Original subtitles

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

It certainly looked like Hillary Clinton was going to win

And so, Trump people are very feverish and this was just blowing up

So I said, "Geez, all these people are just going so wild about it

I wonder if anything's happening at Comet" so I called him up...

I got a call from a guy named Will Sommer

and he at the time was working at the Washington City Paper

and asked me if I had read about this or know about this online conspiracy theory

that Hillary Clinton and I were human trafficking from Comet Ping Pong

And I was like, "I don't know what you're talking about"

And I make a comment like "Everyone is really up about this election''

''and passions are high, and I'm sure that it'll go away in a couple of days''

The election happens and then actually what happened is

the days subsequent to the election these online attacks started escalating

and increasing in volume

We started to get messages onto like, our Yelp page for the restaurant

Reviews that were really weird and weird Facebook things

I had put pictures of my god-children on Instagram

Now, obviously, I would know better than to put anything anywhere

But these images were stolen from my Instagram

taken and put up as some kind of evidence of nefarious activities going on

I just want you to ask yourself: why does this guy

I think he looks like he's in his late 30's

why is this coming-on-middle-age guy have a photo of a random kid drinking milk

Pizzagate, like so many conspiracy theories, it starts to echo on 4chan

There are spaces that drive more extreme content

I would say 4chan is the... now, bathroom may be too polite

Think of the rest stop on the Interstate highway

4chan is a dirty restroom there's no toilet paper on the toilet roll

the sink has not been cleaned in months

And think about the kinds of things you saw on bathroom walls there

It builds on the internet and then it starts getting picked up

by the various right-wing pundits

You know, Alex Jones starts promoting it all the time

Pizzagate is real, the question is how real is it, and what is it

Something's going on something's being covered up

it needs to be investigated to just call...

Infowars becomes the Pizzagate network for a bit

The menu from Comet Ping Pong notice the symbol of the ping-pong paddles

and its clever resemblance to the FBI document's symbol for ChildLove

There were so many different entry points for this specific attack

I am trafficking or abusing these children, is one

The other was that I, or Hillary Clinton

or the Podestas were kidnapping or selling these children to retain our immense wealth

There was some that this idea that because I'm gay

I obviously must be molesting children or something

which is a historical perspective on gayness

So many of the calls we'd receive, people saying, "Why do you like raping children?"

And being like, "I know you're all gay"

And that one is necessarily related to the other...

A lot of what fuels misinformation and what we call "fake news" is hate

It is essentially some group of people,

either misunderstanding or having some sort of violent feelings

about another group of people

And in the case of Comet those who decided to target James

found a little bit of hate and malice in the piece of Comet

that is welcoming to the LGBTQ community

More and more we started receiving phone calls

that ran the gambit of being just prank calls, I'd almost say

where people were like, "Can I get a some kind of special pizza"

like, some ridiculous name

Something that meant to them something about pedophilia, it was code words...

To just straight-up death threats

People saying, "I'm gonna kill you"

Or "We know what you're doing and we're gonna stop it''

''And you're all gonna die"

"We know where you live we are coming to the restaurant''

''We're coming to get you"

You know, "You need to kill yourself"

There was a specific one where someone said

"I'm going to come to your restaurant with a machine gun and kill everyone inside

and like, cut your guts out and watch you die on the floor," or whatever

And I was like, "This is scary"

What I was doing every single night was going online and checking reddit

checking 4chan

Reddit had a new subreddit that had been started specifically for Pizzagate

It went from, within a week, zero followers to 22,000 people who were subscribed to it

One thousand, five-hundred of which were active at any given point

growing and growing and growing and growing

And even if they only spend five minutes a day trying to destroy my life

22,000 people have more five-minutes a day than I have 24 hours in my day

"There it is, there it is, guys...''

''So we're, we're going to go in and we're going to infiltrate Comet Pizza"

I got a phone call from someone who said

"Hey, I just want to let you know that I'm a friend of yours''

''and a guy named Jack Posobiec is in there filming you right now"

"I, I turned it off"

"I understand that, I understand that to you, this is maybe like a game''

''But considering that I, myself and my staff''

''receive death threats many times a day..."

"It's, it's not a game it's not anything..."

"Are you, are you reading these things that people are writing on...?"

"I can't control what somebody posts on the internet"

I read several posts on reddit that said "I've had enough of this''

''If I don't post back here in three hours it's because I've been killed''

''I'm grabbing my shotgun and going into Comet"

We were in real, deep fear like serious fear

These threats were so violent that I... I sort of, like, knew something would happen

So it culminates with Edgar Maddison Welch driving up from North Carolina

And he's one of the people who's been consuming all this stuff

and he's become convinced that there really is a child rape dungeon

in the basement of Comet Ping Pong

He wanted to come up here and save these children

He's a father himself he had two young daughters

He was a classic Infowars listener, follower

You know, people want me to look into it I may take off a week

and just only research this and actually go to where these places are, and stuff

In fact, I'm looking at getting on a plane...

I can't just say something and not see it for myself

They go to these pizza places there's, like, satanic art everywhere

Part of the pitch is get out there and help us unearth the truth

It turns people into a type of vigilante

in which they're out there seeking what they think is justice

In the case of Pizzagate

a guy puts children in danger because he thinks he's rescuing children

We had this restaurant filled with families eating

Sunday afternoon

And Edgar Maddison Welch walks in this front door

with a loaded A-R-15 assault rifle

Ex - Fully exposed

Also with, like, a handgun and a knife, it turned out

And, like, walks through this restaurant

My young staff who had been under online attack

they immediately see him call the police, and...

And go, like, table to table

telling each table that they need to go, like, leave the building

And so each table, it's the customers are like, "Oh no, we're fine"

Like, "We're here to support you, it's okay like, we'll just keep eating," or whatever

And this... these kids are like "No, you don't understand''

''There's a guy here with a gun"

So they evacuate the building

This isn't a joke, get out of the block

The police have shut down the street

and riot / SWAT teams are closing the building, and the street

and leaves this gunman alone to search the restaurant, or do whatever he's going to do

The first thing that he did was immediately walk towards the back room

I'm not sure what he thought he was going to find back here

but I think that he thought that this was the place where Hillary Clinton would be

or he was going to walk back there and find John Podesta

or George Soros or someone... pulling things off of the wall

Trying to pry apart the stage flipping ping-pong tables over

He was trying to break anything that he thought was obscuring his view

But he came over here to the only locked door in the entire restaurant

which is our employee closet

He shot through the door which is a pretty dirty

but innocuous employee closet

Uh, Houses our coats

Realized, there were no children being held here

Came out of the... out of the restaurant

came out with his hands up with a... to a sea of police

- Hands! Hands! - We got a guy coming out right now

- Stand up! - We've got a white male subject

- Hands up over your head! - Coming out of the location

Hands in the air

Don't nobody move don't nobody move, stay where you are

Bring him towards you

I got him... keep going, keep coming to my voice, do not turn around

Stop! Stop! Get down on your knees

get on the ground, lay prone on the ground

Sir, do you work there?

- Are you the... - Who else is in the location right now?

- Nobody else? - What were you doing in the location?

- Regarding what? - Pizzagate he's talking about Pizzagate

This could have been a lot worse someone could have gotten shot

Anything could have happened here

So no one... this was something

that even some of the most seasoned crime reporters had never seen before

That someone came in armed for battle came in on a suicide mission

either knowing he was going to go to jail, or might end up dead

but was willing to do that, based off of fake erroneous news stories

Today, the term "fake news" has become totally weaponized

and misused to the point that I think it's kind of meaningless

We saw back in January, 2017

when President Trump stood up at the news conference and called out CNN

and called it fake news

From there we started to see the term kind of just fall apart, in terms of use

Mr. President Elect can you give us a question

- Don't be rude - You're attacking us

- Don't be rude - Can you give us a question?

Don't be... I'm not going to give you a question'

'You are fake news, go ahead

Where we're at right now is

fake news has most effectively become what Donald Trump has defined it as

which is media that's critical of him

If you want the fake news media to finally investigate...

When he talks about fake news

that is one of the biggest applause lines that he gets at these rallies

Usually at that point, that's when the whole crowd turns to the media pen and boos

As a journalist, obviously

it's disappointing to see that kind of vitriol directed at the press

Don't worry, I don't like 'em either, okay?

CNN is in the dumper

It's become synonymous with fake news

Well, nobody believes it anymore

We expect politicians to be, uh, fast and loose with the truth, depending on the day

We know that it's a car salesman

But we expect journalists newsmen to tell the truth

That's what y'all... you're just supposed to report the facts

And, uh... no, I didn't vote for Obama

Give me one thing he did to help me in... as a Texan, a heterosexual married man

Did he cut... Lower my taxes?

Nope, did he increase my freedoms? Nope

Did he help my white, blonde-haired blue-eye kid go to college? Nope

Donald Trump's trying to stop my culture down here from changing

Look around, his style of populism is working

We're going to give him the benefit of the doubt

Why? Because he's giving us results but y'all don't report that

The media is the public enemy

Let me show you the one I really like, I bought tonight

This sums it up

That is money well-spent right there

Because it's fake news, they don't report the truth the truth's reality

If you want to start living right report the truth

That's all we ask for thank you

Well I think fake news has become a very politicized term

that is being used to censor conservatives

Evidently, because it's published in The New York Times, you believe it

If you do that, you're believing either government, uh, propaganda

or mainstream media-determined truth

And just because The New York Times published it doesn't mean it's true

Jerome Corsi's this long-time Republican operative

and really one of the modern creators of this internet and media-fueled smear campaign

In the 2004 election

he co-wrote this book about John Kerry's behavior on this swift boat

promoting the idea that John Kerry who was this Vietnam war hero

was actually like, this big coward

You know, promoting this really baseless claim

So now, to "swiftboat" someone since 2004, means to create a lie

and propagate it in the idea that it's going to torpedo them

And Jerome Corsi was the creator of that

Cut to 2008-2009

Jerome Corsi is probably the most prominent face of the Birther conspiracy theory

so, the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya

It's like all of the giant conspiracy theories over the past decade or two

Jerome Corsi has jumped on

And either he created them or he really got into pushing them

And what's so nice about this, is just with a laptop computer, a fairly simple camera

it gives the average person an opportunity to establish a voice, and to be heard

I didn't look at CNN and say "I want to do that"

I didn't go to Fox News and say "Here's my resume''

''I want to put on a suit and after Tucker Carlson''

''I want to sit there and read my news"

I didn't say that I didn't go to The New York Times and say

"I want to write stories for you"

I looked at all of those things and I said "You guys are all fucked up''

''Whatever it is that you think is journalism I think is fucked up"

''So this is how I'm gonna do it''

Wake up everyone

If you are forwarding articles from Newsweek, from The New York Times

you have become a zombie propagandist

I find intriguing that even investigating it, questioning it

becoming a forensic examiner of evidence, you get ridiculed

You are a conspiracy theorist

You can disagree on all sorts of interpretations

about a particular subject but not when there's falsehood

When we study false news and disinformation

what we see repeatedly is things that in theory could be just interpretation

get made up of discrete bits of narrative that are distinctly false

It's very clear that what you have here

is a propagandist effort to try to achieve a result

So for example, the Seth Rich case

Seth Rich was a young guy, he's working for the Democratic National Committee

And he's killed, in July of 2016

Police in Washington have said it appears to have been a botched armed robbery

but they don't know for sure what happened

There were a lot of robberies in this neighborhood around that time

People are speculating "Well, what kind of a robbery was it?"

Because his wallet was still on him his watch was still there

But when a gun goes off that's going to draw attention

So his assailant's not going to stick around and try to get those valuables

They're going to take off and that's what happened in this case

Very early on, he... he wanted to do stuff

that was involved in trying to make things better

There was about six-and-a-half years between us

100%, he was very much you know, the annoying little brother

And then as we got older we got a lot closer

just, when we both got to the same spot in life

If he had problems, he'd talked to me if I had problems, I'd talk to him

So I mean, we were each other's best friends and you know, always there for each other

He was the person that I knew I could always count on

and he was that not just to me but also to his friends

His over-the-top sense of humor...

If you were having a bad day, no matter what

it became his mission to make you have a good day, just give in now

I had come back early from a vacation

and we had been playing phone tag since I had gotten back

Obviously, that is something that I realize I would regret

Next morning, my mom called me and I remember her telling me that, um

he had been shot and killed uh, late in the night

I remember, you know, collapse on the floor of our townhome at the time

um, just in sheer disbelief

In the political environment that existed in the summer of 2016

having a DNC staffer that was murdered to a certain group of people

just could not have been a coincidence

Somebody hacked into the DNC computer, and Wikileaks, uh

just recently published a bunch of these emails

and there are a number of emails

in which senior officials of the Democratic National Committee

can be seen conspiring against Bernie Sanders

Seth Rich's murder follows the leak of emails from the Democratic Party

And his death very quickly is linked to the leak

The idea is that Seth Rich himself was somehow in contact with WikiLeaks

objected to Hillary Clinton's assertion of control over the Democratic Party

He was outraged and released these emails

And Hillary Clinton, somehow had Seth Rich murdered

I want to be clear... this is baseless

But certainly Julian Assange of WikiLeaks stoked that, uh, speculation

Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material

and often very significant risks

There's a 27-year-old that works for the DNC, who was shot in the back, murdered

That was just a robbery I believe, wasn't it?

No, there's no finding

Was he one of your sources, then?

We don't comment on who our sources are...

But why make the suggestion?

Julian Assange, obviously it's convenient for him

because it means he's not, kind of a patsy for the Russian government

It means, you know, there was this brave whistleblower who gave him the stuff

Julian Assange was the catalyst

And then, online, on websites and message boards like 4chan or reddit

even Twitter, it blew up

The Seth Rich thing is really getting suspicious now

This was an assassination this kid was murdered for political reasons

I think they want to do damage control with the DNC and the Clinton crime unit

This is exactly the sort of killing you would expect from the Clintons

The guy got fucking murdered after he leaked information to WikiLeaks

There have been stories in which activists in the United States

join forces with the Russians to push the same stories

And you know, the Seth Rich story is probably the leading example of that

They were both eager to deny

that the Russians were behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee

Seth had access to a lot of the IT I mean, he had the access

He had a lot of stuff

The question is we don't know what he did with it

Frankly, we don't know if Seth was a good guy or a bad guy

We don't know if he was a leaker um... we think he was a leaker

We just don't know there's so many unanswered questions

Jack Burkman is one of the premiere hucksters who has latched onto this tragedy

We'll show you the... here's the office over here

This is... this is it this is the nerve center, man

Now come down here... this is the doggy's room

Fake news is a weapon and, uh, we've even tried to use fake news

Fake news is a good way to drive a story you know?

You put up a site, instead of New York 1 - New York 2, and people believe it

And they reprint it, and it gets reprinted

And it can be an effective tool in driving a story, you know?

People use it, it's become a tool of war

It's like, uh, it's World War I and it's chemical weapons

People are using them so you use them, you know?

That's how I'd... that might be the analogy

Jack Burkman, who's a Washington lobbyist

He sends out some legendary press releases in Washington

Reporters are always saying, you know

"Did you see the latest Jack Burkman press release?" because they're so absurd

In the past, has attached himself to other dubious causes

including, he tried to get gay players banned from the NFL

There are four theories, one is what the police say

it was done in the street, street thugs

B) The Russians did it

C) Hillary and the Democrats did it

D) is kind of everything else

We're conducting our own investigation

He's doing all these crazy things, like he's doing a re-enactment of the murder

He teams up with some undergraduate students at George Washington University

and they come up with the idea that the most obvious explanation for Seth Rich's death

is that a hit squad killed him I mean, it's absurd

You have a dead DNC staffer that can't defend himself

It's a good opportunity to make statements and you know, try to use that

And when we ran sentence analyses of the media

you really see how Seth Rich pops up as an interference pattern on the right

when everybody else is talking Russia and impeachment

DNC leaks came from the inside it wasn't hackers from the outside at all

And of course, Julian Assange

has specifically denied receiving any information from the Russian government

Precisely... this whole Russian collusion narrative, which is, I think

actually quite a foolish narrative, that the emails were stolen by Russia from the DNC

these are premises that have not been validated

Yet the left runs with them as if they were gospel truth

We know that by January

you had the entire intelligence community onboard saying that it was the Russians

You know that the Mueller indictments

have very specifically indicted both Russians responsible for the trolls

and Russians responsible for the hacking

And when people say, "Well, we don't absolutely know with certainty"

What do they want? Do they want to be in Saint Petersburg

watching every Russian troll engaging in every act?

I mean, there are levels of proof that no reasonable person would ask for

It was the Russians

The speculation that you saw online was given fuel by places like Gateway Pundit

Infowars and Alex Jones

But you also see it pop up on Fox News

Back with a Fox News Alert

A brand new bombshell in the murder of that guy right there, a DNC staffer

An investigator now says Seth Rich was in contact with WikiLeaks

Fox News, on the website, publishes a story

that there's new evidence that Seth Rich was in fact the source of the leaks

And what you see is the whole network from the local affiliate in DC

through the main cable channel mobilize around this story

Newly discovered evidence shows

that the 27-year-old former DNC employee was in fact communicating with WikiLeaks

And we can really trace how a rumor that starts on reddit

ultimately makes its way to Hannity

and you can just literally follow, from the first to the last, this propaganda pipeline

We see the Russians

We see the alt-right activists

We see the commercial clickbait sites

And then you have, at the very top

a set of a propagandists whose commercial interests and political interests are aligned

to go out, look for all these stories, and bring them to the mainstream of Fox News

If it was true that Seth Rich gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails

wouldn't that blow the whole Russian collusion narrative

that the media's been pushing out of the water?

I mean, Fox does some good reporting

There are good, honorable reporters there doing good reporting

but Sean Hannity is essentially a consultant for the President

By the way, all those people in the back are fake news

Spewing the President's views to his huge audience on Fox

And it's just like, hook, line, and sinker if Sean Hannity says it, it must be true

And of course, Fox News is in the attention business

and so there is a sort of fake news laundering that is occurring

To date, there has been no new evidence that has come out

that would justify the original story in the first place

let alone this constant resurgence

It's not just words, and you're not just pushing something

Like, you're having real effects on real people

It's hard enough to process the thought of a family member being murdered

But very quickly, it went to, you know that I took money from WikiLeaks

That I am cooperating with a hostile foreign intelligence service

Where is this even coming from?

Being directly accused of being involved in any of this

just turns our world completely upside down

that was already turned upside down from the rest of the conspiracies

I still have not been able to sit there

and really properly grieve the fact that he's not there

The number of times I've wanted to pick up my phone

and describe this absolutely ridiculous situation that's going on...

The person I would call would be my brother

After extraordinary backlash from journalists

and especially from the rich family Fox withdrew it story

They said, "It didn't meet our standards"

What they didn't do is apologize

You had a family that had been told their son had essentially committed a crime

an assertion for which they had no proof, and no evidence

Sean Hannity not only hasn't apologized to the Rich family, but he hasn't disavowed it

Out of respect for the family's wishes

for now, I am not discussing this matter at this time

I had no clue why they... why they won't say it

Pushing out false statements and not be willing to accept that they were false

after being proven numerous, numerous times false... it doesn't make sense to me

Now the real question is, who's to blame?

Are we going to say "Oh, look, reddit did this!"

Or are we going to say "Oh look, Hannity did this!"

When people started looking around, what happened?

The answer always fell on what's new and what's new was the technology

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify

in front of a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees today

Senators will demand answers from Zuckerberg

about Facebook's failure to protect millions of users' private information

And they've actually added extra seats to this hearing room

to accommodate all the Senators who are going to be questioning Zuckerberg today...

44 of them

Zuckerberg is going to be in the hot seat for hours

If you think about Facebook specifically

there's more than 2 billion people around the world that log into it every month

There has never been anything like Facebook in the history of humanity

There are ads there there's news there

There's your personal life, your friends

If he was to honestly say that he would no longer be selling any data, um

and if he would own up to it, then...

They've done better than anyone else on the planet

by sucking in every piece of information about you

and what you do and what you think and it's sort of like a digital fence

They've gotten everyone to paint the fence, you know

with you... your data, and they benefit from it

It's designed to actually give so much information about us individually

so that Facebook can turn around and sell insight

into what kind of communication will best manipulate me

to do what someone else wants to do

As Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool

for staying connected to the people they love, for making their voices heard

and for building communities and businesses

But it's clear now that we didn't do enough

to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well

And that goes for fake news the foreign interference in elections

and hate speech as well as developers and data privacy

We didn't take a broad-enough view of our responsibility

and that was a big mistake and it was my mistake, and I'm sorry

There's a lot of things that have been going on at Facebook, for a long time

of people who've covered it a long time

And a lot of them were around privacy violations, sort of sketchy use of data

always pushing the envelope... growth, growth, growth

We're here because of what you Mr. Zuckerberg

have described as a breach of trust

A quiz app used by approximately 300,000 people led to information

about 87 million Facebook users being obtained by the company

Cambridge Analytica

So how is that possible? I mean, their systems are very good at detecting scrapers

spam accounts, and things like that

It's kind of mind-boggling that they weren't able to detect this

And I think the reason is because they didn't care

Not that, you know they were being malicious

It's just that it was something they were not interested in

They had built a system where they didn't know what people were doing on it, really

And when malevolent actors get involved with the platform

you began to see how easily manipulable this platform was

just by using it the way it worked

The Russians, they were a customer of Facebook

They were, they used the tools that were built in this country

to create discord and dissension across our nation in lots of very important areas

And some people, like Donald Trump, say not one vote was shifted, but that's not true

Personally, I think, uh, the... the idea that you know, fake news on Facebook

of which, you know, it's a... it's a very small amount of... of, um, the content

influenced the... the election in any way I think, is a... a pretty crazy idea

So they moved from, "It was crazy to think so," to, "Oh, okay, there was a little thing"

And then, "Oh, there was more" and then... I don't believe any of it

I don't... I don't... the only reason I don't believe it is because I don't think they know

These unverified, divisive pages are on Facebook today

They look a lot like the anonymous groups

the Russian agents used to spread propaganda during the 2016 election

Are you able to confirm whether they're Russian-created groups? Yes or no

Um, Senator, last week

we actually announced a... a major change to our ads and pages policies

that we will be verifying the identity of um, every single advertiser...

I'm asking about these specific ones do you know whether they are?

I am not familiar with those pieces of content specifically

That's the way it was architected

It was architected to be a platform free-for-all

where nobody had responsibility except they got all the money

Probably a lot of the people involved in the hearings

didn't actually understand the technology, and the implications

And so you know, it's hard... if you really...

Don't really understand what's happening you know, you can't really question

Let's say I'm emailing about Black Panther

within WhatsApp, do I get a Black Panther banner ad?

Senator, we don't...

Facebook's systems do not see the content of messages

being transferred over WhatsApp

Yeah, I know, but that's... that's not what I'm asking...

Everybody went in knowing they had four minutes, or whatever, to ask questions

and they were very focused particularly on privacy concerns

And nobody wanted to waste time on fake news, on Russia, on foreign actors

When you sign up for Facebook you sign up, uh, for Terms of Service

Are you familiar with that?

- Yes - Okay, it says...

What's about these Terms of Service?

Like, what? Like, as if Terms of Service were our biggest national emergency

Oh my god, they... you can't read Terms of Service

Like, who cares? Who cares?

Like, they just... they were not focusing on the problem at hand

It was just a ridiculous circus and so therefore Mark came off well

because he didn't, like vomit on the desk or something

Like, he didn't, like, fall apart and he answered questions

But you know "I'll get back to you, Senator''

"That's an interesting question,Senator" he said nothing, he said nothing

It will take some time to work through all the changes

we need to make across the company

But I'm committed to getting this right

I don't think they're malevolent people

Mark is lovely, he's polite he's earnest, he wants to learn

It's just that their basic premise is that this is just a benign platform

These are the most powerful tools in the history of our planet

they are, they just are

When you have these tools, people are going to find ways to use them

in ways that are more nefarious than other ways

Or at least experiment around them

Once you have a gun, you want to shoot it you just do, like, that's what a gun is for

A lot of these technologies are guns and they're going to be shot

I think if you're Vladimir Putin, you wake up every morning and you laugh

because they did some of this stuff to us

but the worst part of 2016 is the stuff we did to ourselves

And the worst part of what's happening now, is we're still doing it to ourselves

The attack is now coming from inside the house

You have small campaigns using these techniques

where you have individual candidates using these techniques

where everybody thinks they need to use data better

and more effectively to target the unknown voter

or the hardcore voter, or the radicalized voter one way or the other

When this is the environment the Russians don't have to do very much

We're doing it to ourselves now

If somebody has chemical weapons

and you deem it necessary to have chemical weapons to deter the chemical weapons

then you know, this is a classic Cold War phenomenon

On the Democratic side

There was a feeling that the Democrats were behind in this race

to use social media, to use technology

So there were some Democrats it turns out, who were thinking, like

"You know, we have to catch up in this race''

''We have to understand these tools"

And one of the races that was sort of a natural to experiment in

was the special Senate race in December of 2017

It pitted an extremely conservative Christian named Roy Moore, a former judge

who was the Republican against a Democrat named Doug Jones

There weren't a lot of other races going on

so Republicans and Democrats were very focused on this race

You have this old school leveraging racist rhetoric...

All the women who are coming out

and accusing Roy Moore of advances on underaged women

and really inappropriate conduct

that was feeding in to all of Democrats' fears coming out of 2016

What if this is happening again?

What if these guys are winning elections again?

So, Reid Hoffman the Silicon Valley billionaire

decides to bankroll his own pro- Democratic campaign, to dampen Roy Moore's chances

We got $100,000

I don't know if that was Mr. Hoffman's money, or what... what it was

All I know is that money arrived and it was, uh, time to go to work

The Alabama Project, as I titled it was an effort to use Facebook

and emulate some of the tactics

that had been used against Democrats in recent years

Doug Jones didn't know that this was happening on his behalf

- Doug Jones - Doug Jones

It was an incredible run, it was an incredible election, it was a fun campaign

Nerve-wracking campaign got a little weird, on occasion

Uh... and then election night was just amazing

It is absolutely deafening in here

This news just coming across the screen there...

Your election was won by about 20,000 votes, a fairly small margin...?

Oh yeah, out of 1.3 million I would say that that was relatively tight

Doug Jones won, absolutely all I did was, uh, push a little from the outside

Our effort, we were hoping, would help Republicans not turn out to vote

So we created a page called Dry Alabama a conservative, pro-Roy Moore

pro-Republican bunch of people who wanted to make Alabama dry again

because the liquor laws had gotten too liberal

And our idea was that if you show this to moderate suburban Republicans

they will say, "Oh man... these Roy Moore supporters, they are crazy

And if these Roy Moore supporters are so crazy, then, uh, I just can't support it"

that was the idea

If you're like me, you're fearful for the souls of our brothers and sisters

We made videos, and some of the videos were just "mocktail recipes"

Try this moral take on a sinful beverage a Righteous Mint Julep

I have a knack for creating new voices

And in this particular case it sounded like a real conservative

You were pretending to be somebody that you weren't?

Oh, sure, sure

Um... I was definitely pretending to be a conservative when I wrote that stuff

I felt empowered for the first time ever, really

to finally give maybe a Republican Party a taste of its own medicine a little bit

Fundamentally, the fakery is going to happen

It's happening to me so why should it not happen to you?

It was December of 2018 when The New York Times article came out

in which the allegation was there was creation of some fake news type accounts

uh, to try to influence the election in my favor

And I was absolutely, one, stunned

Two, pretty outraged pretty, pretty angry about that

And immediately said so, and immediately called for, uh, an investigation

At least two groups of Democrats that we've found out about

were experimenting with essentially Russian techniques

New Knowledge was part of that so was Tovo Labs

And it turns out, so was my little group um... I did not know that at the time

The New Knowledge stuff some of that seems pretty sketchy to me

So let's start with the idea that reality is a construct of your mind

And what that means, in a philosophical context, is, um, that eve...

all of us live in our subjective reality

A little cybersecurity company called New Knowledge based in Austin, Texas

they got some money from Reid Hoffman through a passthrough to this little project

This group created a conservative Alabamian Facebook page

to try to influence conservatives

even though they were Democrats they were liberals

These were the guys the Senate hired to do a comprehensive report

which was quite a well-done report

on what the Russians did in 2016

And here, they're caught uh, doing a little bit of it them themselves, in US politics

It's... It's very embarrassing for them very damaging for them

Among other things, they endorsed a conservative write-in candidate

to try to draw votes from Roy Moore

New Knowledge has gotten a ton of investment

to conduct research to counter disinformation

and they themselves are currently operationalizing disinformation

It's really problematic

It's still a little bit mysterious

because New Knowledge and Jonathon Morgan, the CEO

was I think lying to me about various things

And it was kind of loosely run and involved multiple people

and I think some people had different ideas about it about than others

And... But everyone's... At this point everybody's kind of, like lying

and pointing the finger at somebody else, so...

As a Secretary of State who has to certify these election results

you must be concerned about these incredibly deceptive tactics

Yeah, but seriously, now

What... What we're talking about here is not anything different

than what has occurred in US politics

or international politics in the history of political systems

The only difference is now people are able to do that, in many people's minds

more effectively because of social media

So these tactics don't raise a special type of alarm?

Well the problem is is you can't ever fully address 'em

because you can't control the behavior of people who are engaging in that activity

John Merrill, Alabama Secretary of State is definitely a part of the Republican machine

and he will settle things on terms that are favorable to the Republican machine

To some degree, I was hoping that there would be more reaction from the right

I was hoping that there would be more

"Oh, well, that's terrible what you did"

But that didn't happen, so much

Are there actions that you would take as secretary of state

to defend against disinformation in elections?

Well, if there were instances

where the law was broken, in regard to campaigning, we definitely will

But if it's simply someone doing a superior job to another candidate

without going outside the boundaries of the law

then we can't pick apart what certain people are doing

because at that point that's not making the most effective

or best use of our time

I can't say that we actually made the difference

I wouldn't go that far but think of the math here

Three million people saw this ad

If we affected 1% of them, so that they ended up not voting, that's 30,000 votes

Doug Jones won by 21,000 votes

If we affected one in a thousand of the people who saw that ad, that's 3,000 votes

That's about equal to Doug Jones's winning margin in 11 of the counties that he won

Imagine a bunch of these efforts

Each whittling away just a little bit of the vote, that's what you...

That's all you need if you're talking about a close race

So yeah, I have a moral imperative to use these techniques against you

I absolutely have to because otherwise...

What's going to happen to, uh you know, my political perspective?

It's going to be drowned out completely

The... The situation is that one side is obeying a set of rules

that the other side will never respect, ever

And they will not change the rules

until the rules start smacking them in the face a few times

Two wrongs do not make a right

That's... That's... That's crazy

If... If all of a sudden the left sees

"We've got to do this because the right's been doing it"

and they start winning, then the right's going to up their game

then the left's going to up their game and the next thing you know

there is nothing about this democracy that is real

I wonder about how intense the spiral will be

I wonder if there's not something more toxic with all this

We don't know the effects of fake news

We don't know the... We don't know where this is going

It's changing by the day

It's the Industrial Revolution, but faster bigger, and maybe more consequential

We don't know where it's going

I see myself drowning

drowning in an ocean that gets bigger and bigger and bigger

I would prefer a world without fake news

But, uh, if others are using it I'm gonna use it

NBC News is reporting tonight about an apparent effort to smear Robert Mueller

The plot appeared to be the latest

and one of the more bizarre in a string of attempts

by supporters of President Trump to discredit Mr. Mueller's investigation

as a hoax, and a witch hunt

Jacob, I feel like I've known you for years I'm glad you're finally here

Yeah, yeah, absolutely

Today at the press conference, the main mission is to set the story straight

And, uh, we have to lay out, in detail the accusations of our client

This, for us, is not about infamy it's about legacy

We have to get this done, and we have to prove that Bob Mueller is a sex offender

and I think we're going to do that

We'll do that

We'll do that if we were seeking infamy and publicity

we'd be doing other things this is too hard

- Yeah, believe me - This is too hard

We put out a notice offering a reward

$25,000 reward for whistleblowers either within Bob Mueller's organization

or within the FBI, for bad stuff

We were looking for dirt on McCabe or Mueller

Jack Burkman says

he's going to bring forward a sexual assault accuser against Robert Mueller

And the accuser is going to come to this press conference

And so this obviously an explosive charge

So, he saw a lot of interest from media outlets willing to look into this

if this were something that were true

despite even the fact that these people are fringe characters

You're on, like, ten magazine covers do you know that?

- You're on the cover - Well, I... I don't know how many people

how many, uh, publications have called me a Nazi this week

I mean, geez...

Jacob Wohl is a guy who rose to fame by being an obnoxious character on Twitter

Jacob Wohl is a charlatan

who is part of the bizarro world Trumpverse information machine

He has wanted to be more important than he is for some time

You know, I think it kind of hurt Jack's case to have Jacob also involved in it

because he was already such an untrustworthy character

Any word from our gal?

Um... Yeah, yeah, she's just... She's...

No, okay, that's fine

You think she'll do it in the... You think she'll... Will she pick another day?

I think there's coin flip odds

All right... Off we go!

Let's say that she made a last-minute decision...

I'll just say, in the last 30 minutes because of threats and other things

she's made a decision not to appear today

but we're going to go over the details of her sworn statement

- She's extremely scared - Yeah

I mean, a flurry of death threats and she's... she's safe

You could say something like "We have her in a safe house"

- I'll leave all that to you - Yeah

Yeah, and just say "In the last 30 minutes"

because I'm telling all these reporters she's there, otherwise they won't come

Yeah

You know this... reporters are... They're lazy, and they're dumb

- Right - They go to Harvard, but they're dumb

- They just... They don't... - A journalism major? I mean, come on

- They're just... They're dummies - Here's how you write an article

You can learn that in about 12 minutes

- Yeah, what... What do they teach them - Yeah, exactly

Journalism...

And what the hell is this thing, here? Is this for us?

It is, uh-oh

Hang on, I've got to take a picture of this I've got to take a picture...

The bussed in a mob, it looks like

- Look at that, they bussed in... - Really...? Is that antifa...?

- Who's bussing...? - They've... They've bussed in a mob

Jesus, look at this, huh? Wow, we must rate, you know?

- Yeah, I'm... I'm Jacob - You're Jacob? Hi Jacob

I'm Adam Goldman, New York Times

Adam Goldman, that's right I think you followed on Twitter recently, or did you?

Yeah, yeah, looks like they have a rent-a-mob Soros bus here

- Is that... How do you know that? - I just saw it out the window

So that is a rent-a-mob Soros...? How... How can you say that?

I'm sitting behind Wohl, and they're like

"Ha-ha-ha, here's a Soros-funded bus bringing protestors in"

And I said to him I said, "That's just a bus"

It looks, that's what it is

- That looks... So you have no evi... - It fit the profile

- Wait, that's a good story - I said it looks like...

You have no evidence to suggest that is a Soros mob bus, but yeah, you're saying it

Sorry, you've got to be careful what you say this is just chatter between two guys

I gotcha, right, right, right

There's a bus outside, you're making a claim that it's a Soros mobster bus?

- Probably is - Probably

Then he goes and tweets it tweets a picture of the bus

He's just created fake news

You see the toxicity that ends up on Twitter

and on other social media and these guys are the creators

It offends me as a journalist

somebody who spends an enormous amount of time trying to get to the facts

that they're polluting real news

I'm on the train, Amtrak headed to DC from New York to go to this press conference

It's in the Rosslyn Holiday Inn, where Jack Burkman normally holds these things

And it comes to light that the accuser's not going to show up

"It's not surprising that this isn't panning out right"

Will, good to finally meet you I see you on Twitter all the time

Yeah, you... you as well so what's the deal? No accuser?

We're going to go right in right now

- See you in a sec... - All right, see you soon, all right...

No, what's happened she's... We'll talk about that

She's... I'll let Jacob tell you about that she's got a lot... a number of them

Okay, good idea, good idea

We're taking a handful of questions, that's the key

Now, do you want...

Gotcha, wow, boy, this is tough this is tougher than NFL gay, this is tough

Good afternoon, everyone, my name is Jack Burkman this is Jacob Wohl

There has developed, in the last week as I'm sure all of you have noticed

a rather tragic and sad backstory

that somehow I or Jacob, or others

paid, or attempted to pay some woman for coming forward

None of this is true

So, they come out with this affidavit from this woman named Carolyne Cass

The report is put together by this organization called Surefire Intelligence

And this goes online before the press conference

And so that was where a lot of people started digging

On its website, this looked like a pretty legitimate organization at first

It says that they were former spies

and things like that, that work at Surefire Intelligence

And their numbers, supposedly different bureaus around the world

And so, if you reverse search the number

it was registered to Jacob Wohl's mother

We had a reporter here who was on the phone with Jacob

and he said, "Are you sure this isn't just a front for you?"

"You're not... Surefire Intelligence is a real thing?"

And he's like, "Oh yeah, yeah don't worry about it, don't worry about it"

Well, as it turned out, pictures on Surefire Intelligence of their employees

were people like Christoph Waltz a Hollywood actor

Some models the head of Surefire Intelligence

he was a kind of shady... looking guy on his LinkedIn page, it was really dim

But someone just brightened it in Photoshop and it was just a picture of Jacob

So as people kept realizing how fraudulent Surefire Intelligence was

that was the setup for the press conference

Jacob and his firm went through

the most intense vetting of any woman in one of these situations...

and I've represented other women in these situations as you know...

that I have ever seen

And we determined that the accusation was credible, or we wouldn't be here today

First of all, I want to stress, no one is questioning Ms. Cass's account here

We didn't know her name until 20 minutes ago, okay?

We're questioning you two both very uncredible people

- And here's what I want to know... - Now why do you say we're uncredible?

You know, you had all the Seth Rich stuff - whatever

My... My question's for Jacob: Why were you shady about Surefire Intelligence?

You told one of our... our reporters you didn't run it, there was this alias

there's all these made-up people what's going on there?

The... The investigation at that point, was still in flux

and it was important that I preserve my anonymity as I moved through it

But if you want your anonymity

then why are you doing this press conference now?

Like, you could have just gone to the New York Police Department, right?

Or Ms. Cass could have gone...?

Well, a lot of that is up a lot of that is up to Carolyne

At the time, she made a decision for whatever reason

we didn't know her at the time to not... to not report it to police

But is she reporting it to police now? Like, are you going to the cops...?

Yes, we're... we're in the process of doing that now

Let me say something about

When do you expect that to be wrapped up for...

This is ongoing, this is ongoing

Probably, I would think by the end of this week

Yeah...

Or the end of next week, next Friday

Filed that... To be clear, you filed that with NYPD, correct?

We haven't... we have not done it yet

This... A lot of those decisions are up to my client, I'm just the lawyer

We... We are still in the process of gathering evidence...

The idea was that Carolyne Cass had met Robert Mueller

when she was at a hotel bar in New York a couple years ago

And she claimed that Mueller basically made her go up to his room

and sexually assaulted her, raped her

Now, there were a couple holes in this story

Probably the biggest being that there's a newspaper article

about Robert Mueller being in DC that day

because he was doing jury duty

There's an item in the Washington Post from that day

that spots him, it's one of those sightings around town columns

that shows someone saw him at jury duty on that day

Are you suggesting the Special Counsel

planted a story in the Washington Post nine years ago...?

You have information in front of you as to his whereabouts

Wait a second was he only at jury duty?

Sometimes people go to jury duty but they're also somewhere else

Was he only at jury duty?

No, it's set up... It's... Hang on, it's not funny

This is not a laughing matter

He basically literally said, someone can be in two places at once

It felt like you had left reality

and entered the right-wing media universe, like a physical version of it

Maybe I had gone through a portal

when I walked into the hotel, and ended up in this weird right-wing place

where Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl were holding court

Is the... Is the whole point of this to discredit Bob Mueller

and... and if... and if that is the case

do you really think that would shut down the Russian investigation?

That... No, the point of this is not to discredit anyone

The point of this is to get to the truth

- It's spelled with an "e" - It is spelled with an "e"?

- That's right, that's right - Wait, this... Okay...

Hang on, you'll figure it out okay, Ms. Cass is...

No, no, no, no you don't get to say that

You brought us out here tell us her name

- And all the identifying information - Her name is right below, if I need to...

You know, we go to a lot of press conferences, and they can be adversarial

You could have this back-and-forth debate during these news conferences

but you know you're dealing with genuine people on the other side

and you're just not confronted with this blatant bullshit conspiracy

And you ask yourself, "I'm a reporter I've been doing this for 20 years"

"Why am I... Why am I sitting here?"

You know, my mission here is not to establish a narrative, it's not to follow an agenda...

Wait a minute... you just established a narrative, and you put it in front of us

It's... It's... Hang on hang on, excuse me

It's to bring forth the facts and let the facts speak for themselves

- And that's what we've done - One last question, this is important...

Let me just take it... no, hold on

I want to... I want... We're gonna respond with more...

Where... Where was Mueller's security detail on the day he was hitting on this woman?

Guys, you know what? We're gonna wrap it thank you thank you all

We'll see you guys on the way out

We've done enough, guys I think that's enough for today

We have another... We have another conference coming soon

- When? - With Carolyne

As soon as we get her schedule...

You always say there's another press conference

where you're really gonna give us the...

What's going on with the Seth Rich conspiracy, by the way?

- It worked out well, because I... - Where's your witness for that?

You said you were going to bring a witness last time, and you didn't bring...?

We're... We're only here to discuss Carolyne today, not other matters...

I want to discuss your credibility

You don't have much credibility because... Your credibility

Oh, my credibility?

You bring... You said you were going to bring witnesses...?

Come on out, guys we've got some civilians...

Why can't you show us a document showing that you're representing her?

How do we... How are we supposed to know that you're representing this person?

We have no evidence

Well, we do

So it seems like he had the person first then he came to you, or what happened?

Uh... It's... We'll just say it's synergistic

We'll say... We'll leave it at synergistic

The whole thing was a circus

The only serious thing was what they were trying to do

which is slime Robert Mueller with one of the worst things they can accuse him of

He got people talking about Robert Mueller

and a sexual assault allegation in the same sentence

And they meant to tarnish Bob Mueller's reputation

to undermine his investigation into the President

What Burkman and Wohl were doing was not only knowingly dishonest

and they know that it was corrosive, and destructive

This was about throwing shit on the wall

That's all they were attempting to do to throw shit on the wall

and get somebody to write about it

They would have been very satisfied if the Time had just written, "This is nonsense"

because they would Google Jacob, and he might have come up on the top search

and... I mean, he doesn't care what context his name is used in, does he?

It doesn't seem like it

Are we trending? That's the real question, are we trending?

I'm sure we're trending

I mean, I really was offended by the whole thing

You know, I can come back to the Times and the Times trusts my judgment

and I said, "I'm not writing about this" I'm gonna do my due diligence

I'm going to go try to find this woman to see if there's any there, there

It's the same standard we would treat Kavanaugh's accuser

We need to find the victim, talk to the victim, interview the victim

and then determine if this is actually real

Uh... But I'm not writing about this news conference

Mainstream media needs to understand

that it is operating in a propaganda-rich environment

There are no two realities

There is an intentional deception on one side

and there is an honest, if imperfect process

of trying to get as near the truth as we can on the other

Today in the red chair again, in the same place

we talked two years ago is Tristan Harris

the cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology

We spent about a fourth of lives now in artificial social systems

Meaning, in these digital environments

And that's just on screen I mean, when you're offscreen

you're still thinking thoughts that came from that artificial social environment

Conspiracy theories on these...

you know, magnified by these platforms, times billions of people...

It has completely fragmented our truth

And more importantly the scale of the disinformation and misinformation

people tend to underestimate

I don't think you've had Guillaume Chaslot on the program...?

But he's the ex-YouTube Recommendations engineer

he works with us and his research showed

that... that Alex Jones was recommended 15 billion times

- Right - There's a cover-up going on

They are pulling videos of this young man, a David Hogg

he's on the fake news CNN, known for staging things

and he says over and over again

"I am not a crisis actor I am not a crisis actor"

Right-wing conspiracy theories going viral

about David Hogg, a 17-year-old Parkland shooting survivor

The unsubstantiated claims say he's a crisis actor

a trained actor who takes advantage of tragedies for political gain

Tuesday, the conspiracy went viral on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube

Were they crisis actors? I mean, I don't know

I... I think the possibility exists

That picture of Emma Gonzalez tearing what appeared to be a Constitution

Was it really a Constitution, was it...

What do I think about it? I think it's pretty disgraceful

Why would you tear up the Constitution?

Well, so, in fact that photograph was faked, it was Photoshopped

- Okay... - She... She wasn't holding up...

I gotcha, I gotcha... Knowing that that was purposely Photoshopped, and faked...

Yeah, that's more upsetting than the fact

that she was allegedly tearing up the Constitution

Facebook, it's a city without signs and police forces, and garbage

That's the city they built

What company wouldn't shut down absolutely, provable, false information?

They create the platform where it gets spread

and then are like "Agh, what can we do?"

They hide behind the First Amendment and they are not the government

They can make choices they just don't want to

To say "fake news" - in other words I don't want your news

because it's fake, is antithetical to the principles of the First Amendment

You can't say "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there's no fire

that's what Justice Holmes said

because it could lead to people being hurt

But if someone gets up and preaches revolution

and there's no imminent likelihood

that there's going to be any violence resulting from that

then that speech has to be tolerated

The First Amendment says the government can't suppress speech

But there's no reason that platforms or communities can't say

"This kind of commentary is beyond the pale"

"and people who insist on saying this are going to suffer a penalty"

They're not the federal government they're... It's not a public square

These are private entities they can do what they want

It's just more convenient to do nothing

It's more profitable to do nothing

I am worried about the future for others

Because what happened to me can happen to anyone

A more vulnerable person

or institution like Comet, would have been taken down right away

These online weapons that are directed at different people and institutions

have lasting consequences, and do destroy people

In the case of Pizzagate...

Now, to my mind, when Facebook finds something like that

they should shut it down

Why did you build tools that allow someone to do that

or allow it to iterate and iterate and iterate?

What tools could you build where that isn't iterated again and again?

White men, younger, run Silicon Valley

If you don't ever feel unsafe in your life you do not understand lack of safety

You do not build that in

I had someone at Twitter talk to me

about they had gotten attacked online the first time it happened

And they were like "Oh, that was pretty bad"

And I'm like "Welcome to the world of women"

"Welcome to the world of people of color"

"Welcome to the world of marginalized people"

This is what it's like every day

Like, if you could think of a really awful thing that could happen with your product

you need to figure out ways that it doesn't have as much damage

They have not spent enough time doing that

Oliver Darcy, from CNN

Infowars is pretty... I mean, I don't know if you've been to the page

but they pretty much make stuff up to get clicks

and generate revenue and scare people

And I... I can't understand how Facebook can say

We're serious about fighting fake news and false information

but allowing Infowars and Alex Jones to profit off of your platform

by using it to generate a lot of clicks

That was an ongoing debate that was happening about Alex Jones

When I did the podcast with Mark we were starting to talk about Alex Jones

The principles that we have on what we remove from the service are

if it's going to result in real harm real physical harm

or if you're attacking individuals then that content shouldn't be on the platform

But then there's broad debate, and...

Okay, 'Sandy Hook didn't happen' is not a debate, it is false

You can't just take that down?

I... I agree that it is false

But overall, you know, I mean let's... let's take this a little closer to home

Right, so I'm Jewish

And there's a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened

- Right? - Yes, there's a lot

I find that deeply offensive

But I... I don't believe that our platform should take that down

because I think that there are things that different people get wrong

Either...

I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong but I think that they...

In the case of the Holocaust deniers they might be, but go ahead

Holocaust deniers don't mean to lie

And I was like, "But they do"

So that... that... that, to me was sort of like

"Oh, you're not even sophisticated enough to understand that they mean to lie"

"That's the whole point"

If someone who is running the biggest communication system

in the history of the world someone who cannot be fired

someone who has complete control over that system

does not understand what he just said, it's really...

It really struck me as... It was a big "Uh-oh" moment for me

The implication that they aren't malevolent...

He knows they're malevolent

Come on, you can take them off like, it's okay

He's going to get flak for it but he gets paid the big bucks, right?

Alex Jones he is the founder of Infowars

and he is now feeling the heat himself YouTube, Facebook and Apple

all announcing they're removing his content from their platforms

What changed in that summer?

Apple did it, when Apple was like

"Eh..." You know "Enough, Basta, that's done"

Everybody else then goes

"Oh no, now if they do it, I guess it gives us cover to do it"

Apple, last night removed the entire library

of Alex Jones's podcast from their store

And then we saw... we've seen throughout the day actually

tech platforms just basically remove Alex Jones from their websites

He had been banned by most platforms, except for Twitter

And so he's now on Capitol Hill yelling about censorship

and conservatives under fire and oppression

and all of this Alex Jones stuff

And so, I was going to cover Jack Dorsey

the Twitter CEO, testifying in front of the House Committee

And I'm standing in line waiting to be led into this room

and out comes Alex Jones

Look at this, right here

The guy that goes around policing and calling for censorship

and then claims that Trump's wrong

there's no censorship of conservatives or patriots

- You are incredibly shameful - How are you doing, Alex?

You're just a... Look at you... Look... Look at him

You are literally an anti-American anti-free speech coward

You're going to go down in the history books at the Criminal News Network

This is the... one of the main...

This is one of the main people right here

He comes over and starts berating me

He sticks multiple cameras in my face

with a crowd that gathers of his right-wing supporters

Come on over here, Drew I... I want to get this guy on tape

This is unbelievable I was literally saying

I don't see the Criminal News Network here

But indeed we do, right there at the front of the line of the trough

And for about 10 to 15 minutes he is just yelling in my face

I mean, look at those eyes, folks if you want to see the eyes of a rat...

Alex Jones has chosen to latch onto Oliver as a hate figure

They'll pick people... and frankly I don't think it's an accident

that it's often a woman, or a person of color

Just look at this guy's eyes, man

That is who will rule your life

Look, I mean he's even more evil-looking...

Something to think about the decisions that you made...

The next day, Twitter bans him

And what their reasoning was to my understanding

is because he livestreamed him berating me

He used a Twitter service to do that, Periscope

It violated Twitter's rules against targeted harassment

And so, that was his last strike

That whole thing was sort of ironic

Yelling and complaining about losing his platform ended up

leading to him losing his last remaining platform, being Twitter

You're the classic, hateful vicious leftists

is what's been going on the attack people, shame on you!

You were telling lies, bro you don't know nothing

You're disgusting! You're unbelievable anti-free speech as well

You know nothing, nothing

He's a public figure in his job, in a public space

who's lied about me, and actively

full-time lobbied to have me removed off platforms, and bragged about it

And so I see a modern book-burner who also misrepresents what I've said

and I tell him that I think he's the embodiment of evil

a big corporation working behind the scenes, and publicly, to silence people

He is a book-burning monster

When I first visited Alex Jones

he told me that there were snipers on the roof

which he then called me the next day to clarify

he had made that up, and there actually aren't any snipers on the roof

His offices are in a part of Austin he doesn't want you to reveal or talk about

It's smoked windows, it's surveillance video cameras everywhere

He has a kind of genius business model

He spews out these theories

and then at the beginning and end of every program, he's selling you something

And what he sells feeds that sense of paranoia

and feeling of being besieged that a lot of his listeners and followers have

This is a guy who sells vitamin B male virility products

and special kooky foods by spreading these theories that damage people's lives

Sandy Hook, it's got inside job written all over it

These are dead children, and he put out all this false information about it

and kept saying, "It's free speech free speech," no it's not

The Sandy Hook families have been begging for years

to have this or that piece of video removed

this or that Facebook post this or that tweet

And oftentimes, they feel like that fell on deaf ears

"Deplatformed" is such a bloodless term, you know?

"I've been deplatformed" what does that even mean?

And when you talk with the families they'll say

"You know what that means to me?"

"For the first time, it means I'm not afraid to open my mail"

You know, "That I'm going to see a threat from someone"

"And that threat coming in my mailbox means they know where I live"

Just like James Alefantis, just like Seth Rich's family, they want to know...

Does the First Amendment actually protect the types of claims

that have caused us such damage, and such harm?

And you know I had one of them say, you know

"This makes me feel like, in 30 years"

"truth will be what pops up first when you search on Google"

You know, if you type "Sandy Hook" into Google

and this content isn't taken down

and the purveyors of this content aren't taken down

that the first thing you'll see is that it was a hoax

So then these people have actually changed reality

The only way to fight this sort of fake news is with the truth

I mean, I don't know of any other way to do it

You certainly don't fight it with fake news

You don't win a... that battle by um, playing their game

One of the most important targets of propaganda...

and this is true of Russian propaganda in Russia

it's true of propaganda in the United States...

is to achieve this state of disorientation

this denial of the idea that there is a truth of the matter

Challenging what is knowable is a fundamental way of upending a system

and making it impossible to govern

It's also a way to ensure that you and I can't ever come to compromise on anything

This community is really somewhere that's based in truth, and reality

An online community is one thing

But a physical place where you're playing ping-pong with someone

eating, breaking bread over the table

you're able to actually communicate with the people around you

So if someone were to say, "Wow, this crazy thing is happening, did you hear about it?"

Across the table, one might say "Oh, that thing isn't really happening"

God is going to throw you into Hell!

It is hard, still, we've been under continued threats

The daily messaging that I get now about people wanting to kill me

or that I should be dead, is you know, a hard thing to deal with

So that's just part of my life, now

But the community saved us like, it's the community

They, like, saved the restaurant, basically

and also were like "You need to open, on Monday"

And I was like... "We're not opening on Monday"

"We're... We're never opening"

Like, this... this restaurant is not going to be open again

was my thought, feeling, and response

We called a meeting of the staff and was like, "What do you want to do?"

And I said to them, you know "I can take every precaution"

We would have armed guards at the doors

Police surrounding the building

To open our pizza place, when we can

But I was like, "I don't want to really open, because I am scared"

And... You know, in my head

But I'm like, "But what do you want to do?"

And these 20-something-year-old staff was like

"We need to open"

Because Comet is not gonna be defeated, or something

Or like, this community needs us

So we were able to open because they... wanted to

And the support of this community who also were calling the restaurant saying

"We want to come there right now"

Like, a gunman has come through and literally they're calling being like

"When can we bring our kids to have pizza? You can't close"

Like, it's a simple recipe

It's family, community and truth, like that's what... That's why we're here

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