You're listening to Later with Mo Kelly on demand from KFI A M six forty.
Now key.
Social media, Facebook gets to x, TikTok, viralde.
Off, viral load, viral load.
For viral load, BARLOONDI may.
KF I am six forty. I guess we can say it now. It's Later with Mo Kelly. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, We're live on YouTube. It's nice to see you, Tiffany Hobbs. Let's get to the viral load. Okay, good evening everyone.
Well.
Viral stories are essentially shaping the face of the news as we've seen it play out since from I would say Friday seemed to be the kickoff of this immigration raid and protest kind of cacophony across the news media. And these viral stories involve a lot of people creating content, some based in rumor, some based in fact, but all absolutely being shared across different mediums to not only share information about what's going on, but also to alert people
they feel could be subjected to these immigration raids. One of the things that I did on Friday was actually create my own form of content. On Friday, I went into the protest zone in downtown LA, because I live close to where the kind of kickoff of these protests happen at the Edward R. Royball Federal Building where c SEI President David Whetta was being held.
He's since been.
Really you heard, I told the story yesterday about doing federal grand jury.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So right there, right there, right there, So drove right there. That's Alameda and Commercial. It's just south of Temple Street. Right there in the Olvera Street zone, in the Federal District zone right there is where everything kicked off. So just to let you guys know what I did, I drove into this zone and just wanted to, out of my own curiosity, see what was going on with my own eyes, drove in. It was largely uneventful
at the time. I got in, saw a lot of protesters. There, saw a kind of a main stage where there was someone who at the time was leading speeches and chants and encouraging people to continue to be positive and to be peaceful. That was interesting to me because while the crowd appeared largely peaceful and uneventful, there were the signs, There were the call in response chants, there were you know,
marches that lasted a few blocks in distance. The response to that by LAPD was massive, and you saw LAPD on Friday, this is around six pm, just as this all was starting because of what had happened in Paramount earlier in the afternoon, because of what had happened in
the Westlake district in downtown earlier Friday afternoon. You saw this increasing police presence at the entrances and exits to the one oh one and five freeway interchange there, and you saw these police cars lined up with their officers standing outside in front of the cars, holding the batons
in full shields and full padded everything. It looked to be what people are describing on social media as a militarized response, and that militarized response was in in tandem with what was happening, but it looked to be, in my opinion, kind of an overreach, if you will, given what I experienced while I was there on Friday. Like I said, there was chanting, there was marching, There were people who were highly emotional, There were people on foot,
there were people in cars. There were flags of all different country backgrounds and affiliations. But at that time people were joined by how peaceful they were committed to being now Saturday, I was on air, and Saturday seemed to be when things changed a bit. You still had the protests going on in Paramount, you still had things going
on around the city, including in downtown LA. But while I was on air for Saturdays with Tiffany, right around five point thirty pm, we got a notification that there was a black Hawk helicopter landing in Paramount, and social media went crazy with their sightings, with their accounts, their first hand accounts, their shared accounts of what they were seeing. And there's one social media influencer who went especially viral.
His name is Harry Sisson's. He considers himself to be an influencer who leans a little to the left, I would say, And his post was sharing about that black Hawk helicopter landing in Paramount. It was seen by one point five million people at the time.
Don't run past that it's a black Hawk black Hawk helicopter, yeah, which connotes a very militarized idea in the middle of the city.
Absolutely, so, this helicopter lands in Paramount as a response to the protest in Paramount and Compton at the time, right there on the border there of Paramount and Compton. There's a Department of Homeland Security office right there in that zone, and the Blackhawk helicopter landed there and was seen unloading ammunition, less lethal rounds, tanks, all sorts of
things that were very militarized. And the person's account of that, Harry Sisson, this influencer, his shared post again shared by millions of people, seen by millions of people, really did shape how people were seeing the events of Saturday unfold.
I'm on air, I'm reporting about this, I'm seeing things on the news, I'm seeing things in social media, and you start to really feel kind of this ground swell of information immerse and like I said in the beginning of this, some fact, some rumor, but all of it was geared toward informing people all around southern California of where immigration and customs enforcement might strike.
Next Part two of the viral load. Tiffany hops in just a moment.
It's Later with mo Kelly KFIM six forty Live everywhere on YouTube and the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to Later with mo Kelly on demand from KFI AM six forty.
K if I AM six forty is Later with mo Kelly Live everywhere in the iHeartRadio app. Let's continue with the viral load and Tiffany hops.
From Friday until today, there have been lots of posts across social media, and that's what we're talking about, how imagery and videos are really shaping these immigration protests, these anti ice protests since they started on Friday in downtown LA in the Westlake District. So what I've seen personally and you might have as well, is an abundance of posting across different neighborhood or community apps. You have apps like the Citizen app, which usually documents crime of the
small or larger variety. Well, Citizen has certainly been inundated with thousands of posts since Friday about ice sightings, about purported ice detainments, about all sorts of warnings for community members who could be directly affected by what's happening with immigration and customs enforcement. The same can be said for next door, where neighbors share directly with each other about
what's happening in their neighborhood. And you've had neighborhoods from the South Bay all the way up into Ventura County, and as well the ring Slash Neighbors app, which is probably one of the newest entries into the viral scene of news sharing, and that's what I want to focus on for a moment, because I have the Ring app. That's that device you can put on your door to monitor. It's a camera device. You know, it's security and they have their own app attached to it so you can
share information. And since Friday, I've seen hundreds of posts across the Neighbors app with people simply asking what's going on? What are those loud noises. People have been asking about the flash bang noises. People have been asking how to respond to tear gas or any other sort of chemical inhalent that they might come into contact with. People have been asking how to avoid going into areas. Most recently,
people are asking about the curfew. What does the curfew mean if you are on the edge of the boundary like I find my self being. And that then brings me back to my own personal experience with living near the directly affected impact zone of this one mile or one square mile radius where this curfew is now underway.
I live just outside of it, but because I am close to it, we have absolutely started to see protest activity or hear of possible protest activity coming into our neighborhood as they are being pushed out of downtown LA.
I went back on Sunday.
Remember I started this by saying that I visited the zone, the protest zone, that's what I'm calling it, there at the Federal Building on Friday when all of this just started, and it was fairly quiet. It's fairly uneventful. Emotional, yes, but not violent. Going back Sunday was a different experience altogether. I found myself in the middle of the same zone on Sunday with about the same amount of people, a
few hundred. The counts are up to one thousand. I didn't see a thousand people, not to say that that wasn't that they weren't present, but in where I was, there were a few hundred people. And we ended up driving along the one on one North just to kind of be looky lose because the one on one North was open. The one on one South at the time was closed. And when we got right there to the closure area of the one on one kind of five interchange, you did see quite a few squad cars with damage.
You did see, and these are parked on the freeway. You did see people on the overpasses and at the time we didn't see any projectiles, we saw evidence of something having happened. So we circled back around, came back into the zone right by Alva Street, right there, cross from Union Station, if you will, and that's when things really took a turn and got got hairy, got a little dangerous. So we're in a vehicle and there are
people walking everywhere, there are cars moving through. Were pointed westbound looking at the one oh one freeway right by. I think that is hmm, I don't remember West Street. It's just west of Alameda. And as we're sitting there, we're in traffic and we're stuck. We can't move, we're monitoring. Things are tense, but we didn't feel like we were in any danger. We really felt the emotion of the crowd until we started to see people run, and then we
felt the panic of the crowd. People started running northbound on this street that's a north and southbound street, and they were covering their faces. You know what that means. That means in the way that they were covering their faces wasn't to obscure their identity. No, it was to be able to breathe. And people started yelling and screaming that there were tear gas canisters that were deployed and people were now inhaling all of this tear gas that
was fastly approaching our vehicle. We're in the car, we can't move now, we're not documenting now, We're right in the thick of things, and we have to make a decision to get out of there to be safe. So we rolled up the windows closed all the events. People were literally kind of sliding over the hood of the car to get out of the way. It was a melee and people were running for I imagine at the time what they thought were their lives because they were
certainly panic stricken. So we were able to navigate get out of there, did not sustain any damage luckily to any vehicles. We did see the remnants of the way mos that were still there that had happened earlier that day on Sunday, and we got out of there. We spent about an hour driving around the zone because of traffic, just to take pictures. And that's what this entire protest has been largely about documentation, documentation and sharing and posting
of what people are seeing. There are a number of images that have been picked up by the AP, by CNN that have been circulated, and these images are going to go down in history. They'll be on the cover of magazines and the cover of newspapers for years to come because they have become iconic imagery associated with this
latest round of protests. And the main objective, the main focus of these pictures that I've seen circulating, is to show that the protesters, the people involved, are proud, at least from my vantage point, to be here, but that they want equality and that they want representation, and that they do not want the representation of immigration and customs enforcement in their neighborhoods. That's what the flags say, that's or what they what they denote, That's what the.
Posters are all saying.
And it definitely will be a time in which the chronicling on social media will continue to shape the narrative.
Fantastic recap. I'm glad that you're safe. You're a dancy safe. But you know, it's one thing watching on TV.
It's another thing to experience it and see it up close, you know, for the safety of your home. It's one thing, yeah, but when you see it and feel it, completely.
Different experience and if I may I do discourage people from going down there with their curiosities. Now's not the time the curfew is in effect. We're not planning to do that, even though I'm media, because it's it's just not wise.
It's not wise.
You don't want to catch a rubber bullet.
Don't want to catch a rubber bullet.
Definitely saw them being deployed upon people, and there were people who were agitating the officers and who did not look to be at all involved with any sort of anti ice mission. They seem to have their own agenda, as we see with these sorts of protests. Professional agitator, professional agitators.
You're listening to Later with mo Kelly on demand from KFI AM six forty.
If I AM six forties Later with Mo Kelly Live everywhere in the iHeartRadio app and on YouTube having a spirited conversation in Motown amongst the momigas. If you want to join in, get on YouTube at mister Mokelly. I would recommend that you like and subscribe. It makes it easier for you to find it next time. Let's say you want to get into Motown and you forgot where it is, It'll just come right up on your YouTube
liked selection, so it's easy to find. Also, we have a live link there, so you just click on that. You don't have to worry about whether it's the correction. You know what, I feel like, I'm in the mood for an extended version of the viral load, and I know, Tiffany Hobbes, there are probably some other things going on,
maybe in general social media, things that you might have seen. Well, put it this way, let me just tell you if you've seen the same things that I've seen, I see that social media is now an agent to try to shape how we perceive the news in the moment that
it's happening. I noticed that when we were going through what the protests were going to become, you could see that if there were two sides as far as trying to depict it a certain way, LA is burning down or it's a completely nonviolent protests.
Do you remember with the fires, when all of those memes went out on social media and people around the country would check in with you to see and make sure that the entire city of Los Angelis was not on fire and that you weren't affected because the pictures that were going out were it was like a map of California and you would see flames all over it that someone generated and shared and it would go viral. And that's the narrative that people ran with if they
didn't know any better. Same thing with these protests. And because there are people on the ground, and because everyone has a phone in their hands, they're able to control the story, to write the story as it's happening, to dispel any sort of myth, or dispel any sort of stereotyping or anything that's not to their advantage.
And that's on both sides.
And also I've seen that we have a generation of people, it's not my generation. I would say it's thirty and younger, who get all of their news or the perception of the world in which they live, and they view it through the prism of social media. You know, the people that they trust, the influencers who they follow, or the things that they see without necessarily knowing how to verify
the authenticity, they just kind of run with it. And so you have this belief system running through cyberspace of a given event, which may or may not be accurate, and oftentimes breaking news happens in such a way that not even traditional news can.
Keep up with it absolutely.
Take TikTok for instance, there's an entire generation of people under twenty one, probably even younger than that, who are going to TikTok especially for their news. And this news is in its minutia. It's minute by minute, very detailed. But because it's coming out and you've set this a number of times, MO, it's something that I really live by now. It's important not to be first, but to be correct and to be accurate. All of this news that's coming out is not going through an ac recive filter.
It's just out there and people then have to parse through and use their media literacy to kind of figure out what's right and what's not. And because TikTok is the most popular one for kids, there's a lot of fear mongering going on right now where the posts are coming out and they're really scaring people.
And I talk about that, and I was arguing.
I was doing Cissen McCain, which is the video podcast of Megan McCain, and I was in pitch battle with their chat group who was not in La, Yes, who was determined to tell me what was actually going on in LA And I'm trying to tell people now I was born, was like, I live seven miles from downtown. Yes, okay, I drive through downtown every single day. There's nothing you can tell me about what's happening in LA from the privacy of your home in Arizona or Chicago. And they
were trying to say, well, I saw this, I saw that. Yes, but you don't know that Santa Anna is forty two miles from downtown LA.
That has nothing to do with the city of La or Karen both. You lack scope of perspective.
Yes, in context.
It's funny you say that because those people who are arguing with you, they just want to be right. They want to be right, and they want to be first of the information, and they just want to, you know, kind of put you in your place as a journalist.
Absolutely.
And then there are the.
People whose intentions are a lot less nefarious. Your cousin from Wyoming or your aunt in my case from New York. It's just checking on me to make sure that I am not you know, having tear gas rain down upon me just in my every waking moment.
Yeah, And talking about social media, it's not uncommon if you're on meta Facebook, specifically that if there is something large enough dangerous enough, Facebook will ask you if you want to mark yourself safe.
Yes, never happened.
Never happened, because it never rose to that level. It's unnecessary.
And those of a who live here, especially those of us who live in close proximity like myself to what's going on, we know that it is a very small section of a huge city that's affected. And even within those boundaries, what was happening was sensationalized because these images
were being circulated over and over again. So it seems, certainly if you're on the outside, like things are just burning down and there are just thousands of cars on fire on the freeway, when in reality that wasn't the case.
I have to find this.
Thread that someone sent to me, which was so perfect in its formulation. I hope I can find it soon enough. But oh here it is media literacy tip. Just because you see one thousand pictures of the same car on fire doesn't mean that one thousand car cars are on tap exactly.
I didn't see that, but that's exactly what I'm saying.
We're and people who are not media literate or savvy, they don't know the difference between live and be role. They don't, And b roll is something which may be played in perpetuity again and again and again, and you see it at seven o'clock. You may see it from a slightly different angle at eight thirty or nine o'clock, but it's the same b roll.
And the algorithm is being shaped by what people are posting. So if people in a certain region are posting all about the same thing, and those things are being then shared in other areas of the country, the algorithm will shape itself to show you more of that same content.
So whereas you might see your kittens and your puppies and your other things on your timeline on a normal day, because your timeline is flooded with this information, that's what is going to be shown to you, because there's engagement there.
When I was talking about when I was on earlier today, I hope to get some clips. When I was on Citizen McCain talking to Megan McCain, trying to explain not to straight to her, but more her audience that when you say La most people who are not from California don't know the distinction between La City and La County. No, they don't and they don't know that Santa Ana is in a different city, different county, forty two miles away from downtown. They don't know that Paramount is twenty two
miles from downtown. As far as they're concerned, it's the same city because it's connected to the same story.
One of the things that I've enjoyed is that people who are local to LA or have some accurate knowledge of our landscape of our mapping, have been sharing maps showing specifically where the protest zone is with a circle encasing the zone, so that people can have perspective about the size of LA and LA County and southern California as a region versus this one square mile that's impacted.
If you happen to live in let's say Philadelphia, the size the geographic size of LA, you could easily go from Philhiladelphia to New York, or you could go from Washington, d C.
To Pittsburgh.
Geographically that is smaller distance than going from one side of LA County to the other side of LA County.
It is it is, and the zone itself takes you, with no traffic, ten minutes to get around that one square mile.
And there's a lot within that one square mile.
That again is affected a lot of businesses that are closing early to accommodate the curfew.
A lot's happening, but not only the things which were not impacted.
And I said this last night, I want to say it again.
You know, the most active day, for lack of a better phrase, was Monday, and you have the BT Awards, you had the Sparts game, and the people downtown.
There was a marathon in Inglewood and in the evening people were going to Arawan and Whole Foods on the West side like nothing was happening. I'm driving in close proximity proximate. Yeah, the city was still moving. Everything was still going on as normal. You have people at La Live enjoying La La, you know. And that's that is our relationship to protests. We are a city primed for these sorts of movements and we are used to them.
So most of us who have been here for any length of time aren't really moved in a way that the rest of the country and people outside of La Are.
And the city did not in any way shut down. This city did not. It still hasn't shut down. No, you can't go within that one square mile area downtown, but pretty much has been life is usual, with the exception of maybe some freeway blockages. In other words, where it impacts you as a non participant, non direct observer.
Skid Row is still skid rowing as we talk. They're still down there doing their stuff as if nothing's going on. So you know, if you look at that demographic, match it up or pair it up with the fact that you won't be able to necessarily order from your favorite restaurant in Little Tokyo after a certain amount of time. But the city, as you're saying, is still operating practically in a normal way, say for a few hours.
To wrap this up in a social media context, social media does not often care about context or provide context. If you see a photo of two way moos burning, that is going to be interpreted as complete control, chaos and anarchy. And when you're talking about one half of one street.
Yeah, three cars, four cars, and not that that's any way to be minimized because it was not good, but it is not reflective of the response.
Yeah, the context is key, And if you really want to dispute that, I just want you to go ahead and look up the Dodger celebration of twenty twenty four when they set a metro bus.
On a fire.
Yeah, I mean what a couple of weeks ago there was a takeover I believe in downtown LA or East somewhere. Yeah, and yeah, they took that bus over and that was a lot more violent and problematic than any of the incidents have been.
And then you conflate, Yes, I know, I got to go to break.
Then you conflate because this has been going on for five or six days, that somehow the chaos has been across.
The five or six days, and that's just not true.
We've had two nights of curfews, nothing but violations of curfew arrest for the most part. Yeah, for the most part. That's it, which is good news. KFI AM six forty alive everywhere, the iHeartRadio
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