As someone working in Politics in DC what do you think about Fake News?
I would use fake news as a weapon because it's out there
The Germans use chemical weapons the British use chemical weapons
What are you going to do? That doesn't mean you like chemical weapons
it means you do what you have to do
I've tried some fake news I don't even remember, we've tried some things
Yeah, there are terrible negative potential consequences
But, so what? That's what I say so what? What's the big deal?
We've always taken the position in this country
"Let it all come out and let the people judge"
Despite the dangers
But how can the people judge fake stories and Lie
or do you think we are in a post-truth moment?
Oh, I don't know
I mean, what is truth? If you study philosophy, there is no reality
There's only perception
So when you say "Are we in a post-truth moment?"
most philosophers on all sides would tell you
there was never any such thing as "truth" to begin with
There is this ecosystem that's growing now
where people are actually confusing real and fake news
Especially if they see it online
This "post-truth" culture that we're living in has real costs to the people
who are victimized by those who come up with these theories and themes
People have suffered because of false news that's being spread online
The summer of 2015 was really the first sign
that there was something happening in our information space
that we weren't paying enough attention to
There was a two-month-long military exercise that was occurring
in the American Southwest - Jade Helm -
and this conspiracy emerged around it
that President Obama was going to round up political dissidents
and put them in camps in Texas
Fake news... what do I think about it? A very old saying comes to mind
"Don't believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see"
I find myself there a lot I don't know what's real and what's fake
Here in Bastrop, it's a very close-knit, rural community
Typical small-town America hometown value structure
In 2015, back during the Obama administration
there was a huge amount of concern about distrust of the national government
And once people found out
that there was going to be a major military operation in Bastrop County
a lot of people were, you know making puzzle pieces fit together
We're going to be conducting the training exercise safely, and courteously
We're not going to interfere with their privacy or their rights with this
The Army says it's an eight-week training exercise in a realistic setting
but they're not saying much beyond that
We began to get inquiries from people
"Why are you allowing the military to come into Bastrop County?''
''What's going to happen? Why are they coming here?"
And then all sorts of conspiracies were put together
"The truth is, that it's an exercise, um for enacting martial law in this country"
This is conditioning for martial law and a takeover
And then I tuned into another show they're saying the same thing
"I guess Alex Jones was right" there's been an awakening
We happened to be kind of the clearinghouse of a lot of conversation
People would come here it's like the pub, to talk about it
Somebody shares a story someone else commiserates
and then everyone else jumps on the bandwagon
I think it has a lot to do with, you know having a degree in Google
Whether it's vaccines cause autism, Masonic lizard people running the world, Jade Helm...
We want so hard to believe even in conspiracies, that things actually exist
that there is an underlying deal, that we have some knowledge that other people don't
And we want to believe all that
Um... but it's... sometimes it's just not true
I will be headed to Bastrop, Texas
to report on the Jade Helm '15 the military exercise
I don't trust the corporate media
I don't want somebody else to tell me what's going on
I want to go find out for myself
In my view, Jade Helm was a psychological operation to gauge the response
Will the people, you know be complacent when this exercise happens?
Will they push back?
We're going to go inside, see, this is what the corporate media does
They stand across the street... and we go inside
I can't believe we're in here...
I believe in personal responsibility
If somebody reads an article, and they go crazy because of that
Because of whatever issues they've got going on, like
I don't know how I can, you know, be held responsible for that
There are many who made some pretty wild claims, and social media is the devil
So, in my interest in open government and in transparency, I said
"Well let's just have a town hall meeting and explain this to everybody''
Colonel Lastoria came, and we asked him to explain to everyone who was interested
what exactly the operation was going to entail
Jade Helm is simply just a challenging 8-week training exercise
For unconventional warfare
and it's an exercise that'll be conducted throughout Texas
New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah
Hysteria is a little strong of a word but there were pockets of hysteria
You had people that were otherwise normal people, in the Jade Helm thing
believing that there was an underground network of tunnels
that connected all the Walmarts in Texas
These are giant facilities that can house people
So, people started speculating that
Okay these Walmarts are getting ready to be turned into concentration camps
detention centers, what have you
''Today, Governor Greg Abbott is choosing to assign the Texas State Guard''
''to monitor the operation"
Commander Abbott states his reasoning is, quote
"To address concerns of Texas citizens''
''and to ensure that Texas communities remain safe"
You get a part of the citizenry worked up and the Governor reacted to it in a way
that looked like the state government was taking this seriously
The relatively quick jump of that information from conspiracy blogs, to town hall meetings
to the Governor's office I think was of great concern certainly to the military
and to our intelligence services
Recently, Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director
talked about this, very clearly linking the disinformation campaign around Jade Helm
to Russian information activities targeting the United States
"Russian bots, Russian trolls, combining with the American alt-right media''
''convinced a non-trivial portion of the Texas population''
''that it was an attempt by the Obama administration''
''to round up political opponents"
It was interesting to me that someone would tie what went on here in Bastrop County
to this worldwide concern about Russian interference in American politics
but you know what, uh, it's a small world
"And in Texas, we don't compare our economy to other states''
''We compare our economy to other countries''
''The Texas economy is larger than Canada it's larger than Australia''
''and get this, the Texas economy is even larger than the economy of Russia''
''That makes me more powerful than Putin!"
That was a test
And what all of it showed was, we are in a weaponized information environment
So we're at the point now where I don't think people can distinguish
fact from truth anymore or people are starting to make their own truth
and honestly, I'm okay with that
I have about eight different daily digests that come into my inbox every morning
from different Facebook pages and other things that we started tracking over time
and I'd scan hyper-partisan stuff from people who tend to propagate misinformation
And it's basically just like starting your morning bathing in internet garbage
is pretty much the deal
I have been looking at false stories since 2014
There were a handful of journalists and researchers who were interested in this stuff
but it wasn't what was the main focus of the world
And in the span of a few months that completely changed
at the end of 2016, with Trump's victory
What we found was, the core, key time, before Election Day
that fake stories got way more engagement than the real news stories about the election
And as soon as everybody, journalists politicians, researchers
started scratching the surface they were like
"Holy crap, this is, look at what's here"
And then right after the election we had Pizzagate
Somebody walking into a D.C. pizzeria with a rifle and firing it off
and realizing that that was a result of this person
Consuming conspiracies and misinformation
I think that freaked a lot of people out
My restaurant, I try to be, like, everyone's invited, just have a good time
Play ping-pong, eat some great food
Families and kids are the people who like it the most, because it's, like, it's fun
They can run around
Comet Ping Pong is a fixture here in Washington
Everyone knows this restaurant
People come from other parts of Washington to have pizza here
We do have some politically-connected people that come in here
and that is just something that happens
I mean, I have CNN news anchors who have been eating here for years
But what Comet is about is, this is a safe space for people to come in
and be themselves
We host shows for local bands, queer bands
I think that one of the nice things about Comet is that there's space here
for queer folks to be part of the identity of the restaurant
I had this party for the ten-year anniversary
Everyone was invited, and we had the Attorney General of the United States
and like, congresspeople and kids and musicians and artists
And that was in the end of October, 2016
I looked at it at one moment and I just thought
"Wow," like, "we've really created something here"
Like, "This place is special"
And then quickly after that, we were slammed with this year-plus-long
endless, uh, conspiracy theory
John Podesta, who's Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman
his emails were hacked and they get uploaded online
And a lot of conspiracy theorists start crawling through them
And based on these emails
they spin up this crazy conspiracy theory about Comet Ping Pong
People on pro-Trump forums start going through John Podesta's emails
and they see these references to pizza
Now these are pretty innocuous references
"Do we need to get pizza for the campaign volunteers," that kind of stuff
and perhaps the first example we've ever seen of the creation of Pizzagate
is on a reddit post
Someone saying "I think we need to be looking''
''at these clues, for all this pizza stuff"
And really, from there that's where it took off
So, inside the emails, they connect a lot of different things
CP, "cheese pizza"
People will dissect it, they think maybe it stands for, "child pornography"
Various people on reddit, sites like 4chan
become convinced that "pizza" is slang for essentially, children to rape
And so then they see the exchanges with James Alefantis and John Podesta...
I had emailed with John Podesta about hosting pizza party fundraiser
cookout at someone's house
And so, people become convinced that Comet Ping Pong is, like
this child rape dungeon in the basement
This was supported by George Soros
and John Podesta, and Hillary Clinton and like everybody was somehow connected
to this child sex trafficking ring in a pizza parlor
that you could dial up, and say the right food words, and get your order of children
It's just days before the election and so, tensions are high
It certainly looked like Hillary Clinton was going to win
And so, Trump people are very feverish and this was just blowing up
So I said, "Geez, all these people are just going so wild about it
I wonder if anything's happening at Comet" so I called him up...
I got a call from a guy named Will Sommer
and he at the time was working at the Washington City Paper
and asked me if I had read about this or know about this online conspiracy theory
that Hillary Clinton and I were human trafficking from Comet Ping Pong
And I was like, "I don't know what you're talking about"
And I make a comment like "Everyone is really up about this election''
''and passions are high, and I'm sure that it'll go away in a couple of days''
The election happens and then actually what happened is
the days subsequent to the election these online attacks started escalating
and increasing in volume
We started to get messages onto like, our Yelp page for the restaurant
Reviews that were really weird and weird Facebook things
I had put pictures of my god-children on Instagram
Now, obviously, I would know better than to put anything anywhere
But these images were stolen from my Instagram
taken and put up as some kind of evidence of nefarious activities going on
I just want you to ask yourself: why does this guy
I think he looks like he's in his late 30's
why is this coming-on-middle-age guy have a photo of a random kid drinking milk
Pizzagate, like so many conspiracy theories, it starts to echo on 4chan
There are spaces that drive more extreme content
I would say 4chan is the... now, bathroom may be too polite
Think of the rest stop on the Interstate highway
4chan is a dirty restroom there's no toilet paper on the toilet roll
the sink has not been cleaned in months
And think about the kinds of things you saw on bathroom walls there
It builds on the internet and then it starts getting picked up
by the various right-wing pundits
You know, Alex Jones starts promoting it all the time
Pizzagate is real, the question is how real is it, and what is it
Something's going on something's being covered up
it needs to be investigated to just call...
Infowars becomes the Pizzagate network for a bit
The menu from Comet Ping Pong notice the symbol of the ping-pong paddles
and its clever resemblance to the FBI document's symbol for ChildLove
There were so many different entry points for this specific attack
I am trafficking or abusing these children, is one
The other was that I, or Hillary Clinton
or the Podestas were kidnapping or selling these children to retain our immense wealth
There was some that this idea that because I'm gay
I obviously must be molesting children or something
which is a historical perspective on gayness
So many of the calls we'd receive, people saying, "Why do you like raping children?"
And being like, "I know you're all gay"
And that one is necessarily related to the other...
A lot of what fuels misinformation and what we call "fake news" is hate
It is essentially some group of people,
either misunderstanding or having some sort of violent feelings
about another group of people
And in the case of Comet those who decided to target James
found a little bit of hate and malice in the piece of Comet
that is welcoming to the LGBTQ community
More and more we started receiving phone calls
that ran the gambit of being just prank calls, I'd almost say
where people were like, "Can I get a some kind of special pizza"
like, some ridiculous name
Something that meant to them something about pedophilia, it was code words...
To just straight-up death threats
People saying, "I'm gonna kill you"
Or "We know what you're doing and we're gonna stop it''
''And you're all gonna die"
"We know where you live we are coming to the restaurant''
''We're coming to get you"
You know, "You need to kill yourself"
There was a specific one where someone said
"I'm going to come to your restaurant with a machine gun and kill everyone inside
and like, cut your guts out and watch you die on the floor," or whatever
And I was like, "This is scary"
What I was doing every single night was going online and checking reddit
checking 4chan
Reddit had a new subreddit that had been started specifically for Pizzagate
It went from, within a week, zero followers to 22,000 people who were subscribed to it
One thousand, five-hundred of which were active at any given point
growing and growing and growing and growing
And even if they only spend five minutes a day trying to destroy my life
22,000 people have more five-minutes a day than I have 24 hours in my day
"There it is, there it is, guys...''
''So we're, we're going to go in and we're going to infiltrate Comet Pizza"
I got a phone call from someone who said
"Hey, I just want to let you know that I'm a friend of yours''
''and a guy named Jack Posobiec is in there filming you right now"
"I, I turned it off"
"I understand that, I understand that to you, this is maybe like a game''
''But considering that I, myself and my staff''
''receive death threats many times a day..."
"It's, it's not a game it's not anything..."
"Are you, are you reading these things that people are writing on...?"
"I can't control what somebody posts on the internet"
I read several posts on reddit that said "I've had enough of this''
''If I don't post back here in three hours it's because I've been killed''
''I'm grabbing my shotgun and going into Comet"
We were in real, deep fear like serious fear
These threats were so violent that I... I sort of, like, knew something would happen
So it culminates with Edgar Maddison Welch driving up from North Carolina
And he's one of the people who's been consuming all this stuff
and he's become convinced that there really is a child rape dungeon
in the basement of Comet Ping Pong
He wanted to come up here and save these children
He's a father himself he had two young daughters
He was a classic Infowars listener, follower
You know, people want me to look into it I may take off a week
and just only research this and actually go to where these places are, and stuff
In fact, I'm looking at getting on a plane...
I can't just say something and not see it for myself
They go to these pizza places there's, like, satanic art everywhere
Part of the pitch is get out there and help us unearth the truth
It turns people into a type of vigilante
in which they're out there seeking what they think is justice
In the case of Pizzagate
a guy puts children in danger because he thinks he's rescuing children
We had this restaurant filled with families eating
Sunday afternoon
And Edgar Maddison Welch walks in this front door
with a loaded A-R-15 assault rifle
Ex - Fully exposed
Also with, like, a handgun and a knife, it turned out
And, like, walks through this restaurant
My young staff who had been under online attack
they immediately see him call the police, and...
And go, like, table to table
telling each table that they need to go, like, leave the building
And so each table, it's the customers are like, "Oh no, we're fine"
Like, "We're here to support you, it's okay like, we'll just keep eating," or whatever
And this... these kids are like "No, you don't understand''
''There's a guy here with a gun"
So they evacuate the building
This isn't a joke, get out of the block
The police have shut down the street
and riot / SWAT teams are closing the building, and the street
and leaves this gunman alone to search the restaurant, or do whatever he's going to do
The first thing that he did was immediately walk towards the back room
I'm not sure what he thought he was going to find back here
but I think that he thought that this was the place where Hillary Clinton would be
or he was going to walk back there and find John Podesta
or George Soros or someone... pulling things off of the wall
Trying to pry apart the stage flipping ping-pong tables over
He was trying to break anything that he thought was obscuring his view
But he came over here to the only locked door in the entire restaurant
which is our employee closet
He shot through the door which is a pretty dirty
but innocuous employee closet
Uh, Houses our coats
Realized, there were no children being held here
Came out of the... out of the restaurant
came out with his hands up with a... to a sea of police
- Hands! Hands! - We got a guy coming out right now
- Stand up! - We've got a white male subject
- Hands up over your head! - Coming out of the location
Hands in the air
Don't nobody move don't nobody move, stay where you are
Bring him towards you
I got him... keep going, keep coming to my voice, do not turn around
Stop! Stop! Get down on your knees
get on the ground, lay prone on the ground
Sir, do you work there?
- Are you the... - Who else is in the location right now?
- Nobody else? - What were you doing in the location?
- Regarding what? - Pizzagate he's talking about Pizzagate
This could have been a lot worse someone could have gotten shot
Anything could have happened here
So no one... this was something
that even some of the most seasoned crime reporters had never seen before
That someone came in armed for battle came in on a suicide mission
either knowing he was going to go to jail, or might end up dead
but was willing to do that, based off of fake erroneous news stories
Today, the term "fake news" has become totally weaponized
and misused to the point that I think it's kind of meaningless
We saw back in January, 2017
when President Trump stood up at the news conference and called out CNN
and called it fake news
From there we started to see the term kind of just fall apart, in terms of use
Mr. President Elect can you give us a question
- Don't be rude - You're attacking us
- Don't be rude - Can you give us a question?
Don't be... I'm not going to give you a question'
'You are fake news, go ahead
Where we're at right now is
fake news has most effectively become what Donald Trump has defined it as
which is media that's critical of him
If you want the fake news media to finally investigate...
When he talks about fake news
that is one of the biggest applause lines that he gets at these rallies
Usually at that point, that's when the whole crowd turns to the media pen and boos
As a journalist, obviously
it's disappointing to see that kind of vitriol directed at the press
Don't worry, I don't like 'em either, okay?
CNN is in the dumper
It's become synonymous with fake news
Well, nobody believes it anymore
We expect politicians to be, uh, fast and loose with the truth, depending on the day
We know that it's a car salesman
But we expect journalists newsmen to tell the truth
That's what y'all... you're just supposed to report the facts
And, uh... no, I didn't vote for Obama
Give me one thing he did to help me in... as a Texan, a heterosexual married man
Did he cut... Lower my taxes?
Nope, did he increase my freedoms? Nope
Did he help my white, blonde-haired blue-eye kid go to college? Nope
Donald Trump's trying to stop my culture down here from changing
Look around, his style of populism is working
We're going to give him the benefit of the doubt
Why? Because he's giving us results but y'all don't report that
The media is the public enemy
Let me show you the one I really like, I bought tonight
This sums it up
That is money well-spent right there
Because it's fake news, they don't report the truth the truth's reality
If you want to start living right report the truth
That's all we ask for thank you
Well I think fake news has become a very politicized term
that is being used to censor conservatives
Evidently, because it's published in The New York Times, you believe it
If you do that, you're believing either government, uh, propaganda
or mainstream media-determined truth
And just because The New York Times published it doesn't mean it's true
Jerome Corsi's this long-time Republican operative
and really one of the modern creators of this internet and media-fueled smear campaign
In the 2004 election
he co-wrote this book about John Kerry's behavior on this swift boat
promoting the idea that John Kerry who was this Vietnam war hero
was actually like, this big coward
You know, promoting this really baseless claim
So now, to "swiftboat" someone since 2004, means to create a lie
and propagate it in the idea that it's going to torpedo them
And Jerome Corsi was the creator of that
Cut to 2008-2009
Jerome Corsi is probably the most prominent face of the Birther conspiracy theory
so, the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya
It's like all of the giant conspiracy theories over the past decade or two
Jerome Corsi has jumped on
And either he created them or he really got into pushing them
And what's so nice about this, is just with a laptop computer, a fairly simple camera
it gives the average person an opportunity to establish a voice, and to be heard
I didn't look at CNN and say "I want to do that"
I didn't go to Fox News and say "Here's my resume''
''I want to put on a suit and after Tucker Carlson''
''I want to sit there and read my news"
I didn't say that I didn't go to The New York Times and say
"I want to write stories for you"
I looked at all of those things and I said "You guys are all fucked up''
''Whatever it is that you think is journalism I think is fucked up"
''So this is how I'm gonna do it''
Wake up everyone
If you are forwarding articles from Newsweek, from The New York Times
you have become a zombie propagandist
I find intriguing that even investigating it, questioning it
becoming a forensic examiner of evidence, you get ridiculed
You are a conspiracy theorist
You can disagree on all sorts of interpretations
about a particular subject but not when there's falsehood
When we study false news and disinformation
what we see repeatedly is things that in theory could be just interpretation
get made up of discrete bits of narrative that are distinctly false
It's very clear that what you have here
is a propagandist effort to try to achieve a result
So for example, the Seth Rich case
Seth Rich was a young guy, he's working for the Democratic National Committee
And he's killed, in July of 2016
Police in Washington have said it appears to have been a botched armed robbery
but they don't know for sure what happened
There were a lot of robberies in this neighborhood around that time
People are speculating "Well, what kind of a robbery was it?"
Because his wallet was still on him his watch was still there
But when a gun goes off that's going to draw attention
So his assailant's not going to stick around and try to get those valuables
They're going to take off and that's what happened in this case
Very early on, he... he wanted to do stuff
that was involved in trying to make things better
There was about six-and-a-half years between us
100%, he was very much you know, the annoying little brother
And then as we got older we got a lot closer
just, when we both got to the same spot in life
If he had problems, he'd talked to me if I had problems, I'd talk to him
So I mean, we were each other's best friends and you know, always there for each other
He was the person that I knew I could always count on
and he was that not just to me but also to his friends
His over-the-top sense of humor...
If you were having a bad day, no matter what
it became his mission to make you have a good day, just give in now
I had come back early from a vacation
and we had been playing phone tag since I had gotten back
Obviously, that is something that I realize I would regret
Next morning, my mom called me and I remember her telling me that, um
he had been shot and killed uh, late in the night
I remember, you know, collapse on the floor of our townhome at the time
um, just in sheer disbelief
In the political environment that existed in the summer of 2016
having a DNC staffer that was murdered to a certain group of people
just could not have been a coincidence
Somebody hacked into the DNC computer, and Wikileaks, uh
just recently published a bunch of these emails
and there are a number of emails
in which senior officials of the Democratic National Committee
can be seen conspiring against Bernie Sanders
Seth Rich's murder follows the leak of emails from the Democratic Party
And his death very quickly is linked to the leak
The idea is that Seth Rich himself was somehow in contact with WikiLeaks
objected to Hillary Clinton's assertion of control over the Democratic Party
He was outraged and released these emails
And Hillary Clinton, somehow had Seth Rich murdered
I want to be clear... this is baseless
But certainly Julian Assange of WikiLeaks stoked that, uh, speculation
Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material
and often very significant risks
There's a 27-year-old that works for the DNC, who was shot in the back, murdered
That was just a robbery I believe, wasn't it?
No, there's no finding
Was he one of your sources, then?
We don't comment on who our sources are...
But why make the suggestion?
Julian Assange, obviously it's convenient for him
because it means he's not, kind of a patsy for the Russian government
It means, you know, there was this brave whistleblower who gave him the stuff
Julian Assange was the catalyst
And then, online, on websites and message boards like 4chan or reddit
even Twitter, it blew up
The Seth Rich thing is really getting suspicious now
This was an assassination this kid was murdered for political reasons
I think they want to do damage control with the DNC and the Clinton crime unit
This is exactly the sort of killing you would expect from the Clintons
The guy got fucking murdered after he leaked information to WikiLeaks
There have been stories in which activists in the United States
join forces with the Russians to push the same stories
And you know, the Seth Rich story is probably the leading example of that
They were both eager to deny
that the Russians were behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee
Seth had access to a lot of the IT I mean, he had the access
He had a lot of stuff
The question is we don't know what he did with it
Frankly, we don't know if Seth was a good guy or a bad guy
We don't know if he was a leaker um... we think he was a leaker
We just don't know there's so many unanswered questions
Jack Burkman is one of the premiere hucksters who has latched onto this tragedy
We'll show you the... here's the office over here
This is... this is it this is the nerve center, man
Now come down here... this is the doggy's room
Fake news is a weapon and, uh, we've even tried to use fake news
Fake news is a good way to drive a story you know?
You put up a site, instead of New York 1 - New York 2, and people believe it
And they reprint it, and it gets reprinted
And it can be an effective tool in driving a story, you know?
People use it, it's become a tool of war
It's like, uh, it's World War I and it's chemical weapons
People are using them so you use them, you know?
That's how I'd... that might be the analogy
Jack Burkman, who's a Washington lobbyist
He sends out some legendary press releases in Washington
Reporters are always saying, you know
"Did you see the latest Jack Burkman press release?" because they're so absurd
In the past, has attached himself to other dubious causes
including, he tried to get gay players banned from the NFL
There are four theories, one is what the police say
it was done in the street, street thugs
B) The Russians did it
C) Hillary and the Democrats did it
D) is kind of everything else
We're conducting our own investigation
He's doing all these crazy things, like he's doing a re-enactment of the murder
He teams up with some undergraduate students at George Washington University
and they come up with the idea that the most obvious explanation for Seth Rich's death
is that a hit squad killed him I mean, it's absurd
You have a dead DNC staffer that can't defend himself
It's a good opportunity to make statements and you know, try to use that
And when we ran sentence analyses of the media
you really see how Seth Rich pops up as an interference pattern on the right
when everybody else is talking Russia and impeachment
DNC leaks came from the inside it wasn't hackers from the outside at all
And of course, Julian Assange
has specifically denied receiving any information from the Russian government
Precisely... this whole Russian collusion narrative, which is, I think
actually quite a foolish narrative, that the emails were stolen by Russia from the DNC
these are premises that have not been validated
Yet the left runs with them as if they were gospel truth
We know that by January
you had the entire intelligence community onboard saying that it was the Russians
You know that the Mueller indictments
have very specifically indicted both Russians responsible for the trolls
and Russians responsible for the hacking
And when people say, "Well, we don't absolutely know with certainty"
What do they want? Do they want to be in Saint Petersburg
watching every Russian troll engaging in every act?
I mean, there are levels of proof that no reasonable person would ask for
It was the Russians
The speculation that you saw online was given fuel by places like Gateway Pundit
Infowars and Alex Jones
But you also see it pop up on Fox News
Back with a Fox News Alert
A brand new bombshell in the murder of that guy right there, a DNC staffer
An investigator now says Seth Rich was in contact with WikiLeaks
Fox News, on the website, publishes a story
that there's new evidence that Seth Rich was in fact the source of the leaks
And what you see is the whole network from the local affiliate in DC
through the main cable channel mobilize around this story
Newly discovered evidence shows
that the 27-year-old former DNC employee was in fact communicating with WikiLeaks
And we can really trace how a rumor that starts on reddit
ultimately makes its way to Hannity
and you can just literally follow, from the first to the last, this propaganda pipeline
We see the Russians
We see the alt-right activists
We see the commercial clickbait sites
And then you have, at the very top
a set of a propagandists whose commercial interests and political interests are aligned
to go out, look for all these stories, and bring them to the mainstream of Fox News
If it was true that Seth Rich gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails
wouldn't that blow the whole Russian collusion narrative
that the media's been pushing out of the water?
I mean, Fox does some good reporting
There are good, honorable reporters there doing good reporting
but Sean Hannity is essentially a consultant for the President
By the way, all those people in the back are fake news
Spewing the President's views to his huge audience on Fox
And it's just like, hook, line, and sinker if Sean Hannity says it, it must be true
And of course, Fox News is in the attention business
and so there is a sort of fake news laundering that is occurring
To date, there has been no new evidence that has come out
that would justify the original story in the first place
let alone this constant resurgence
It's not just words, and you're not just pushing something
Like, you're having real effects on real people
It's hard enough to process the thought of a family member being murdered
But very quickly, it went to, you know that I took money from WikiLeaks
That I am cooperating with a hostile foreign intelligence service
Where is this even coming from?
Being directly accused of being involved in any of this
just turns our world completely upside down
that was already turned upside down from the rest of the conspiracies
I still have not been able to sit there
and really properly grieve the fact that he's not there
The number of times I've wanted to pick up my phone
and describe this absolutely ridiculous situation that's going on...
The person I would call would be my brother
After extraordinary backlash from journalists
and especially from the rich family Fox withdrew it story
They said, "It didn't meet our standards"
What they didn't do is apologize
You had a family that had been told their son had essentially committed a crime
an assertion for which they had no proof, and no evidence
Sean Hannity not only hasn't apologized to the Rich family, but he hasn't disavowed it
Out of respect for the family's wishes
for now, I am not discussing this matter at this time
I had no clue why they... why they won't say it
Pushing out false statements and not be willing to accept that they were false
after being proven numerous, numerous times false... it doesn't make sense to me
Now the real question is, who's to blame?
Are we going to say "Oh, look, reddit did this!"
Or are we going to say "Oh look, Hannity did this!"
When people started looking around, what happened?
The answer always fell on what's new and what's new was the technology
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify
in front of a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees today
Senators will demand answers from Zuckerberg
about Facebook's failure to protect millions of users' private information
And they've actually added extra seats to this hearing room
to accommodate all the Senators who are going to be questioning Zuckerberg today...
44 of them
Zuckerberg is going to be in the hot seat for hours
If you think about Facebook specifically
there's more than 2 billion people around the world that log into it every month
There has never been anything like Facebook in the history of humanity
There are ads there there's news there
There's your personal life, your friends
If he was to honestly say that he would no longer be selling any data, um
and if he would own up to it, then...
They've done better than anyone else on the planet
by sucking in every piece of information about you
and what you do and what you think and it's sort of like a digital fence
They've gotten everyone to paint the fence, you know
with you... your data, and they benefit from it
It's designed to actually give so much information about us individually
so that Facebook can turn around and sell insight
into what kind of communication will best manipulate me
to do what someone else wants to do
As Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool
for staying connected to the people they love, for making their voices heard
and for building communities and businesses
But it's clear now that we didn't do enough
to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well
And that goes for fake news the foreign interference in elections
and hate speech as well as developers and data privacy
We didn't take a broad-enough view of our responsibility
and that was a big mistake and it was my mistake, and I'm sorry
There's a lot of things that have been going on at Facebook, for a long time
of people who've covered it a long time
And a lot of them were around privacy violations, sort of sketchy use of data
always pushing the envelope... growth, growth, growth
We're here because of what you Mr. Zuckerberg
have described as a breach of trust
A quiz app used by approximately 300,000 people led to information
about 87 million Facebook users being obtained by the company
Cambridge Analytica
So how is that possible? I mean, their systems are very good at detecting scrapers
spam accounts, and things like that
It's kind of mind-boggling that they weren't able to detect this
And I think the reason is because they didn't care
Not that, you know they were being malicious
It's just that it was something they were not interested in
They had built a system where they didn't know what people were doing on it, really
And when malevolent actors get involved with the platform
you began to see how easily manipulable this platform was
just by using it the way it worked
The Russians, they were a customer of Facebook
They were, they used the tools that were built in this country
to create discord and dissension across our nation in lots of very important areas
And some people, like Donald Trump, say not one vote was shifted, but that's not true
Personally, I think, uh, the... the idea that you know, fake news on Facebook
of which, you know, it's a... it's a very small amount of... of, um, the content
influenced the... the election in any way I think, is a... a pretty crazy idea
So they moved from, "It was crazy to think so," to, "Oh, okay, there was a little thing"
And then, "Oh, there was more" and then... I don't believe any of it
I don't... I don't... the only reason I don't believe it is because I don't think they know
These unverified, divisive pages are on Facebook today
They look a lot like the anonymous groups
the Russian agents used to spread propaganda during the 2016 election
Are you able to confirm whether they're Russian-created groups? Yes or no
Um, Senator, last week
we actually announced a... a major change to our ads and pages policies
that we will be verifying the identity of um, every single advertiser...
I'm asking about these specific ones do you know whether they are?
I am not familiar with those pieces of content specifically
That's the way it was architected
It was architected to be a platform free-for-all
where nobody had responsibility except they got all the money
Probably a lot of the people involved in the hearings
didn't actually understand the technology, and the implications
And so you know, it's hard... if you really...
Don't really understand what's happening you know, you can't really question
Let's say I'm emailing about Black Panther
within WhatsApp, do I get a Black Panther banner ad?
Senator, we don't...
Facebook's systems do not see the content of messages
being transferred over WhatsApp
Yeah, I know, but that's... that's not what I'm asking...
Everybody went in knowing they had four minutes, or whatever, to ask questions
and they were very focused particularly on privacy concerns
And nobody wanted to waste time on fake news, on Russia, on foreign actors
When you sign up for Facebook you sign up, uh, for Terms of Service
Are you familiar with that?
- Yes - Okay, it says...
What's about these Terms of Service?
Like, what? Like, as if Terms of Service were our biggest national emergency
Oh my god, they... you can't read Terms of Service
Like, who cares? Who cares?
Like, they just... they were not focusing on the problem at hand
It was just a ridiculous circus and so therefore Mark came off well
because he didn't, like vomit on the desk or something
Like, he didn't, like, fall apart and he answered questions
But you know "I'll get back to you, Senator''
"That's an interesting question,Senator" he said nothing, he said nothing
It will take some time to work through all the changes
we need to make across the company
But I'm committed to getting this right
I don't think they're malevolent people
Mark is lovely, he's polite he's earnest, he wants to learn
It's just that their basic premise is that this is just a benign platform
These are the most powerful tools in the history of our planet
they are, they just are
When you have these tools, people are going to find ways to use them
in ways that are more nefarious than other ways
Or at least experiment around them
Once you have a gun, you want to shoot it you just do, like, that's what a gun is for
A lot of these technologies are guns and they're going to be shot
I think if you're Vladimir Putin, you wake up every morning and you laugh
because they did some of this stuff to us
but the worst part of 2016 is the stuff we did to ourselves
And the worst part of what's happening now, is we're still doing it to ourselves
The attack is now coming from inside the house
You have small campaigns using these techniques
where you have individual candidates using these techniques
where everybody thinks they need to use data better
and more effectively to target the unknown voter
or the hardcore voter, or the radicalized voter one way or the other
When this is the environment the Russians don't have to do very much
We're doing it to ourselves now
If somebody has chemical weapons
and you deem it necessary to have chemical weapons to deter the chemical weapons
then you know, this is a classic Cold War phenomenon
On the Democratic side
There was a feeling that the Democrats were behind in this race
to use social media, to use technology
So there were some Democrats it turns out, who were thinking, like
"You know, we have to catch up in this race''
''We have to understand these tools"
And one of the races that was sort of a natural to experiment in
was the special Senate race in December of 2017
It pitted an extremely conservative Christian named Roy Moore, a former judge
who was the Republican against a Democrat named Doug Jones
There weren't a lot of other races going on
so Republicans and Democrats were very focused on this race
You have this old school leveraging racist rhetoric...
All the women who are coming out
and accusing Roy Moore of advances on underaged women
and really inappropriate conduct
that was feeding in to all of Democrats' fears coming out of 2016
What if this is happening again?
What if these guys are winning elections again?
So, Reid Hoffman the Silicon Valley billionaire
decides to bankroll his own pro- Democratic campaign, to dampen Roy Moore's chances
We got $100,000
I don't know if that was Mr. Hoffman's money, or what... what it was
All I know is that money arrived and it was, uh, time to go to work
The Alabama Project, as I titled it was an effort to use Facebook
and emulate some of the tactics
that had been used against Democrats in recent years
Doug Jones didn't know that this was happening on his behalf
- Doug Jones - Doug Jones
It was an incredible run, it was an incredible election, it was a fun campaign
Nerve-wracking campaign got a little weird, on occasion
Uh... and then election night was just amazing
It is absolutely deafening in here
This news just coming across the screen there...
Your election was won by about 20,000 votes, a fairly small margin...?
Oh yeah, out of 1.3 million I would say that that was relatively tight
Doug Jones won, absolutely all I did was, uh, push a little from the outside
Our effort, we were hoping, would help Republicans not turn out to vote
So we created a page called Dry Alabama a conservative, pro-Roy Moore
pro-Republican bunch of people who wanted to make Alabama dry again
because the liquor laws had gotten too liberal
And our idea was that if you show this to moderate suburban Republicans
they will say, "Oh man... these Roy Moore supporters, they are crazy
And if these Roy Moore supporters are so crazy, then, uh, I just can't support it"
that was the idea
If you're like me, you're fearful for the souls of our brothers and sisters
We made videos, and some of the videos were just "mocktail recipes"
Try this moral take on a sinful beverage a Righteous Mint Julep
I have a knack for creating new voices
And in this particular case it sounded like a real conservative
You were pretending to be somebody that you weren't?
Oh, sure, sure
Um... I was definitely pretending to be a conservative when I wrote that stuff
I felt empowered for the first time ever, really
to finally give maybe a Republican Party a taste of its own medicine a little bit
Fundamentally, the fakery is going to happen
It's happening to me so why should it not happen to you?
It was December of 2018 when The New York Times article came out
in which the allegation was there was creation of some fake news type accounts
uh, to try to influence the election in my favor
And I was absolutely, one, stunned
Two, pretty outraged pretty, pretty angry about that
And immediately said so, and immediately called for, uh, an investigation
At least two groups of Democrats that we've found out about
were experimenting with essentially Russian techniques
New Knowledge was part of that so was Tovo Labs
And it turns out, so was my little group um... I did not know that at the time
The New Knowledge stuff some of that seems pretty sketchy to me
So let's start with the idea that reality is a construct of your mind
And what that means, in a philosophical context, is, um, that eve...
all of us live in our subjective reality
A little cybersecurity company called New Knowledge based in Austin, Texas
they got some money from Reid Hoffman through a passthrough to this little project
This group created a conservative Alabamian Facebook page
to try to influence conservatives
even though they were Democrats they were liberals
These were the guys the Senate hired to do a comprehensive report
which was quite a well-done report
on what the Russians did in 2016
And here, they're caught uh, doing a little bit of it them themselves, in US politics
It's... It's very embarrassing for them very damaging for them
Among other things, they endorsed a conservative write-in candidate
to try to draw votes from Roy Moore
New Knowledge has gotten a ton of investment
to conduct research to counter disinformation
and they themselves are currently operationalizing disinformation
It's really problematic
It's still a little bit mysterious
because New Knowledge and Jonathon Morgan, the CEO
was I think lying to me about various things
And it was kind of loosely run and involved multiple people
and I think some people had different ideas about it about than others
And... But everyone's... At this point everybody's kind of, like lying
and pointing the finger at somebody else, so...
As a Secretary of State who has to certify these election results
you must be concerned about these incredibly deceptive tactics
Yeah, but seriously, now
What... What we're talking about here is not anything different
than what has occurred in US politics
or international politics in the history of political systems
The only difference is now people are able to do that, in many people's minds
more effectively because of social media
So these tactics don't raise a special type of alarm?
Well the problem is is you can't ever fully address 'em
because you can't control the behavior of people who are engaging in that activity
John Merrill, Alabama Secretary of State is definitely a part of the Republican machine
and he will settle things on terms that are favorable to the Republican machine
To some degree, I was hoping that there would be more reaction from the right
I was hoping that there would be more
"Oh, well, that's terrible what you did"
But that didn't happen, so much
Are there actions that you would take as secretary of state
to defend against disinformation in elections?
Well, if there were instances
where the law was broken, in regard to campaigning, we definitely will
But if it's simply someone doing a superior job to another candidate
without going outside the boundaries of the law
then we can't pick apart what certain people are doing
because at that point that's not making the most effective
or best use of our time
I can't say that we actually made the difference
I wouldn't go that far but think of the math here
Three million people saw this ad
If we affected 1% of them, so that they ended up not voting, that's 30,000 votes
Doug Jones won by 21,000 votes
If we affected one in a thousand of the people who saw that ad, that's 3,000 votes
That's about equal to Doug Jones's winning margin in 11 of the counties that he won
Imagine a bunch of these efforts
Each whittling away just a little bit of the vote, that's what you...
That's all you need if you're talking about a close race
So yeah, I have a moral imperative to use these techniques against you
I absolutely have to because otherwise...
What's going to happen to, uh you know, my political perspective?
It's going to be drowned out completely
The... The situation is that one side is obeying a set of rules
that the other side will never respect, ever
And they will not change the rules
until the rules start smacking them in the face a few times
Two wrongs do not make a right
That's... That's... That's crazy
If... If all of a sudden the left sees
"We've got to do this because the right's been doing it"
and they start winning, then the right's going to up their game
then the left's going to up their game and the next thing you know
there is nothing about this democracy that is real
I wonder about how intense the spiral will be
I wonder if there's not something more toxic with all this
We don't know the effects of fake news
We don't know the... We don't know where this is going
It's changing by the day
It's the Industrial Revolution, but faster bigger, and maybe more consequential
We don't know where it's going
I see myself drowning
drowning in an ocean that gets bigger and bigger and bigger
I would prefer a world without fake news
But, uh, if others are using it I'm gonna use it
NBC News is reporting tonight about an apparent effort to smear Robert Mueller
The plot appeared to be the latest
and one of the more bizarre in a string of attempts
by supporters of President Trump to discredit Mr. Mueller's investigation
as a hoax, and a witch hunt
Jacob, I feel like I've known you for years I'm glad you're finally here
Yeah, yeah, absolutely
Today at the press conference, the main mission is to set the story straight
And, uh, we have to lay out, in detail the accusations of our client
This, for us, is not about infamy it's about legacy
We have to get this done, and we have to prove that Bob Mueller is a sex offender
and I think we're going to do that
We'll do that
We'll do that if we were seeking infamy and publicity
we'd be doing other things this is too hard
- Yeah, believe me - This is too hard
We put out a notice offering a reward
$25,000 reward for whistleblowers either within Bob Mueller's organization
or within the FBI, for bad stuff
We were looking for dirt on McCabe or Mueller
Jack Burkman says
he's going to bring forward a sexual assault accuser against Robert Mueller
And the accuser is going to come to this press conference
And so this obviously an explosive charge
So, he saw a lot of interest from media outlets willing to look into this
if this were something that were true
despite even the fact that these people are fringe characters
You're on, like, ten magazine covers do you know that?
- You're on the cover - Well, I... I don't know how many people
how many, uh, publications have called me a Nazi this week
I mean, geez...
Jacob Wohl is a guy who rose to fame by being an obnoxious character on Twitter
Jacob Wohl is a charlatan
who is part of the bizarro world Trumpverse information machine
He has wanted to be more important than he is for some time
You know, I think it kind of hurt Jack's case to have Jacob also involved in it
because he was already such an untrustworthy character
Any word from our gal?
Um... Yeah, yeah, she's just... She's...
No, okay, that's fine
You think she'll do it in the... You think she'll... Will she pick another day?
I think there's coin flip odds
All right... Off we go!
Let's say that she made a last-minute decision...
I'll just say, in the last 30 minutes because of threats and other things
she's made a decision not to appear today
but we're going to go over the details of her sworn statement
- She's extremely scared - Yeah
I mean, a flurry of death threats and she's... she's safe
You could say something like "We have her in a safe house"
- I'll leave all that to you - Yeah
Yeah, and just say "In the last 30 minutes"
because I'm telling all these reporters she's there, otherwise they won't come
Yeah
You know this... reporters are... They're lazy, and they're dumb
- Right - They go to Harvard, but they're dumb
- They just... They don't... - A journalism major? I mean, come on
- They're just... They're dummies - Here's how you write an article
You can learn that in about 12 minutes
- Yeah, what... What do they teach them - Yeah, exactly
Journalism...
And what the hell is this thing, here? Is this for us?
It is, uh-oh
Hang on, I've got to take a picture of this I've got to take a picture...
The bussed in a mob, it looks like
- Look at that, they bussed in... - Really...? Is that antifa...?
- Who's bussing...? - They've... They've bussed in a mob
Jesus, look at this, huh? Wow, we must rate, you know?
- Yeah, I'm... I'm Jacob - You're Jacob? Hi Jacob
I'm Adam Goldman, New York Times
Adam Goldman, that's right I think you followed on Twitter recently, or did you?
Yeah, yeah, looks like they have a rent-a-mob Soros bus here
- Is that... How do you know that? - I just saw it out the window
So that is a rent-a-mob Soros...? How... How can you say that?
I'm sitting behind Wohl, and they're like
"Ha-ha-ha, here's a Soros-funded bus bringing protestors in"
And I said to him I said, "That's just a bus"
It looks, that's what it is
- That looks... So you have no evi... - It fit the profile
- Wait, that's a good story - I said it looks like...
You have no evidence to suggest that is a Soros mob bus, but yeah, you're saying it
Sorry, you've got to be careful what you say this is just chatter between two guys
I gotcha, right, right, right
There's a bus outside, you're making a claim that it's a Soros mobster bus?
- Probably is - Probably
Then he goes and tweets it tweets a picture of the bus
He's just created fake news
You see the toxicity that ends up on Twitter
and on other social media and these guys are the creators
It offends me as a journalist
somebody who spends an enormous amount of time trying to get to the facts
that they're polluting real news
I'm on the train, Amtrak headed to DC from New York to go to this press conference
It's in the Rosslyn Holiday Inn, where Jack Burkman normally holds these things
And it comes to light that the accuser's not going to show up
"It's not surprising that this isn't panning out right"
Will, good to finally meet you I see you on Twitter all the time
Yeah, you... you as well so what's the deal? No accuser?
We're going to go right in right now
- See you in a sec... - All right, see you soon, all right...
No, what's happened she's... We'll talk about that
She's... I'll let Jacob tell you about that she's got a lot... a number of them
Okay, good idea, good idea
We're taking a handful of questions, that's the key
Now, do you want...
Gotcha, wow, boy, this is tough this is tougher than NFL gay, this is tough
Good afternoon, everyone, my name is Jack Burkman this is Jacob Wohl
There has developed, in the last week as I'm sure all of you have noticed
a rather tragic and sad backstory
that somehow I or Jacob, or others
paid, or attempted to pay some woman for coming forward
None of this is true
So, they come out with this affidavit from this woman named Carolyne Cass
The report is put together by this organization called Surefire Intelligence
And this goes online before the press conference
And so that was where a lot of people started digging
On its website, this looked like a pretty legitimate organization at first
It says that they were former spies
and things like that, that work at Surefire Intelligence
And their numbers, supposedly different bureaus around the world
And so, if you reverse search the number
it was registered to Jacob Wohl's mother
We had a reporter here who was on the phone with Jacob
and he said, "Are you sure this isn't just a front for you?"
"You're not... Surefire Intelligence is a real thing?"
And he's like, "Oh yeah, yeah don't worry about it, don't worry about it"
Well, as it turned out, pictures on Surefire Intelligence of their employees
were people like Christoph Waltz a Hollywood actor
Some models the head of Surefire Intelligence
he was a kind of shady... looking guy on his LinkedIn page, it was really dim
But someone just brightened it in Photoshop and it was just a picture of Jacob
So as people kept realizing how fraudulent Surefire Intelligence was
that was the setup for the press conference
Jacob and his firm went through
the most intense vetting of any woman in one of these situations...
and I've represented other women in these situations as you know...
that I have ever seen
And we determined that the accusation was credible, or we wouldn't be here today
First of all, I want to stress, no one is questioning Ms. Cass's account here
We didn't know her name until 20 minutes ago, okay?
We're questioning you two both very uncredible people
- And here's what I want to know... - Now why do you say we're uncredible?
You know, you had all the Seth Rich stuff - whatever
My... My question's for Jacob: Why were you shady about Surefire Intelligence?
You told one of our... our reporters you didn't run it, there was this alias
there's all these made-up people what's going on there?
The... The investigation at that point, was still in flux
and it was important that I preserve my anonymity as I moved through it
But if you want your anonymity
then why are you doing this press conference now?
Like, you could have just gone to the New York Police Department, right?
Or Ms. Cass could have gone...?
Well, a lot of that is up a lot of that is up to Carolyne
At the time, she made a decision for whatever reason
we didn't know her at the time to not... to not report it to police
But is she reporting it to police now? Like, are you going to the cops...?
Yes, we're... we're in the process of doing that now
Let me say something about
When do you expect that to be wrapped up for...
This is ongoing, this is ongoing
Probably, I would think by the end of this week
Yeah...
Or the end of next week, next Friday
Filed that... To be clear, you filed that with NYPD, correct?
We haven't... we have not done it yet
This... A lot of those decisions are up to my client, I'm just the lawyer
We... We are still in the process of gathering evidence...
The idea was that Carolyne Cass had met Robert Mueller
when she was at a hotel bar in New York a couple years ago
And she claimed that Mueller basically made her go up to his room
and sexually assaulted her, raped her
Now, there were a couple holes in this story
Probably the biggest being that there's a newspaper article
about Robert Mueller being in DC that day
because he was doing jury duty
There's an item in the Washington Post from that day
that spots him, it's one of those sightings around town columns
that shows someone saw him at jury duty on that day
Are you suggesting the Special Counsel
planted a story in the Washington Post nine years ago...?
You have information in front of you as to his whereabouts
Wait a second was he only at jury duty?
Sometimes people go to jury duty but they're also somewhere else
Was he only at jury duty?
No, it's set up... It's... Hang on, it's not funny
This is not a laughing matter
He basically literally said, someone can be in two places at once
It felt like you had left reality
and entered the right-wing media universe, like a physical version of it
Maybe I had gone through a portal
when I walked into the hotel, and ended up in this weird right-wing place
where Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl were holding court
Is the... Is the whole point of this to discredit Bob Mueller
and... and if... and if that is the case
do you really think that would shut down the Russian investigation?
That... No, the point of this is not to discredit anyone
The point of this is to get to the truth
- It's spelled with an "e" - It is spelled with an "e"?
- That's right, that's right - Wait, this... Okay...
Hang on, you'll figure it out okay, Ms. Cass is...
No, no, no, no you don't get to say that
You brought us out here tell us her name
- And all the identifying information - Her name is right below, if I need to...
You know, we go to a lot of press conferences, and they can be adversarial
You could have this back-and-forth debate during these news conferences
but you know you're dealing with genuine people on the other side
and you're just not confronted with this blatant bullshit conspiracy
And you ask yourself, "I'm a reporter I've been doing this for 20 years"
"Why am I... Why am I sitting here?"
You know, my mission here is not to establish a narrative, it's not to follow an agenda...
Wait a minute... you just established a narrative, and you put it in front of us
It's... It's... Hang on hang on, excuse me
It's to bring forth the facts and let the facts speak for themselves
- And that's what we've done - One last question, this is important...
Let me just take it... no, hold on
I want to... I want... We're gonna respond with more...
Where... Where was Mueller's security detail on the day he was hitting on this woman?
Guys, you know what? We're gonna wrap it thank you thank you all
We'll see you guys on the way out
We've done enough, guys I think that's enough for today
We have another... We have another conference coming soon
- When? - With Carolyne
As soon as we get her schedule...
You always say there's another press conference
where you're really gonna give us the...
What's going on with the Seth Rich conspiracy, by the way?
- It worked out well, because I... - Where's your witness for that?
You said you were going to bring a witness last time, and you didn't bring...?
We're... We're only here to discuss Carolyne today, not other matters...
I want to discuss your credibility
You don't have much credibility because... Your credibility
Oh, my credibility?
You bring... You said you were going to bring witnesses...?
Come on out, guys we've got some civilians...
Why can't you show us a document showing that you're representing her?
How do we... How are we supposed to know that you're representing this person?
We have no evidence
Well, we do
So it seems like he had the person first then he came to you, or what happened?
Uh... It's... We'll just say it's synergistic
We'll say... We'll leave it at synergistic
The whole thing was a circus
The only serious thing was what they were trying to do
which is slime Robert Mueller with one of the worst things they can accuse him of
He got people talking about Robert Mueller
and a sexual assault allegation in the same sentence
And they meant to tarnish Bob Mueller's reputation
to undermine his investigation into the President
What Burkman and Wohl were doing was not only knowingly dishonest
and they know that it was corrosive, and destructive
This was about throwing shit on the wall
That's all they were attempting to do to throw shit on the wall
and get somebody to write about it
They would have been very satisfied if the Time had just written, "This is nonsense"
because they would Google Jacob, and he might have come up on the top search
and... I mean, he doesn't care what context his name is used in, does he?
It doesn't seem like it
Are we trending? That's the real question, are we trending?
I'm sure we're trending
I mean, I really was offended by the whole thing
You know, I can come back to the Times and the Times trusts my judgment
and I said, "I'm not writing about this" I'm gonna do my due diligence
I'm going to go try to find this woman to see if there's any there, there
It's the same standard we would treat Kavanaugh's accuser
We need to find the victim, talk to the victim, interview the victim
and then determine if this is actually real
Uh... But I'm not writing about this news conference
Mainstream media needs to understand
that it is operating in a propaganda-rich environment
There are no two realities
There is an intentional deception on one side
and there is an honest, if imperfect process
of trying to get as near the truth as we can on the other
Today in the red chair again, in the same place
we talked two years ago is Tristan Harris
the cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology
We spent about a fourth of lives now in artificial social systems
Meaning, in these digital environments
And that's just on screen I mean, when you're offscreen
you're still thinking thoughts that came from that artificial social environment
Conspiracy theories on these...
you know, magnified by these platforms, times billions of people...
It has completely fragmented our truth
And more importantly the scale of the disinformation and misinformation
people tend to underestimate
I don't think you've had Guillaume Chaslot on the program...?
But he's the ex-YouTube Recommendations engineer
he works with us and his research showed
that... that Alex Jones was recommended 15 billion times
- Right - There's a cover-up going on
They are pulling videos of this young man, a David Hogg
he's on the fake news CNN, known for staging things
and he says over and over again
"I am not a crisis actor I am not a crisis actor"
Right-wing conspiracy theories going viral
about David Hogg, a 17-year-old Parkland shooting survivor
The unsubstantiated claims say he's a crisis actor
a trained actor who takes advantage of tragedies for political gain
Tuesday, the conspiracy went viral on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube
Were they crisis actors? I mean, I don't know
I... I think the possibility exists
That picture of Emma Gonzalez tearing what appeared to be a Constitution
Was it really a Constitution, was it...
What do I think about it? I think it's pretty disgraceful
Why would you tear up the Constitution?
Well, so, in fact that photograph was faked, it was Photoshopped
- Okay... - She... She wasn't holding up...
I gotcha, I gotcha... Knowing that that was purposely Photoshopped, and faked...
Yeah, that's more upsetting than the fact
that she was allegedly tearing up the Constitution
Facebook, it's a city without signs and police forces, and garbage
That's the city they built
What company wouldn't shut down absolutely, provable, false information?
They create the platform where it gets spread
and then are like "Agh, what can we do?"
They hide behind the First Amendment and they are not the government
They can make choices they just don't want to
To say "fake news" - in other words I don't want your news
because it's fake, is antithetical to the principles of the First Amendment
You can't say "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there's no fire
that's what Justice Holmes said
because it could lead to people being hurt
But if someone gets up and preaches revolution
and there's no imminent likelihood
that there's going to be any violence resulting from that
then that speech has to be tolerated
The First Amendment says the government can't suppress speech
But there's no reason that platforms or communities can't say
"This kind of commentary is beyond the pale"
"and people who insist on saying this are going to suffer a penalty"
They're not the federal government they're... It's not a public square
These are private entities they can do what they want
It's just more convenient to do nothing
It's more profitable to do nothing
I am worried about the future for others
Because what happened to me can happen to anyone
A more vulnerable person
or institution like Comet, would have been taken down right away
These online weapons that are directed at different people and institutions
have lasting consequences, and do destroy people
In the case of Pizzagate...
Now, to my mind, when Facebook finds something like that
they should shut it down
Why did you build tools that allow someone to do that
or allow it to iterate and iterate and iterate?
What tools could you build where that isn't iterated again and again?
White men, younger, run Silicon Valley
If you don't ever feel unsafe in your life you do not understand lack of safety
You do not build that in
I had someone at Twitter talk to me
about they had gotten attacked online the first time it happened
And they were like "Oh, that was pretty bad"
And I'm like "Welcome to the world of women"
"Welcome to the world of people of color"
"Welcome to the world of marginalized people"
This is what it's like every day
Like, if you could think of a really awful thing that could happen with your product
you need to figure out ways that it doesn't have as much damage
They have not spent enough time doing that
Oliver Darcy, from CNN
Infowars is pretty... I mean, I don't know if you've been to the page
but they pretty much make stuff up to get clicks
and generate revenue and scare people
And I... I can't understand how Facebook can say
We're serious about fighting fake news and false information
but allowing Infowars and Alex Jones to profit off of your platform
by using it to generate a lot of clicks
That was an ongoing debate that was happening about Alex Jones
When I did the podcast with Mark we were starting to talk about Alex Jones
The principles that we have on what we remove from the service are
if it's going to result in real harm real physical harm
or if you're attacking individuals then that content shouldn't be on the platform
But then there's broad debate, and...
Okay, 'Sandy Hook didn't happen' is not a debate, it is false
You can't just take that down?
I... I agree that it is false
But overall, you know, I mean let's... let's take this a little closer to home
Right, so I'm Jewish
And there's a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened
- Right? - Yes, there's a lot
I find that deeply offensive
But I... I don't believe that our platform should take that down
because I think that there are things that different people get wrong
Either...
I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong but I think that they...
In the case of the Holocaust deniers they might be, but go ahead
Holocaust deniers don't mean to lie
And I was like, "But they do"
So that... that... that, to me was sort of like
"Oh, you're not even sophisticated enough to understand that they mean to lie"
"That's the whole point"
If someone who is running the biggest communication system
in the history of the world someone who cannot be fired
someone who has complete control over that system
does not understand what he just said, it's really...
It really struck me as... It was a big "Uh-oh" moment for me
The implication that they aren't malevolent...
He knows they're malevolent
Come on, you can take them off like, it's okay
He's going to get flak for it but he gets paid the big bucks, right?
Alex Jones he is the founder of Infowars
and he is now feeling the heat himself YouTube, Facebook and Apple
all announcing they're removing his content from their platforms
What changed in that summer?
Apple did it, when Apple was like
"Eh..." You know "Enough, Basta, that's done"
Everybody else then goes
"Oh no, now if they do it, I guess it gives us cover to do it"
Apple, last night removed the entire library
of Alex Jones's podcast from their store
And then we saw... we've seen throughout the day actually
tech platforms just basically remove Alex Jones from their websites
He had been banned by most platforms, except for Twitter
And so he's now on Capitol Hill yelling about censorship
and conservatives under fire and oppression
and all of this Alex Jones stuff
And so, I was going to cover Jack Dorsey
the Twitter CEO, testifying in front of the House Committee
And I'm standing in line waiting to be led into this room
and out comes Alex Jones
Look at this, right here
The guy that goes around policing and calling for censorship
and then claims that Trump's wrong
there's no censorship of conservatives or patriots
- You are incredibly shameful - How are you doing, Alex?
You're just a... Look at you... Look... Look at him
You are literally an anti-American anti-free speech coward
You're going to go down in the history books at the Criminal News Network
This is the... one of the main...
This is one of the main people right here
He comes over and starts berating me
He sticks multiple cameras in my face
with a crowd that gathers of his right-wing supporters
Come on over here, Drew I... I want to get this guy on tape
This is unbelievable I was literally saying
I don't see the Criminal News Network here
But indeed we do, right there at the front of the line of the trough
And for about 10 to 15 minutes he is just yelling in my face
I mean, look at those eyes, folks if you want to see the eyes of a rat...
Alex Jones has chosen to latch onto Oliver as a hate figure
They'll pick people... and frankly I don't think it's an accident
that it's often a woman, or a person of color
Just look at this guy's eyes, man
That is who will rule your life
Look, I mean he's even more evil-looking...
Something to think about the decisions that you made...
The next day, Twitter bans him
And what their reasoning was to my understanding
is because he livestreamed him berating me
He used a Twitter service to do that, Periscope
It violated Twitter's rules against targeted harassment
And so, that was his last strike
That whole thing was sort of ironic
Yelling and complaining about losing his platform ended up
leading to him losing his last remaining platform, being Twitter
You're the classic, hateful vicious leftists
is what's been going on the attack people, shame on you!
You were telling lies, bro you don't know nothing
You're disgusting! You're unbelievable anti-free speech as well
You know nothing, nothing
He's a public figure in his job, in a public space
who's lied about me, and actively
full-time lobbied to have me removed off platforms, and bragged about it
And so I see a modern book-burner who also misrepresents what I've said
and I tell him that I think he's the embodiment of evil
a big corporation working behind the scenes, and publicly, to silence people
He is a book-burning monster
When I first visited Alex Jones
he told me that there were snipers on the roof
which he then called me the next day to clarify
he had made that up, and there actually aren't any snipers on the roof
His offices are in a part of Austin he doesn't want you to reveal or talk about
It's smoked windows, it's surveillance video cameras everywhere
He has a kind of genius business model
He spews out these theories
and then at the beginning and end of every program, he's selling you something
And what he sells feeds that sense of paranoia
and feeling of being besieged that a lot of his listeners and followers have
This is a guy who sells vitamin B male virility products
and special kooky foods by spreading these theories that damage people's lives
Sandy Hook, it's got inside job written all over it
These are dead children, and he put out all this false information about it
and kept saying, "It's free speech free speech," no it's not
The Sandy Hook families have been begging for years
to have this or that piece of video removed
this or that Facebook post this or that tweet
And oftentimes, they feel like that fell on deaf ears
"Deplatformed" is such a bloodless term, you know?
"I've been deplatformed" what does that even mean?
And when you talk with the families they'll say
"You know what that means to me?"
"For the first time, it means I'm not afraid to open my mail"
You know, "That I'm going to see a threat from someone"
"And that threat coming in my mailbox means they know where I live"
Just like James Alefantis, just like Seth Rich's family, they want to know...
Does the First Amendment actually protect the types of claims
that have caused us such damage, and such harm?
And you know I had one of them say, you know
"This makes me feel like, in 30 years"
"truth will be what pops up first when you search on Google"
You know, if you type "Sandy Hook" into Google
and this content isn't taken down
and the purveyors of this content aren't taken down
that the first thing you'll see is that it was a hoax
So then these people have actually changed reality
The only way to fight this sort of fake news is with the truth
I mean, I don't know of any other way to do it
You certainly don't fight it with fake news
You don't win a... that battle by um, playing their game
One of the most important targets of propaganda...
and this is true of Russian propaganda in Russia
it's true of propaganda in the United States...
is to achieve this state of disorientation
this denial of the idea that there is a truth of the matter
Challenging what is knowable is a fundamental way of upending a system
and making it impossible to govern
It's also a way to ensure that you and I can't ever come to compromise on anything
This community is really somewhere that's based in truth, and reality
An online community is one thing
But a physical place where you're playing ping-pong with someone
eating, breaking bread over the table
you're able to actually communicate with the people around you
So if someone were to say, "Wow, this crazy thing is happening, did you hear about it?"
Across the table, one might say "Oh, that thing isn't really happening"
God is going to throw you into Hell!
It is hard, still, we've been under continued threats
The daily messaging that I get now about people wanting to kill me
or that I should be dead, is you know, a hard thing to deal with
So that's just part of my life, now
But the community saved us like, it's the community
They, like, saved the restaurant, basically
and also were like "You need to open, on Monday"
And I was like... "We're not opening on Monday"
"We're... We're never opening"
Like, this... this restaurant is not going to be open again
was my thought, feeling, and response
We called a meeting of the staff and was like, "What do you want to do?"
And I said to them, you know "I can take every precaution"
We would have armed guards at the doors
Police surrounding the building
To open our pizza place, when we can
But I was like, "I don't want to really open, because I am scared"
And... You know, in my head
But I'm like, "But what do you want to do?"
And these 20-something-year-old staff was like
"We need to open"
Because Comet is not gonna be defeated, or something
Or like, this community needs us
So we were able to open because they... wanted to
And the support of this community who also were calling the restaurant saying
"We want to come there right now"
Like, a gunman has come through and literally they're calling being like
"When can we bring our kids to have pizza? You can't close"
Like, it's a simple recipe
It's family, community and truth, like that's what... That's why we're here
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