For like average news people, it's a really, really difficult thing to understand what is going on on a very basic level.

And I don't know whether that's like a platform problem or whether that's news operations that operate within a platform logic.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and after Russian tanks and military vehicles rolled into Ukraine

last week, and all of a sudden, it seemed like we were consumed with following what was

happening in this part of the world through social media, through traditional media.

And there was so much conflicting information in such a short period of time in the fog of war, as many people call it.

I wanted to have a conversation about what was going on there and what social media and the way that the internet is affecting

traditional media is affecting our ability to understand what is going on in this conflict and

other, you know, important major events beyond this war as well. So this week I have two guests

who are experts on social media and the content economy. The first is Ryan Broderick,

the writer of the Garbage Day newsletter and host of content minds. And second is Hussein

Kesvani, the writer who's written for a ton of different publications and the co-host of

Trash Future and 10,000 posts. In this conversation, we get into what it has been like for this past week.

You know, at the time we spoke, it was just about five days into this war and what that was

like on social media, what it was like to see all of this content being produced, and how

it was like regular people were wading into this information

war being conducted by the two powers on opposite sides of this conflict, but also, you know,

people and states and institutions who were supporting either side as well. You know, Russia pumping

out pro-Russian information, but particularly in the English

language, the Ukrainian side of things, the Ukrainian government and organizations that supported Ukraine,

pushing out pro-Ukrainian information as well. And again, even though we have that conception,

that things that come from Russia are inherently, you know,

...