lee mcintyre is a research

fellow at the center for philosophy and history of science at boston university. he is the author of dark ages, the for a science of human behavior post-truth and the scientific attitude defending science, denial, fraud and pseudoscience all published by the mit press, he is joined in

conversation by hank phillippi ryan, the usa today bestselling author of 14 novels of suspense. she has won multiple prestigious awards for her crime fiction, including five. agatha is five anthonys and the coveted mary clark award. she's also on air investigative reporter for boston's whdh tv and has won 37 emmys, 14 edward r murrow awards and dozens of other honors for her groundbreaking. lee mcintyre is presenting his new book on this information how to fight for truth and protect democracy. the effort to destroy facts and make ungovernable didn't come of nowhere. it is the culmination of seven years of strategic denialism in on disinformation. lemack entire shows how the war on facts began and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our. in the words of michael shermer, quote lee mcintyre has emerged as our foremost scholar of science denier and an

intellectual activists combatting the attempted assassination truth in the teeth of fake alternative facts, conspiracy, identity politics, postmodern ism and epistemological relativism. lee mcintyre is on this expertly identifies who the enemies of truth are and how to counter claims with reason, science and. compassion. a tour de force scholarship and advocacy. we are so pleased that it is this event at harvard bookstore tonight. please join in welcoming lee mcintyre and hank ryan. a tour de force he called it a tour de force. i sent michael a big bag of cash to tell you. did not. you did not welcome tonight and thank you for this marvelous, thought provoking book. just to start, just for the basics. what is disinformation? and we'll get a lot more into it. but just so we know what we're starting, you started with most important question of all

because what drives me crazy is when i see newscasters always saying misinformation, they mean disinformation. misinformation is a mistake. it's an accident. it's when you believe a falsehood just by accident. just happen to believe something that's false disinformation, a lie. this information isn't intentional falsehood that by someone who has an agenda they want you to believe the falsehood because it serves not you. and that's interesting because. a falsehood that is created to be told has a motivation behind it. and someone is being fed some sort of information and then urge to say paid to say it, we talk a little bit about that process. it depends what they want. in some cases, it's money. in some cases, it's political power. this can happen with science

facts. it can happen with, you know, other factors of reality. and usually the way it works is that i mean, there's really a a playbook that they follow because disinformation is not just about getting you to believe a falsehood. it's about making sure that that falsehood isn't something that you later become convinced is a falsehood. now, how do they do that? it's by undermining your trust in the other side. well, let's talk about that more in a minute. i think it is so incredibly and so valuable what you do to give us a roadmap to recognize it, understand it and fight it. and that's what i really think book on disinformation is about. and it doesn't gorgeously in this wonderful, little shareable portable format. why did you feel compelled to write this? why did you feel compelled to write it and fight it and share it with everyone? so i've been fighting for truth and and science for a long time.

i'm a philosopher of science. i'm a scholar. and i became a public philosopher because all of a sudden truth and justification and evidence were in the news. and so i wanted to start, you know, write about this topic and wrote earlier books, post-truth and the scientific attitude and how to talk to a science. and i actually went to a flat earth convention to try to talk to people, their beliefs. i mean, i did the work. i did the work on the ground, but was left with the feeling that there was something i was still missing, which was the motivation behind it. and, you know, i found that, yes. could talk to the people who believed the falsehood and try to debunk it and try to build their trust and try get them to change their mind. but then i realized that there were i wanted to turn the telescope around and realize there was another end to this, which were the people who were creating the falsehood. so once you buy into. and that was when the book came

in i didn't have to write very much it was a short book because this was the missing piece of the puzzle that disinformation is what causes denial. people don't wake up one day and wonder whether there is a jewish space laser starting the wildfires in california. they're fed is a lie. who would lie about that? somebody who has an interest at stake. and it's interesting when you talk being fed it as a lie because it's like planting the seed of a belief and then cultivating this belief until it goes and grows into what is becoming truth. it truth to them and it feels which is so terrifying. do you remember the first time you heard someone say alternative facts? i happened to be watching. i was in real time when. kellyanne conway said alternative. i wish i had been with you. so what what was your reaction to that? i don't think i said. i was by myself in the room watching tv. don't think i said much. i just kind of watching my jaw dropped and i wasn't completely

happy. i can't remember who. it was that she said it to. was it chuck todd? is it jake tapper? i wasn't happy with his response to. but if it was a jaw dropping moment, i mean, i think he laughed, actually is an interesting reaction to it because. it was such a. yeah, because it was such new concept. the idea of calling it alternative facts. i mean, people who create something for people to believe, you know, disinformation and don't often label it themselves as that. well, she was pushed was under some some pressure. you know, it's new for politics. it's not in the academy where it came from. i mean, that idea that there's no truth there's only narrative that comes from the academy that came from literary, from postmodernism and relativism. so i was already familiar with that. i just never seen it used in american politics. so the thing that i started to wonder, you know, at that moment

when she's talking about alternative facts is, you know, son of a gun. now the right wing has up postmodernism because there wasn't that long ago when -- cheney's wife was writing a book excoriating the relativists. you know, these were the worst people ever but now on the right. they figured out that they saw this flame thrower sitting there in the battlefield said, oh, i wonder how this works. wow, that's really effective. and they figured out that you can have a narrative and, feed the narrative, and it has all these benefits. now that's why it was invented in literary criticism. i'm not laying blame. it's just that they left their flame thrower laying around and it's such a powerful weapon. and we see that when things that we see with our own eyes, for instance, just randomly, how many people to an inauguration and we're told that it's something else. we say no at the picture. talk a little bit about that. so that was another searing moment for me in writing.

i think i was writing a post truth at the time and you know, the moment trump said that his inauguration was bigger than obama's, i you know, a lot of people shocked because why would he say that why would he say something that was so easily fact checked? it just it didn't make. it did sense because what he was doing was asserting his power. he was saying that was the first shot in the war against reality. he was saying, you know what, this is the reality. you now live in. you live in a reality in which i tell you what's true now? it wasn't actually true. but anybody who's ever lived in a country that is a dictator ship, country that has propaganda, understands that there is sense in which if the leader says something is true, it's true. now, we didn't live that nation yet, but i think that's what he was saying. he wanted to the i defined the word so that my first book kind of in this series it's called

post-truth and i define post-truth the political subordination reality. it's that moment. i didn't particularly like oxford dictionary definition of it and they made it word of the year and i had one of the first books with post-truth in, the title. so i tried to, you know, grab it, redefine it. and i think the political subordination of reality says, something about it that oxford did not is that there's a point this there's a goal, there's a strategy. there are people behind it people who are benefiting from bending the truth. well, i mean, i think it's interesting because the political subordination reality is such an incredible concept to grasp, because there is reality. there is truth. and the idea that you are some word like survive, you can make it be into your it into your own truth and it truth. and then it becomes someone is truth that is terrifying. well and almost as to actually more than that is the idea that

there is no such thing as true or that if there is truth, it can't be known. i mean, goal of disinformation is to get you to believe a falsehood. another goal of disinformation is to polarize you, to get you to hate someone. if they don't believe that same falsehood and to distrust them so that you ever listen to anything they say. so remember, that means that you're not just one falsehood. you're now the whole process by which truth comes together. but here's third part the even most insidious part, it's to confuse you and to make you feel helpless. to make you feel like i'm confused. i don't even know what's. how do any of us know what's true? everybody's biased and. there's no such thing as truth. i be my own fact checker. i check out because those are the people who are the easiest to rule. and you have a wonderful chapter in disinformation about that and how to recognize that and the

careful steps of, the process. i recommend it to you all, because it not only is illustrative of the process, but it helps us recognize we see that. and when we hear it, the process of the arguments that they make mean. i remember when i was a kid, we used to watch huntley and brinkley or walter cronkite and those people told us news and we believed this was true. kind of because was no reason to believe that it wasn't true. how much do the presenters of news have to do with our beliefs and how has that changed. i think it was i mean. i remember walter cronkite were people who were criticizing walter cronkite during vietnam. even the time what happened that i think that people figured out that these alternative narratives were really fascinating and that they looked enough like news that i mean, they were more and especially

after the downfall of the fairness doctrine when rush came on the scene and then fox news and everything that came after, people figured out that this could really make money. i mean, it wasn't long ago when the news was the loss leader. it was what the that they needed to do in order to keep their broadcast license and run all their entertainment they needed a half hour of news to justify it but all of a sudden they they could make money on news. and what that does is it means that the media has their own interests. now, i'm always loathe to draw any sort of false equivalence. and so i'm not going do that. but i'm going to say that all of the cable networks, no matter what their partizan slant, do, have their own interests, their interest in engagement and ratings and not being accused of political bias. well, it used to be i mean, talk a little bit about the difference between it used to be there. two sides of every story. you talked about the fairness

talk about the difference between two sides to every story and spin and disinformation and proper gander. how do we what are the among those and how do we recognize that? now, you just asked if philosopher to make some distinctions so we could be here for 2 hours. if i did all of that, let me put it this way. propaganda is when you're trying to convince somebody that something is true and it could be true and. you could even believe that it's true. but you're just you're using it to try to persuade. disinformation is black disinformation when you know that it's untrue and you're using it for an purpose, it's a falsehood that you know is true. and the other word that you will the two sides don't spin. oh, is spin. so do you remember when politicians used to be embarrassed when they got caught lying? i mean, think about john edwards. he his entire career was over

because he got caught lying. i mean, there used be such a thing as blame and accountability because there used to be such a thing as recognizing when you were caught in a lie and it was a bad i don't think politicians feel that way anymore. and the trouble now to bring the media back and back into it now is remember why i'm talking to you. so be is that you know this question about being accused of political bias the easiest way show you're not politically biased is to let both sides talk. but what do you do when one side is lying? i said once before or in a program i forget where at the halfway point between truth and a lie. it's still a lie. i read a better version of that that i wish i had said the other day stuart stevens. he's got a book for sale here somewhere. i read him on twitter. he said, how do you tell both sides of a lie? yes. you cannot tell both sides of a lie. so what's the charge to

journalism? to tell the truth, even if it leads to accusation of political bias for telling the truth? i mean, it's interesting because back in the olden days, again, a a newbie reporter like me, you in 1975 would not have said to someone that's a lie, would not have said in an interview that's, just not true. you would say. here's a piece of paper that says something that show that proves something that. what you said isn't correct. you look at this and tell me what you think about. this what do you think? the role of the media should be now when someone says something that's whatever not is. i remember watching the new york go through all media, but i remember especially watching the new york times go through this and the milestone when they finally used the word lie, when they were talking about trump and i understand that that was a kind of a crisis because, you know, they didn't want to to do it. and i didn't know there were so synonyms for lying. i it's mendacious.

it dissimulation. i mean, how many words can you use and you don't want say and i can't remember anymore but how many words before you say lie. and the problem is that when you say that somebody is a liar, you're saying that they know that what they're saying is not true. so it comes into the question of intent and you know, then you feel like you have to prove it. but isn't that really in the great interest of the this informer right to this informer who wants to fudge things pretend that because part of their schtick is no, it's not a lie it's true. well how could you ever and you and you and you do so so beautifully and on this you handle what say when confronted with that talk a little bit about the ways they get out of when someone says that's not true so there tactics in this information there's disinformation can be taught

there's there's a kind of a a playbook. this is not my book. this is a free the handbook of russian warfare. this is not written by russia. this is written by naito. and they talk about the different tactics. there is what about ism. there is the firehose of falsehood. well, let's take them one at a time. what is what about ism? so what about ism? you putin use this all the time. you see trump use it as well. when someone pins you to the wall with a question that you can't. you pivot to something that you know on the other side. so if somebody i remember a reporter once an american reporter asked putin something about why many of his enemies happened to be standing high windows and fall of them, you know. well, why? what was he afraid? and he pivoted. well, what about and i can't remember what he said next, but it was it a distraction you to something else. so what about ism a way of getting yourself after off the

topic and you know and if the what about outrageous enough then can kind of be the little distraction that you know the interviewer follow and we hear that all the time and once you raise the what's show us what that sounds like let us hear what that sounds like when. we were watching television. now we're listening to too radio now. now we'll understand. someone even says, what about oh, they use the term. yes, they say, what about i mean that's what it's like both sides ism. why is called both sides ism. yeah what about ism. they used the term and now we should in our brains go ding ding ding. here is something that is. i didn't want to talk about that. yes, exactly. and then you said the so the fire hose. the fire hose of falsehood or the fire hose of lies, this is really a terrific one. and again, putin uses this all the time and trump uses this all the time. it's when you just tell lie, lie after lie.

even the lies can even contradict one another. it doesn't matter. the point is to get so far ahead of the people who are trying to debunk you that they give up. after about the 10th lie, they think this guy's not even worth talking to. what am i going to do? go home for the rest of the night, debunk all this? meanwhile, they've moved on. i'll give you an example. when, after january six, when were talking about the violence on january. one of trump's and the republican party's stock phrases was this was a peaceful but then the footage came out show that it was not peaceful rally and they would say well it was a peaceful rally but any violence was committed by blacklivesmatter. there is a false flag or by antifa. well, how can both of those things be true at the same time? there was no violence, but the was committed by false flag. if they contradict one another. so. so what you do and i mean, i

could ask you a question because i know that you would probably interview food dictators, propaganda strongmen. you know the people who you know as a matter of ruling just lie to their people mean this is what authoritarians where they it's interesting how do you do it. well it's interesting i did an interview with a person a while ago who was in charge of the town water. i mean it's small it's the town water. and i was asking i asked him whether there was a certain of what is called to arms trial meetings in the water, which are and he said me we have no evidence of arms in the water. so i said, okay. and then i thought, did you actually for them? yeah. and he says, no. and i said, so you don't really know whether there are. and he said, yeah, i guess we don't and i've always thought about that what if i hadn't

asked and i would have gone on the air saying, you know, mr. smith says, are no thc. there. and that's what he wanted me. and you interrupted his narrative. bravo there's a passage in the book. i can't remember who said it. it was it was on twitter. it was a journalist who said the only people who were prepared to cover trump were the people who had interviewed gadhafi saddam hussein. you know, putin people who understood how this work. you can't just put a microphone in front of him and amplify his life. you have to know how to ask the follow up question you should have been asking those follow up questions because that's mean. it was a small. it was a small. they're all venue. but that's the point is you can't the worst thing you can do is amplify this informers lie without amplification. disinformation is meaningless how many people does it take to amplify a lie to it? to be in the common so. so i'll shock you.

in 2019, the center for countering digital hate found that 65% of the anti-vax propaganda on twitter was due to 12 people oh, and the night before elon musk took over twitter, i checked in. eight of them were still platformed on twitter now. so can get in. i have a friend who one time was studying this, not about vax but about something else. you know, the people who put comments online and there was this one guy who this troll was so prolific that his his comments were more than in the lord of the rings. i know i've. got it in the footnotes somewhere, not in any volume, were three volumes in lord of the rings. that's how much. so a few really dedicated people can make a huge impact. which is why de-platforming is so important in fighting disinformation. and i love that you talk about that in i go back on disinformation because there are a list of things, a list of ideas of things that you have

that might help in stopping the amplification. but as you say and a quote from you is disinformation. it has to be created, amplified and believed so because can spew out whatever you want, whoever it is. and we're not talking about just one clump of people, but it is can chew out whatever want and hope that someone believes them. but until they are believed doesn't matter who is susceptible to believing that they want to believe why. do we wish things were true and? then decide it must be true. everybody, we all have the same cognitive. we all have motivated reasoning, we all have confirmation bias, we all have the primacy effect. the first thing we hear is the thing that we're more likely to believe. we're all subject to the repetition effect. why don't we use that more for the truth? mean it works. you know, you ever go you go to a car dealer in, the first thing that they want to do is show you the they don't want to ask you first, what do you want to say.

they want to show you the sticker because that's anchor and then you bargain down from the sticker. they understand the primacy effect. they probably read kahneman and diversity but they know the primacy effect mean there are about 100 cognitive biases in the human brain and we're all susceptible to this. now, why do some people take it a step further and go that rabbit hole? it depends on the disinformation. it depends on how they're targeted. the scariest thing about, the amplification of disinformation. these are stock of amplification is where you just get a megaphone you tell everybody and you'll get a certain amount. today, this information is micro-targeting. so look at how facebook works they micro target you to sell cosmetics sneakers backpacks they also micro target you for hey they might target you for everything it's it's the same make a little about how that works so why the reason it works

is because they were i forget the quotation but after 20 clicks you know somebody than their spouse i mean the the companies understand who they're talking to. i mean if you're a marketer or there's a line in this book says the distinction between trying sell this book this but there's a line in this where they say that the distinction between marketing and propaganda is very thin so i mean, the same mechanism arms that that madison avenue uses to sell you goods they can use to sell you hate and it's i mean trump knows this trump steaks trump water university and it even matter if it fails it feels like power it feels like power and you can pivot, twist and go somewhere else. and it's not only it's not only hate, but it's belief. it's this belief is such a power powerful thing in itself.

i, i listened to an interview recently, one of my favorite quotes recently was from rudy giuliani who said, we have a right to believe things. and i just thought that was so chilling that is a straight up relativist point of view, doesn't know it. he probably denies it, but i mean, the right to believe he who was a moynihan who said you have a right to your own opinion but not your own facts. i mean, to have a right to believe. means what even facts. i have a right to think it's. i mean a right. i don't even know what that means exactly. well, that's what i was sort of getting at because it sounds like. well, sure, why we have a right to believe things, but, you know that that's not what he was saying mean he was he was debunking when said to him this isn't true this isn't true, this isn't true, this isn't true. he said, we have a right to believe things and there is essentially no answer to that, except you can believe whatever

want, but it doesn't make it true. correct. and i learned this chapter and verse when. i went to the flat earth international. in denver in 2018 and there were 650 people who believed that the was flat and that we'd never been to the moon. and i was of, you know, maybe three other people there under cover. we know one another at the time. and there were few reporters, you know, skedaddled after 15 minutes. but, yes, the the power to believe what want to believe is especially important when you're in a community of other people that also believe. and that's what i was just going to bring up the power of community were talking about the firehose of facts yeah the one about ism but also being in a group of people who have similar beliefs, it's easier. it's just peer pressure that we learned in the second grade. easier to agree. talk a little bit about the

experiment that you refer to in this book. so it the famous one is solomon asch in the 1950s at swarthmore college, who. had 20 people who were subjects except only one of them was actually experimental. the other 19 were confederates that were in his control, and he had lines on the on the chalkboard, one was this long and one was this long and point of the experiment was to go through all 19 and say which line was longer. and then the last, the real experimental subject was the 20th person. and he had told the that, you know, the confederates the first three iterations say that the longer line is longer and the shorter line is shorter, but on the fourth iteration. and mass my you start me because you're a psychologist you start me if i get this wrong. on the fourth iteration he said i want you one by one to say that the shorter line is longer and when they did that in, 33% of the cases the night the 20th

person agreed now that agreeing over the i mean it wasn't a subtle finding now and you know what, 33% that number sticks in my for some reason that i'm not going to identify but i mean is there that's overactive and i don't know but i mean it does show the community basis. i mean, we believe on the basis of our identity community, what makes us feel good when you attack somebody is belief and it's not backed up by fact. you know, their belief is not backed by fact. they didn't believe it based fact. they believed it based on different disinformation. and you attack that belief, you're attacking who they are that's why they won't change their mind. they don't trust you been taught to hate you and. you're attacking them as a person and you get all these other people around who believe, they believe and you're never

going to get their which is was the motivation for my earlier book how to talk to a science denier because thought there's got to be some way to get through the way to get through is patience, calm, respectful, listening but here's the problem and i identify in this book. yeah, the creators, the amplifiers, the believers. you cannot solve the disinformation problem only by debunking the beliefs, by to the believers it's too late if you if you wait to point, it's game over. you've got to find it's like in an epidemic you can heal. you can try to treat the sick. but if you don't try to figure out what's making them sick, other people will just get. when you talk about as victims. yes. science deniers or victims. reality deniers are victims. and it is super hard to convince somebody that they're a victim. i mean people will embrace that if they want to. but if you tell somebody, as mark twain said, easier to fool

somebody than to convince them, been fooled, you know, try convince somebody. no, that guy's to you. he's a con man. oh no, he's not. i believe i would never be conned. i could never be caught. what are you saying? because they're their egos, how much of the how much it is power, how much? how are people who feel powerless that's more likely to be led believe to denied reality. i don't know. that's an empirical question i don't that's what i ask all the time, right? it does. but i don't know. maybe that's been studied. but i don't i don't know. i mean, there have been all sorts of psychological studies on, you know. the partizan brain put him in an fmri and try to figure out you know it is one part light up. i don't know what it's come to. i can't i mean one of the, one of the people who was charged in the in georgia indictment talked about how he had come to realize

was that he was thought as a rube that the people who quote in charge allegedly this thought of him as a rube and that he had just been led along to believe that he was doing something that was right. and it was really sad. i'll this this is maybe not the happiest note. i'll say this. we are all subject to this. the day that we think that we're not is the day that maybe we're more likely to fall for something because disinformation polarizes just the believer. but the don't talk to the other people, get in your own silo. those are not worth talking to. and then once you do that, then you also are prime for the micro-targeting thing, i feel this sometimes. don't you feel that it's not just people who want to believe

something, but how? what goes along that it seems sometimes is it is that you have to hate the other person. can't be that you agree to disagree to. it's that the other side is, evil and bad and does not deserve to. fill in the blank and that starts with the erosion of trust. and in the earlier book i said that science was not a matter of it was a matter of trust. that's why you can't ramp facts on somebody's throat and convince them to change mind because they don't trust you. so if they don't trust you, anything that you say isn't going to work. so and this is this is why face to face conversation is so valuable face to face conversation. you just begin to trust somebody if you talk to somebody that you disagree with, if you're not rude and maybe you even find something in common, they begin to trust you, i'll tell you, i was at the flat earth convention for 48 hours and i had cordial civil conversations. one guy i took out to dinner, we

spoke 2 hours, so it possible i did not change his mind, but we didn't hate one another. but at least i didn't him. i don't think he hated me all the time. we laughed. and one of the one of the things i love about on disinformation is such a handbook for us to to truth, to getting to truth, and to to help other people learn about truth as well. when you when you sort of quantified the way the things that people can do what was it what crystallized in your brain about the thought that process is so at the end of the book so this disinformation is supposed to make you feel helpless and the point of the book is you're not helpless pick up this book, read it, pass to a friend. here's what you can do. i spend most of the book outlining the problem and at the end there are ten steps grassroots. steps because nobody else is coming to save us grassroots steps that we can each to fight back. and the most important of all is

that the only way to win an information is to know that you're in one. if we don't know, we're in an information war. we're already losing. this is why it drives me insane. hear so many tv say missing information when they mean disinformation. because if it's misinformation, then like they're reporting on a hurricane. i'm scared. put my head down. there's nothing i can do. but if it's disinfo formation, there is something you can do. you can fight back. you can fight back by telling the truth, by other people who are telling the and form that community by. going after the people who are amplifying the lies like partizan media or like i don't know, twitter, facebook youtube, the covert, the companies that are supporting i mean, there are there are it's a it's a short book i don't want to tell you the whole book saying you your mind, but then there are ten steps like that that anybody can take that are relatively easy.

take if you care about about fighting back for truth. but as i said the main one is that you have to know that there's something that you can do sometimes. i mean, what is the weariness factor when it comes to this? when you say when think i'm just not going fight with that guy over this, i'm just going to turn around and walk away, what do you say to them, okay, i, i never get weary. i've written four books on truth in a row so i, you know, i'll stay up all night because somebody on the internet was wrong and the thing that i want to find here is the quotation from hannah. i always think of this. i have actually over my desk the ideal subject of totalitarian rule. it's not the convinced nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exist. that motivates. and tim snyder and another

holocaust historian said it even more concisely. he said, post-truth is pre fascism that me i don't get weary because i think that the are democracy first it was science and the science deniers followed this blueprint and then the exact same tactics started to used by the reality deniers. and now the target is democracy those are the stakes. so i'm not tired. i'm mad. and in your call to action us, what would you tell. us how do we not be tired? how, how do we not be weary? read the book and pass it a friend i. i just think that i wanted to empower people. i want people to know that there is something that you can. it. it is upsetting to think that there something that we can do

and we haven't done it yet. and why doesn't somebody else do it? what isn't the government do it? why don't big social media companies do it? what is it? somebody else? what is it? one of the journalists do it for us. why it somebody handle this? but they're not. and we actually have more power than we think. i think to the whole resistance strategy at the beginning of the trump administration individual people when they come together have more power than they think. and i don't think that there could be any higher stakes. i mean, look, we it read right, how to fight for truth and protect democracy, because i think this is a flashing red alarm moment. i think that i genuinely think democracy is in peril for reasons that i just read. there's an even more contemporary quotation. joan donovan, my new colleague, boston university, who's one of the leading scholars in the world, disinformation and she was talking at eight and i can

almost quote it from memory won't be able to find it in the book but she was at a congressional hearing on problem and she said that the greatest problem that we that our nation faces today is misinformation at scale and the cost of doing nothing is democracy's end. how could you not be motivated when you hear that the people who study disinformation, understand what what's coming? and finally, little boy, you reading the world book and thinking there were no frontiers. just tell us that. so i grew up in a house where we have much money and. my parents had never been to college and it was, but we had books and. what we had mostly was the encyclopedia, the world book encyclopedia, and i loved that encyclopedia and i was so motivated because one day my dad said, you, you don't really need a college education, you just need to read the encyclopedia.

and by god, i read the encyclopedia and i went, how many did any of you read? the entire thing. you remember the world book the american side encyclopedia is it's it's wonderful. and i read the encyclopedia and i remember the story of galileo, socrates and giordano. bruno, all these people thinking, --, i was born 500 years too late. i mean, how easy would it have been to stand up for truth and reason and logic if you live back then when everybody was benighted? i mean, they didn't even know to wash their hands before, did surgery back then. come on. it these this was low hanging fruit. this have been easy but i born into the age in which all truth been discovered. so i couldn't for what i wanted to. well, guess what? i still could, because little me grew up in an age in which all of a sudden you realize that truth is in peril, as it always has been. and i use a metaphor at the end. most people in this room are too

young to understand, but maybe some of you played with mercury. i had an idea in our basement. that's not smart to do another thing. my dad, you, me. this is fun. if you hammer mercury, it scatters. but then it comes back together. and i think that's what happens to people who resist truth. they you can hammer down and they scatter, but eventually they gather back together again and they need to be hammered again. and that's what this little book does. congratulations lay on a wonderful book. isn't he powerful? there's so we skinned the surface of this book. this is this is church, as they say. talk a little bit about what you, the people to know right now, like the people to know right now. boy, i don't know. i mean, it's interesting because you're calling out people to take action and to let things go by. and when we hear people say,

what about thing? yes, i've got thing. because i was asked a similar question, though. you threw me off there because that's just good. if if i had a microphone for 5 minutes and look at this, i would tell people about the distinction between misunderstood, tell other people about that distinction. right to your cable news operator and tell next time next time you're watching cnn or msnbc and you hear them say misinformed nation in your head, think decent. does that fit. and if it does, why didn't they say and tweet them and ask them, why didn't you say disinformation you should have you should have said disinformation was was that a lie? yes. so there's a liar. so why didn't you identify how many people would it take to get them to doing that? and by the way, the one thing that we didn't talk about in the book that's important part this

pipeline from the creators to the amplifiers to the believers, you know, where you stop it, the amplifiers, that's where you stop disinformation, cable news, partizan media, social media. that's where we have to stop this. so anything you can do to fight against just that confusion, myths and disinformation is the most important thing you can do. and you have empowered us tonight. thank so much for this. we do want to take wasn't a good portion. but we do want we do want to take questions. and raymond will come with a boom. yes, ma'am. we've got to wait until the nina totenberg look right in your face. oh, i was wondering. let's see. i have question about what you just said. do you think there should be censorship, like of the internet if it's found to contain

disinformation? yeah, i think that content, moderation is not censorship right now is a coordinated, organized well-funded effort to try to make people believe that fighting disinfo formation is the same as censorship. but as i say in the book, refusing to amplify someone else's lie is not censorship. imagine you didn't believe in censorship. you were a radical free speech advocate. and so you thought that even if you radically disagreed with smith's point of view, they still had a right to get a parade permit and have their rally and make it. the ku klux klan something that you hate would you so you wouldn't censor that maybe does that you to go to the rally and help them hand out fliers it does not because that would only amplify their message that's

where social media runs afoul of this i don't believe for a minute all the argument that elon musk is making about how content, moderation, censorship of the same thing. the first amendment protects us from censorship from the government, the internet companies or private corporations, which are, by the way, protected by section 230 of the communications decency act from being sued for whatever do, whether they miss something or whether they take it down, they can do as they like and have so they have it occasionally before the 2020 election, they did have some warning labels that they would put up about covid, of disinformation, about election disinformation. but then after the election, they kind of dialed it back. so they know how to do this. so i think that's censorship. i think that de-platforming a liar is not censorship. they may have a right to say. they may have a right to believe

what they want to believe. they have a right to say what they want to say. they do not have a right to a microphone that will reach the entire world in the next 10 seconds. and you talk a lot about in this book, talks a lot about that. who else has a question? yes, sir. what can we do to help defend institutions that are under not just the justice department and the congress but today i heard on cbs news that four states have withdrawn from the american library association because they're objecting to the fact that their librarians refuse to censor books. i was just i just did an event the other day at a public library in which i was appalled to learn that librarians are today under attack, not just in the way that you're talking about, but personally hate mail,

stock death threats over the fact that they're librarians over the you know, the fact that they're not sent censoring books. so it's interesting, isn't it? how that censorship question kind of cuts both ways. i mean, what can we do to defend our institutions, defend i mean, be an ally for the institutions that you think need an ally? i mean, sometimes it's just as easy as calling out those sorts of tactics when they're happening, letting the people be victimized. i mean, i gave a talk one time to a group of up county public health officials. there were about thousand of them, and they were all completely demoralized. i mean, these are the people who had a big hand in saving our lives, the pandemic. and they're reward was that they were attacked, mocked. we had against their lives and who would say, you know, you're

trying to kill me with that vaccine and they had lost, you know, lots of people that they wish that they could have saved. and my main message them was, thank you for the work that you've done to save as many lives as you did. and it was over zoom. i don't know how many of them you know, reacted to that because we never do on zoom. but i thought that's what they need to hear. that's how i supported them by saying thanks thanks was due for the work that they've done because people will cross the street to curse somebody out but they won't say thank you and your librarian your public health official your poll worker. they need to be thanked. they need to be that that at grassroots. i think that's really important. thanks for the question, mark. yes. in the front. so how do people get to the earth society by by plane or using their g.p.s. and so how do

you so you've got to understand something. yeah that's what i'm asking the pilots are all in on the conspiracy as are all the scientists and the teachers and every government official including trump who they didn't like for that reason. so they flew most of them to the flat convention, trusted the pilots with their lives to get there, but didn't trust them over the shape of the earth and then took out phones and tweeted about the flat-earth convention, not understanding that there was traffic taking. that message around. i mean, there were it was a problem. so we had a lot to talk about. so you mentioned that. and i did because my goal was to be completely honest and tell

them who i was, i'm a philosopher, i'm not a scientist. so i wasn't going to with what i had on me, prove to them that the world was round because it's surprisingly hard to do with what you got in your pockets. i'm not a scientist, but am a logician. and so i talked to them about why they believed what they believed. and i would ask them questions like. you just told me that every picture from nasa was faked, but so do you believe that picture? well, that's not from. but why should i believe it. well, i know the guy who took it in and yet i don't i would them what? you don't believe what you believe on the basis faith. no i don't. i believe you think you're more scientific than the scientists. yes. so convinces you that's what the seminars. so what evidence could i potentially show you that would convince you to change your mind? they couldn't answer that. so i would ask them uncomfortable questions with a smile on my face, taking them to dinner because they needed to

hear push back. but if push back is done in a cordial way, then becomes conversation. you don't to hate and might not get an instant reversal, might just percolate in someone's brain and later they think, hmm, maybe airplane thing i don't know very people will tear off the lanyard and say what a fool i've been and leave. they just don't. but and this is where it's a good thing. i'm not a scientist because what i did was i read the anecdotal evidence, the scientific evidence, there was there was no study on hard core deniers who changed their mind all the studies which are good studies were about people who had just become deniers the hardcore deniers. but the deniers who changed their mind was always every single time the same way it was because some person in their life took the time with them and was doesn't always work. but if anything's going to work

that's what worked. yes, sir. which works in the blue. yeah. it's got one thing that you've talked about in the site, how to talk to assassins and. you hinted out here, it seems like you get the best effect by getting these deniers away their support group and talking them one on one. is that the correct. you're forcing me to say something out loud? that's a kind of a proprietary. but yes. yeah, except that the one guy that i pulled away from the herd had just gotten off stage trying to tell give them a seminar on how to turn other people into flat-earthers. so he was a tough one. he was a tough to turn him. but, you know, that's a good strategy. is it cultish? would you say it's cultish? i'm not going to say that i'm. going to say that the people in that believed what they believe for a reason.

and it was very hard for me to understand the reason, but virtually to a person, they had had a break in trust in their life. they had some there was a time in their life when they had lived through a massive breach of trust, which caused them to wonder. who else can i trust? and once you to follow that, it can go down as one of the things that you talk about in on disinformation. so thoroughly is about doubt, yes, no doubt. i mean, doubt can feel very scientific scientists doubt all the time. but you stop doubting, even if you understood that the evidence could later prove you wrong. when you've got enough evidence right, you the theory that has the most evidence, there's a point at which even the skeptic says, yeah, that's pretty good evidence. i'm going to believe that. and so that's okay. but it's, you know, the other thing that happens too is that people are often in consider in

their beliefs, right? they want proof for the thing. they don't want to believe and they require no evidence at all for the thing they do want to believe. and i can talk to about that all day you know that that's because that's a point in the philosophy of science and i'm perfectly happy to go over them. well, why would you do that? we do that about this belief, but not about this other belief. well, why disbelief and not that belief? isn't that inconsistent? so i'm kind of annoying in that way. but but it's that's not a conversation to have. and you know what the other important point is empathy. once you think that somebody has been fooled and that they're victimized, you got to have some empathy. them i mean, a lot of people who believe the propaganda about the vaccines died. don't they deserve some empathy empathy? oh, a couple more questions. anyone else?

yes, thank you. wait for the boom. thank you. you are a thief. you stole my had a rant quote. but i was going to ask you about, i wanted to mention one of the most famous hoaxes in the united states. look it up, about 120 something years. a guy named h.l. maga wrote a thing about a bathtub hoax in the new york mail. it was complete, utter nonsense. ten years later, he wrote thing saying it was utter nonsense. nonetheless, once it was in print, it got put in two journals and ahead and put into the history of plumbing, which a rather interesting is the famous h.l. mencken quote, i was the holocaust museum. i was quite fascinated, according to what they said, the word holocaust did not originally mean the killing the --. it originally meant the book burning. that was the holocaust.

in flames. oh, i wanted ask you, you mentioned his latest lady who came from across the street to boston university. i was very curious if you could give us the of why she left harvard the same time that they're getting funding from other things the records of relationship or or your funding cut off or is it mere coincidence and there's a lot to unpack in that question. i have to say know yeah that's that's another it's not my story to tell. fair. perfect. and yes, in the red shirt in the back. so could you talk little bit about the global aspects of this information like i guess, two things. is there room for democracies to go on the offensive against nefarious authoritarian that may be coordinating some of these attacks? and then is there a or free society that's handled it better than others? and what could we learn from them? yeah, i love that question.

i mean, i like your ambition to go on the attack. don't just defend what you need to. defend, you know, go after them. look, there are. democracies that have fallen to hungry, it's not looking so good. turkey is not looking so good. bolsonaro almost succeeded in brazil. and i mean, the scariest thing happening internationally right now, that i see is that, you have some dictator ships that are leaning to the fight against disinformation because they get to define disinformation is. so there's there are now laws in russia. there are laws. turkey, where you spread fake news, go to jail for ten years. i'm i couldn't travel to certain countries because of what written i'd go to jail because why are they doing this they're doing this not because they care so much about fighting,

disinformation but because the ruse of fighting disinformation allows them to jail their dissidents, to fight back the people who are criticizing their regime. so, you know, that's kind of three d chess. that's going on. that's something that i'm worried about. i'm also worried about this coordinated effort in the united states right now where jim jordan is running, his weaponization of government subcommittee and bringing some of the disinformation fighters in the world in and trying to intimidate and them to make them feel that they're they're under attack and you shouldn't be fighting against disinformation. so this this is what scares me. who's doing it better than we are? finland finland has a curriculum where they teach children how to identify news. i mean, yes, there's a lot now. we can't wait for the kids save us. but i love idea that they're

getting kids to be critical thinkers early on. so. so. yes, there are many other examples. there are examples in the united states, there was a a teacher in california a few years back, scott baddeley. he was teacher of the year and he had the fake news game with fifth graders and he taught them he gave them a rubric how identify fake news and the kids loved it they didn't want to go out to recess. give us another one, mr. baddeley. i mean, how much do kids love debunking a fake, right? i mean, they would love. okay, here's what you got to do. look for the byline. now get on google woke up. what else have they? was there a date on the story. where did the story come from? who that newspaper or whatever? i mean, there are. look up, scott baddeley. he can tell you what the 12 steps are. and when kids know that they can. i mean, how many of us know that that's really so i think that's good. so i think there is reason for us to to be up optimistic.

but we can't wait for the kids to save this. and i think right now we're really we're on the defense. i mean, especially in the united states, if you read all those books, how democracy is fail? i mean, how many books of about to fall in democracies can there be before? you start wondering if the united states next. i mean, we all know this our time is up lee you are marvelous and. i know that you have changed all of our lives teaching us how to question and how to analyze and how to protect the truth. and we are grateful for that. thank you so much. thankand annie jacobsen, thank u

very much for sitting a