At What Cost?

 

NEWS REPORT Alex Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1,000,000,000 in damages for the extraordinary lies he spread about the Sandy Hook massacre.

 

ALEX JONES Ain't going to be happening. Ain't no money.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE The conspiracist finally gets his comeuppance, but is the damage beyond repair?

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON Nearly a fifth of all Americans believe that every high profile mass shooting is faked, usually by the government.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Also this week, a former Alex Jones cameraman reflects.

 

JOSH OWENS I'm not here to say that Jones is responsible for the things that I did, because ultimately that responsibility falls on me.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Plus, is social media to blame for turning nice folks into trolls? The data says: nope.

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSON We did not find this huge group of people who report to be nice in face to face discussions but hostile online.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Coming up after this.

 

[END OF BILLBOARD]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Thursday, what could be the last public congressional hearing on January 6th airedand streamed across the country. Its crescendo was preceded by a montage of the silent.

 

[CLIP]

 

LIZ CHENEY More than thirty witnesses in our investigation have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and several of those did so specifically in response to questions about their dealings with Donald Trump. This is Roger Stone.

 

ROGER STONE I will assert my Fifth Amendment right to respectfully decline to answer your question.

 

LIZ CHENEY General Michael Flynn.

 

GENERAL MICHAEL FLYNN The Fifth.

 

LIZ CHENEY John Eastman.

 

JOHN EASTMAN The fifth [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE And then this.

 

[CLIP]

 

LIZ CHENEY We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion. And every American is entitled to those answers. So we can act now to protect our republic. So this afternoon I am offering this resolution: that the committee direct the chairman to issue a subpoena for relevant documents and testimony under oath from Donald John Trump in connection with the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol.

 

BENNIE THOMPSON Those in favor will say I.

 

[JAN 6 COMMITTEE IN UNISON SAY "I"]

 

BENNIE THOMPSON Those oppose this no. [PAUSE] In the opinion of the chair I’s have it. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE The vote was unanimous, but Trump's compliance is very much in doubt. Perhaps he'll take the approach of his more dubious colleagues and his buddy Alex Jones.

 

[CLIP MONTAGE]

 

NEWS REPORT Alex Jones sat down before the bipartisan House committee investigating January six and, oh, to be a fly on the wall. He pleaded the fifth nearly a hundred times instead of answering questions.

 

NEWS REPORT So surprising to those of us who have been watching from afar, this Alex Jones, who really has been disregarded as this Internet clown, is how intricately he is involved in the financing, planning and the possibility the insurrection that took place on January 6.

 

NEWS REPORT His own employees face criminal charges.

 

NEWS REPORT The mother of one rioter told a judge her son believes everything Alex Jones has to say. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE But silence didn't shield Jones, who made a fortune from his talk show and website Infowars. From a reckoning in a more traditional kind of court.

 

[CLIP]

 

NEWS REPORT Alex Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1,000,000,000 in damages for the extraordinary lies he spread about the Sandy Hook massacre. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE This week, a Connecticut jury ruled that Jones would pay the families of eight Sandy Hook victims, as well as an FBI agent, $965 million for spreading conspiracy theories around the December 2012 shooting that took the lives of 26 people at the school, including 20 children under the age of eight. His main lie was that the tragedy didn't actually happen. During the trial, parents recounted compounded experiences of horror and surreality.

 

[CLIP]

 

SANDY HOOK PARENT I felt like I was underwater to have someone publicly telling the world that it didn't happen is incredibly disorienting.

 

SANDY HOOK PARENT My son existed. You're still on your show today implying that I'm an actress, that I'm deep state. Truth is so vital. Truth is what we base our reality on, and we have to agree on that to have a civil society. Sandy Hook is a hard truth. Nobody would want to ever believe that 26 kids could be murdered. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE One family, whose son was the youngest victim of the attack, says they were forced to move multiple times after their address was leaked and threats of harm multiplied.

 

[CLIP]

 

NEWS REPORT They said they do not feel safe because so many people have believed Alex Jones lies. Of course, Jones has now apologized and has now walked back the claims that the shooting was a hoax. [END CLIP]

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON Alex Jones has played a role in virtually every high profile conspiracy theory that has brought so much harm in the decade since Sandy Hook including Pizzagate and coronavirus myths and the conspiracy theories about the presidential election that brought a mob to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Elizabeth Williamson is features writer for The New York Times. She's also the author of Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth. Even after spending four weeks straight in that Connecticut courtroom hearing the searing testimony of Jones victims, the judgment was still a stunner.

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON I actually couldn't really believe, at first, the numbers that I was hearing, because there were 15 plaintiffs in this case and the court clerk just went systematically through what the awards were for each plaintiff, and it just kept mounting. And there was this sort of stunned silence on both sides. People were really agog.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE The largest award went to Robbie Parker. He received $120 million from the jury. We'll wait and see whether he actually receives it. Who was Robby Parker, and what was his role in this case?

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON Robbie Parker was really the centerpiece of this trial. He did not realize this at the time, but he was the first Sandy Hook family member to speak publicly after the tragedy. The night afterward, he had been getting inquiries from family and friends in Utah who were saying “Media keeps calling us, they want to comment. They want us to talk about Emily,” and Robbie and Alissa Parker, Emily's parents, said “We really want anything like that to come from us. We want those reminiscences to be our own.” And so he said to a friend very close to him in Utah, “Send an affiliate reporter from this outlet to my church in Newtown. I'll meet them outside, and I'll speak with them. And then that message can go out to our family and friends back home in Utah.”

 

[CLIP]

 

ROBBIE PARKER My daughter Emily would have been one of the first ones to be standing and giving her love and support to all those victims, because that's the type of person that she is. Not because of any parenting that my wife and I could have done, but because those are the gifts that were given to her by her Heavenly Father. She was the type of person that could just light up a room. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE How old was Emily?

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON Emily was six. She was an avid artist, a little girl who got calluses on her hands because she spent so much time painting and drawing. She was an empathetic big sister, a sweet girl who made greeting cards for people who she sensed were down. And so Robby just shared all of these reminiscences. But as he stepped to the lectern in the church parking lot, he realized that this wouldn't be one reporter as he had imagined. But there was a sea of cameras and microphones and reporters. And so he gave a kind of shocked half laugh and a smile as he stepped to the lectern. And then realizing, you know, exactly what he was about to do, he got very emotional and delivered what was a very heartfelt and saddening tribute to Emily. Well, Alex Jones seized on that split second where Robbie Parker smiled and laughed, and he replayed that section only of this press conference for years. And he accused Robbie Parker of being an actor. He said that that tribute to Emily that day was disgusting because it demonstrated that the Sandy Hook families were faking their loved ones’ deaths and that this was all a government hoax aimed at gun control. So the family immediately got a flood of threats and abuse online. Emily's funeral hadn't even taken place. Five minutes before the service was to begin, Robbie found Alissa Parker, Emily's mom, hiding in the closet, just not sure if she could even go through with that. And there began the torment that lasted for years. The death threats, letters to their house, etc..

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE And you say that formed the centerpiece of the case?

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON Yes. Because Robbie had been so relentlessly singled out by Jones, and because he had been mentioned by name, and because this video had been played so many times on Infowars over the years, he became kind of the face of that false claim that these grieving parents and relatives were actors.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Now, Robbie said every day in that courtroom, we got up and we told the truth. Telling the truth shouldn't be so hard. It shouldn't be so scary. And then he said to Jones, his followers, “For anybody that still chooses to listen to that man, just ask yourself, what has he ever given you?”

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON Exactly.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE What did he mean?

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON Alex Jones, for years and on his show, portrays himself as a truth teller, as someone who, at great personal cost, delivers the real story. So what Robbie was saying was, “He's lying to you. He's doing this to sell you products. He's keeping you on the hook until he can deliver the sales pitch.” That was what he meant.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmhmm. As the verdict was being read, Alex Jones was live on Infowars. And his big takeaway:

 

[CLIP]

 

ALEX JONES Ain't going to be happening. Ain't no money. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE You know, according to the coverage, he doesn't have anywhere near that much money. And what he does have, he's been actively trying to shelter because he knew the jury would go against him just as an earlier jury had in Texas. But how much does he have? And what are they going to do to try and get it?

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON So we've received only hints as to what Alex Jones' net worth and the worth of his empire has been. And some of that was revealed in the first damages trial in August in Austin, Texas, where the jury awarded $50 million to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, who are the parents of Jesse Lewis, who was killed at Sandy Hook. And there the families produced a forensic economist who said that, at the outside, Alex Jones and Infowars were probably worth around $300 million at most. So, yes, you're absolutely right. This is a fraction of what these judgments are. The families acknowledge that. They really do feel like what they've won here is a battle for truth. They've taken back their own story. They've shown Alex Jones for what he is, which is a profit-driven huckster who is just selling these diet supplements and survivalist gear and dried food and quack cures on his online and radio show.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE He's also earned money from the trial by getting his followers to send him money for legal fees and so forth. That's a familiar strategy, but he put his parent company Free Speech Systems, into bankruptcy, claiming that he owed a debt of 54 million. But that debt is to a company he controls. Can he get away with any of this stuff?

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON That remains to be seen. The families and their lawyers have said that he's not really bankrupt and that, as you say, you know, these companies are means for him to siphon money out of the business to himself and to his family so that the families can't collect it. So the families will be playing a game of cat and mouse with Alex Jones. But that is something that they're used to because this litigation has gone on for four years. He lost all four defamation cases that the families originally filed against him by default because he wouldn't surrender business records and financial statements and analytics and all of the things that the families by hook or by crook were able to secure, at least partly, and demonstrate that he was using these Sandy Hook lies to boost his online sales. So the families have decided that they'll just pursue, and, if they have nothing else, they have patience. And Brooke, in talking with them, they've already been through the worst that anyone can imagine. And they've sort of been through it twice because they've lost their children and their loved ones to a gunman. And then they've had people attack them saying that they lied about it and that it never happened. And so if that does anything to a person, it steels them for a big, long fight.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE You mentioned Robbie Parker, who lost his daughter in Sandy Hook and was one of the first people to be called, quote, “a crisis actor” by Jones. This week, we also heard that the jury in the Parkland shooting case recommended life in prison without parole for the perpetrator. You wrote that the Parkland case also played a role in the Sandy Hook trial, or at least for Robbie Parker.

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON Yes. For years, the Parker family stayed silent as these threats mounted, as people stalked them. And even in 2016, Robbie was confronted on the street in Seattle; a man recognized him from that video and followed him for blocks, just hissing venom into his ear, saying, “How much money did you make from the government? What did you get paid for faking your daughter's death?” And the two of them almost came to blows. He went through that, and still he remained silent because he didn't want to poke the bear. You know, he didn't want there to be more abuse heaped on them. And so in 2018, the Parkers were asked to counsel and speak with a couple whose daughter died at Parkland. And in doing that, the father of the girl described a scenario very, very similar to what Robbie had been through. This dad spoke publicly and afterward was subjected to all kinds of abuse because he was called out online as a liar and as an actor. And it was then that Robbie realized this is not going to end. You know, these people won't go away or move on to the next target. In fact, they do move on to the next target, but they retain all the targets that went before. And so he just felt like he owed it to other parents and to, actually, Americans in general to stand up for this because it had become a phenomenon. Today, nearly a fifth of all Americans believe that every high profile mass shooting is faked, usually by the government.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Astonishing. You said the outcome of this trial likely won't actually change the way Jones functions. He makes a lot of money off of the model he uses, but he does have copycats who have created talk shows, YouTube channels, podcasts and so forth that are similar to his and profit from the conspiracy theories that he spawns. What impact do you think this verdict will have on those secondary characters – at least?

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON Some of my colleagues might disagree with me here, but I really do hope that it makes people who want to be the next Alex Jones think twice. It shows them that there are crippling consequences for spreading this type of disinformation so harmful to vulnerable people. I think most Americans are good people and they looked at this situation once it became more public through filing the lawsuits and said, “What kind of a country are we? What's gone wrong in a society in which you have a substantial number of people who are hounding the parents of dead children who are murdered in this way and telling them that they're liars?”

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE In your book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy in the Battle for Truth, you have a chapter on a lady who devoted herself to these conspiracy theories with the kind of vigor that both she and her children concede harmed her children because she didn't pay any attention to them and may have not done her husband any good who later died from alcoholism. When Americans ask themselves the question that you just framed, do you have an answer for them?

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON These conspiracy theories and the people who embrace them are driven by factors that don't have to do necessarily with the content. So, Kelly Watt, who is the person you're referencing — she had a house cleaning business in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She had a lot of disappointments in her life, and she ended up embracing conspiracy theories as a way to sort of make herself necessary, to kind of elevate herself and be that person who has the inside knowledge and is educating other people as to what the real story is. So back in the nineties, she was convinced that liberals in the Department of Education were indoctrinating Tulsa's public school children. And so she was attending school board meetings and PTA meetings and trying to alert people to this danger that she imagined was lurking in the curriculum. The local newspaper didn't pay attention to her. The school board kind of shut her down. And in the process, her family was kind of imploding. So her quest came to an end. But when she embraced Sandy Hook, she had the Internet, and that turned Kelly White, who was, as she described it, a janitor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, into a crusader. A citizen journalist who contributed a chapter to a book called Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. What I said earlier that a fifth of Americans now believe that every high profile mass shooting is staged by the government — there was never that kind of theorizing around the Virginia Tech shooting, our worst school shooting. And part of it was because social media wasn't at the rate of adoption that it was at the time of Sandy Hook just five years before. But it's given Kelly Watt a whole new world. It's given her a collection of new friends. It's put her in company of people that she considers smart and educated and questioning and skeptical. And so she's never going to give this up.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Thank you very much, Elizabeth.

 

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON Brooke, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Elizabeth Williamson is author of Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and The Battle for Truth. Coming up, a peek under the Infowars hood. This is On the Media.

 

[BREAK]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Among those testifying in the case against Alex Jones in the last few weeks was Josh Owens, a former Infowars staffer who worked for Jones from 2013 to 2017. In the five years since, Owens has been grappling with the damage he's caused both personally and in pieces penned for CNN and The New York Times. When OTM correspondent Micah Loewinger interviewed him this summer, he told Micah he first encountered Jones in 2008 when he was 19.

 

 

JOSH OWENS I lived my life through movies at the time, and Jones does a similar thing. He's almost living in a fantasy land, and he references movies a lot. And, you know, the world is complicated. And Jones condensed it into this very simple version. It was binary. It was good and bad. There were bad people who wanted to do bad things and there were plots and conspiracies. I didn't have to think too hard. And the simplified version of the world he was portraying was appealing.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER So how did you go from just being like a fan to actually joining his staff as a cameraman and editor?

 

JOSH OWENS I graduated high school. I had no intention of going to college, and I decided to enroll in film school. So Jones posted a reporter contest online. I was becoming a little disillusioned with film school. I think I was floundering and I just thought, Well, let me give this a shot. And I got in the top ten of that contest. And then through that, Jones offered me a job and I had no other prospects, so I decided to give it a shot.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER You wrote "Over time as I stood behind a camera and watched Jones ignore, conflate, misrepresent and fabricate information, my critical thinking skills improved. Unfortunately, my education in media literacy came from learning how to circumvent it in others." So what did you mean by that?

 

JOSH OWENS Well, so I was standing behind the camera most of the time. I wasn't an on air personality, and I got to see, you know, out on the road. Jones would say we had intel that, you know, this was going on. We had a source.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER Where he would use the language of broadcast journalism to sound credible, to sound like that reporting had been done.

 

JOSH OWENS Yeah, it was almost like he was protecting sources. And that was his excuse of saying, well, we have intel that this is going on. But we didn't, and it wasn't true. And that happened a lot.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER Speaking of fabrications, you joined in 2013. So that would have been shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre. What did you make of the story that Alex Jones told?

 

[CLIP]

 

ALEX JONES Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. [END CLIP]

 

JOSH OWENS At the time. I wasn't fully aware of what Jones's story was. I mean, on some level, it feels like I'm making an excuse. And I think that I am to a degree, because I should have had the discernment to see the damage that could cause the danger that that would cause. But I didn't, because Jones said that about everything, you know, everything was a false flag. Everything was crisis actors. It didn't really happen. I'm just asking questions. I think in retrospect now, you know, when you can see the videos of Jones saying multiple times that it was a complete fabrication, it never happened, and then walking that back and then, you know, coming back around and saying it didn't happen again. I mean, it's all over the place. Like I said, it was like taking a fire hose straight into your mouth. It was just nonstop chaos. 

There was a Hillary Clinton speech where she said something like Jones had a dark heart because he had used, you know, Sandy Hook as an opportunity basically to boost his own audience by, you know, pushing these conspiracy theories about it out. And that was, I feel like, the first realization had they're like, oh, okay, well, this is real. I was also around the Pizzagate time — it was Jones pushing these baseless conspiracy theories and people were taking action like that guy going to the comet ping pong pizza place with a gun. It was learning about what these families had to endure. But that was after the fact. You know, I can't say that that was the reason that I left or anything, but I definitely became acutely aware of the dangers and the repercussions of some of those ideas.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER In your New York Times Magazine piece, you've said your coverage of this Muslim town in upstate New York. Islamburg was a turning point for you.

 

JOSH OWENS We started having meetings, you know, where Jones can give us directives for what the goal was, what you know, what we were hoping to get out of the trip. So Islamburg, Jones brought us in a room and he was we're going to send you guys to Muslim majority communities. He wanted to call it an investigation into the American caliphate. There were some baseless claims circling the Internet that this mostly African-American group of Muslims who was just families living in a community, that they were somehow terrorists. Jones was like, 'Go there and check it out.' That's what we're hoping to find. We got there. There was nothing. We spoke to the sheriff. We spoke to the mayor of Deposit, New York. And all they had to say were positive things. That the people were kind, that their children went to school together. They never had an issue, they had never had suspicions, there was no reason to be concerned about anything. But that's not what Jones wanted. That's not creating content. That's not what we're there to do. So the reporter filed reports, and I filmed them and posted them online that were just blatant lies, that there was an Islamic training center, that they were promoting Sharia law, which is a dog whistle. The intention of saying that was there's danger here. On the flight back, I was seated next to a Muslim woman and her young child, and I can't explain it other than there was just something that kind of clicked in my head. It was like, these are just people, and there are repercussions to what we're talking about, like going from the macro to the micro of seeing real human experience and just putting a face on it. I feel like I started to shift, to stop thinking about these big grand ideas that Jones had been pushing for so long that were not about the people. It was about a political agenda.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER After your New York Times piece came out, there were all kinds of responses. The New York Times article had over a thousand comments, and I did recently come across the response from some Muslim-Americans. And they said that in a couple of cases that what you wrote was too little, too late, and that the damage and what you had participated in had already been done to these communities.

 

JOSH OWENS I think that's a completely valid response, and I understand it. But I had been there, I had done these things, and I felt like the responsibility fell on my shoulders, too. I don't want to say correct it because I don't think you can. I think the damage has been done. But I do think that there is a culture of fear at Infowars and a lot of people are afraid to talk about their experiences and a lot of people, when they leave, want to forget it. And I was carrying a lot of guilt, a lot of shame, and it just felt like the right thing to do.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER To speak out.

 

JOSH OWENS To talk about my experience and how that experience changed me. Because, look, I'm not an expert on Alex Jones. I'm not a social psychologist. I'm not someone that can look at these statistics and say, look, this is who listens to conspiracy theories. All I can do is talk about my experience. I certainly didn't want it to come off as if I was some acrimonious employee who was looking for revenge. I chose to quit. You know, Jones begged me to stay, and I left that job because I was trying to be a better person. So I'm incredibly sorry for the things that I've done. I'm also not here to say that Jones is responsible for the things that I did, because ultimately that responsibility falls on me. I don't think that it's fair of me or right of me to sit and ask for someone's forgiveness, because those people, there's no expectation that anyone will give me forgiveness.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER In 2018, Alex Jones saw his podcast and social media accounts kicked off of Spotify, Facebook, YouTube, Apple. And I think that was the moment that like a lot of people who are listening to this, stop thinking about him. But you don't think that de-platforming him hurt his show and his cult of personality quite as much as it seemed then?

 

JOSH OWENS Well, look, Jones has spent 20 plus years cultivating this audience. I don't want to say that it hasn't affected him. I just think that I don't want to be trite. But Jones is like a cockroach. I don't think he's ever going to go away.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER As the January 6th committee continues to reveal its findings, at least for me, it's hard not to feel a bit pessimistic. That feeling that the people who need to be watching it aren't or are getting some sanitized, spun version from Fox or other right wing media outlets. But reading your recent CNN piece, it seems like you really do believe that reaching across the divide is not only important, but is possible.

 

JOSH OWENS I have to believe that it's possible because on some level it worked for me. Not everyone can go spend four years working for Jones and I certainly don't want them to. But yeah, I have to believe that there is hope in having conversations and people talking to each other. Maybe that's being idealistic. But what else do we have? De-Platforming people like Jones is a start, but I think there is false comfort found in that de-platforming because those messages still spread. Those people are still out there. They're still saying the same things. And are more people listening? I don't know. I mean, it seems like maybe.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER Based on what you've learned, what worked for you? What would you say to somebody who is deeply convinced of the big lie or entrenched in any number of these constellation of beliefs and conspiracy theories?

 

JOSH OWENS Well, I think if we stop taking these politically motivated ideas and we just look at how does overturning Roe v Wade affect real people, what are the real effects that that has on people? You see that at the border. I saw it in Islamburg. I saw this hate filled rhetoric have a real world impact on individuals.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER We've been talking for a while. I guess I'm just trying to figure out where you think this conversation ends.

 

JOSH OWENS Okay. Let me ask you this. What was your point in having me on?

 

MICAH LOEWINGER That's a great question. Well, we have been talking about the hearings. And so we're coming to you somebody who worked to help furnish the machine that creates disinformation and harmful conspiracy theories. Someone who's come out the other side. What you might have learned about why the Alex Jones of the world are as effective as they are, and what can be done to help the people who are being hurt by him?

 

JOSH OWENS Well, I think everyone's circumstances are different. But what I can sit here and say is that I was part of that machine. We lied and it was intentional. Alex Jones doesn't care about the people that he speaks to on a regular basis. And I don't know if a lot of those people are looking for that community that I was looking for. They're looking for that validation. But all I can say is, I can promise you you aren't going to find it there.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER Josh, thank you very much.

 

JOSH OWENS Thank you very much.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER Josh Owens wrote about his experience working for Infowars for CNN.com in an article titled “I Escaped Alex Jones's World: This Is What I Learned.”

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Coming up, one expert says the Internet doesn't make a person mean. It just concentrates the cruelty. This is On the Media.

 

[BREAK]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. How well do we really understand the problem of misinformation? According to Michael Bang Petersen, a political science professor at Morehouse University, not very well. He directs the research on online Political Hostility Project, which found that algorithms aren't making people meaner online. They were already mean when they logged on. I spoke to him last October.

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN I think that many of us have the intuition that social media platforms create psychological changes. And that idea is something that's also represented in the Facebook files, but the research that we have been doing suggests that that might actually not be the case.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE We do know that these algorithms leverage neurotransmitters like dopamine to get people to engage. It seems to work, and people feel it. So you aren't arguing that your data suggest that it doesn't have an emotional impact?

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN No, that is not what I'm saying, but I think it's very, very important to understand what exactly social media are doing. Social media potentially can impact us turning nice people into trolls. But we and our research finds that is not really the way that social media works.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE You know, I've always said what social media makes you is more of what you are going to be anyway. I think we're in fundamental agreement about that. I guess it's a question of degree. If you have permission or you find permission online for views that even you suspect are unacceptable or reprehensible, you will be encouraged to act on them or express them.

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN I think that's absolutely true. One way to think about social media in this particular regard is to turn some of the ordinary notions that we have about social media upside down. And here I'm thinking about the notion of echo chambers. So we've been talking a lot about echo chambers and how social media are creating echo chambers, but in reality, the biggest echo chamber that we all live in is the one we live in in our everyday lives. I'm a university professor. I'm not really exposed to any person who has a radically different worldview or radically different life from me in my everyday life. But when I'm online, I can see all sorts of opinions that I may disagree with, and that might trigger me if I'm a hostile person and encourage me to reach out and tell these people that I think that they are wrong. But that's because social media essentially breaks down the echo chambers.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Wow, you have really flipped that on its head. Because most people think that because we can tailor our news feeds and the people we speak to online much more than we can in real life, that living online isolates us more than even living in bubbled communities. But you're saying not so, and that will supercharge hostility.

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN Exactly. So the research that we've been doing shows that the real difference between online and offline political discussions is that when it comes to online discussions there you are seeing a lot of strangers being attacked and being the target of hostility. But you don't see that offline. In our offline lives, there is a lot of hostility as well, but that happens behind closed doors in private. It happens in bars where we cannot hear what's going on, but we are exposed to all that when we enter the online realm.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE When you started this research, you proceeded from the presumption that nice people become angry when they log on to social media because of this weird online environment.

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN But when we began to actually do the research, we did not find this huge group of people who report to be nice in face-to-face discussions, but hostile in online discussions. Rather, we found the exact same thing as we found with political violence in general that it's particularly individuals who engage in it. And what really characterized them is a personality that is focused on acquiring as much status as possible.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE You said that you didn't notice people who were nice offline being jerks online, but there are plenty of anecdotal examples, I can give, of somebody who writes an unbelievably nasty letter. And if you respond politely, generally, they'll respond incredibly nicely after that and maybe even sometimes apologize because they're not used to thinking of other people online as people. You don't think that the internet enables or disinhibited people to the point where people who at least act nice in the real world act differently online.

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN I think that the same kinds of processes that happens online also happens offline. You can easily find people who apologize for stuff they said in face-to-face discussions as well. I do think that there is one difference which is important. Sometimes when people are writing on Facebook or on Twitter, for that matter or other social media, they are acting as if they're sitting down at the bar with their friends when no one is listening. And the key difference is that that's not how social media works. On social media other people are listening, other people are seeing what you are writing and people will react to that. And when they do it, you sort of realize, 'Oh, I said something I shouldn't have.' But it's not because people don't know what they are saying. They know exactly what they're writing and they know exactly that this is something that hurts if other people read it.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE You also discovered some common characteristics in people who share misinformation online. They know more about politics and are more digitally literate. They spread misinformation, you conclude, because they simply hate the other party more. How did you determine that?

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN We got consent to connect the survey data with people's behavior on Twitter, and then we looked at the kinds of information that people shared on Twitter and what was predictive of that sharing behavior in terms of psychological profiles and political profiles. The people who are sharing misinformation are not ignorant. They are used to navigate social media and the internet. They know more about politics than the average person, but where they're really different from the average is they have much more negative feelings towards members of the other party. And that's really what it's predicting. Not only their sharing of fake news, but also the sharing of real news. They want to derogate people that they don't like, and they are sort of actively searching for information that they can use for that purpose.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE So you're suggesting that sometimes they spread misinformation that they are fully aware is false, but it serves their goals?

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN It's not. That people look at information and then make a firm evaluation saying this is false. But I will share it anyway. It simply is not what is relevant to the decision. What they look at is this useful for the particular purpose?

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Did you find any correlation between political parties and the tendency to share misinformation?

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN There is a much greater risk of sharing misinformation if you are Republican than if you are a Democrat, and that is something that we have been spending a lot of energy looking into trying to understand. Why is there this difference? Some past research, which has found the same, has been arguing that, well, we know that there is a relationship between education levels and party choice. So potentially this is because Republicans have slightly lower education and therefore are not knowledgeable about what is true and what is false. But that's actually not what we are finding. The key difference is that the kinds of news that are available for these political purposes of Democrats and Republicans are different.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Wait a minute. What you're saying is that if Republicans want to find stories that are more negative toward Democrats, they are likely to go to sites where that stuff abounds. And there's also more misinformation on those sites.

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN Exactly. So we analyzed huge amounts of news from all over the spectrum, and we found that the only sources which are extremely critical of Democrats and positive towards Republicans are these fake news sites. A lot of mainstream news media, at least in this period that we've been analyzing, which was during the Trump presidency, are portraying Republicans in more negative ways than they're portraying Democrats. And that means that if you are a very committed Republican who are looking for this kind of ammunition, you have the motivation to move to fake news sites and find that ammunition.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Does that mean that mainstream news is biased against Republicans?

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN That is not something that we can conclude from this research. In general, it's extremely difficult to actually conclude that a media bias exists because what you could argue is that it's not a bias in the media, it's a bias in reality, so to speak. That during this particular period of American political history, there was a lot of negative things to report on the Republican Party exactly because of the behavior of Donald Trump, and that that was what drove the difference in reporting

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Is the basic conclusion here that misinformation or disinformation isn't as big of a problem as we may think it is.

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN Misinformation is not in itself a big problem, so that's the good news. But the bad news is that it's probably a symptom of a much worse problem. And here we again come back to the polarization in society because that is really what's driving the sharing of misinformation. I think we have been focusing a lot on the symptoms. Fox News, Trump, Facebook, but I think that there's some evidence that suggests that rising inequality over the last decades have been a fundamental driver of political instability in the U.S. and beyond. It's a problem in many Western democracies. That is at least where I would start to sort of look for solutions.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE What about the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6? Misinformation may not be the most important thing in the big picture, but it was misinformation about the election being stolen, mostly online, where people were organized that got them to the Capitol.

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN I would say differently. I would say that we had individuals who were predisposed for violence due to frustrations that have originated elsewhere and these people were essentially looking for a signal of when to engage in that violence. And the sharing of misinformation about the election was essentially the signal that they were looking for. So the misinformation about the election served a coordination purpose, but it wasn't such that people were manipulated into doing something that they wouldn't have liked to do otherwise.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE And social media made that possible.

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN Again, what social media does is that it connects people, back in the days you could have frustrated, violence-prone individuals in each town, but nothing really came of it because they couldn't be connected. But now they can connect very, very easily. And that means that they can all sit there and wait for the signal of when is the time to act, and social media helps that coordination happen.

 

The discussion about content moderation is very, very difficult. But I think we need to figure out how we can disrupt this connectivity for individuals that seek to use it for purposes that are destructive. The connectivity of social media is a tool that can be used for good or for bad. And we need to figure out how we can make sure that it's mainly used for good.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Michael, thank you very much. 

 

MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN You're welcome. 

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Michael Bang Petersen is a professor of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Liz Cheney opened this week's January 6th committee hearing with the statement that the goal is to propose reforms to prevent January 6th from ever happening again. So what have we learned? In hindsight, with real crisis actors in power, January 6th seemed inevitable. Social media platforms like Facebook certainly spread the B.S. and concentrated the crazies. But as we heard this hour, it's clear we can't lay all the blame on the Internet. It's just the new supercharged tool in the age old search for power, influence and belonging. There are ways to temper its influence if we have the political will. So much comes down to that, which is why bringing people to justice is even more important. Alex Jones had been banned from every mainstream platform out there, from Spotify to Facebook to YouTube. It hasn't stopped him from spreading his money-making garbage, and he brags his Sandy Hook victims won't get a dime. Donald Trump is similarly unimpressed by the efforts of the justice system to hold him accountable. And it's a justified disdain given his long history. But even for him, all good things must come to an end. Reckoning is afoot for Jones, for social media, maybe even for Trump. If the good people, to which Liz Williamson wistfully referred at the top of the hour, manage to keep the pressure on the political will.

 

And that's the show! On the Media is produced by Micah Loewinger, Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clarke-Callender, Candice Wang and Susanne Gaber with help from Temi George. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, our engineers this week for Andrew Nerviano and Adrienne Lily. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

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