaker 2: washing away entire neighborhoods.
Speaker 3: But let's pause for a moment and consider an amazing
Speaker 3: possible future. It's twenty fifty and I'm Chris Turney, a
Speaker 3: retired climate scientist. Almost everything around me has been electrified.
Speaker 3: Our homes, our work, are cars. People no longer live
Speaker 3: in those harmful little suburbs. We live in small communities
Speaker 3: where we know our neighbors, and it's just a short
Speaker 3: walk to the grocery store. And if we do need
Speaker 3: to go further, we can just use for clean, affordable
Speaker 3: public transportation that's widely available across the world. Fossil fuel
Speaker 3: companies are a thing of a past, and the people
Speaker 3: who are working in coal and oil now working green jobs.
Speaker 3: At school, kids learn about smog and wildfires, but not
Speaker 3: because they need to learn how to survive them. They're
Speaker 3: learning about these events in their history classes. Natural disasters
Speaker 3: because of climate change have largely stopped, or at least
Speaker 3: become less frequent and less extreme, And the world just
Speaker 3: feels pretty damn good. While this might sound like a
Speaker 3: total fantasy, it's totally within our reach. We're going to
Speaker 3: have to work really fucking hard to achieve this vision,
Speaker 3: but one of the most pressing challenges is that a
Speaker 3: world is full of bad actors pushing bad information in
Speaker 3: bad faith. Misinformation cast out on the urgency of a
Speaker 3: climate crisis, and it distracts us from a real issue.
Speaker 3: We need to take immediate action at speed and scale.
Speaker 3: It's easy to find examples of how mis and disinformation
Speaker 3: is influencing the climate crisis, like the idea a walkable
Speaker 3: fifteen minute cities is some sort of plot for totalitarian control,
Speaker 3: or that the wildfires in Mary last year were started
Speaker 3: by energy weapons or space lasers, or that shifts in
Speaker 3: the Earth's magnetic field and not human activity, is responsible
Speaker 3: for a climate crisis. That one was promoted by Joe
Speaker 3: Rogan and got millions of views on TikTok. All of
Speaker 3: this is easily disprovable, of course, by any of the
Speaker 3: world's thousands of climate scientists who look at the actual
Speaker 3: facts and data and models all day long. But too
Speaker 3: many people are believing these things, and that's all of
Speaker 3: our problem. Today we're going to talk about how and
Speaker 3: why misinformation came for a climate crisis and what we
Speaker 3: can do about it. Our guest is Kaylen O'Connor. She's
Speaker 3: a professor of philosophy at University of California, Irvine, where,
Speaker 3: among other things, she researches misinformation and how false beliefs
Speaker 3: spread between people. And Kaylen is not like other philosophers.
Speaker 3: She's a cool philosopher. On her website, she's got this
Speaker 3: beautiful photo of herself, her kids, and a chicken. It's
Speaker 3: not the kind of headshot you see most academics posts.
Speaker 3: They're normally quite formal. And I've been intimidating.
Speaker 2: I'm in a discipline which is like very male, very.
Speaker 1: White philosophy, even though it's in the humanities, has been
Speaker 1: like the humanities discipline where it hasn't diversified as much
Speaker 1: as other ones.
Speaker 2: So as a you know, as a woman, as a.
Speaker 1: Full professor, I sort of like to open the doors
Speaker 1: a little bit and be like I'm a real person
Speaker 1: to younger women who want to join the field, like
Speaker 1: you can be a real person who So in this picture,
Speaker 1: I have my three kids and I bring them along
Speaker 1: to conferences sometimes and they show up one zoom with me,
Speaker 1: and I tell everyone who will listen about my chickens.
Speaker 3: Yeah, those chickens are a pretty big part of her life.
Speaker 1: I am zoned to have up to three chickens, and
Speaker 1: I have seven chickens, and I recently had to build
Speaker 1: them a new enclosure because my neighbor was like, enough
Speaker 1: with the damn chickens. They're all different breeds. They're very beautiful.
Speaker 1: They are named Starfrost and red Velvet and Molasses and
Speaker 1: cream puff and Oreo, mostly after desserts. That's a wolf.
Speaker 3: So you must be dragging your eggs on you? Or
Speaker 3: do you give them out to you? Maybe apiece your neighbor?
Speaker 1: Do you give them a Yeah, I just I just
Speaker 1: give them to neighbors if we have too many, And
Speaker 1: like my neighbors and I, we have you know, like
Speaker 1: someone brings over the extra lemons, someone brings over the
Speaker 1: extra ginger cake, someone brings over the extra eggs.
Speaker 2: It's like a very nice little.
Speaker 3: It sounds lovely. It sounds lovely. In that Star's hollow
Speaker 3: esque setting, it could be easy to forget the existential
Speaker 3: crisis we're facing, but Kayla says she's rarely not thinking
Speaker 3: about the environment. Part of that is Judo her upbringing.
Speaker 2: My dad was an environmentalist.
Speaker 1: I used to read Ranger Rick magazine, and my grandfather
Speaker 1: wrote an article I think in the seventies about the
Speaker 1: threats of human omission and possible emergence of climate change
Speaker 1: as a result. So yeah, I've been worried about climate
Speaker 1: change literally since I was five or.
Speaker 2: Six years old.
Speaker 3: Really, that's sometimes.
Speaker 2: Depressing to be.
Speaker 1: Like now I'm forty and I'm even more worried about
Speaker 1: it than before.
Speaker 3: The twenty sixty US presidential debates made Caylen feel particularly
Speaker 3: concerned about our future.
Speaker 1: I mean, I still remember in one of the Trump
Speaker 1: Clinton debates, Hillary Clinton saying something like the Russian government
Speaker 1: is making these claims about me, and kind of jumping
Speaker 1: back up, like.
Speaker 2: The Russian government, what are we talking about? You know.
Speaker 1: At that point, I at least was just not aware
Speaker 1: of the way that big forces were starting to use
Speaker 1: social media to try to control or shape political events
Speaker 1: and outcomes. My collaborator James weather Or and I both
Speaker 1: started thinking like, oh, this is really going to matter,
Speaker 1: this is going to be important. But one thing that's
Speaker 1: kind of funny is that we we even writing this
Speaker 1: book on misinformation.
Speaker 2: So we wrote this book The Misinformation Age.
Speaker 1: Starting then, we really underestimated how serious of an issue
Speaker 1: it would be, and how long term, So we thought
Speaker 1: we have to write this book really fast.
Speaker 3: The book for Misinformation Age, How False Beliefs Spread is
Speaker 3: an impressive and stellar contribution to the field. It's totally
Speaker 3: digestible for the general public, and it digs into how
Speaker 3: people understand what is truthful and what is not, and
Speaker 3: ultimately how misinformation has become such a huge issue in
Speaker 3: our digital world. So getting into your work, you call
Speaker 3: yourself a philosopher of science. Now, if a word philosopher
Speaker 3: to me makes me think of Confucius or Aristotle, and
Speaker 3: people whose feels to study definitely do not overlap with
Speaker 3: mine at all. So what does it mean to be
Speaker 3: a philosopher of science?
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, I'll just point out all the
Speaker 1: sciences used to be philosophers. I mean, Aristotle wrote on
Speaker 1: all sorts of things biology and physics and astronomy, you
Speaker 1: know everything, and then the science has kind of peeled
Speaker 1: away and philosophy was what was left. But philosophy of
Speaker 1: science is an old discipline and there are a lot
Speaker 1: of things philosophers of science do. So one thing is
Speaker 1: work on understanding how science as an enterprise works.
Speaker 2: You know, how do scientific progress work?
Speaker 3: For thousands of years, philosophers have asked questions about the
Speaker 3: way we live and why, about how we work together,
Speaker 3: and why societies work the way they do.
Speaker 1: One thing that's a very traditional question in philosophy is
Speaker 1: how does knowledge work?
Speaker 2: How do we come to know anything?
Speaker 1: And also what does it mean to have a belief
Speaker 1: in something that's justified. One thing that a lot of
Speaker 1: philosophers work on now is what's called social epistemology.
Speaker 3: That's the study of how people understand knowledge, how they
Speaker 3: understand what is true, and how we search for truth.
Speaker 1: So Descartes was focused on these really these questions about
Speaker 1: individual knowledge, like how can I, as this one little
Speaker 1: isolated unit.
Speaker 2: Have confidence that the things I believe are true?
Speaker 1: But increasingly people came to understand that that's not really
Speaker 1: how human knowledge works. So other people tell us things,
Speaker 1: we choose to trust them, We uptake those things as beliefs.
Speaker 1: We do some other things we reason about, like is
Speaker 1: this consistent with the other things I believe? Should I
Speaker 1: trust this person for what reason?
Speaker 2: Or should I not?
Speaker 1: Our knowledge, in fact, is just very very deeply social.
Speaker 1: So one thing a lot of philosophers study is social
Speaker 1: epistemology that relates to philosophy of science, because a lot
Speaker 1: of things in philosophy of science or work on how
Speaker 1: groups of scientists come to know or believe things.
Speaker 2: So how does a group.
Speaker 1: Of humans who are interested in climate change come to
Speaker 1: believe the climate is warming and at these rates and
Speaker 1: as the result of these causes. So those are things
Speaker 1: that philosophers work on.
Speaker 3: So with fake news, then it's an element of actually,
Speaker 3: you've got a belief that's not true that is being
Speaker 3: presented effectively as a truth.
Speaker 1: So, first of all, I don't necessarily love to use
Speaker 1: the term fake news, because, as a lot of people
Speaker 1: have pointed out, fake news was this term that was
Speaker 1: like very much applied to this specific phenomena happening in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, when people would make
Speaker 1: fake news sites and fake news articles, and then the
Speaker 1: term got co opted by the right to describe a
Speaker 1: lot of true things as fake when they weren't.
Speaker 6: They are the enemy of the people, and we could
Speaker 6: have a country that would be able to heal and
Speaker 6: get together, except the media fomens it. They're so corrupt,
Speaker 6: and you know, I call it. I came up with
Speaker 6: the term fake news a long time ago. I don't
Speaker 6: know if I'll get credit for that, but that's okay.
Speaker 3: As Kaylin said, fake news has taken on a new
Speaker 3: meaning for a lot of people. It just means anything
Speaker 3: I don't like, So I.
Speaker 1: Often will use misinformation or misleading content. So that's why
Speaker 1: I'm like switching language a little bit. So there are
Speaker 1: a lot of ways that people spread misinformation or misleading content,
Speaker 1: and a lot of reasons why people like uptake it.
Speaker 1: The most basic just has to do with this fact
Speaker 1: that we're social learners, where we necessarily have to trust
Speaker 1: each other in order to learn most things we know
Speaker 1: about the world, which means that people tell us things.
Speaker 1: You know, most of the time it's in our best
Speaker 1: interest to believe those things, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes
Speaker 1: those things are wrong, but we just don't have the
Speaker 1: ability to always differentiate between the stuff we're getting from
Speaker 1: other people that's true and that's false. And so social
Speaker 1: knowledge is tremendously powerful. But once you open up that channel,
Speaker 1: this door for social information to come through, you're going
Speaker 1: to open up a channel for misinformation for fake news
Speaker 1: to come through too.
Speaker 3: That's a really powerful analogy. I really like that, Kayley,
Speaker 3: so I have to ask. I mean, I'm very aware
Speaker 3: that I have done this. Have you ever fallen for
Speaker 3: any news articles that are basically misinformed?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: One hundred times.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think people would find that reas.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was stressful to write a book about
Speaker 1: misinformation because I guarantee somewhere in that book we say
Speaker 1: something false, probably multiple things false, even though we did
Speaker 1: the best research we could. But yeah, I'm a human,
Speaker 1: and like all other humans, I often fall for misinformation.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite little examples is I was doing
Speaker 1: an interview on misinformation and someone brought up an example
Speaker 1: of like a propagated false belief, which is that Daddy
Speaker 1: long legs these spiders in the US are the most
Speaker 1: poisonous spiders in the world, but their mouth they're too
Speaker 1: small to bite you.
Speaker 2: And as he was saying it, I was like, yep,
Speaker 2: I believed that one.
Speaker 3: Until I've not heard that one. Actually, that's amazing. It's
Speaker 3: a crowd of story.
Speaker 2: As soon as he said it, I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's very dumb. Of course that's false, but no, I
Speaker 2: hadn't believed it until that.
Speaker 3: I've done it too. A few years ago, there was
Speaker 3: this news article about a polar bear who had become
Speaker 3: stranded on a Scottish island after the melting Arctic ice.
Speaker 3: Ha'd separated the poor animal from its home. And I
Speaker 3: remember reading this piece and going, oh, that's amazing. But
Speaker 3: of course this is just an April fool's prank have
Speaker 3: a newspaper, even I, as someone who studs as a
Speaker 3: climate and melting ice fell for it. Now, that kind
Speaker 3: of misinformation is fairly harmless, both to us and of
Speaker 3: the Daddy long legs and polar bears not in Scotland.
Speaker 3: But other misinformation is developed by bad actors to influence politics,
Speaker 3: the economy, and the very social fabric of our communities.
Speaker 4: We're a fucking the future. We're a fucking the future.
Speaker 3: One of the most interesting, or perhaps most terrifying things
Speaker 3: about the miss and disinformation landscape today is how oil
Speaker 3: and gas are using environmental and nature activists to spew falsehoods.
Speaker 1: There's been a lot of stuff spread by oil and
Speaker 1: gas about how windmills kill birds and how windmills harm whales.
Speaker 1: So here are people trying to glom on to people's
Speaker 1: environmental impulses, their desires to help other animals protect the environment.
Speaker 2: But what they're.
Speaker 1: Actually trying to do is to stop action our.
Speaker 3: Climate change, really pressing those emotional buttons. Now, what if
Speaker 3: you could help clarify for me and the listeners as well,
Speaker 3: what is the difference between misinformation and disinformation?
Speaker 1: So the way people typically pull those apart is to
Speaker 1: say that disinformation is false and it's intended to mislead,
Speaker 1: it's misleading, and someone's trying to mislead you, whereas misinformation
Speaker 1: is misleading but there's no intention to.
Speaker 2: Lead you astray.
Speaker 5: Ah.
Speaker 3: So some of the times when we're talking about these
Speaker 3: climate issues which are being deliberately misleading, are actually effectively disinformation.
Speaker 3: Is that right?
Speaker 1: Yes? Though I think that when we talk about information
Speaker 1: on social media, it's not like this is a bad
Speaker 1: way to differentiate things, but it ends up not, I think,
Speaker 1: always capturing what's happening on social media, because a lot
Speaker 1: of what you see is disinformation created by cynical parties
Speaker 1: that then becomes misinformation.
Speaker 3: Ooh, so that they are actually sharing it not with
Speaker 3: the intent to mislead, they think it's true exactly.
Speaker 1: So most of the people spreading, for example, say of
Speaker 1: the whales, are not going to be people who are
Speaker 1: trying to mislead to anyone or not going to be
Speaker 1: people who want a bad outcome. Environmentalism so in that
Speaker 1: it sort of transforms into misinformation, and it's designed to
Speaker 1: transform into misinformation.
Speaker 3: In Kalin's book The Age of Misinformation, she and are
Speaker 3: co author James Owen revel right about Roger Ravel, a
Speaker 3: climate scientist who was one of the first people to
Speaker 3: study global heating.
Speaker 1: He was a major influence on al Gore, who of
Speaker 1: course has been a climate activist. As a politician, he
Speaker 1: did a lot of work showing that carbon diaxterrad was
Speaker 1: increasing in the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: So he really spent his career showing that the climate
Speaker 1: was changing and in fact raising alarms about global warming.
Speaker 3: By the time Jim Hansen gave his testimony in front
Speaker 3: of Congress in nineteen eighty eight, Ravel was already seventy nine,
Speaker 3: and as he aged he became very sick. Now during
Speaker 3: his time, a man named Fred Singer came along, took
Speaker 3: money from oil and gas. He was basically paid to
Speaker 3: sow skepticism and doubt about climate change. Fred Singer has
Speaker 3: a long resume to name some of his greatest hits.
Speaker 3: In the nineteen eighties, he helped promote confusion about the
Speaker 3: causes of acid rain, the health effects of smoking, and
Speaker 3: ye ozone hole depletion. And in nineteen ninety one, Fred
Speaker 3: took some of his previous writing, repurposed it into an
Speaker 3: article and added Ravel's name as a co author. Now
Speaker 3: all of this happened at a time when Revel was
Speaker 3: gravely ill.
Speaker 2: The paper was skeptical about climate change.
Speaker 3: So you've got this subject matter expert, now in old age,
Speaker 3: claiming that maybe the science behind global heating isn't as
Speaker 3: solid as he previously claimed, maybe it shouldn't be believed,
Speaker 3: Maybe there's nothing to be concerned about here.
Speaker 1: And so Revel's reputation as a climate scientist was weaponized
Speaker 1: for climate skepticism.
Speaker 3: But people who knew Revel, including his research assistant who
Speaker 3: had been working with him for twelve years at this point,
Speaker 3: said Revel had been hoodwinked into attaching his name to
Speaker 3: the paper.
Speaker 1: A lot of people cast doubts about whether Revel was
Speaker 1: really able to consent properly to being an author on
Speaker 1: this paper.
Speaker 3: And the paper had serious repercussions on the public debate
Speaker 3: around climate change. For example, the then Senator al Gore
Speaker 3: had been talking about the greenhouse effect and climate change
Speaker 3: for many years, but now the top scientist on climate
Speaker 3: change was apparently doubting his own work. It cast doubts
Speaker 3: on the whole thing.
Speaker 2: This was made to use to make Al Gore look foolish.
Speaker 1: You know, the person who you told us had showed
Speaker 1: all these things about how the climate is warming, even
Speaker 1: he doesn't actually think it's warming. This is something we've
Speaker 1: seen happen again and again in the climate skepticism movement.
Speaker 2: Is that, you know, oil and gas.
Speaker 1: The people sort of working to fight understanding on climate change.
Speaker 1: They get real scientists to take up climate skeptic positions. However,
Speaker 1: these scientists are very rarely like climate scientists.
Speaker 2: In fact, it's almost always physicists.
Speaker 1: I don't know what is wrong with physicists producing these
Speaker 1: people who are willing to do this, But so they'll
Speaker 1: get these very prominent physicists to sort of be the
Speaker 1: face of climate skepticism. And because these are actual scientific
Speaker 1: experts and people usually trust scientific experts, their skepticism ends
Speaker 1: up looking very powerful.
Speaker 3: Fred Singer was repeatedly interviewed about the paper Have the
Speaker 3: Huge Change in Revel's view on global heating in the interviews,
Speaker 3: he just outright lies about the situation.
Speaker 7: When he joins US Live from Washington, DC, Doctor Singer,
Speaker 7: what was Roger Ruvel's view of carbon dioxide as a
Speaker 7: greenhouse gas when you co author that caused most article
Speaker 7: back in nineteen ninety, he was very relaxed about it.
Speaker 7: He basically.
Speaker 4: Looked at this as a grand geophysical experiment.
Speaker 3: And this, of course wasn't the first time something like
Speaker 3: this happened. The Roger level case is just one of
Speaker 3: many alarming examples of how a big oil lobby uses
Speaker 3: real scientific experts to amplify their quack science.
Speaker 1: I mean, there have been others, so I mean, this
Speaker 1: was a strategy that was really engineered by big tobacco
Speaker 1: in the fifties and sixties. But for example, they created
Speaker 1: a group called the Tobacco Industry Research Committee that was
Speaker 1: supposedly going to research whether tobacco was harmful. It was
Speaker 1: in fact a propaganda body. But it was headed by
Speaker 1: a molecular biologist who didn't like genetics, and so he
Speaker 1: again was a scientific expert. He of course was in
Speaker 1: no way like a health expert or a doctor or
Speaker 1: a medical researcher, but he lent the sort of way
Speaker 1: of expertise to this group.
Speaker 3: So when we think about misinformation, we think about Russian
Speaker 3: state television, but one of the things you write about
Speaker 3: is actually way way scarier. And it's our idea that
Speaker 3: these days the propagandis are family and friends, and that's
Speaker 3: because of social media. I wonder if you could take
Speaker 3: us way back to twenty sixteen and explain how social
Speaker 3: media really changed the state of misinformation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So social media, we can think of it broadly as
Speaker 1: having changed the way information can flow between people. It's
Speaker 1: kind of special in that it changes very quickly, and
Speaker 1: there's always new platforms, and the way information is flowing
Speaker 1: is always changing. First it soundbites, and then it's pictures,
Speaker 1: and then it's words, and then it's words and pictures,
Speaker 1: and then it's videos, and so the change is so
Speaker 1: fast that it's sort of hard to respond regulate. Here's
Speaker 1: a few of the things that really matter about social
Speaker 1: media and why misinformation can spread so well on there.
Speaker 1: So one thing is that people can get big platforms
Speaker 1: even when they don't really deserve big platforms. Another thing
Speaker 1: is that it's hard to know the source of information.
Speaker 1: So if you're thinking about like person to person social
Speaker 1: exchange of information, you're looking at another person in the face.
Speaker 1: You can see who they are, you know where they live,
Speaker 1: you know how you met them, You probably know other
Speaker 1: people they're connected to. You have a lot of information
Speaker 1: about who they are. Once you get onto social media,
Speaker 1: you're looking at profiles where there may or may not
Speaker 1: even be a real person corresponding with that profile. That
Speaker 1: profile could be bought, it could be a Russian agent,
Speaker 1: it could be another political agent, it could be someone's
Speaker 1: secret earner account where they're trying to do something, and
Speaker 1: so you have less ability to judge your social sources
Speaker 1: as trustworthy or not trustworthy. In addition, we see propagandists
Speaker 1: able to take advantage of various aspects of social media
Speaker 1: to sort of tweak our social feelings of trust in
Speaker 1: ways that are much harder to do person to person. So,
Speaker 1: for example, they can get a bunch of bots to
Speaker 1: like a piece of misinformation, and then that looks to
Speaker 1: us like this is very popular.
Speaker 2: A lot of people like it, a lot of people
Speaker 2: trust it.
Speaker 1: That's a cue to us that it is trustworthy that
Speaker 1: we we ought to engage in, or that we could share,
Speaker 1: and so there are ways for our you know, our
Speaker 1: normal knowledge forming mechanisms to get hacked.
Speaker 3: And Kalin says that right now a lot of people
Speaker 3: don't trust the institutions that we've historically gained knowledge from,
Speaker 3: like traditional media and subject matter experts.
Speaker 1: A lot of people argue that for the most part,
Speaker 1: people are trusting of experts still, including of scientists, and
Speaker 1: yet we do see this kind of phenomenon of people
Speaker 1: describing the New York Times as fake news. A lot
Speaker 1: of what is driving that, I think is cynical actors
Speaker 1: who are trying to erode public trust in science, and
Speaker 1: especially you see this in the US among right wing
Speaker 1: politicians and especially populist type politicians, because of course populism
Speaker 1: is associated with this kind of rejection of authority or expertise.
Speaker 1: But there's often a reason people are doing it, which
Speaker 1: is that if you can get people not to trust
Speaker 1: the real scientists, not to trust the real journalists, not
Speaker 1: to trust these good sources of information, then they're easier
Speaker 1: to control.
Speaker 3: Just backing up, we've got bad actors who are trying
Speaker 3: to influence public opinion so that those people don't say,
Speaker 3: stop protesting in the streets about the government's inact on
Speaker 3: the climate crisis, and these bad actors are putting a
Speaker 3: share ton of money into advertising and propaganda campaigns, but
Speaker 3: they're also influencing our politics through lobbying and funding the
Speaker 3: campaigns of politicians who side with their bogus narrative. This
Speaker 3: might seem pretty bleak that there is a solution.
Speaker 1: Thing.
Speaker 2: Number One, campaign finance reform.
Speaker 1: That's a depressing topic because the people who are financed
Speaker 1: are the ones who have to implement campaign finance reform.
Speaker 1: But without it, it's pretty hard to see how we'll
Speaker 1: get effective climate action because there are just so many
Speaker 1: politicians who are funded by oil gas call these massively
Speaker 1: wealthy corporations that can afford to give a lot of
Speaker 1: money to politicians. Another thing has to do with regulation
Speaker 1: of online content, so free speech.
Speaker 2: We don't want to impinge on free speech.
Speaker 1: We do want it to be the case that all
Speaker 1: of us can be in informational environments that allow us
Speaker 1: to form good beliefs, that give us the freedom to
Speaker 1: think effectively about what's happening around us, to learn about
Speaker 1: the world, that give us the freedom to make good
Speaker 1: choices for our own lives and protect our own interests.
Speaker 1: So you know, there are ways in which we can
Speaker 1: think about us as having rights to be in good
Speaker 1: informational environments as well as other people having rights to
Speaker 1: share bad information.
Speaker 2: One thing a lot of philosophers have talked about.
Speaker 1: Is the difference between stopping speech and deplatforming. So we
Speaker 1: don't think of people as having a right to have
Speaker 1: any platform for their false beliefs or bad ideas, Like
Speaker 1: nobody is entitled to come to a university and get
Speaker 1: of talks on their flat earth theories.
Speaker 2: In the same way people.
Speaker 1: Aren't entitled to have the algorithm on Instagram promote their
Speaker 1: content for them.
Speaker 2: To a lot of people, that's not an entitlement.
Speaker 1: So we can have regulations where people can say what
Speaker 1: they want, but where we don't have to platform spread
Speaker 1: what they're seeing. And you know, it's not as if
Speaker 1: people have an entitlement to even be on social media
Speaker 1: platform that's up to social media platforms, and if you know,
Speaker 1: they were to take that more seriously, I would think
Speaker 1: a good model is something like, when you get onto
Speaker 1: a platform like this, you sign a user agreement or
Speaker 1: a contract that says if I promote too much misleading
Speaker 1: or harmful.
Speaker 2: Content, then the platform can.
Speaker 1: Kick me off because the platform has a standard for
Speaker 1: the kind of content you can share.
Speaker 2: Of course, that gets into very difficult about who's.
Speaker 1: Going to decide what kind of content is misleading and harmful.
Speaker 2: And that is legitimately tricky, but sort of in.
Speaker 1: The extremes, there's a lot of content that we can
Speaker 1: you know, it's just not controversial that it's misleading, that
Speaker 1: it's interfering with people's abilities to function and make decisions,
Speaker 1: and that's the kind of stuff that could be a
Speaker 1: gimme to say if people are sharing too much of that,
Speaker 1: then they don't get platformed on this.
Speaker 2: I think the.
Speaker 1: Sort of most promising model for how to regulate niche
Speaker 1: online is to have something analogous like to the EPA
Speaker 1: or the FDA, a regulatory agency where we're not thinking
Speaker 1: about like passing laws in Congress that say this is
Speaker 1: what you can do on Instagram, but rather we have
Speaker 1: a set of guidelines that social media platforms have to
Speaker 1: comply to, and then these regulatory agencies can work flexibly
Speaker 1: with those media companies to comply with those guidelines.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's big honors, maybe not up your alley, but
Speaker 3: there are a ton of ways we can protect ourselves
Speaker 3: from missing disinformation.
Speaker 4: We're fucking the future, We're un fucking the future.
Speaker 3: If you like me, you might feel totally equipped to
Speaker 3: recognize miss and disinformation, and yet most of us have
Speaker 3: fallen for it. I definitely have. So what can we
Speaker 3: actually do here?
Speaker 4: What fuck can I do?
Speaker 3: I'm joined again by the brilliant Maggie bed Maggie. How's
Speaker 3: it going, Hey.
Speaker 2: Chris, I'm doing really well.
Speaker 8: But honestly, some of the steph you and kill just
Speaker 8: talked about it's pretty fucking depressing. I mean, even those
Speaker 8: of us who think of ourselves as savvy can be
Speaker 8: easily duped by misinformation.
Speaker 5: Because the people who put that shit out do a
Speaker 5: really good job of it.
Speaker 9: And some of it is disinformation. They really are trying
Speaker 9: to make us believe something that's not true. I don't
Speaker 9: know about you, but I think of times when I've
Speaker 9: been fooled but like a visual image and I believe
Speaker 9: it because I see it with my own eyes and
Speaker 9: then I realized it was manipulated.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the same thing that happens with facts.
Speaker 3: Totally me too, I mean, Kaitlin had one tip I
Speaker 3: wanted to share about how we can steal clear misinformation.
Speaker 3: I mean, she says one of the easiest ways to
Speaker 3: spot misinformation relate to the climate change is to look
Speaker 3: out for news of articles where climate disansers are being
Speaker 3: blamed on something other than the climate crisis.
Speaker 1: When you see these kind of social consequences of climate change, like,
Speaker 1: for example, conflicts related to climate crises or refugees, lines
Speaker 1: that are casting doubt about the real causes, like oh,
Speaker 1: this would have happened even without rising heat, or it
Speaker 1: wasn't actually the climate that caused this, lines about I'm
Speaker 1: meant being a conspiracy. And then I talked about these
Speaker 1: kinds of distracting claims where they're talking about harms from
Speaker 1: climate mitigation or green energy, and those harms might be real,
Speaker 1: but they're distracting from the much much more serious harms
Speaker 1: of continuing to use fossil fuels.
Speaker 5: Oh, I think that is such a good point. Misinformation
Speaker 5: isn't just incorrect information. It's also information that doesn't include
Speaker 5: the full picture. Maybe it's facts cherry picked from a
Speaker 5: larger study that paint a picture that is very misleading.
Speaker 5: So if you're wondering if what you're reading is misinformation
Speaker 5: or disinformation. Here are some red flags to look out for.
Speaker 5: First of all, I am very skeptical of emotional reactions.
Speaker 5: Content that uses really emotional or charge language, it just
Speaker 5: should be checked. You just want to make sure all
Speaker 5: the facts are straight before retweeting or sharing it. It's
Speaker 5: so tempting because you're like, oh my gosh, that's shocking.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna share it, and then you know, just take
Speaker 5: a breath, check it out. And when something sounds too
Speaker 5: good or too bad, or or maybe too shocking to
Speaker 5: be true, well it just might not be true. Also,
Speaker 5: always make sure you check the source of the information.
Speaker 5: Who funded the study that is being cited. Is it
Speaker 5: a reputable academic resource or a corporation that stands to
Speaker 5: gain financially? And if it's the latter, maybe take that
Speaker 5: information with a grain of salt.
Speaker 3: Oh, that last one is good. Always check out the
Speaker 3: source of the information and that you're conveying the full picture.
Speaker 3: And that's what the fuck you can do?
Speaker 4: What the fuck can I do? Oh?
Speaker 1: Fucked?
Speaker 3: That's all for this episode. Next time, I'm fucking the
Speaker 3: future Bill neither science guy.
Speaker 2: A question I have for conservative me is why are
Speaker 2: you doing this? Why are you ignoring the facts. What
Speaker 2: is it and to think, well, they're doing it for
Speaker 2: the money.
Speaker 1: What money?
Speaker 2: We're all gonna die if you keep this up.
Speaker 3: I think you're really going to enjoy it until then.
Speaker 3: I'm Chris Turney signing off from Sydney, Australia. Thanks for
Speaker 3: joining me in I'm Fucking the Future.
Speaker 4: Weird Fucking the Future.
Speaker 3: I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Imagine Audio and
Speaker 3: Awfully Nice for iHeart Podcasts and hosted by me Chris Turney.
Speaker 3: The show is written by Meredith Brian. I'm Fucking the
Speaker 3: Future is produced by Amber von Shassen and Renee Colvert.
Speaker 3: Ron Howard, Brian, Carral Welker and Nathan Chloke are the
Speaker 3: executive producers from Imagine Audio. Jesse Burton and Katie Hodges
Speaker 3: are the executive producers from Awfully Nice. Sound design and
Speaker 3: mixing by Evan Arnette, original music by Lillly Hayden and
Speaker 3: producing services by Peter McGuigan. Sam Swinnerton wrote our theme
Speaker 3: and all those fun jingles. If you enjoyed this episode,
Speaker 3: be sure to rate and review Unfucking the Future on
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts or whether you get your podcasts