Andrew Marantz: Inside the bizarre world of internet trolls and propagandists
Andrew Marantz writes narrative journalism about politics, the internet and the way we understand our world. Full bio
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people on the internet.
a lot of toxic garbage out there:
viral misinformation.
who was making this stuff.
how they were spreading it.
it might be having on our society.
some of these memes back to their source,
or who were making them go viral.
Can I come watch you do what you do?"
Brooklyn globalist Jew cuck
"Look, man, that's only 57 percent true."
in the living room
in Southern California.
in his late 30s.
with a mug of coffee,
to Periscope and YouTube.
noxious talking points
the American conversation.
had a Muslim-sounding name.
this seemed like an opportunity,
almost all immigration,
worked up into a frenzy
was going to kill us all
images like this one.
and philanthropist,
of some conspiracists online,
a globalist bogeyman,
manipulating all of global affairs.
if this idea sounds familiar to you,
who control the world
anti-Semitic tropes in existence.
in New York who planted that bomb,
he understood all this.
He was actually a lawyer.
do not drive conversation online.
to bring us all together,
and tolerant and fair ...
have never been built
what's true or false,
what's prosocial and what's antisocial.
is measure engagement:
retweets, that kind of thing.
to get engagement,
call "high-arousal emotion."
mean sexual arousal,
obviously that works.
that gets people's hearts pumping.
but dozens of them,
again and again successfully,
not because they were tech prodigies,
unique political insights --
how social media worked,
to exploit it to their advantage.
this was a fringe phenomenon,
relegated to the internet.
between the internet and everything else.
on multiple TV stations
that one of the candidates
international manipulator George Soros,
next to stacks of cash.
the President of the United States,
manipulated by George Soros.
and marginal and, frankly, just ignorable,
that we hardly even notice it.
three years in this world.
no core beliefs at all.
perfectly rationally,
to make some money online
as outrageous as possible.
who were true ideologues.
was not traditional conservatism.
to revoke female suffrage.
to go back to racial segregation.
with democracy altogether.
were not born believing these things.
in elementary school.
down some internet rabbit hole,
or they had been socialist
of a high IQ and a low EQ.
in anonymous, online spaces
to these message boards
would be magnified.
something just as a sick joke,
positive reinforcement for that joke,
"internet points," as they called it,
believing their own joke.
who grew up in New Jersey,
she moved to a new place
alienated and cut off
spaces on the internet
the most shocking, heinous things.
really off-putting
look away from it.
in these online spaces,
they made her feel validated.
some of these shocking memes
with some of her new internet friends
in the name of the white race.
from Obama supporter
out of the cult of white supremacy.
I spoke to were not.
that I had to find common ground
you're a fascist propagandist, I'm not,
all our differences will melt away."
just look away from this stuff.
because only by understanding it
ourselves against it.
I got a few nasty phone calls,
female journalists get on this beat.
couldn't tell I was Jewish,
kind of disappointing.
is being a professional anti-Semite.
is tipping you off at all?
I write for "The New Yorker,"
is like if a Seinfeld episode
it would be nice
equals 12 percent chance of Nazi.
being descriptive, not prescriptive.
of the internet like you and I
a little bit less toxic.
two kinds of skepticism.
epistemological information here,
it sounds like skepticism,
to knee-jerk contrarianism.
I'm skeptical about that."
I have spoken to in the last few years
they're all trying to indoctrinate me
and white privilege,
man, I don't think so."
white teens of the world --
and a male privilege skeptic
you're being a jerk.
we all should be independent-minded,
who will say, "Well, I'm pro-free speech,"
that it's like they're settling a debate,
of any meaningful conversation.
happens after that point.
What does that mean?
and Richard Spencer
can harass anyone else online
the entire list of TED speakers this year.
round earth skeptic.
it's wonderful to be pro-free speech,
how to say again and again,
of a more productive conversation.
to Reddit or YouTube or Facebook,
what the algorithms showed me, right?
across the United States?"
bizarre dynamic online,
and human decency as pearl-clutching
whether intentionally or not,
is great for engagement.
everyone comments on it,
that has to happen here
to fix their platforms.
and you work at a social media company
or, I don't know, own one,
for maximum emotional engagement
to be actively harming the world,
on them to do that
and hoping that they'll do that,
the rest of us can do, too.
or suggest some better pathways
is really creative and thoughtful
you can share that thing,
with high arousal emotion.
this stuff does matter,
as powerful as they are,
behavioral cues from us.
it was really fashionable
was a revolutionary tool
irredeemable dumpster fire.
is just too vast and complex
these ways of thinking,
that the internet will inevitably save us
will inevitably destroy us,
ourselves off the hook.
about our future.
at social media companies.
for some inevitable future to arrive
that the arc of the moral universe is long
by some mysterious force.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Andrew Marantz - WriterAndrew Marantz writes narrative journalism about politics, the internet and the way we understand our world.
Why you should listen
Since 2016, Andrew Marantz has been at work on a book about the perils of virality, the myth of linear progress and the American far right. To report the book, he spent several years embedded with some of the conspiracists, white supremacists and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agendas. He also watched as some of social media's earliest and most influential founders started to reckon with the forces they'd unleashed. The book, forthcoming in October from Viking Press, is called Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.
Marantz is also a contributor to Radiolab and The New Yorker Radio Hour, and has written for Harper's, Mother Jones, the New York Times and many other outlets. He holds an undergraduate degree in religion from Brown University and a master's degree in literary nonfiction from New York University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, who is a criminal-justice reformer; his two-year-old son, who is an excellent dancer; and an endless supply of peanut butter.
Andrew Marantz | Speaker | TED.com