There Are No Girls on the Internet - Introducing： Disinformed

00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:00:02.580 Guaranteed human.

00:00:05.180 Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches,

00:00:08.020 there's a lot of suspense.

00:00:09.440 Will they finally eat the veggies?

00:00:10.940 Will the pesto survive the first bite?

00:00:12.980 Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all?

00:00:17.020 And will you finish Episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers?

00:00:20.920 Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus

00:00:24.120 from $94 a month.

00:00:25.540 Price guaranteed for two years on Internet

00:00:27.440 with a two-year term and auto-pay credit.

00:00:29.380 Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability.

00:00:32.420 Bell, connection is everything.

00:00:34.700 Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?

00:00:36.960 Think again.

00:00:37.600 More Americans listen to podcasts, then add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.

00:00:41.760 And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

00:00:45.880 Learn how podcasting can help your business.

00:00:47.720 Call 844-844-iHeart.

00:00:49.980 If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.

00:00:55.400 Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.

00:01:04.060 Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.

00:01:12.300 Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.

00:01:14.080 Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:01:19.460 I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive

00:01:26.780 what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.

00:01:32.380 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled,

00:01:38.200 and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

00:01:43.380 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:01:54.700 You're listening to Disinformed, a miniseries from There Are No Girls on the Internet.

00:01:59.680 I'm Bridget Todd.

00:02:06.960 On January 6th, I watched in horror as white supremacist Trump supporters attacked the Capitol.

00:02:12.720 I also live in D.C., so they were attacking my city and my hometown, my community.

00:02:18.120 But for me, this story doesn't start on January 6th, 2021.

00:02:22.480 I want to take y'all back to 2016.

00:02:24.740 After running a campaign full of lies, distortions, and conspiracy theories,

00:02:28.520 Trump had just been elected to be our next president.

00:02:31.140 The mood in D.C., where I've lived for most of my adult life, was pretty somber.

00:02:35.900 In the days before Trump's inauguration, my friends and I would sit around together,

00:02:39.200 raging and screaming and lamenting

00:02:41.960 and sometimes just sitting in complete silence over drinks.

00:02:45.880 I can't believe this means Trump will actually be living in our city,

00:02:49.040 we'd say over and over again in utter disbelief.

00:02:52.140 One day I was supposed to be meeting up with a friend

00:02:53.600 and she was late, which was not at all like her.

00:02:56.480 When she finally arrived,

00:02:57.760 I could not believe what had prevented her from being on time.

00:03:01.100 She was killing time before meeting me, browsing in a store,

00:03:03.380 when a man with a gun came into a nearby pizza place

00:03:06.400 and she couldn't leave.

00:03:08.320 Someone said it had something to do with child trafficking and the internet, she explained.

00:03:13.260 Last weekend, as people were dining inside here, a 28-year-old man turned up armed with an assault rifle

00:03:21.120 to, as he put it, self-investigate what police have called a fictitious online conspiracy theory.

00:03:28.320 So the violent attacks at the Capitol weren't the first time conspiracy theories run amok online

00:03:33.080 had unleashed chaos and terror on my city. 0.87

00:03:36.380 This was Pizzagate, a completely untrue conspiracy theory that Democratic leaders, including Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, were secretly pedophiles who trafficked children for sex. 0.96

00:03:46.800 Code word, pizza.

00:03:48.200 And this whole vast network was supposedly housed in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a local D.C. pizza restaurant.

00:03:54.220 This conspiracy spread, grew, and mutated on Reddit and 4chan until a man traveled from North Carolina to D.C. to investigate the restaurant himself with a gun.

00:04:04.980 And this was really the first time I saw how dangerous conspiracy theories, unchecked false stories, and media manipulation can be online.

00:04:11.480 And that even though they may start online, they could end in real-world dangerous situations, like the attack we saw on the Capitol earlier this month.

00:04:19.240 Now, disinformation, misinformation, online harassment, and conspiracy theories are obviously nothing new.

00:04:24.900 But in many ways, I saw Trump and his supporters weaponize them for political gain and welcome them into our institutions in ways I had never seen before.

00:04:32.920 It's pretty easy to see the ways that disinformation is political,

00:04:36.060 especially when our president invites his supporters to have a wild time at the Capitol

00:04:39.880 in support of the lie that he won the election.

00:04:43.520 But it's also personal because it relies on people not being able to trust one another.

00:04:48.180 And this is something I know a little bit about.

00:04:50.340 I lost my best friend to conspiracy theories and misinformation.

00:04:54.200 I met Joe, not his real name, in college in North Carolina when I was 19.

00:04:59.220 Back then, we were just two friends who really cared about politics.

00:05:02.380 I was a strident young lefty who would tell anyone who would listen about it.

00:05:06.780 I was fresh from a small town on a college campus for the first time,

00:05:09.860 and I felt like I was being welcomed into the marketplace of ideas.

00:05:13.360 Whatever that means.

00:05:14.800 Whatever, I was 19.

00:05:16.500 Joe and I connected over spirited conversations about our still-forming ideologies,

00:05:20.420 and we stayed close friends after I graduated college and moved to D.C.

00:05:23.940 But in 2016, our once-spirited debates took a new turn.

00:05:27.960 Rather than talking about policies or positions,

00:05:30.700 Joe was talking about things that were truly out there. 0.98

00:05:34.400 Hillary Clinton is using a body double and probably only has a few weeks to live.

00:05:38.460 He once texted me out of the blue at the height of the 2016 election.

00:05:42.180 Our mutual friends would start group chats about the things he was posting to Facebook.

00:05:46.880 He cannot be serious with this stuff, I remember texting.

00:05:50.660 And I remember the last straw.

00:05:52.360 I was attending the Democratic National Convention in Philly, and my phone dinged.

00:05:57.140 How can you vote for Hillary Clinton even after she had Seth Rich killed?

00:06:01.520 Seth Rich was a Democratic National Committee staffer in D.C.

00:06:05.220 I didn't know him, but our circles were close enough that his death really hit home.

00:06:09.380 Seth was shot and killed on July 10, 2016, in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of D.C.

00:06:14.280 His killers were never found.

00:06:16.020 The most likely explanation seems to be a mugging gone bad.

00:06:19.200 But according to the right-wing conspiracy theory machine,

00:06:22.660 Hillary Clinton had Seth Rich killed in retaliation for leaking DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

00:06:28.780 Now, even though there's no evidence this ever happened,

00:06:31.360 it didn't stop the right-wing media from irresponsibly amplifying these baseless claims.

00:06:35.680 In a Washington Post op-ed this week, Rich's parents called the story baseless

00:06:40.500 and pleaded with people to stop using our beloved Seth's memory and legacy for their own political goals.

00:06:47.680 Yesterday, the story was taken down from the Fox News website.

00:06:51.800 Fueled by bogus Fox News reports from Sean Hannity,

00:06:55.000 conspiracy theories hounded Seth's grieving parents

00:06:57.640 and anyone who supported them publicly.

00:06:59.940 When this family should have been able to grieve his murder in peace,

00:07:03.000 they were instead being attacked by a right-wing disinformation campaign. 0.96

00:07:06.960 The entire thing was so disgusting and dangerous,

00:07:10.000 and here was my friend, believing it, spreading it.

00:07:13.160 I think up until then, I had been able to tell myself

00:07:15.580 that Joe was kind of half-kidding with these ideas. 0.99

00:07:18.260 There's no way he actually believed this garbage. 1.00

00:07:21.100 I thought that people who believed conspiracy theories were Fox News-obsessed simpletons who were too stupid to realize the ways they had been misled. 1.00

00:07:29.340 Joe was educated. We went to the same college. 1.00

00:07:32.240 He had a great white-collar job and made good money.

00:07:34.840 He voted for Obama.

00:07:36.340 He was into cool music and knew about art and film.

00:07:39.400 Back then, I didn't really realize that any of us could be taken by disinformation campaigns.

00:07:43.720 I didn't know how powerful it is, or how it spreads, or what you could do if you're watching someone you love be taken in by it.

00:07:50.760 Or how to keep from spreading it yourself.

00:07:53.440 Eventually, Joe and I lost touch.

00:07:55.100 I just didn't know how to have him in my life.

00:07:57.540 But I wish I had known what to do or say

00:07:59.460 to help him off-board from a steady diet of conspiracy theories.

00:08:03.160 And I wish Joe had known how disinformation

00:08:04.960 disproportionately harms people from underrepresented backgrounds like me

00:08:08.600 because it traffics in the worst biases about our identities and who we are,

00:08:12.820 exploiting and inflaming tensions, fears, and fractures.

00:08:16.460 And I wish we had all known the impact that social media platforms would have

00:08:20.160 spreading disinformation and driving our country further apart.

00:08:23.200 Some people saw it coming and spoke up,

00:08:25.640 but very few people with power did anything at all to curb its threat.

00:08:29.580 I wish I had known a lot of things back then,

00:08:31.780 and that's part of the reason why I'm making this podcast.

00:08:34.760 Today, my work involves training everyday people

00:08:36.860 to curb the spread of disinformation online

00:08:38.800 and pressuring tech leaders to take action

00:08:41.120 to keep dangerous disinformation, misinformation,

00:08:44.220 harassment, and violent rhetoric off their platforms.

00:08:47.300 And I believe that's a big reason why we're here.

00:08:49.700 still reeling from a violent attack on the Capitol by white supremacist Trump supporters

00:08:53.360 who believed the repeated false claim that Trump won the election and that it was being unfairly

00:08:58.380 stolen from him. Disinformation is a racial justice and gender justice issue. Women,

00:09:04.060 communities of color, and other people from underrepresented backgrounds and identities

00:09:07.800 are the ones who are hit hardest by its impact. But they're also the organizers, academics,

00:09:13.180 and culture creators who have been speaking up against the threat disinformation poses for years,

00:09:18.240 even while the people who had the power to make a difference didn't seem to listen.

00:09:22.220 And now, they're the same ones fighting back against the harm disinformation spreads

00:09:26.500 and working to inoculate the entire internet against it.

00:09:30.240 On Disinformed, we'll hear their stories about how disinformation online got us here

00:09:34.100 and what we can all do to join the fight to stop it.

00:09:37.620 New episodes drop every Tuesday.

00:09:43.100 Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi?

00:09:46.420 We'd love to hear from you at hello at tangody.com. 1.00

00:09:49.600 Disinformed is brought to you by There Are No Girls on the Internet.

00:09:52.320 It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.

00:09:55.180 Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.

00:09:57.340 Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer.

00:10:00.360 Mike Amato is our producer.

00:10:02.160 I'm your host, Bridget Todd.

00:10:03.820 For more great podcasts, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:10:16.120 if your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality

00:10:26.560 welcome home pro society is a weekly podcast that's part book club part group chat for anyone

00:10:32.780 who thinks pride and prejudice and love island to serve the same level of discourse each week

00:10:37.320 we're connecting the dots between books the internet and pop culture with your favorite

00:10:41.340 writers book talk creators and plenty of overthought opinions listen to pro society

00:10:48.060 on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts i survived nine months in

00:10:55.360 captivity and i've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed

00:11:00.720 them i'm elizabeth smart and these are the survivor files every week i'm with survivors

00:11:07.020 who lived through the unthinkable,

00:11:08.980 abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

00:11:12.820 These are stories about what it takes

00:11:14.720 to make it out alive.

00:11:16.640 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart

00:11:19.420 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

00:11:22.440 or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:11:24.740 I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast,

00:11:27.260 Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.

00:11:29.100 You know, I'm always searching for inspiration

00:11:31.700 and useful tools to maximize joy.

00:11:34.300 Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice

00:11:36.880 to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out.

00:11:41.480 You're not hired just to fill time and space.

00:11:44.300 You're hired to fill the space with you.

00:11:47.480 Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app,

00:11:51.680 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:11:55.560 Our hometown is not a test tube.

00:11:58.240 90 miles northeast of Nashville,

00:12:00.260 a battle for the future of America plays out in one small town.

00:12:04.300 Developers with right-wing ties have purchased hundreds of acres of land.

00:12:07.940 We need cities on a shining hill.

00:12:10.140 This is Our Town, a podcast about what happens when a small town

00:12:14.200 becomes the site of a social experiment and fights back. 0.99

00:12:18.180 Guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you? 0.98

00:12:20.900 Listen to Our Town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 0.99

00:12:24.980 or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:12:29.500 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:12:32.380 Guaranteed human.

00:12:34.120 Thank you.

There Are No Girls on the Internet - January 19, 2021

Introducing： Disinformed

Episode Stats

Transcript