There are all these metaphors about disinformation that relate it to pollutants, to corporate polluters,

but you observed that there's this weird thing going on, where usually if you're being accused

of being a polluter, which is to say, if you're a social media platform, Facebook, Twitter,

whatever, you're being accused of being a polluter, you would think they would go,

no, no, no, there is no polluting going on. Instead, these people go, yes, disinformation is a big

problem. We're going to fund a bunch of research on it. We're going to have in-house scholars

to work on it. We're all taking this very, very seriously. This is one of the great conceptual

maneuvers of your piece is to explain why that is. Why is it that there's a sort of perverse

incentive on the part of the platforms to agree that disinformation is real, has an effect on the

world, and that they are, in fact, pervading it? One of the books that I was spending a ton of time

thinking about when I wrote this piece is a book by the technologist Tim Wong, who's a brilliant guy,

and his book is just about how online advertising is in house of cards. I was thinking about that as

I was thinking about disinformation, and as you said, why these technologists or by these platforms

are incentivized to claim that disinformation is real and a problem. That is, if you take out the

value judgment of good and bad information, and you just think about what platforms want to do,

which is sell ads, of course, they want to make the claim that information on their

platforms can influence people and impel them to action, right? Make a purchasing decision,

or pull the lever for Donald Trump. If we can elect an idiot celebrity president,

then Goddamn, we can sell your fucking boots. Completely, yeah. Of course, what the

subscribers is a long debate over whether or not advertising actually works. I don't want to

get into Frekenomics territory, but I think it's in the advertisers interest to communicate

that advertising works. While advertising is getting more and more targeted and narrow all the time,

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