Generalists and clever with it the fight interesting stories. Something outside in interesting at the time was what the internet was doing to us as a society in terms of our information streams. It wasnt political in my mind at that time. It was sort of what happens when the trusted systems of information breakdown and people no longer know whats true of whats important versus irrelevant or how to spend their time. I was looking at this as a tech story, as the business story. I was looking at clickbait farms and had to get you to click on things and waste your time and have make money from that. And then in the middle of 2015 there was a Big Press Conference at trump tower and trumpkim down the escalator and then i suddenly thought, all these forces ive been looking at about how informational architecture online is changing us, thats a political store as well. From there it was kind of off to the races. Host you group your book into two groups of people if i understand it correctly, and correct me if im wrong, you have a group called the big swinging brains and then you have the gate crashers. Explain the groups and how to interact with each other to the topic of trying to address in this book. Guest thats exactly right. The subtitle is on my extremists, and hijacking of the american conversation. The idea is there with these two groups, the strange bedfellows that were either wittingly or unwittingly collaborating to hijack the conversation that we are all a a part of. Those groups, the big swinging brains, my kind of derisive title for them, those would be the technoutopians, the Silicon Valley disruptors, the people who were so blithely recklessly optimistic about the future that they couldnt yet envision that they just that will just disrupt everything and we will have every hierarchy that we know just come crashing down, and whatever happens next it will probably be fine but we dont really know what it is. We now know in retrospect, spoiler, it was not fine. And into the power vacuum that Silicon Valley created came rushing these people i call the gate crashers, which are nihilists, trolls, liars, bigots, propagandists. The internet did not create racism and misogyny and lies but the internet spread it much more rapidly, made it much more bible and it demolished all of the note informational ecosystems that existed heretofore, which gave the gate crashers, this unprecedented amount of power. To me thats a huge part of the story of how he ended up where we are now both in terms of who the president is, who is leaving lots of other liberal democracies around the world and also how we relate to each other and how we go about our lives on a daily basis. Host back to the president election, you open the book talking to group of people attending an event called the deplorable. Talk about those parties, the people he met and now those right to the term gate crashers, or leased the big idea of a gatecrasher. Guest a lot of what it wanted to do because of the kind of narrative new yorker style of reporting i like to do, i didnt want to opine or offer my analysis, although i did do a bunch of that. I wanted to embed myself and be a fly on the wall for a long, long time. I really spent three years just fully embedded with both the people who were running these Silicon Valley platforms, but also most with the people who are actively trying to dismantle and destroy the roots of our common democratic understanding. Often it would be to events as you say like the deplorable which was inauguration party. These were the people who is like to say they got donald trump into the presidency and they were selfconsciously taking on the moniker that Hillary Clinton had tried to admonish them with which was a basket of deplorable. They were owning that in celebrating get as they are so good at doing kind of turning it around as a with the phrase fake news or so many of the phrases these were people who really did and said a lot of pretty odious thing. People who i frankly at first was kind of hesitant to legitimize in print either in the book or in the articles i was writing. At the end of the day they had so much influence on their own, that so much power, that influence was part of the story i felt we in the mainstream were missing and ignoring. I felt i had to embed and explain what they were doing if only so the rest of society could understand what they were doing and start to inoculate itself against it because it was happening whether we look at it or not. Host a couple of names to the point to mention. Gavin mcinnis is one of those names. My concern of which is another. Who are they and what part to the plate in your book . Guest . Guest at cora think its important to point out they and the dozens of other people in my book are essentially propagandist. I call them better media insurgents. They are not meta media. They are not proper political thinkers although Gavin Mcginnis had a consultant gig on fox news for a long time. Sorry, a correspondent deed. Mike sernavich was a lawyer and these are all smart people. They are not sort of ignoramuses or anything. They are very canny and well spoken and in some sense thats part of their power. But they also, they are not so straightforward political analysts who are working some think tank. Their main skill is propagating ideas and memes and talking points and propelling them into the mainstream. These things that would start as french, mike sernavich started as a pickup artist. Gavin started cowboys. These are things that should remain on the fringe but the fact is they havent, and the big part of the reason for that is that these people and a lot of other people i spent time with are so good at taking these french ideologies and pushing them into the mainstream and the new information ecosystem allows them to do that. They have taken the lunatic fringe and made it no longer the fringe. Host one of the light in your book reads, you write, the disruptors had gleaned through osmosis that free speech was of value with protecting. Now that there were not expected to spend much time think it is at on principle. Instead they released their products into the world and waited to see what would happen. Could you expand on that . Guest so theyre disruptors is standing in for the big swinging brains, the people who are found in the social Media Companies. In 2004, 2005 around when facebook and reddit and twitter and all these companies would come into existence it was just this feeling in the air, this cultural osmosis consensus that the more free speech in the better and we will put it all out there in the market place of ideas will take care of the rest, almost automatically. There was never any real reason to believe that other than kind of unexamined faith. That faith got so entrenched as a techno libertarian axiom of the internet and of our society, that it really was in question that much. It wasnt just a few guys in hoodies in california who believed this. You would see it on the cover of magazines. You would see it. It was a surroundsound thing. When that all sort of came crashing down it was basically too little too late. We had already kind of built this System Industry unexamined way. Post trump, the conversation really split open and the public is now very, very critical of these companies as i think it should all along but the fact is they have been built around this fundamental structure and they can be tweaked at the edges but the basic weighted algorithms are built which is run emotional engagement at around the kind of unfettered marketplace of ideas. Thats not going away. I should be clear none of this is an antifreespeech argument. I want to be very clear this is, the First Amendment is sacred to me. Im a journalist. There is no call anywhere close to anything for the government to come in and stifle speech you basically what insane is when you take freespeech absolutism, when you just assume it has its speech that must be good, you are going to be very blind to the ways in which speech can harm us. We all know unfettered speech can harm us. That doesnt mean you censor it but it does mean you to set up systems to try to deal with that very real fact. Host you talk with several of his people in these companies. Give an example of how they wrestle with this issue and what kind of justification they come to release what conclusions they come to in dealing with this issue. Guest the one i spend the most time on was reddit. I talk to get from facebook and twitter but reddit is a social network that is much bigger than twitter in terms of traffic. It was the fourth or fifth biggest site in the country when i was there. Like all the other sites it was founded on this i give full freedom, never take anything down, only take anything down when its a clear violation of u. S. Law, which is very, very few things. The founders made it in that image. They left for about ten years. They went and found it of the companies and when they came back one of the images i compare two is like an open Warehouse Party that just turn the chaos. You start this party. You let anyone come in. You leave the lights off. You let people do whatever they want and suddenly you come back and people are throwing couches at the window and just wreaking havoc. What the founders who came back as leaders of the company decided to do was rather than just let the party ray john and continue to be fully laissezfaire about it, they decided to take it in hand and to let me sit in the room and watch as they turned into gatekeepers in realtime. They were alumni at the university of virginia and they would, after charlottesville, systematically go through and find all the people on the platform would been using it to organize white supremacist violence, and get rid of them. The founders quote was nuked them. If theyre there on our platfot them gone. Which was a total 180 from live and let live. But he said to me i like the idea of unchallenged freespeech in theory, but in practice there are people who are just not good for the world and i brought them into this platform, i can take them up. I watched them as they went through sub reddit and press the delete button. It was weird and felt arbitrary and messy and human but also felt like better than doing nothing, i guess. Host your book recounts would you did that there was some retaliation on the reddit site itself. Guest yes. They had inculcated the spirit of free speech and so everyone not everyone but a lot of people on reddit whenever you take anything away from them they say this is inhumane, this is suppresses our freespeech rights. We might as well live in north korea. I dont think this is a very nuanced way of thinking about it. Reddit is a private company. They can do what it wants but they had created this established precedent that you can do and say whatever you want at essentially you will never be challenged. When you did start to challenge things, and these are really, really gross things, things like that people hate where you go to hate fat people. Thats the most safe for tv one, but even taking away that stuff was still very controversial because they had set up such a precedent of anything goes. Host the idea of types of content you write in your book, for a certain kind of reader, discovering these all right sites felt someone onto a countercultural intellectual vanguard. You could post something because you bleed it or because you didnt believe it and you wanted to see the wood. Did you expand on that . Guest there is this clandestine subversive thrill to discovering something on the internet that feels like something youre not supposed to discover, something dangerous point the metaphor people always use for this is the red pill. This is an image that comes from the movie the matrix where the blue pill allows you to wake up and forget the reality youve glimpsed a finger was all a dream, and the red pill let you see the real truth which is been hidden from you all along. This is a very attractive trope that goes back to play to his cave and alice in wonderland s. O. B. Other things. The internet is very, very good at delivering this feeling of you are being brought into a secret society of people who was the only sort of chosen few who understand the truth. Thats a funny feeling and its a very fun mental space to live in it you can keep it under control. The problem is a lot of time the red pill quoteunquote is being used to show people the truth that the jews are running the world or that women are actually oppressing men, or any number of other things. Those things are not true but if you are joining a society of people who is repeatedly banging into you had the notion that this counterintuitive truth is, in fact, a real reality, a lot of people get sucked into that. I spent a lot of time with a few people who had gotten taken up in that and a few people who had worked the way out of that, which was startling to see. Host to that idea then i think it is mike sernavich or someone else, in some case a few they view themselves as a journalist. Can you expand on that . Guest oh, yeah. There was a whole range of people who sometimes just as a troll would sit on the world famous journalist and they would do it sometimes to get a rise out of me because i was embedded with them for so long. I would hang out and get drinks and they would say yeah, youre writing a book about us. Im writing a book too. He just published a book last week. There was this kind of flattening of all status hierarchies which they sound very amusing, but in point of fact, a lot of them did act as a journalist. I would argue they were not very good ones i spent a lot of time with the young man who i met at the deploraball and it went on stage at that event and sort of said hold my trip take a listeo what im about to say. I was trying to frankly that given that much attention because he clearly wanted so much attention and i didnt want to promote him. He went on stage and made the announcement that he was about to be Given White House press credentials and is going to be the White House Correspondent for publication called the gateway pundit. The gateway pundit if your views are not familiar is like, it makes breitbart look like the london review of books or something. Its not a good publication, and yet we now live in a timeline with a gateway pundit gets a White House Correspondent. So i said, yeah, i got to track this and see where it goes. I got on a mega bus within from new york to d. C. And watched him go down there. Instead of studying up for the job and learning all about how the white house works and who was, which undersecretary of which part of the government, he took a nap and then watched king of the hill on his laptop and then arrived in d. C. And just sort of started to wing it. Essentially he didnt need to do any homework because he wasnt there to ask probing questions or do the real work of journalism. He was there as a troll, as a Performance Art to freak everyone out and to desecrate the norms of what happens in spaces like that. It worked. On one level it wasnt doing real journalism. He wasnt well informed. He wasnt telling the truth. On another level he had a press pass the cutting into the White House Press room. So in that sense he was a journalist. Thats part of the point of this stuff. Its supposed to scramble everything and nothing everything we thought we knew. Thats part of the goal of the trope administration and of the altright. Host this is andrew baratz, author of antisocial online extremists, technoutopians, and the hijacking of the american cnversation. Joining us on this edition of the communicators. You mentioned altright and use another term of light. What is that . Guest these terms are all disputed and a lot of people mean Different Things by them when they say them. The key distinction between altright and the altlight is the altright is a really hardcore at the somatic openly white nationalist, bigoted group. And the altlight is a people who might share some of his commitments but cannot antisemitic. Some of them are jewish. Then it openly white nationalist. They call themselves civic nationalists and some of them are people of color or marriage to people of color or are gay. Like any world, the further you burrow into it, the more it surprises you. A lot of people came from new york or california who i was tracking who are the kind of master propagandists of this world. Even within the hardcore altright really hardcore antisemitic close to neonazi segments of the movement you still find one of the guys i spent a lot of time tracking was married to a jewish woman before he went down some nazi turned in his mind, and he had a black brother who was adopted. Theres always more strangeness to the stuff than first appears but the most basic distinction is the altright and the altlight were divided over what they call the jewish question, the ghq. That turned into a cleavage point where this took two separate people even though they claimed to be free speech absolutist, and they claim anyone should be able to speak to monitor any topic, in practice they started feuding, started holding competing rallies. The deploreball, the hardcore antisemitic all right people like Richard Spencer were precluded from getting inside that party. He kind of loitered around outside trying to recruit people. It was very messy and full of squabbling, but also spoke to just how many ways that are to mess with the national discourse. There is a whole range, for some people its more of just again. For other people was really a hardcore ideological exercise. That confusion, that slippage also worked to their advantage because there were a lot of dog whistles, a lot of layers of irony and a lot of ways to get them wrong, if you were not really paying attention. Host are we as a society more sophisticated about the speech and could lessen the impact, do you think . Guest in some ways i think were more sophisticated but in other ways i dont think weve really got into the bottom of the. There are certain framings of people are less likely to fall for now, certain types of false information, dog whistles. The fact that the internet is constantly evolving and as soon as one trope gets discovered, they will be on to the next one. So to me the key insights are structural. I spent a lot of time with the particular people i did because i thought there good case examples at a think we will be able to run for a long time from these case studies but im also cognizant that those particular people will eventually go away and what would be left over is the underlying structures that will always incentivize and produce the behavior that theyre known for. Its not as if there are a few bad apples and once we get rid of them everything will go back to normal. These are case studies that show how the system we have built is actually just fundamentally on the wrong access. Host is there then a remedy . Guest the art of view but they are hard. I talk about facebook because its the biggest one but all these social Media Companies are centrally built around emotional engagement, meaning that all they can measure is whether you click on something, whether you share something, how long you spend scrolling past something behaviors. The way they make things go viral, the way they put things in your feed is by gauging which things are likely to provoke those behaviors in you. Those things tend to be things that twitchy, reactive, things the cause an immediate spike of what i call activating emotion of what social scientists call activating emotion which could be rage or fear or lust or envy, these things to get your blood boiling. Thats a everything on the internet obviously. My work is on the internet. This clip will be on the internet. Everything is internet but the fact is the way these feeds are built, the bill to incentivize things that spike your heart rate and get your skin response going to the companies could change that. They could change at tomorrow. The question is whether they would lose too much money and whether their shareholders wouldnt be happy. Theres a problem here is around capitalism. There is a problem here around stubbornness. A lot of these founders dont want to reckon with the notion of what they built be causing harm in the world. These are deep structural problems, but the fact is we have a lot of deep structural problems like the Climate Crisis or like the opioid crisis, and the response that we have to take the those is to get to work digging ourselves out. We cant just throw up our hands and say free speech, or in the case of climate, you know, freedom of enterprise and lets just let the market sort it out. The more skeptical and appropriate view would be the market has failed to sort this out, so now we as a society had to come up with a better solution. Host talk about politics overall and the current structure in the federal government, particularly congress, interested in getting with this type of speech and other capable of doing so, do you think . Guest congress i think is making more and more noise about regulating this stuff. For a long time, a decade or more, these companies basically got a free pass. The free pass error is over. Obviously Elizabeth Warren talks a lot about breaking up some of these companies. Sanders has talked about that, too. Some of the of the democrats will follow suit eventually in the senate and in the house. Some legislation could be useful. I do think that facebook is too big, but thats just my opinion. I also just dont think though that any particular set of regulatory measures would be enough to address the problems im focused on in terms of how, what kinds of behaviors and, frankly, ideological patterns are incentivize by the systems. Theres really no way to address that through regulation. Its a combination, antitrust stuff could be useful, all kinds of sbc and sec staff to be useful but i dont think will regulate our way out of the problem. That doesnt mean we shouldnt try to do it again but i think its even deeper than attornment Andrew Marantz right for the new yorker and author of antisocial online extremists, technoutopians, and the hijacking of the american cnversation. Thanks for your time and thank you for joining us on the communicators. Guest thank you so much. Cspan, your unfiltered view of government. Created by cable and 1979 and brought to you today by your television provider. The winners are in for this your studentcam video documentary competition. We asked students what issued you most want the president ial candidates to address in the 2020 campaign . We received more than 2500 entries from 44 states with more than 5000 students dissipating with our winners telling us most important issues are climate change, gun violence, college affordability, the opioid crisis, Mental Health and immigration. Now it is time to announce all of our first prize winners. Our first Prize Middle School winners are eighthgraders from Eastern Middle School in silver springs, maryland, were cspan is provided by comcast. There were any documentary is titled blackout, misinformation in the age of social media. It doesnt matter which party you associate with. Doesnt matter for whom you end up voting picky get access to the internet come social media is going to influence your vote. Went to exercise Critical Thinking and keep an eye on the social issues we choose to follow otherwise the United States would be the next social media victim. Everybody wants action but nobody wants by rain in executive power we cant ensure washington remains ballots among the three branches of government. So it asked the 2020 candidates, how will you put a halt to the runaway train of executive privilege. Was the first fight High School Central winners are johnson johnson, through misleading marketing overprescribed opioids, and that as result, oklahomans became addicted creating this opioid epidemic. The first prize High School West goes to the more you get money from certain types of sources, the more you are beholden to the sources. And what you want to be is to be free enough to make decisions based upon what you think is in the best interest of your district and the nation. And now its time to announce our 5000 grand prize winner. They are they won the top prize for the documentary titled command delete, Technology Damaging effect on democracy in 2020 about technology and data privacy. In 2016 Cambridge Analytica collected data to influence the 2016 election from 87 million a. Users, which only 270,000 this time were not face with music piracy. We are faced with personal information piracy. Congratulations to our grand prize winners. None of us has taken formal Video Production classes and we all just got together as friends. Friends. We didnt do this as part of our class. Were at school right now this is one of the top everyone around us is doing projects and itll is think about working for Tech Companies but we were thinking that sometimes there are issues with tech compass, data breaches all the staff and we thought bringing a voice to the concerns of many would be important. It helps were in Silicon Valley which is a center of all the tech change. Are studentcam video documentary competition has awarded more than 1 million in total prices since 2004. The top 21 winning entries will air on cspan april 1. You can watch all studentcam documentaries online at studentcam. Org. The Atlantic Council is holding a discussion of the corona