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♪ ♪
Andrew Rossi: As someone working in politics in DC,
what do you think about fake news?
Jack Burkman: I would use fake news as a weapon 'cause it's out there.
The Germans used chemical weapons, the British used chemical weapons.
What are you gonna do?
It doesn't mean you like chemical weapons.
It means you do what you have to do.
I've tried some fake news. I don't even remember.
We've tried some things.
Yeah, there are terrible, negative potential consequences, but so what?
That's what I say. So what?
What's the big deal?
We've always taken the position in this country,
let it all come out, let the people judge.
Despite the dangers.
Rossi: But how can the people judge fake stories and lies?
Or do you think we're in a post-truth moment?
Burkman: Oh, I don't know.
I mean, what is truth?
You study philosophy, there is no reality.
There is only perception.
So when you say, are we in a post-truth moment,
most philosophers on all sides would tell you
there was never any such thing as truth to begin with.
♪ ♪
(distant jet engine whining)
(voices chattering)
(keyboard clattering)
Elizabeth Williamson: There is this ecosystem that's growing now
where people are actually confusing real and fake news,
especially if they see it online.
This "post-truth" culture that we're living in
has real costs to the people
who are victimized by those who come up
with these theories and themes.
People have suffered because of false news
that's being spread online.
Molly McKew: The summer of 2015 was really the first sign
that there was something happening
in our information space
that we weren't paying enough attention to.
There was a two-month long military exercise
that was occurring in the American Southwest, Jade Helm,
and this conspiracy emerged around it
that President Obama was going to round up
political dissidents and put them in camps in Texas.
♪ ♪
Troy Michalik: Fake news. What do I think about it?
A very old saying comes to mind.
Don't believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see.
I find myself there a lot.
I don't know what's real and what's fake.
Here in Bastrop, it's a very close-knit, rural community.
Typical small-town America, hometown value structure.
In 2015, back during the Obama administration,
there was a huge amount of concern
about distrust of the national government.
And once people found out
that there was gonna be a major military operation
in Bastrop County, a lot of people were,
you know, making puzzle pieces fit together.
Mark Lastoria: We're going to be conducting the training exercise
safely and courteously.
We're not gonna interfere with their privacy
or their rights with this.
The army says it's an eight-week training exercise
in a realistic setting,
but they're not saying much beyond that.
Paul Pape: We began to get inquiries from people.
Why are you allowing the military
to come into Bastrop County?
What's gonna happen, and why are they coming here?
And then, all sorts of conspiracies were put together.
The truth is that it's an exercise,
um, for enacting martial law in this country.
This is conditioning for martial law and a takeover.
And then I tuned into another show.
They're saying the same thing, "I guess Alex Jones was right."
There's been an awakening.
We happened to be kind of the clearinghouse
of a lot of conversation.
People would come here, it's like the pub,
to talk about it.
Nina Roach: Somebody shares a story, somebody else commiserates,
and then everyone else jumps on the bandwagon.
I think it has a lot to do with, you know,
having a degree in Google.
Whether it's vaccines cause autism,
Masonic lizard people running the world,
Jade Helm, we want so hard to believe even in conspiracies
that things actually exist,
that there is an underlying deal,
that we have some knowledge that other people don't.
And we want to believe all that,
um, but it's... sometimes, it's just not true.
I will be headed to Bastrop, Texas,
to report on the Jade Helm '15 military exercise.
I don't trust the corporate media.
I don't want somebody else to tell me what's going on.
I want to go find out for myself.
In my view, Jade Helm was a psychological operation
to gauge the response.
Will the people, you know,
be complacent when this exercise happens?
Will they push back?
We're gonna go inside. See, this is what the corporate media does.
They stand across the street,
and we go inside.
(laughs)
I can't believe we're in here.
I believe in personal responsibility.
If somebody reads an article and they go crazy because of that,
because whatever issues they got going on,
like, I don't know how I can, you know,
be held responsible for that.
Pape: There are many who made some pretty wild claims.
And social media is the devil.
So in my interest in open government
and in transparency, I said,
well, let's just have a town hall meeting
and explain this to everybody.
Colonel Lastoria came and we asked him
to explain to everyone who was interested
what exactly the operation was going to entail.
Lastoria: Jade Helm is simply just a challenging,
eight-week training exercise
for unconventional warfare
and it's an exercise that will be conducted
throughout Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.
Man (speaking):
(cheers and applause)
♪ ♪
Michalik: Hysteria is a little strong of a word,
but there were pockets of hysteria.
Pape (speaking):
Lastoria (speaking):
♪ ♪
Ross Ramsey: You had people that were otherwise normal people,
in the Jade Helm thing, believing that there was an underground
network of tunnels that connected all the Walmarts in Texas.
Broze: These are giant facilities that can house people.
So people started speculating that, okay,
these Walmarts are getting ready to be turned into
concentration camps, detention centers, what have you.
Today, Governor Greg Abbott is choosing to assign
the Texas State Guard to monitor the operation.
Newswoman: Commander Abbott states his reasoning is...
Ramsey: You get a part of the citizenry worked up
and the governor reacted to it in a way that looked like
the state government was taking this seriously.
The relatively quick jump of that information
from conspiracy blogs to town hall meetings
to the governor's office, I think,
was of great concern, certainly to the military
and to our intelligence services.
Recently, Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director,
talked about this, very clearly linking
the disinformation campaign around Jade Helm
to Russian information activities targeting the United States.
Hayden: Russian bots, Russian trolls,
combining with the American alt-right media
convinced a non-trivial portion of the Texas population
that it was an attempt by the Obama administration
to round up political opponents.
Pape: It was interesting to me that someone would tie
what went on here in Bastrop County
to this worldwide concern about Russian interference
in American politics, but you know what, um,
it's a small world.
Abbott: In Texas,
we don't compare our economy to other states.
We compare our economy to other countries.
(cheering)
The Texas economy is larger than Canada,
it's larger than Australia.
And get this,
the Texas economy is even larger than the economy of Russia.
(cheering)
That makes me more powerful than Putin.
(cheering)
McKew: That was a test.
And what all of it showed was
we are in a weaponized information environment.
So we're at the point now where I don't think people
can distinguish fact from truth anymore
or people are starting to make their own truth,
and honestly, I'm okay with that.
♪ ♪
Craig Silverman: I have about eight different daily digests
that come into my inbox every morning
from different Facebook pages and other things
that we've started tracking over time.
I scan hyper-partisan stuff
from people who tend to propagate misinformation.
And it's basically just like starting your morning
bathing in Internet garbage, is pretty much the deal.
I have been looking at false stories since 2014.
There were a handful of journalists and researchers
who were interested in this stuff, but it wasn't
what was the main focus of the world.
And in the span of a few months, that completely changed,
at the end of 2016, with Trump's victory.
What we found was the core key time
before Election Day, that fake stories
got way more engagement
than the real news stories about the election.
And as soon as everybody, journalists,
politicians, researchers started scratching the surface,
they were like, holy crap, this is, look at what's here.
And then, right after the election, we had Pizzagate.
Somebody walking into a DC pizzeria
with a rifle and firing it off,
and realizing that that was a result of this person
consuming conspiracies and misinformation,
I think that freaked a lot of people out.
♪ ♪
James Alefantis: My restaurant, I try to be like,
everyone's invited, just have a good time.
Play ping-pong, eat some great food.
Families and kids are the people who like it the most
because it's like, it's fun, they can run around.
♪ ♪
Keith Alexander: Comet Ping Pong is a fixture here in Washington.
Everyone knows this restaurant.
People come from other parts of Washington
to have pizza here.
We do have some politically connected people
that come in here, and that is just something that happens.
I mean, I have CNN news anchors
who have been eating here for years.
But what Comet is about is, this is a safe space
for people to come in and be themselves.
We host shows for local bands, queer bands.
I think that one of the nice things about Comet
is that there's space here
for... queer folks
to be part of the identity of the restaurant.
Alefantis: I had this party for the 10-year anniversary.
Everyone was invited, and we had
the attorney general of the United States
and like, congresspeople and like, kids,
and musicians and artists.
And that was in the end of October 2016.
I looked at it one moment and I just thought,
wow, like, we've really created something here.
Like, this place is special.
Uh, and then quickly after that, we were slammed with this
year-plus-long, endless conspiracy theory.
John Podesta, who's Hillary Clinton's
campaign chairman, his emails are hacked,
and they get uploaded online.
And a lot of conspiracy theorists start crawling through them.
And based on these emails, they spin up
this crazy conspiracy theory about Comet Ping Pong.
Will Sommer: People on pro-Trump forums
start going through John Podesta's emails,
and they see these references to pizza.
Now, these are pretty innocuous references.
Do we need to get pizza for the campaign volunteers?
That kind of stuff.
And perhaps the first example we've ever seen
of the creation of Pizzagate is on a Reddit post.
Someone saying, I think we need to be looking at these clues
for all this pizza stuff.
And really, from there, that's where it took off.
Silverman: So inside the emails, they connect a lot of things.
CP, cheese pizza. People dissect it.
They think maybe it stands for child pornography.
Sommer: Various people on Reddit, sites like 4chan
become convinced that pizza is slang for,
essentially, children to rape.
And so then, they see the exchanges
with James Alefantis and John Podesta.
I had emailed with John Podesta
about hosting a pizza party
fundraiser cookout at someone's house.
Sommer: And so, people become convinced
that Comet Ping Pong is like, this child rape dungeon
in the basement.
McKew: This was supported by George Soros
and John Podesta and Hillary Clinton
and like, everybody was somehow connected to this
child sex trafficking ring at a pizza parlor
that you could dial up, and say the right food words,
and get your order of children.
Sommer: It's just days before the election
and so, tensions are high.
It certainly looked like Hillary Clinton was gonna win,
and so, Trump people are very feverish,
and this was just blowing up.
So I said, jeez, all these people are just going so wild about it.
I wonder if anything's happening at Comet.
So I called him up.
Alefantis: I got a call from a guy named Will Sommer
and he, at the time, was working
at the Washington City Paper
and asked me if I had read about this
or know about this online conspiracy theory
that Hillary Clinton and I
were human trafficking from Comet Ping Pong.
And I was like,
I don't know what you're talking about.
And I make a comment like,
everyone is really up about this election,
and passions are high,
and I'm sure that it'll go away in a couple of days.
The election happens, and then actually what happened
is in the days subsequent to the election,
these online attacks started escalating
and increasing in volume.
We started to get messages onto, like, our Yelp page
for the restaurant.
Reviews that were really weird and weird Facebook things.
I had put pictures of my godchildren on Instagram.
Now, obviously, I would know better
than to put anything anywhere, but these images
were stolen from my Instagram, taken and put up
as some kind of evidence of nefarious activities going on.
Woman: I just want you to ask yourself,
why does this guy,
I think he looks like he's in his late 30's,
why is this coming-on-middle-age guy
have a photo of a random kid drinking milk?
Pizzagate, like so many conspiracy theories,
it starts to echo on 4chan.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson: There are spaces that drive more extreme content.
I would say 4chan is--
no, a bathroom may be too polite.
Think of the rest stop on the interstate highway.
4chan is a dirty restroom.
There's no toilet paper on the toilet roll.
The sink has not been cleaned in months.
And think about the kinds of things
you saw on bathroom walls there.
Sommer: It builds on the Internet, and then it starts
getting picked up by various right-wing pundits.
You know, Alex Jones starts promoting it all the time.
Pizzagate is real. The question is how real is it?
What is it? Something's going on.
Something's being covered up.
It needs to be investigated. To just call it fake news...
Sommer: InfoWars becomes the Pizzagate network for a bit.
Male YouTuber: The menu from Comet Ping Pong.
Notice the symbol of the ping-pong paddles
and its clever resemblance to the FBI documents'
symbol for ChildLove.
Alefantis: There were so many different entry points
for this specific attack.
I'm trafficking or abusing these children is one.
The other was that I or Hillary Clinton
or the Podestas were kidnapping and selling these children
to retain our immense wealth.
There was some that, this idea that
because I'm gay, I obviously must be molesting children
or something, which is a historical perspective on gayness.
Saperstein: So many of the calls we've received,
people saying, why do you like raping children?
And being like, I know you're all gay.
And that one is necessarily related to the other.
A lot of what fuels misinformation
and what we call "fake news" is hate.
It is essentially some group of people
either misunderstanding
or having some sort of violent feelings
about another group of people.
And in the case of Comet, those who decided
to target James found a little bit of hate and malice
in the piece of Comet that is welcoming
to the LGBTQ community.
Saperstein: More and more, we started receiving phone calls
that ran the gambit of being
just prank calls, I'd almost say,
where people were like, can I get a--
some kind of special pizza, some ridiculous name--
something that meant to them something about pedophilia.
It was code words
to just straight-up death threats.
People saying, gonna kill you,
or we know what you're doing and we're gonna stop it,
and you're all gonna die.
We know where you live. We are coming to the restaurant.
We're coming to get you.
You know, you need to kill yourself.
There was a specific one where someone said,
I'm gonna come to your restaurant with a machine gun
and kill everyone inside, and like,
cut your guts out and watch you die on the floor or whatever.
I was like, this is scary.
Reh: What I was doing every single night
was going online and checking Reddit, checking 4chan.
Reddit had a new subreddit
that had been started specifically for Pizzagate.
It went from, within a week, zero followers
to 22,000 people who were subscribed to it, 1,500 of which
were active at any given point,
growing and growing and growing and growing.
And even if they only spend five minutes a day
trying to destroy my life, 22,000 people
have more five minutes a day
than I have 24 hours in my day.
Jack Posobiec: There it is. There it is, guys.
So we're, we're gonna go in, we're gonna infiltrate
Comet Pizza.
Reh: I got a phone call from someone who said,
hey, I just want to let you know that I'm a friend of yours,
and a guy named Jack Posobiec is in there,
filming you right now.
I-I turned it off.
Reh: I-I understand that, to you,
this is maybe like a game.
But considering that I myself and my staff
-receive death threats-- -It's not a game.
It's not anything.
Are you, are you reading these things
that people are writing?
Posobiec: I can't control what somebody posts on the Internet.
I read several posts on Reddit that said
I've had enough of this.
If I don't post back here in three hours,
it's because I've been killed.
I'm grabbing my shotgun and going into Comet.
Alefantis: We were in real deep fear,
like, serious fear.
These threats were so violent that I, I sort of, like,
knew something would happen.
Sommer: So it culminates with Edgar Maddison Welch
driving up from North Carolina.
He's one of the people who's been consuming all this stuff,
and he's become convinced that there really is a child rape dungeon
in the basement of Comet Ping Pong.
He wanted to come up here and save these children.
He's a father himself. He had two young daughters.
He was a classic InfoWars listener, follower.
You know, people want me to look into it. I may just have to take off a week
and just only research this and actually go to where these places are and stuff.
In fact, I'm looking at... getting on a plane.
I can't just say something and not see it for myself.
They go to these pizza places, there's like, satanic art everywhere.
Williamson: Part of the pitch is, get out there
and help us unearth the truth.
It turns people into a type of vigilante
in which they're out there seeking what they think is justice.
In the case of Pizzagate, a guy puts children in danger
because he thinks he's rescuing children.
Alefantis: We had this restaurant filled with families eating,
Sunday afternoon, and Edgar Maddison Welch
walks in this front door with a loaded AR-15 assault rifle,
fully exposed,
also with, like, a handgun and a knife, it turned out,
and like, walks through this restaurant.
♪ ♪
My young staff, who had been under online attack,
they immediately see him,
call the police and...
(voice breaking): and go, like, table-to-table,
telling each table that they need to go,
like leave the building, and...
So each table... (sniffles)
...the customers are like, oh, no, we're fine.
Like, we're here to support you.
It's okay, like... we'll just keep eating or whatever.
And these kids are like, no, you don't understand, there's a guy here with a gun.
-(police radio chattering) -So they evacuate the building.
Policewoman: This isn't a joke! Get out of the block!
Alefantis: Police have shut down the street,
and riot, SWAT teams are closing the building and the street,
and leaves this gunman alone to search the restaurant or do whatever he's gonna do.
Reh: The first thing that he did was immediately
walk towards the back room.
I'm not sure what he thought he was gonna find back here,
but I think that he thought that this was the place
where Hillary Clinton would be.
Or he was gonna walk back there and find John Podesta
or George Soros or someone.
Pulling things off of the wall, trying to pry apart the stage,
flipping ping-pong tables over.
He was trying to break anything that he thought
was obscuring his view.
But he came over here,
to the only locked door in the entire restaurant,
which is our employee closet.
He shot through the door,
which is a pretty dirty
but innocuous employee closet,
um, houses our coats.
Alexander: Realized there were no children being held here,
came out of the restaurant, came out with his hands up,
to a sea of police.
-Officer 1: Hands! Hands! -Officer 2: We got a guy coming out right now.
Officer 1: Stand up!
-Officer 2: We got a white male subject... -Officer 1: Hands up--
...coming out of the location, hands in the air.
Officer 2: Don't nobody move! Don't nobody move!
Stay where you are! Bring him towards you!
I got him, Mike. Keep going! Keep coming to my voice!
Do not turn around! Stop, stop!
Get down on your knees!
Get on the ground! Lay prone on the ground!
♪ ♪
-Officer 1: Sir, do you work there? -Welch (speaks):
-Officer 2: Who else is at the location right now? -Welch (speaks):
-Officer 1: Nobody else? -Officer 2: What were you doing in the location?
(Welch speaks):
Officer 2 (speaks):
Welch (speaks):
-Officer 2: Regarding what? -Welch (speaks):
Officer 1 (speaks):
♪ ♪
Alexander: This could have been a lot worse.
Someone could have gotten shot.
Anything could have happened here.
So no one-- This was something that
even some of the most seasoned crime reporters
had never seen before:
That someone came in armed for battle,
came in on a suicide mission,
either knowing he was going to jail
or might end up dead,
but was willing to do that
based off of fake, erroneous news stories.
♪ ♪
Silverman: Today, the term "fake news"
has become totally weaponized
and misused to the point that I think it's kind of meaningless.
We saw back in January 2017,
when President Trump stood up at the news conference
and called out CNN and called it fake news.
From there, we started to see the term kind of
just fall apart in terms of use.
Reporter: Mr. President-elect, can you give us a question?
-Trump: Don't be rude. -You're attacking us. Can you give us a question?
Don't be ru-- No, I'm not gonna give you a question.
-I'm not gonna give you a question. -Can you state categorically--
-You are fake news. -Sir--
Silverman: Where we're at right now is
fake news has most effectively become
what Donald Trump has defined it as,
which is media that's critical of him.
If you want the fake news media
-to finally investigate... -(crowd booing)
Patrick Svitek: When he talks about fake news,
that is one of the biggest applause lines that he gets at these rallies.
Usually at that point, that's when the whole crowd
turns to the media pen and boos.
(booing loudly)
(booing continuing)
As a journalist, obviously, it's disappointing
to see that kind of vitriol directed at the press.
(booing)
Don't worry, I don't like them either, okay?
(crowd chanting):
(chanting continuing)
♪ ♪
John Campbell: CNN is in the dumper.
It's become synonymous with fake news.
Nobody believes it anymore.
We expect politicians to be, uh,
fast and loose with the truth, depending on the day.
We know that. It's a car salesman.
But we expect journalists, newsmen to tell the truth.
That's what y'all-- You're just supposed to report the facts.
And, uh, no, I didn't vote for Obama.
Give me one thing he did to help me as a Texan,
heterosexual, a married man.
Did he cut-- lower my taxes? Nope.
Did he increase my freedoms? Nope.
Did he help my white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed kid
go to college? Nope.
Donald Trump's trying to stop my culture down here from changing.
Look around.
His style of populism is working.
We're gonna give him the benefit of the doubt.
Why? Because he's given us results.
But y'all don't report that.
The media is the public enemy.
Let me show you the one I really like I bought tonight.
This sums it up.
That is money well spent right there.
Because it's fake news, they don't report the truth.
Truth's reality.
You want to start living right, report the truth.
That's all we ask for.
Thank you.
♪ ♪
Jerome Corsi: Well, I think "fake news" has become a very politicized term
that is being used to censor conservatives.
Uh, evidently, because it's published
in the New York Times, you believe it.
If you do that, you're believing either
government, uh, propaganda
or mainstream media-determined truth.
And just because the New York Times published it, doesn't mean it's true.
Sommer: Jerome Corsi's this longtime Republican operative,
and really, one of the modern creators
of this Internet and media-fueled smear campaign.
In the 2004 election, he cowrote this book
about John Kerry's behavior on this swiftboat,
promoting that idea that John Kerry,
who was this Vietnam war hero,
was actually like this big coward,
you know, promoting this really baseless claim.
So now, to swiftboat someone, since 2004,
means to create a lie and propagate it
in the idea that it's gonna torpedo them,
and Jerome Corsi was the creator of that.
Cut to 2008, 2009, Jerome Corsi is probably
the most prominent face of the "birther" conspiracy theory,
so the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
It's like all of the giant conspiracy theories
of the past decade or two, Jerome Corsi has jumped on,
and either he created them or he really got into pushing them.
And what's so nice about this is just with a
laptop computer, a fairly simple camera,
it gives the average person the opportunity to establish a voice and to be heard.
♪ ♪
I didn't look at CNN and say, I want to do that.
I didn't go to Fox News and say, here's my résumé,
I want to put on a suit and after Tucker Carlson,
I want to sit there and read my news.
I didn't say that. I didn't go to the New York Times
and say, I want to write stories for you.
I looked at all of those things and I said,
you guys are all fucked up.
Whatever it is that you think is journalism, I think is fucked up.
So this is how I'm gonna do it.
Wake up, everyone.
If you are forwarding articles from Newsweek
from the New York Times,
you have become a zombie propagandist.
I find it intriguing that even investigating it,
questioning it, becoming a forensic examiner
of evidence, you get ridiculed.
You are a conspiracy theorist.
Yochai Benkler: You can disagree on all sorts of interpretations
about a particular subject, but not when there's falsehood.
When we study false news and disinformation,
what we see repeatedly
is things that, in theory, could be just interpretation,
get made up of discrete bits of narrative that are distinctly false.
It's very clear that what you have here
is a propagandist effort to try to achieve a result.
So for example, the Seth Rich case.
David Folkenflik: Seth Rich was a young guy.
He's working for the Democratic National Committee,
and he's killed,
in July of 2016.
Police in Washington have said it appears to have been
a botched armed robbery, but they don't know for sure what happened.
♪ ♪
Alexander: There were a lot of robberies
in this neighborhood around that time.
People were speculating, well, what kind of a robbery was it?
Because his wallet was still on him,
his watch was still there.
But when a gun goes off, that's gonna draw attention.
So his assailant's not gonna stick around
and try to get those valuables. They're gonna take off.
And that's what happened in this case.
Very early on, he wanted to do stuff
that was involved in trying to make things better.
There was six and a half years between us.
Hundred percent, he was very much,
you know, the annoying little brother.
Then as we got older, we got a lot closer
just when we both got to the same spot in life.
If he had problems, he'd talk to me.
If I had problems, I'd talk to him.
So, I mean, we were each other's best friends
and, you know, always there for each other.
He was the person that I knew I could always count on,
and he was that not just to me but also to his friends.
His over-the-top sense of humor.
If you were having a bad day, no matter what,
if it became his mission to make you have a good day,
just give in now.
♪ ♪
I had come back early from a vacation,
and we had been playing phone tag since I had got back.
Obviously, that is something that I realize I would regret.
The next morning, my mom called me.
I remember her telling me that, um...
uh, he had been shot and killed late in the night.
I remember, you know, collapsing on the floor
of our townhome at the time,
um, just in sheer disbelief.
Mike Gottlieb: In the political environment that existed
in the summer of 2016,
having a DNC staffer that was murdered,
to a certain group of people,
just could not have been a coincidence.
Somebody hacked into the DNC computer,
and WikiLeaks just recently published
a bunch of these emails, and there are a number
of emails in which senior officials
of the Democratic National Committee
can be seen conspiring against Bernie Sanders.
Seth Rich's murder follows the leak of emails
from the Democratic Party.
And his death very quickly is linked to the leak.
The idea is that Seth Rich himself was somehow
in contact with WikiLeaks,
objected to Hillary Clinton's assertion of control over the Democratic Party.
He was outraged and released these emails,
and Hillary Clinton somehow had Seth Rich murdered.
I want to be clear, this is baseless.
But certainly, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks
stoked that, uh, speculation.
Assange: Our whistleblower has gone to significant efforts
to get us material, and often very significant risks.
He's a 27-year-old that works for the DNC,
who was shot in the back, murdered.
That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn't it?
-No, there's no finding-- -Reporter: Was he one of your sources, then?
-We don't comment on who our sources are-- -Then why make the suggestion?
Julian Assange, it's convenient for him
because it means he's not kind of a patsy for the Russian government.
It means, you know, there was this brave whistleblower who gave him the stuff.
♪ ♪
Darcy: Julian Assange was the catalyst.
And then, online, on websites and message boards
like 4chan or Reddit, even Twitter, it blew up.
The Seth Rich thing is really getting suspicious now.
This was an assassination.
This kid was murdered for political reasons.
I think they want to do damage control
with the DNC and the Clinton Crime Unit.
This is exactly the sort of killing
you would expect from the Clintons.
The guy got fucking murdered
after he leaked information to WikiLeaks.
Scott Shane: There have been stories in which
activists in the United States
join forces with the Russians to push the same stories.
And you know, the Seth Rich story
is probably the leading example of that.
They were both eager to deny
that the Russians were behind the hacking
of the Democratic National Committee.
Seth had access to a lot of the IT.
I mean, he had the access. He had a lot of stuff.
The question is, we don't know what he did with it.
Frankly, we don't know if Seth was a good guy or a bad guy.
We don't know if he was a leaker.
Um, we think he was a leaker. We just don't know.
There's so many unanswered questions.
(barking)
Sommer: Jack Burkman is one of the premier hucksters
who has latched onto this tragedy.
We'll show you in here. Here's the office over here.
This is, this is it. This is the nerve center, man.
So we'll come down here.
-This is the doggy's room. -(dog barks)
Fake news is a weapon,
and, uh, we've even tried to use fake news.
Fake news is a good way to drive a story.
You know, you put up a site
instead of New York 1, New York 2.
And people believe it, and they reprint it,
and it gets reprinted.
It can be an effective tool in driving a story, you know?
People use it. It's become a tool of war.
It's like, uh, it's World War I and its chemical weapons.
People are using them, so you use them.
You know?
That's how I'd-- that might be the analogy.
Sommer: Jack Burkman, who's a Washington lobbyist,
he sends out some legendary press releases in Washington.
Reporters are always saying, did you see the latest Jack Burkman press release?
Because they're so absurd.
In the past, has attached himself to other dubious causes,
including, he tried to get gay players banned from the NFL.
There are four theories: One is what the police say.
It was done in the street, street thugs.
B, the Russians did it.
C, Hillary and the Democrats did it.
D is kind of everything else.
We're conducting our own investigation.
He's doing all these crazy things.
Like, he's doing a reenactment of the murder.
He teams up with some undergraduate students
at George Washington University,
and they come up with the idea that the most obvious explanation
for Seth Rich's death is that a hit squad killed him. I mean, it's absurd.
You have a dead DNC staffer that can't defend himself.
It's a good opportunity to make statements and, you know, try to use them.
And when we ran sentence analyses of the media,
you really see how Seth Rich pops up
as an interference pattern on the right,
when everybody else is talking Russia and impeachment.
DNC leaks came from the inside.
It wasn't hackers from the outside at all.
And of course, Julian Assange has specifically denied
receiving any information from the Russians.
Corsi: Precisely.
This whole Russian collusion narrative
which is, I think, actually quite a foolish narrative,
that the emails were stolen by Russia from the DNC,
these are premises that have not been validated.
Yet the left runs with them as if they were gospel truth.
We know that by January, you had the entire
intelligence community on board, saying that it was the Russians.
You know that the Mueller indictments
have very specifically indicted
both Russians responsible for the trolls
and Russians responsible for the hacking.
And when people say, well, we don't absolutely know with certainty.
What do they want? Do they want to be in St. Petersburg,
watching every Russian troll engaging in every act?
I mean, there are levels of proof that no reasonable person would ask for.
It was the Russians.
Folkenflik: The speculation that you saw online
was given fuel by places like Gateway Pundit,
InfoWars, Alex Jones,
but you also see it pop up on Fox News.
Newswoman: Back with a Fox News alert:
a brand-new bombshell in the murder
of that guy right there, a DNC staffer.
An investigator now says Seth Rich
was in contact with WikiLeaks.
Benkler: Fox News, on the website,
publishes a story
that there's new evidence that Seth Rich
was, in fact, the source of the leaks.
And what you see is the whole network,
from the local affiliate in DC through the main cable channel,
mobilized around this story.
Newly discovered evidence shows that the 27-year-old,
former DNC employee was, in fact, communicating with WikiLeaks.
Benkler: And we can really trace
how a rumor that starts on Reddit
ultimately makes its way to Hannity,
and you can just literally follow,
from the first to the last, this propaganda pipeline.
We see the Russians. We see the alt-right activists.
We see the commercial clickbait sites.
And then you have, at the very top
a set of propagandists
whose commercial interest and political interest
are aligned to go out, look for all these stories,
and bring them to the mainstream of Fox News.
If it was true that Seth Rich gave WikiLeaks
the DNC emails, wouldn't that blow
the whole Russia collusion narrative that the media
has been pushing out of the water?
I mean, Fox does some good reporting.
There are good, honorable reporters there that do good reporting,
but Sean Hannity is essentially a consultant for the president.
By the way, all those people in the back are fake news.
(cheers and applause)
Goldman: Spewing the president's views
to his huge audience on Fox,
and it's just like hook, line, and sinker.
If Sean Hannity says it, it must be true.
David Lazer: And, of course, Fox News is in the attention business,
and so, there's a sort of fake news laundering
that is occurring.
To date, there has been no "new evidence"
that has come out that would justify
the original story in the first place,
let alone this constant resurgence.
♪ ♪
Aaron Rich: It's not just words,
and you're not just pushing something,
like, you're having real effects on real people.
It's hard enough to process the thought of a family member being murdered.
But it very quickly went to,
you know, that I took money from WikiLeaks,
that I'm cooperating with a hostile
foreign intelligence service.
Where is this even coming from?
Being directly accused of being involved in any of this,
just turns our world completely upside down,
that was already turned upside down
from the rest of the conspiracies.
I still have not been able to sit there and really
properly grieve the fact that he's not there.
The number of times I've wanted to pick up my phone
and describe this absolute ridiculous situation that's going on,
the person I would call would be my brother.
Folkenflik: After extraordinary backlash from journalists
and especially the Rich family, Fox withdrew its story.
They said, it didn't meet our standards.
What they didn't do is apologize.
You had a family who had been told their son
had essentially committed a crime,
an assertion for which they had no proof and no evidence.
Sean Hannity not only hasn't apologized
to the Rich family,
but he hasn't disavowed it.
Out of respect for the family's wishes for now,
I am not discussing this matter at this time.
I have no clue why they, why they won't say it.
Pushing out false statements and not being willing to accept that they were false
after being proven numerous, numerous times false, um...
doesn't make sense to me.
♪ ♪
Now, the real question is, who's to blame?
Are we going to say, oh, look, Reddit did this?
Or are we going to say, oh, look, Hannity did this?
When people started looking around, what happened?
The answer always fell on what's new,
and what's new was the technology.
♪ ♪
Newsman: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify
in front of a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary
and Commerce Committees today.
Senators will demand answers from Zuckerberg
about Facebook's failure to protect millions of users' private information.
Newswoman: And they've actually added extra seats
to this hearing room to accommodate all the senators
who are going to be questioning Zuckerberg today, 44 of them.
Zuckerberg is going to be in the hot seat for hours.
Silverman: If you think about Facebook specifically,
there's more than two billion people around the world
that log into it every month.
There has never been anything like Facebook in the history of humanity.
There are ads there. There's news there.
There's your personal life, your friends.
If he was to honestly say that he would no longer
be selling any data, um, and if he would own up to it...
Kara Swisher: They've done better than anyone else on the planet
by sucking in every piece of information about you
and what you do and what you think.
And it's sort of like a digital fence,
they've gotten everyone to paint the fence,
you know, with your data, and they benefit from it.
Benkler: It's designed to actually give
so much information about us individually
so that Facebook can turn around and sell insight
into what kind of communication will best manipulate me
to do what someone else wants to do.
Zuckerberg: As Facebook has grown, people everywhere
have gotten a powerful new tool
for staying connected to the people they love,
for making their voices heard, and for building communities and businesses.
But it's clear now that we didn't do enough
to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.
And that goes for fake news,
for foreign interference in elections and hate speech,
as well as developers and data privacy.
We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility,
and that was a big mistake,
and it was my mistake, and I'm sorry.
There's a lot of things that have been going on at Facebook for a long time,
of people who've covered it a long time.
And a lot of them are on privacy violations,
sort of sketchy use of data,
always pushing the envelope-- growth, growth, growth.
We're here because of what you, Mr. Zuckerberg,
have described as a breach of trust.
A quiz app used by approximately 300,000 people
led to information about 87 million Facebook users
being obtained by the company Cambridge Analytica.
Soroush Vosoughi: So how is that possible?
I mean, their systems are very good at detecting
scrapers, spam accounts, and things like that.
It's kind of mind-boggling that they weren't able to detect this,
and I think the reason is because they didn't care.
Not that, you know, they were being malicious,
it's just that it was something they were not interested in.
They had built a system where they didn't know
what people were doing on it, really.
And when malevolent actors get involved with the platform,
you began to see how easily manipulable
this platform was just by using it the way it worked.
The Russians, they were a customer of Facebook.
They were. They used the tools
that were built in this country
to create discord and dissention
across our nation in lots of very important areas.
And some people like Donald Trump say,
not one vote was shifted, but that's not true.
Personally, I think the idea that,
you know, fake news on Facebook, of which, you know,
it's a very small amount of, of the content,
uh, influenced the election in any way,
I think is a pretty crazy idea.
So they moved from, it was crazy to think so,
to okay, there was a little thing,
and then, oh, there was more, and then--
I don't believe any of it. I don't, I don't--
The only reason I don't believe it is because I don't think they know.
Senator: These unverified, divisive pages are on Facebook today.
They look a lot like the anonymous groups
the Russian agents used
to spread propaganda during the 2016 election.
Are you able to confirm whether they're
Russian-created groups, yes or no?
Um, Senator, last week, we actually announced
a major change to our ads and pages policies,
that we will be verifying the identity of every single advertiser--
I'm asking about these specific ones. Do you know whether they are?
I am not familiar with those pieces of content specifically.
That's the way it was architected.
It was architected to be a platform free-for-all,
where nobody had responsibility, except they got all the money.
Vosoughi: Probably a lot of the people involved in the hearings
didn't actually understand the technology
and the implications, and so, you know, it's hard--
If you don't really understand what's happening, you can't really question.
Let's say I'm emailing about Black Panther within WhatsApp.
Do I get a Black Panther banner ad?
Senator, we don't--
Facebook systems do not see the content of messages
being transferred over WhatsApp.
Yeah, I know, but that's not what I'm asking.
McKew: Everybody went in knowing they had four minutes
or whatever to ask questions, and they were very focused
particularly on privacy concerns,
and nobody wanted to waste time on
fake news, on Russia, on foreign actors.
When you sign up for Facebook,
you sign up for terms of service.
-Are you familiar with that? -Yes.
Okay. It says...
Swisher: What's about these terms of service?
What? Like, as if terms of service
were our biggest national emergency.
Oh, my God, you can't read terms of service.
Like, who cares? Who cares?
Like, they just, we're not focusing on the problem at hand.
It was just a ridiculous circus, and so, therefore,
Mark came off well because he didn't, like,
vomit on the desk or something, like, he didn't like, fall apart.
He answered questions.
But, you know, I'll get back to you, Senator.
That's an interesting question, Senator.
He said nothing, he said nothing.
It will take some time to work through all the changes
we need to make across the company,
but I'm committed to getting this right.
Swisher: I don't think they're malevolent people.
Mark is lovely. He's polite.
He's earnest. He wants to learn.
It's just that their basic premise
is that this is just a benign platform.
These are the most powerful tools in the history of our planet.
They are. They just are.
When you have these tools, people are gonna find ways
to use them in ways that are
more nefarious than other ways,
or at least experiment around them.
Once you have a gun, you want to shoot it.
You just do, like, that's what a gun is for.
A lot of these technologies are guns,
and they're gonna be shot.
♪ ♪
McKew: I think if you're Vladimir Putin, you wake up every morning and you laugh.
Because they did some of this stuff to us,
but the worst part of 2016
is the stuff we did to ourselves.
The worst part of what's happening now
is we're still doing it to ourselves.
The attack is now coming from inside the house.
You have small campaigns using these techniques
where you have individual candidates using these techniques,
where everybody thinks they need to use data better
and more effectively to target
the unknown voter or the hardcore voter
or the radicalized voter, one way or the other.
When this is the environment,
the Russians don't have to do very much.
We're doing it to ourselves now.
Matt Osborne: If somebody has chemical weapons,
and you deem it necessary to have chemical weapons
to deter the chemical weapons, then, you know,
this is a classic Cold War phenomenon.
Shane: On the Democratic side, there was a feeling that
Democrats were behind in this race
to use social media, to use technology.
So there were some Democrats, it turns out,
who are thinking, like,
you know, we have to catch up in this race.
We have to understand these tools.
And one of the races that was sort of a natural
to experiment in was the special senate race
in December of 2017.
It pitted an extremely conservative Christian
named Roy Moore, a former judge, who's a Republican,
against a Democrat named Doug Jones.
There weren't a lot of other races going on,
so Republicans and Democrats were very focused on this race.
McKew: You have this old-school, leveraging racist rhetoric.
All the women who are coming out and accusing Roy Moore
of advances on under-aged women
and really inappropriate conduct,
that was feeding into all of Democrat's fears
coming out of 2016.
What if this is happening again?
What if these guys are winning elections again?
So, Reid Hoffman, a Silicon Valley billionaire,
decides to bankroll his own pro-Democratic campaign
to dampen Roy Moore's chances.
Osborne: We got $100,000.
I don't know if that was Mr. Hoffman's money
or what, what it was.
All I know is that money arrived,
and it was time to go to work.
The Alabama project, as I titled it,
was an effort to use Facebook
and emulate some of the tactics that had been used
against Democrats in recent years.
Doug Jones didn't know that this was happening on his behalf.
-Woman: Doug Jones! -Crowd: Doug Jones!
Jones: It was an incredible run. It was an incredible election.
It was a fun campaign,
nerve-wracking campaign, got a little weird on occasion,
uh, and then election night was just amazing.
-(crowd roaring) -Newsman: It is absolutely deafening in here.
This news just coming across the screen there...
Rossi: Your election was won by about 20,000 votes.
-Mm-hmm. -Rossi: A fairly small margin?
Oh, yeah, out of 1.3 million, I would say
that that was relatively tight.
Doug Jones won, absolutely.
All I did was push a little from the outside.
Our effort, we were hoping, would help Republicans
not turn out to vote.
So we created a page called Dry Alabama,
a conservative, pro-Roy Moore,
pro-Republican bunch of people who wanted to make
Alabama dry again because the liquor laws had gotten too liberal.
And our idea was that if you show this
to moderate suburban Republicans,
they will say, oh, man, these Roy Moore supporters, they are crazy.
And if these Roy Moore supporters are so crazy,
then I just can't support him.
That was the idea.
Woman: If you're like me, you're fearful for the souls
of our brothers and sisters.
We made videos, and some of the videos
were just mocktail recipes.
Woman: Try this moral take on a sinful beverage.
A righteous mint julep.
Osborne: I have a knack for creating new voices,
and in this particular case, it sounded like a real conservative.
Rossi: You were pretending to be somebody that you weren't.
Oh, sure, sure.
Um, I was definitely pretending to be
a conservative when I wrote that stuff.
I felt empowered for the first time ever, really,
to finally give, maybe, a Republican party
a taste of its own medicine a little bit.
Fundamentally, the fakery is... going to happen.
It's happening to me, so why should it not happen to you?
Jones: It was December of 2018
when the New York Times article came out
in which the allegation was
there was a creation of some fake news type accounts
to try to influence the election in my favor.
And I was absolutely, one, stunned,
two, pretty outraged, pretty, pretty angry about that
and immediately said so,
and immediately called for an investigation.
Shane: At least two groups of Democrats
that we've found out about
were experimenting with essentially Russian techniques.
New Knowledge was part of that, so was Tovo Labs,
and, it turns out, so was my little group.
Um, I did not know that at the time.
The New Knowledge stuff, some of that seems pretty sketchy to me.
So let's start with the idea that reality
is a construct of your mind.
And what that means, in a philosophical context,
is, um, that all of us live in our own subjective reality.
Shane: A little cybersecurity company called New Knowledge
based in Austin, Texas, they got some money
from Reid Hoffman through a pass-through
to this little project.
This group created a conservative
Alabamian Facebook page
to try to influence conservatives,
even though they were Democrats, they were liberals.
These were the guys the Senate hired
to do a comprehensive report,
which was quite a well-done report,
on what the Russians did in 2016.
And here, they're caught doing a little bit of it
themselves in US politics.
It's very embarrassing for them, very damaging for them.
♪ ♪
Among other things, they endorsed
a conservative write-in candidate
to try to draw votes from Roy Moore.
McKew: New Knowledge has gotten a ton of investment
to conduct research to counter disinformation,
and they themselves are currently operationalizing disinformation.
It's really problematic.
♪ ♪
It's still a little bit mysterious,
because New Knowledge and Jonathan Morgan, the CEO,
was, I think, lying to me about various things.
And it was kind of loosely run and involved multiple people,
and I think some people had different ideas about it than others.
But everyone's, at this point, everybody's kind of like,
lying and pointing a finger at somebody else.
♪ ♪
Rossi: As the secretary of state,
who has to certify election results,
you must be concerned about
these incredibly deceptive tactics.
Yeah, but seriously, now.
What we're talking about here is not anything different
than what has occurred in US politics
or international politics in the history of political systems.
The only difference is now people are able to do that,
in many people's minds, more effectively
because of social media.
Rossi: So these tactics don't raise a special kind of alarm?
Well, the problem is, you can't ever fully address them,
because you can't control the behavior
of people who are engaging in that activity.
Osborne: John Merrill, Alabama's secretary of state,
is definitely part of the Republican machine,
and he will settle things on terms
that are favorable to the Republican machine.
To some degree, I was hoping that there would be
more reaction from the right.
I was hoping that there would be more,
oh, well, that's terrible, what you did.
But that didn't happen so much.
Rossi: Are there actions you would take as secretary of state
to defend against disinformation in elections?
Well, if there were instances where the law was broken
in regard to campaigning, we definitely will.
But if it's simply someone
doing a superior job to another candidate
without going outside the boundaries of the law,
then we can't pick apart
what certain people are doing, because at that point,
that's not making the most effective or best use of our time.
I can't say that we actually made the difference,
I wouldn't go that far.
But think of the math here.
Three million people saw this ad.
If we affected one percent of them,
so that they ended up not voting,
that's 30,000 votes.
Doug Jones won by 21,000 votes.
If we affected one in a thousand of the people who saw that ad,
that's 3,000 votes, that's about equal
to Doug Jones's winning margin
in 11 of the counties that he won.
Imagine a bunch of these efforts,
each whittling away just a little bit of the vote.
That what you-- That's all you need
if you're talking about a close race.
So, yeah, I have a moral imperative
to use these techniques against you,
I absolutely have to, because otherwise,
what's gonna happen to my political perspective?
It's gonna be drowned out completely.
The situation is that one side is obeying a set of rules
that the other side will never respect,
ever.
And they will not change the rules
until the rules start smacking them
in the face a few times.
Two wrongs do not make a right, that's, that's crazy.
If all of a sudden, the left sees
we've got to do this because the right's been doing it,
and they start winning, then the right's gonna up their game.
Then the left's gonna up their game.
And the next thing you know, there is nothing
about this democracy that is real.
Burkman: I wonder about how intense the spiral will be.
I wonder if there's not something more toxic with all this.
We don't know the effects of fake news.
We don't know where this is going.
It's changing by the day.
It's the industrial revolution, but faster, bigger,
and maybe more consequential.
We don't know where it's going.
I see myself drowning,
drowning in an ocean that gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
I would prefer a world without fake news,
but if others are using it, I'm gonna use it.
NBC News is reporting tonight
about an apparent effort to smear Robert Mueller.
The plot appeared to be the latest
and one of the more bizarre in a string of attempts
by supporters of President Trump to discredit
Mr. Mueller's investigation as a hoax and a witch hunt.
(barks)
Burkman: Jacob, I feel like I've known you for years.
-I'm glad you're finally here. -Jacob Wohl: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Today, at the press conference,
the main mission is to set the story straight.
And we have to lay out, in detail,
the accusations of our client.
(barks)
This for us, is not about infamy, it's about legacy.
We have to get this done. We have to prove
that Bob Mueller is a sex offender, and I think we're gonna do that.
We'll do that.
If we were seeking infamy and publicity,
we'd be doing other things.
-This is too hard. -Wohl: Yeah, believe me.
This is too hard.
We put out a notice offering a reward,
$25,000 reward for whistleblowers
either within Bob Mueller's organization
or within the FBI for bad stuff.
We were looking for dirt on McCabe or Mueller.
Darcy: Jack Burkman says he's going to bring forward
a sexual assault accuser against Robert Mueller.
And the accuser is going to come to this press conference.
And so, this is, obviously, an explosive charge.
So you saw a lot of interest from media outlets
willing to look into this
if this were something that were true,
despite, even, the fact that
these people are fringe characters.
Burkman: You're on like, ten magazine covers.
-Do you know that? -Wohl: I'm on the cover, yeah.
-You're on the cover. -Well, I don't know
how many people, how many publications
have called me a Nazi this week, I mean, jeez.
Sommer: Jacob Wohl is a guy who rose to fame
by being an obnoxious character on Twitter.
McKew: Jacob Wohl is a charlatan
who is part of the bizarro-world Trump-verse information machine.
He has wanted to be more important than he is for some time.
Sommer: You know, I think it kind of hurt Jack's case
to have Jacob also involved in it,
because he was already such an untrustworthy character.
Any word from our gal?
Um, yeah, yeah. She's just, she's--
No, okay, that's fine.
Do you think she'll do it... Will she pick another day?
-I think there's coin-flip odds. -All right.
Off we go.
Let's say that she made a last-minute decision.
I'll just say in the last 30 minutes,
because of threats and other things,
she's made a decision not to appear today.
But we're gonna go over the details of her sworn statement.
-Wohl: She's extremely scared... -Burkman: Yeah.
Wohl: ... from a flurry of death threats, and she's safe.
Burkman: You could say something like, we have her in a safe house.
-I'll leave all that to you. -Wohl: Yeah.
Burkman: Yeah, just say in the last 30 minutes,
because I'm telling all these reporters she's there.
-Otherwise, they won't come. -Wohl: Yeah.
You know this, reporters are-- they're lazy and they're dumb.
-Right. -They go to Harvard,
but they're dumb. They're just--
A journalism major, I mean, come on.
They just they're dummies.
Here's how you write an article.
You can learn that in about 12 minutes.
-Yeah, what do they teach them? -Yeah, exactly?
Journalism.
♪ ♪
Burkman: What the hell is this thing here?
-Is this for us? -Wohl: It is.
Uh-oh.
Hang on, I got to take a picture of this. I got to take a picture.
They bused in a mob, it looks like.
-Look at that, they bused Antifa. -Really--
-Who's bused-- -They've bused in a mob.
Burkman: Jesus, look at this, huh? Wow, we must rate, you know?
-Wohl: Yeah, I'm Jacob. -Goldman: You're Jacob.
-Who are you? -I'm Adam Goldman.
-New York Times. -Adam Goldman, that's right.
I think you followed me on Twitter recently.
-I did. -Or did you? Yeah.
Yeah, it looks like they have a rent-a-mob Soros bus here.
-Is that-- How do you know that? -I just saw it out the window.
So that is a rent-a-mob Soros-- How can you say that?
I'm sitting behind Wohl,
and they're like ha, ha, ha, here's a Soros-funded bus
bringing protesters in.
And I said to him, I said, that's just a bus.
It looks to be that's what it is.
-So, you have no evidence-- -It would fit would fit the profile--
-I said it looks like. -You have no evidence
to suggest that is a Soros mob bus,
but, yeah, you're saying that.
Sorry, you got to be careful what you say.
This is just chatter between two guys.
I got you, right, right, right.
Goldman: There's a bus outside, you're making a claim
that it's a Soros mobster bus?
-It probably is. -Probably.
Goldman: Then he goes and tweets it.
Tweets a picture of the bus. He's just created fake news.
You see the toxicity that ends up on Twitter,
and other social media, and these guys are the creators.
It offends me as a journalist,
somebody who spends an enormous amount of time
trying to get to the facts that they're polluting real news.
I'm on the train, Amtrak, headed to DC
from New York to go to this press conference.
It's in the Rosslyn Holiday Inn, where Jack Burkman
normally holds these things,
and... it comes to light that the accuser's not gonna show up.
It's not surprising that this isn't panning out, right?
Sommer (speaks):
-Will, good to finally meet you. -Good to meet you.
-You as well. -See you on Twitter all the time.
Yeah, you as well. So what's the deal? No accuser?
We're gonna go right in right now.
-All right. -Yep, see you in a sec.
-See you soon. -All right.
You know, what's happened-- We'll talk about this.
I'll let Jacob tell you about that.
She's got a lot-- a number of them.
Burkman (speaking quietly):
Wohl (speaking):
Burkman (speaking):
Wohl (speaking):
-Okay, good idea, good idea. -Wohl: ...questions, that's the key.
Burkman: Now, do you want--
Wohl (speaking):
Got you.
Wow, boy, this is tough.
This is tougher than NFL gay. This is tough.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Jack Burkman.
This is Jacob Wohl.
There has developed in the last week
as I'm sure all of you have noticed,
a rather tragic and sad backstory
that somehow I or Jacob or others
paid or attempted to pay some woman for coming forward.
None of this is true.
Sommer: So they come out with this affidavit
from this woman named Carolyne Cass.
The report is put together by this organization
called Surefire Intelligence,
and this goes online before the press conference.
And so, that was where a lot of people started digging.
On its website, this looked like
a pretty legitimate organization at first.
It says that they were former spies and things like that,
that work at Surefire Intelligence.
And their numbers, supposedly different bureaus around the world.
And so, if you reverse-searched the number,
it was registered to Jacob Wohl's mother.
We had a reporter here who was on the phone with Jacob,
and he said, are you sure this isn't just a front for you?
You're not-- Surefire Intelligence is a real thing?
And he's, oh, yeah, yeah. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.
Well, as it turned out,
pictures on Surefire Intelligence of their employees
were people like Christoph Waltz, a Hollywood actor.
Some models. Head of Surefire Intelligence,
he was a kind of shady-looking guy on his LinkedIn page.
It was really dim, but someone just
brightened it in Photoshop, and it was just a picture of Jacob.
So as people kept realizing
how fraudulent Surefire Intelligence was,
that was the setup for the press conference.
Jacob and his firm went through the most intense vetting
of any woman in one of these situations,
and I've represented other women in these situations,
as you know, that I have ever seen.
And we determined that the accusation was credible,
or we wouldn't be here today.
First of all, I want to stress, no one is questioning Ms. Cass's account here.
We didn't know her name until 20 minutes ago.
Okay, we're questioning you two, both very uncredible people.
-Here's what I want to know-- -Why are you saying we're uncredible?
You know, you had all the Seth Rich stuff, whatever.
My question is for Jacob.
Why were you so shady about Surefire Intelligence?
You told one of our reporters you didn't run it.
There was this alias. There's all these made-up people.
What's going on there?
The investigation, at that point,
was still in flux, and it was important that I preserve
my anonymity as I move through it.
But if you want your anonymity,
then why are you doing this press conference now?
Like, you could have just gone to the New York Police Department, right?
Burkman: Well, a lot of that-- A lot of that is up to Carolyne.
At the time, she made a decision, for whatever reason,
we didn't know her at the time,
to not, to not report it to police.
But is she reporting it to police now?
-Like, are you going to the cops? -Burkman: Yes.
We're, we're in the process of doing that now.
-Let me say something about-- -When do you expect that to be wrapped up?
This is ongoing. This is ongoing.
Newsman (speaking):
Probably, I would think, by the end of this week.
At the end of next week, next Friday.
You filed that, you filed that with the NYPD, correct?
Burkman: We haven't, we have not done it yet.
A lot of those decisions are up to my client.
I'm just the lawyer.
We are still in the process of gathering evidence.
Sommer: The idea was that Carolyne Cass had met Robert Mueller
when she was at a hotel bar in New York a couple years ago.
And she claimed that Mueller basically
made her go up to his room
and sexually assaulted her, raped her.
Now, there were a couple holes in this story.
Probably the biggest being that there was a newspaper article
about Robert Mueller being in DC that day
because he was doing jury duty.
There's an item in The Washington Post
from that day, uh, that spots him.
It's one of those sightings-around-town columns
that shows someone saw him at jury duty on that date.
Are you suggesting the special counsel
planted a story in The Washington Post nine years ago?
Burkman: You have information in front of you as to his whereabouts.
Wait a second. Was he only at jury duty?
Sometimes, people go to jury duty, but they're also somewhere else.
Was he only at jury duty?
No, instead of-- Hang on, it's not funny.
This is not a laughing matter.
He basically, literally, said, someone can be in two places at once.
♪ ♪
Darcy: It felt like you had left reality
and entered the right-wing media universe, like, a physical version of it.
Maybe I had gone through a portal
when I walked into the hotel and ended up
in this weird right-wing place
where Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl were holding court.
Thomas: Is the whole point of this to discredit Bob Mueller?
And, and if that is the case,
do you really think that would shut down the Russia investigation?
Uh, no, the point of this is not to discredit anyone.
The point of this is to get to the truth.
Reporter (speaking):
-Wohl: It's spelled with an "E." -Reporter 1: It is with in "E"?
-That's correct, that's right. -Reporter 2: It is with an "E"?
-Goldman: Wait, there's-- -Wohl: Hang on.
-You'll figure it out. Okay, Ms. Cass is-- -(reporters laughing)
No, no, no, no, you don't get to say that.
You brought us out here. Tell us her name
-and all of the identifying information. -Wohl: Her name's right below...
Goldman: You know, we go to a lot of press conferences,
and they can be adversarial.
You can have this back and forth debate during these news conferences,
but you know you're dealing with
genuine people on the other side.
You're just not confronted with this blatant bullshit conspiracy.
And you ask yourself, I'm a reporter.
I've been doing this for 20 years. Why am I... Why am I sitting here?
You know, my mission here is not to establish a narrative.
It's not to follow an agenda--
Wait a minute. You just established a narrative
-and you put it in front of us. -Wohl: Hang on, hang on.
Excuse me. It's to bring forth the facts
and let the facts speak for themselves, and that's what we've done here.
-Wait, one last question. This is important. -(reporters asking questions)
Where was, where was-- Hold on, I've got this.
Where, where was Mueller's security detail
on the day he was hitting on this woman?
Guys, you know what? We got to wrap it. Thank you all.
-(reporters shouting) -We'll see you guys on the way out.
Burkman: We've done enough, guys. I think that's enough for today.
-We have another, we have another conference coming soon. -Sommer: When?
Burkman: With Carolyne, as soon as we get her schedule.
Sommer: You always say there's another press conference where you're really gonna give us--
What's going on with the Seth Rich conspiracy, by the way?
-It worked out well because-- -Where's your witness for that?
You said you were gonna bring a witness last time--
We're only here to discuss Carolyne today.
-Not other matters. -I want to discuss your credibility.
You don't have much credibility because--
-Burkman: Who's credibility? -Darcy: Your credibility.
-Burkman: Oh, my credibility. -You said you were gonna bring witnesses--
-Wohl: We've got some civilians. -Burkman: All right.
Darcy: Why can't you show us the document
showing that you're representing her?
-Burkman: Uh... -Darcy: How are we supposed to know
that you're representing this person? We have no evidence.
Burkman: Well, we do.
Sommer (speaking):
It seems like he had the person first.
Then he came to you, or what happened?
Uh, we'll just say it's synergistic.
We'll, we'll leave it at synergistic.
Darcy: The whole thing was a circus.
The only serious thing was what they were trying to do,
which is slime Robert Mueller
with one of the worst things they can accuse him of.
He got people talking about Robert Mueller
and a sexual assault allegation in the same sentence.
They meant to tarnish Bob Mueller's reputation
to undermine his investigation into the president.
What Burkman and Wohl were doing
was not only knowingly dishonest
and they know that, it was corrosive
and destructive.
This was about throwing shit on the wall.
That's all they were attempting to do.
To throw shit on the wall and get somebody to write about it.
They would have been very satisfied
if the Times had just written, "This is nonsense."
Because they would Google Jacob
and he might have come up on the top search
and he doesn't care what context his name is used in.
Does he? It doesn't seem like it.
Wohl: Are we trending? That's the real question.
Are we trending? I'm sure we're trending.
Goldman: I mean, I really was offended by the whole thing.
You know, I could come back to the Times,
and the Times trusts my judgment,
and I said, I'm not writing about this.
I'm gonna do my due diligence.
I'm gonna go try to find this woman
to see if there's any there, there.
It's the same standard we would treat Kavanaugh's accuser.
We need to find the victim, talk to the victim,
interview the victim, and then determine
if this is actually real.
Uh, but I'm not writing about this news conference.
(sighs)
Benkler: Mainstream media needs to understand
that it is operating in a propaganda-rich environment.
There are no two realities.
There is an intentional deception on one side,
and there is an honest if imperfect process
of trying to get as near to the truth as we can on the other.
♪ ♪
Today in the red chair again, in the same place
we talked two years ago is Tristan Harris,
the cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology.
Harris: We spend about a fourth of our lives now
in artificial social systems.
Meaning, in these digital environments.
And that's just onscreen. I mean, when you're off-screen,
-you're still thinking thoughts. -Right.
That came from that artificial social environment.
-Mm-hmm. -Conspiracy theories on these,
you know, magnified by these platforms,
times billions of people,
it has completely fragmented our truth,
and more importantly, the scale
of the disinformation and misinformation,
people tend to underestimate.
Um, I don't think you've had Guillaume Chaslot--
-Swisher: No, I haven't, but-- -but he's ex-YouTube recommendations engineer.
He works with us, and his research showed that
Alex Jones was recommended 15 billion times.
-Swisher: Right. -There's a cover-up going on.
They are pulling videos of this young man,
a David Hogg.
He's on the fake news, CNN, known for staging things,
and he says over and over again, I am not a crisis actor.
Newswoman: Right-wing conspiracy theories going viral
about David Hogg, a 17-year-old Parkland shooting survivor.
The unsubstantiated claims say he's a crisis actor,
a trained actor who takes advantage
of tragedies for political gain.
Tuesday, the conspiracy went viral on Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
Michalik: Were they crisis actors? I mean, I don't know.
I think the possibility exists.
A picture of Emma Gonzalez tearing what appeared to be a Constitution.
Was it really a Constitution?
Was it-- What do I think about it?
I think it's pretty disgraceful.
Why would you tear up the Constitution?
Rossi: Well, so, in fact, that photograph was fake.
-It was Photoshopped. -Michalik: Okay.
Rossi: She wasn't holding up--
Michalik: I got you, I got you.
Knowing that that was purposely
Photoshopped and faked?
Yeah, that's more upsetting than the fact
that she was allegedly tearing up the Constitution.
Swisher: Facebook, it's a city without signs
and police forces and garbage.
That's the city they built.
What company wouldn't shut down
absolutely provable false information?
They create the platform where it gets spread,
and then are like, oh, what can we do?
They hide behind the First Amendment
and they are not the government.
They can make choices, they just don't want to.
To say fake news, in other words,
I don't want your news because it's fake,
is antithetical to the principals of the First Amendment.
You can't say "fire" in a crowded theater
when there's no fire. That's what Justice Holmes said.
Because it could lead to people being hurt.
But if someone gets up and preaches revolution
and there's no imminent likelihood
that there's gonna be any violence resulting from that,
then that speech has to be tolerated.
The First Amendment says the government can't suppress speech,
but there's no reason that platforms or communities
can't say this kind of commentary's beyond the pale,
and people who insist on saying this
are gonna suffer a penalty.
They're not the federal government.
It's not a public square. These are private entities.
They can do what they want.
It's just more convenient to do nothing.
It's more profitable to do nothing.
I'm worried about the future for others.
Because what happened to me can happen to anyone.
A more vulnerable person or institution like Comet
would have been taken down right away.
These online weapons
that are directed at different people and institutions
have lasting consequences and do destroy people.
Swisher: In the case of Pizzagate,
now, to my mind, when Facebook finds something like that,
they should shut it down.
Why did you build tools that allow someone
to do that, or allow it to iterate and iterate and iterate?
What tools could you build where that isn't iterated
again and again?
White men, younger, run Silicon Valley
If you don't ever feel unsafe in your life,
you do not understand lack of safety.
You do not build that in.
I had someone at Twitter talk to me about,
they had gotten attacked online, the first time it happened.
And they were like, oh, that was pretty bad.
And I'm like, welcome to the world of women.
Welcome to the world of people of color.
Welcome to the world of marginalized people.
You know, this is what it's like every day.
If you can think of a really awful thing
that could happen with your product,
you need to figure out ways that it doesn't have as much damage.
They have not spent enough time doing that.
Darcy: Oliver Darcy from CNN.
InfoWars is pretty, I mean, I don't know
if you've been to the page, but they pretty much
make stuff up to get clicks and generate revenue
and scare people.
And I can't understand how Facebook can say,
we're serious about fighting fake news
and false information, but allowing InfoWars
and Alex Jones to profit off your platform
by using it to generate a lot of clicks.
Swisher: That was an ongoing debate
that was happening about Alex Jones.
When I did the podcast with Mark,
we were starting to talk about Alex Jones.
Zuckerberg: The principles that we have on what
we remove from the service are if it's going to result
in real harm, real physical harm,
or if you're attacking individuals,
then that content shouldn't be on the platform.
-Swisher: Mm-hmm. -Zuckerberg: But then, there's
broad debate, and--
Swisher: Okay, Sandy Hook didn't happen is not a debate.
It is false. You can't just take that down?
Zuckerberg: I agree that it is false.
But overall, I mean, let's take this a little closer to home.
-Right, so I'm Jewish. -Swisher: Mm-hmm.
Zuckerberg: Um, and there's a set of people who
deny that the Holocaust happened.
-Swisher: Yes, there's a lot. -Zuckerberg: Right, I find that
-deeply offensive. -Swisher: Mm-hmm.
Zuckerberg: But I don't believe that our platform
should take that down because I think that there are things
that different people get wrong,
um, either, I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong,
-but I think that they-- -Swisher: In the case of
the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.
Holocaust deniers don't mean to lie.
And I was like, but they do.
So that, that, that to me was sort of like, oh, you're not even sophisticated enough
to understand that they mean to lie, that's the whole point.
If someone who is running the biggest
communication system in the history of the world,
someone who cannot be fired,
someone who has complete control over that system,
does not understand what he just said,
it's really-- it really struck me as,
it was a big uh-oh moment for me.
The implication that they aren't malevolent--
he knows they're malevolent, come on.
You can take them off. Like, it's okay.
He's gonna get flak for it, but he gets paid
the big bucks, right?
Alex Jones, he is the founder of InfoWars,
and he is now feeling the heat himself.
YouTube, Facebook, and Apple all announcing
they are removing his content from their platforms.
Rossi: What changed in that summer?
Apple did it. When Apple was like,
you know, enough, basta . That's done.
Everybody else then goes, oh, no, now if they do it,
I guess it gives us cover to do it.
Apple last night removed the entire library
of Alex Jones's podcast from their store.
And then, we saw, we've seen throughout the day, actually,
tech platforms just basically remove Alex Jones
from their websites.
He had been banned by most platforms except for Twitter.
And so, he's on Capitol Hill,
yelling about censorship and conservatives under fire
and oppression and all of this Alex Jones' stuff.
And so, I was going to cover Jack Dorsey,
the Twitter CEO, testifying in front of a House Committee,
and I'm standing in line,
waiting to be let into this room,
and out comes Alex Jones.
Look at this right here.
The guy that goes around policing,
and calling for censorship, and then claims that
Trump's wrong, there's no censorship
of conservatives or patriots.
You are incredibly shameful.
-How are you doing, Alex? -You are just, look at you.
You are literally an anti-American
anti-free speech coward.
You're gonna go down in the history books
at the Criminal News Network.
This is one of the main,
this is one of the main people right here.
Darcy: He comes over and starts berating me.
He sticks multiple cameras in my face.
There's a crowd that gathers of his right-wing supporters.
Come on over here, Drew. I want to get this guy on tape.
This is unbelievable.
I was literally saying, I don't see the
Criminal News Network here.
But indeed we do, right there at the front of the line at the trough.
Darcy: And for about ten or 15 minutes,
he is just yelling in my face.
I mean, look at those eyes, folks.
If you want to see the eyes of a rat.
Sommer: Alex Jones has chosen to latch onto
Oliver as a hate figure.
He'll pick people, and frankly I don't think it's an accident,
that it's often a woman or a person of color.
Just look at this guy's eyes, man.
That is who will ruin your life.
Look, I mean,
he's even more evil-looking in person.
Man: Something to think about, the decisions that you've made.
The next day, Twitter bans him, and what their reasoning was
to my understanding, it's because he
livestreamed him berating me.
He used a Twitter service to do that, Periscope.
It violated Twitter's rules against targeted harassment,
and so, that was his last strike.
That whole thing was sort of ironic.
Yelling and complaining about losing his platform
ended up leading to him losing his last remaining platform, being Twitter.
All: USA, USA!
You're the classic, hateful, vicious leftists
that just wants to go out and attack people.
-Shame on you, shame on you. -You were telling lies, bro.
-You don't know nothing. -You're disgusting.
You're unbelievably anti-free speech as well.
You know nothing. Nothing.
Reporter (speaking):
He's a public figure, in his job,
in a public space.
He's lied about me, and actively
full-time lobbied to have me removed off platforms
and bragged about it.
And so, I see a modern book-burner,
who also misrepresents what I've said,
and I tell him that I think he's the embodiment of evil,
a big corporation working behind the scenes
and publicly to silence people.
He is a book-burning monster.
Williamson: When I first visited Alex Jones,
he told me that there were snipers on the roof,
which he then called me the next day to clarify
he had made that up and there actually
aren't any snipers on the roof.
His offices are in a part of Austin
he doesn't want you to reveal or talk about.
It's smoked windows.
It's surveillance video cameras everywhere.
He has a kind of genius business model.
He spews out these theories,
and then, at the beginning and end
of every program, he's selling you something.
And what he sells feeds that sense of paranoia
and feeling of being besieged
that a lot of his listeners and followers have.
This is a guy who sells vitamin B,
male virility products, and special kooky foods
by spreading these theories that damage people's lives.
Sandy Hook, it's got inside job written all over it.
These are dead children, and he put out
all this false information about it.
And kept saying, "It's free speech, free speech!"
No, it's not.
Williamson: The Sandy Hook families
have been begging for years
to have this or that piece of video removed,
this or that Facebook post, this or that tweet.
And often times, they feel like that fell on deaf ears.
"Deplatformed" is such a bloodless term, you know?
I've been deplatformed. What does that even mean?
And when you talk with the families, they'll say,
you know what that means to me?
For the first time, it means I'm not afraid to open my mail.
You know, that I'm gonna see a threat from someone.
And that threat coming in my mailbox
means they know where I live.
Just like James Alefantis, just like Seth Rich's family,
they want to know.
Does the First Amendment actually protect
the types of claims that have caused us
such damage and such harm?
And you know, had one of them said,
you know, this makes me feel like in 30 years
truth will be what pops up first when you search on Google.
You know, if you type Sandy Hook into Google,
and this content isn't taken down,
and the purveyors of this content aren't taken down,
the first thing you'll see is that it was a hoax.
So then these people have actually changed reality.
Pape: The only way you fight this sort of fake news
is with the truth.
I mean, I don't know of any other way to do it.
You certainly don't fight it with fake news.
You don't win that battle by, um, playing their game.
Benkler: One of the most important targets
of propaganda, and this is true of Russian propaganda in Russia,
it's true of propaganda in the United States,
is to achieve this state of disorientation,
this denial of the idea that there is a truth of the matter.
Challenging what is knowable
is a fundamental way of upending a system
and making it impossible to govern.
It's also a way to ensure that you and I can't ever
come to compromise on anything.
♪ ♪
Alefantis: This community is really somewhere
that's based in truth
and reality.
An online community is one thing,
but a physical place where you're playing ping-pong
with someone, eating, breaking bread over the table,
you're able to actually communicate
with the people around you.
So if someone were to say,
wow, this crazy thing is happening.
Did you hear about it?
Across the table, one might say,
oh, that thing isn't really happening.
Man: God is going to throw you into Hell.
(clamoring)
Alefantis: It is hard, still.
We've been under continued threat.
The daily messaging that I get now
about people wanting to kill me or that I should be dead
is, you know, a hard thing to deal with.
So that's just part of my life now.
But the community saved us.
Like, it's the community.
They, like, saved the restaurant, basically.
And also were, like, you need to open.
On Monday.
And I was like...
we're not opening on Monday.
We're, we're never opening.
Like, this restaurant is not gonna be open again,
was my thought, feeling and response.
We called a meeting of the staff
and was like, what do you want to do?
And I said to them,
you know, I can take every precaution.
We would have armed guards at the doors,
police surrounding the building
to open our pizza place when we can.
But I was like, I don't want to really open
because I'm scared.
And, you know, in my head, but I'm like,
but what do you want to do?
And this 20-something-year-old staff
was like, we need to open.
Because...
Comet is not gonna be defeated or something.
Or like, this community needs us.
So we were able to open
because they wanted to.
And the support of this community
who also were calling the restaurant
saying we want to come there right now.
Like, a gunman has come through,
and literally, they're calling, being like,
when can we bring our kids to have pizza?
You can't close.
♪ ♪
Like, it's a simple recipe:
It's family, community and truth,
like that's what, that's why we're here.
♪ ♪