Jane Lytvynenko on Debunking the Disinformation Garbage Fire
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2020
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on our Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jane Lytvynenko, a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News who focuses on disinformation. If you use Twitter regularly and have looked at the platform during any major media events—disasters, protests, you name it—you’ve likely seen her enormous tweet threads where she debunks hoaxes and misinformation. Recently, she’s turned her debunking skills toward misinformation and disinformation around the coronavirus pandemic, reporting on the various “fake experts” peddling misleading stories about the virus and the long half-life of the conspiratorial “Plandemic” video. She’s also written on the rise of “disinformation for hire”—PR firms that turn to disinformation as a marketing tool. So what is it like to report on disinformation and misinformation in real time? How can journalists help readers understand and spot that bad information? And, is there any cause to be optimistic?
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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 | They're retreating real news articles mixed in with maybe websites that |
| 0:41.0 | sland one way or the other. |
| 0:43.0 | They're posting memes that are not 100% false but are not 100% true. |
| 0:48.0 | Either video taken out of context is also huge problem. |
| 0:52.0 | So when we talk about misinformation and disinformation and social |
| 0:56.0 | medium manipulation, really we need to be thinking on a level of |
| 1:00.0 | an ecosystem rather than a one-off piece of content. |
| 1:04.0 | And it's still incredibly important to debunk those one-off pieces of content. |
| 1:08.0 | But when it comes to sort of understanding the problem, we need to have a broader scope. |
| 1:14.0 | I'm Quintedgerusic and this is the LawFair podcast July 16, 2020. |
| 1:21.0 | This week on our Herbators of Truth Series on disinformation, |
| 1:25.0 | Evelyn Dwick and I spoke with Jane Lepanenko, a senior reporter at Buzzfeed news |
| 1:30.0 | who focuses on disinformation. |
| 1:33.0 | If you use Twitter regularly and have looked the platform during major media events, |
| 1:38.0 | disasters, protests, you name it. |
| 1:41.0 | You've likely seen her enormous tweet threads where she debunks hoaxes and misinformation. |
... |
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