Abbie Richards on Fighting Disinformation on TikTok

Offline with Jon Favreau

Crooked Media

Society & Culture, News

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Offline, Jon is joined by TikToker and disinformation researcher Abbie Richards. A leading voice on the platform, Abbie inoculates her viewers to trending disinformation and provides them with the tools to fight back. Jon asks her about what that work entails, why this current moment has seen the rise of so many new conspiracies, and dives into her viral conspiracy theory classification chart. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I can't imagine the amount of hate and threats that come your way as someone who's
0:04.5	taking on conspiracy theorists and extremists every day. What has that been like for you? How
0:08.8	do you process that? Oh, no, it's great being a woman online. Of course, famously, famously,
0:16.4	easy and wonderful, right? Time to time would do it again. Yeah, no, it's not something I was ever
0:24.4	prepared for when I started hosting. You know, it's not something anyone's psyche is built for.
0:32.9	Like your brain just is not meant to be processing that amount of like discussion about you in the
0:40.0	first place, but especially when there's so much like hatred in that discussion. It feels very
0:44.4	strange for your brain. So you're dealing with threats, you're seeing, you know, even your most
0:50.4	popular posts sometimes get fewer views than, you know, some of the disinformation and conspiracy
0:55.6	theories you're trying to debunk. You're seeing online extremism get even worse. How do you stay
1:00.8	hopeful that this is a winnable fight? I'm John Fabro. Welcome to offline.
1:12.8	Hey, everyone. My guess this week is Abby Richards, a 25-year-old TikTok disinformation and
1:18.7	extremism researcher. So Abby is our first TikToker. If you're not familiar with TikTok,
1:24.4	it means you are old or at the very least it means that you seem old. But just so you know,
1:29.6	TikTok is an incredibly addictive social media platform where you can create and share short
1:34.0	videos on just about any topic that lasts anywhere from 15 seconds to three minutes. It has over
1:40.2	one billion active users, more than double the number of users on Twitter, a platform that
1:45.8	launched 10 years earlier. Abby's videos are smart, funny and extremely popular. Her goal isn't
1:52.2	just to debunk conspiracy theories, but as she puts it, to inoculate more people against the
1:57.7	spread of disinformation so that we can better identify it, understand why it so easily believed,
2:03.6	and maybe stop future conspiracy theories from infecting our media, our politics, and our brains.
2:09.8	So far, she's doing a pretty good job. In September of 2020, she created a chart that maps
	...

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