Speaker 1: Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
Speaker 1: known things go. Corridors lined with lockers filled with textbooks
Speaker 1: and backpacks and snacks. That place. This place is a
Speaker 1: high school. Sneakers skidding on freshly waxed linoleum floors, florescent
Speaker 1: lights gleaming overhead, the gabble of gossip flirting in the
Speaker 1: hallway and down this hallway a history class. What is
Speaker 1: a fact? Start there amongst your table, and how do
Speaker 1: you know when something is true? Discuss take a few minutes.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the last archive, the show about how we
Speaker 1: know what we know and why it seems lately hard
Speaker 1: to know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapoor. This episode,
Speaker 1: we're going back to school to learn how to know
Speaker 1: what's true. Tell me be brave? Now, what's a fact?
Speaker 1: Who wants to go first? Start me? What's a fact?
Speaker 1: Benji Cohen teaches world history at Cambridge Ringe in Latin School,
Speaker 1: a public high school in Massachusetts outside Boston. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna watch it, being like three minutes long. You have
Speaker 1: in front of you the transcript of it to use afterwards.
Speaker 1: One day last winter, he started his class by playing
Speaker 1: a campaign ad, actually a spoof of a campaign ad
Speaker 1: in which a generic political candidate says meaningless things over
Speaker 1: stock footage and sappie music. Hello, it's me candidate for president.
Speaker 1: A person with a face, a person whose hand gestures
Speaker 1: are definitely not weird. Here are a bunch of different
Speaker 1: people matched with career signifiers like a helmet, a uniform,
Speaker 1: or a stethoscope on the off chance that you identify
Speaker 1: with one event. And here's a guy with a belly,
Speaker 1: a beer, and a hard hat. I talked to this guy.
Speaker 1: I think the kids in mister Cohen's class thought this
Speaker 1: was pretty funny, laugh out loud funny. They got it
Speaker 1: right away. They'd seen political ads their whole lives, and
Speaker 1: they get oh my god, they so get irony. What
Speaker 1: is this ad arguing? What's it actually say? What aesthetic
Speaker 1: choices stand out to you? What has it revealed to
Speaker 1: you about America politics? And are there any factual claims here?
Speaker 1: And if so, what are they take two minutes talk
Speaker 1: to another? I was there in Benji Cohen's class to
Speaker 1: witness a thought experiment brought to life, an attempt in
Speaker 1: this our season of solutions to confront up close Mano Amato.
Speaker 1: The problem of political missin formation. These kids know their
Speaker 1: country is facing a lot of problems, but a lot
Speaker 1: of the election talk they hear sounds more like a
Speaker 1: fight in the hallway. You lie, No, you lie. Politicians lie,
Speaker 1: They tell big lies. This has been true for as
Speaker 1: long as there have been politicians, and it'll be true forever. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm not a crook. I experimented with marijuana a time
Speaker 1: or two, and I didn't like it and didn't inhale.
Speaker 1: Campaign ads are full of misrepresentations. Attack ads are the worst,
Speaker 1: but even straight up pro candidate ads can be outrageously deceptive,
Speaker 1: and entire political campaigns, even campaigns for the White House,
Speaker 1: can be lost over these ads. Considered the time in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty eight when supporters of George hw Bush aired
Speaker 1: an ad attacking Massachusetts Governor Michael Ducaucus for being weak
Speaker 1: on crime. Duconcas not only opposers of the death penalty,
Speaker 1: he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison.
Speaker 1: Was Willie Horton. The ad was deceptive, but it was
Speaker 1: also effective. It's often cited as a major contributing factor
Speaker 1: for Ducaucus losing his election. Or think about how in
Speaker 1: two thousand and four, when one ad all but accused
Speaker 1: Vietnam veteran John Kerry of treason. He betrayed us in
Speaker 1: the past, how could we be loyal to him now?
Speaker 1: This was not true, but it helped sink Carry's campaign.
Speaker 1: To say that this has been going on for a
Speaker 1: long time, isn't to say that it isn't especially terrible
Speaker 1: right now, because it is terrible. There's no real way
Speaker 1: to answer lies and misrepresentations, and political ads no effective
Speaker 1: way to fact check them. In the broadcast era of
Speaker 1: broadcast radio and television, the FCC created a set of
Speaker 1: rules for political ads. Those rules mean that broadcasters just
Speaker 1: can't cannot refuse to air a political ad if it's
Speaker 1: been made by the candidate's own campaign. You might remember
Speaker 1: last season when we had a whole episode about a
Speaker 1: thing called the Fairness Doctrine, an FCC rule that made
Speaker 1: it so television and radio stations had to reflect all
Speaker 1: points of view. But that rule ended in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: seven with the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the
Speaker 1: rise of talk radio and partisan cable television, an era
Speaker 1: where you get stuff like this and I rescue feminazis
Speaker 1: here's the deal. What I have Here is a copy
Speaker 1: of Donald Trump's tax returns. We have his federal tracks
Speaker 1: return for one year, for two thousand and five. What
Speaker 1: we have are these two pages. People have tried to
Speaker 1: bring back the fairness doctrine, but it never works. It's
Speaker 1: not coming back. And even though this is a season
Speaker 1: of solutions, I have to be honest broadcast television and radio,
Speaker 1: cable television, I don't see a solution there when it
Speaker 1: comes to horrible political ads. The real fight, and the
Speaker 1: real possibility too, is with social media. The FCC doesn't
Speaker 1: control political advertisements on social media, No central governing body does.
Speaker 1: There are no rules except the ones social media companies
Speaker 1: make for themselves. Wild West to all that, and usually
Speaker 1: I would say this is a bad thing. The Internet.
Speaker 1: It loves lies, It thrives on lies, conspiracies, Lies get clicks,
Speaker 1: Clicks make money. You know all about it. The thing
Speaker 1: about these companies is they can still change how they work.
Speaker 1: They could still change how they handle political ads. They
Speaker 1: could make a new version of the fairness doctrine something better,
Speaker 1: not a doctrine, but a practice. That's how I ended
Speaker 1: up in Benji Cohen's history classroom at Cambridge Ringe and Latin,
Speaker 1: because who knows social media better than teenagers. Also, I'd
Speaker 1: come across an idea that I thought maybe could fix
Speaker 1: this whole mess while back, when the days were cold
Speaker 1: and short and COVID was in one of its peaks.
Speaker 1: I went to visit a colleague of mine, Jonathan Zittrain.
Speaker 1: He teaches at Harvard Law School and he's the co
Speaker 1: founder of the Berkman Client Center for Internet and Society.
Speaker 1: I had a hunch one of ZiT Traine's ideas would
Speaker 1: be perfect for my season of solutions. Everyone calls Jonathan
Speaker 1: ZiT Train jay z Okay, not jay Z as in
Speaker 1: Jay Z and Beyonce jay Z as in Jay Z
Speaker 1: the legal scholar. He might not be a multi platinum
Speaker 1: Grammy winner, but jay Z is the man. He got
Speaker 1: into computers as a siss up on a CompuServe forum
Speaker 1: for people who love Texas instruments. That's computer speak for
Speaker 1: moderator on a discussion board. He was in sixth grade.
Speaker 1: He's still got that anarchic early web energy and faith.
Speaker 1: He's always got these ideas that are so crazy they
Speaker 1: just might work. This idea was really, to myself, just
Speaker 1: met as a thought experiment that was clearly goofy. But
Speaker 1: I was just going to think it through and see
Speaker 1: where it led. And as time has gone on, it
Speaker 1: has seemed less and less goofy. Or maybe it's that
Speaker 1: everything else has seemed more and more so, so it's
Speaker 1: the last plan standing. Citrian said, I know how to
Speaker 1: solve political misinformation and campaign ads, or at least he said,
Speaker 1: I have a pretty darn good idea for how to try. Imagine,
Speaker 1: in every Civics or US History classroom in every public
Speaker 1: high school across the country, students gathering, say for one
Speaker 1: class period a week to decide what political ads should
Speaker 1: be allowed on the internet trial by teenager. If we
Speaker 1: ask those students to have a look at the ads
Speaker 1: as they are proposed to be run on a platform
Speaker 1: like Facebook, and take a moment and see if they
Speaker 1: pass some threshold of disinformation, of lying outright, of inaccuracy,
Speaker 1: deliberate in whatever small groups they might form from among
Speaker 1: a single classroom, and see if they can come to
Speaker 1: consensus or if necessary, a vote on whether the ad
Speaker 1: meets a minimum standard of truthfulness. And if the students
Speaker 1: decide that it fails, to their decision sticks and that
Speaker 1: ad will not run. And there you have it high
Speaker 1: school students, they decide. Not only would you, turns out,
Speaker 1: have enough high school students to actually manage the scale
Speaker 1: of the number of ads being lodged, but maybe you'd
Speaker 1: be in a position both to have their decisions respect it,
Speaker 1: and you might be helping them exercise a muscle from
Speaker 1: the vantage of playing the role of an arbiter that
Speaker 1: could come in handy as they in turn become voters
Speaker 1: a year or two after these exercises. Yeah, I love
Speaker 1: that sort of two for quality about it. Right that
Speaker 1: it both resolves the question of should these ads be
Speaker 1: made available to the public and how high school students
Speaker 1: can learn skills as citizens in a democracy. It also
Speaker 1: because as I understood your proposal, you'd be grouping together
Speaker 1: students from different communities kind of anti polarization or check
Speaker 1: against polarization. Is also maybe the piece of I think
Speaker 1: that's right for now, and you would get the value
Speaker 1: of both the deliberations, and this is something you don't
Speaker 1: much get on a jury. Asking the students to craft
Speaker 1: their reasoning, and it might be that some students would
Speaker 1: write in dissent and that that could be very nice. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there could be like a Minority report exactly. Now. I
Speaker 1: think this is a fascinating idea and a really promising one,
Speaker 1: but I want to be very clear about what it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not a lark, it's not idle speculation or armchair quarterbacking.
Speaker 1: It comes from Jay Z's very careful analysis of the
Speaker 1: problem with the Internet and society. He described for me
Speaker 1: three different eras in that history, and the first era
Speaker 1: was one of what i'd call the rights era. Era one,
Speaker 1: the rights era where anything goes free speech. That era
Speaker 1: lasts through the early years of the Internet and even
Speaker 1: the start of social media, and that era you could
Speaker 1: say anything you wanted, there are no limits. A lot
Speaker 1: of people hoped expected even that the Internet with strengthen
Speaker 1: democracy by democratizing publishing, and as you know, this isn't
Speaker 1: quite what happened. People started to revolt against this idea
Speaker 1: of free speech, and so Era too started around the
Speaker 1: year twenty ten, jay Z says, and he calls Era
Speaker 1: too the public health era. It's then that some kinds
Speaker 1: of speech came to be understood as harm, as if
Speaker 1: bad ideas are viruses. But a problem with the public
Speaker 1: health era is this, who decides which speech is harmful.
Speaker 1: The problem is that we don't even trust our public institutions,
Speaker 1: and it's not like we're trusting Facebook or Twitter these
Speaker 1: days so much so, whom would we want to wield
Speaker 1: the power or to shape what we can and can't see.
Speaker 1: And that led to me thinking it might be a
Speaker 1: third era in the making, which is the era of
Speaker 1: legitimacy or process Era three? The process or a legitimacy era,
Speaker 1: I think maybe it needs a better name. But jay
Speaker 1: Z's point is that in the era we're now in,
Speaker 1: we need to find a process, one that people respect
Speaker 1: as legitimate, that can start to reconcile the tension between
Speaker 1: rights arguments and public health arguments. And so he says,
Speaker 1: what process to people still respect? Trial by jury? You say, gosh,
Speaker 1: what that jury decided doesn't seem like what I would
Speaker 1: decide from what little I followed that case. But they
Speaker 1: were there, they know, and that person who was judged
Speaker 1: by that jury got a fair spin. Would be the
Speaker 1: idea of an ideal process. From there, jay Z came
Speaker 1: up with the idea of having a jury of high
Speaker 1: school students decide what political ads can and cannot get
Speaker 1: stood on social media. For jay Z, this scheme began
Speaker 1: as a thought experiment. I mean, I think it also
Speaker 1: came out of the fact that he was moderating content
Speaker 1: online when he was in sixth grade. But some of
Speaker 1: the best things ever invented started out as thought experiments.
Speaker 1: This high school thing, it had started as a thought experiment.
Speaker 1: But I told jay Z I wanted to actually do it,
Speaker 1: and then we both got excited because jay Z will
Speaker 1: he thought that if it worked, it might actually become
Speaker 1: a thing. If Mark Zuckerberg woke up on morning or
Speaker 1: one of his primary deputies and said this would be
Speaker 1: a great idea, you could like suddenly have a nationwide
Speaker 1: implementation rather quickly. That makes it very high stakes. That
Speaker 1: brings us back to our experiment. I put together a
Speaker 1: lesson plan and I went to Ringe to test it
Speaker 1: out to Benji Cohen's class back to school right after
Speaker 1: the bill. For those who can't see, my room is
Speaker 1: small and has no windows, and so when I moved in,
Speaker 1: I was like, these walls are going to become tattooed.
Speaker 1: Benji mister Cohen, mister c at age thirty two, He's
Speaker 1: already a legend Cohen's Lean. He's a runner in winter.
Speaker 1: He wears Chuck's All Stars otherwise Sandals. He is killer
Speaker 1: at Ultimate Frisbee, also tennis. He tells the students they
Speaker 1: can gamble their grade on his serve one serve. If
Speaker 1: they can return it, he'll give them an A plus.
Speaker 1: Otherwise they flunk his class his first year teaching, one
Speaker 1: kid who was already getting an F took him up
Speaker 1: on it. The whole class went outside their tennis courts
Speaker 1: out front. Mister Cohen aced him. The kids f stood.
Speaker 1: That was four years ago. No one has challenged him since.
Speaker 1: The walls of his classroom are covered. There's a giant
Speaker 1: poster that reads are you public education is a civil right?
Speaker 1: There's a photo of James Baldwin, and paste it on
Speaker 1: all four walls. Our student projects. Some highlights include the
Speaker 1: Pizza Gate board game. I teach a class about American
Speaker 1: politics and current events, and we do a unit on
Speaker 1: like conspiracy thinking and the infiltration of that into politics,
Speaker 1: and so we examine pizza Gate and some students decided
Speaker 1: to turn it into a game. This school, Cambridge Ringe
Speaker 1: in Latin School, a Ringe, as everyone calls it, is
Speaker 1: a big citywide public school. My kids all went to Ringe.
Speaker 1: Come on school, has nearly two thousand students. More than
Speaker 1: half of them are students of color. Kids at Range
Speaker 1: are native speakers of more than twenty languages. At graduation,
Speaker 1: they welcome the audience in each of those languages. I've
Speaker 1: attended that ceremony, and I can tell you everyone cries
Speaker 1: when that part happens. If you live in Cambridge, you
Speaker 1: heard about the famous people Blue went to Ryne, Patrick Ewing,
Speaker 1: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck build a Blasio,
Speaker 1: NPRS car talk guys. They went to Rynch too, Benji Cohen,
Speaker 1: he went to Ryne. Anyway, it's a fantastic, amazing, hubbubby school.
Speaker 1: What's the morning? We went to Ryne just after MLK Day.
Speaker 1: The kids tramped in winter coats, face masks, backpacks, looking
Speaker 1: a little sleepy. They slouched into those chairs, you know,
Speaker 1: the ones with the tennis balls on the feet. They
Speaker 1: checked TikTok, and then mister Cohen got started. All right,
Speaker 1: everyone put your welcome. Um, here's what we're gonna do today.
Speaker 1: Our guests are gonna introduce themselves and then we're just
Speaker 1: gonna jump right in. Sound like a plaid. All right,
Speaker 1: rock on, let's do it all right, Good morning everybody. Um,
Speaker 1: mister cos I told you were working out on a podcast,
Speaker 1: and the podcast is about how people know things and
Speaker 1: know whether things are true. Something one. There's a piece
Speaker 1: of paper at your desks. You can use it or
Speaker 1: you cannot. The first thing I want you to think
Speaker 1: about as a collective, just talk to each other. You
Speaker 1: could write notes if you want, is what is a
Speaker 1: fact and how do you know when something is true?
Speaker 1: We wanted to figure out how kids thought about facts, opinions, beliefs.
Speaker 1: Twenty or so students, mostly juniors, divided into four groups
Speaker 1: and sat huddled around tables, pushed together, trying to write
Speaker 1: a definition for the word fact. It was a kind
Speaker 1: of beautiful chaos. That is like something that I feel
Speaker 1: like people getting back to a beliefs like Ruth is
Speaker 1: a junior, plays on the basketball team. She's also part
Speaker 1: of a student run project at Ringe whose aim is
Speaker 1: to integrate more of the black past into the history curriculum.
Speaker 1: She seemed like a classic go getter for the room.
Speaker 1: Hand raised kind of kid. Mister Cohen nodded along, encouraging them.
Speaker 1: Then he called on a ninth grader, Oh, yes, start,
Speaker 1: what's a fact. So a fact is something that can
Speaker 1: be like proven. You have a statement that's been said,
Speaker 1: like um Benji was born on July twenty second, July
Speaker 1: twenty second, nineteen ninety two or whatever I wish um
Speaker 1: and to prove that he would have like a birth
Speaker 1: certificate to prove it, which would mean like, you know,
Speaker 1: that's that, that's the fact. And but like I think
Speaker 1: that's what happened. As sounds what you're saying you need
Speaker 1: like a primary source. Yeah, ok yeah, that okay, great,
Speaker 1: good start. But then what mister Cohen kept pushing them.
Speaker 1: And what's striking here I hope you can hear it
Speaker 1: because it blew my ears right off my head is
Speaker 1: the seriousness with which the students are taking all of this.
Speaker 1: Sure they're messing around, but there's a real sense of
Speaker 1: solemn responsibility that this civic exercise. Maybe it matters maybe
Speaker 1: to their great okay, and maybe to their relationship to
Speaker 1: mister Cohen, whom they all adore, but also their relationship
Speaker 1: to one another and to themselves. They care, they really
Speaker 1: care about getting this right. From the start, they cared
Speaker 1: about that, they cared about doing it well. Mister Cohen
Speaker 1: has this way of urging his students on. It just
Speaker 1: knocked me out. Be brave, He'll say, go for it.
Speaker 1: Rock on, We're gonna rock with an example. Get it
Speaker 1: from the back. I want to hear what everyone has
Speaker 1: to say. Okay, so Robbie, Robbie trying to make trouble
Speaker 1: Soren in the morning. So here's the question. You're ready,
Speaker 1: you're ready? Is it a fact that on January sixth,
Speaker 1: Trump supporters went into the United States Capital? Is that
Speaker 1: an established fact? And if so, how do you know?
Speaker 1: Go ahead? Oh, yes, it is. So there's two parts
Speaker 1: of this. There's the went into the Capitol part and
Speaker 1: the Trump supporters part. After the went into the Capitol part.
Speaker 1: We have video have it enjoying the people were in
Speaker 1: the Capitol, and we also know from the um and
Speaker 1: it's so people appeared to be Trump supporters. It's a fact, Isaac.
Speaker 1: You just heard Isaac. He's a junior, remember the school
Speaker 1: debate team. He was sitting next to Robbie, who started
Speaker 1: the school hiking club. Robbie piped up next, I'm under
Speaker 1: the belief that, I mean, there's like a one true fact.
Speaker 1: It's just whether we know it or not. And me
Speaker 1: personally I'm ninety nine percent sure that it actually was
Speaker 1: Trump supporters, but there's always, like, there's always a possibility
Speaker 1: that it's something completely different. I think at this point
Speaker 1: it's not even whether or not you know it, it's
Speaker 1: whether or not you believe it. Robbie and Isaac and Zach,
Speaker 1: boys in the back of the room kept ramping it up.
Speaker 1: In the mythology of the big city public school classroom,
Speaker 1: the boys in the back of the room would be
Speaker 1: leaning their chairs back, chewing gum, throwing wads of paper
Speaker 1: at the front. But mister Cohen knows these kids are smart,
Speaker 1: so is a fact just about belief? He was just
Speaker 1: accepting it. I'm on tea team that they must be this.
Speaker 1: And that's where it's true. Any of the understandings of
Speaker 1: a fact separate from that example, what else makes a
Speaker 1: fact affect alight? Go for it alor he's a senior,
Speaker 1: he's in the school musical Well, like I really liked um,
Speaker 1: Like George Ryals nineteen eighty four when he when he
Speaker 1: was talking about like whether the truth really matters? And
Speaker 1: of course it does matter to all of the characters, right,
Speaker 1: Like the final thing that they ask you to dismisses
Speaker 1: the truth of your eyes and ears fact actually about
Speaker 1: like what majority accepted. Is that what makes a fact
Speaker 1: a fact? No, because that goes directly contrary to like
Speaker 1: the definition of facts that we've talked about before, which
Speaker 1: is a fact is something that can be basically verified
Speaker 1: correct evidence. All right. That leaves us in a good place, yep,
Speaker 1: a good place with a working definition of a fact,
Speaker 1: and ready to apply that definition to some political ads, mister,
Speaker 1: and moved to that. Next, we're gonna watch two ads.
Speaker 1: These are we'll see what actually happens. I think the
Speaker 1: Republican incumbent, meaning the guy who's currently the Republican senator
Speaker 1: at Wisconsin. It's his reelection ad. His name is Ron Johnson,
Speaker 1: and I think fair to saying maybe the Democratic front
Speaker 1: runner to challenge him. So you're gonna watch two ads
Speaker 1: in a row, mister Cohen, students were ready to be
Speaker 1: called to the jury. They'd be evaluating two internet ads
Speaker 1: from the same race for a Senate seat in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: We picked Wisconsin sort of randomly, but this looked like
Speaker 1: an interesting race, and the goal of the first experiment
Speaker 1: was just to see how the kids thought about truth
Speaker 1: in advertising. See if they'd even be interested in this.
Speaker 1: So for this version of the experiment, we wanted to
Speaker 1: ask high schoolers to consider candidates from another state campaigns
Speaker 1: they'd probably not followed or even heard of. First, the
Speaker 1: Democrat Mandela Barnes excuses are nothing but a dead end
Speaker 1: into expectations are something to be shattered. You can't see it.
Speaker 1: So I'll just tell you this whole ad. Basically, Barnes
Speaker 1: is running, literally running in track shoes and short way.
Speaker 1: There are no idle hands here, no low we haven't carried,
Speaker 1: no one waiting for a handout. We were free pass.
Speaker 1: But that hard work isn't paying off like it used to.
Speaker 1: My mom takes school for thirty years. My dad worked
Speaker 1: third shift at the factory. When I think about their
Speaker 1: hard work, about everything that wisconstant, families have on the line.
Speaker 1: There's no option to tap out, no tie to throw in.
Speaker 1: Instead of changing our dreams, we got to change the game.
Speaker 1: That's America had his court in this state, our state.
Speaker 1: We were the first to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment giving
Speaker 1: women the right to vote. We were the first to
Speaker 1: protect the rights of the LGBTQ community. We are game. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's number one is number two. Remember the task of
Speaker 1: this jury is to watch and listen and look for
Speaker 1: assertions of fact, because afterward they'll have to check them.
Speaker 1: So next we all watch the Republican incumbent sad this
Speaker 1: guy's running for reelection as Wisconsin Senator. Our country is
Speaker 1: in troubled. Democrat policies have been disastrous for America, opened
Speaker 1: borders in a flood of illegal immigrants, the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: summer Ryans defunding the police, glowering bail, and not prosecuting criminals.
Speaker 1: The result more crime, human and sex trafficking, record, drug overdoses,
Speaker 1: Kenosha set on fire, a growing number of murders in Milwaukee,
Speaker 1: and the walk Shop Christmas Parade turned into a terrible tragedy.
Speaker 1: It feels like our country is being torn apart. That's
Speaker 1: not how it felt when I ran in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: Back then, I intended to serve a second term and
Speaker 1: go home. But now with the Democrats in total control,
Speaker 1: our nation's on a very dangerous path. If you're in
Speaker 1: a position to help make our country safer and stronger,
Speaker 1: would you just walk away? I've decided I can't. I'll
Speaker 1: stand and fight for freedom I'm Ron Johnson, and I've
Speaker 1: proved this message because I love America and Wisconsin just
Speaker 1: like you. So the students watched the two ads, Ron
Speaker 1: Johnson Mandela Barnes. Then we handed out transcripts of what
Speaker 1: the candidates had said, line by line, and mister Cohen
Speaker 1: divided the class into two groups, one for each candidate. No,
Speaker 1: it's no y'all handled round. Y'all would say, y'all handled one,
Speaker 1: Bendella Barnes, listen close? What using those sheets in front
Speaker 1: of you? Does your ad have statements of fact? Find
Speaker 1: out which ones are true? Actually find out? Get a computer,
Speaker 1: look one person. Is this ad useful? Is your ads
Speaker 1: true enough to be posted online by social media companies? Why?
Speaker 1: Or why not? Enjoy? Have fun? Ron Johnson Mandela Barnes
Speaker 1: will do it. I started at watching the kids who
Speaker 1: were evaluating Mendela Barnes's ad, The Jogging Democrat Are the
Speaker 1: kid in the school musical jumped in first. I mean
Speaker 1: he said to protect the rights of the LGBTQ community. Like,
Speaker 1: even though that's super broad, I feel like it's at
Speaker 1: least a stance kind of but it's still so vague.
Speaker 1: Pretty workers is something that either one of them could say,
Speaker 1: like the Democrat and the Republicans, what does it mean
Speaker 1: to protect exactly right? I also thought it was odd
Speaker 1: how he said we were the first to protect the
Speaker 1: rights of the LGBTQ community. But I'm like, what does
Speaker 1: that mean? Where do you start? That's that's a pretty
Speaker 1: you can either find if that's correct or not. It's okay.
Speaker 1: They only had about twenty minutes to get this done,
Speaker 1: but they took out their phones and started searching looking
Speaker 1: for places to catch Mendela Barnes in an error of fact.
Speaker 1: Teenagers are pretty good at the art of the takedown.
Speaker 1: The first thing by NPS dot Gov. June tenth, nineteen nineteen. Illinois, Michigan,
Speaker 1: and Wisconsin became the first states to ratify the amendment.
Speaker 1: Wisconsin was among the first among the first foot well,
Speaker 1: maybe his we statement all right, if we make it
Speaker 1: vague enough, He's like, we as in like all of
Speaker 1: the states I did it with or maybe within nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: Wisconsin was first on the calendar. Oh, I think there's other.
Speaker 1: I left them mulling over that one. Then I headed
Speaker 1: over to the group that was evaluating the Republican Ron
Speaker 1: Johnson said they've gotten really interested in this one line
Speaker 1: listed on the transcript that we'd handed out, line ten,
Speaker 1: where the senator says, as part of a list of
Speaker 1: things that are wrong with America, Kenosha set on fire.
Speaker 1: Mister Cohen got them started. Okay, I want one of
Speaker 1: you to explain how we've just gone through this thinking
Speaker 1: about line ten. So start from the beginning. When we
Speaker 1: looked at the lines before we Consha set on fire?
Speaker 1: What did we think was Kenosha set on fire? Were
Speaker 1: there fires in Kenosha fires? Right? I'm just looking at
Speaker 1: his line here, right, he says, Conosha set on fire.
Speaker 1: If we googled right now, was Conosha set on fire?
Speaker 1: What would we find? Well, I guess Peter doing right now?
Speaker 1: You can tell us a moment. What I'm what I'm
Speaker 1: getting at is is there a fact here? But there's
Speaker 1: something missing in the fact Kenosha might have been set
Speaker 1: on fire? But like, what is missing here? Context? Context?
Speaker 1: Who set it on fire? Why it was set on fire?
Speaker 1: In the context? That feels valuable information? Right. The students
Speaker 1: did a bunch more googling, close reading of the transcripts
Speaker 1: of the ad checking facts. This much was clear for
Speaker 1: this experiment to really work, students would need more time,
Speaker 1: not just one class period, maybe more like a week.
Speaker 1: I have an idea that's Ruth again stepping in to
Speaker 1: save the day and come up with a possible verdict.
Speaker 1: I feel like I could kind of be a good ideas, like,
Speaker 1: so both perspectives at the same time, because I know,
Speaker 1: like first, for example, at first I could be this,
Speaker 1: and then the next slide could be like the other
Speaker 1: side of it. So yeah, speaking at two perspectives at
Speaker 1: the same time. And also like um, when like when
Speaker 1: you postum this specific campaign on on social media and stuff,
Speaker 1: there can be like a link for like different words
Speaker 1: of kenosha and then you click on your earn like
Speaker 1: it takes you and like you actually know facts. So
Speaker 1: it's just like all you learn stuff altogether rather than
Speaker 1: just like seeing one thing and then going with it
Speaker 1: like you're presented with both sides and like contexts has worked.
Speaker 1: So this is a good idea, a really good idea.
Speaker 1: But it isn't a new idea. It is in fact
Speaker 1: the fairness doctrine. The classic way of navigating the murky
Speaker 1: waters were fact and opinion mix. Still, the idea was
Speaker 1: new to Ruth, and she came up with it in
Speaker 1: one class period. Up until this moment, I'd been wondering
Speaker 1: would this experiment work, would these kids get it? This
Speaker 1: was when I knew it was working. Soon we'd get
Speaker 1: to hear their verdicts coming up after the break. The
Speaker 1: high school history students at Ringe were about the most
Speaker 1: thoughtful commentators on the problem of political misinformation that I
Speaker 1: had ever come across. I could have listened to them forever,
Speaker 1: But mister Cohen knew the bill was going to ring
Speaker 1: pretty soon. He called everyone back together time for a
Speaker 1: final verdict. Both ads were true enough, the students said,
Speaker 1: both could be posted on social media. Then mister Cohen
Speaker 1: asked a different question, who is more honest, Mandela Barnes
Speaker 1: or Ron Johnson? In your opinion, who presents a more
Speaker 1: honest view of themselves as politician? This turned out to
Speaker 1: be a really difficult question. For a minute, the kids
Speaker 1: were stumped. They hadn't thought about honesty. Robbie said, honesty
Speaker 1: is a political good, maybe it really counts. And then
Speaker 1: when you started thinking about honesty and thinking about those
Speaker 1: two ads through that lens, the ads looked different. Johnson,
Speaker 1: the Republican incumbent Remember and Barnes, his Democratic challenger. I
Speaker 1: could not predict what Barnes would vote for, which, as
Speaker 1: a voter is most important to me. Barnes thing his
Speaker 1: ad is so generic that I don't know where he stands, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know his base at all. I don't know
Speaker 1: how progressive he is. I don't know how modern he is.
Speaker 1: I mean the Democratic Party as a whole, it's like
Speaker 1: a huge spectrum. So specifically for Barnes, I feel like
Speaker 1: I get less of a read on him as a
Speaker 1: person than I do on Johnson, even if I may
Speaker 1: agree with him. So this question of personally, yeah, so
Speaker 1: this question of honesty, would you say Johnson is more
Speaker 1: like Johnson is now more honest with himself, He's more
Speaker 1: honest with his policy. I don't know who Johnson as
Speaker 1: a as a person. I never will, but at least
Speaker 1: I will know what he's going to vote for. And
Speaker 1: with that, the class was just about over and it
Speaker 1: was time to head off to calculus and Spanish and banned.
Speaker 1: But before we stopped recording, mister Cohen asked one last
Speaker 1: question just before the bell rang. He wanted to know
Speaker 1: if this actually happened, if high school kids were actually
Speaker 1: tasked with vetting political advertisements. Would these kids want to
Speaker 1: take part? How should social media companies decide, well, there's
Speaker 1: true enough to be posted. Which one of you is
Speaker 1: going to be brave? Talk to me? Come on? Look
Speaker 1: got a jar? He was looking at me. Sheriffs had
Speaker 1: been quiet for a while. Mister Cohen was giving her
Speaker 1: an encouraging stare. Helly, do you think it's good for
Speaker 1: Do you want the responsibility as a citizen democracy? No?
Speaker 1: Not necessarily. I think I don't know if I should
Speaker 1: have that much of it to say of how social
Speaker 1: media companies like dictate what they do. I don't know
Speaker 1: if that's then everyone had an opinion. Honestly, no one
Speaker 1: knows social media better than teenagers. The social media companies
Speaker 1: shouldn't be in charge at all. They have way too
Speaker 1: much to gain. I don't know if it should be teenagers,
Speaker 1: but it should just not be social media companies at all.
Speaker 1: I feel like we definitely should be asking random people,
Speaker 1: random citizens, to be the fact checkers, because they have
Speaker 1: no idea. I think that the reason that works for
Speaker 1: jurys is because cases can take like weeks and stuff.
Speaker 1: I don't want to spend weeks of my life deciding
Speaker 1: whether or not to flag a post of thirty likes
Speaker 1: on Facebook. Then and no nonsense. I hit A junior
Speaker 1: named Geffen jumped in. He jumped all in. I don't
Speaker 1: think that the social media companies should be deciding what's
Speaker 1: true and what isn't true. They shouldn't be controlling what
Speaker 1: we see. Diversity of thought is important. Shutting everyone down
Speaker 1: like Putin does not so great. I don't support that,
Speaker 1: but of course it is their right to do it,
Speaker 1: because it's their own business. Deefin. If you were to
Speaker 1: lean sort of all any meeting, the social media companies
Speaker 1: should just allow politicians to post whatever, don't regulate any
Speaker 1: of it, or don't allow any of it. Where would
Speaker 1: you fall? They should not ban anything, just let it
Speaker 1: all out. Yeah, did anyone want it? No? No one.
Speaker 1: No one wants to be that group decides. Everyone shook
Speaker 1: their heads. Nah. They didn't want that responsibility. They didn't
Speaker 1: want to be making binding decisions for Facebook. Not Isaac,
Speaker 1: not Geffen, not Sherriffs, not Robbie. To any students, shaking
Speaker 1: their heads, hell yeah you got pad, you classic credit,
Speaker 1: Yeah you got today. Oh I was kind of staggered
Speaker 1: to hear that these incredible students didn't want to be
Speaker 1: the ones deciding what political ads are true enough to
Speaker 1: go up on social media. They either thought someone else
Speaker 1: should do it, or it shouldn't be done, or they
Speaker 1: do it if they could get paid like me. Mister
Speaker 1: Cohen seemed pretty crestfall and he asked his students if
Speaker 1: in that case, democracy is just screwed? Are you asking
Speaker 1: like democracy a concept is like inevitably like like screwed?
Speaker 1: Be willing to like democracy is a but you like
Speaker 1: hard it? I don't aside your essays, you'll do it.
Speaker 1: Mister Cohen was trying to make a deal with his students.
Speaker 1: No homework. Okay, look, how about a different deal. Mister
Speaker 1: Cohen has that standing offer to all of his students.
Speaker 1: If a student can return his killer Tennis serve, they
Speaker 1: get an a. So how about any student who can
Speaker 1: return mister Cohen serve can skip this assignment and doesn't
Speaker 1: have to decide what political ads can go up on Facebook.
Speaker 1: But all you students who can't return that man serve,
Speaker 1: it is on you. The kids zipped up their backpacks,
Speaker 1: grabbed their water bottles, and left for the next period.
Speaker 1: They'd issued their verdict. Their job was done in this
Speaker 1: test run. They'd set high standards, clear standards, hard rules.
Speaker 1: They challenged one another. They're willing to change their minds.
Speaker 1: These kids brought to this assignment a whole lot of
Speaker 1: savvy and energy, and those are brought an extraordinary capacity
Speaker 1: to look beyond their own views, to think about the
Speaker 1: needs of everyone the public. My verdict, Jay Z's idea
Speaker 1: for high school juries to be the final content moderators
Speaker 1: of political ads online is even more brilliant than I thought.
Speaker 1: I was thinking two things when I left Benji Cohen's classroom.
Speaker 1: The first was, maybe our civic institutions still work. It
Speaker 1: felt good to spend a day in a public high
Speaker 1: school classroom and see an amazing teacher working his magic,
Speaker 1: see students being brave. We'd have to convince them that
Speaker 1: they wanted to evaluate ads, but that seemed possible. Maybe
Speaker 1: the kids were all right. The second thing I was thinking, though,
Speaker 1: was that the solution can't come quickly enough. It was
Speaker 1: winter twenty twenty two, and already the nation was gearing
Speaker 1: up for another brutal election cycle. The last presidential election,
Speaker 1: the Biden and Trump campaigns together spent more than four
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty million dollars on ads online. That's not
Speaker 1: counting all the state and local races. It seemed a
Speaker 1: safe bet that the money spent on online ads was
Speaker 1: only growing, and so were the lies. So I'll be honest.
Speaker 1: I tried this at first because we were working on
Speaker 1: the new season of our show and I wanted to
Speaker 1: do an episode on political misinformation, and this was just
Speaker 1: a very provocative proposal. But now I'd gone full Mad
Speaker 1: Soto scientist. I'd become convinced that Jonathan Zitrin's idea was
Speaker 1: a great one, but I knew I hadn't sufficiently proven
Speaker 1: that it could work, and Jay z was right. If
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg decided to run with this, it could be
Speaker 1: policy in a few months. So I went back to
Speaker 1: the lab. There were two things I needed to fix. First,
Speaker 1: one class period was not enough time for students to
Speaker 1: properly fact check and add Second, what if this class
Speaker 1: was a one off? Due to the genius of mister Cohen,
Speaker 1: everything in his classroom, from the stuff on the walls
Speaker 1: to his voice, said you are here to listen to
Speaker 1: one another and to learn, and to care and to
Speaker 1: do good. And to be brave. So to really test
Speaker 1: this idea, I figured I needed to try it out
Speaker 1: at a bigger scale, different people, different place, teachers I
Speaker 1: don't know, schools I wasn't familiar with. I also wanted
Speaker 1: to try out a longer version, with more ads and
Speaker 1: giving students more time to do the research. And then,
Speaker 1: most of all, I wanted to mix things up and
Speaker 1: add another crucial element of Jonathan Zittrain's idea, political differences
Speaker 1: on the teen Jury. It's not that there weren't differences
Speaker 1: at ringe. There were, but not enough differences. I needed
Speaker 1: to ask students in two different schools to evaluate the
Speaker 1: same ads. Students and two high schools in two very
Speaker 1: different states. Next time on the Last Archive, Trial by
Speaker 1: high school take two a whole other level, across state lines,
Speaker 1: dueling schools, the March Madness, the World Series, the Olympic Games,
Speaker 1: effect Checking The Last Archive is written and hosted by
Speaker 1: me Jill Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, Ben Natt
Speaker 1: of Hafrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are Julia Barton
Speaker 1: and Sophie Crane, and our executive producer is Mia Lobell.
Speaker 1: Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines.
Speaker 1: Original music by Matthias Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett.
Speaker 1: Our research assistant is Mia Hazra. Our full proof player
Speaker 1: is Robert Ricotta. Many of our sound effects are from
Speaker 1: Harry Janette Junior at the Star Jennette Foundation. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Benji Cohen and the Cambridge Ringe in Latin High School.
Speaker 1: The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. If
Speaker 1: you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering
Speaker 1: bonus content like The Last Archivist, a limited series just
Speaker 1: for subscribers, and add free listening across our network for
Speaker 1: four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus
Speaker 1: channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. If
Speaker 1: you like the show, please you remember to rate, share
Speaker 1: and review. To find more pushkun podcasts. Listen on the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: I'm Jillapoor.