Our Cognitive Dissonance Helps Russian Disinfo Campaigns | Joe Rogan and Renée DiResta

You don't know if this is just more bullshit. It's like in Like you were saying earlier if they get you and you buy into it hook line and sink or they win if they get you to Think well, how much else is bullshit? They still win because you're looking at everything with sort of this tainted lens now Everything seemed and in a sense that's probably the ultimate goal is to disrupt our Social media environment and to sort of hijack the the natural Conversations that are taking place. Yeah, and I think it's I mean it's effective There's certain, you know, I was in Estonia last year And they've been targeted by this stuff for decades now You know the 25% Russian speaking population most of the news that they get is from Russian media, right? You know right on the border they talk a lot about the extreme commitment to Educating their citizens to make them realize that this kind of thing does happen This is what it usually looks like Don't share it here, you know, just ignore it let it go by and I don't think we are quite there yet. I think that there's still plenty of people in the country who don't believe it happened or for some reason are completely incapable of separating the Russian social media influence campaign happened from It means Donald Trump's election is illegitimate or it means Donald Trump colluded, right? Those are very different statements. You don't have to collude in order for someone somewhere too unsolicited go and support your candidacy so you can believe two things simultaneously one that Trump did not collude and That his election is perfectly legitimate that this had no impact and two that it still happened and that I think is I am consistently amazed When I read my social media mentions it at how hard that ability to hold those two ideas is for for people They just believe that if they're supporters of Trump they absolutely cannot acknowledge that this operation took place and I or if they are passionate supporters of the far left It's more of like an equivocation, you know, well, we don't really know if they did it. Well, the US does bad things too Well, how do we know, you know, so that's where It it it plays out very differently depending on which part of the political spectrum you sit on Well, it falls right into our The issue that we have with cognitive dissonance If we believe in someone or if we want someone to win, especially if it's our team or our person or on our side You know, like I I yeah, I saw a lot of this when Donna Brazil released her book Detailing how the DNC sort of rigged the primaries Against Bernie Sanders and and for Clinton there were so many people that were Clinton supporters. I just didn't want to believe it I was like, well, why wouldn't you believe this woman like you believed her before when she was supporting Clinton? And then when she leaves now, you know, you won't believe her. It's because it's inconvenient and we're real weird in our Binary view we want things to be good or bad One or zero, this is it and this is a Super complex issue. It seems like they've been doing this for a long time and they've gotten really sophisticated at it And I think there's a lot of people that have been sucked into it that have no idea that it's actually influenced the way they've they've Formed their own opinions. This is where it gets really strange people are so malleable and they're so easily manipulated Many people are that something like this like a real good solid concentrated effort to try to target these groups that have these very specific interests and Really dig in and form roots and then go out. I mean, it's so sophisticated to their approaches I'm on one hand horrified and the other hand deeply impressed Me too Now was this freaking you out when you had to like go over all these memes and you were actually laughing at them And you're like god damn it Well, you know, there's that tweet that goes around every now and then you don't have to hand it to them And I'm always like how do I? how do I properly convey a Recognition for the You know, I don't think we do ourselves any favors by pretending it all sucked and didn't matter and they're incompetent Right. I think that you have to acknowledge that you have a sophisticated adversary that is very capable That is very determined that is constantly evolving And to treat that with the degree of respect it deserves I think that that's just common sense actually I I I read media on both sides of the aisle and I you know, I feel I try to stay current actually on what memes are percolating in lots of different spaces and part just because I am always curious about What's organic versus what seems to be disproportionately amplified or what new communities are popping up? I just think it's an I think the spread of information among people is just a very interesting You know, it's something that interests me a lot. I think crowd psychology is really interesting I think ways that crowd psychology has transformed as the internet has kind of come into being Particularly with things like the mass consolidation the ease with which we can target people, you know, we didn't even really talk about that but the One of the things with there's always you know, even in the decentralized internet There's always been propaganda. There's always been Crazy conspiracy theories all the stuff but it's that you can reach the people who are likely to be receptive to it now and as people self-select into tribes particularly in this country right now One of the things that's remarkable is the way in which once you've self selected into that tribe And this is the media in your ecosystem and you share it with your friends and Facebook ensures that the people who see it Are the people who are most likely to be receptive to it or if you run the ad targeting you? Directly, you know send it into the feeds of people most likely to be receptive to it. We have this interesting phenomenon where consolidation targeting and then these gameable algorithms mean that it's just This kind of information Goes way farther way faster than it ever could have in the past regardless of whether it's