A Jan. 6 Committee Staffer on Social Media and the Insurrection
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2023
⏱️ 57 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
The Jan. 6 Committee released its final report on December 22, 2022—the capstone of a year and half of investigative work. But while the report is 800 pages, there’s a lot that it doesn’t include. The Washington Post recently reported on the work done by investigators looking into the role of social media in enabling the insurrection—work that wasn’t incorporated into the final document.
Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with Dean Jackson, project manager of the Influence Operations Researchers’ Guild at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served as an investigative analyst with the Jan. 6 committee, investigating the role of social media in the insurrection. They talked about his experience working on the investigation and what his team uncovered—and walked through what got left out from the final report.
You can read Dean’s essay with fellow Jan. 6 committee staffers Meghan Conroy and Alex Newhouse here on Just Security and listen to an interview with Dean and his colleagues here at Tech Policy Press.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
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| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | There's this kind of larger question about the role of social media in our politics, right? |
| 0:37.0 | Social media has changed or at least amplified and accelerated a lot of media trends |
| 0:43.0 | that reward more extreme speech, more sensational speech, more vitriolic speech. |
| 0:47.0 | What I think as a sort of analyst of these topics in my sort of think tank job outside of the committee |
| 0:53.0 | is that there's a sort of dangerous feedback loop in which politicians are rewarded for kind of more combative, |
| 1:01.0 | sometimes more violent rhetoric. |
| 1:03.0 | That feeds into the social media ecosystem, generates a ton of engagement, a ton of media activity, |
| 1:08.0 | would then thus strengthen the incentives for politicians to conduct that behavior again. |
| 1:13.0 | I'm Quintedurusic, a senior editor at LawFair. |
| 1:16.0 | And this is the LawFair podcast, February 8, 2023. |
| 1:22.0 | The January 6th committee released its final report on December 22, 2022, |
| 1:28.0 | the capstone of a year and a half of investigative work. |
| 1:32.0 | But while the report is 800 pages, there's a lot that it doesn't include. |
| 1:37.0 | The Washington Post recently reported on the work done by investigators looking into the role of social media |
| 1:43.0 | in enabling the insurrection, work that wasn't incorporated into the final document. |
| 1:48.0 | Today on the podcast, we're excited to bring you a conversation with one of the staffers who worked on that investigation. |
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