 There's a name, Julianne Gorbach, mean anything to you. Sister Professor of Journalism in the journalism program at the School of Communications at UH Manoa, and he's here with me now, and he's our guest, and we're going to talk about what we're going to talk about today. Now, Facebook news news, fake news or something else, we're going to talk about how it all works now in the news. And we have sort of an endless list of possibilities for how it works. It's unfolding in front of us. These are things that you never studied. Am I right? Yeah, I mean, we've studied them, but the things that are happening now, I feel like in some ways or other, I'm outpacing our best-laid plans for what we plan to teach and how we plan to reckon with it. When you went to journalism school, Julianne, I'm sure that part of it was you wanted to be in the mix of the connection of what was happening in the community and the public. And there's a gratification in that. That's what journalism is all about, delivering a gift, if you will, every day to the public, informing them, making them aware, making our society a better place. I can't put it in any other terms than that. If I went to journalism school and your students and you, that's what I would go for. But this is all different now. And only in the last couple of years has it surfaced. And so we have today, we have the caravans bunching up at the border. We have the army with strange instructions on how to deal with them. We have the immigration service, the Border Patrol, which closed the border already. And the whole thing is in—it's like two boxers, and they're in clinch. They're going anywhere. And it's a crisis. So what do we learn from this in terms of how the White House is dealing with this and creating news out of it, and how this is a complex question, and how the public is reacting? Well, I mean, I think that it's funny because I teach this semester and once a couple years ago I've taught this news literacy class that we offer at UH to freshmen and older students too. But it's a 100-level course, so introductory level. And what we teach is kind of part of a movement, like a news literacy movement. And it's funny because when I first got to UH in 2016, right at—well, yeah, 2016 right as the election was happening, and then the semester—the first time I taught the class was the spring of 2017. So right in the fall out of that, when the word fake news was—was erupting as like something we were all talking about. Erupting like a boil. Yeah. We—I think we approached it at the time like there is a wilderness of information out there. And people are now confronted with it within the digital realm. So there had been a revolution when the printing press was invented and suddenly people needed to learn how to read. And the printing press had such a vast impact as an invention on human society because so many people could find out, for example, what the aristocrats or what the people in power were up to, and printing presses used to be licensed by the state for this very reason. You can almost draw a direct line between the invention of the printing press and, say, the Protestant Reformation and even, you know, to 200 years later to the French Revolution and the outbreak of democracy in the fall of all these monarchies that ruled by divine right and everything. So the argument for this kind of global movement of news literacy was that we have a new revolution, which is, you know, if there was the Gutenberg revolution that invented the printing press, we have the Zuckerberg revolution. No less consequential, perhaps much more. Right. And so people are now trying to become illiterate in terms of navigating the digital landscape. Now what does that mean? What it means is that we used to have this thing called the editor or the gatekeeper. And so when we got information for the most part, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, Walter Cronkite would deliver the news. And we would get newspapers. We would get magazines. So if you couldn't just put out any kind of BS just to everybody, it was harder anyway. And we removed that gatekeeper and now everybody is swimming around in this digital realm and anybody can make a newspaper look realistic and news is traveling much faster speed. So there are all these challenges. So in 2016, when I started teaching it, we had this idea that we're dealing with a confusing wilderness landscape. How do people find their way through it? Fast forward two years later, we're dealing with a rather different environment. So we developed tools. We had tools. We could talk about those tools for dealing with a confusing environment, with dealing with an environment where there's a lot of junk and a lot of falsehood for various reasons. But in 2017, these terms like gaslighting and just this deliberate, aggressive assault on the truth, anti-democratic actors, these are now bringing us into a whole new realm. So I'm coming into a class with tools to teach students digital literacy. I don't have the tools to teach them jujitsu or these kind of counter moves. In fact, I did a thing just in the last few days of saying for extra credit, can you guys try and come up with an exercise for what do you do when people are employing deliberate tactics to mislead? You want to call it misinformation? Maybe you'd be better to call it disinformation. And so collectively as a class, we're all trying, and they know because I've told them 50 times, I don't have exercises or drills or specific things to teach you. We're just beginning to try and figure out how to reckon not just with the confusing digital landscape, but with a aggressive, constant attacks from different directions on the truth itself. Yeah. So I mean, one question which we can get to in a minute is, is there a solution? It could be that it's pandemonium. It's, you remember, the Kham, it was sort of a city of fools and they're all confused. And then no one can actually find the truth. It's a biblical reference. And, you know, we may be there. We may be at a place where sort of the search for truth ends in confusion. And then everybody's speaking, because when I was a kid, my friend in my apartment building got a television. Yeah. This was in the 50s. Yeah. And we were sitting there watching this amazing, brilliant thing, television. And his father worked for the diplomatic service, and his father stood there, and he said to us, someday you watch television, you will be able to talk to the people on the television. It will be a two-way conversation, or it will be a conversation among everybody who's watching the television. One great big conversation. Well, you can see how well that's working out. And he said, you won't like it. It'll be amazing, but you won't like it. He was looking into it, and she was prescient, anyway. And so what I wanted to mention is that Russia has been doing this, according to the New York Times, and has been doing it for a while. It's the Active Measures Initiative, and with intentional disinformation, which it showed during the 2016 election, for sure, if not before. And it's been doing it with Estonia Latvia and the Ukraine for a long time. And in Estonia Latvia and Ukraine, they have a solution to this, if you're searching for a student-driven solution. Every day, prime time, there are television shows where these guys get up as if they were newscasters. This is the defending team, so to speak. And they say, well, we heard this today. And it was planted by the Russian government, and it's not true. Let us show you how it got to be on the news. Let us show you how it is not true. And every day, this is what they do, and it's their solution. Query whether it will work, query whether the Russian Active Measures Team, and wherever they are in Russia, will find a way around this defense. So far, it seems to be popular. It seems to be a defensive move that actually has promise. Do you think the answer is somewhere in there? No. I mean, it might be a little bit. I think, OK, there's a couple of things embedded in there. One is the idea that if we fact-check, that will correct things. If we just give people the correct facts as opposed to the incorrect facts, well, so Brendan Nyhan, he's a professor out of Dartmouth. And he's for many years been studying the efficacy of fact-checking. And he's continuing to tweak his results. But the broader findings are that it's not very effective, that fact-checking, that people end up doubling down, that in other words, ideology overrides people's ability to see the truth. So if you're thinking, feels true to people, if you confront them with facts, they'll find a way of digesting what you gave them and still coming back to position A. The second thing though is I've noticed, I brought this up to you before, that you can't just identify individual facts. This is our last time we talked. I did notice that the talking heads on cable are beginning to do a better job. Maybe they've been doing it of, you know, this is why we have all this bloviation that goes on. I mean, I suppose they save money with not having so much journalism, actual journalism on NBSC and CNN. They have a lot of talking heads. And one of the things these talking heads are doing is they're unraveling the mythological stories, the longer lies, the legends and the myths that, you know, that Trump and others are telling. The big lies. Yeah, the big lies. Well, the big lies can mean a couple of different things. One, it can mean like a big, huge lie, but it can also mean, in Goebbels' definition, it was, you know, create a, invent a problem, create a solution, and then keep repeating that over and over and over again. Sometimes the big, huge lie is also one of those, like you could say immigration might be one of those. But so they have been doing that, and that's, I mean, what we, because fact checking is of limited efficacy, that's why we felt like the news literacy that we teach is important, because we try and teach students to say, okay, we have an acronym, I'm Vane, which is a silly acronym, but it is a word for getting them to pay attention to the source of whatever they're reading and then evaluate it in terms of, is the source independent? Are there multiple sources? Are the sources verified? Are the sources authoritative? Are the sources informed, which is a bit like being authoritative? And are the sources named? And... I am Vane. Yeah. I'm Vane. Great acronym. You know, so that's effective. Again, it's effective for being in a wilderness, a confusing atmosphere of information, but to your point, you know, one of my students was, when I said, okay, extra credit, come up with a way for us to deal with this aggressive attacks on the news, she pointed out something this morning that I thought was really valuable insight. Her name's Amiko, and what she pointed out was that context is very important. You can't combat the falsehoods of, say, a given story when it's being actively promoted or when the truth is being suppressed unless your audience has a grip on a broader pool of knowledge of what it is that you're talking about in the first place. So in a way, the short answer to your question of, yeah, how do you reckon with this? How do you combat that is, it's really not easy, and there's no shortcuts, and we end up with these kind of almost like things just like we need to improve education. I mean, if they're going to understand context better, well, we need better education, we need better civics so you're following the stories, and you need better all-around knowledge, so that's, you know, not a direct solution, but maybe there isn't simple answers or some new, even though that these might be newer iterations of old problems, the solutions might end up being going back to the drawing board to the, well, we need improved education, we need better civics in America, and there may not be any other... That's a 20-year project at least. And there may not be, you know, if you look at gun control, there's the latest shooting and people say, how do we solve this problem? Well, America has had a problem with guns and violence for 200 years. You know, do people really think you're going to pass one piece of regulation or legislation that is going to control, you know, the cure our sick relationship with guns? We had 350 million guns. I mean, maybe part of the original thing there, it's like the same thing, it's like recognize the depth and the size of the problem, the real problem. I would add another C. You see for con... I am vain with a C context, but also confusion. I think, you know, just my own observation, since Trump came into power, is that he has doubled down on the lies, and the public was confused, and it becomes more confused as he doubles down, creates new lies, lies that are bigger and worse and somehow more pernicious, and after a while, the confusion gets worse. And as the confusion gets worse, it seems to me, the lies are more bold, and the attempts to make further confusion are more bold. Do you agree, do you see a process like that? I think the state of public confusion is greater today than it was at the inauguration. Well, I mean, I think that you attack the truth in order to create a situation where if you're in power and you're attacking the truth, you know, why does a fascist attack the truth? Because the fascist wants all power. So if you now have people with a population with a very tenuous grasp of facts or of the truth, then you can say and do whatever you want for your own benefit. On Khashoggi, you know, it reminds me of what he said in the campaign, that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. And he can also back somebody up who can murder somebody, you know, in an embassy in Turkey, and get away with it. It's quite remarkable how people get so confused that they tolerate it. And what he's doing is being tolerated. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's one where a buddy of his went and did something, murdered somebody. And so now he's doing his different dances. I mean, I think what's interesting about him is he's really quite the, you know, between him and his team, but him alone, he's really quite the versuoso. His bag of dirty tricks goes really pretty deep. I mean, and so many of the things, you've got to like, you know, you've got to kind of separate them out as tactics, talk about, understand each one of them maybe individually, but also be able to step back and say, what do all these things have in common and how do you deal with it? And what do they have in common with, you know, tyrants from before? Well, and then some of these things are entirely independent of him, which is what's, you know, when you said, are we ever going to solve this? I mean, as much of a problem, if we want to talk about Trump as a problem in and of itself, your first thing on there was Facebook. And Facebook is more than one problem. It's problems wrapped up in, you know, so... Let's talk about Facebook in the context of now. I mean, we know they were doing funny things during the election. We know that Zuckerberg has not been forthcoming in terms of trying to resolve this or even admitting, you know, the depth of the problem around Facebook and other social media. And, you know, the problem is that it's the printing press come forward. It's social media confusing people, social media permitting confusion, engendering it, amplifying it, and you're right. It's not just Trump. Trump is just finding this as a convenient weapon. It's not just Putin. Well, he's an opportunist in a, you know, who's a hustler in an environment where the truth is becoming unmoored for a variety of reasons and not, you know, and he's not the only one actively attacking the truth. So Facebook has fallen into the hands of Putin. Putin with his active measures and his seven commandments of disinformation was in the New York Times. And it goes something like, find something you can capitalize, find a schism of some sort that you can make worse. Yeah. And try to make it worse, repeat the lie, oppose and criticize anybody who tells you you're lying, and so forth. There's seven of them all together, and you can see them being repeated, not only for the Russians in active measures, but what Trump does, it's the same thing. And so, I guess... Well, the Russian propaganda is a multi-platform endeavor, you know, certainly, you wouldn't confine themselves to your Facebook. Right, right. Oh, sure. It just happens to be part of their system. Yeah. You're right. I mean, they're everywhere. And then sometimes, there was a story about some small newspaper in India where they published, they originally published a story about how the U.S. was responsible for the AIDS virus. Yeah. Okay. In India. And it went silent for a while, and then it came back, it came roaring back a year or two later. Well, it was interesting about that example. So they plant a story in the press in India, and if you heard their explanation, they said, we looked for these third world countries and newspapers to sneak it in that they found, and I don't know if this is really true, but they obviously found the gatekeeping, the role of these professional editors that we had before the internet, so effective that they had to go plant it in a small paper in India to even get a fake piece of information. I don't think it would be that hard to get something in a major newspaper, I think. And I think the Americans, probably with all the elections that we meddled in, probably got major pieces in major metropolitan papers of the places we want to attack all the time. So I don't think the gatekeepers, you know, when we teach I'm vain, we're not teaching them some kind of bulletproof system. We're just teaching them what editors do when they're on the job. But you know, these things are, you know, they're each a whole Pandora's box or whatever in themselves. There is just a box full of stuff. So you just talk about, you leave Russian propaganda for a minute and just talk about Facebook. You kind of have two separate problems just with Facebook. You have one, which is that this idea that they operated on from the get-go, which was to your point about how, you know, was your father said, oh, in the future you'll be able to talk two ways to the TV and it'll be just like, you know, so you have this original thing of like, well, what if we have a town hall, but everybody can get online and join the town hall. Same thing. And I think for the first several years that Facebook operated, they operated with fundamental democratic idealism. We're not going to, it would be very dangerous to censor things, because either the First Amendment or all of this, and people will argue it out. But you know, people can't be named like Julian Thirteen, you know. I can't, I can't have a dozen different me's running around all over and in Sim City with butterfly wings or whatever else I want to do to myself in a virtual environment. So it's not the same thing. We have virtual selves. We are anonymous. We say things online even with our real names that we would never say to other people. We can dress things up in a digital realm the way we, visually the way we can, etc. The second, so there just was a huge hole and a huge problem that we only discovered would get worse. Because it's like, if you want to have an argument, it's hard enough to have an argument with a real person when two people are stubborn, it's another thing. How do you argue with a bot? Or a bot and a troll together arguing against you. I mean, now you're into like, you know, that the founders never know, never envisioned bots and trolls. And then entirely separate from that is when they decided to monetize their operation at Facebook. And they found, you know, as it says in the documentaries that have now been made, we can't just find out what color people like or what their type is that they like to date. We need actual real monetizing, you know, monetizable information. We need to know where you go all day, what you went online and did. Every single piece of fragment of digital footprint. And somehow in going public, they managed to erect this incredibly vast, powerful, for purely commercial reasons, kind of data suction machine without kind of taking the next step forward and saying, is this for sale? If we create this, and it's the Facebook thing, does every single one of our clients, like if the Trump campaign comes around in 2016 and offers us $100 million, do we just hand them our entire data thing that we've created? I think they did. And you know, we spent 60 years in media studies arguing limited effects, arguing that, you know, from the 1940s on, that people overestimate the direct impact of media. But we've been studying that for 60 or 70 years. Is it possible that the technology has gotten to the point with micro targeting and the digital footprints and everything else? That actually media now, you can do incredibly powerful things because you can direct all of this kind of multimedia with all these tools, anonymous, whatever, video, augmented reality, virtual reality at exactly who you want to target. And you can then bring in an artificial intelligence and, you know, at what point do we throw up our hands and say, you know, the limited effects model? Okay, now we need to study how much of an effect media has. Right, we know it's not limited. So when you have those two things in Facebook intertwine, the fact that, no, we are not in a public sphere. This is not actually real people interacting in a real way. Something weird and unpredictable and unknown happens in a digital realm in the first place. And the fact that you have this incredibly powerful machine now, this data capture that they created, and that they're now selling, whether it's selling it to the Russians or selling it to any state actor that wants to come in. Now, and that's just, I'm just talking about Facebook. That's that one problem. Now we haven't even talked about the Russians and the playbook that they've had for 20, 30 years and how they might intersect with that Facebook issue. So there's a lot to unpack with all this. So yes, and I'd like to unpack it against what's happening with the military on the border and the caravans coming in and a president who clearly used the presence of his ability to put the military at the border as a tool for the midterms only a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. Can you describe how that all integrates? Well, so I mean, I don't know at what point you can get on television on Think Tech and say I'm an expert at this or I'm, so I shy and say I'm an expert on propaganda. I don't want to do that. But as much as I understand, I'm a media historian and I've studied Nazi propaganda mostly and just just World War II era propaganda, I should say, and World War I era propaganda. What I can say is this, it's like what I'm seeing is whether you want to talk about the seven steps that people can find or that's in that New York Times op doc about the Russian propaganda or whether you want to talk about the Nazi big lie or things that were done during the Spanish Civil War. There are lots of different playbooks and they're very interesting. And so one that I've noticed that I don't know that there's a rule book for, but that is cropping up with this Mexico situation is that you go back to a Nazi propaganda film like Triumph of the Will and what was going on in American, I guess you could call it propaganda or sort of getting people riled up. There's a word, but I'm forgetting it in the 30s and 40s. And what you find in like Triumph of the Will was thousands of people in these beautifully choreographed sequences. We've seen footage of that. Yeah. And we see in New York and Madison Square Garden, 20,000 people show up and do Heil Hitler in 1939. Right. Well, and so then, but in America, you actually have something different that the Jews are doing largely. It's sort of a, it was very popular as a medium among Jews, which was pageants. So it's like the cast of thousands thing that you had in the Cecil B. DeMille films or whatever, but you had it with stage. So you'd have these 500 people or 1000 people in a, in something that would go on in Madison Square Garden and it would be orchestrated. So while the Nazis are doing their Nuremberg rallies and they're having thousands of people choreographed in these, in these spectacles that are created by the state, you also have political messaging going on in the States, on Broadway and, and, you know, elsewhere in these huge venues with thousands of people involved in pageantry. And, and then you get into World War Two and you start seeing Hitler is commanding armies and he'll do things like he'll, he'll say, Hey, allies, I'll give you 80,000 Jews for $50 a Jew. All you have to do, I'll dump them on you in Palestine, right where you want them, right, right in the middle of the Arab world. I'll give you 80,000 Jews for 50 bucks each. If you give me some trucks and coffee, middle of 1940, you know, early 43. And the reaction to the world is England and America, because England has the British Empire, we don't want the Jews. These Jews are dirty refugees. You keep the Jews. So now the upshot of the message that the Germans have control of armies. They're exterminating people. They can do things to people and they can make a message like we've got 80,000 of these people. We're going to hand them to you. Oh, you don't want them. And then that message goes out so you can use armies. If you're, if you're the head of state, you can use your cast of thousands now is, is cast of millions. You can use your, yeah, you're doing pageantry, but on this, you know, on, and so you look at what does Trump do? He says there's going to be a problem on the border in three or four weeks when these people come up, there's 4,000 people coming up. So I'm going to deploy 15,000 soldiers there. And then I'm going to change the policies that we have for, because all they're all going to want asylum to make these people very unhappy and uncomfortable sitting there in this limbo for a few weeks. And I'm going to continue to antagonize them rhetorically. And then up, there's violence. Well, no, you know, people say, well, how, how does violence, you know, so maybe with Hitler, maybe he wasn't, maybe he didn't even dislike Jews. Maybe, you know, maybe useful, you know, yeah, exactly. It's, if you look beyond that, maybe it's, you know, whether it's Hitler blaming the depression on Jews, or, you know, at any given time, being able to say, oh, gee, the economy is really bad. It's because all these refugees are pouring in the country. If we just attack them and you keep stoking that, sounds like modern day and dramatizing it, then it doesn't, it doesn't matter how many of this a person, a B or C, we actually kill, because to the leader, it's just all riding on the wave. If your entire foundation is based on that fervor and getting people caught up in that battle, then you can rise very quickly and you can have an incredible power and maintain it as long as you can ride that battle. As long as you keep that fight going, you are the king. Yeah, it's a means to an end. Yeah. And the end justifies the means. And so what I, well, you know, and, and that's, that's one tactic, one playbook that's not Trump. Trump interrupts people. He shouts over them all the time. I mean, do you notice how much he does that? Just the shouting and the interruptions. Yeah, he interrupted Hillary Clinton straight through all of her debates and nobody stopped him and said, excuse me, you're a six foot four man. She's a woman. Stop shouting over her every time she speaks. None of the moderators stepped up and said that, you know, and, and he knows it's a tactic. It's all part of his war on the press. It's part of his war on the truth. And Julie and I really enjoyed talking with you. I enjoy learning about these things. These are new thoughts from me and I really appreciate it. And there'll be more. I guarantee there'll be more because we're going to learn more about his, his style and his style will evolve. It'll be better and better. I mean, in his own way, and he's going to use these tools in different circumstances and create different pageantry so we can get to his end. And so when that happens, we have to talk again. Well, I only hope we can come up with as many solutions as we can identify problems. Before you can come up with a solution, you have to identify them. That's right. Thank you, Julie. Yeah. Hello, hi.