Transcript

Bridget Todd (00:03):

You're listening to Disinformed, a mini series from There Are No Girls on the Internet. I'm Bridget Todd.

Bridget Todd (00:15):

On January 6th, I watched in horror as white supremacist Trump supporters attacked the Capitol. I also live in DC, so they were attacking my city and my hometown, my community. But for me, this story doesn't start on January 6th, 2021. I want to take y'all back to 2016. After running a campaign full of lies, distortions, and conspiracy theories, Trump had just been elected to be our next president. The mood in DC, where I've lived for most of my adult life, was pretty somber. In the days before Trump's inauguration, my friends and I would sit around together raging, and screaming, and lamenting, and sometimes just sitting in complete silence over drinks. "I can't believe this means Trump will actually be living in our city," we'd say over and over again in utter disbelief.

Bridget Todd (01:00):

One day, I was supposed to be meeting up with a friend and she was late, which was not at all like her. When she finally arrived, I could not believe what had prevented her from being on time. She was killing time before meeting me, browsing in a store, when a man with a gun came into a nearby pizza place and she couldn't leave. "Someone said it had something to do with child trafficking in the internet," she explained.

Speaker 2 (01:21):

Last weekend, as people were dining inside here, a 28-year-old man turned up armed with an assault rifle to, as he put it, self-investigate what police have called a fictitious online conspiracy theory.

Bridget Todd (01:37):

So the violent attacks at the Capitol weren't the first time conspiracy theories run amok online had unleashed chaos and terror on my city. 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, codeword pizza, and this whole vast network was supposedly housed in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a local DC pizza restaurant. This conspiracy spread, grew, and mutated on Reddit and 4Chan until a man traveled from North Carolina to DC to investigate the restaurant himself with a gun. And this was really the first time I saw how dangerous conspiracy theories, unchecked false stories, and media manipulation can be online. And that even though they may start online, they could end in real-world dangerous situations, like the attack we saw in the Capitol earlier this month.

Trump and his supporters weaponized disinformation, harassment, and conspiracy theories for political gain

Bridget Todd (02:27):

Now, disinformation, misinformation, online harassment, and conspiracy theories are obviously nothing new, 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. It's pretty easy to see the ways that disinformation is political, especially when our president invites his supporters to have a wild time at the Capitol in support of the lie that he won the election, but it's also personal because it relies on people not being able to trust one another, and this is something I know a little bit about. I lost my best friend to conspiracy theories and misinformation. I met Joe, not his real name, in college in North Carolina when I was 19. Back then we were just two friends who really cared about politics. I was a strident young lefty who would tell anyone who would listen about it. I was fresh from a small town on a college campus for the first time and I felt like I was being welcomed into the marketplace of ideas, whatever that means. Whatever, I was 19.

Bridget Todd (03:24):

Joe and I connected over spirited conversations about our still forming ideologies, and we stayed close friends after I graduated college and moved to DC. But in 2016, our once spirited debates took a new turn. Rather than talking about policies or positions, Joe was talking about things that were truly out there. "Hillary Clinton is using a body double and probably only has a few weeks to live," he once texted me out of the blue at the height of the 2016 election. Our mutual friends would start group chats about the things he was posting to Facebook. "He cannot be serious with this stuff," I remember texting.

Bridget Todd (03:59):

And I remember the last straw, I was attending the Democratic National Convention in Philly and my phone dinged. "How can you vote for Hillary Clinton even after she had Seth Rich killed?" Seth rich was a Democratic National Committee staffer in DC. I didn't know him, but our circles were close enough that his death really hit home. Seth was shot and killed on July 10th, 2016 in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of DC. His killers were never found. The most likely explanation seems to be a mugging gone bad, but according to the right wing conspiracy theory machine Hillary Clinton had Seth Rich killed in retaliation for leaking DNC emails to WikiLeaks. Now, even though there's no evidence this ever happened, it didn't stop the right wing media from irresponsibly amplifying these baseless claims.

Speaker 3 (04:44):

In a Washington Post op-ed this week, Rich's parents called the story baseless and pleaded with people to, "Stop using our beloved Seth's memory and legacy for their own political goals." Yesterday, the story was taken down from the Fox News website.

Bridget Todd (05:00):

Fueled by bogus Fox News reports from Sean Hannity, conspiracy theories hounded Seth's grieving parents and anyone who supported them publicly. When this family should have been able to grieve his murder in peace, they were instead of being attacked by a right wing disinformation campaign. The entire thing was so disgusting and dangerous, and here was my friend believing it, spreading it. I think up until then I had been able to tell myself that Joe was half kidding with these ideas. There's no way he actually believed this garbage. I thought that people who believe conspiracy theories were Fox News obsessed simpletons who were too stupid to realize the ways they had been misled. Joe was educated. We went to the same college. He had a great white collar job and made good money. He voted for Obama. He was into cool music, and knew about art and film.

Bridget Todd (05:47):

Back then I didn't really realize that any of us could be taken by disinformation campaigns. I didn't know how powerful it is, or how it spreads, or what you could do if you're watching you love be taken in by it, or how to keep from spending it yourself. Eventually Joe and I lost touch. I just didn't know how to have him in my life, but I wish I had known what to do or say to help him off-board from a steady diet of conspiracy theories. And I wish Joe had known how disinformation disproportionately harms people from underrepresented backgrounds like me, because it traffics in the worst biases about our identities and who we are, exploiting and inflaming tensions, fears, and fractures. And I wish we had all known the impact that social media platforms would have spreading disinformation and driving our country further apart. Some people saw it coming and spoke up, but very few people with power did anything at all to curb its threat. I wish I had known a lot of things back then, and that's part of the reason why I'm making this podcast.

my work involves training everyday people to curb the spread of disinformation online

Bridget Todd (06:43):

Today, my work involves training everyday people to curb the spread of disinformation online and pressuring tech leaders to take action, to keep dangerous disinformation, misinformation, harassment, and violent rhetoric off their platforms. And I believe that's a big reason why we're here, still reeling from a violent attack on the Capitol by white supremacist Trump supporters who believed the repeated false claim that Trump won the election and that it was being unfairly stolen from him. Disinformation is a racial justice and gender justice issue. Women, communities of color, and other people from underrepresented backgrounds and identities are the ones who are hit hardest by its impact, but they're also the organizers, academics, and culture creators who have been speaking up against the threat disinformation poses for years, even while the people who had the power to make a difference didn't seem to listen. And now, they're the same ones fighting back against the harm disinformation spreads and working to inoculate the entire internet against it. On Disinformed, we'll hear their stories about how disinformation online got us here and what we can all do to join the fight to stop it. New episodes drop every Tuesday.

Bridget Todd (07:47):

Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi, we'd love to hear from you at hello@tangoti.com. Disinformed is brought to you by There Are No Girls on the Internet. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unboss Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Mike Amato is our producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Bridget Todd (08:16):

(silence).