Aric Toler on How Not to Report on Disinformation
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2020
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For this week's episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Alina Polyakova talked to Aric Toler of Bellingcat, a collective that has quickly become the gold-standard for open source and social media investigations. Aric recently published a blog post in response to a New York Times article on Russian influence campaigns—one retweeted by former President Barak Obama no less—that Aric called “How Not to Report on Disinformation.” Evelyn and Alina asked him about the article and what exactly Aric thought was wrong with it as a case study for reporters writing about disinformation operations. When are reporters helping to uncover threats to democracy, and when are they giving oxygen to fringe actors?
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.0 | This is definitely a question with coronavirus as well. |
| 0:36.5 | There's a god awful amount of disinformation around this. |
| 0:39.7 | So it's like a whack-a-mall with this. |
| 0:41.2 | There's so many things coming out. |
| 0:42.5 | There's so many threads of disinformation that is impossible to keep up. |
| 0:46.6 | But you know, a lot of this takes a little bit of intuition about if you see something |
| 0:50.1 | that could later on get more traction, you think that could then catch up and you know, |
| 0:54.4 | maybe become a Facebook meme or whatever, kind of pulling out the weeds early is helpful. |
| 0:59.5 | But again, if you depending on your outlet, if you give oxygen to something, if you are |
| 1:04.0 | a think tank who published an article about an obscure article in a Russian propaganda |
| 1:08.8 | site, well all of a sudden now that Russian propaganda site has a badge of honor, right? |
| 1:12.8 | This thing, you know, this is what they don't want you to hear. |
| 1:14.8 | They're coming at us, you know, there. |
| 1:16.8 | A home NATO wants to censor us because we're telling the truth, kind of a thing. |
| 1:20.5 | So it's very sensitive about when the threshold of reporting something versus just ignoring |
| 1:25.4 | and letting it die its own natural death. |
| 1:27.8 | I'm Quintet Jurusik and this is the Laugh Air Podcast, May 7, 2020. |
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