Media Literacy 101 - What’s Legit & What To Quit
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Do you love reading as much as we do? Well, you're in luck because we're launching our first ever Betches Book Club in partnership with Nutella Biscuits because they know the best moments are even sweeter when you share a great snack with your friends. If you're in New York City, come hang out with us IRL at the Betches Book Club.

On October 28th, Aileen, Sammy, and I are hosting a book discussion with author Margot Harrison, where we'll be discussing her brand new novel, The Midnight Club, and snacking on Nutella biscuits. No, I won't be sharing mine because I'm truly obsessed and they're actually my new favorite snack in the world. But don't worry, there's going to be plenty for everyone to share. Head to bit.ly slash book club IRL to grab tickets for you and your friends. That's

bit.ly slash book club IRL for tickets. Grab yours before they sell out. Rise and shine, fever dreamers. Look alive, my friends. I'm Bea Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream presented by Betches News, where we explore the absurdities and oddities of our uniquely American experience.

And as promised, we are talking about some absurdities and oddities today. We have a special episode for you this week on media literacy. This is going to be your official American Fever Dream Guide to parsing through what you're seeing on social media, in reporting, or even hearing straight from your MAGA uncle's mouth firsthand.

Our goal with this episode and all of our episodes is to help you be a better consumer of information this election cycle and beyond. I'm excited to try out this new format, Bea. Well, guess what, pal? It is announcement time. I have something I'm very excited to share with you all. Tell us, tell us.

So I was just appointed to be the next MediaWise ambassador at the Poynter Institute, joining the ranks of queer icon and legacy journalist Lester Holt, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Joan Lunden, Jessica Yellen, John Green. And our collective mission is to teach people how to sort fact from fiction online and slow the spread of misinformation.

This MediaWise ambassadorship is part of the Pointer Institute, which is a prestigious nonprofit media institute newsroom that provides fact-checking, media literacy, and journalism ethics training to citizens and journalists alike. So I'm super excited. Wow. Okay. First of all, congrats, or as we say in the Jewish faith, mazel tov. We just have to tell the audience, we planned this episode.

and had been conceiving this for a while before I had any idea. Congrats. I'm so proud to be your co-host. Thank you. I appreciate that. Well, they wrote in and they were like, hi, because they don't, they're like, hey, you're the newest one for your work on TikTok and like helping people understand the world better in a kind way. And I was like,

what? Because sometimes you're doing your job and you don't think that people are noticing or whatever, but it is helping people. So that brought me a lot of heart joy. So I'm very grateful. B, you don't think the 3 million people who follow you on TikTok are noticing? None of them are noticing? No, I still treat it like, I don't know, I'm like a normal person. But that's, I think, why you are good to be in this position because you understand that it's not

just about growing the following, but about actually the value you're providing. And the Poynter Institute has recognized that as well. And this is really exciting because this is exactly what we're going to be talking about today. Let's start here.

Why are we even talking about this and why do we continue to emphasize media literacy so much on this show? Because media has become the battlefield in everything, not just in terms of our presidential election and our own election, our own culture, but it is now a geopolitical battleground. And the reason for that is because it is much less expensive to conduct, and I'm going to take it to a dark place here, a level of war online using digital weapons than

that also gives America's geopolitical adversaries a chance to actually go up against the United States in a way that they never could militarily or economically. So it is important for us to all be aware of this

broader reality because if the media that we're all consuming is the battlefield consuming and creating in many cases that makes us the soldiers whether we know it or whether we like it or not so that's that's really the stakes of this episode and why we continue to speak about this

And you know, I'm a deeply patriotic person, which I think means a lot of different things to different people. But to me, I'm very proud to be an American. And I think part of being proud to be an American is having the ability and the interest to learn about America's mistakes and want to improve them for the future. But you said it exactly right. Nobody can touch us on the battlefields, the physical battlefields when it comes to war. We also...

are a little bit smarter now. And we don't want to be going to war and putting people on the front lines with guns in their hands. So what's happening instead is...

the divisive tactics to try and break the American spirit, to try and infiltrate the idea that this is a great nation and that we are the beacon of democracy for the rest of the world. And I know that there's probably people listening to this right now that are like, yeah, right. But we are. If you look at the way that other countries still look to us, the way that the dollar is the currency to be all that kind of stuff.

does factor in and we have to hold on to that and reclaim in many ways what it means to be patriotic, what it means to be an American and rebuild that trust and camaraderie between neighbors and friends and other Americans to fight this mental warfare that's happening online that's going to just destroy us. As imperfect as America is, and it is deeply, deeply imperfect, it continues to be. Regardless, there is no other system

that has brought as many people as much prosperity and has the potential to. And I don't mean prosperity in terms of economic success, though that is a factor. I mean freedom to live your life in ways that are taken for granted. And I think many of us take them for granted, which will be harder to take for granted when they go away. Well, I mean, that's the thing. We've talked about before, my family came here from Albania and the whole Romani factor and whatnot. But

People don't come to this country with nothing but the clothes on their backs or swim through razor wire in Texas because it's the bad place. They come here because it is still the good place for all of its flaws and all of the ways that we can improve it. But that's the thing. There is room. There is potential in America still. And it's something that we have to believe in because my grandmother didn't escape Albania to come here for me to try to go back or to live under fascism here. Like that's a real thing. And that's just one or two generations away.

That is really what this is ultimately about. This is ultimately about the fact that America has the potential, the fact that there is potential built into our system and we need to all collectively fight to take it. And part of that is knowing what we're up against.

And what we're up against is something that has been a trend for over a decade in the making. And our own intelligence agencies, as well as NATO, have been sounding the alarm about a new type of warfare for several years now called hybrid warfare. Hybrid warfare is a new reality which emphasizes a combination of conventional and unconventional strategies, methods, and tactics that

In contemporary warfare, as well as the, here's the key part, psychological or information related aspects of modern conflict. Technically, there is no fully agreed upon definition of a hybrid war, but that is sort of the point. It entails an interplay of things like disinformation, non-state actors, economic factors, policies that make it hard to identify whether or

a country's actions have breached the threshold of war, and therefore it's harder to counteract or even rally your own citizens around the fact that there is a threat. And a key part of this is the goal to impair the social contract between the state and its constituents, as well as between constituents themselves by creating more polarization. This

This article gives the example of when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, and they were able to achieve that objective by deploying what were deniable proxies, such as local armed actors, disinformation, economic clout, and exploiting the existing social political polarization in Ukraine, particularly in the Crimea region.

And that is a particularly important example because of the timing. Because if Russia had been conducting this type of warfare in 2014, you can be sure that they have perfected it by 2024.

Russia's like your toxic friend in the friends group where you're saying, oh, I'm having trouble with my boyfriend today. And she's like, well, he's always been a nightmare. And he's been gaslighting me for years. And it exacerbates what could be a small flaw or problem. Russia's doing that to America. America's got problems. And Russia's coming in here and trying to make it seem like America's a bad boyfriend that we should all leave and

In fact, Russia's the bad boyfriend. But the thing is that like, really, you only have to understand sort of this one very basic line of history. This is just a continuation of the Cold War by one fucking guy. And that guy is Vladimir Putin. He's just hung up on that still. And I mean, there is that Russian imperialist psychology, but he is the person. He is the one who was in the KGB and has...

essentially recovered it so that he can restore the former Soviet Union to its glory. So that's why we're, and we're still, he's still living in that. But I also want to point out, since we don't want to just present problems here, we also want to achieve solutions. This report from NATO in 2021 pointed out that the antidote to hybrid warfare is social trust. And

That makes sense when you think about the goals of hybrid war, which is to deplete trust between the state and its people as a means of weakening the state. So hybrid threats are often particularly tailored to the vulnerabilities of the target state or the communities that they want to sow division or issues within and between. Ultimately, they are about undercutting trust, which is why the answer is building trust between citizens and

as well as between citizens and the government. So our government has definitely done some pretty untrustworthy things that are clearly being brought to light and exploited.

I mean, they're real, but the fact that our government has not held itself accountable in a lot of cases is why it's so powerful, why that propaganda is so powerful and effective. Don't you talk about this a little bit in your book, Sammy? It's time to plug the book again. Yeah. I mean, there's so much of the book is actually the answer. It's trying to be the antidote to this. We didn't want it to make it so doom and gloom. So we

The answer is about building community and defraying the loneliness that people feel because when people are lonely and isolated, they become more polarized. They become more calcified in their views. They become more extreme. Picture the sort of classic incel vibe. That is a person who is right for authoritarianism. But to counteract that,

Mm-hmm.

And that is the social trust that we are losing by having these conversations online and then having those conversations appear way more toxic than approximate reality. So in the book, basically what we're talking about is how each person can kind of find their own way through their own skills, knowledge.

time, resources, abilities, what they care about to take one place in your community that rebuilds the social trust. And if everyone's doing that, instead of just a few activists who seem to cover every issue, everyone kind of takes their own place. We will rebuild this fabric and this trust. So that is really what we're trying to help you do for most of the book. And we see it online too. We're going to get into it now, but

you know, so much of the divisive stuff that goes viral because it's so extreme is exactly what's tearing us apart. And I promise you, I have been in rooms with conservative Republicans and within an hour or so, we're like talking about how we had a similar love for the Power Rangers. I mean, it's like finding the dumbest thing from childhood, even you have to go way back to find some sort of thing that you can align on. And that's a good jumping off point. And then we can start to find the humanity in each other.

Well, also when you just meet people in life, you might connect with them before you even get to the political view. Now this is so hard because everything has become politicized partly because of this hybrid warfare that we're going to talk about and explain how that's been carried out. But that's really what we're trying to encourage is that rebuilding of the social trust, even with people who you really disagree with. So by the way, right now, pre-order the book because you can enter to win

a $3,000 gift card to Expedia. And in addition to that, everyone who sends their proof of pre-order to democracyandretrograde at gmail.com before July 12th, the book is out on July 9th, you will receive a digital gift from Emily and I. We'll tell you what it is in two weeks.

And then, yeah, but you will either way be entered to win a $3,000 gift card. Pre-order the book, Democracy in Retrograde, How to Make Changes Big and Small in Our Country and Our Lives. I have the book physically here and I'm so excited about it. I have the pre-copy and I love it. Me and my wife like go through it every night. Literally, this is like how we're bonding because she's not super political, but she likes to learn things and

you know, she likes to be in conversation with me. So she has to do political stuff sometimes. And it's such a great guide for just folks who are even, you know, mildly curious about politics. It's a great book for teens. It's a great book for high school kids, college kids to just sort of get that education and that understanding going without having it be too heavy or wordy or textbooky. You also might find out that something you're already doing or that you already like doing is considered political.

part of what we're talking about. I think that that's another piece of it. People think it's like, oh, what political issue do I have to get activist-y on? It's not only about that. It's also about the way that you, the posture you take towards your life and the people in it and towards people you may not even know in your community. And it

It doesn't have to be partisan at all. I think that is another key thing. Email your proof of pre-order to democracyinretrograde at gmail.com by July 12th. And please support the book. I think it will be, Emily and I really think it will be such a helpful guide for people.

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So let's start with the very basics of jumping into our media literacy training for today. Now, lack of media literacy and the divisiveness we see online is ultimately about destabilizing a country and untethering its citizens from reality. And we certainly do that well on social media, right?

So the easiest way to do that is by removing the ability to access a set of shared truths and facts that are the basis on which to operate and take action. You see this a lot when people say, oh, both sides are bad. Oh, everyone's doing it. Everyone's not doing it. Both sides aren't bad. Not everything is equal. So that's straight off the top. Now, there are three main types of information that could be harmful to you online. That's misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.

Misinformation is false or inaccurate stuff, right? Just somebody who got the facts wrong. It could be on purpose, but most often it's an accident or a misunderstanding. Misinformation can be fairly innocent most of the time or details of a story came out and then they changed, right? But misinformation, somebody just got it wrong. That's okay. Misinformation is one thing, but not correcting the misinformation is where

We, you run into a problem. Well, misinformation can turn to stage two, which is disinformation, which is false information, which is deliberately intended to mislead intentionally misstating the facts or cherry picking facts or quilting together pieces of quote evidence to build a new narrative. That is not true at all. That's disinformation. Um,

And then the last type that is not talked about as much, but I think is just as important, is called malinformation or malicious information. This is the deliberate publication of private information for personal, corporate, or political gains rather than public interest. So you can think of malinformation as things like revenge porn or leaking certain emails, hacking somebody's accounts to damage their reputation. It can also include deliberate changes of context,

dates or time of the original content to make somebody look even worse than they are. And a good example of this is when people go back 20 years to somebody's 16-year-old Twitter and say, oh, you said that you don't like fat people when you were 11 years old, and now you're 42, and I'm going to hold you accountable to that. Or you said that people shouldn't resist the police when you were 14 years old, and now you're a 41-year-old police abolitionist activist, and I'm going to hold you to that.

We have to assume that people can grow and learn and better themselves and going back in time to try and find something they said while they were developing and hold their adult self to it. That's a great example of common malinformation that you'll see out there.

Right. I think people are thinking about these as one-offs. Like, oh, there's one little piece of misinformation. And that did sort of used to be how it was, if you think about it. Like, if something was wrong, people, I think, would be generally aware of a big correction. But now the danger is not just fake news as a one-off, but this intentionally forced virality of...

many false things in order to create an altered reality. And ultimately, the goal is to create reactions and change behavior offline. That is what this is about. That is why, you know, these malign influences and foreign adversaries and special interests don't just want to create chaos in online. Their goal is to take this offline. And the way that they actually do this is not, you know, one-offs. They're doing this at scale.

through bot farms and troll farms. You can call them whatever you want. Think of this like a corporate workforce, you know, a media company, you know, think of it like a giant media company tasked with pushing a false reality that benefits an adversary. So troll farms are like fully organized groups of people posting coordinated messages that

But they're posting from fake accounts that are impersonating, in our case, real Americans to create the illusion of

other viewpoints that may or may not be held. Then real Americans see them, see that they're happening at scale and they're influenced by them. However, what makes this worse is that these bot farms and troll farms aren't just creating accounts to pose as people. They're also posing as grassroots organization and then organizations and then using their fake farms to

you know, bolster these organizations and give them the illusion of having people with them. You know, they'll also pose as interest groups, even as state political parties. In some cases, they don't. And they're not just posting replies as if they're normal users, but they're also in the 2016 election. They post a purchase ads that reach millions of Americans and they were able to coordinate real life political rallies.

You know what another example of this is that I'm just thinking of now? You know when you go to Amazon and you search like We The People or patriotic merchandise? A lot of that is AI-generated content from Russia, right? That's where you see those absurd things of like a muscular Donald Trump on a tank.

or you see these crazy flags with like really outrageous slogans on them. And you think that stuff must have been created by an American because it's American propaganda, but it's not. It's created by these Russian troll farms and AI artists to try and make it seem like, well, if Amazon is selling this, there must be a market for it. There must be tons of people who purchased this insane thing and then you hang it up on your house. And that's how they've taken you from online to offline and into the real world to make it seem like this is something normal to do when it's very much not.

Yeah, and this is where we really get into the problem. And if you've been listening to this podcast since we started, this is the beat I have been on.

In Russia, this was spearheaded by the Internet Research Agency. That was cited, we're going back to the Mueller report, oh boy, that was cited in the Mueller report as having a central role in the Kremlin efforts to meddle in the 2016 election, which they were found to have done. So let's talk about this because this is really the model.

And what I'm going to explain now, a lot of this happened in 2016 or in the past, but this is the basis of what they have continued doing. So look at this as something that has only scaled from what I'm about to describe.

The head of the Wagner mercenary group and one of Putin's former besties, they have since had a falling out, Yevgeny Prokhozhin, admitted to founding the Internet Research Agency, which is the Kremlin's arm that conducts these operations. They have since been sanctioned by the U.S. government for interfering in U.S. elections.

And when Yevgeny Prokhozhin was asked about his reaction to the accusation that he was the founder of this internet research agency, he said, quote, I react with pleasure. I've never been just the financier of the internet research agency. I invented it. I created it. I managed it for a long time.

And then in going back even in November 2022, he had said, quote, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.

I do find it noteworthy that he's talking about how surgical they're able to be. And the fact that Trump only won the Electoral College in 2016, thanks to slivers of tens of thousands of votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. They're proud of this. They're saying they're experts. They're not messy. They've been trained. They have a doctoral and elegance to what they do. Even they're extremely proud of their ability to interfere.

So it just is true. Russia has ever had an advantage. It is in this information propaganda. Yeah. Number one shit posters in the world. Absolutely. It's true. United States of shit posting. Yep. So this is what they were doing in 2016. And I will have more examples of this later in the show. The point is,

not only are their capabilities significantly more vast right now, it's actually not just them. It is China and Iran, and they are now working in coordination with each other. There is now intelligence suggesting that as recently as a few months ago. And this is not just in terms of online messages, but how those online messages interact with what is going on in real life. Think TikTok. Think campus protests. Think

October 7th. All of these things benefit the same parties. Think Donald Trump. Well, and it's all to punish America for being Western, right? So if you look at these countries and we wonder like, well, why do they care what we're doing over here? In part, it's because their people that they lord over look at America as a place that they want to escape to, right? That hasn't changed in a hundred years that America is this place that people can escape to, to find freedom. Now,

Iran, China, and Russia don't want their people to escape to America because they want to continue to explore them as a workforce, as you know, for their intellectual property, for whatever the case may be. So they can't change the fact that America is the good place when you're in a place like China, Russia, or Iran.

So what they have to do is try and make it look like the bad place or try to destroy America from the inside out. Why would you want to go there? They're at war with each other. Why would you want to go there? They're so stupid. All these different kinds of things. They hate immigrants. They hate gay people. All the reasons why you might want to escape an autocratic nation. Well, if you go there...

you'll be harmed. It's not just to hurt Americans. It's to deter the people that they lured over from thinking that it's so great over here. And as Elika Laban says, this is where the Marxist and the anti-imperialist Islamist propaganda coincide. And that's why you have China, Russia, and Iran working together to create another pull to counteract American...

supremacy, essentially. And they're amped up right now, especially in Iran, because the United States supported the protests that were going on against compulsory hijab and the killing of Masa Amini. So again, some of this is these old clerical dudes fighting with each other. Which Abrahamic religion should rule the entire world? And we all have to suffer on account of it.

And they have turned us as social media users, the average social media user into the foot soldiers of this. Yep.

So let's talk about the tactics and goals of these bot farms because there's false engagement, which turns into manufactured consensus, that good old friend of ours that we've been rambling on about for weeks now. But as Sammy said earlier, the ultimate goal of these bot farms is to change behavior in real life. And they've been able to achieve some really sophisticated results and are getting increasingly better at doing so. Sammy, you want to bring us back to the Mueller report, your favorite report? This is my favorite. Okay, this is...

To me, the most demonstrative anecdote of how they can create something in real life and manufacture a reality that is inorganic and to their own ends. The goal is polarization. Remember, according to the Mueller report, Russian nationals and their associates in 2016 paid people who attended pro-Trump rallies in Florida to carry out certain tasks.

And the one that sticks with me, because it's very visual, is that they got someone to construct a cage on the back of a flatbed truck at a protest and another person to dress up as Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform so that she could go in the cage as if she were in jail in order to continue to incite the lock her up rhetoric, which now Donald Trump is saying he never said. He did. And there was a float. There was a parade. This is that's one really salient example. But they

did this for a ton of other groups. They posed as both Black Americans, as Muslim Americans, and urged people to boycott the election in order to protest Clinton. They created accounts and organizations called United Muslims of America and Woke Blacks. They always have the stupidest name. Black people would never, ever be that cringed to say something like that. Yeah. That's why the isolation is so effective.

People are very vulnerable to the approximation of reality, or at least like they're not going to report it, you know? So the way that the Kremlin was able to figure this out, according to an indictment of the IRA, the group began monitoring social media pages of real American activist organizations in 2014 before they started setting up fake pages and personas. So what they're doing is a mimicry. We'll get into the like solutions for this later.

That's how I've started to identify what is fake because they feel just a little bit uncanny valley. So that is going to be a big tip. They're also issue agnostic. And by that, I mean that their goal is polarization. They post from accounts that offer commentary on every side of social issues, cultural issues, what color Eminem is gay. And if you're wondering why everyone is so tense and psychotic, it's because we're all infected by this shit online.

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Something that I see a lot of folks say in my comments or whatever is there'll be some absurd thing that gets posted, goes viral, and they'll be like, well, this account has a million followers. Babies, account followers is not an indication of accuracy or trust. I'm going to talk a little bit about buying followers because we think, oh, people buy followers like makeup influencers because they want to look more popular than they are. They do it as a vanity metric. No.

A report in 2021 showed that 49% of Instagram mega influencers and celebrities, meaning people with more than a million followers, were caught fraudulently inflating their following by purchasing followers. And by 2023, that number had gone up to 58% of mega influencers engaging in this thing, buying followers. Now, this is important because the size of someone's platform does not correlate to how accurate or trustworthy they are, or even if those followers are actual people.

Again, this goes back to the culpability of the platforms. Facebook is reliant on just getting bigger numbers. They just want the number higher users, people, comments, whatever. They don't care if it's real. So they don't do anything about this because they just want those numbers to be higher for shareholders. So that is everywhere.

And I'm sure the celebrities are not all about just only buying followers. Like there's a lot of just malactivity going on. Well, let me tell you about that. So part of it is also you were probably identified as somebody who owns a media company. That's very popular, right? This has happened to me. Now, Instagram does have a new feature where you can go in and like get rid of your fake followers.

It's so they can comment on my shit so that every time I post this flood of bots can comment whatever their, their bullshit's going to be for the day. And that's why I have to use like keywords to filter them out. To make more activity, I guess. Yes. To manufacture that consensus that like, oh, V just posted. And within the first three seconds, there's 400 things saying like,

I don't trust you. Come on. It's these disinformation campaigns trying to get you to not believe in trustworthy things like certain media figures or just our institutions in general. There is a way to spot fake followers. Low engagement rate. So if you're looking to decide, you know, am I going to trust this account or this person? You can look at their engagement rate. If the account has a million followers, but the likes and comments are extremely low on their average post, it's very likely that many of those followers could have been inflated.

You're also looking for spam-like comments. The number one way to recognize bot comments is that they pretty much only use emojis. And that's because they're just sending out emojis. They're not trying to send out like context or respond intelligently to what you say. So you might see a ton of emojis that are just like hearts and eyes and you're so pretty or whatever the case may be.

That is the most common sign of bots. But you'll also see things, and I see this on Trump's TikTok, which I've been deep in analyzing, that say, best president in the world emoji, Trump 2024, American flag. And you will see that comment thousands of times. Same capitalization, same emojis. There's no way that thousands of people are posting like that identically. You will also, when you click into these, so you'll see one of these comments and you click into it, you'll see inactive or empty follower profiles.

You test a couple of the top commenters on an account. You're trying to decide if this is real or not. And you may notice that they follow thousands of accounts, but no one follows them. Not even one in real life friend. That's a good sign that it's a bot. They make no content. They have no favorites. They have no bio. And they have inconsistent follower demographics and niches. So your followers, you as a creator or somebody you appreciate personally,

will not vary that much. We shouldn't be seeing an overwhelming number of, say, accounts with an anime profile picture following an adult politician from Wisconsin.

The anime profile picture is a huge indicator of a Russian troll farm for whatever reason. I wish that there was a way that I could ban anime profile pictures from interacting with me because that is where you get a lot of the shit posting and they make it seem like they are like young men who are into anime, I guess. I don't know. But those are more often than not.

fake and you will see them. Why would this many young boys be following Hillary Clinton and shit posting? They wouldn't be, you know, my feeling on, on all of that is like, there's probably more premium and less premium bot activity. So there's like the automated stuff that they're trying to just get volume for to boost the posts. And then there's the,

you know, the ones that will get into your replies and engage with you. And that is what I've noticed quite sophisticated because you'll have the same person, quote unquote, fighting about the same sort of thing in multiple replies, saying the same exact thing. And they're not, it's just very clearly not a real person. They're trying to just keep it going. That's Ashley on TikTok. Let me tell you about this Ashley character on TikTok.

So there's this account, Ashley, that shows up on every political commenter's comments. She's typically my number one comment, and she's incredibly intelligent because this Ashley bot is able to run your caption through chat GPT to spit out an intelligent, affirming content.

And her entire purpose is to get people to click on the profile of this girl, Ashley, which will bring you to her link tree, which will sell you pornography. The payoff in many cases with fake news or fake engagement online is being able to sell you something else. So be that porn or an idea like America is the bad place. I mean, who benefits from that? It's definitely Russia in both cases.

But there are these intelligent bots that you will see. Sometimes they'll say, am I pretty in the comments? And then people will click on it and then it's a porn bot. But this Ashley one is especially good because she typically leaves intelligent, affirming, political, liberal comments. So it's not just the Republican boys are trying to get with the porn online. Ashley is here for the libs. A lot of it is just sort of independent content.

you know, Nigerian prince-esque thing. But the danger is the geopolitical adversary of it all. And I mean, just hearing about all this, you know, we talked about dead internet theory a few episodes ago. All of this tracks with that. It's like, it's not that everything on the internet is fake, but there's so much of it is inorganic and forced and it's not real. It's just algorithmic.

There's this other thing. We've got the bot farms, the troll farms, the porn bots, and then we have what's called a click farm. This is different than bots. These are actually manned by low-wage workers, oftentimes foreign workers, who are paid to click websites, petitions, and links to inflate the success of a campaign. The use of a click farm is common, but it's a little more expensive than just running bots because there is a small amount of actual human influence on the process.

But politicians and lobbyists will use click farms not just to inflate their social following, but to spread misinformation through the troll farms or to artificially inflate their political advertising and social media posts.

These organizations, these click farms, aim to spread misinformation and influence public opinion. Trolls and individuals who engage in this behavior are paid to post inflammatory and or misleading content. And to maximize the grift, they'll purchase as many eSIM cards as they can, and then they will run all of these eSIM cards by a single human. But it looks like thousands of unique IP addresses. This is something that I was really worried about when

We were seeing a little bit of misinformation about the Middle East coming out. And the number one thing that they were asking for was eSIMs. And I'm like...

I understand that eSIMs are used authentically by people to connect to the internet when cellular services dropped, but they are also used extensively on these bot and troll farms to create new IPs that allow you to create an authentic account to make it look like there are so many more supporters for something that there might not be. I suspect that a lot of the people who support the Houthis, for example, are perhaps driven by these click farms or these bot farms. The original

folks who were kind of like the Osama bin Laden letter trying to make it seem like that was a real thing. I'm going to bet that a lot of that was ESIM created slightly hands-on human touch and

misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. So you want to be careful with that because using these eSIMs helps the fraudster go around moderators because the eSIM has created an actual account, a real unique IP, and then you can have one human that's controlling thousands of eSIM accounts. So that's something you might not have heard too much about.

One piece that has been missing for me is how they get so much scale because, you know, I'm reading, you know, you've got any prognosis employs hundreds of workers. I'm like, there's way more than hundreds of people employed.

operating this scale. There has to be some level of automation as well. Well, let me tell you what the picture is. I looked up what does a bot farm look like? And it's literally these huge warehouses. It's very interesting. People should Google it. It's these warehouses and they have like iPhones on a stand. And then somebody just walks up and down for hours, pushes the button, pushes the button, pushes the button, pushes the button on the next one. And they're running. I mean, that's the thing is like, they'll only get better at this as we get more robotic in the way that we can like

artificially touch different things. But right now it's just one human who's in charge of thousands of phones in a warehouse pushing buttons over and over and over and over.

You know what? I'm seeing the end result of this. People need to go back to physical newspapers. We need dumb phones, dumb phones and newspapers. Exactly. The smartphone, it's too easy to trick people. And that's the thing I want folks to be very careful about is there are bots that are very easy to identify. We can tell straight off. But then there are these more expensive, a little bit high touch human eSIM driven bots.

and false engagement accounts. And there's thousands of them and they're posting the same message. So, and it's, the thing is, it's not just politics. And I'm going to bring up Caitlin Clark again.

The Caitlin Clark of it all is very manufactured. She's an incredible basketball player. This has nothing to do with her skill. It has to do with the way that her personhood is being leveraged against America in some ways. They picked her because the engagement around her is real. And that's why they picked her, because people will engage with their personality.

divisive fake content about it. So what they want to do now is they want to build more race tension, right? So we have this WNBA thing. It's starting to get some traction that benefits the online betting communities, which we know was part of why WNBA was getting a boost is because they wanted more things to have people gamble on. But there are hundreds of thousands of accounts right now that will post something like, Caitlin Clark is the victim of anti-white bias. She's not.

Or they'll post something like, in a surprise upset, the Pope shuns devout Catholic Joe Biden and endorses Donald Trump. He didn't. But it sounds real, right? It sounds like it could be real. Or something like Ukrainians abandoned comedian president to fight for the honorable Russia. They're not. These blitzes can make it look like something is happening and it is straight up not happening.

And I've seen this on my own account. When I tried to explain Agenda 47 and Project 2025, the video was posted on Twitter by a partisan hack account. And it got hundreds of thousands of comments that said, well, I'm convinced now I'll be voting for Trump 2024. Now, we know that I'm not trying to convince you to vote for Trump. And we know that all of these bots saying the exact same thing. Well, I'm convinced now, comma, American flag. I'm voting for Trump 2024 is all manufactured.

But we have to understand that the average actual human who is scrolling social media is doing so while they're taking a shit. And they're just seeing that for two seconds and they don't care. Even if that misinformation is corrected later, the way we felt about what we saw is just how we experience it. We're not that conscious all the time, especially when we're dissociating scrolling social media. We're in a very vulnerable place.

Right. And it's impossible to actually parse through whether every single thing you see is legitimate or valid. No, because we want to just fire off a retweet. We see that it's got a million retweets. We want to be a part of it. And according to MIT, fake news spreads faster than true news on Twitter. And that's thanks to people, not bots. A study of the last 12 years of Twitter showed that tweets containing falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than truthful tweets.

And all of that makes sense, given that reporting from 2023 on Elon Musk, that he had laid off the specialists at Twitter who focused on combating misinformation operations from foreign adversaries. So now there's hundreds of Russian and Chinese state propaganda accounts proliferating throughout Twitter because, again, he just wants to have accounts. He doesn't care. He said he was going to get rid of the bots until he realized Twitter is almost all bots.

But ultimately, it makes sense that lies go further than truth because lies are more astounding. They're surprising. They catch you off guard. You're like, ooh, what is this? It's a lie. That's why. We want it to be true sometimes too. I mean, the number one way you can get tricked by misinformation is actually getting excited about it, right? Like how many times do I send you a text, Sam? And I'm like, is this real? Because I really want it to be. And you're like, girl, no, that is not real. And I'm like, okay. But again, you got to have a phone a friend in real life who you can like check things with before you retweet them.

We have that happen to us, I would say, a lot. Increasingly. Increasingly. Well, and sometimes something is so outrageous, and you'll send it to me, like Trump pretending to lift weights as a trans athlete. And I'm like, no, that one's real. That's actually real. I'm happy it's real because I need more people to see and remember. There's this narrative, and it seems to be true, that people don't remember how bad he was and what he'll do. And-

People need to see it. In addition to all of this kind of stuff, if you're not overwhelmed already, there's fake news. The actual, the famous fake news, fake websites, news programs and statistics. Now, there's this thing that I think is especially nefarious called website spoofing, where some fraudsters will use a bitly link or a short link to mask the final web destination that you're going to be sent to.

Others will hyperlink a site, making the blue text read AP News or ABC News. So, of course, you click that link and you think you're headed to the real AP News site, only to find that this fraudster has created a mock page and you're actually at APNEWZ.net. And you're not going to realize that at first. I mean, how many people look at the web bar after you click a link? Nobody does, right? And it looks just like the AP, but it's got these fake stories on it.

So beyond that, there are websites that are just there to straight up make you think that they are small indie newspapers. They are intentionally spouting disinformation to inflame tensions on social media and create these easy little like clickbait engagement-y fake articles with crazy headlines. So if you're out there, these are some of the most notorious spoof websites, fake news websites, actual fake news websites.

Call things like American News, Conservative 101, The Democratic Review, Liberal Society, Christian Freedom Daily is a really big one, News Examiner, and then things that look like your local TV station. So they'll be called like Daily News 10 or Channel17News.net, Your Newswire, HealthFacts.pro.

And then the most nefarious ones, I think, are the ones that take the actual website and then just add a little something to it. So you have like drudgereport.com.co, which mimics the Drudge Report. usatoday.com.co mimics USA Today. There's washingtonpost.com.co that mimics Washington Post. So a lot of that is stuff you got to look out for.

That was also in the reporting about the Russian disinformation around the Paris Olympics, that they were creating fake websites that look like real French websites. So this is a common thing. Check your URLs, I guess.

Everyone just has to stay vigilant. My friend Tony Morton does it to shitpost on people too. So some of these are satirical and some of them are straight up fake news. Tony Morton has like ChayaRachik.net where he posts about what a horrible nightmare she is. Or he has like WarOnWomen.com, which is actually a really great website that talks about all the people who are doing terrible things to women. But

There's also shit posters and trolls and people who are making actual satirical sites. We'll talk about that in a quick second. But the last thing I want to do on the fake news space here is there's all these companies that do reputation management. And

they will do things like create fake news to make their client look better. So some of these are vanity interviews that are real interviews that are posted on bullshit internet news pages to make the client look really super smart and then they point to it. You also see different celebrities or wannabes. This happens a lot on the speaker circuit where people will have a fake award. Like,

I won the award. I won the Abraham Lincoln Best Writer Award. What the fuck is that? I've never heard of that. You know what I mean? But they'll say it. These reputation management companies make up these accolades or make up doctorates, the online university farms, so that I could say, oh, I'm Dr. Vita Spear. Doctor of what? Where did you go? It's all for vanity. These reputation management companies, which is part of the big publicist companies, will do things for high-profile politicians, celebrities, sports players, public

figures to bury bad but true headlines and coat everything about this celebrity in some sort of like sugary, sweet, happy way. So an example of disinformation campaigns from companies include this company called Eliminalia, which was a reputation management firm that created a network of 600 fake news websites to flatter its clients.

They made millions of dollars burying bad press under fake press. So when you search for this client name, all this amazing stuff comes up from these 600 fake news sites and you don't see the actual bad news about them that's from the Washington Post, right? And they did this

between 2015 and 21. Eliminalia sent thousands of bogus copyright infringement complaints to search engines and web hosting companies on behalf of their clients, falsely claiming that negative articles about its clients had previously been published elsewhere. It was stolen information. It was plagiarized. And so thereby had to be hidden or removed. And these

These website companies are mostly moderating through AI or through algorithms. There's not a human person who's vetting every single one of these, so a lot of the stuff got taken down.

The firm sent legal notices under made up company names to Google saying, I am the law office of whoever and you have to take this down. And they successfully tricked the overly busy search engine and social media moderators so that their clients came out smelling like a rose with no searchable history of their bad behavior. And that's a great example of digital gaslighting at its finest. And it happens all the time.

So how do you know if something is a fake news site? I mean, you're going to want to look and see, is it satirical? Is it very funny? Or is it something like mousetrap news that does fake news about Disney for entertainment or The Onion? Does it attempt to subvert actual fact-checking sites? So you may go to a site that says, we're better than the AP fact-checker or more accurate than Snopes. That's probably a sign that it's a fake site.

There is no such thing as a fact checker or a news site for Republicans or Democrats. Facts do not have a political preference and any legit news site will be sure to be objective or at least try to.

pretend that they're objective and not claim outwardly to be for a partisan political party. So if you see something that says like news for conservatives, you could probably bet that's not accurate. And you want to be wary of sites that claim to be totally unbiased or no spin. In those cases, I always think that the lady doth protest too much. But most of all, you want to be wary of celebrity endorsed news. Things like from Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Goop,

All of that is opinion and certainly there to sell you something. So I think the obvious question is now, what do you do when you encounter something that you're not sure about or is fake? How do you decide what to amplify or minimize or even what conversations to wade into? Because simply wading into them can also be harmful. So my number one thing is reaffirm.

report. Don't hesitate to report posts you see or accounts that seem problematic. And you should block troll accounts and encourage people you know to also do these same things because a lot of content moderation on platforms is automated. So if you continue to marginalize the accounts,

or have those accounts removed when you're using the platforms, you have to use those tools that are in place, even if they're very inadequate. But if more people understand that we need to be doing this instead of just sort of letting it pass you by, that will make a difference if over time more people know that the importance of doing this. Well, and it helps train the automation because the more that they can find those sort of like similarities between troll accounts, it makes the automation, the machine learning better able to identify them in the future.

Exactly. The other piece is how do you react when there is a breaking story? A really important way to go about this, we think, is to take a pause. Mind the gap is a phrase that's been coined by the News Literacy Project, referring to the gap between the information the public wants when something happens and what is available at the time the story is breaking.

including other considerations like risks that might come about if you reveal certain information. This is a very precarious moment where you're actually making the news happen. And the narratives that can spin off and get lost can really, really mess people up and create long-term false impressions, especially when people will fill in the gaps of what happened with big explanations because we crave

You know, nature pours a vacuum and we crave explanations. So people are now being rewarded for going viral for their hot take, which is increasingly dangerous. An example, when that bridge collapsed in Baltimore, there were early reports of terrorism. The actual reported reason later was that there was neglected maintenance on a cargo boat, which led to a power outage and the boat drifted into a support beam for the bridge and it collapsed.

Conspiratorial thinking is very understandable, especially when there has been so much documented lack of transparency and things we found out later. So it makes sense. And certain conspiracies are real.

Yeah. I mean, I lived through 9-11. So to me, everything is possible, right? Once you live through something outrageous, it's more likely that you'll believe the next outrageous thing because you're like, well, I didn't think on my second week of college I would be watching the Twin Towers fall, but I did. So if a bridge is collapsing in Baltimore, sure, terrorism, why not? Could be. It was before. You're not dumb if you get tricked by this stuff. We all do because it's like,

they're smart about it. They build it on just enough truth to get you to suspend your disbelief. Another tactic of distraction happens when a bunch of creators or accounts seem to shout fire. So you'll notice this happens when somebody wants a big breaking story about a celebrity or a political figure to get buried. Suddenly here comes a big distraction. Now, when this like tactic of shouting fire happens, it's typically because there's a real story out that somebody wants to be

or to make that story seem less important than it is. Now, they can be fake and sensational stories that are meant to lead you down a rabbit hole away from the important information that was breaking, or they could just be another less interesting thing that they're trying to get you to notice. So you'll see Congress do this a lot, like, oh, the Senate Republicans blocked access to IVF bill being passed.

And then Marjorie Taylor Greene will come out and say something like fucking insane. And then what does the media pick up? Marjorie Taylor Greene saying something nuts like she'll secede from the union if Donald Trump becomes president. We lose that story about the GOP not voting for IVF and we get hours on hours on hours of people making fun of Marjorie Taylor Greene again. It's this shouting fire tactic. That is a Donald Trump original. Sarah Kensier calls it

covering up maliciousness with scandal. That is what they're doing. Yep. So Sammy, how can we find good information on the internet? I think we know about all the bad stuff that's happening. Yeah. So we're going to give you a few more tips on how to navigate social media. And then we're going to do a little section on trad media, which still has its place amongst the gerontocracy. And a lot of what comes from there ends up online. So number one, look at primary sources.

Do not just repeat the headline of an article describing a primary source. If something says so and so said X, Y, Z, watch the video or read the interview transcript before you just repeat the headline and have no additional information or context to follow it up. You will, you know, possibly you will sound like an idiot, but also what you are saying could be dangerous to perpetuate without the proper context. So it's better to say nothing if you're not going to give the proper information.

Something I learned when I was at the LA Times and the Washington Post that made me absolutely nuts is the reporters write the stories, but the editors write the headlines. So like sometimes your headline isn't even what you put in the story. They're just picking something that they know will get the click so that people read the story. But that's so just dangerous. And the editors can be brutal, brutal on what they put in a headline that oftentimes has nothing to do with the story.

So deeply flawed. Yeah. If you're looking to verify a fact, you can go to PolitiFact. That is PolitiFact.com. That is from the Poynter Institute, which V mentioned. If you're looking at who might want a story out there because they are maybe a donor of something, go to Open Secrets. That is where you can find donor structures if you're curious about who is maybe behind something.

You should also be looking at the pages of the accounts that you're sharing information from. Anyone can buy a blue check nowadays. That is no longer a sign of verification. And even before verification was not a sign of an accurate reporter or even an accurate report, though, it does have some more gravitas. So having that is supposed to be a seal, a stamp of approval, but

When it's weaponized, that is very dangerous. Totes.

And then lastly, AI. So AI can be scary mostly because people aren't paying attention when scrolling social media. So we just see something quick and we don't notice the seventh finger on Princess Charlotte, right? Or the absolute absurdity of a circumstance being depicted. But there is a way to catch AI manufactured reporting. And that is because AI cannot do multi-step reasoning. There is no AI decision tree. So what you'll find is that AI speaks at

you. It doesn't respond intelligently in the comments. And you'll find that something about the wording or the visual will be very uncanny valley. It'll be almost human, but AI can't empathize. And according to NVIDIA's CEO, we are about five to 10 years away from

any kind of AI being able to imitate a human with conviction. So there is no her out there for AI, which is, I guess, good right now. But most AI is being leveraged to sell you porn or disinformation. So if you see something out there like Donald Trump laughing on a stoop with a bunch of really cool black rappers, it's probably not real. Those aren't his Bronx voters. Similarly, if you see Joe Biden with

outrageous muscles eating an ice cream cone, probably also not real. But where I find AI or chat GBT generated articles is like, this way I got to read beyond the headline because you'll start reading the article and you're like, this is a word salad of nonsense. And because-

It's because the article doesn't need to be anything. It just needs the headline to say something and then look like a bunch of paragraphs. So you can pretty easily pick it out. Right. And a lot of it is just make money, not some of it's to drive public opinion and others of it is like to just make money gaming the algorithm. Yep.

But you want you want to be careful. One of the ones that I know out there that's that's a disinformation AI generated news reporting site right now is called American Military News. And it's it's very active on Instagram. The headlines are never what the articles are. What they'll do is they will post an AI generated, often very inflammatory picture, something from a video game that looks like a war, a crazy headline. But then they will link to a real article.

So it will look like American Military News on Instagram has reposted a Washington Post article, but they've completely changed the photo and the headline. And they understand that people aren't going to read the whole article. So that is a super tricky one because they are counting on you sharing just the headline and the picture. But if you go and you try to check them, oh, well, now it's a Washington Post article. Maybe it is legit, but it's not.

That is deeply sketchy. It's super sketch. There's a lot of organizations out there to help you navigate social media. News Literacy Project, newslit.org is one. You can also go to apnews.com slash AP fact check. There's my friend's book, Manufacturing Consensus, Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity. That's from Professor Sam Woolley down there at the University of Texas, Austin. And then for the kids out there, because I know so many parents are listening, it's

Poinier Institute has something really cool that's called the Teen Fact Check Network. It's a YouTube channel for teens. What's cool about this is they can go in there, learn from their peers, become the smartest person in their peer group to help lead their friends through navigating social media and identifying bias in news and facts.

And we know that the kids are interested in this stuff because they don't see a future that looks all that super hopeful and they don't see the gerontocracy taking care of them. So you can set them up with the Teen Fact Check Network. The name of the program is Is This Legit? And it's really well done programming. So I think that's great for teens. Great name, whoever came up with that. Good for them. All right, V, let's take it home. We are going to do a section on the Trad Media section.

And what's going on there? How do you know who you can trust? What about local media, local journalism? And how is the ownership playing into this?

Take it away, V. Did we make up the term trad media? Because I said it. I think I did. Yeah, I think you did because I use it all the time because it makes sense to me. Same. But it's like trad wife, trad media. And I said it to somebody at the New York Times the other day and they were like, did you just call this trad media? I'm like, yeah, like traditional media. And they're like, I'm so disgusted right now. I'm so sorry. I think...

They called it trad media too, but apparently. No, I call it that. I mean it a little bit rudely. I mean it a little bit rudely too. But anyway, so you heard it here first. American Fever Dream coined the term trad media compliments of Sammy Sage. So trad media, traditional media. Often folks think that the way journalism works is the editor decides the stories and the slant and then hands it off to reporters to write those stories with bias. But that is not how it happens.

editors certainly have the ability to green light or kill stories, which contributes to the bias of the newspaper outlet. But on the whole, you'll find that reporters are the ones pitching their investigations and selling the editor on their story. They're trusted to research, write, and fact check the stories at the lower levels before the editorial team takes it for that final pass and the story heads out the door. So one thing I want to sort of break down is the idea that

all of the reporters that work and journalists that work at a traditional media outlet like NBC or Washington Post or any of these things are just like little shills for the editor. That is absolutely not true. We have to just strike that from our feelings about trad media. The journalists are good. Sometimes the editors and the overlords are bad. But I want us to really relieve ourselves

I don't think we should feel so comfortable saying I don't trust traditional media because so much of the truth is being built by these folks who are incredibly talented. But I think we should be skeptical of the publishers and the money behind some of these outlets. So our distrust of trad media will be the end of our democracy in so many ways. And that's why I feel like really, especially having worked at LA Times and Washington Post and NBC now, I'm like, oh, okay.

These are good people. A lot of them are really good people. So the idea that everyone is lying just benefits liars, and it's not true. And on the whole, for the most part, with some exception, you can trust the facts in a story published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, The Associated Press. Those are going to have factually accurate publishings. Even studies published by well-regarded trade papers like TechCrunch or Mashable or Axios will be, on the whole, correct.

And when it comes to independent investigative reporting, ProPublica, Popular Information, Mother Jones, Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, The Intercept, PBS, Pew Research, and the long-running television show Frontline all rank incredibly high on the trust and fact-based reporting scales. So that made me feel a lot better. I will say.

When it comes to Fox News, that is fake news. Legally, it is fake news. They won a lawsuit. They've won several lawsuits, actually, to be able to identify as an entertainment channel, not a hard news channel. They went on record under oath and said, quote, the general tenor of shows like the Tucker Carlson show should inform a viewer that the host is not stating actual facts about the topics they discussed.

and is instead engaging in exaggeration and non-literal commentary. They won a court case when people tell you who they are, believe them. Fox News is not news. It is entertainment, exaggeration, and non-literal commentary. Now, I don't know if you're going to get your MAGA uncle to believe that, but you should believe that. Yeah, I mean, same with Alex Jones. He literally argued with...

He literally argued in court that he should not be liable for the Sandy Hook for calling Sandy Hook a hoax because he plays a character named Alex Jones who pushes conspiracies. So this is legally who they are saying they are, but the consumer, there's no disclaimer about that on there. One other thing I want to talk about is local, local broadcast media because they,

Generally, local journalism is so, so, so important, and we need that to cover so many stories that do not get covered. We talked about this in our episode with Sharon extensively. But there is one very, very serious threat to local broadcast media, and that is Sinclair Media. Sinclair Media is owned by a right-wing businessman and conservative megadonor named David D. Smith.

He purchased 185 local broadcast stations in the mid 2010s and essentially has created, has formed them into a syndicated propaganda network where he has formed

They have prescribed local anchors to all read from the same script. This happened as recently as last week when every anchor on all of these Sinclair broadcast stations read the same exact script about Biden's age. This is a man who donates to

All conservative PACs, Turning Point USA, Project Veritas, Moms for Liberty. And he reportedly told Donald Trump in 2016 after he had met with him, quote, we are here to deliver your message. So these are local stations. These are what people are turning on Channel 2 on their TV. This is a lot of older people who are just kind of passively watching the news, hearing this in the background.

And that is what they're hearing. These people are in news deserts. They don't have other publications. They probably don't subscribe to The Washington Post or The New York Times. And this is what they're being fed. And they trust these people because people have more trust for local stations and local journalism. This has a really dangerous influence on the electorate. Can I tell you a crazy story about David Smith? Yes. So you...

We know that these 180 some stations and the Baltimore Sun, which is majority owned by him, are forced to read these scripts that he writes on his ideological views, which are hard conservative. But did you know that David Smith started as a pornographer? Oh, it's always something like that.

So his dad was a newsman, right? And David Smith actually started working, selling pornographic videos in Baltimore's red light district in the 1970s. And then in the 1990s, when it was less cool to be a pornographer in the post Rudy Giuliani days, was arrested for committing an unnatural and perverted sect act in a Sinclair company vehicle. Now he was not sentenced to any kind of like

criminal penalty. He had to do community service, which he fulfilled by having one of the Sinclair stations produce reports on local drug counseling programs. So, you know, these people are weird. People are weird. They control our local news and it's the worst. This is so Anthony Comstock.

It's absolutely Anthony Comstock. The thing is, just go be a freak. You know what I mean? Go be a freak. Enjoy it. Have fun. Stop trying to do stuff behind closed doors and then make everybody else live in your prude fantasy life where conservative values reign. It makes me nuts. Every...

accusation is an admission with these people. They'll come for my people, for the gays. We're just trying to mind our business and have our little dogs and our white picket fences and go to pickleball and shit. And then they'll be like, no, the gays are terrible. And I'm like, you're the one who got caught giving a BJ in the back of one of the Sinclair vehicles and had to do community service. I never did that. But it's not just the local stations, right? I mean, if you look at the ownership of major publications, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post

I actually liked working at the Washington Post when Bezos was there. We had a whole desk assigned to him. He just is a true narcissist in the way that he does not care what you say about him. And also, he's a super billionaire. What are you going to do? Cancel Jeff Bezos? He doesn't care. But now we have this right-wing Will Lewis that we talked about on the prior episode that's maybe changing the direction of the paper. The New York Times is privately owned but has been accused of being hard right-leaning. And

You got the Murdoch Empire, which is Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, and Fox. And then my new friend, David Zasloff, who owns Warner, Discovery, Disney, and CNN. And something that he said to me very proudly that I lost my breath on.

is, hey, did you know that 40% of everything you see on television is owned by Warner Brothers? And it's only going to go up with the acquisition of Paramount this summer. See, I mean, the way my breath came out of my chest and I was like, it's cool. That's cool. Love it. He's actually really nice, which is crazy because I mean, he owns so much.

Is that good? I don't know. He owns Discovery. I like Naked and Afraid and TLC. He owns that. The Baldwin's are getting a show. Everything, everything, everything. So, I mean, and all of that is meant to distract us and make us look like a more divisive country as well. I mean, part of the things that do so well are these reality television shows where people are flipping tables and acting crazy and turning on their neighbors. It normalizes that behavior and it's not normal.

Bread and circuses, even though I love it. But I wouldn't blame Bravo. I would blame everything we just talked about. Oh, it's everything we just talked about. I mean, they're just providing us what we want, you know? And I love watching reality TV because to me, it's an escape. Back in the 90s, my grandma used to watch the Jerry Springer show. She didn't miss it. And we were like,

Grandma, why are you watching the Jerry Springer show? She goes, because, you know, I watch these people and I think to myself, wow, what a successful family I have. I'm doing so much better than these people. That's why people watch it.

Meanwhile, my uncle's in jail. Everything's going crazy. She's like, but you know what? We know where he is. And that's good. And we're not on the show. We're not posting about it. She's like, you know where we would never be? Jerry Springer show. We're better than that. And so providing a service. That's why we have TLC. We got it. So I mean, we are going to be here guiding you through the muck.

If you have any questions, please email us AmericanFeverDream at Betches.com. Let us know what you think of the episode. We really hope that this was helpful. Absolutely. Until next time, I'm Vita Speer. I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream, the fact-checking network.

American Fever Dream is hosted by Vitus Spear and Sammy Sage. The show is produced by Rebecca Sous-McCatt, Jorge Morales-Picot, and Rebecca Steinberg. Editing by Rebecca Sous-McCatt. Social media by Bridget Schwartz. And be sure to follow Betches News on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Betches.