Latest / Question Everything / Can AI tell us what stories to look out for? A live experiment.

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Can AI tell us what stories to look out for? A live experiment. · Question Everything

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: In the last couple of months, our team here at
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Question Everything has been playing around with this new technology.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: It's called Pira. It's a startup, and it uses AI
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: to determine what people are talking about in all sorts
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: of corners of the internet before it breaks into more
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: mainstream conversation and eventually the news and real life.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Is there a topic that I can kind of center
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: the demo around? It's something that's interesting.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: This is a training session Pira's CEO, Welton Chang, gave
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: our staff a couple of months ago. Wilton used to
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: be an intelligence officer for the army. Then after 2016,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: when it became clear that Russia had been meddling in
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: online spaces to influence American voters, he left. And he
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: and a colleague ended up joining an NGO to start
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: developing this technology to track security threats online. Hate speech, disinformation,
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: threats of political violence. They started by focusing on what
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: they called unmoderated social media platforms. places like Telegram, 4chan, Parler,
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: that do less flagging and fact-checking of content than Facebook,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: for instance, or in some cases, none, because they knew
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: this is where certain ideas and obsessions and conspiracies often
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: start to percolate before sometimes jumping over to more mainstream
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: platforms like Twitter and Facebook and then into the wider conversation.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: They were hoping this could help them detect threats early.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: The tech basically vacuums up tons of posts from across
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: these platforms, a massive amount of data each day, And
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: then they use AI to analyze it.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: We take every post and run it through our language
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: modeling capability. So what that does is it identifies highly
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: negative content, highly offensive, highly hateful, and highly violent.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: And it was after Election Day in November 2020, when
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Donald Trump was claiming he'd won, and that Democrats had
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: committed widespread voter fraud, that Welton and his colleagues saw
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: the potential power of what they were building. So the election.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: results were still being tabulated. And, you know, there was
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: talk of, you know, voter fraud and all this stuff
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: in the lead up to the actual ballots being cast.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: But what we saw on the platforms that we were
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: monitoring was a little bit different in that it wasn't
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: just people spouting off. It had turned into, I'm taking
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: a video of and here's me in a Walmart parking lot,
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: and I'm kind of getting together with other like-minded people,
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: and we're headed to Georgia to do a protest. We're
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: headed to Michigan to make our views known. And we
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: started seeing some chatter about heading to D.C. for a
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: big rally at the Ellipse. It was also being accompanied
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: with more violent language, more hateful language.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: The program actually measures how violent or hateful language is.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: It quantifies it on a scale.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: And that's, you know, I think it kind of got
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: our antenna up a little bit. And then the morning
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: of Jan 6, I remember going into our organizational Slack
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: and saying to everybody, hey, you know, I think something's
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: going to go down today. It might even go, you know,
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: to use a military term, kinetic. And then, of course,
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: there's the rally at the Ellipse. The folks at the
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: Ellipse start moving towards the Capitol, right? And, yeah, you know,
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: we feel like we had like a front row seat
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: to it, watching what was going on online.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: Welton and his colleagues realized that the program they were building,
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: you really could use it to try and anticipate the future,
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: to maybe get ahead of a damaging conspiracy theory or
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: even potential violence. They spun off from the NGO into
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: this company, Pira, and expanded the sites they look at.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: There's now more than 40. They don't do Twitter, Facebook,
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: or Instagram yet, and only parts of TikTok. But the
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: program does suck in data from YouTube, Spotify podcasts, Reddit, Substack,
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: plus what Pira sees as more left-leaning platforms, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Spoutable,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Says Us, along with ones that are more right-wing, Gab, Getter,
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: Truth Social, lots of others too. And one of the
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: most interesting things I've found that they do is each week,
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: They use the AI to identify what they call the
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: top narratives forming across these platforms. This is not like
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: a trending topic or keyword on Google like Biden or
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Taylor Swift or the NFL. The AI reads about 100
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: million posts a week and then it clusters them together
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: thematically and determines which ideas seem to be forming most
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: prominently among people who are posting on all these sites.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: It's tricky because they're basically trying to read tea leaves
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: in a sewer. These corners of the internet are obviously
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: filled with garbage. There's shitposting and infighting and extremist groups
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: and bot farms and foreign and domestic influence campaigns and
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: posts from teenagers whose parents have taken their PlayStation controllers
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: away and are looking for something to do. But then again,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: garbage ideas bubble up into our politics all the time. Pizzagate, QAnon,
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: vaccine conspiracies, claims that government officials are geoengineering hurricanes, claims
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: about election fraud that can lead to people amassing in D.C.,
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: breaking into the Capitol, real-life violence. The conversations online, they
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: mirror and shape our reality every day, even if you're
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: not aware of them. I'm certainly not tapped into them
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: on a regular basis. And at the same time, for
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: a lot of people, these conversations can have more influence
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: than any news story. So I think there's value in
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: looking at what people are talking about on these platforms,
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: even if it can be kind of inscrutable, hard to
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: know which ideas will catch and which will stay festering
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: in the pipes. From KCRW and Placement Theory, this is
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: Question Everything. I'm Brian Reed. And on today's show, we're
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: doing a kind of experiment I've been wanting to do
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: since I got to know about PIRA. We look at
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: the top narratives PIRA identified in just the last week,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: a relatively random week in the life of America. So
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: we can all track them together and keep an eye
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: on if any of them start to gain more steam.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Even just this snapshot from this one week, it's chaotic, disjointed, bizarre. Wait,
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: this is all from this last week? Yeah, I mean,
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: these are, oh my gosh. Okay, first of all, I
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: was going to just read one aloud. No, you can't read,
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: that's the thing.
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: I don't, I have to take breaks from looking at
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: this sometimes because it can feel like you're inside the
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: brain of somebody having a mental health crisis.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Stick around. The guy who pulls together the narratives from
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: Pura each week is named John Reed. Pura is not
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: a journalism company, but John is a journalist who works
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: for them. And every week he goes through what the
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: AI identified, gives it a human check And then puts
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: out a newsletter outlining the most prominent narratives. John and
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: I got together on Monday to talk about the most
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: recent ones. I printed out the newsletter. The top narrative
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: for the week, Bill Gates is trying to depopulate the
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: earth and must be stopped. Yes.
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: The Bill Gates narrative is essentially because of his work
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: on public health and vaccines. There is a huge claim
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: that he's out to control the world or depopulate the world.
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: or you name it, some kind of, you know, nefarious
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: goal that he has. And it's largely tied back to
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: his public health work. Again, this is a narrative. This
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: is a conspiracy theory.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: I don't know. It's a wild spreadsheet I've just pulled
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: of some of this stuff.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: And you can see some of them are a bit baseless.
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: Do you mind if I look here?
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So this is, wait, this is all from this
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: last week.
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, these are from about the past week
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: and a half, some of them, it looks like.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, the first one is like, you know, maybe
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: 15 words and somehow manages to be like anti-Chinese and
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: anti-Semitic in one line. It's wild. Like, is there anything
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: that's readable? Let's see here. Bill Gates should stand in
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: front of a firing squad for crimes against humanity.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: Here's another one. They are all guilty of murdering millions
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: across the globe. Bill Gates is the puppet master.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Let's see.
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: This is a climate-oriented one. He's a pathological liar. Arrest
• 8:22
  Speaker 3: this unelected villain. Saying he's inventing fake crises for people
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: to buy his fraudulent climate garbage. Bill Gates is angry.
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: He wants to depopulate the earth. President Trump is standing
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: in the way.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: I guess it's not surprising to me that these theories
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: and ideas about Bill Gates exist and get shared. On
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: platforms like these, what's surprising to me is just that
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: this is the top narrative of the last week. Like
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: just the fact that this is what is getting talked
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: about so prominently on these platforms right now when it
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be part of the conversation that certainly
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: I'm tuning into as a reader of kind of more
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: traditional news outlets. Do you have a sense of why now?
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: Why is this a prominent topic of conversation now? So
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure what the Gates one, right? So sometimes
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: it makes sense as to why these are surging. Other
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: times it doesn't. Sometimes it feels like somebody's just taking
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: spaghetti and throwing it at the wall. I have possible theories.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: I'm curious if you see any evidence to this in
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: what you're looking at. I know that Elon Musk, you know,
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: who's become a more prominent voice right now, he is
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: of the mindset that global population needs to grow, that
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: low birth rates are a problem. and advocates for that
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: and I think puts money behind it and also has
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: a lot of kids himself. Could this be in response
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: to that taking hold somewhere?
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: It could be.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: People saying like Bill Gates is kind of anti-Elon Musk
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: in a way or something. So it could be that.
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: With the Bill Gates narrative, I did notice one interesting
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: thing because it pops up every few weeks, the Gates narrative.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: Oh, it does? Every few weeks, every few months. Yeah.
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: Some of these recur and they kind of ebb and flow.
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: And the Gates ones, I noticed that there is increasingly
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: a focus on his work in Africa. And I have
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: to wonder, you know, there is a new geopolitical scramble
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: for influence in Africa right now where you see Russia
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: and China have been trying to get more influence on
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: the continent compared to the West and And that's just
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: one of those things that makes me kind of go, Hmm,
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: I wonder what, what this is.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Oh, so also this couldn't, it's possible. This isn't totally organic.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: This conversation, is that what you're getting at?
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: That's something exactly. These aren't always organic. Sometimes tricky though,
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: differentiating what's organic versus what's not. What is a bot campaign,
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: for example, right? You can see individual posts and be like,
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: that looks like a bot, but like how much of
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: this is actually being driven by, um, fake, fake software.
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: Versus how much of this is being driven by, is
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: this just organic people are furious about this and talking
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: about it?
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like the next one, the second one
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: you list, does seem to be more obvious. The narrative
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: is the Democratic Party is dying and needs to be
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: finished off. It should be banned.
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: And we're seeing that narrative emerge, I should be clear,
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: on platforms that are popular among right-leaning users.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: But you also noted that it's prominent in some way
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: or another on left-wing platforms, too.
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you'll see a slightly different narrative oftentimes. And sometimes
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: these messages merge, right?
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: Like here you have, seems like a right-wing getter user,
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: the Democrat power brokers only represent the elites, the credentialed
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: already successful. The numbers are crystal clear. In contrast, we
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: are the movement of workers, the patriotic populace of America first.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: And then on the left here, on a blue sky post... LOL,
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: the Democratic Party is awash with donor money and corporate lobbyists.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: There's no working within the Democratic Party. Anybody that tries
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: to eradicate super PAC, APAC money is scorned at and
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: kicked out of leadership. So there's kind of like a
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: weird consensus there. Is there certain language that you see
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: show up in left-wing posts versus right-wing posts?
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: It seems like there was more coherent narrative development on
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: platforms favored by the right than on the left. The
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: left was a lot more chatter and debate, kind of loose,
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: whereas platforms with the right, you saw a lot more
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: kind of more coherent narratives being pushed.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: And that's like people coalescing behind a story or a
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: theme or a conspiracy theory. Exactly. Whatever it may be, right?
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: Exactly.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: I noticed that a lot. I mean, that's an observation
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: or critique you always hear or I've often heard of
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: kind of At the party level, you know, which is
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: that Democrats are terrible at staying on one message and
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Republicans are much more disciplined. It's interesting that it would
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: be true kind of in this wild west of all these.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: And the language is generally not quite as just violently angry.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: You know, the calls for mass executions and things like that.
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: You don't see those on the sides favored by the
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: left nearly the same way that you do on the right.
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: It's the vitriolic aggression.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: Like, I mean.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: It's as if someone just slammed a pint of vinegar
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: and just is going after their neighbor on some of
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: these sites. But I mean, I did notice one interesting
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: thing around the election, specifically on election day. For a
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: very brief, I don't even know that I'd say it's
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: a full 24 hours, where to me it seemed like
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: for half a second, the rhetoric calmed down. Huh. As
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: if people were just like watching to see what was
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: going to happen.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: And then, boop, came back.
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: What was interesting was I noticed that it was calming
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: down kind of on election day before we all had
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: the exact results, right? And then a little bit into
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: the next day. Yeah, that's what we said. That was
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: the interesting thing. It was as if everybody was just going,
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: hold off, wait.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: All right. So what's the final top narrative you identified?
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: Let's dive in back to this week.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: Back to this week. Okay.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: It's basically arguing that Nick Fuentes, the far-right– far, far,
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: far-right influencer and kind of self-described extreme misogynist is actually
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: a federal informant.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not totally familiar with this conspiracy.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: So he was at– on the National Mall on January 6, 2021,
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: kind of encouraging people to go to the Capitol building.
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: And then why hasn't he been charged with anything? He
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: must be a fed. He seems to be getting off scot-free.
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: He's a fed.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: Got it. And this is coming from– People on the right,
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: it seems like.
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's on. And this week we saw that, especially
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: on 4chan. And that's like, are these guys just, you know,
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: kids on 4chan having an argument about one another? Is
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: it an organic just back and forth kind of internet contest?
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: Or what's driving this latest cycle? Because this is an
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: idea that's been out there for a long time, that
• 14:58
  Speaker 3: Nick Fuentes is fed. This is one of those things
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: that it surges from time to time and you can't
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: always tell immediately. When I'm producing the news letter, I
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: can't always immediately see, like, what was the spark that
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: set this latest round of this off? But this helps
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: you understand what everybody's kind of thinking, where their brain
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: is going and where people may be trying to push
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: their thinking.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break. When we come back,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: a sketchy website that should maybe be on our radar
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: and the narrative taking form online that John thinks is
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: the most likely to become something we're going to have
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: to deal with soon. In the Pira newsletter, after going
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: through the top narratives for the week, John also lists
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: the most shared content, like actual links people are sharing
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: in their posts on the array of platforms that the
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: company monitors. And that list I found both bewildering and
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: telling in some way or another, you know? So I'm
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: looking at this list, and there's a list of 10.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: This is the most shared content, the most shared on
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: these sites. And I have heard of one... No, I've
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: heard of three of these outlets out of 10. So
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: there's a Fox News story on here. I've heard of them, obviously.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: GB News is like a right-wing British outlet. I've heard
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: of them. Newsmax is on here.
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: I've heard of them. Oh, I guess I've heard of this.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: I guess number nine most shared on here was the
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: Expedia cancellation policy. a complete guide for passengers. So I've
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: heard of Expedia. Yeah. But other than that, I've not
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: heard of these sites. So for instance, the number one
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: piece of shared content this week on these social media
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: sites was from AC News. I have never heard of
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: AC News. I went to Google it and I can't
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: find it. What is AC News? Do you have a
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: link there? Can you look internally?
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: I'm looking right now for it. Oh, there we go.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: This is it.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Alternative Central News. Uncensored and independent media seeking the truth,
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: fighting for freedom.
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: And we see this one shared an awful lot. When
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: you go over to their menu and their kind of
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: options for coverage, you see the top thing is politics, geopolitics, crime, justice, terrorism, economy, army, wars,
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: conflict zones, military tech. Then you get into the NWO,
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: New World Order, deep state, dictatorship, tyranny. Propaganda, ideology, disinfo, control, surveillance, privacy, censorship.
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: And the list goes on and on and on from there.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: There's a category here, racism, transgender, LGBTQ +, sex crimes.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: That's one category.
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: Yep. Oh, interestingly, look at the language that the calendar
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: is in down there in the archives. It's not an
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: English language calendar.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: It's a Czech language calendar, actually. We did a little
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: digging this week just to see what is this site.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: And there's not a lot out there about it, honestly.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: But we sent it to some researchers who study the
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: ways Russia and China infiltrate U.S. politics. And they were
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: aware of it. They'd included it in a report on
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: Russian propaganda saying the site appears to be repackaging and
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: reposting content from Russian state media to influence Americans. They
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: did some more investigating after we wrote them and told
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: us they were actually able to trace AC News to
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: a Czech guy who shares an address in London with
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: a crypto exchange and something called the Slavic World Foundation. Anyway,
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: seems like a site to keep an eye on. John
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: looked at the traffic that made this the most shared
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: site on the Pura monitored platforms this past week. And
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: it was mostly coming from social media accounts created by
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: AC News itself.
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: Mastodon, Blue Sky, AC News on Getter. They have a
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: Getter account. AC News on Gab.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: So it's like spreading in this whole other ecosystem. It
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: just shows that, okay, this site that I've never heard
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: of that I can barely find on the normal search
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: engine that I use is gaining influence somewhere.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: Like this doesn't quite feel like it was made by
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: necessarily a person. This might have been AI generated, right?
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: There's humanity missing here.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: Some of this is just giving me that initial gut sense, right?
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: You can tell it's not organic, right?
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: Users pushing this out. This is all AC News pushing
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: this stuff out.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: All right, so that's the number one most shared piece
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: of content is that website.
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that was on Friday's newsletter, right?
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: All right, this one jumped out at me. This is
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: number three, the number three most shared story. This is
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: from a site, again, I've never heard of called Real
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Raw News.
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: They are all over the place, this.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Week, too. Really? Yeah. When you search on that, the
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: way they describe themselves is Real Raw News, science, politics, conspiracy, Trump,
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: an independent publisher. Real Raw News explores content often avoided
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: by the mainstream media. And the story that I guess
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: is getting shared. as one of the top stories on,
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: on these social media sites in the last week or
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: so is that Anita Dunn was executed at Gitmo. Anita
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Dunn is one of Joe Biden's advisors.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: Who's still alive.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: Very much still alive.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: Well, I went to the story and not only is
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: it just an insane, you know, lie, basically a piece
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: of fiction. Um, it's from February, 2022.
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: You see that sometimes people do recycling, right? It's kind
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: of like the Nick Fuentes is a Fed story. Sometimes
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: that just comes back.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: So say more about that. Like, what are the forces
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: behind that? Why does that happen? Why is this lie
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: that Anita Dunn, Joe Biden's advisor, was executed at Gitmo
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: that was written in this story two years ago or more?
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: Why is that the number three story last Friday? I
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: can't tell specifically in that case, but I mean, it
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: coincides with a whole kind of an upswing again lately
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: in kind of the prosecute Biden, prosecute Democrats in power,
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: they're corrupt, this kind of thing, narrative that's been flourishing
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: again since the election that we've kind of seen, right?
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: That's my guess is that we've seen an upswing in
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: all of this talk of, you know, Democratic politicians and
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: operatives are, you know, evil and this and that, and
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: they're involved in all sorts of conspiracies. And some of
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: them get just Absolutely wild.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: I mean, just to read this, Anita Dunn did not
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: have a happy Valentine's Day. Again, this is for February 2022,
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: and yet it's one of the most shared stories right now.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: No flowers, no chocolates, and no cards embossed with cute hearts.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: She did, however, have her head put in a noose
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: at Guantanamo Bay, where she was hanged to death following
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: a lengthy self-imposed hunger strike.
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: So you see a lot of that kind of generalized stuff.
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: Biden's are treasonous. People in his orbit are treasonous, this
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: kind of thing. You see an awful lot of that rhetoric, right?
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: And it's often accompanied with executions.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: But with this actually saying an execution happened at the
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: hands of the U.S. government? Oh, they've done that about Biden,
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: I believe.
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: I think they've even said that Biden's body double and
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: the real one was executed or something like that.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: You see that sometimes. Is it common or it's just
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: not uncommon?
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say it's not uncommon. I've definitely seen
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: that trope before. There's the, there is this bloodlust in
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: some of the posts that I'm seeing that kind of
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: is really disconcerting to say the least.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: What have you learned from doing this week after week?
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: I don't know if I've learned it from this, but
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: I've really internalized just how you can see these kinds
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: of ideas germinate and spread, right? This is something that, um,
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: I've known kind of intellectually for a long time, but
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: then watching them week after week spread this way. Um,
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: It is different. It's like when you experience something versus
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: when you just read about it, right? Watching it in
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: real time happen. An example that comes to mind is
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: in October, we saw about a week, maybe two before
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: it started to gain real traction in the mainstream. There
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: was the narrative that claimed that Tim Waltz had been
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: kind of sexually grooming or abusing a Kazakh exchange student
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: that famously hit the news cycle in October. We saw
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: that one pop up. About a week or two before
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: it really blew up.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: And that was not true. Exactly.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: Got it. Exactly. Exactly. Okay.
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: That's just one example of how we tend to see
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: these narratives germinate.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: I saw that pop up and I said, what? Okay, sure.
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: It's trending now, but I didn't think that much of it.
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: It was just one of many kind of crazy sounding
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: stories that you can see on these sites. And you
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: don't always know which one's going to take off or
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: which one's going to get attention in mainstream, right? And
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: that was one of those where, sure enough, boom, then
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: a few weeks later or a week or two later,
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: it caught on. Like I'll click a New York Times
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: headline and all of a sudden they're talking about this
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: crazy sounding narrative that I wrote a very quick bit
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: about a few weeks before that was only on, you know,
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: Getter or Gab or a handful of those sites. And
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: then the Times will say how it's just all over
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: X or Facebook or, you know, whatever platform it is.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: And I said, wow.
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: And it's kind of– it's shocking how it gets that pickup.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: And it's like arguably possibly influencing how people are thinking
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: about the election or the democratic ticket.
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: And I suppose there's some kind of meta point to
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: be made about how we're all retreating into our individualized
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: kind of narrative ecosystems where people just go down these
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: rabbit holes and their ideas are being reinforced by one
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: another and by networks of people. You really do see
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: it here where it's just all these little soda straws
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: of realities. When I dip into Pira like this, I
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: do end up thinking about my little soda straw.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: What am I drinking? What's my reality? Before we wrapped up,
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: I asked John if there was anything else notable he
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: was seeing this week. And he said, actually, there was
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: one narrative that he just clued into that morning that
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: he thought out of all the ones we discussed, out
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: of all the sewage we were sifting through, actually, this
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: could be the most likely to emerge as a real
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: situation we might have to contend with soon. And it
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: wasn't anything I'd come across in my own news consumption.
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: Over the weekend and late last week, a bunch of
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: chatter about the Romanian election.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw that in your political newsletter. Yeah. I
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: didn't even know there was an election happening in Romania.
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: There's this presidential election where out of nowhere, seemingly, according
• 25:41
  Speaker 3: to most news reports, this ultra-nationalist presidential candidate who seems
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: to have a very serious affinity for the Kremlin, isn't
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: necessarily the biggest fan of the EU and NATO. won
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: kind of the first round of Romania's elections. And there's
• 25:57
  Speaker 3: been a lot of talk of possible interference from the Kremlin.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: And so Romania's court ordered a recount. And so he
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: just kind of came out of almost nowhere. It seems
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: like nobody was tracking this guy. And then bang, he
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: wins the first round of the election. And so a
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: lot of the commentary we saw over the last few
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: days about it has been saying, whoa, who's this guy?
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: So a lot of people just sharing this kind of
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: surprise news and links to it. But then we also
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: do see some posts going in and not, not an
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: overwhelming amount yet, but saying that it is a CIA
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: or Western intelligence operation to the, that the recount is,
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: has gotta be a Western intelligence operation. This is a
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: case where this could percolate into a proper narrative that
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: really runs away that like, this is the West interfering
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: in Romania's election. to keep the people's choice out of
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: office or something like that. Yeah, I could see this
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: being like a big news story pretty soon.
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: This is the kind of thing that this may blow up.
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: It might not go anywhere. Who knows?
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's interesting.
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: So, yeah, that's just one of these things that, you know,
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: we're seeing what may be the early phases of a
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: messaging campaign around this candidate to say that, you know,
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: the West's conspiring to keep him out of office or
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: something like that.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: John Reed. We are not related, by the way. He
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: works for Pura Technologies. On our next show, in a
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: change of pace, I get together a bunch of Hollywood
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: directors who have all mined journalism to make some of
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: my favorite movies and TV shows. We open a bottle
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: of whiskey and talk shop, including Tom McCarthy, who made Spotlight.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: When did you know Spotlight was a story?
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: When I knew it was a story?
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Or when it was a movie. When did you
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: know Spotlight was a movie? Can I switch to scotch
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: if we're going to do this? Yeah, you haven't already?
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: I haven't.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: I haven't.
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: I've been stuck in red wine.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: Today's episode was produced by me, with Sophie Kazis. It
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: was edited by Jonathan Goldstein and Jen Kinney. Our show
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: is made by executive producer Robin Simeon, producer Zach St. Louis,
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: and production intern Emily Malterre. Neil Drumming is a contributing editor.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: Fact-checking by Maggie Duffy. Sound design this week by Sharif Youssef.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: Music by Matt McGinley. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seipel,
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: Gina Delvac, Tejal Ajmera, and Jennifer Farrow. Thanks for listening.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: See you next time.