After Truth: Disinformation And The Cost Of Fake News Purchasing Truth From The Viewer
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Almost everyone with access to the Internet is online, relying on what is displayed on the screen for news and “facts.” Coupled with this huge shift in the way we gather news is the dissemination of fake news. After teasing listeners for a couple of episodes, Bill Stierle and Tom finally go deeply into the documentary film After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News. They talk about the overwhelming amount of information accessible to us and how it has made us vulnerable to having our beliefs and truths purchased. Bill and Tom provide insights into the film, Including the role of the media, our political leaders, and even military liaisons in spreading disinformation, and how we can fight back to reclaim the truth.
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Bill, you and I have been teasing for a couple of episodes here that we’re going to talk about this documentary called After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News. Today is the day we’re going to talk about it. Truthfully, just so our readers understand, you and I have spent more time researching and talking about this than we do many other topics that we’ve talked about. There’s a lot to chew on this one. We want to recommend the readers to check out this documentary. It’s on HBO. If you have an HBO account, HBO.com, HBO Go app on any of your TV streaming services, you can get it. I highly recommend you check it out.
We’re going to talk about some of it now. If you haven’t watched it yet, spoiler alert, we are going to talk about it. I don’t think anything we say is going to, in any way, take away from your viewing experience watching it, even if you haven’t seen it yet. This documentary does a very good job of pointing out how easy it is for disinformation to be created and to be propagated, meaning spread like wildfire. Don’t you agree, Bill?
I agree from the standpoint, Tom, that our minds are very sensitive to trying to figure out the truth in our world to create an experience of two important needs of ours being met. It’s the need for certainty and the need for stability in a changing world. As I mentioned to one of my clients, we are not used to the volume of information that we have access to. We’re not used to the accessibility of information real and imagined, real and illusionary, or real and fake, our brains aren’t used to this. We used to get a chance to talk about it once a week, once a month, only on holidays, once a quarter, or a little around the water cooler. That’s not the way this is going.
If you want to know what Tom Hank’s birthday is, all you’ve got to do is ask and you’ll know what it is. There could be a disinformation campaign that says, “Tom Hanks is ten years younger than what he is.” That’s what will show up at the top of Google because more people are searching for the falsehood rather than the real fact. That’s one of the things I love about this movie. It says, “We need to clean up our core resource for information because it’s a lot of junk at the front end.” If you look up Pizzagate, it’s telling you an entire untruth about a Comet Pizza in Washington, DC. It is unsettling because it took off, it got a lot of clicks, and it made a lot of money for advertisers, Google, Facebook and Twitter but at the expense of truth and physical and emotional health of others.
It’s that last part, Bill, that is a point that this documentary makes very loud and clear. What was fascinating is that not only did this disinformation catch fire, it spread like a wildfire uncontrollably to the point where it purchased truth of this man who took it upon himself to drive from North Carolina to Washington, DC with an AR-15 style assault rifle. Everybody who’s interested needs to watch this movie and form their own opinion. I’m telling you from my perspective, watching this film and what I had read and learned about this issue in the news back in 2016 when this took place, that this man truly believed that there were people in the basement of Comet Pizza or in some backroom, which by the way, when he got there, he found out there is no basement but he believed there were people that were being physically abused, held against their will, and children too in this pizza parlor.
He could not live with himself if he just sat by understanding and believing that to be true. This man took action and drove up to North Carolina, walked right into Comet Pizza during business hours with this assault rifle in hand, and is looking throughout the entire restaurant, looking in cabinets, behind the main desk, at the kitchen, walk into the back of the store, opening closet doors, and not asking anybody’s permission. He’s just doing it.
The movie takes you through what happened as the staff realized what was happening. They’re trying to get everybody quietly to leave the store because they don’t want anybody to be harmed. Somebody calls the police. What was shocking and illuminating, what makes me believe was this man believed he was doing a public service when he went in there with his gun. The police surrounded the place. He couldn’t find anything or anybody being abused. He couldn’t even find a space where people could have been being stored.
The reality is that at no time in human history have we had this much information accessible to us.
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He walks back out of the restaurant and the police have surrounded the place. They give him orders. They all have guns pointed at him, “Drop your weapon, turn around, put your hands behind your head, walk backwards, lie front on the ground.” They arrest the guy. This is my point here, Bill. He complied with the officer’s instructions and they asked him, “What are you doing here?” He answered truthfully, “I was here to help save some people, people that were being held against their will.” One of the officers who’s arresting him says, “What?” The other officer says, “He’s talking about Pizzagate.” Even one of the arresting officers knew the disinformation about this restaurant. It is mind-blowing how disinformation like this can brainwash somebody.
The emotional experience of the man laying down and getting handcuffed is relieved. Not anything else but relieved, “I feel relieved to find out for myself that nothing was happening here. You’re going to arrest me. I feel relieved because I needed to solve this thing in my head because I needed to trust that kids were being safe. The only way I could do it is because I was told that kids were not safe. I have two daughters myself. I would feel horrified if I didn’t do anything about it, where I heard this from Alex Jones said that ‘I’m going to go down there myself.’ Somebody should go down there and take this on.
Alex Jones was a part of the process of stirring the pot. When a person’s need for protection and safety isn’t met, human beings naturally want to protect other human beings. This is why our military budget is so high. Remember World War II, we weren’t ready for the Japanese, we should’ve known about that. We need a bigger military. No one knew that there were concentration camps. We didn’t find out about concentration camps until we got there. It’s like, “Yikes.”
Those kinds of ‘we need to know’ information to make our world safe can be easily hijacked by people that are representing themselves as news but are providing a form of disinformation to get viewership and clicks. This is the what of the problem. The why of the problem is that the viewers are meeting needs of theirs. They’re going like, “My need for safety isn’t met. I’m going to watch Fox News because they talked to me about my values, my worldview and my perspective. These are things I believe that the government is keeping this secret. I’ve been watching this on TV for years.” It’s disheartening and sad to see that we’ve gotten ourselves into this place. The reality is that at no time in human history have we had this much information accessible to us.
It’s all being thrown at us. I like to use the analogy of somebody’s got one of these machines that will shoot tennis balls at you from across the court so you can keep swinging when there’s no one there. They have it on rapid-fire. They’re firing tennis ball after a tennis ball at you. There’s no way you can hit them all or catch them all. We are overloaded with information. It’s not all that shocking that many people do not take the time to vet or question all the information that they are exposed to.
It’s unsettling. The thing for me that is challenging is that our society has softened itself up through TV. For a TV show, for example The X-Files, it was on the air for nine years. It was a highly-rated show and 202 episodes. What was it about? A government conspiracy and our two heroes trying to uncover about aliens. For years, that belief propaganda thing was supposed to be for entertainment, not supposed to be for doubt government and the people that are in charge. That’s not the only place that the distrust of government shows up.
One of the earlier places is Ronald Reagan saying, “The worst sentence you can hear is I’m from the government, I’m here to help,” but you’re going to run the government. That was a sentence that got him elected that the government is bad news. The answer is, “I don’t think you’re seeing what the role of the job that you’re signing up for, big guy.” The answer was, “He said what he needed to say to get elected because there were people that believe that the government should take more of a role and other people group would say the government needed to take less of a role in helping people with their independence and their identity.”
What are we dealing with right now? “The election is a fraud. You can’t trust the government.” I’m going like, “This is the end of the head of the snake. This is the shit that’s coming out at the end.” This is the disconnection regrettably that’s showing up in the world. We do need to fight the truth inside our minds. We do need to use different tools and communication techniques so that we can get the truth where it needs to be, which is more of a process. This film has done a good job of saying, “This is how truth is purchased through the strategy of disinformation. I’m going to disinform somebody to create a sway of things.” Don’t do this.
Bill, one of the things that is illuminated in this film is that a community of people in Texas had their truth purchased based on some US military training that was going to be conducted in a part of Texas for an eight-week period of time. It’s a very same thing that goes on there. The reason I bring it up now is what you mentioned about people and what they believe. One of the things that strikes me is it’s challenging for the military and local government leadership who ran a community meeting to try to address residents’ concerns about these military training or exercises. What it meant was these people came to the meeting, not wanting to hear the truth about it. They came, it seems, wanting to have their belief biases confirmed. Can we talk about that? I think that’s important.
That’s a huge switch that’s taken place. If I’ve watched X number of hours of disinformation, partial information, partial truth or minimal truth, and I’ve watched a certain amount of time, I’m going to come in to look for something that is going to validate what I’ve already know. I’m not going to come into a situation with a beginner’s mind and saying, “Yes, Congressman, I now hear,” or “Yes, State Representative, I now hear that you’re on top of this and this is what you’ve approved. These were the things that we see. This is the thing that we need to trust you on because you’ve done the information.” They’re not doing that. They say, “Representative, you are saying something to calm us down or to explain something.” “I have too much evidence on my side.” They don’t have evidence. All they have is messaging. There’s a big difference between, “I have messaging and I have evidence.” That’s where the line is in bad shape.
What happened is that there were people putting messages out into the community, online and all different places that people were seeing that said, “What are all these military people doing in here in Texas?” They were sowing seeds of doubt and skepticism over it being for legitimate purposes, maybe the fact that we have this military personnel. Before we go and send them into a conflict situation to do their job, we need to train them as to how to do that job, and we need to do this. The State of Texas agreed to do it, or these counties or towns agreed to let them train, but people didn’t believe it. They were being sold this alternate reality that the military was going to try and seek out dissidents and arrest them.
It’s political opponents, political adversaries, and it’s going to do it. That has been something that the Russians, and the Eastern Bloc countries have done that disinformation. You better not trust these people. Therefore, you don’t want to vote. You don’t want to do this thing because it’s not true. This is a counter-message instead of going like, “This thing is true.” It’s so unsettling that we’re not able to talk about an advocate for our values because the disinformation is occupying so much space. You can’t fight for fairness if you’re trying to argue over truth.
What happens is fairness is not taking place because the distractor is arguing on what’s true and what’s not true instead of going like, “Here’s what fairness doesn’t look like in the corporate world, in the justice system, in the medical thing, and in climate change.” We can’t even get to those harder things because there is an argument over truth that doesn’t need to be there. We’ve mentioned many times that the quickest way to get somebody to feel doubt is to question truth. The quickest way to get somebody to feel skeptical is to cultivate the need for trust not being met. Truth and trust have a direct emotional impact on the reader even if it’s not true. The illusion works just the same.
Bill, the irony here of this particular disinformation is that a military leader and spokesperson was invited to come to a community meeting by the local representative of the House of Representatives for this district or something like that. They’re there to have an open forum and to provide what they thought was going to calm people down. “We’re going to tell them exactly what we’re doing, why we’re here and why we’re not here.” They told them and the people didn’t believe them. You and I have said many times that in certain situations, the truth doesn’t matter. The facts are not going to help you. I’m wondering, Bill, what would that political leader or that military liaison have done differently in that situation to have achieved their goal?
It’s such an unsettling statement people will not believe what I’m going to say next. There are somewhere between 3 to 5 sentences that need to be spoken before you give them the factual information. Those 3 to 5 sentences are to face the disinformation that they have received up to this point. You have to face the disinformation first before you can have a healthy discussion of truth. You’ve got to face it, and facing it doesn’t mean listening to it. Facing means empathize with it. That’s what facing it means.
Leading with the facts is not going to be helpful. The 3 to 5 sentences, could you give me a for instance?
The facilitation of that meeting, which I’ve done many of these, would sound like this, “I’d like to make sure that people are being heard of their concerns. I’d like to address these concerns one at a time to make sure that we’re all on the same page.” I gave a pre-emptive narrative of saying, “I am interested in hearing what you’ve heard.” I want to know where the disinformation has been planted. I might get a sentence that says, “We heard that Barack Obama sent the military here to practice rounding up political dissonance to affect the vote of the state or for whatever reason it is.”
Here’s where the rubber meets the road. It’s hard to believe but this is the sentence that needs to be spoken and dealt with. Here’s the sentence, “I’m guessing you’re feeling worried, concerned and scared to make sure that there is protection for the people of this city of this county. Is that correct?” The person then says, “Yes.” “What do you need to hear from us about protection and safety about what you said?” They don’t know what that answer is.
That surprised me when you said that because I would think they wouldn’t know the answer. They probably want the military to go away.
It would be an okay sentence because you would like the military to take this into another state to make sure it doesn’t happen here. Notice that anxiousness, nervousness and panic are in the room but at least I’m facing it and I’m not allowing disinflation to take hold. I’m going to like, “I’m interested. You’d like us to move the training. Is that what you’d like us to move?” One person says yes. One person might say, “I want to make sure it’s approved and someone is watching them.”
You need them to work on their own biases, not to disregard the truth and reinforce their biases. You want them to work on reframing their own bias so they can say, “What would work for me is that the military would leave.” You would like them to not spend money here in the state and take the money that they’re spending in the state for these military exercises. You’d rather have the military exercises done in a different state so that you can have the safety. They’ll go, “No, we want them to spend the money here.”
They don’t know which need they’re going for right now. All they’ve been doing is sold 1 or 2 needs that their political voice or their vote isn’t going to be heard. Meanwhile, if the military took it nonchalantly and the military representative would say, “Would it work better for all of you for us to take the money that we would spend in this state? Would you like us to move it to Oklahoma or Nebraska for us to do it in those environments so that you get the level of safety that you would like, take the revenue and move it there? Would that work better for you?” The room would pivot because you’ve introduced a different need.
I’ve also facilitated where I write the needs up here and I’d put them in opposition with each other with two different whiteboards or flip charts or whatever, “You’ve got financial security over here and you’ve got safety and protection over here. How can we get both of these things?” The person is calming down because they’ve got to get into agreement and disinformation evaporates inside that room because it’s going like, “Which one are we going to pick here?” It doesn’t mean that people aren’t working out of the room and going like, “I feel a little unsettled but also better. I felt like this was a good meeting. I now see what the choices were that these different people were making. I’m a human being and they’re a human being, and they’re making choices over there.”
Somehow, another human being who was scared on the internet was working out their stuff. There’s a problem with that guy because I was in the room. I was the person that experienced it. To loop this back around, you’ll see how weird this is going to get. Just like the person that is being handcuffed out in the front of Comet Pizza feels calm and relieved, the people in this space walked out and said, “We’re going to decide on our economy. We’re going to trust these people because at least they face my emotions and face my concerns. They didn’t try to talk over me. They didn’t try to give us a logical rational example. They didn’t fill my head with facts that I don’t believe. They dealt with my upset.” This is where we’re like, “If I want to get rid of disinformation, it’s the spotlight of empathy for the upset.”
People are unaware that you cannot fight disinformation with the facts or the truth. You have to fight it. We must sound like broken records because what it comes back to is stepping into the issue with empathy and compassion, does it not?
It does. A lot of people think that’s a nice language. Empathy is not like a nice language. It’s a protective language. When you’re using empathy, you’re advocating for a need and you’re associating a feeling with it, it is one of the strongest narratives you can use towards people that are screaming at you, a child that’s doing a tantrum, a spouse that’s upset and repeating one of their greatest fears. You’ve got to sit in the space. We’re both parents and it is hard to stare it down that the upset is large. If you don’t stare it down, disinformation gets to occupy the first ten slots of a Google search. Most people don’t go to the 2nd, 3rd or 4th page of Google to find the information. We’re not going 10 or 20 down. We’re not doing that because the algorithm in searching is bringing a bunch of junk information towards the top. It brings popularity to the top, not truth.
In relevance to the term you searched on, which I’ve got to burst your bubble here if you think that truth is in any way something they use to determine relevance because it’s not.
It allows a lot of cracks for people who want to meet their needs at the expense of others to work their way through. That’s one of the things that was nice about this movie, but also extremely heart-wrenching and disheartening to watch the physical impact and the emotional impact on many of the goodwill people that were at the business end of some of these propaganda campaigns. The workers at Comet Pizza getting harassed, the owner still getting death threats because it’s on the internet. It’s living forever on the internet because it swirls around, and people get to bring it back up, “Is that the truth because I found it in a corner?” It’s like, “No, you found a speck of dirt. Clean it out and throw it out already.” There are many examples of this.
They’re very well presented, I have to say. Unfortunately for Comet Pizza and the owner did think after this incident that his business was done. It was not going to survive. Not only the employees who worked there and the people of the community all wanted him to stay in business. They wanted to support this business. I have to say the community is very heartwarming to see how they rallied around this business to make sure it survived and that it did not become ultimately a casualty of disinformation.
If somebody was in a disinformation piece and finds out that they were a part of the disinformation campaign, the accountability and reconciliation might look like this, “Sean Hannity eating pizza at that location playing ping pong with kids.” If I ruled the world, reconciliation, healing and truth-telling would look like Sean Hannity than anybody else playing ping pong with a kid at that pizza shop, talking with the owner, sincere apology in front of the person, or an empathy sentence which might have sounded like this coming out of Sean Hannity’s mouth, “I feel sad and disheartened at the level of pain that is coming to your direction because of our following this story or reporting a story that wasn’t true. It showed up as disinformation on my desk. We reported it so that we could be ahead of the curve in case it was true. The impact was your business, your personal life and your clients were threatened because of my actions.”
Do you think we’re ever going to get that out of him? I feel doubtful and skeptical at the moment, but there is a wave of accountability showing up. The wave of accountability is you say things that are threatening, social media will take you down. That’s what Apple did with Alex Jones and then these other major people took him off the internet. He got angry at things and started yelling at another person and then Twitter took them off. That’s the wave of accountability that I’m hoping will show up on social media because they’re not accountable to anybody. They’re supposed to be operating out of ethics and integrity, but also they’re trying to make their business model work which is, “How many advertising clicks can I get?” That’s where they’re getting paid the money. Why would I take down this person that’s making me $1 million a year?
Alex Jones figures into this documentary quite a bit. They do talk about that, his business, a little bit of how it operates, how and why it was removed from many outlets that it was distributed through because of disinformation and disregard for the truth. It’s a partial victory for the battle against disinformation. Some things happen there with Alex Jones in particular that will make for a deeper dive in another episode, which I look forward to that.
You have to face the disinformation first before you can have a healthy discussion of the truth.
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One of the things that sticks out in my head to put the ball on the tee here is that when a journalist sits in front of a person, they’re trained to look for the facts and ask for questions to cultivate the facts so they can then write a story about it. That’s what they’re looking to do. The problem is the powers to be on the social media that’s at a hand promotes illusion equally or even more so, amplifies illusion and sensationalism gets more clicks than a raw fact. If you get a raw fact, it’s harder to sell features and benefits. It’s easier to sell the smell of the steak than it is to sell the steak. It’s easier to sell the branding slogan than it is to sell the quality of the product.
I like your sizzle analogy. We live in California and there’s an awful lot of Carl’s Jr. fast-food restaurants. Do you ever driven by a Carl’s Jr., stopped at a stoplight right there, and smell what’s coming out of their vents? I’m like, “That smells so good.” I literally have said that, that makes me hungry. It makes me want to go in there and buy ten of whatever they’re selling. That’s an example of what you’re saying. I’m having a Spaceballs moment, I can see Mel Brooks opening the can of Perri-Air, and smelling the canned air from the Planet Druidia. They could sell the smell of Carl’s Jr. as an air freshener better than they could sell the food.
It is a part of how easy the brain is getting hijacked. It is a part of how sensitive of what we are as a human animal. A big part of this show is that we’re sensitive to language, in the same way that we’re sensitive to smell. Language creates a molecule of emotion. What’s the difference between a propaganda campaign and a marketing campaign? The answer is not much different. There’s one selling a little bit more alive than the other one is. Propaganda is selling to the detriment of the needs of the many. Propaganda is trying to implant a derogatory message that’s at the expense of the group.
In the movie, they get into this with the phrase “Vladimir Putin must be smiling” because he doesn’t have to do much. After all, we’re taking it out on ourselves. We’re imploding on the inside. He’s sitting back and going like, “All I have to do is stoke this a little bit.” It’s partly true because we are. All you’ve got to do is sit down and watch a counter-veiling narrative back and forth and you’re shaking your head. No one is getting evidence and even bringing other brands into it to validate their truth. For example, the dialogue with masks for the health crisis. Why is it news media fully covering the lengths that the professional teams are going to protect their players? Why is that not good enough for the common person?
If I was in charge of a news department, I go like, “Here’s the story I want. I want a story about whatever city it is, and whatever pro team it is in that city. I want to amplify the work and the strain that they’re going to keep their people from getting sick because if they lose one of these multi-million-dollar players, and why is that not as valuable as losing the regular citizen?” That is must-see TV. We’ve got to do our best to purchase truth back. You’ve got to fight for it. In this case, it’s not an Alex Jones rant. It is an empathetic, clear-minded, adult narrative about, “Here’s what protection for people look like. Here’s what fairness looks like in a capitalist society.” You’ve got to start fighting the value. That’s what we can get into next time because you can see there are a dozen rabbit holes we can go down pretty quickly.
There are a lot of good examples. It’s not that we’re going to subsequent episodes to beat a dead horse like, “You’re still talking about after truth,” but there are many valuable things to discuss, that in different ways, it’s not the same thing over and over. I look forward to some of these, Bill, especially when it comes to some of the things that are trying to create disinformation around the Mueller Report before it was published. In particular, some of the journalists that were involved in that, and there are many great things to learn among other things. I like that we’re going to take a little bit deeper dive into a few of these things over time. I look forward to continuing that with you.
It’s a lot of fun, Tom. Thanks.
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