Podcast
Lovett or Leave It
It was discussed in the context of how the internet initially promised to debunk conspiracy theories through social networks, but it then 'went wrong' due to a confluence of factors including increased polarization and the use of social media as a tool for reinforcing one's own viewpoint.
Everything's crazy now. Let me just... Two years ago, everything I said made sense. And now none of it makes sense anymore.
— Episode: Retweet to Impeach
Episode: Retweet to Impeach
It was discussed in the context of how the internet initially promised to debunk conspiracy theories through social networks, but it then 'went wrong' due to a confluence of factors including increased polarization and the use of social media as a tool for reinforcing one's own viewpoint.
Everything's crazy now. Let me just... Two years ago, everything I said made sense. And now none of it makes sense anymore.
The internet was a place... Terrified. I know. No, I still like I wake up in the middle of the night and kind of have palpitations and need to take a drink and go back to bed.
So very early days. There was a website out there that said, how many cows are in Texas? There are no cows. Aliens have abducted all the cows and replaced them with alien cow doppelgangers that eventually will rise up, right?
And my dissertation was like, how do we prove that this stuff is not true? And you could do that by leveraging the power of the internet and who you trusted and these social networks that we were starting to build.
It all seemed like and continued after that to seem like a place where we were going to be able to debunk these conspiracies to crowdsource the truth. And then it all went really wrong.