Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner on Our Polluted Information Environment
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2020
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
In this episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner, authors of the new book, “You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape.” Phillips is an assistant professor in Communications and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University, and Milner is an associate professor of Communication at the College of Charleston. In “You Are Here,” they look at the uniquely disorienting aspects of the current online information environment and how that is exacerbated by aspects of “internet culture” that don’t make sense from the outside. They discussed the challenges for journalists in understanding and reporting on that culture and how that can fuel information pollution, how the internet got to this point where everything is so polluted, and, of course, what QAnon has to do with it.
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.2 | Typically in the US, freedom is about negative freedoms. |
| 0:39.4 | It's about freedom from outside restriction. |
| 0:42.2 | And so platforms are hinged on that idea, or at least they were designed to sort of to |
| 0:47.8 | foreground that, that, you know, people need to be free to say what they want without |
| 0:52.8 | fear of, you know, undue censorship. |
| 0:55.0 | So it's about the individual and it's about protecting them from being encroached upon. |
| 0:59.3 | And when you start from that premise, then, and if you build a platform based on that premise, |
| 1:04.5 | that platform is going to look a particular kind of way. |
| 1:06.8 | You're going to get Twitter. |
| 1:07.8 | And so I think those conversations need to shift to focus instead on freedoms for. |
| 1:14.6 | I'm Quintet Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast June 25, 2020. |
| 1:22.0 | It's another episode of our Arbiter's of Truth series on disinformation. |
| 1:26.0 | For this week, Evelyn Dwack and I spoke with Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner. |
| 1:30.8 | Authors of the new book, You Are Here, a field guide for navigating polarized speech, conspiracy |
| 1:36.6 | theories, and our polluted media landscape. |
| 1:40.2 | Phillips is an assistant professor in communications and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University. |
| 1:45.6 | And Milner is an associate professor of communication at the College of Charleston. |
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