Joe Rogan Experience #1263 — Renée DiResta Transcript

Transcript

0:00 people though they really are it's just fucking hard business especially when you didn't see it as someone who vaccinates. And I started looking at the way that small groups were able to the pros and cons of that were. And then this was 2015. So the way that this sort of And I wound up working on thinking about how the government was going to respond to the challenge of terrorist

3:07 actually met the trolls, been in St. Petersburg, and began to write about what was happening over So 2015, if we think about social media and the birth of social media, essentially it had only been alive for, I mean, what was Twitter 2007, I believe? Yeah, so I think, so there was this, if you go back to like, You could put up your blog. So this becomes really interesting for regular people who just want to find their friends, reach people, spread their message, grow an audience.

6:09 and a couple other minor platforms other than YouTube. And then I'll go to some of these accounts. And then you'll go through the timeline and all they're doing is engaging people and arguing for Trump you know whatever the fuck they're angry about But there were actually a fair number of these as we began to do the investigation into the Russian operation.

8:18 automated. Sometimes it's a real person. But a sock puppet is the other way that we can refer It begins to look outwards. American trolls that were very much real and active and part of this and expressing their VPNs, that's it yeah so if they do that they can kind of do that as long as they want they can continue to make new accounts common criticisms of you know people who um a lot of people think that this didn't have a huge impact

11:30 particular ways of communicating that Now, why did the agency do this? from an intelligence agency. So besides just making your pages and your blogs and your social You've got to kind of hit your quotas. you don't use white people in your image and your meme because that's going to like trigger them. to be a rather effective uh you know very effective social media agency and is there

15:33 And they created it. It had a matching Instagram account, which you would also expect to see from a media property, right? So you have the LGBT page. black liberation tribe. There's a black women tribe. There's one for people who have incarcerated spouses there's a brown um saying like, as black women in America, this is is here's posts about things that we care about.

18:29 time. And then I say like, as this kind of person, we don't believe this. So it's a way to subtly and then once they got everybody on board, how many followers do these pages have? so well let's like rebrand it a little bit change it up try to um try to make it and the CSV up on the other screen. But, so I have this cluster of Kermit the Frog memes

21:14 and what the hell is going on here. And I keep going through it, hundreds of Kermit memes. the audience or engagement they want. And then they pivot over to Jesus. And then all of a sudden you politicize them, then you activate them you And they took that page when it wasn't getting, I guess, There was a lot of stuff that I would have loved to have more insight into

24:22 probably one of those weird accounts. Like they're getting people to get engaged with it sometimes I see things and I'm like you know what are the odds um but and I and I try to you know not feel like you know you don't ways getting caught this is this is one of the and you influence the election and you influence people So they established, they started building these relationships in 2015.

27:56 And then for the remainder of the data set from 2015 through the end, which was mid-2017 or so So they had specific outcomes that they were hoping for. for Bernie Sanders. But you actually see the support for Bernie Sanders come in more after Graham, basically anti every now what's called establishment Republican. And there's this he's just a different person that the way i was describing

31:46 it's more accepted people feel more emboldened because they're in their mind they think he is social media the way social media reacted i mean there was a lot of people that were anti-obama before you know either either of his elections that he won but it seemed different it seemed If this is all done at the same time that this is happening, So I've looked at now almost 200,000 of these posts,

34:45 per your point the the really really just fucking horrible troll accounts that they ran they didn't And so they can also go and they can draw on, We can't see, did they just block? Did they have the fight back? Was there a huge, you know, It also matters how does this change how people relate to each other? accounts um there were about 133 let me just read it 133 um instagram accounts with about 116 000 posts and then 81 facebook pages and 17 youtube channels with about 1100 um videos and so they

38:06 Don't know it off the top of my head. is if you know the names of the accounts, We don't know if it influenced people to go follow other accounts. repurposing real american content um did they do that as well yeah tons of times uh but let me let when they would write their own stuff you would see the sloppiness that's where you could see ergo you know it is clear that and I'm like it reads like remember you're like in you know English

41:30 especially not, And so that's where you would see memes getting shared from on both the right and the left. Do we understand? they couldn't work basically i assume this is like some american intelligence agency just like it's spy versus spy yeah it's it i mean it only makes sense that in this bizarre and unpredictable And there's, but I just go to them.

44:57 And they don't say much, if anything, underneath the memes. that they were seeing evidence of, um, both kind of overt propaganda and then ways of, um, And then the third is the dissemination pattern. the same time there's competition for who's gonna get the you know large contract to provide rice to Why are we tweeting about Hillary's votes? Yeah, that was an interesting thing. So I would say not much, to be honest.

48:48 no mention of vaccines on those platforms not on youtube on twitter you see it in 2015 funny enough It looked like a blonde woman. How much autonomy do you think these people have that are creating these things? political proclivities you may have i think you can at least recognize humor even if it's laughing The first was when Facebook started to moderate their pages,

51:54 It must have been the Russians or picture of Hillary Clinton. I'm an American. oh, I'm too smart to fall for it, It's good. we have like a four-year-old's understanding like if you had a if you just grabbed a person did this and they know that bernie wants to give the money away and you know it's it's crazy it's Hello, Texas. And this is where you get at this thing that comes out during the standup

55:50 couple under what's you know deep cover that are engaging with and pretending to be americans and how can we help you? We can give you some up to look like a jail. Let us, you know, if we give you some money, will you find the Hillary across the street from a rally to defend muslim culture and so they like there's literally no you And that's the insidious thing, right, is how does Facebook detect that?

59:16 they're always experimenting. You know, if you're on the outside, you think about the amount of effort that's involved in doing something like this. they're probably throwing a lot of things against the wall hoping that they stick. And then there's the Black Matters Facebook page, the Twitter account, the Instagram page, the YouTube channel, the SoundCloud podcast, the Tumblr, the Facebook stickers.

1:01:23 Come photograph our protests come um you know they They had a physical fitness thing. um and he just talks about how they yeah they just paypalled you know, a couple hundred bucks every time he ran a fitness class. Actual, yeah, actual black men. They have things to exploit. Well, that particular one, I think that they were actually—they were in on it.

1:04:16 And so they actually put out this, so this guy who had been in the Williams and Calvin video, so people recognized his face face in the 2018 midterms goes and says um he You know, you don't trust the intentions. Or they read the headlines that are then released by the more propagandist, overt Russian propaganda. light well it's really fascinating that they went so far as to hire people to make a fake account

1:07:27 is to disrupt our social media environment They talk a lot about the extreme commitment to educating their citizens, or, for some reason, are completely incapable of separating And I or if they are passionate supporters of the far left, it's more of like an equivocation. especially if it's our team or our person or on our side you know like i i yeah i saw a lot of this when donna brazil released

1:10:35 This is where it gets really strange. freaking you out when you had to like go over all these memes and you were actually laughing at them I think that that's just common sense, actually. I think ways that crowd psychology has transformed as the internet has kind of come into being, particularly with things like the mass consolidation, Or if you run the ad targeting, you directly send it into the feeds of people most likely

1:13:56 Yeah, do you have them? in 2017 was when we started like we being independent researchers i guess people on Twitter goes crazy that night with people who work at Twitter saying, oh, my God, were we responsible for this, which is a very Silicon Valley thing to say. And as the research and the discovery begins to take place over the next nine months or so, you get to when the tech hearings happen. So I worked with a guy by the name of Tristan Harris.

1:17:21 can you get them to give you the data? Because the platforms hadn't given the data. in a way but but also towards um changing the minds of the public and making them realize that so it was really trying to get at making the platforms accountable but they did it outside And when we were having this conversation about ISIS, there was a um were we stifling their freedom of speech freedom of expression and like goodness what would come next and that when you when you look at that um that

1:21:33 lead to in incorrect attributions people losing accounts and things like that so because i mean jesus christ i mean that if you can't say learn to code it was all just insults and and you know you fucking chill and this and if you're trying to assess the um just the content itself like if you start doing keyword bans censoring elizabeth warren i i personally didn't think that it read like censorship

1:25:50 every little kind of moderation snafu that it makes it, I think, I don't know how we have the and then algorithms and computer learning that's trying to keep up, this person is harassing me and I'm demanding moderation and nobody's doing anything about it. who hear the words free speech, and they just assume that it's people asking for carte blanche right to harass and saying, you know, how do we balance that? Make sure that all voices do get heard without being unnecessarily heavy-handed and moderating a thought or content and instead moderate behavior.

1:29:37 And that very specific direction is less boundaries between people and information. manipulate us specifically designed to manipulate us and change our opinions by foreign entities was pretty clear from the facebook hearings right i mean they barely understood an android phone and I mean, to say that you knew Tim Cook, his real name wasn't Tim Apple.

1:31:35 No, it's okay. squarely in the purview of the platforms and that's because it's an arms race right as they that right now the tech ecosystem is lacking regulation in all of its forms. So that will central platform but then you have these little communities under it and each community has its If you don't like the moderation standards, you go to this other community.

1:34:42 like it seems like the best approach is to sort of let these communities sort of establish themselves. But even inside those communities, then you have people that gain power through moderation, and they start abusing it, and then it becomes some sort of a weird hierarchy. So that would have been like late 2017. can't put the ad disclaimer on there.

1:37:50 There was that California GDPR thing from last year. It creates particular protections. it created a law that applied to the people of California. And so Facebook and Twitter and the have some sort of a government id shows that it's you that we would somehow or another minimize trolling, minimize disinformation that that's not necessarily the be all and end all. I think it depends on, per your point,

1:41:17 It's hard. And then I remember people complaining that people who didn't have, you know, that this was going to, what was it? So we're in this gridlock. But this is, I think, this is going to be the theme of 2019. media but even amazon she's talking about breaking up a lot of these bigger companies um it's the problem with that is like to what and I don't know if you've seen this in your friends or community.

1:45:31 And it's mostly toxic. it seems like the reaction to it is very rarely is it some sort of uh objective rational discourse it's most likely just insults and you know swears it's weird it's just uh people are communicating in a way There are regional public squares or town squares, state squares, you know, where there is, again, this kind of federalism.

1:47:20 And when you're online, there is nobody who's going to come and step in and intervene in a way that would play out in real life. I think this is a byproduct of the type of communication volatile protests at universities where you have conservatives and liberals screaming at each gonna say you gotta go back to war protests but they were protesting something very specific an unjust war that nobody wanted to be a

1:50:17 and that's getting a lot of support there's more discourse now even if it's toxic and i think a lot and it's the platform I use more than any other. I have absolutely no data to bear this out, So maybe there is something per your point about that. Yeah, they think they should be able to do that because that falls under the blanket with human beings there's a lot of folks that are on their phone eight hours in a day that's

1:54:13 representing their actual thoughts just trying to push your buttons yeah no that's true it's uh fuck you, Yeah. let me see your phone. And I said, let me click this, man. I go, let me see your phone. Yeah, I mean, they're trying to get you. on twitter particularly ones who have like open dms they'll periodically post the insane catfishing what we can maybe take from it and make changes.

1:57:30 generative adversarial networks. right out the window as stuff like this gets easier and easier to do well then deep faking take it all in, and try to filter it out yourself. Hopefully we get better at detecting it as it evolves. September 11th, 2014, they created a hoax saying that ISIS had attacked a chemical plant down in Louisiana. I just remember it actually being pushed into my social media feed. So you have these, and we

2:01:26 They're so good. And they're also, with someone like me, I'm fucking doomed It generates your lip movements, everything. Have you watched that recently? Like it's insane except for the phone booths. the southern california there's a bunch of really good labs down here and i tried one where it was environment and it's great i mean you're it's very clear that you're in a video game.

2:04:43 You're not strapped into a chair There's one Star Wars one It's getting weird are not really people and that we are probably going to look at i mean the all you have to do It was crazy. What could be done in the future? All right. And terrifying And you don't necessarily Really appreciate it