Speaker 1: Flex and Frooms, Flex and Frooms. This is the Flex
Speaker 1: and Frooms catch up podcast. Should you fear ai? Potentially?
Speaker 1: But how much do you fear the spread of misinformation
Speaker 1: for a bit of a joke. I'm no stranger to it.
Speaker 1: I'm actually more of an acquaintance to it. I didn't
Speaker 1: know that people lied on the Internet as much as
Speaker 1: they do. Case in point, when we read out listener
Speaker 1: submissions and things like that, I honestly think they're all real.
Speaker 1: And there have been a few on occasion where rooms
Speaker 1: might say that's definitely fake, because I'm like, why would
Speaker 1: it be? Why wouldn't it be? Because I just for
Speaker 1: far less. Yeah, if you over the last few weeks
Speaker 1: have seen the rise of this eighties horror z Apothera
Speaker 1: that's somehow this cult classic, but you've also never heard
Speaker 1: of it, You're actually not alone. This has been one
Speaker 1: of the I would say one of the fastest growing
Speaker 1: internet hoaxes I've seen in a little while. It went
Speaker 1: from zero to one hundred in literally two or three days.
Speaker 1: So this movie Zepither started popping up online. Where were
Speaker 1: you when it started? I was at home dodging these tiktoks.
Speaker 1: People were like oh you look just like Zepether. I
Speaker 1: love this movie. I'm so glad people are talking about it.
Speaker 1: I don't really care about indie films like that, so
Speaker 1: I just didn't think it was for me. Come to
Speaker 1: find out, it all started because a TikToker by the
Speaker 1: name of Emily Jeffrey E. M I l y je
Speaker 1: double FRII uploaded a video captioned okay, so new bit ideas.
Speaker 1: What if we created a fake eighties horror movie called
Speaker 1: Zeppether and started commenting on people's TikTok saying things like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, you look exactly like that one girl
Speaker 1: from Zepether. Oh wait, you look exactly like in character
Speaker 1: from Zepether. They added that we can make new law
Speaker 1: and new main characters as we go and convince thousands
Speaker 1: of people that this weird titled eighties horror film actually exists.
Speaker 1: And it sounds strange, but it literally worked. The hashtag
Speaker 1: is over one hundred and twenty million views, and someone
Speaker 1: even created a twenty twenty four remake of the fake
Speaker 1: eighties movie in a trailer. But the thing is, if
Speaker 1: we're losing the ability to fact check, or we're believing
Speaker 1: that when things are expressed with conviction that they're true, Like,
Speaker 1: what is that spectrum of danger? Because how many ways
Speaker 1: could we recreate this hype for fun? How many in
Speaker 1: cell groups, far right groups, far left groups, whatever, could
Speaker 1: just decide? Why don't we just spread this thing because
Speaker 1: it's fun, and we'll do all the things that make
Speaker 1: it seem legitimate. We'll get a website, we'll make social
Speaker 1: media pages for it, We'll get a Twitter, an x threads,
Speaker 1: a TikTok, we'll get little shirts made, we'll get a letterhead.
Speaker 1: How would we know that it wasn't real? And then
Speaker 1: the worst thing about not being able to discern if
Speaker 1: something is real or not, you doubt yourself. Yeah, then
Speaker 1: you think you're unreliable and become more susceptible to this information.
Speaker 2: Honestly, this is not new news.
Speaker 1: It's not. But then I think, for me, it's just
Speaker 1: like how quickly things become popular, Like I saw the
Speaker 1: remnants of this Zeppether stuff before I even knew what
Speaker 1: it was, So it had already peppered my timeline enough
Speaker 1: for me to clock that I had seen it. It's
Speaker 1: already in my brain. I didn't even consent to that.
Speaker 1: And if I went to go seek information, I would
Speaker 1: find it and it would affirm this fake narrative. I
Speaker 1: think when I initially started hearing the term of fake
Speaker 1: news around Trump's election, I thought that it was just
Speaker 1: so aligned with a certain demographic of person who just
Speaker 1: wasn't that Internet savvy. Yeah, you know, an older demographic
Speaker 1: who's stuck on Facebook, stuck on WhatsApp is easily kind
Speaker 1: of shocked into acting. You know, you put the bright
Speaker 1: red font on the news article and you use like
Speaker 1: the salacious headlines, and everybody's freaking out. But young people,
Speaker 1: will we know better? Right? Like we can? You know,
Speaker 1: it's the letterhead's got to be in Times New Roman.
Speaker 1: That's legitimate. You know, we're not writing articles in calibri, okay,
Speaker 1: But it's so much more than that. And I feel
Speaker 1: as though I also assumed that fake news was coming
Speaker 1: from an organized source initially, like it's an organized group
Speaker 1: of people or people with a single mission or a
Speaker 1: single mind gathering together to disseminate it far and wide
Speaker 1: with a group of people who are all like minded, right,
Speaker 1: organizational gathering. This was just a single person doing a
Speaker 1: little bit, and people opted in on their own, and
Speaker 1: then it was able to spread just with that minor
Speaker 1: opt in, and it wasn't like people were adding heaps
Speaker 1: of juice or heaps of depth to the law. It
Speaker 1: was just a little bit here and there, a TikTok
Speaker 1: here and there. But I saw one too many that
Speaker 1: I was like, Oh, it must be a real thing.
Speaker 1: What if I didn't know it was fake? And then
Speaker 1: I talked to someone in the office and I was like,
Speaker 1: what about Zeppatha, Like, yeah, I love that cult movie.
Speaker 1: Because people would do that, they would be like, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I've seen this so much about it, I can't wait
Speaker 1: to watch it. It's strange. You are one of the very
Speaker 1: few people I know that read news often. So clearly
Speaker 1: you're going to reputable sites, right, studying smah whatever. But
Speaker 1: we're assuming that information is reputable because of the banner
Speaker 1: that it's on. That information can change. New sites have
Speaker 1: uploaded information that's wrong before, but you're going to the source.
Speaker 1: Most other people rely on the information to come to
Speaker 1: them through social media, and usually we measure the importance
Speaker 1: of this information by how frequently we're seeing it. So,
Speaker 1: for example, I saw one or two tiktoks about the
Speaker 1: wildfire in Maui, right, and then I was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: that's crazy, and then it was my whole feed and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, I should research this. This is hectic,
Speaker 1: this is this is really important. Had i've not seen
Speaker 1: those initial two tiktoks, I don't think I haven't seen
Speaker 1: on the news.
Speaker 2: I don't idly know that was the thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah see yeah, and look you go to new sites
Speaker 1: and they're not talking about it, so like, how are
Speaker 1: we meant to discern what is important to keep track of?
Speaker 1: And then I feel like, because it's really difficult to
Speaker 1: tell what news is real and not real, we get
Speaker 1: into conspiracy territory really really quickly when you preemptively have
Speaker 1: this like skepticism about information, which is not helpful either.
Speaker 2: The reason why I know that, like life is moving
Speaker 2: fast is because I lied to really remember when conspiracy
Speaker 2: theories were funny, Like there was actually a time where
Speaker 2: like nine eleven conspiracies were like a meme and the
Speaker 2: term conspiracy theory wasn't common parlance, Like it wasn't a.
Speaker 1: Thing that actually gets us.
Speaker 2: And also we can't be thinking where above it, Like
Speaker 2: there's been exactly times where I've like almost hit on
Speaker 2: the oz post link that I'm.
Speaker 1: Getting ready to ship. Yeah, yeah, oh no that yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean no.
Speaker 2: You Mickey showed me one today.
Speaker 1: What was it, Mickey? Your Spotify has finished? That might
Speaker 1: have goropped me.
Speaker 2: And also, you know what, Spotify messaged me a little
Speaker 2: while back to tell me that they'd taken down through
Speaker 2: me Fridays, which seems been restated. The email they sent
Speaker 2: me look to so fake.
Speaker 1: When you posted it. So there was no letterhead, there
Speaker 1: was no nothing.
Speaker 2: It looked like the most like stuff.
Speaker 1: And I guess there's no incentive for it to be changed, right,
Speaker 1: because if we think this is for sinister motives, most people,
Speaker 1: corporation's brands can benefit from fake news. Right. You can
Speaker 1: deliver information in a way that it's meant to be
Speaker 1: polarizing and it's meant to start conversation. But after we've
Speaker 1: started conversation, people aren't doing additional research. I'm finding that
Speaker 1: a lot of people struggle to dismount off the cliff
Speaker 1: of conspiracy. They kind of just get there and stay there,
Speaker 1: and then everything becomes painted with the same brush of
Speaker 1: skepticism and there's nothing you can do about it. Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, sorry, friends, but I will say if
Speaker 1: we take out anything sinister about what could possibly happen
Speaker 1: with the way this was spread. I'm kind of impressed
Speaker 1: from a little a little TikTok about what if we
Speaker 1: did this one thing and everybody got on board. It's
Speaker 1: because we desire a community, truly. Bye. Mickey's actually the
Speaker 1: cult leader. You've been listening to The Flex and Froom's
Speaker 1: daily podcast.
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