Inside the bizarre world of internet trolls and propagandists | Andrew Marantz

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2019

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Journalist Andrew Marantz spent three years embedded in the world of internet trolls and social media propagandists, seeking out the people who are propelling fringe talking points into the heart of conversation online and trying to understand how they're making their ideas spread. Go down the rabbit hole of online propaganda and misinformation -- and learn we can start to make the internet less toxic.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features writer Andrew Morrance, recorded live at TED 2019.
0:07.8	I spent the past three years talking to some of the worst people on the internet.
0:13.7	Now, if you've been online recently, you may have noticed that there's a lot of toxic garbage out there.
0:20.2	Racist memes, misogynist propaganda,
0:22.9	viral misinformation. So I wanted to know who was making this stuff. I wanted to understand how
0:27.9	they were spreading it. Ultimately, I wanted to know what kind of impact it might be having on our
0:32.2	society. So in 2016, I started tracing some of these memes back to their source.
0:40.2	Back to the people who were making them or who were making them go viral.
0:42.4	I'd approach those people and say, hey, I'm a journalist.
0:44.1	Can I come watch you do what you do?
0:46.2	Now, often the response would be,
0:51.6	why in hell would I want to talk to some low-tie, soyboy Brooklyn globalist Jew cuck who's in cahoots with the Democrat Party.
0:55.9	To which my response would be,
0:58.3	look, man, that's only 57% true.
1:01.7	But often I got the opposite response.
1:02.9	Yeah, sure. Come on by.
1:05.8	So that's how I ended up in the living room of a social media propagandist in Southern California.
1:09.9	He was a married white guy in his late 30s.
1:12.4	He had a table in front of him with a mug of coffee,
1:15.6	a laptop for tweeting, a phone for texting,
1:19.0	and an iPad for live streaming to Periscope and YouTube.
1:22.8	That was it.
	...

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