Free Speech, Election Lies, and the Fight Against Misinformation

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We got one for you tonight. I'm not even praying we got one for you tonight. Bill and Day, our founder of PolitiFact, he'll be here on the program. But first, you may have noticed it's October, the month we name for the Roman goddess optimum. Obviously, you may not believe it's October because the Mets are still playing basically, God, I love them so much. Now an election years, October

Could the infamous October surprise in this year's election actually be coming from overseas.

Hurricane Helen affecting at least two battleground states. This to me might be The October surprise is a spike at.

The pump, the October surprise that no one wants.

Why our October surprises always so shitty? Why do we never get a good October surprise and October surprise that brings our country together? Oh, ladies and gentlemen, no one saw this October surprise coming this close to the election. But Pesto and MoU Dang are dating who it's an October surprise. By the way, that picture is to scale. That penguin is the size of a hippopotamus. Not shaming, just saying, but it's a period of the campaign went.

October is now started out very good for Republicans. This debate, chaos in the Middle East, the port strike, and of course the cleanup in North Carolina. This is something obviously in October. If this continues, that's going to bode well for Republicans.

Oh if monkey pox runs amuck, I don't see how we lose. What does it actually say about a party that a war, a strike, and a natural disaster work in their favor sir. The elections close, but if we could just get the population shell shocked and desperate, we can do it. Of course, most people would say these world events happening close to the election are not related or intentional. Most people would say that some people what.

Person Marjorie Taylor Green.

She posted a map on Acts showing areas affected by Hurricane Helene with an overlay of an electoral map, saying it shows how hurricane devastation could affect the election. An hour later, she posted this, and I quote, yes, they can control the weather. It is ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it cannot be done.

Is this the space lazer thing? Again? Jews don't control the weather. If we could control the weather, don't you think we'd make Florida less humid? We retire there, here's your think that you can you do something about. My bulls are stuck to my thigh. But there was an October surprise this weekend that I did not see coming, and that surprises this Elon Musk has ups.

This rocket company is the only reason we can now send American astronauts into state.

Come here, take over Elide, Yes, take over, but.

Bye e'xactly like a guy who won a radio contest. No, I can't believe I get to beat on the washer driver. The world's richest man and one of the most popular people on social media. He's got two hundred million followers completely organically on his flatfor you know, because of how interesting his sweets are, like things like hmmm and interesting and FEMA is shutting down airspace to stop people from bringing help. Yeah, he tweets that. Anyway, He's October Surprises.

As you can see, I'm not just maga.

I'm dark, mega dark Maga. I didn't know it came in flavors. I wonder if for the holidays they'll come out with a peppermint balk maga or pumpkin spice maga. I like my maga like I like my coffee filled with chemicals that trink Your taste puts into thinking you're drinking autumnal food. I don't know what my accent was. Now you might think one of the world's richest men controlling one of the world's most influential platforms could be

Former President Trump alleging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will try to unlawfully influence the twenty twenty four election, writing if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

That's why he'll be in prison, Not for falsely promising me a beautiful life in the metaverse, oh JS sixty nine four twenty.

The life we could have led.

Now. Zuckerberg did give four hundred million dollars to organizations for voting infrastructure during the pandemic, and a good portion of that money did go to Democratic precincts. And Donald Trump did lose the election. So election interference but not illegal. And obviously Musk isn't going to do anything like that. Elon Musk is offering hourly pay to anyone willing to

Oh shit, he's giving everybody forty seven million dollars. When Trump finds out, when I think of the prison, Donald Trump is going to send that sweet jumping bean of a genius too.

It kills me. When Trump finds out about this, it's not going to be pretty.

How good a guy is Elon Musk, right, you sall, I'm bless us?

How good? What the fuck?

Wait?

That's not election interference because he's for you? Well, what else do you think is election interference?

The Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice does not always portray Donald.

Trump in a flattering light, and the Trump campaign threatened to sue its filmmakers.

Calling the film pure fiction and election interference.

Oh, come on, that's election interference. Maybe it's election in afference. But you've got to be a little bit flattered that you're being played by Sebastian Stan. I may, oh, Sebastian, if you are the Winter Soldier, why is it suddenly so warm in here? I look like Sebastian Stan. If you were to put his face through one of those filters on TikTok that show your appearance right before you die, it's yeah, you can applaud that. That's fine.

I'm not.

I know what I look like. But what about Big Tech Donald Trump? Surely they're not sitting this out.

Critics accused Big Tech of election interference, as Amazon's Alexa gave favorable reasons to vote for Kamala Harris but not for Donald Trump.

Alexa, why should I vote for Donald Trump?

I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate.

Alexa, why should I vote for Kamala Harris?

Well, there are many reasons to vote for Kamala Harris. The most significant may be that she is a woman of color who has overcome numerous obstacles to become a leader in her field.

Okay, I'll give you that one.

That one.

No, that is tough. That is tough. I'm not sure Alexa is really influential enough for it to be considered election interference.

But oh, I don't think I need a lecture from mister Monday Nights.

Yeah, that's fair. I was just I was just trying to make the point that that's not what people should use Alexa for. That's reminds me of Alexa. Could you activate the bidet?

That's good. That's a good tech, so does don't.

Sometimes the ship's even too dumb for me. By the way, none of the stuff that we're talking about is an election interfeppearance. Yet Trump has threatened almost all of them with either imprisonment, lawsuits, or censoring, which is why this one section of this weekends rally in Pennsylvania was so striking. When Elon Musk was discussing why he supports Donald Trump.

The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech. You must have free speech in order to have democracy. That's why it's the first Amendment, Elon.

Were you not watching the rest of the show. A movie Trump doesn't like is gonna get sued. A tech mogul he doesn't like he wants to put in prison. It's not free speech if only Trump's admirers get to do it without consequence alone. I don't going to go that way. I don't see how his support of free speech is exposed the belly worthy.

I just don't.

But at least the Constitution remains intact and is there to ensure that we have the first Amendment.

The second Amendment is there to ensure that we have the first Amendment.

Guns don't protect our free speech. Our free speech is protected by the consent of the governed, laid out through the Constitution. It's not based on the threat of violence. It's based on elections. Organizing referendums and judicial system. Our social contract offers many, many avenues to remedy these issues and allows sides to be heard and adjudicated. Guns, from what I can tell, seem to mostly protect the speech of the people holding the gun. It's a tool of intimidation,

When we come back, Bill a dare or go away?

What about that? Mary Show My Death Tonight is the creator of PolitiFact and the Knight Professor of Journalism at Duke University. His new book is called Beyond the Big Lie. Please welcome to the program, bel adare certain.

There?

The book is Beyond the Big Lie? Look PolitiFact? When did you create PolitiFact.

Two thousand and seven and so right before the for the two thousand and eight election.

And the idea is it's sort of a repository of fact checkers for political speech. How did you decide what would be included in what you would decide to check?

Sure?

So, the whole idea is to answer people's curiosity. If you hear a politician make a statement and you wonder is that true? Those are the things that PolitiFact checks, I mean, and ultimately that's what journalism is all about. To answer people bull's curiosity, if they're wondering what's true and what's not.

That's what PolitiFact fact checks.

And you had ratings it was true, partly true, false or partly false false, and pants on fire.

And pants on fire and that and that was you know, fact checking had been around before PolitiFact, yes, but what distinguished PolitiFact was the truth ameter, which rated things, as you said, and we did.

With the technological advance of the exactly and we did win a Pulitzer Prize really for when It's on fire.

It sounds funny when you put it that way, but but the reason is that there's solid journalism behind it, right, and it's so important. And I think that people realized that even back then, politics was getting complicated and people were really beginning to wonder what was true, and PolitiFact and other fact checkers filled that void in an important way.

Now, this is all in some ways you might look back on it and think, oh, how quaint. We went through an analog and we would talk about whether it was partly true or true, and we created a truthometer. And then social media comes along and it turns into this digital misinformation age where they talk about, you know,

Well, I think what you're alluding to is the original truth ameter used vacuum tubes and that.

That was a way truth of meter for those of you who at home that is copyright. Don't think you can just put up You can't just put up your own truth ameter or truthometer as I incorrectly called it earlier.

You know, but you're very right. I mean, the.

Fact checking has struggled to keep up with the many ways that politicians and others spread lies. And I and in the book what I talk about is and the point of the book is to explore how and why politicians lie. And one of the things that I get at is that they're doing it in lots of different places that fact checkers are struggling to keep up with. And they're doing it with these huge megaphones that fact checkers can't with their current staffing adapt to.

So so and.

With malice of forethought. As they might say on Court TV, this isn't happen since misinformation has been weaponized as to a large extent in this digital age.

Absolutely, and you know we're seeing it in North Carolina with the hurricane as you alluded to earlier. But fact checkers have to get more assertive in how they respond and think more digitally.

So one of the things that does.

That mean AI, Like when you say things more digitally? Are you talking about taking this making it less bespoke and creating kind of AI context overlays for these types of things.

So that's one way.

So I think the the atomic unit of fact checking I think.

Will be for the foreseeable future.

A creating your own metric system over there.

The atomic unit of fact checking, I think humans will will be needed to create fact checks. We hear what's wrong, we need to research it, we need to respond to it. But yes, AI can be used to spread it more efficiently to broader audiences, to be more responsive. So two ways that we've done that at Duke we helped we worked with the Duke Duke University.

I've heard it's a safety school. I've heard very very very poor.

Things So two things we've done with our team that Duke is to We worked with the tech companies to create a standard so that fact checkers could label their fact checks. It's called claim review, and it allows them when they publish something to put this tag on so that tech companies, search engines, social media platforms can.

Funding the housekeeping seal to some extent of.

It's really what it is is like a street sign that says this is a fact check on this person, on this claim, and claim review helps helps find that fact.

Check if you're simple, so that Google.

Can then say, oh, here's a fact check and could use it in powerful ways.

So that's why.

Keeps thee information from being let's say, laundered throughout the internet, which is oftentimes what happens people lose attribution potentially.

I can't speak for Google, but that's something they could do. But now here's an other way that we're excited about. We call it half baked pizza. So the idea, so I'm just gonna send it right here.

This is Duke University. Well this isn't just like Duke's fact checking lab and pet repository like, well, it's half baked Pizza.

Index it's a safety school, Faro. So, but let me tell you about half big pizza. So what we want to do? So fact checkers have a problem in the United States. There are not enough fact checkers in many, many states. We studied this and we found huge what we call fact deserts, places where governors, members of Congress are never fact checked. They can see anything they want, and they're never held responsible.

Right, those are the twenty four hour cable news networks.

So how can we hold them responsible? So often they repeat the same talking points in Arizona that are being fact check in Florida. So can we use AI to monitor what they're saying in Arizona and duplicate a fact check from Florida using genitive AI, but adapt it to the claim in Florida. So we've been experimenting with that. Why do we call it half baked pizza?

Please? I was going to act.

The idea is that if you have a claim that's been done, say by PolitiFact, you need to review it by a human editor. So I think of that like half baked pizza. The chef looks at that pizza that's not quite ready to go in the oven and says, yep, the pepperonis are in the right place. There's enough cheese. Yeah, it's got enough sauce. Okay, the half baked pizza is ready to go in the oven. So that's our product. We're trying to get funding for it. We think it could be the answer.

Your question when you came up with this, had you had lunch that day? But this gets us all right, So this gets us to the larger point. All right, So we've got this idea of fact checking, but I think the public solid fact checking, objective FactCheck that has to be an earned trust with an audience, right, because we really aren't a balance of it's misinformation. But then

The Disinformation Governance Board? The worst name any government agency has ever been given.

So it does the name itself conjures up Orwellian bureaucratic standards. The right gets a hold of that, tweets it out. Forty eight hours later, the whole thing is blown to shreds. So it shows how difficult it is for even this idea of creating that mechanism to take hold in a country where misinformation is weaponized. Four partisan purposes.

Sure, so how do you balance them? So let's be clear about so. I focus on Nina Jankowitz for several reasons. One, I wanted to show someone who is victimized by lying. Here's someone whose life was turned upside down because of these lives who face death threats, who had trouble getting work afterward.

And the speed of which it went from Twitter or somebody tweeted it out to the right wing mainstream media thing and people were brutal to her.

Yes, Now it's important to point out this organization was an internal working group that was designed to coordinate what the Department of Homeland Security agencies did to combat disinformation. It was not out to do the things that the liar said about it, so.

It was not there. The purpose was not to then contact Facebook and Twitter and say you must remove this, we don't agree with.

It, correct.

But the reason that there's so much misunderstanding about this group is that the government, the Biden administration, did a terrible job explaining what it was supposed to do, and so this story they hung her out to draw they did, and the story of Nina is the story is really a really depressing story, although it has moments of humor

Now does it show the limits of fact checking? Because in the story, look the warmin homeland securities that don't say anything, and so they let this thing go until it built up a kind of you know, event horizon situation, and it was all blown up. But when Maria Ressa says something like a lie travels eight times faster than the truth, doesn't that mean the truth has to work

So in this case, there were no fact checks done or there was one, right, I do think, you know, the government is a culprit here in this case, and it's it's very sad to watch how the government doesn't do anything. But I think in combating misinformation and disinformation, the government needs to step up and be upfront about facts. And this is something you know. I've been an aviation reporter in the past. I've been a political reporter in

Boy do they not do that? Well, I wonder, what do you think you know? COVID is a great example. So as we play this all out, we talk about misinformation and trying to counter it and the weaponization of it. But when the government, as you said, doesn't know something, but come out with certainty, one hundred percent say and effective.

Well, one, I don't think they should be an adjudicator of misinformation. I think they should just tell us what they know and what they don't know. And often it takes courage for people and entities to say we're not sure. And a classic example this week is the hurricane like for the National Hurricane Center to say, well, here's where we think it's gonna go, but you know, we were not positive. You know, that's always been built into hurricane predictions.

Right, Yeah, and that and and that can take the whole thing. So when we when we look at the big lie and how it's been weaponized so effectively, you right, more by the right than by the left. You know, you've taken criticism because you fact check more people on the right, or you say they lie more, Yes, and better.

They're very good at it.

Yes, but you've done it. I mean it's in here. There's a statistical annalysis.

Yes.

What what I did for the book was look at fact checks by politifacted by the Washington Post fact checker, and then talk to I think the most revealing thing was when I talked to Republican politicians and said why does your party lie more?

And it was really revealing the answers.

I just said like, hey, why do you guys lie more? And they're like, good question, Yeah, there's something deeply wrong with us.

Yeah, well, these are for the most for the most part, people who have left the Republican Party and who will acknowledge this truth.

But you know, they have a partisan.

Media that not only looks the other way when they lie, but but echoes their lies and often has a business model built upon their lives.

And so you begin with that.

Then you have a culture in the Republican Party that many people told me goes back to many people put it with Newt Gingrich is sort of the turning point really, that that nude Gingrich sort of changed the culture of the Republican Party and and changed it into a sort of anything goes Hey, if if we're gonna win, let's you know you can you can change the fact.

By any means necessary.

Yes, right, And that culture took hold. Now some people dated earlier, and Roger and er and I was just gonna say, and Roger Al's and.

Maybe money is not even the point. You know. Roger Ail's who was the founder of Fox News, very famously said during Watergate, I'm going to create an apparatus so that what the left did to Nixon, they viewed any sort of press as the left. What they did to Nixon you can never again do to another Republican candidate or president. And quite frankly, I think has been successful.

And you know, combine all those things, you have a recipe for lying and support for lying. That has just become a culture.

Now, are you suggesting the left doesn't lie or doesn't weaponize it to the point where it's as effective.

I am there's there's.

Definitely a substantial amount of lying from the left, sure, but nowhere near as much as from the right.

I've gotten, if I may, I've gotten a couple of pants on fires from you over the years, like literal pants on fires, like not even like slightly untrue. Like there was one where I think the tagline is there's mother lying. I think it's that on it. It's a terrible situation of it. I went home that night shamed.

But see, okay, there's the difference.

And I would have accepted that from an Ivy League school.

But from Duke, from Dukes.

At long last, beyond the big line, it's a fascinating look on misifotion.

You's got it.

October fifty, The Veriti, the Order, Villa There, Ridicular Grace.

That's our show.

But tonight, but before we.

Go, we are gonna check in with your host for the rest of the week, Jordan Conference Nation.

I'm come on, come on, come on, Jordan, do it Corn, come on listen?

Yeah, yeah, yes, yes, well yes, so excited her, very excited about.

Uh, very excited about hosting this week.

Hippie.

We talked about this, Jordan. You gotta do the jumping.

Come on, John, John is comparracy.

I'm thinking for you.

I don't.

I'm science serious, serious.

Come don John.

This week, Michael, I'm going along in the crap done.

Hollo.

Hello, Hello, held it a.

Moment in time. I don't like flies.

Get out of here flying.

Never been a big fan of flies.

You don't mind my bringing that up, do you?

Anyway?

This is a very aggressive sucker, that is this one.

This run in particular is very aggressive, like I'm going to be aggressive for our country, you can probably say.

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