[MUSIC FADES IN]
Brian Stelter, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News.
I'm Brian Stelter, filling in for Shumita Basu.
Today, America's disinformation problem, how it affects all of us,
and what we should do about it.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Earlier this year, just ahead of the New Hampshire primary,
some voters in the state received a robocall
that sounded like it was coming from President Biden.
[START THE TELEGRAPH ARCHIVAL CLIP]
President Joe Biden: Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest
to elect Donald Trump again.
Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.
[END THE TELEGRAPH ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Stelter, Narrating: That was not a call from Biden or his campaign.
It was an AI-generated impersonation of Biden's voice.
This sort of stuff is happening all the time.
Just a couple of weeks ago, images circulated on social media
that appeared to show Donald Trump with Black voters.
But "BBC" reporters noticed something strange.
[START BBC ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Reporter 1: It looks like they're at a party.
All great until you realize there's lots of strange things going on with fingers,
which is one of the best ways to spot AI.
Reporter 2: Yes.
Reporter 1: People are missing a finger or they have lots of extra fingers.
Reporter 2: Yeah.
[END BBC ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Stelter, Narrating: Disinformation has been a problem in American life for decades,
but it's getting more and more intense now.
With an election coming up,
and artificial intelligence getting more and more sophisticated,
it's getting harder to tell what is real and what is not.
Barbara McQuade: I think we need to take back the idea that there is such a thing as truth.
Stelter, Narrating: That's Barbara McQuade.
She's a former U.S. attorney,
a legal analyst for "NBC" and "MSNBC," and the author of the new book,
"Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America."
McQuade: Was the light red at the time of the accident or was the light green?
Those are facts.
Those are knowable facts.
And so it is possible to have knowable, attributable facts.
And I think we need to insist on that as opposed to, you know,
allowing people to just make stuff up.
Stelter, Narrating: As someone who has covered media throughout my career,
the plague of disinformation is something that I worry about a lot.
So I wanted to talk to Barbara about the state of the information landscape today.
Why this problem seems to be getting worse instead of better.
And most importantly, what we need to do to actually address it.
McQuade: Disinformation is the deliberate use of lies to deceive and manipulate people.
It is an intentional deception.
And then I use the term "misinformation" to be its sort of unwitting cousin.
When we learn a fact that we think is true,
but it's false, and then we pass it on.
There was a time when I was a victim of misinformation,
and I share it in the book about how easy it is for us
to fall prey to this and pass on false information.
I read something online, I'm a big sports fan,
and I read something online that said Patrick Mahomes had said
he would not play another down for the Kansas City Chiefs
until they changed their name to something
that was not offensive to Native Americans.
And I thought, "Wow, that's a big story."
And so I, you know, retweeted it and got it out there.
And then later in the day, I was talking to my, my husband and my son
and said, "Did you guys see this story about Patrick Mahomes?
How about that, huh?"
And they said, "No, no, I haven't seen it. I don't know what you're talking about."
And then they said, "Are you sure that's true?"
And I started thinking about it and thought,
"You know, now that I say it, I'm wondering if it's true."
So I started looking to see if it was reported anywhere else, and it wasn't.
So then I went back to the original tweet, and I read and saw a little more carefully
and noticed for the first time that it was from "ESPN,"
but it said "Sprott Center" and not "Sports Center."
[STELTER LAUGHS]
And so I had been duped, and I realized just how easy it is for us
to fall prey to disinformation and to so then share it with other people.
Stelter: And you are a former U.S. attorney.
You're a legal analyst for "NBC" and "MSNBC."
So it's hard out there for everybody. [CHUCKLES]
McQuade: Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, some of this deception is getting better and better
with artificial intelligence.
We might see something, we might hear something that looks genuine
and, in fact, is just completely manufactured.
You know, sometimes you see these scams where they say,
"Did you know you can vote from home by texting to this number?"
Which, of course, is not true at all.
And so I worry that in this election year,
we're going to see more and more of that kind of thing where
false information is put out there to try to fool voters into wasting their vote.
You know, some of those kinds of scams that will just have the effect
of suppressing the vote.
Stelter: That's why I was so interested in having this conversation with you.
This feels like a situation, a problem, an environment
where it's only getting worse,
where the fog, the pollution, the haze of disinformation,
it's only getting thicker.
We're only choking on it more and more every day.
Is that a fair assessment of the gravity of the situation?
Is it getting worse?
McQuade: Yeah, I think it is. I think…
And I think it's because we haven't quite gotten our arms around it yet.
The problem has been growing,
and we have not done anything to try to address it.
And one of the problems, Brian,
is that the more disinformation there is out there,
the easier it is for people to hide behind it
and say that everything is fake news.
This is sometimes referred to as "the liar's dividend."
Because everybody lies, I can lie because I'll just,
you know, I'll just say it's fake news if somebody criticizes me.
I can say whatever I want because there's so much disinformation out there.
But that's really dangerous in a democracy.
You know, in Putin's Russia, there is this idea of the fog of unknowability,
and that everything is PR, and that truth is for suckers,
and there's no real truth in the world anyway,
and nobody can ever know any fact to be true.
And so, rather than insisting on facts or truth, instead,
you should focus on the candidate or the party or the policy
that will get you the most for you.
Everybody's corrupt, and if everybody's corrupt,
then you might as well vote for me,
even though I'm corrupt, because I'll get you what you want.
And so the effect that has on politics is that people become very cynical,
and then they tune out altogether and they say,
"I don't know what to think, I don't know what to believe,
I'm just going to disengage from politics,
I don't want to participate in that system."
And then that's a real recipe for disaster in democracy
because then we have fewer members of the public
who are deciding what our future and what our government is going to look like.
Stelter: Mm.
In the book, you lay out some key disinformation tactics
and how figures like Trump have used them in recent years.
What are the most significant tactics that people should learn to spot,
should learn to identify?
McQuade: Yeah, I'll name just a couple of them.
I mean, one is repetition.
And so this is an idea that comes out of Hitler's "Mein Kampf,"
when he talked about the importance of repetition
and he wrote words to the effect of, "No narrative is too simple.
It should be simple, repeatable, easy to remember, catchy slogans,
because if people hear these things, then they will remember them."
Stelter: Mm.
McQuade: And so one of the things he had was he referred to the media
as the Lügenpresse, which means "lying press."
And he would say that over and over again in the same way Donald Trump refers to
the "enemy of the people."
You hear it again and again.
And it gives it the patina of credibility because people say they've heard it
from a number of different sources.
Or "Stop the steal."
People, you know, will hear that phrase not only from Donald Trump,
but they'll start hearing it from their neighbors and on social media.
And so it's a catchy little phrase that's got a simple narrative,
and they can follow along.
So, that's one.
Another is this idea that the bigger the lie,
the more likely it is to be believed.
And this one is kind of counterintuitive.
This was, you know, what Hitler's strategy,
again, he defines it in "Mein Kampf,"
and he said, "Everybody tells white lies from time to time."
You know, you might tell somebody that they look good tonight,
or, you know, they're saying things out of a place of kindness or courtesy.
But what Hitler wrote is, "It would never occur to most people
to have the audacity to lie about something of great significance."
And so they project onto others that same moral limit that, you know,
"Who would do that? Nobody would lie about that."
And so for the person who is willing to cross that moral line
and lie about things that are very significant,
it has the unlikely result of being more believable than a little white lie.
People are like, "Yeah, yeah, people might lie about that.
That's no big deal.
But nobody would lie about a stolen election.
It'd be too easy to catch.
I mean, there'd be lawsuits filed.
There'd be audits.
You'd fail all of them."
Well, yes, that is what happened.
But I think that's one of the tactics that gets used is this idea of
the bigger the lie, the more believable it will be.
Stelter: Why do people want to believe disinformation?
Why do they want to believe some of these campaigns of lies.
And you identify these factors like confirmation bias, stubbornness,
cognitive dissonance.
Does the political world need to learn more
from the realm of psychology
to understand this problem?
McQuade: Yes, I think so.
So I read a number of books about psychology
and how these cognitive biases that we all have come into play.
And you've mentioned some, you know, this idea of confirmation bias.
We know what we think and what we want to think.
And so, we will notice the facts that support our theory,
and we will overlook the facts that don't support our theory.
And not intentionally, it's just the way our minds work.
So, if I am a Michigan football fan, as I am…
[STELTER CHUCKLES]
…and I go to a game at Michigan Stadium,
and there's, you know, pass interference is called against my team,
you know, the crowd all starts booing,
and then they show the play again on the jumbotron,
and even if that replay shows that the ref made the right call,
everybody in that stadium is going to boo anyway, right?
And we might see that, like, it's absolutely the right call.
[STELTER LAUGHS]
But we care more about, you know, demonstrating our bona fides,
that what we want to happen,
and we will see the evidence that we believe happened
that fits our own narrative.
And that's just one of the ways our minds work.
Stelter: Right.
This term "disinformation" has itself been weaponized and turned into disinformation.
You know what I'm talking about.
There is a concerted campaign from the likes of Elon Musk
to claim that anything fact checked,
anything out there purporting to be a fact check,
is actually disinformation.
So you must have come up against this when you were working on this book.
McQuade: Oh, yeah.
In fact, not so much when I was working on it,
but since I've published it.
You know, I might tweet on there that I'm going to be giving a talk somewhere,
and there, you know, a number of people will say very nice things.
And then there are a number of trolls who say,
"You want to repeal the First Amendment, you Nazi!"
[LAUGHS] It's just crazy what people write.
"You're advocating for censorship."
Like, no, no, none of the above.
Just, just want truth.
But I think one of the things that's happened, Brian,
is that in today's society,
we've become so polarized that we care more about our tribe
than we care about the truth.
If our side said it, then it must be so.
And if the other side said it, it must be false.
And we are willing to accept whatever facts are required
to reach the conclusion that will favor our side.
We'll even, you know, sort of reverse engineer it so that our side can win.
And that's not the way it can work
in a democracy where compromise is the way to get things done.
You know, sometimes you have to get half a loaf,
but it's better than no loaf at all.
[STELTER CHUCKLES]
And instead, we are having impasse all the time because it seems, sometimes,
lawmakers would rather simply demonize their opponents
than reach some agreeable solution.
Stelter: Since you used the phrase "fake news,"
I think we should unpack what it actually means.
You know, because disinformation, misinformation,
these are helpful labels that are a little more precise than so-called "fake news."
But I remember, you were there, I was there, 10 years ago,
the term "fake news" was invented
to actually mean something really specific.
It was coined about a decade ago by a reporter at "BuzzFeed"
to describe stories that were actually made up,
designed to deceive you.
That famous 2016 headline, for example, saying,
"Pope Endorses Donald Trump Over Hillary Clinton."
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: And I remember, Barbara, going on "CNN,"
talking about this plague of fake news stories,
using the phrase "fake news" a bunch,
and now I feel like I was part of the problem.
Because I was using this phrase that meant something really specific.
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: But people like Donald Trump were listening.
McQuade: Mm.
Stelter: And Trump re-coined the term.
He took the term, and he redefined it to mean stories he doesn't like,
stories he doesn't believe,
stories he doesn't want his voters to believe.
McQuade: So, that's interesting.
Stelter: But I feel like that's what happens every time
we identify a problem out there in the marketplace,
identify a problem in the information landscape,
it gets weaponized.
McQuade: Yeah.
Well, that's all part of the disinformation game, I suppose,
is to try to neutralize anything that would help
to pinpoint and expose disinformation.
And, you know, there are a number of examples of it.
I think another example of trying to neutralize accountability
is in the impeachment arena.
So Donald Trump gets impeached twice, and, um,
you know, that's a stain on a presidency.
And so then we see efforts to impeach Joe Biden,
efforts to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas.
And it seems, at least to me, that it may be that some people
are trying to cheapen impeachment and say, "Everybody gets impeached.
It's no big deal.
It's just a political thing that opponents do to each other,
and it has no meaning whatsoever."
And so they're kind of neutering the idea of impeachment,
which is supposed to be accountability for a president
who has committed high crimes or misdemeanors, or a cabinet official.
And instead, you know, we're seeing everybody get impeached.
And so then others can say, "Yeah, it's no,
it's no big deal to be impeached."
Stelter: Well, speaking of that, let's talk now about January 6th,
because right after the attack on the Capitol,
it seemed as if there was a common understanding of what had happened.
There was mostly a shared reality.
But after a few months, disinformation wormed its way in.
McQuade: Mm-hmm.
Stelter: A new narrative started to form about the government perpetuating the plot,
about secret agents in the crowd, saying that Trump voters were actually
the victims of a government conspiracy to trick them.
Where did this disinformation come from?
And how did it end up changing so many Americans' perception
of what happened that day?
McQuade: Well, I don't know who is the originator of this plot,
but we certainly know some of the people who've participated in it.
Donald Trump certainly has participated in it.
And it's interesting to see how he has persuaded other politicians,
other Republicans to kind of slowly evolve from on January 6th and 7th
standing up and saying, "This is awful,"
to, you know, a few years later saying, "Well, it was ordinary tourist activity,"
or "It was ordinary political discourse."
And there are even some, Elise Stefanik, Congresswoman from New York,
and Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia,
at least those two who are parroting Donald Trump's phrase
and calling some of these January 6th defendants "hostages."
I mean, hostages!
That suggests that they have been kidnapped
and held against their will and are innocent of anything.
And of course, there are a number of people who've been charged with crimes,
detained, given due process, and convicted of crimes.
So the idea that these people are hostages, you know,
gives life to the idea that this is all just sort of a trumped up charge,
that there really was no crime here.
that what they were doing was very ordinary.
And that's just not normal.
[STELTER CHUCKLES]
I think there is a normalization of the use of violence
to get someone's political way.
Stelter: Mm.
So much of this exists on the right in an echo chamber that is ultimately harmful
to the cause.
But what about the left?
What's a potent example of disinformation that comes from or impacts the left?
McQuade: Well, I don't see it to the same extent that we see on the far right.
But there have been instances where people on the left engage in disinformation.
There was an incident where Mehmet Oz,
who was a candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania,
was depicted kissing a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,
and it went around social media suggesting that he was kissing
the star of Donald Trump on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,
you know, which would suggest a submissiveness,
that he is the pawn of Donald Trump.
In fact, it turns out it was his own star on the day of his…
[STELTER CHUCKLES]
…induction into the Hollywood Walk of Fame,
which is part of the tradition
that, you know, you get down and you kiss your star,
and that's what he had done.
So, he didn't do anything really unusual at all,
other than earn a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
But, you know, there were some, and who knows how many people it was,
if it was just one individual,
but somebody was willing to put that out there
and suggest that it was Trump's star that he was kissing.
Stelter: Mm.
That's an interesting one because that is an example of kind of like dirty tricks…
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: …probably coming from someone on the left.
But, you know, I'd never even heard that example.
These are pretty narrow.
They're pretty confined compared to what we're seeing
from the kind of pro-Trump media on a daily basis.
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: And it's just not fair to pretend as if the scales are even.
McQuade: Right. And I don't want to "both sides" it.
I mean, I think anyone is capable of disinformation,
and we don't know the full extent of who all is using it.
But I think it is fair to say that it is members of the far right
who are most engaged in it.
I think Steve Bannon is one of the masterminds of all of this.
Steve Bannon was the one who said, "You have to flood the zone, you know,
with garbage so that people don't know what to think."
Stelter: With this in mind, how do you grapple with
the role of reality-based, truth-telling media outlets
when they are having to cover what Donald Trump is saying,
what other politicians are saying?
Is the media part of the problem?
McQuade: I think so.
And I think they haven't quite figured out how to handle him yet.
You know, certainly there was "Fox News--"
Stelter: Wait. It's 2024.
We still haven't figured out how to handle Donald Trump?
McQuade: No, I don't think so.
Well, first, there was "Fox News" that, you know, paid a $700 million settlement
to Dominion Voting Systems for airing lies
about their voting machines flipping votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
So you would think they would have learned their lesson there.
But I don't know that anybody has.
I think we still see this kind of both sides-ing
of a lot of issues.
And I think it's because reporters grew up in a time
when politicians were acting in good faith and just had differences of opinion.
And so they were trained to cover both sides of a story.
What's the Republican position on this issue?
What's the Democratic position on this issue?
What are the areas of disagreement?
And you could do it in that way fairly and accurately.
Now, you know, when there's a politician who's willing to just make stuff up
and, and tell lies,
I think it's very difficult for our reporters
because I think their instincts tell them just to say, "This was the position,"
without also saying, "and it was a lie."
So I think that they need to have the nerve to do that when it is clear
or to reference in their story sites of accurate information.
If it's about voting, sending readers to the websites
of the secretaries of state, of their people's states
so that they can actually check on these things.
Stelter: This is a daily struggle.
I definitely felt it when I was at "CNN."
It's especially hard when a politician is using rhetoric
that is not 100% false.
It's like 99% false, right?
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: And this is true, especially, this is…
You know, I hate to make it all about Trump,
but this election season is gonna be all about Trump.
When Trump will say something that has a tiny little kernel of truth to it…
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: …but then he exaggerates it beyond belief into some monster that doesn't exist.
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: Is that disinformation?
Is that just lousy, you know, rhetoric?
Is it lying?
I mean, part of this is a labeling issue when someone is, again,
acting beyond the norms of what the media is used to.
McQuade: Yeah, I think so.
I mean, I consider disinformation to include efforts
to manipulate and mislead the public.
And so, even if a statement has a grain of truth in it,
if it is also designed to manipulate or deceive
or make people look like they're guilty of something…
Stelter: Mm.
McQuade: …you know, like, Donald Trump loves to talk about the Bidens
and Hunter Biden accepting money
from Ukrainian energy company and from China,
and then suggesting that that means that Joe Biden is corrupt.
So there's a patina of truth there, right?
And so he takes that and then runs with it to suggest that his opponent is corrupt
when, you know, there's no real basis to say that.
Stelter: I remember, let's say, five, six, seven years ago,
there was a lot of energy at Facebook
and at the company then called Twitter to address rampant disinformation,
to try to curtail some of the most poisonous lies
that were spreading on the platforms.
But now, it feels like that energy has been zapped.
Elon Musk himself, now the owner of X, he posts total lies on his own feed.
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: Facebook has backed away from the news industry
and has curtailed funding to the fact-checkers.
So… what happened?
Why has the oxygen been sucked out of this room?
McQuade: I think Elon Musk is one who's really changed the whole industry
by pushing this idea that we should be able
to say anything we want on social media because it is the town square.
And any effort to moderate content there is censorship
that is forbidden by the First Amendment.
But I'll tell you why I think it's not equivalent to the town square.
In the town square, if someone is giving a speech, you know,
on their little soapbox, you can see who it is.
You can see if that's someone who's credible
and they have a credible voice.
So you can say, "Oh, that guy, he's always out here,
and he says dumb stuff.
[STELTER LAUGHS]
Not that guy."
You can see how the crowd is reacting.
Are people, you know, cheering and clapping, or are they booing,
or are they ignoring the person?
Because that is important, too, to tell you how popular someone is.
On social media, you can't see the identity of the person.
They might have a false persona.
They might just be Patriot Girl or Eagle Boy or something like that.
So we don't know who they are.
So we can't assess their credibility.
And with regard to their popularity,
it could be that it's just bots who are boosting their likes and shares.
And so we don't really get to see whether their message is being well-received
or booed or ignored because the bots are sending lots of likes and shares,
making it look like they're more popular than they are.
Stelter: That's really interesting.
So it's nothing like an actual, physical town square.
McQuade: No.
[STELTER LAUGHS]
I mean, think about remember when Elon Musk restored
Donald Trump's Twitter account?
He said, "I'm going to put it to a vote of the people."
And then he put it like, you know,
"Should we restore Donald Trump's account?
Yes? No? Vote for one."
Knowing full well that people could vote more than one time
because they could have multiple accounts.
They could use bots to account.
He just let the wild vote come in.
And then he reported that the yeses had won like…
And then his tweet was, "The people have spoken."
Stelter: Right.
McQuade: I mean, he knows that's not, you know, it's not like a one person,
one vote situation that we have in an election.
But he created a false impression that this had been a democratic process
and the people wanted Donald Trump back.
Stelter: I had a recent experience with all of this,
and I wonder what you think I should have done.
There were some articles written about me on far-right websites
saying that I'm running for school board in New Jersey.
[MCQUADE LAUGHS]
And the truth is, I thought about it.
I sent in a letter, but I withdrew.
I decided not to do it.
I didn't get interviewed or anything.
But I didn't know what to do when these articles started popping up.
And then it spread beyond articles.
There's radio hosts out in other states…
McQuade: Oh, jeez.
Stelter: …talking about "Brian Stelter, the former 'CNN' guy,
trying to run for school board."
[MCQUADE LAUGHS]
And I'm thinking to myself, "Am I better off ignoring it?"
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: Or am I better off trying to tamp it down and say, "That's not true, that's a lie"?
I guess I don't know what you're supposed to do
when there's a fire in your house, and you didn't start it,
but someone's got to put it out.
McQuade: Yeah, no, it's such an interesting thing because, you know, do you dignify it
by responding to it?
Do you give it oxygen by responding to it?
My inclination is often not to do that,
but I think sometimes when something is starting to get a lot of attention,
the best way to do it is to make a quick denial
and provide accurate facts, because otherwise,
people are going to fill the vacuum with their false information.
Stelter: Yeah, we're in an environment now where even if I spoke up as loudly as I could
and said, "That's not true, and that's not true,"
because it's not a real physical town square,
you know, people don't know what to believe.
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: And that gets to your point about countries like Russia,
where the environment is so destabilized,
people don't know what to believe, so they believe nothing.
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: And I fear we're getting really close to that in the United States.
McQuade: Yes. Yes.
This idea of the "fog of unknowability."
Nobody knows what to believe,
and so people disengage from public life altogether,
which is a really bad place for people to be in a democracy.
Stelter: Because that's what the bad faith actors want to have happen.
McQuade: Mm-hmm. Yup.
Stelter: So is there anything that listeners of this episode can do
about this environment, about this information pollution?
McQuade: One is that we need to build up our media literacy in this country,
and it's something all of us can do.
There are a lot of great resources out there to build media literacy.
Stelter: Yeah.
McQuade: I'll tell you some is when you read a story,
don't look at just the headline, actually read the story
because headlines sometimes do not match the content of the story very much at all.
Sometimes the headline is designed to be clickbait just to attract readers there
without accurately reflecting the story.
Look for second sources.
It can be very easy to be led astray when you read something
and believe it to be true.
So really important that you look for second sources of things.
When there is an article that talks about statistical studies or surveys,
look at the sample size.
Is it three million people or is it three?
[STELTER LAUGHS]
Because that can make a real difference.
So, those are some of the ways we can protect ourselves.
I think we also owe it to our children to ensure that
civic education is what it should be.
Civics education, I think, is so critically important
because it helps people to understand how things can go wrong in a government
and also how things can go right.
The idea of checks and balances and three separate branches of government,
all of that stuff is really important to understanding how our government works.
And I think it would avoid some of the false accusations of government misconduct
that we see from time to time with disinformation.
Stelter: One day, my six-year-old came home from school
and told me about the difference between fact and fiction.
McQuade: Oh, love it.
Stelter: And it was very easy for her to know the difference.
And then I made it a little more complicated.
I said, "Okay, there's facts, there's fictions, and then there's lies."
McQuade: Ooh!
Stelter: "People trying to trick you."
And she had no problem with that either.
And I found myself thinking, "If she can figure this out…"
[MCQUADE LAUGHS]
"…there's hope for the rest of us."
Like, this is not actually that hard.
McQuade: There you go.
No, it's really not.
And, you know, I was talking with somebody
who is a far-right MAGA supporter recently,
who kept trying to say, "So, who decides what's true and false?
Is there a disinformation police?
Is that how it all works?"
And, you know, if you take it to that degree
and you don't want to believe that anything is true,
I suppose you can make it sound absurd like that,
but certainly there are knowable facts.
I am wearing a green jacket today.
[STELTER CHUCKLES]
That is a fact.
The floor in the room where I'm sitting is brown.
That is a fact.
And if someone were to say to me, "Oh, but is it?"
Um, you know, maybe people might give a different name for it,
but I can see what it is.
And I think that those who refuse to admit that there are certain verifiable facts
want to keep it deliberately vague out there
because they want to be able to run from facts that they find inconvenient.
Stelter: And I think they're a minority.
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: I truly believe, deep down inside, most people want to know what is true.
McQuade: I agree.
Stelter: Most people don't want to be fooled.
They don't want to be duped.
They don't want to spread disinformation.
They don't want to be part of this problem.
They want to know what's real in the world!
McQuade: Yeah.
Stelter: And it can be really confusing.
And there's not enough local news sources to trust.
And there's all these issues.
But most people want to know what's real.
So, we talked about what individuals can do.
What can institutions do?
What are the bigger picture solutions here?
McQuade: Well, it's one of the reasons, Brian, I really love talking to students,
because I think adults think in the short term, like,
"We got to fix this now! I don't have much time left." [LAUGHS]
But young people, I think, are willing to take a longer view
of how do we fix this over time.
Stelter: Mm.
McQuade: And I think there are some things we ought to be doing.
I mean, one is responding to the Supreme Court case
called Citizens United,
which has been on the books now for over 10 years.
And this was the case in which the Supreme Court said that
corporations are people when it comes to political speech,
and money is speech,
and so corporations cannot be limited
in the amount of money that they give to support candidates for office,
as long as they don't coordinate that spending with the candidate themselves.
And that has really introduced a huge amount
of dark money into the political system.
Stelter: Mm.
McQuade: And so there's all this dark money.
People don't know where it comes from, what its source is.
And although we probably can't change the ruling of Citizens United
saying that there is this unlimited spending,
I think we could require disclosure
to find out who is spending money on these big ads.
Is it the NRA?
Is it Mothers Against Drunk Driving?
Is it Vladimir Putin?
You know, I think we're entitled to know that.
And so I think putting some laws in the books that would require that
would be very useful.
Stelter: Hmm.
McQuade: Um, I think regulations that regulate social media,
but not the content so much as the algorithms.
Frances Haugen is a whistleblower.
She used to be a data scientist at Facebook,
and she testified before Congress that the real key at Facebook
was not the content, but the algorithms, because what they were doing
is pushing content that would generate outrage through these algorithms.
You know, these are proprietary software designed with code
to cause certain messages to appear in various priority in your feed.
Stelter: Mm-hmm.
McQuade: And so if we're being manipulated, perhaps we can prevent that
through regulation or at least require disclosure of that,
so people know that they're being manipulated.
Stelter: Mm.
This conversation can be dispiriting, but can also be optimistic.
How do we try to reach people who are turned off
by even the term "disinformation,"
who believe that, you know, the disinformation conversation
is all part of a plot to censor them?
McQuade: Yeah.
I think that whenever we want to talk to people across difference,
we have to start from a place of empathy and curiosity.
Stelter: Mm.
McQuade: So if all we do is judge them and tell them,
"You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, you know, you fool,"
they're going to close their ears, and they're not going to listen.
We're wired to win arguments.
And if they hear that, they're going to disengage.
Instead, I think we have to show our friends and neighbors
and loved ones respect.
We have to try to understand where it is they're coming from.
What is it that appeals to them about this message?
And then when they say, you know,
"I know for a fact that something is wrong,"
you know, "Donald Trump won the election,"
you know, to ask, "What evidence do you have of that?
I'm curious.
Help me understand your viewpoint.
I'd like to get there.
So, what is the evidence you used to reach the conclusions
that the facts that you believe actually occurred?"
Stelter: Mm.
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McQuade: And so I think that can help dispel some of the facts.
Now, you may never change your mind and the other person may not either,
but at least when we're talking to each other,
there is some possibility of compromise.
And that's what politics is all about.
Stelter: Barbara, thank you so much for this conversation.
McQuade: Thank you.
Stelter, Narrating: You can find Barbara McQuade's "Attack from Within:
How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America" on Apple Books.
You can find a link to it on our show notes page.
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