Corey into President Donald Trump N.P.R.'s Winsor Johnson reports 1st up are 2 key witnesses who've already offered what Democratic lawmakers have characterized as compelling testimony to investigators behind closed doors the House Intelligence Committee will 1st hear from Build Taylor the top u.s. Diplomat in Ukraine and then from George Kent a senior official at the State Department in charge of Ukraine policy both officials raise concerns in closed door depositions last month about whether Trump used military aid as leverage to press the Ukrainian government to investigate a political rival Trump has repeatedly denied any quid pro quo in his dealings with Ukraine and has called the inquiry an illegitimate sham N.P.R.'s Winsor Johnson reporting the Acting White House chief of staff says he still has no plans to comply with a subpoena to testify before a House impeachment investigators but Mick Mulvaney says he no longer plans to sue over the proceedings he says instead he'll take his direction from the president former President Jimmy Carter remains in an Atlanta hospital following surgery to reduce swelling on his brain as a meal Moffitt of member station to be tells us it's been a year of health challenges for the 95 year old Carter has fallen 3 times this year leading to a broken hip a black eye and most recently a fractured pelvis the last 2 mishaps have happened in the last 6 weeks and have led to bleeding around the brain to days procedure was meant to reduce swelling the Carter Center says there are no complications from the surgery but that he'll remain in the hospital for observation Carter's injuries haven't slowed him down much as he continues his humanitarian work and teaching bimonthly Sunday school classes in his hometown of Plains Georgia for n.p.r. News I'm Amy all Moffitt in Atlanta President Trump use a speech at the Economic Club of New York today to boast of the strength of the u.s. Economy but as N.P.R.'s Scott Horsley reports Trump made no promises to end the trade war which is taking a toll on factories and farmers. Wall Street rallied last week when China announced a truce in the trade war but there were no such assurances from President Trump the u.s. Has been negotiating a possible mini trade deal with Beijing but Trump notes similar talks of falling apart in the past would close a significant Shay's one trade deal with China. That could happen could happen soon but we will only accept a deal of it's good for the United States and our workers and our great companies if no deal is struck Trump warned he's prepared to impose higher tariffs on Chinese imports Scott Horsley n.p.r. News Washington the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down slightly to end the day $27691.00 s. And p. Close up 4 points Nasdaq gained $21.00 this is n.p.r. . Easy access to fat year and cheaper foods has the obesity rate across the Americas soaring what's proven to be a public health crisis in the United States is also found to be affecting tens of millions of lives in Latin America and the Caribbean where the obesity rate has tripled since 1975 N.P.R.'s Ping Wang reports on a new study that places most of the blame on significantly poor diets in Latin America and the Caribbean one in 4 adults is obese that makes for over 100000000 people at high risk for diabetes high blood pressure heart disease and some cancers The report says girls are growing in large part because people are eating more ultra processed foods soda and cookies frozen meals and instant soups they're all widely available relatively low in price and packed with salt fat and sugar in the past 20 years fast food consumption has gone up 40 percent there part is from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations it says these changes have affected poor people the most because unhealthy foods are cheaper and easier to get instead of food deserts many people now live in food swamps where food is available but it's all ultra processed being long n.p.r. News millions of people across the eastern half of the u.s. Are dealing with record cold temperatures and winter's not for at least another month Chicago got hit with single digit temperatures arctic blast unleashed record snowfall in Detroit and Buffalo the cold snap unusual for portions of the Gulf Coast also took its toll many schools and businesses either open late or stayed closed today I'm Lakshmi saying n.p.r. News support for n.p.r. Comes from n.p.r. Stations other contributors include Warner Brothers presenting the new motion picture Richard Jewel based on the true story of the 1996 Atlanta bombing a Clint Eastwood film only in the Friday December 13th. This is Cap Radio 90.9 Sacramento and 91.3 stop the Midwest your n.p.r. 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This is Fresh Air I'm Terry Gross my guest Andrew Moran's has spent the past 3 years reporting on the all right use of social media He's embedded with the people he describes as the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical means into national policy Moran says a staff writer for The New Yorker and started this reporting project during the 2016 presidential campaign he watched how extremist means and lives were created and went viral and he profiled the people creating the memes Moran's has also been reporting on social media platforms like Facebook Twitter and Reddit that claim they're dedicated to free speech but have vulnerabilities that have allowed them to become the primary means for spreading dissent from ation his latest articles are about what social media platforms have been doing and have declined to do to prevent purveyors of false news and smears from exploiting social media during the 2020 Alexion Andrew Moran's is the author of the new book anti-social on line extremists techno utopian and the hijacking of the American conversation. Welcome to Fresh Air Your book is about this information propaganda and social media trolling before and after the election of Trump do you think enough has changed to prevent that from happening again as we face the 20 twentieth's action no definitely not there have been a couple of little loopholes that I'm in closed here and there but you know I think we're pretty much in for what we were in for a last time I want to get to a good example of what you were covering you were with Mike certain of it you made the whole Hillary is sick Hillary has a neurological problem me go viral So let's start with who is Mike certain of it. Is a lawyer and a massage honest and a married guy with kids who lives in. Other in California and he also sells nutritional supplements and hair products online and he also is a mastermind behind a lot of memes that travel through the Internet him very dubious ways so he's a lot of things and of course he presents himself as a very serious investigative journalist I mean he is a journalist in a sense but he's not in my opinion a very good one to tell us how he came up with the name that Hillary is sick I think she has Parkinson's disease. And this is a source during the election right so when I 1st reached out to him I this was middle of 2016 and when I 1st reached out to him he said yeah you know I'm happy to let you just sit in my living room and watch me do this day after day and so I just sat with him and watched him he wasn't anonymous he was totally proud of what he was doing and you know one of the things he was doing as you say is he sort of said Ok I want people to trust Hillary less and I don't want to use sort of you know brow for allowing concern to do that I want to use really visceral emotions like fear and discussed to do that so I'm just going to insinuate that she is really really sick even though of course I don't have evidence that she has Parkinson's or anything I'm just going to suggest that and so he would you know not just sort of sit around and think about it or sort of insinuate it he would he would really actively plant it into the bloodstream of the national discourse so the way he would do it is he would open a open and i Pad he would do a periscope live stream it's an app owned by Twitter where you can do a live stream he would get about a 1000 of his hardcore fans into the periscope and he would say Ok guys this is what we're doing today we're going to make everyone think Hillary's sick we need to hash tag and they would all kind of workshop a hash tag you know him speaking to the camera them typing in the comments. They would come up with the hash tag they thought would be the best and they would all kind of swarm to Twitter together at the same time and try to get that hash tag to trend and put in you know images and sort of insinuations and wordings that they thought would be really sticky get the hash tag trending and then once they got it trending then every journalist in the world would see it it would be on the Drudge Report it would jump from the Drudge Report to Fox news from Fox News it would be on c.n.n. Almost to the point where I could open the newspaper the next morning and say I think this story is being reported on in the newspaper because of what I watched this guy do in his living room yesterday so he did that with the sickness rumors he did it almost every day with whatever he wanted and what was the quote evidence he used that Hillary was sick. Oh for that one it was like she blinked in a way that he found weird in a video or you know she had parts of her public schedule that couldn't be accounted for. And you know I should say the Clinton campaign was not very transparent with the press so there were things that conspiracy minded people could jump on because she didn't always account for where she was so they could say oh that's when she went to the hospital in secret and she did collapse I think she had pneumonia Right exactly so that happened before he was planting these sickness rumors before that happened and then she had pneumonia again she wasn't very transparent with the press about the fact that she had pneumonia and then she showed up for this 911 Memorial and collapsed and that it was caught on video and people her campaign people were trying to hide it from the cameras so it was all kind of this perfect storm of secrecy on the one hand and kind of over overeager dot connecting on the other and when I saw that happen I said oh you know this might not mean anything in any real sense but it's going to be very meaningful in a kind of appearance semiotics sense and one of your points is here's a guy at home with a phone or a laptop and followers and he can really make something that is not true at all go viral and get picked up eventually by the media yeah when I was 1st with him I kind of thought Wow I'm getting really lucky today you know I'm seeing him move the needle of the public discourse in such discreet ways you know it wasn't just Hillary being sick it was rumors about her e-mail it was rumors about immigration and it was you know every day I was with him multiple times a day I would see this and I thought man I must be getting really lucky and then I was like you know he just does this kind of whenever he wants morning noon and night you know the way we've built our information ecosystem is such that if you're good at it and you're motivated enough and you're not. The shamed of transgressing all kinds of various norms of human behavior you can kind of just do it whenever you want of course I wondered like how does the fundamental is this something he can monetize making things go viral but apparently part of how we funded himself was through his divorce because his wife his wife had worked at Facebook and had a lot of shares he got some of those shares as part of the divorce settlement and when Facebook went public that translated to $2600000.00 but I guess he also funded himself through all the things that he sold that had nothing to do with politics like the vitamin supplements and dieting things and and books he sold a lot of books on Amazon and they were self published which means he kept a big share of the revenue this is just one of these many details that came up in the course of reporting you know on him and on all the other people where there were a lot of details that you couldn't really make them up or if you did may come up in a novel they would be too on the nose you know the idea that one of the main social media propagandists I was tracking got his money from the Facebook i.p.o. By by way of a divorce or you know which he did not want me to find out but I went and got the court records or you know the fact that Richard Spencer the kind of king of the nazi trolls has his family wealth deriving from cotton fields in Louisiana these are things that if you put them in fiction they would seem a little off or determined but you know it's reality. Well one of the other things that might sort of if you leave been talking about did was he co-hosted the deplorable all which was basically the framing device for your book why don't you explain what the deplorable was and why you made at the framing device Yeah so there was a campaign event during the 2016 campaign where Hillary Clinton famously or infamously depending on your point of view said. About half of Trump's supporters are what I would call a basket of deplorable you could put them into a basket of deplorable and it was one of those interesting political moments where it was 1st of all a very weird memorable phrase like who who puts people in baskets and it was also just a totem of how easy it is to take something your political enemy is doing rhetorical Ian Just flip it on its head so the people she was ostensibly describing just immediately said yep we're deplorable zx we are proud to call ourselves that we're going to make hats that say adorable deplorable on it and it just immediately not only lost its power but it became a counter weapon you know this is a thing that happened with the term fake news again and again it was you know sort of taking the club out of your enemy's hand and then returning the beating with it so kind of the height of this was on inauguration weekend the people who as the way they put it is we mean Trump into the White House so they like to use me my as a verb which is a pretty good description of what they do and so the people who mean to trump into the White House said we are going to proudly wear this label of deplorable we're going to have an inauguration ball called the deplorable and we're going to celebrate the fact that you know the likes of Hillary thought we were so deplorable and yet we still beat her and. As for why use that as a device and why I wanted to be in that room you know there was definitely a human part of me that did not want to be in that room there were a lot of people in that room who were manipulative people who were trying to troll me or deceive me or get my attention as a mainstream journalist and that made me uncomfortable but I felt that something was happening that was not being adequately described anywhere else that there was a lot of energy in that room and people were kind of responding to the energy either in good or bad ways but in pretty sort of straightforward ways you know putting out a news story the next day saying well there were a lot of people in that room but I didn't see a lot of kind of deeper more patient analysis and so I just thought well what if you not only start in that room but then follow those people for you know a year or 2 years or really go back and reconstruct how they got to that room I think you'll learn a lot more than just. Reporting on the immediate effects of it the immediate effects of it were Trump is the president but I thought there was a lot more backstory there that could be uncovered if you're just joining us my guest is Andrew Moran's author of the new book anti-social extremeness techno utopian is and the hijacking of the American conversation going to take a short break and we'll be right back this is Fresh Air This is kind of radio 90.9 Sacramento $90.00 Torino nor n.p.r. Station we get support from family promise of Sacramento offering support services to families facing homelessness learn more about helping families regained housing self the self-sufficiency and their independence at Sac Family Promise dot org. This is Fresh Air and if you're just joining us my guest is Andrew Moran's author of the new book anti-social extremists techno utopian and the hijacking of the American conversation he's a staff writer for The New Yorker when you decided to follow some of the trolls before and after the presidential election you had to decide whether in doing so you were exposing them and therefore doing a productive thing or whether you were giving them more of a platform by talking about them in the New Yorker and then writing a book about them letting people know their names or my impression is even from reading your book and a lot of the people who have been putting out the. Dissent from ation on American social media they want to tension I mean going viral is really important to them and getting attention seems to be really important to them and you would be giving it to them and yeah I lost a lot of sleep over that I did not want to be used as a vector for propaganda I didn't want to be someone else's talk on. And look I mean I think it would be naive to ignore the fact that there is some transactional nature to all journalism especially this kind of journalism that as you say is really fundamentally about attention there are a lot of people in the book who thrive on any kind of attention whether it's positive or negative they monetize it they use it to build their brand up so I knew that that would be part of it and a lot of times when a person or an event or a story line didn't meet a certain threshold of newsworthiness or instructive No sir or any of these other things I didn't include and that's the majority of things didn't reach that threshold but I did feel that it was worth wrestling with that tension and sometimes writing about it anyway staying around long enough to see. People when their masks start to slip and also seeing it in the context of what it means for larger information ecosystem then again a lot of it was because I just felt a lot of people who are not part of these sort of Us danceable fringes by not looking at what the fringes do they are really preventing themselves from being able to inoculate themselves and the rest of society against these tricks you know they they make themselves sitting ducks in a way one of the people who you write about in your new book is Mike he's the founder of the blog the right stuff and that's right as and far right and the founder of the podcast The Daily Show which is obviously a joke on the name The Daily Show and the show of the Holocaust and it's hilarious and no surprise the podcast is very anti-Semitic and white supremacist so. Tell us about Mike you know going what the right stuff is and yes so this is another one where I really struggled with whether to pay this any attention or whether to just leave it alone you know it's obviously extremely toxic stuff and you know I'm Jewish I didn't particularly want to spend a lot of time looking into you know arguably the nation's leading anti-Semitic propagandist it wasn't fun for me. But there came a time when. Mike in UK got docs So that's Mike you know it isn't his real name. And Doc saying is when you sort of as a retribution or punishment put out people's personal information against their will so some online activists found out who he really was and put that information out there and who he turned out to be was a guy named Mike Payne of h. Living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was married to a Jewish woman he came from Maplewood in Montclair these very sort of progressive kind of multicultural suburbs in New Jersey he had gone to high school with Lauryn Hill and Zach Braff his father was a professor of Beowulf he had an adopted brother who was biracial so again as often happened when I would delve into this stuff it just none of it was what I had thought it would be if I was just sort of using my caricature or fill in the blanks imagination and at that point I was intrigued so I actually I wrote to him to the propagandist and I also wrote to another email address called Mike Payne of it and that one turned out to be his father Mike Painter which senior and then it ended up finding a kind of family saga buried in it so let's get back to what his blog The Wright Stuff in his pot cast the Daily Show are like and how much influence they actually seem to have Yes So as with a lot of fringe things they are extremely frankly and to Semitic racist the aesthetic is kind of like. Drive time radio shock jock from the ninety's kind of thing they were big fans of the Jerky Boys and Opie and Anthony so it's kind of that is that act mixed with just shockingly horrifyingly racist stuff so as for how influential it is on the one hand you know you don't hear a lot of people walking around just openly talking like that but on the other hand because all these things are interconnected and because the entire you know circulatory system of American media is sort of one big thing now you do sometimes see means that they invented permeating across the entire system so you know they for instance they invented the me most of putting 3 parentheses around the names of Jewish people that was then something you saw everywhere so like on Twitter a lot of like Jewish journalists have the press parentheses around each side of their name to say yeah I'm Jewish and I'm proud of that that's kind of yeah you claim and yet you reclaim it so that you can't be attacked for being Jewish you're saying Yeah I am yeah and so that was the kind of thing where. Most people who did that probably had no idea where it originated and yet if you actually go trace that meaning back to its source what you see is that this wasn't it obviously wasn't just innocent fun it also wasn't just a way to make Jews feel upset and afraid although it was that too it was specifically what they were interested in doing was called naming the Jews so they're very put off by the fact that Jews can appear to be white but in their pseudo scientific hierarchy Jews are not white and they're very very concerned with this you know Jews are these shapeshifters these scary creatures to them and so the 1st order of business to them was to point out where all the Jews were so that innocent white people could no one could rise up against them so a lot of people who were playing around with this Me month Twitter would not have known its true origins and in a sense that's how they like it you know they want to stay in the shadows let it seems to be this mix of wanting to stay in the shadows and wanting to be. Famous and have a lot of power yeah it is I guess yeah it made me more of an in the shadows guy he's sort of the guy behind the guy I mean he's in a way kind of the Cyrano who puts words in Richard Spencer's mouth but literally like I'm not literally Cyrano but literally He put words and responses mouth of or closely together often and yet they became very close allies and Richard Spencer would often go on The Daily Show and what you know would do he called them narratives so he would sort of set the narratives so Iraq and his co-host would sort of say Ok Well I think a good narrative for this moment would be to do x. Y. Or z. So for instance they were very interested in getting the word cook serve it of to permeate through the national discourse now that such a gross word that I almost can't really define it on public radio but in a way that's kind of the point right there goal would be to get people like me saying that word in polite company the way that start. By kibitzing on their podcast and saying Ok How can we do this and who do we go after on Twitter what emotions do we create in that person to get them to almost become a host for this mental virus that can then be propagated through the rest of society so yeah definitely people like Richard Spencer people like Jason Kessler who organized the Charlottesville rally all these people would kind of gather in these small rooms where it was just that inner circle of the hard core who were listening and then from there it would kind of permeate in multiple directions my guest is Andrew Moran a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the new book anti-social on line extremist techno utopian and the hijacking of the American conversation after a break we'll talk about what Facebook and Twitter are and aren't doing to prevent false news and smears from being spread through political ads and our t.v. 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This is Fresh Air I'm Terry Gross let's get back to my interview with Andrew Moran's author of the new book anti-social on line extremist techno utopian and the hijacking of the American conversation he spent the past 3 years starting with the 2016 presidential campaign embedding with online extremists profiling them and watching them create viral means he's also written about social media platforms like Facebook Twitter and read it and what they have and have not done to prevent their platforms from being used to spread lies smears and hate speech when we left off we were talking about Mike a knock who Moran's describes as a white supremacist in UK founded the blog the right stuff and the podcast The Daily Show and The title is a play on The Daily Show and the Shoah a Hebrew word for the Holocaust. Well Mike in Aqua's Doc's the information came out that his wife is Jewish and I think you confirm that yeah did you talk to him about that I mean because he's he's basically you know white supremacist as a nationalist whatever were he he prefers white nationalist I think white supremacist is more than there you go and I assume anti-Semitism is a part of that definitely yes yeah well so I talked to him about it at length and part of it was just that he hadn't been what they call red pilled yet when he met her so he hadn't had this conversion experience yet when he met her when he met her it didn't matter to him at all that she was Jewish because he grew up in bucolic suburban New Jersey where half his friends were Jewish and then his kind of eyes were opened to the Centrale of the of the Jews in this massive conspiracy and then it was essentially like a Greek tragedy for him like he was a really isolated person and his wife was really the only person who understood him in the world and in a way he had found the one thing that could risk driving them apart and in a sense it just felt like a random tragedy to him but as I learned more about his story it seemed fitting because he was just one of these people and there are many of them in the book who is so addicted to contrary an ism that they will find a way to be contrary to anything in their lives even at the deepest level so there are some people who just want to be contrary where they you know hear something on the news and they say I don't know I'm skeptical of that some people take that so far that they will be contrary and even to the point of trying to ruin their own marriages and their own lives it's tragic in a way is he still married no no they separated she claimed that she wasn't really aware of what his podcast was about while it was happening I might really show the depth Exactly yeah not only is it implausible but I have some reporting that pretty clearly shows that that's not true and you know it just makes you wonder like how could a Jewish woman have sat there and stayed married to this guy and I just one of the things I found again and again and again. Is that people are just weirder than we could possibly imagine they have more flexibility they have maybe more kind of emptiness at the core of their political ideology than we think it's made me really honestly change the way I think about politics you know when we talk about people's political convictions and say some voters like free trade and others like you know protectionism it just like a lot of people are just way more open to vast strange conversion on all kinds of things than we ever think possible so you know it is anti-Semitic racist and promotes those thoughts on his blog and podcast did he support Donald Trump during the election does he support President Trump now did he play any role in promoting Trump Yes So he and the rest of the All right definitely supported Trump during the campaign and saw him as the best they were ever going to get from a plausible presidential candidate I mean they saw him as someone who would give voice to their kind of white identity movement in a tacit way but still in a way that sounded very very clear to them after he became president he started to alienate them by being erratic and inconsistent Also by being a little too hawkish a lot of these people came out of anti-war organizing either from the left or the right or both so when he started dropping bombs on Syria a lot of the all right. Stopped being Trump supporters and also when he failed to build the wall and failed to enact what they wanted which was essentially a proto white nationalist agenda. He lost a lot of their support to but a lot of them you know in a way the end to Semitism it's not just a kind of purely irrational I mean it's obviously irrational but it doesn't come out of nowhere a lot of it for them comes out of what they perceive as libertarian or anti-war politics so if Trump were to run again do you think you'd have the support of Mike or other people that you've written about in the book. Yeah it's a really good question. A lot of them have moved on to other people like Tulsa Gabbert a lot of people in my book are really into Tulsi these days how come because well for one she's just the most anti-war candidate and some of them are almost single issue voters in that way. But others they really stand so far outside the political system that they know that they're not going to get most of what they want from any particular candidate so they're you know like all sort of radical politics it's a question of getting what you can from the mainstream system so do you do that by doing it the way they did in 2016 by saying you know Trump might not be a full white nationalist but he's signaling enough toward white nationalism that he's our guy or do you do it by you know heightening the contradiction and accelerating things you know. Trying to support someone who's so against what you believe that they're going to sort of accelerate the system into chaos from your point of view so Hillary Clinton said that jabbered has been getting support from Russia. Do you know anything about that mention that is because I was surprised to hear she's getting so much support from extremists on the far right yeah so I think there are 2 plausible ways to read this one is that Gabbert is outside of the mainstream on foreign policy issues and she is. Pushing an agenda that she feels strongly about and her opponents former and current are smearing her for it another way to look at it is her agenda seems so closely aligned with Putin's And Assad's that maybe that's not a coincidence now I don't know it's possible that somebody with subpoena power will find out at some point but in a way if you're a Russian state actor. Kind of all you might need is just that insinuation and that lack of clarity. We don't know exactly what Putin wants but it seems from the reporting I've read that what Putin mostly wants is for Americans to be confused and distrustful and not be able to believe their own eyes when they see something so if Americans are looking at a presidential candidate and not knowing whether she's a Russian asset or not that seems to fulfill a large part of Putin's motives whether she is or she isn't well let's take a short break here and then we'll talk some more if you're just joining us my guest is Andrew Moran's He's a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the new book anti-social online extremist techno utopian and the hijacking of the American conversation we'll be right back after a short break this is Fresh Air This is kept Radio 90.9 Sacramento and 91.3 stock to Modesto your n.p.r. Station key and key players involved in the Ukraine affair will offer public testimony join n.p.r. 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This is Fresh Air and if you're just joining us my guest is Andrew Morales a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the new book anti-social on line extremist techno utopian and the hijacking of the American conversation and during the 2016 presidential campaign and then after he followed and you know interviewed and spoke with spent time with a lot of people on the far right who had figured out how to make things go viral and that sounds were having a big contribution to the American conversation about Donald Trump in American politics. Do you see any echoing of the extremists who you write about in your book on Fox News defy news pick up on the blog posts and names that these people put out yeah definitely this is another case where you know I don't have subpoena power I can't order Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingram and whoever else to turn over their cellphones to me but I could ask the all right people what they thought and they told me Yeah when I watch Laura Ingram I get the sense that when she's talking about globalist elites and Rootless Cosmopolitans she's really talking about the j Q And when they say the j Q That's their previous one for the Jewish question so their sense often was yeah you know these people might be saying things like globalists and elites but they're really talking about the Jews or Tucker Carlson might be saying immigrants are dirty meaning that he's concerned about the literal issue of litter collection on the border but we know that what he means when he says immigrants are dirty to them they saw those things as dog whistles now the nature of a dog whistle is that I can't definitively prove what was in someone's mind or heart when they said it but the echoes are very strong there's a lot of pressure now on social media to prevent smears hate speech thread. That's dissin from Asian propaganda and you know Facebook is a good example of a company that appears to be trying to deal with that So what has Facebook done recently to try to cut down on propaganda dissin from ation smears threats so in one sense Facebook is doing a lot of stuff in another sense they're kind of running away from their responsibility often something really awful will happen on Facebook like they will add fuel to the fire of genocide in Myanmar or in Sri Lanka they had to just shut down essentially shut down the Internet for a few days because people were inciting so much violence now we can't lay all of that at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg Obviously violence and ethnic strife and all those things existed before the semiconductor did but. For a long time the reason I was so obsessed with this ideology of laissez faire the reason that techno utopian ism is in the subtitle of my book is that when you just believe to your core that everything will be sorted out by the marketplace of ideas in the long run you're much more reluctant to do anything in the present to impede people saying anything they want to say and I think we've reached a point now where we really recognize how irresponsible that is what worries me about Facebook right now is that they do keep kind of falling back on that rhetoric I mean Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech recently at Georgetown University it was a 40 minute written speech from Aleck turn with teleprompters I mean for someone who doesn't like being thought of as a politician like political figure he really made himself seem sort of analogous to a politician in that setting and his entire speech was just about freedom of expression you know we love freedom of expression Facebook is here to protect free speech and it's the kind of airy abstraction that sounds nice but in practice what it's being used for is to avoid the responsibility that Facebook has to be a responsible gatekeeper to be a curator of information it's essentially being used as a cop out Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook will continue to take political ads and it won't fact check or reject those ads he doesn't see it as their job to do that. And then there was a letter from about $250.00 Facebook employees. Offering suggestions to improve the policy on political ads without eliminating them all together what was said in that letter. It was really specific you know these are Facebook employees who know how to speak a language that Facebook executives can understand so they didn't leave with a lot of broad sweeping political statements they said Here are 6 things we can do to improve our policies and you know we can reduce the amount of micro-targeting that is used by political advertisers so yes maybe they can put up false information but maybe we shouldn't give them the tools to be able to target that false information to single moms in Dayton Ohio who drink bullet bourbon and go to church on Wednesdays you know again this is the kind of thing where the executives and Zuckerberg himself really really seemed determined to stay at the level of abstraction and keep the debate focused on well do you like free speech or don't you and this set of anonymous engineers within the company was willing to say no no no let's drill down on what we're actually talking about this isn't about I mean 1st of all it's not about the 1st Amendment right because Facebook is not the government but it's also it's not the out of 1st Amendment is about government intrusion on speech it's not yeah private enterprise you know the kind of the 1st Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech now there are people who say that Facebook should be governed more like a public utility and I think that's a worthwhile conversation to have but as of now Facebook is not a part of the government and it's not treated as such and so rather than retreating to these sort of mottos that could be carved on marble statues you know these engineers and sort of activists outside the company are sort of saying well let's talk about what we actually mean and how you're actually making money by doing these things rather than you know are you for free speech or are you against it that doesn't actually describe what's happening so what's another suggestion that was made in this letter from Facebook employees. They mentioned the idea of shutting down political ads altogether but only to kind of dismiss it they sort of said well that's outside the question and then of course Twitter did that like 2 days later I'm assuming that political ads are in port and part of Facebook's revenue stream. Well even that is debatable I mean Zuckerberg has made a point of saying this is such a small part of our revenue stream that you know trust me it's not worth it for the controversy we're doing this because we believe in it now like a lot of the things he says it's hard to know how much of that to believe. He says that it's not purely because of revenue now. It might be that he is projecting that political ads will become a bigger revenue source over time or that even if it's a small part of his revenue it's not one that he's willing to give up or it might be that he knows that these lines are so blurry that if he says Ok we're banning political ads well what does that really mean I mean this is the issue that Twitter is facing now when they said they were going to ban political ads immediately it led to a torrent of questions you know does that mean issue ads does that mean ads from activists who are just trying to point to climate science you know it becomes a slippery slope and the move that these companies have always made is to go for the simplest clearest most ideologically consistent answer which is the minimalist laissez fair answer if your answer is we're not going to do anything that allows you to be consistent and ideologically pure as soon as you say we're going to do something then all the questions arise Ok are you going to do this or are you going to do that. Social media platforms have been criticised for their role in the 2016 election in spreading dissin from Asian smears fake news so now as we head to the 2020 Alexion are we in better shape than we were in terms of social media because there's more of an awareness and awareness for the people who run the platforms and I think from the users of the platforms some of the people who you've written about have been thrown off Twitter. And other social platforms social media platforms to Reddit. You know so like Have we made progress are we in better shape in terms of American social media Russia still quite a wild card but yes of America social media away in better shape. Yeah Russia is a wildcard Iran is a wildcard China is a wildcard and a lot of the stuff I focus on in the book is not even shadowy secret state actors but American citizens who are willingly in voluntarily muddying the waters again and again minute by minute hour by hour so yes some of the individual people who I write about do have this kind of rise and fall narrative and one of the things that is kind of slightly hopeful about the story I tell is that some of the bad people do in a sense get their comeuppance by just kind of being shunted back to the margins where I think they belong but that doesn't mean that the problem is fixed in any lasting structural sense and you're Moran thank you so much for talking with us thank you Terry this was really great. Andrew Moran's is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the new book anti-social on line extremist techno utopian and the hijacking of the American conversation after a break our t.v. Critic David Bianculli will preview Disney plus the new Disney streaming service this is Fresh Air This is Caprio $90.00 Sacramento and $90.00 Tom your n.p.r. Station we get support from a style bakery in patisserie a French bakery featuring their new French toast flavors of banana Karen melon pecan or breach. 2 locations Arden way in downtown next to Golden One center a style bakery dot com and from u.c. Davis where doctors partner with their patients discover your healthy at any of their 17 neighborhood clinics throughout the sacrament of region learn more at Health dot u.c. Davis dot edu. Local support for fresh air comes from Sierra Nevada Brewing Company family owned operated and argued over since 1980 reminding listeners to think for themselves but with others Sierra Nevada dot com. This is Fresh Air yet another t.v. Streaming service joins the increasingly crowded entertainment universe today as Disney launches its new online offering called Disney Plus our t.v. Critic David Bianculli has a preview and some thoughts. There's no denying the influence of Walt Disney and the Disney empire on popular entertainment almost 100 years ago in the 1920 s. The earliest Mickey Mouse and musical cartoons helped pioneer sound in the cinema in the thirty's Disney's Snow White movie was the 1st feature length cartoon in the fifty's Disney became the 1st movie studio to make a deal with the venue and threatening medium of television Disney attacked Broadway like a conquering army and now is approaching the streaming t.v. Universe with the same well planned ruthless all out invasion force its inventory of old movies and t.v. Shows is deep and rich and its new programming premiering on launch day is impressively even surprisingly top notch Disney plus to anyone who is a parent or has been a child isn't really a streaming t.v. Option it's more like a requirement I resent having to pay more to watch more t.v. As much as the next guy and Disney plus doesn't come cheap its subscription costs $7.00 a month or $70.00 if you prepay for an entire year but what you get for that may be the best bargain around better even the long established Netflix or Amazon or Hulu with Disney Plus just from the vintage inventory alone you get the best of Disney and Marvel and Pixar and Star Wars you get 3 decades of The Simpsons synergy and corporate dominance can do that what is less expected and maybe even more welcome from Disney Plus is the new programming. Disney didn't make the new t.v. Series spin off from the Star Wars cycle man Delorean available for preview but did provide episodes of just about everything else take what might as well be called the live action movie remake of Lady in the Tramp I started watching it with trepidation but almost instantly embraced it wholeheartedly this new version of the 1955 animated movie has Tessa Thompson and Justin Theroux providing the voices of Lady in the tramp who look like real dogs but speak like people most of the time like the time they 1st meet when Lady spies tramp through the backyard fence where is trusty trusty I'm sure. What are you never get out of my people are going to warn them but what do you know it's not when the people Ok. I would get out of here but I can't go not to make trouble and just the one that's in trouble you could really help you know I can explain. Coming over here all you're doing. I'm going to bark out of our Please do not do that I'm not a mark absolutely do not do that stop. Stop tell me what to do the new t.v. Incarnation of the High School Musical franchise is pretty much what you'd expect but another new spin off from the latest Pixar Toy Story film is much more clever and novel it stars 40 the goofy loosely constructed character from Toy Story for as the host of his own series for he asks a question each episode is weird and funny and has only 3 minutes long the programs are short but the topics can be did a 40 year ago and I got to the question what is a friend from what I enjoy most of these new series so far are the nonfiction ones Disney plus has found people in subjects the truly match the Disney spirit and they all start out as winners the. The World According to Jeff Goldblum is an odd success taking this very likeable actor and sending him out into the world to explore one subject at a time like when he ride shotgun in an ice cream truck driven by a woman named d.m. And then Deanna presses a button and in an instant. Culture all comes flooding back listen to this music is awesome. To its own so I think that's not a brown jug it is a little brown so I hear it is like. Another nonfiction series Marvel's hero project focuses on real life youngsters doing amazing things detailing their accomplishments and as a capper presenting them with he wrote back it's a limited edition Marvel comic in which they are the hero It may sound calculated and corporate but the opener made me cry it profiles 13 year old Jordan Reeves born with only the upper half of her left arm who designed a unicorn horn manufactured with help from an inventor and mentor to fit on her arm and shoot out. A lot of it. I've made this. I have this unique idea. People with 2 hands can chew glitter might as well take a difference and make something really cool. Shows the joy of differences she goes on to become a mentor herself passing on her enthusiasm and her pride to younger kids nationwide it's inspirational and so is what may be my favorite series of this initial batch the Imagineering story. It's a multi-part documentary telling of the people behind the scenes who worked with Walt Disney to create Disneyland and other imaginative wonders these behind the scenes interviews and film clips are fascinating and Disney himself comes off as truly stubbornly visionary when he hosted the 1st episode of his weekly a.b.c. Television series in 1954 and called the Disney Land his California theme park of the same name hadn't even been built yet here now to tell you about it. This week. We want. To. 'd Disney had an amazing vision then and Disney plus has an amazing vision now it would have been foolish to bet against Disney in the 1920 s. And the thirty's and the fifty's and based on what Disney plus is presenting out of the gate it would be foolish to bet against Disney now. David Bianculli is founder and editor of the website t.v. Worth watching and is a professor of television at New Jersey's Rowan University tomorrow on fresh air our guest. The 4 time Oscar nominee has portrayed of vampire villains and soldiers as well as Vincent Van Gogh and Jesus he's currently appearing with Edward Norton in the film Motherless Brooklyn and he stars as a crusty lighthouse keeper in the drama the lighthouse I hope you'll join us. From. Directed today's show I'm Terry Gross. 2 support for n.p.r. Comes from this station and from Capital One committed to reimagining banking offering savings and checking accounts that can be opened from anywhere. What's in your wallet. And from Progressive Insurance offering stop a device that adjusts insurance rates based on safe driving habits progressive learn more at progressive dot com or 1800 progressive. The world starts next to. This is public radio. They kept radio digital teams always looking for new ways to tell stories online they could be photos videos maps we try to teach you where you are whether that's on our website your phone your smart speaker anywhere. And I'm the senior editor of digital content here at Cap radio. Good Thanksgiving feast on Morning Edition we give you a little bit of everything horses we've been sort of over the u.s. Relationship substantial size a lot of school officials are fed up with students on campus and so just to get backwards is used to. Dig into a full spread of stories every day from n.p.r. News to Morning Edition until 9 am weekdays on. Turkey's president wretch of type everyone is coming to Washington memories linger about what his security detail did the last time he rolled through I was just thrown on the ground repeatedly kicked in the head and I was just couldn't imagine why would somebody beat me so violently also deadly Hong Kong protests leave some citizens skeptical of the democracy movement by shouting We want democracy does not actually create democracy and thousands of people are writing letters to one of literature is greatest fictional characters so far from all over from Russia Poland California all of them to a radio station where each one was 12 pages long but can the heroine of Romeo and Juliet give good life advice I'm Marco Werman Those stories and more today here on the world. This is the b.b.c. News Hello I'm Jonathan Izod Bolivia's former president Evo Morales is in Mexico where he's been given political asylum following his resignation on Sunday he said he had fled from his country because his life was at risk here America's editor of the Russia Mr Morale is made an emotional statement on the tarmac of Mexico City's airport he thanked Mexico's president a lot as well but our door in credited him with saving his life he said his house and his sister's house in central believer had been ransacked by violent opposition groups angry at their defeat in October tests at the presidential election the opposition and the Organization of American states have accused him of electoral fraud Mr Mollett said however that he was the victim of a right wing coup politicians loyal to Mr Morales have boycotted a special session of Congress called to choose an interim leader and organize new elections within 90 days Mr Morality his party has a clear majority in both houses of Congress. Tens of thousands of people in Chile are holding more protests in the capital Santiago demanding social reforms many roads have been blocked public transport services closed early because of fears of violence the demonstrations have been peaceful so far protesters in the president to implement measures to reduce inequality the u.s. Supreme Court has begun oral argument begun hearing oral arguments from the trumpet ministration calling for the overturning of an Obama era program that protects hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from deportation a program known as Dachau was put in place to help people brought into the u.s. Illegally when they were children Mr Trump tried to end the policy 2 years ago the Democratic Party leader in the Senate Chuck Schumer said the u.s. Had always been a nation of immigrants we are hopeful that the Supreme Court will shine a light on us will understand the right thing to do to understand that a president who wants to violate the law is so wrong that in a nation where there is rule of law he will be rebuffed Uganda has protested to Rwanda after 2 suspected smugglers were shot dead by Rwandan soldiers near their common border a letter delivered to Rwanda's High Commissioner in camp says the alleged crime of smuggling cannot justify what it called criminal acts by Rwandan security personnel is will Russ this strongly worded complaint is a sign that relations between the neighbors are deteriorating fast Uganda is accusing Rwanda of murdering its unarmed citizens near the common border over the somewhat petty crime of smuggling at the heart of the tension appears to be a very personal long running feud.