YouSaid · the spoken record

Emily Bell

lines on the record: 77
first: 2020-05-27
most recent: 2020-05-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And it cost them $2,000, and now they're going to make another one, which is all about the science underlying clandening. And this is where you have this really weird kind of spectrum that goes from just pure grifting, just making cash out of people's ignorance up to state disinformation and manipulation and really sort of deciding where one turns into the other is incredibly hard these days. I think that that's another thing which has changed, which is because so many people are now jumping on these things to make money, you get this blend of all kinds of different actors all on the same types of campaign.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it uses very sort of similar tactics of, again, pushing on kind of like influencer buttons, getting a hashtag that's, you know, that's very catchy, getting people to see it. And then, of course, the kind of platforms of acted and said, oh, we must take this down. But by that point, it's kind of too late in a way because people are like, we want to see the video. So this kind of cat and mouse with taking material off platforms has also become part of the strategy, which is if you can get something taken down, you can prove your conspiracy. So the folks with their... Arrest Bill Gates signs in Australia have watched the pandemic movie and it was made for like $2,000. This is the other thing. The person who made it is a marketer.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pandemic is, I think, the one that everybody is talking about, which is this, I'm not going to call it documentary, but it's a documentary style film with a doctor, a credible doctor, who is actually not a credible doctor if you then research her background. She effectively has had her research pretty kind of comprehensively debunked and it fits in all of these conspiracies about how this has been seeded, how it's deliberate, the plan aspect of this is important. And this has been viewed hundreds of millions of times. It's really like you might remember the Stop Coney campaign, which is maybe kind of like one of the earliest examples of this that was about, I don't know when that was, Phil, it was Years ago, something like”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there are stories. We did a survey of seven country survey about where we asked people where they thought COVID had originated, and just almost a quarter of people, including the US and the UK, a quarter of people thought the virus had originated in a lab. And that's sort of an old meme, but it's part of a bigger conspiracy story that somebody's out to get us or somebody's producing this, somebody's targeting African Americans with this particular disease, or somebody's targeting Americans to try to undermine the economy. I think people do like to look for conspiracies and hidden truths. And that's what these stories play to.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the YouTuber influences or a major politician who says something that asks the question. It's like teaching the controversy on climate change. There's scientific consensus that climate change is happening, but we don't actually need to teach the controversy. It's the same kind of thing with the anti-vax campaign. They want to find some deeper truth that isn't going to be there. And in this case, the myths about COVID are deadly, and that's what makes it worrying.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now this pushes multiple buttons for people who are opposed to inoculations. And it continues the sense of fear we have that we don't really know what's in those vials and we don't really understand the science. I think an important part of these campaigns is having an occasional high-profile influencer, right? A Hollywood star or a...”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do something all right? Let's talk about some of the more virulent disinformation campaigns going on. Phil, I want each of you to sort of take one. Phil, have anti-vaxx because right now, and these are people who actually, let me just say, I think they really do believe this. Whenever I write about vaccines anytime or say anything. These are real people talking to me. They are not bots. They are actual. So talk a little bit about that.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so they often get sort of swapped in and out because I think it matters much more to academics in some ways than it does to the general public. But disinformation is purposeful quite often but not always from a political base. So in other words, something which is deliberately ceded to make you behave or think something is true when it isn't for an end goal. misinformation is just basically anything which is misleading and there's a lot of that so but the idea of intent is much more present in disinformation whereas in misinformation it can be present but often isn't”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the only reason we know about it is that the campaign managers who developed the bot, the Tinderbot, tweeted about it and said over Twitter they thanked their bot and they named the two or three districts where they thought the bot had given them just a few percentage points that tipped their candidates over the edge. campaign managers think it works. It's hard to know big picture how well it works, the social media firms are actually the ones who would have that data and they don't share that data.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a great story of a campaign run over Tinder over the dating app. This was an automated set of accounts that would flirt and then talk about Jeremy Corbyn, the labor leader here in the UK. Yes, it's ridiculous.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the answer to that is yes and probably yes. It's yes in the sense that we know misinformation in 2016 was targeted at swing states. The audience for that stuff was not the average voter or the average American. It was particularly for voters that were trying to make up their minds uncertain about how to vote. There are a number of behavioral models that demonstrate a certain amount of exposure, introduces a certain amount of doubt. There are campaigns of misinformation around voting itself that look more like voter suppression campaigns. The election's been moved. It's now on Friday. It's not on Tuesday or your favorite candidate died over the weekend, so there's no point in voting. Those kinds of campaigns are, it's hard to know how well they work.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Phil, if everybody is doing this, if everybody is now taking the lessons from 2016 election or applying it, whether it's a PR firm, whether it's a local politician, whether it's, I don't know, whatever someone wants to convince someone of, is it as effective if everybody's doing it, this idea that everybody is weaponized and therefore it's just part of the general noise that everybody hears?”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's kind of crazy because these are run by PACs and political operatives and they're used as kind of staging material so that if you're just flicking through things on your feed and you see something like voter fraud, repeat it over and over again in the font of your local news. And if you click through and it looks like an article written by a real person and it has news media written on it, on its Facebook page, all of that is exactly what Phyllis describing as well, which is, you know, kind of a marketing effort to sway people's opinions and how they think about things. And this is now just something which is absolutely routine for politicians, campaigns and single subject lobbyists to latch onto. And it's moving into this vacuum where we used to have actual local news. So this is a new thing that has come to America.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's how it works. But just one thing that Phil said, which I think is really interesting now is that this is domestic actors now and this is marketing. We've been investigating these groups of what I call Pink Slime news networks, which are they look like local news. They produce thousands and thousands and thousands of stories a month. We've collected about 400,000. They're not very good, but they're also not actually fake. You know, they take, they automate stories from feeds from things like funeral homes. Looks like your local paper.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things that just circulate among people who I would say are not necessarily crazy conspiracy theorists but who are a bit concerned don't spend any time at all really examining mainstream news but like to get it from these communities and the kind of stuff that Circulates in there is exactly the kinds of things that Phil is talking about, you know, just everything from grifters by this, you know, there's always vitamins for some reason kind of good physical health. And these conspiracy theories go hand in hand. So it goes right the way from grifters to things like the 5G conspiracy theory, which is Mars, spreading coronavirus, and you get things like all the...”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's take the fact that last weekend you had protesters outside the state house in Melbourne, Australia, which is a long way away. Not very many of them, like maybe kind of a few dozen, but nevertheless, they'd bothered to get out of bed and go and hold up placards saying arrest Bill Gates, which is, and that's a bizarre connection of a crazy conspiracy theory that puts Bill Gates in the center of this liberal conspiracy to control population through the coronavirus, etc. And somehow it seeped into these fringe areas. But this is kind of not just local, it's a global thing. And if you spend much time, I've just been teaching a class where unfortunately I make my students spend quite a lot of time in closed Facebook groups, you know, just learning how to get in there and how to hang out and what to see.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Emily, let's talk about what is typical because a lot of this stuff had been done before in previous elections. It's happened. It's not a fresh new thing that politicians lie or do ads. I'd love to look at the concept of that people are now used to this. They know when they see this stuff that some of it's just noise and some of it's not. Is that fair to say or do you think that it's still effective? If everyone knows there's Russians out there”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Internet Research Agency used to develop on its own from St. Petersburg. So that's why it's much more common. And there are many more politicians in the West who don't mind paying for these services, contracting out, and they don't want to lose, right, when they run for office. So many of them see it as a worthwhile investment.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even today, those big mechanisms exist. So for Russia and China, there would be teams that in China in particular, they do not want us to think of this as the Wuhan virus, and they want to introduce doubt as to where it might have come from. And there'd be a production team that produces news articles, produces commentary, but commentary essays that look like news articles because they use the New York Times font or they use the BBC colors. And then all that content flows over Reddit and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and arrives in your inbox along with the ads that would make you doubt that you're getting the real information from the leadership. So the system's pretty similar. I think one of the things that's changed is that in the last couple of years, it's actually become PR agencies in the West that are offering the same kinds of services that”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a pretty similar machine, I'd say. It's definitely evolved. It evolved in 2018 in the midterm elections, and it's evolving now. But at its very basic level, there's a component of production. There's teams of people who produce misinformation and design the graphics and sit in offices and think up the spin. There's a dissemination system, and that's the social media platforms themselves, right? That's the algorithms that Facebook and Twitter use to pick particular bits of content to put into your social media feed. And then there's an additional layer of marketing that often involves”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, Phil, when you think about the coronavirus itself, it's probably one of the things you studied in this new book was about the 2016 election. Is it the same techniques? Is it a similar kind of atmosphere? And if you could describe sort of the ecosystem for people who don't, you know, who aren't as technical as you are, but talk about how the ecosystem works. Is it exactly the same Lyme machines? And what does it take to make them work perfectly?”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why do people here spread this? Why do they? I mean, this is the other thing to say, which is there's a long, long, long history of propagandists and state actors. I mean, Know America's done it plenty in the past, but for any of it to actually work, you have to have fertile ground. So you have to have people who are susceptible to doubt, who don't trust what they're being told, or who just want other answers because the real answer isn't very helpful to their own lives. It's pretty bad news. So if you really want to believe that it's a good idea to open your business, because if you don't open your business, you're going to be in debt. You're going to go bankrupt, then you will hang on to some of those fringe theories or crazy assertions, particularly if you've got the president of the United States going, yeah, you know, maybe, maybe this is true, maybe it isn't true.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Idiots. So, why China and Russia doing this? Well, there's a long established history of wanting to destabilize, particularly Western governments and alliances in the West. If you think about the power that sanctions have over somewhere like Europe, those only really work when you have coordinated action between state actors. If you have somebody like Trump in the White House who is a kind of conspiracy theorist himself, then you are much more able to, if you like, sort of manipulate things so that you don't get consensus among populations, but also you don't really get consensus among leaders either. So that's the kind of short version of why are they doing it, which is a consolidation of power to keep potential adversaries weak.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What it means is that the state broadcaster will use dozens and dozens of official accounts to push out a news story on a given week, and then those official accounts will be retweets and reshares and cross-platform exchanges that a larger army of trolls, sometimes their military personnel who've been retasked to doing social media, and they'll promote the content, they'll push it into the corners, they'll take it from Twitter and put it on Instagram or TikTok or WhatsApp. There's quite a complex ecology of all these platforms. And that's what amplifies a message. And usually the messages are about questions. Where did the virus really come from? Can there ever be a cure? And is this lockdown really necessary? It's about introducing doubt into our minds using our own network. Of family and friends.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While operationally China's CGTN and a variety of newspapers and Russia's RT and Sputnik, operationally, we find that they can reach a billion social media user accounts each week. We've started a weekly tracking memo, and many of these accounts are DUDs, they're empty, they're fake accounts set up by the Russians and the Chinese themselves, but that is many more social media users than even the most professional media outlets like CNN or BBC on a weekly basis, the state-run content from China and Russia reaches more English language, social media users, than even the best of the professional news outlets.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the state of play right now is sort of in a terrible state in that the misinformation around the coronavirus is now being generated in huge volumes by the state media agencies in China and Russia. And they are working in a coordinated way to undermine our trust in democracy and make us wonder where the virus came from and whether our leaders can do anything about it.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's go with each of you. I'm going to start with you, Phil. Talk a little bit about the state of play right now. Like right now in the disinformation state with relating to coronavirus, because that's where a lot of the social networks have sort of stepped up and tried to push back the flow of bad information and whether it's about cures or vaccines or other things.”
2020-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Phil Howard and Emily Bell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT