Speaker 1: Before we get into it, be advised that this series
Speaker 1: contains bad language and references to violence. It doesn't exist anymore,
Speaker 1: but right on the bank of the Savannah, on the
Speaker 1: border between South Carolina and Georgia, there was once a
Speaker 1: famous town. The place is a golf course nowadays, but
Speaker 1: back in the eighteen seventies, Hamburg was a center of
Speaker 1: black political power. The mayor and sheriff were black, Most
Speaker 1: of the city officials were black. Black state politicians lived
Speaker 1: in Hamburg in a land where many white citizens still
Speaker 1: mourned the abolition of slavery just ten short years earlier.
Speaker 1: Hamburg was a safe haven for African Americans trying to
Speaker 1: move up in the world. But on January eighth, eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, all of that changed. There was talk the
Speaker 1: white people would come through and say something's about to
Speaker 1: happen at Hamburg. So African Americans kind of knew that
Speaker 1: something was going to happen, they just didn't know what.
Speaker 1: That's Wayne O'Briant. He's a historian who lives five miles
Speaker 1: away from the site of old Hamburg. Wayne spent a
Speaker 1: lot of his life studying the town and the people
Speaker 1: who lived there. He told me about the Hamburg massacre
Speaker 1: that July day, when a white mob hundreds strong arrived
Speaker 1: in the town. According to a paper from the time,
Speaker 1: they were armed with shotguns, revolvers, whose axes, and pitchforks. Oh,
Speaker 1: and they brought a cannon, an actual cannon. The mob's
Speaker 1: mission is to disarm Hamburg's garrison of black militiamen, one
Speaker 1: of whom is Wayne's ancestor, my great great grandfather's brother,
Speaker 1: was named with Needum or Bryant. He was actually going
Speaker 1: around the town at the time telling everybody to stay
Speaker 1: indoors and saying that if you're not going to give
Speaker 1: up your weapons, y'all need to, you know, batten everything
Speaker 1: down and just stay inside, you know, and hopefully this
Speaker 1: thing will blow over. It wouldn't be so easy. The
Speaker 1: mob surrounds the black militiaman, besieging them in a brick
Speaker 1: warehouse that serves as the town's armory. As nightfalls, the
Speaker 1: mob begins to rain down musket and cannon fire on
Speaker 1: the armory. At least one militiaman is killed. The town
Speaker 1: sheriff is hunted down. According to some accounts, they cut
Speaker 1: his tongue from his head. The residence of Hamburg can
Speaker 1: do nothing but hide and pray. The mob finally disperses
Speaker 1: late at night on July. By that time over a
Speaker 1: thousand people strong. Before they go home, the mob ransacks
Speaker 1: black homes and shops and executes five black townsmen. They
Speaker 1: discussed the horror and the terror that would be in
Speaker 1: African American people's eyes and hearts when they woke up
Speaker 1: the next morning saw seven stiff bodies on the ground.
Speaker 1: Terror is exactly the point. The Hamburg massacre took place
Speaker 1: in an election year, and some white South Carolinians had
Speaker 1: reached across roads. They knew that South Carolina was about
Speaker 1: six black before the Civil War, which had ended eleven
Speaker 1: years before, the black majority it had no input on elections,
Speaker 1: But now that African American men could legally vote, the
Speaker 1: electoral landscape had changed. Some white Southerners were waking up
Speaker 1: to the fact that multiracial democracy was a losing proposition
Speaker 1: for them. They decided to do something about it. Hamburg
Speaker 1: was the obvious place for them to strike first. The
Speaker 1: massacre was just the start. After they left Hamburg, same
Speaker 1: group started marching onto different towns and you know, doing
Speaker 1: the same thing. Yes, I into just murder African Americans.
Speaker 1: The rest of the year was dedicated to terrorizing African
Speaker 1: Americans to keep them away from the fool The plan
Speaker 1: was put into place that every white man has a
Speaker 1: duty to control at least two Black votes. You can
Speaker 1: do it by threat. You can do it by you know, violence.
Speaker 1: You can do it if you had to kill them,
Speaker 1: but you had to make sure that at least two
Speaker 1: African Americans did not vote. The plan worked. Many African
Speaker 1: Americans were prevented from voting. Those that did vote did
Speaker 1: so under the threat of violence, and the next year,
Speaker 1: when Northern forces left the South at the end of reconstruction,
Speaker 1: white Southerners had a free hand to take back power.
Speaker 1: Black lawmakers were forced out of office and practically, if
Speaker 1: not legally, they lost the right to vote altogether. Wayne
Speaker 1: has a record of one of his ancestors on the
Speaker 1: South Carolina voter roles in seventy six, the year of
Speaker 1: the Hamburg massacre. After that, there's no record of anyone
Speaker 1: in his family voting for another ninety two years. Mult
Speaker 1: the racial democracy died in America. It wouldn't return until
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, when African Americans were at long last
Speaker 1: granted full suffrage, but the story doesn't in there. On
Speaker 1: the sixth of January, the spirit of the Hamburg massacre
Speaker 1: came to Washington, d C. White mob violence was once
Speaker 1: again deployed as a tool to subvert democracy at the
Speaker 1: Capitol Riot. The violence happened after the election, not before,
Speaker 1: as it had at Hamburg, but the intent was the same,
Speaker 1: to influence an election by force. As Wayne O'Bryant watched
Speaker 1: the siege unfold on TV, he felt a sense of
Speaker 1: weary familiarity. If people knew history, they would recognize the immediately.
Speaker 1: These things are all, you know, tied together. It's just
Speaker 1: like one long story, and if you know all the points,
Speaker 1: then you can see how the story goes. The tactives
Speaker 1: have worked in the past, and every so often you
Speaker 1: see old tactics being dusted off and maybe rebranded. But
Speaker 1: there's the same thing. What if Wayne's right, What if
Speaker 1: the story is repeating? Is white mob violence returning as
Speaker 1: a political tool the final recourse for people who feel
Speaker 1: their power slipping away from the team's at Cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and novel. This is the Assault on
Speaker 1: America Episode one, The Digital Fever Spot The Road to
Speaker 1: the Capital Riot on January sixth, twenty twenty one, starts
Speaker 1: with a lie. You've probably heard people talk about the
Speaker 1: big lie. It's a term that dates back to before
Speaker 1: the Second World War. You'll see a lot of quotes
Speaker 1: about the big lie attributed to Joseph Gebel's or Adolf Hitler,
Speaker 1: but neither man was the kind to admit their own falsehoods.
Speaker 1: The best definition of how big lie tactics work really
Speaker 1: comes from a profile the O. S. S, precursor to
Speaker 1: the c I A wrote about Hitler quote. His primary
Speaker 1: rules were never allow the public to cool off, Never
Speaker 1: admit a fault or wrong, Never concede that there may
Speaker 1: be some good in your enemy, Never leave room for alternatives,
Speaker 1: never except blame. Concentrate on one enemy at a time,
Speaker 1: and blame him for everything that goes wrong. People will
Speaker 1: believe a big lie sooner than a little one, and
Speaker 1: if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or
Speaker 1: later believe it. The most recent and most dangerous big
Speaker 1: lie to hit US politics is the falsehood that the
Speaker 1: U S presidential election was fraudulent. It says that once
Speaker 1: you discount the dumped ballots, the Venezuelan voting machines, the
Speaker 1: dead voters, the voting dogs, the biased election officials, and
Speaker 1: all the other totally plausible reasons. Then Joe Biden didn't
Speaker 1: win the US election at all. Rather, he lost by
Speaker 1: millions of votes. According to the big lie, Donald Trump
Speaker 1: took the White House in November, and it wasn't even close.
Speaker 1: On January six, the whole world saw where that lie
Speaker 1: took us. What we have yet to see is how
Speaker 1: much further it can still take us. Was the siege
Speaker 1: at the capital the last convulsion of a dying Trump
Speaker 1: presidency or was it the start of a new civil war.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans, an investigative journalist at Bellancat, and in
Speaker 1: this series, I'll be investigating the why, the how, and
Speaker 1: the who behind the first mass breach of the US
Speaker 1: capital since the British stormed Washington in eighteen fourteen. I'm
Speaker 1: going to dig into the events of January six in
Speaker 1: forensic detail, all identify key players who spread disinformation and
Speaker 1: helped to create a riot. I'll speak to those who
Speaker 1: know them best and the experts trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how we got here. With their help, I'll trace the
Speaker 1: stories of instigators, militia leaders, and far right influencers whose
Speaker 1: poison has seeped into every corner of America and honestly
Speaker 1: might be the thing that tears us all apart. It's
Speaker 1: a fraud and it's a shame. I'm talking about some
Speaker 1: massive straight lines up in the vote tallies after they've
Speaker 1: supposedly stopped counting. We'll shut down is country. We have
Speaker 1: to the bike patch does the right thing. We win
Speaker 1: the election. I've been plotting, I've been planning. I've been
Speaker 1: scheming to damn today. It's the day American patriots start
Speaker 1: taking down names and Chicken as he's any school relationship
Speaker 1: is on the ground here where we went on the
Speaker 1: cab overran the Capitol. In the Capital, they've got the
Speaker 1: gallows bit upside of the Capitol building. This guy can
Speaker 1: start fucking years and up in the cap and the
Speaker 1: revolution we will. We will stop the steel. To understand
Speaker 1: how the Capital riot was conceived and planned, we have
Speaker 1: to get into some pretty murky online spaces. This is
Speaker 1: kind of my home turf. Unfortunately for me, I spend
Speaker 1: quite a lot of my time lurking on what you
Speaker 1: might call controversial internet message boards places like eight chan,
Speaker 1: and encrypted social media apps like telegram. These online communities
Speaker 1: are filled with trolls pretending to be neo Nazis, Neo
Speaker 1: Nazis pretending to be patriots, militiamen LARPing as real soldiers,
Speaker 1: and actual soldiers viewing far right hate. I think of
Speaker 1: these places as a kind of digital fever swamp. My
Speaker 1: job is to document what happens when this swamp leaks
Speaker 1: into the real world. Usually I'm monitoring small, dangerous groups,
Speaker 1: the type of people who celebrate racist mass shootings like
Speaker 1: the christ Church massacre. They spend these atrocities into propaganda,
Speaker 1: creating false narratives that serve their cause with the big Lie.
Speaker 1: Donald Trump applied this tactic to an entire nation. He
Speaker 1: pulled off the biggest gas light in modern US history
Speaker 1: in terms of online poison seeping into everyday life. This
Speaker 1: was the bp oil spill of disinformation. Here's how it started.
Speaker 1: Following the results of the November elections, the conversation really
Speaker 1: shifted from people talking about the possibility of election fraud
Speaker 1: to really believing that election fraud happened. Shira Frankel is
Speaker 1: a tech reporter for the New York Times. Like me,
Speaker 1: she spends an unhealthy amount of time online monitoring far
Speaker 1: right groups, she witnessed in real time how a single
Speaker 1: lie born online jumped like a plague bearing fleet into
Speaker 1: people's minds. It really started in the day after the elections,
Speaker 1: and it started as a Facebook group. On November four,
Speaker 1: the day after the presidential election, Shearin noticed a new
Speaker 1: group on Facebook. Welcome. It read to Stop the Steel
Speaker 1: You're hearing the audio from a grainy video that was
Speaker 1: posted on the original Stopped the Steel group. The footage
Speaker 1: shows a crowd of Trump supporters gathered outside a voting
Speaker 1: facility in Detroit, trying to stop officials from counting the
Speaker 1: remaining votes, the majority of which were postal votes favoring Biden.
Speaker 1: The pixelated, shaky footage quickly went viral. As it spread
Speaker 1: across Facebook, more and more people found the new group.
Speaker 1: This Facebook group grew faster than any other group I've
Speaker 1: ever seen on Facebook, and I monitor these things quite closely.
Speaker 1: And I recalled allowing Facebook up that day and saying,
Speaker 1: do you see the numbers in this group? Every time
Speaker 1: I checked their thousands of new members, and one of
Speaker 1: their engineers where I was speaking to you you, said, the
Speaker 1: numbers are crazy. We haven't seen this before. By the
Speaker 1: morning of Thursday, November five, less than twenty two hours
Speaker 1: after it was created. The group numbered more than three
Speaker 1: d and twenty thousand users. By this point, the Detroit
Speaker 1: video wasn't the only thing on there. They were sharing
Speaker 1: videos and photographs that they claimed showed people illegally voting.
Speaker 1: A lot of those photos were manipulated. Those videos were
Speaker 1: some of them not even from this election cycle. One
Speaker 1: of the really popular ones, you know, they showed dump
Speaker 1: trucks of ballots, sort of dumping up of shredders going
Speaker 1: through and shredding ballots. I'm watching all of the ballots
Speaker 1: being shredded now one. Now those videos are real. They
Speaker 1: come from previous elections where after the vote is counted
Speaker 1: in tally, the election officials were shredd documents and that's
Speaker 1: just something that happens. Or when you're done going through envelopes,
Speaker 1: you will dump the empty envelopes, or sometimes you're dumping
Speaker 1: blank envelopes to make sure they don't get used for
Speaker 1: fraudulent purposes. So it's about taking things from the Internet
Speaker 1: and just pulling them out of context and making them
Speaker 1: frightening enough to people believe that this is actually showing
Speaker 1: you vote to fraud. The crazy thing is it works.
Speaker 1: If people think they're candidate is being cheated out of
Speaker 1: an election, they'll do something about it. Who wouldn't. In
Speaker 1: November and December, there were Stopped to Steel rallies almost
Speaker 1: every weekend across America. Many of those attending echoed the
Speaker 1: same points they saw online. If there's one vote that
Speaker 1: is fraudulent, that's enough for me. This isn't a research project.
Speaker 1: I'm not looking for statistically significant stuff. At what point
Speaker 1: did Facebook, you know, put the kai bosh on all this?
Speaker 1: Facebook shut down the original Stop Steel group fairly quickly
Speaker 1: for violating its rules, and they were posting a ton
Speaker 1: of misinformation and fake videos, and there was you know,
Speaker 1: sorts of virtual in there. The problem, which we often
Speaker 1: find to be the problem with Facebook, is that they
Speaker 1: shut down one group, but they let dozens or even
Speaker 1: hundreds of other groups remain. When Facebook execs pulled the
Speaker 1: plug on the original Stop the Steel Facebook group, the
Speaker 1: damage was already done. There were dozens of other similar
Speaker 1: groups sharing the same videos, spreading the same rumors, promoting
Speaker 1: the same conspiracy theories fraudulent. The poison was spreading at
Speaker 1: an unstoppable rate, and soon it's spilled over from Facebook
Speaker 1: to the other platforms. It was this kind of piecemeal
Speaker 1: approach which gave them time to move to Telegram and
Speaker 1: to gathergely to all these other social media sites. It said, well,
Speaker 1: if we get shut down, here, give us your email
Speaker 1: address and we'll put you on our list server, and
Speaker 1: we'll make sure that you stay in touch with us,
Speaker 1: and we can keep feeding you this misinformation. And when
Speaker 1: Facebook act in that way, when they act in a
Speaker 1: piecemeal way or in a in a very slow kind
Speaker 1: of way, it gives the bad actors time to organize
Speaker 1: and rally and find a way around them. In short,
Speaker 1: the horse had bolted, but Shira didn't let the story
Speaker 1: escape her so easily. As the Trump supporters dispersed to
Speaker 1: right leaning social media apps like parlor and gab, where
Speaker 1: users can spread disinformation unchallenged, Shira went with them by
Speaker 1: joined hundreds of different groups across different social media channels
Speaker 1: that were dedicated to supporting him. How did you kind
Speaker 1: of see the narratives and the conversations in these online
Speaker 1: spaces shift In the weeks leading up to the capital attack,
Speaker 1: after there were a series of legal complaints against the
Speaker 1: elections that seemed to fail one after another, and these
Speaker 1: sort of ongoing promises by President Trump and people in
Speaker 1: his team that they would find people who had voted
Speaker 1: illegally and they would find that the vote had actually
Speaker 1: been fraudulent. People really amped up and believed that they're
Speaker 1: sending millions of ballots all over the country. There's fraud.
Speaker 1: They found him in Greeks. They found some with the
Speaker 1: name Drumped just the other day in a waste paper basket.
Speaker 1: And so the closer we got to January, the more
Speaker 1: the more angry really the conversation was. The more people
Speaker 1: who seemed to believe that the election had been stolen
Speaker 1: from them, and that these moments in time that they
Speaker 1: thought were going to reveal the truth, these lawsuits that
Speaker 1: they thought were going to succeed, or these election results
Speaker 1: that were going to be overturned. Every time that didn't happen,
Speaker 1: they were more and more angry at the results of
Speaker 1: the November elections. In the immediate lead up to the sixth,
Speaker 1: did you see conversations about what kind of equipment they
Speaker 1: planned to bring. As we got closer to January six
Speaker 1: we started to see real time planning of how people
Speaker 1: wanted to get to Washington and where they were going
Speaker 1: to be staying. And part of that conversation in volved
Speaker 1: weapons as well. People discussed are you going to put
Speaker 1: a gun in the trunk of your car? Are you
Speaker 1: going to come armed? What kind of bullets are you
Speaker 1: going to bring with you? There was discussions of the
Speaker 1: legality of transporting weapons across state lines, and then they
Speaker 1: seem to be very real planning happening around bringing weapons
Speaker 1: to Washington. What started as a single Facebook group on
Speaker 1: November four had morphed into a national movement. People who
Speaker 1: were once ordinary Facebook users are now one obscure far
Speaker 1: right apps discussing the kind of ammunition that might be
Speaker 1: best suited to helping them storm the nation's capital. What
Speaker 1: was frightening is that you had members of the Republican Party.
Speaker 1: You had voting officials coming out time and again and saying,
Speaker 1: we've found no claims of vote fraud. You know, we've
Speaker 1: looked at the lawsuits, We've given people a chance to
Speaker 1: count and recount, and it's not here. You should trust
Speaker 1: that your vote matters. You should trust that our voting
Speaker 1: systems are secure. The most powerful condemnation of the trunk
Speaker 1: campaigns fraud claims happened in Georgia. On December one, an
Speaker 1: election official named Gabriel Sterling lost his cool during a
Speaker 1: press statement. It had all gone too far, all of it.
Speaker 1: It has to stop. Shortly before his speech, an election
Speaker 1: official working under Sterling received a death threat, accompanied by
Speaker 1: the image of a noose. Death threats, physical threats, intimidation.
Speaker 1: It's too much. It's not right the way Sterling saw it,
Speaker 1: Trump's claims about the election, We're putting officials in danger,
Speaker 1: and to what end? Everyone knew the claims were bullshit,
Speaker 1: These unsubstantiated claims. Are these claims that were just there
Speaker 1: were false? Right Like? People investigated and they found that
Speaker 1: these were not real claims. People still wanted to believe that,
Speaker 1: and that's that's rightening. I think the public well of
Speaker 1: information was being poisoned and people were knowingly drinking from it.
Speaker 1: The sickness that followed was inevitable. I was sitting at
Speaker 1: home in my office and I had a couple of
Speaker 1: screens open on my laptop, and then I had a
Speaker 1: second screen that was set up. One was on a
Speaker 1: YouTube channel, another was tweet deck. On January six, Shira
Speaker 1: was monitoring her screens, tracking the movements of the extremely
Speaker 1: online crowd that gathered in d C. Good America. The
Speaker 1: day started with a series of speeches at the Ellipse,
Speaker 1: a park situated a few hundred yards south of the
Speaker 1: White House. I watched a sort of the rally launched
Speaker 1: and the speakers went on stage. They can lie, they
Speaker 1: can cheat, they can steal. My father has started a movement,
Speaker 1: and this movement will never ever die. I was waiting
Speaker 1: for the moment where Trump got on stage that was right,
Speaker 1: curious to hear what he would say, and I knew
Speaker 1: that would likely play a large role in the response
Speaker 1: of the crowd. I've been in two elections. I won
Speaker 1: them both, and the second one I won much bigger
Speaker 1: than the first. Okay, I remember vividly the moment where
Speaker 1: he talked about march on the building. I think I
Speaker 1: can't remember the words he used. And after this, we're
Speaker 1: gonna walk down and I'll be there with you. We're
Speaker 1: gonna walk down to the capital and we're gonna cheer
Speaker 1: on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're
Speaker 1: probably not gonna be cheering so much for some of them,
Speaker 1: because you'll never take back our country with weakness. It
Speaker 1: sounded like a rallying cry when I heard it, and
Speaker 1: so at that point I started looking more and more
Speaker 1: at some of the chats I was in, and people
Speaker 1: were giving each other instructions about how to get to
Speaker 1: the Capitol building. And I think that was the first
Speaker 1: moment where I realized, oh, this might go off the rails.
Speaker 1: Like many of us, Shira was glued to her computer
Speaker 1: as the crowd turned by looked That feeling of this
Speaker 1: is going sideways intensified as they broke through that first
Speaker 1: police barricade towards the Capitol Building, and you could watch
Speaker 1: all this in a live stream. One of the things
Speaker 1: I was doing is I was finding new live streams
Speaker 1: as they were happening. Yo, Yo, we're on the steps
Speaker 1: of the US Capitol. We're going in. I remember one
Speaker 1: point I was watching a guy with a camera, and
Speaker 1: then I recognized somebody behind him, a right wing figure
Speaker 1: with another camera right behind him, and so I went
Speaker 1: to go find his live stream because I knew they
Speaker 1: would have different angles on the same scene. The moment
Speaker 1: they got up to the building, when it was clear
Speaker 1: they were actually reaching the building, we were just sort
Speaker 1: of watching this in real time. And what was amazing
Speaker 1: was that how many people felt emboldened to record this
Speaker 1: in real time and to eric live foots on the ground. Here,
Speaker 1: we're moving on to Capitol. We gotta stoys. This is
Speaker 1: the key point. The Capitol riot was a frenzy of
Speaker 1: content creation. Rioters recorded themselves, often maskless, sometimes declaring their
Speaker 1: own names to the camera, proudly boasting of the crimes
Speaker 1: they were actively committing. Patriots actually just storing the Capitol
Speaker 1: building up. And they didn't just record their actions, they
Speaker 1: also recorded what they were thinking. The people are piste off,
Speaker 1: we're standing up for the truth. Keep sucking with us,
Speaker 1: funking around and find out. Right after the riot, it
Speaker 1: was clear what the general mood was. Content. People were hyped,
Speaker 1: they were gloating. There was a lot of boasts of
Speaker 1: you know, whose office did you get into, did you
Speaker 1: take anything? A lot of people posting selfies to show
Speaker 1: off where they had been. I think the mood was
Speaker 1: was jubilant. I don't think people understood the gravity of
Speaker 1: what had happened. It's kind of amusing that so many
Speaker 1: rioters put themselves on a plate for federal prosecutors will
Speaker 1: meet some of those rioters later in the series. But
Speaker 1: what's clear from the digital breadcrumbs is that this riot
Speaker 1: would not have happened without social media. That's where people
Speaker 1: met and exchanged ideas. That's where plans were hatched and
Speaker 1: logistics ironed out. Social media bosses will argue that when
Speaker 1: you connect the entire world, it's possible the odd coup
Speaker 1: might get planned on your platform. Plotters are gone a plot.
Speaker 1: But if only, if only armed insurrection was all we
Speaker 1: had to worry about. The deeper problem, arguably, is that
Speaker 1: the very notion of reality in America is fractured beyond repair.
Speaker 1: Broadly speaking, there was this kind of I cannot believe
Speaker 1: this happened, you know, in the hours and days after
Speaker 1: one six. Charlie Warzl is a technology reporter. He writes
Speaker 1: a newsletter about the Internet called Galaxy Brain. Like me
Speaker 1: and others who dwell in the swamp for a living,
Speaker 1: January six wasn't the biggest shock for him. Anyone who's
Speaker 1: even dipped their toes into the extremism researcher reporting waters
Speaker 1: is like, no, this is this is why people have
Speaker 1: been so concerned for so long, Like this seemed inevitable,
Speaker 1: not some some wild outcome I'm curious what you find
Speaker 1: particularly malign about the way that Facebook group's function or
Speaker 1: at least the way they impact people. Yeah, so there's
Speaker 1: this great conference that Facebook through. It was like a
Speaker 1: summit in Chicago, Illinois. Mark Zuckerberg kicked it off. Before
Speaker 1: we get started today, I want to introduce myself. This
Speaker 1: is like one of those things you're not paying attention
Speaker 1: to unless or like a tech writer, nerd or really
Speaker 1: into it. Mark and I'm a member of the Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: Family group. And it was all about how Facebook was
Speaker 1: going to sort of shift it's focus into communities, right.
Speaker 1: The idea behind our new mission is to bring the
Speaker 1: world closer together. He was trying to model Facebook groups
Speaker 1: and things like that around the way things work in
Speaker 1: the physical world, which is you don't come in your
Speaker 1: community and immediately say, all right, I need to find
Speaker 1: a knitting group, I need to find you know, book club,
Speaker 1: and need to find this and just sort of like
Speaker 1: willy nilly cast around. The idea is like your ties
Speaker 1: and networks are the ones that say, hey, I'm part
Speaker 1: of this book club. You want to join something like that.
Speaker 1: You may think you're just creating a space for new
Speaker 1: moms or for bird watchers or for locksmiths. But when
Speaker 1: you give people a way to connect and a sense
Speaker 1: of support, it can lead to important changes. What it
Speaker 1: ended doing was, you know, taking this sort of nuanced
Speaker 1: cultural societal way that humans operate and just like mapping
Speaker 1: it onto like a recommendation algorithm. And it was just
Speaker 1: incredibly blunt. And so what Facebook began doing was basically
Speaker 1: saying like, oh, I see you're doing this, Let's give
Speaker 1: you more of that, Let's push you deeper into that.
Speaker 1: Because of my own work investigating the far right, I
Speaker 1: subscribe to hundreds of Telegram channels, gab accounts, parlor feeds,
Speaker 1: all that good stuff. But the people on the platforms
Speaker 1: I study are already far gone. Facebook groups, on the
Speaker 1: other hand, that's where folks come to get radicalized. When
Speaker 1: I was hanging out in right wing Facebook groups, it
Speaker 1: became increasingly obvious that not only where the groups growing quickly,
Speaker 1: but that as soon as you join one, you start
Speaker 1: getting shared others. I get invited to a group where
Speaker 1: people they're joking about Hawaiian shirts, and before I know it,
Speaker 1: I'm in a new group where people are talking very
Speaker 1: seriously about shooting federal re agents. For real, this stuff
Speaker 1: is not hard to find. You accept a couple of recommendations,
Speaker 1: you go where you're pointed by the algorithm, and hey,
Speaker 1: you're hob nobbing with some of the scariest people in America,
Speaker 1: and the admins who create these groups know exactly how
Speaker 1: to speed you along the journey. Facebook release report after
Speaker 1: one six and it showed that, like all the stuff,
Speaker 1: the Steel groups were in large part driven by a
Speaker 1: small core of superinviters that would basically find people via
Speaker 1: different groups and build audiences based off of these common interests.
Speaker 1: And so, I mean, I think that the groups has
Speaker 1: so so much to do with it, because not only
Speaker 1: are you talking about insular communities on their own that
Speaker 1: are sort of away from people, where you know they
Speaker 1: can kind of become more and more intense, but you're
Speaker 1: also talking about a network of those groups that are
Speaker 1: just constantly being thrown into your face. And I think
Speaker 1: that it was really just a way of pushing people
Speaker 1: further down that radicalization funnel. For their part, Facebook does
Speaker 1: say that it's been more aggressive than ever at labeling
Speaker 1: misleading posts, clamping down on conspiracy theories, and amplifying credible
Speaker 1: information about voting It's not a new observation that social
Speaker 1: media funnels our interests towards outrage and extreme opinions. But
Speaker 1: what I think hasn't been appreciated is just how many
Speaker 1: people went down this path after the election to stop
Speaker 1: The Steel campaign fell like a guillotine, severing the connection
Speaker 1: between millions of Trump supporters and the basic reality of
Speaker 1: the election result, and social media was the perfect medium
Speaker 1: for the message. Would it be fair to say that
Speaker 1: social media rewards and even makes people famous for being
Speaker 1: better at lying and distributing misinformation? Oh? Yeah, completely. You know,
Speaker 1: these algorithms a reward high engagement subjects, many of which
Speaker 1: provoke pretty strong emotions. The strongest emotions tend to be
Speaker 1: outrage and feeling victimized, and you know in group out,
Speaker 1: group exclusions, and so yeah. I mean, I think the
Speaker 1: architecture of these platforms is geared towards attention first and
Speaker 1: like civic responsibility a hundred and thirty five. And as
Speaker 1: long as that's the case, the attention is gonna win
Speaker 1: out every single time. There's no way anyone could tell
Speaker 1: me the joke Biden one this election wrong. Is not
Speaker 1: trying to overturn the election. He is trying to get
Speaker 1: the real election results to be heard, the real election.
Speaker 1: What do you think is the end result? We're in
Speaker 1: this place now where at least in the low tens
Speaker 1: of millions of Americans believe in what is functionally an
Speaker 1: alternative reality, you know, not just may have a conspiracy
Speaker 1: or two, not just like, oh maybe I'm curious about
Speaker 1: the jfk assassination whatever, but believe in like a fully
Speaker 1: separate reality. Do you think that bubble ever bursts or
Speaker 1: do you think more and more people just become siloed
Speaker 1: off to what is effectively another world. I don't get
Speaker 1: the sense that this is a bubble that bursts, Like
Speaker 1: I think that this is pretty durable for a lot
Speaker 1: of people. I'm very worried. Like I think candidly, I'm
Speaker 1: in a period right now where I'm trying to sort
Speaker 1: of not think about it for just a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks or months, because I just know it's getting worse.
Speaker 1: But not on a very public level. I think post Trump,
Speaker 1: you know, everyone's sort of collectively said, Okay, can I
Speaker 1: take a break, can I recharge my batteries? And personally
Speaker 1: I'm doing that because I think what we're in for
Speaker 1: is a lot more of the same with a higher intensity,
Speaker 1: and soon we're not going to the luxury of not
Speaker 1: paying attention to it fully, and that's pretty scary. There's
Speaker 1: a term I didn't invent it, but it's come to
Speaker 1: define what I think is the single largest problem we
Speaker 1: face in our culture right now. That term is weaponized unreality.
Speaker 1: Here's how it works. You're a person for whom the
Speaker 1: observable facts of reality are problematic. Maybe you're an oil
Speaker 1: and gas company. It's the nineteen seventies and you don't
Speaker 1: want people to think climate change is a thing, so
Speaker 1: you start paying pr people in shady media types to
Speaker 1: help you build an unreality when we're the problems caused
Speaker 1: by your product don't exist. Most of us are familiar
Speaker 1: with how big businesses use unreality. The most prominent example
Speaker 1: is probably the tobacco industry. Weaponized unreality takes that a
Speaker 1: step further. If you're a demagogue politician who as an election,
Speaker 1: you might blame the people who won legitimately for orchestrating
Speaker 1: a vasked conspiracy to steal the election, and you might
Speaker 1: dog whistle towards other conspiracies, ones that suggest your political
Speaker 1: opponents are satanic pedophiles working to destroy the country. This
Speaker 1: allows you to say face and keep breaking in donations.
Speaker 1: But if you succeed in convincing millions of people that
Speaker 1: they're under constant, deadly attack by real people who really exist, well,
Speaker 1: they might try to murder those people. A Reuter's and
Speaker 1: Ipsos poll from March found that of all Americans think
Speaker 1: that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. The simple
Speaker 1: fact of the matter is that tens of millions of
Speaker 1: Americans live in realities so different that they cannot continue
Speaker 1: to coexist. It's fine if your neighbor believes in Bigfoot,
Speaker 1: but if he believes you're planning to steal the blood
Speaker 1: of his children for black magic, you probably can't keep
Speaker 1: living together. As long as social media companies decide that
Speaker 1: the best way to engage people is to rile them up,
Speaker 1: push them closer and closer to the edge, there will
Speaker 1: be bad actors who decide to profit from just shoving
Speaker 1: those folks right over it. In the next episode of
Speaker 1: The Assault on America, we meet one of the most
Speaker 1: nefarious actors in this entire story. He's a shady political
Speaker 1: operative who made January sixth happen, and most people don't
Speaker 1: have a clue who he is. It's time to meet
Speaker 1: the man behind the lie. I've been plotting. I've been planning.
Speaker 1: I've been scheming that's coming up in episode two of
Speaker 1: the Assault on America.