After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News

As someone working in Politics in DC what do you think about Fake News?

I would use fake news as a weapon because it's out there

The Germans use chemical weapons the British use chemical weapons

What are you going to do? That doesn't mean you like chemical weapons

it means you do what you have to do

I've tried some fake news I don't even remember, we've tried some things

Yeah, there are terrible negative potential consequences

But, so what? That's what I say so what? What's the big deal?

We've always taken the position in this country

"Let it all come out and let the people judge"

Despite the dangers

But how can the people judge fake stories and Lie

or do you think we are in a post-truth moment?

Oh, I don't know

I mean, what is truth? If you study philosophy, there is no reality

There's only perception

So when you say "Are we in a post-truth moment?"

most philosophers on all sides would tell you

there was never any such thing as "truth" to begin with

There is this ecosystem that's growing now

where people are actually confusing real and fake news

Especially if they see it online

This "post-truth" culture that we're living in has real costs to the people

who are victimized by those who come up with these theories and themes

People have suffered because of false news that's being spread online

The summer of 2015 was really the first sign

that there was something happening in our information space

that we weren't paying enough attention to

There was a two-month-long military exercise that was occurring

in the American Southwest - Jade Helm -

and this conspiracy emerged around it

that President Obama was going to round up political dissidents

and put them in camps in Texas

Fake news... what do I think about it? A very old saying comes to mind

"Don't believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see"

I find myself there a lot I don't know what's real and what's fake

Here in Bastrop, it's a very close-knit, rural community

Typical small-town America hometown value structure

In 2015, back during the Obama administration

there was a huge amount of concern about distrust of the national government

And once people found out

that there was going to be a major military operation in Bastrop County

a lot of people were, you know making puzzle pieces fit together

We're going to be conducting the training exercise safely, and courteously

We're not going to interfere with their privacy or their rights with this

The Army says it's an eight-week training exercise in a realistic setting

but they're not saying much beyond that

We began to get inquiries from people

"Why are you allowing the military to come into Bastrop County?''

''What's going to happen? Why are they coming here?"

And then all sorts of conspiracies were put together

"The truth is, that it's an exercise, um for enacting martial law in this country"

This is conditioning for martial law and a takeover

And then I tuned into another show they're saying the same thing

"I guess Alex Jones was right" there's been an awakening

We happened to be kind of the clearinghouse of a lot of conversation

People would come here it's like the pub, to talk about it

Somebody shares a story someone else commiserates

and then everyone else jumps on the bandwagon

I think it has a lot to do with, you know having a degree in Google

Whether it's vaccines cause autism, Masonic lizard people running the world, Jade Helm...

We want so hard to believe even in conspiracies, that things actually exist

that there is an underlying deal, that we have some knowledge that other people don't

And we want to believe all that

Um... but it's... sometimes it's just not true

I will be headed to Bastrop, Texas

to report on the Jade Helm '15 the military exercise

I don't trust the corporate media

I don't want somebody else to tell me what's going on

I want to go find out for myself

In my view, Jade Helm was a psychological operation to gauge the response

Will the people, you know be complacent when this exercise happens?

Will they push back?

We're going to go inside, see, this is what the corporate media does

They stand across the street... and we go inside

I can't believe we're in here...

I believe in personal responsibility

If somebody reads an article, and they go crazy because of that

Because of whatever issues they've got going on, like

I don't know how I can, you know, be held responsible for that

There are many who made some pretty wild claims, and social media is the devil

So, in my interest in open government and in transparency, I said

"Well let's just have a town hall meeting and explain this to everybody''

Colonel Lastoria came, and we asked him to explain to everyone who was interested

what exactly the operation was going to entail

Jade Helm is simply just a challenging 8-week training exercise

For unconventional warfare

and it's an exercise that'll be conducted throughout Texas

New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah

Hysteria is a little strong of a word but there were pockets of hysteria

You had people that were otherwise normal people, in the Jade Helm thing

believing that there was an underground network of tunnels

that connected all the Walmarts in Texas

These are giant facilities that can house people

So, people started speculating that

Okay these Walmarts are getting ready to be turned into concentration camps

detention centers, what have you

''Today, Governor Greg Abbott is choosing to assign the Texas State Guard''

''to monitor the operation"

Commander Abbott states his reasoning is, quote

"To address concerns of Texas citizens''

''and to ensure that Texas communities remain safe"

You get a part of the citizenry worked up and the Governor reacted to it in a way

that looked like the state government was taking this seriously

The relatively quick jump of that information from conspiracy blogs, to town hall meetings

to the Governor's office I think was of great concern certainly to the military

and to our intelligence services

Recently, Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director

talked about this, very clearly linking the disinformation campaign around Jade Helm

to Russian information activities targeting the United States

"Russian bots, Russian trolls, combining with the American alt-right media''

''convinced a non-trivial portion of the Texas population''

''that it was an attempt by the Obama administration''

''to round up political opponents"

It was interesting to me that someone would tie what went on here in Bastrop County

to this worldwide concern about Russian interference in American politics

but you know what, uh, it's a small world

"And in Texas, we don't compare our economy to other states''

''We compare our economy to other countries''

''The Texas economy is larger than Canada it's larger than Australia''

''and get this, the Texas economy is even larger than the economy of Russia''

''That makes me more powerful than Putin!"

That was a test

And what all of it showed was, we are in a weaponized information environment

So we're at the point now where I don't think people can distinguish

fact from truth anymore or people are starting to make their own truth

and honestly, I'm okay with that

I have about eight different daily digests that come into my inbox every morning

from different Facebook pages and other things that we started tracking over time

and I'd scan hyper-partisan stuff from people who tend to propagate misinformation

And it's basically just like starting your morning bathing in internet garbage

is pretty much the deal

I have been looking at false stories since 2014

There were a handful of journalists and researchers who were interested in this stuff

but it wasn't what was the main focus of the world

And in the span of a few months that completely changed

at the end of 2016, with Trump's victory

What we found was, the core, key time, before Election Day

that fake stories got way more engagement than the real news stories about the election

And as soon as everybody, journalists politicians, researchers

started scratching the surface they were like

"Holy crap, this is, look at what's here"

And then right after the election we had Pizzagate

Somebody walking into a D.C. pizzeria with a rifle and firing it off

and realizing that that was a result of this person

Consuming conspiracies and misinformation

I think that freaked a lot of people out

My restaurant, I try to be, like, everyone's invited, just have a good time

Play ping-pong, eat some great food

Families and kids are the people who like it the most, because it's, like, it's fun

They can run around

Comet Ping Pong is a fixture here in Washington

Everyone knows this restaurant

People come from other parts of Washington to have pizza here

We do have some politically-connected people that come in here

and that is just something that happens

I mean, I have CNN news anchors who have been eating here for years

But what Comet is about is, this is a safe space for people to come in

and be themselves

We host shows for local bands, queer bands

I think that one of the nice things about Comet is that there's space here

for queer folks to be part of the identity of the restaurant

I had this party for the ten-year anniversary

Everyone was invited, and we had the Attorney General of the United States

and like, congresspeople and kids and musicians and artists

And that was in the end of October, 2016

I looked at it at one moment and I just thought

"Wow," like, "we've really created something here"

Like, "This place is special"

And then quickly after that, we were slammed with this year-plus-long

endless, uh, conspiracy theory

John Podesta, who's Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman

his emails were hacked and they get uploaded online

And a lot of conspiracy theorists start crawling through them

And based on these emails

they spin up this crazy conspiracy theory about Comet Ping Pong

People on pro-Trump forums start going through John Podesta's emails

and they see these references to pizza

Now these are pretty innocuous references

"Do we need to get pizza for the campaign volunteers," that kind of stuff

and perhaps the first example we've ever seen of the creation of Pizzagate

is on a reddit post

Someone saying "I think we need to be looking''

''at these clues, for all this pizza stuff"

And really, from there that's where it took off

So, inside the emails, they connect a lot of different things

CP, "cheese pizza"

People will dissect it, they think maybe it stands for, "child pornography"

Various people on reddit, sites like 4chan

become convinced that "pizza" is slang for essentially, children to rape

And so then they see the exchanges with James Alefantis and John Podesta...

I had emailed with John Podesta about hosting pizza party fundraiser

cookout at someone's house

And so, people become convinced that Comet Ping Pong is, like

this child rape dungeon in the basement

This was supported by George Soros

and John Podesta, and Hillary Clinton and like everybody was somehow connected

to this child sex trafficking ring in a pizza parlor

that you could dial up, and say the right food words, and get your order of children

It's just days before the election and so, tensions are high