Disinformation is a Threat to Democracy Says Barbara McQuade

We have to care more about truth than tribe. We have to care more about each other than about profit.

Barbara McQuade

This episode was made in partnership with the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy

Access Episodes Ad-Free on Patreon

Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox.

Proudly sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Learn more at https://kellogg.nd.edu

Sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Learn more at https://carnegieendowment.org

A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.

Barbara McQuade is a professor from practice at the University of Michigan Law School. She is also a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and a co-host of the podcast #SistersInLaw. Her new book Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:20
• Propaganda Today - 3:05
• Disinformation and Polarization - 19:57
• Free Speech - 24:29
• Attack from Within - 37:14

Key Links

Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade

Learn more about Barbara McQuade

Follow Barbara McQuade on X @BarbMcQuade

Democracy Paradox Podcast

Peter Pomerantsev on Winning an Information War

Samuel Woolley on Bots, Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Propaganda

More Episodes from the Podcast

More Information

Apes of the State created all Music

Email the show at jkempf@democracyparadox.com

Follow on Twitter @DemParadox, Facebook, Instagram @democracyparadoxpodcast

100 Books on Democracy

Transcript

For the past eight years misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda have dominated conversations about democracy. At first the fear was foreign adversaries like Russia and China could use our open society against us. But disinformation does not always originate from abroad. American citizens also use disinformation to manipulate politics as well. After so much focus on this topic, I could tell you a lot about this topic. But there is one question I can’t seem to answer. Why are we so vulnerable to it?

Barbara McQuade reflects on questions like this in her new book Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. Barb is a professor from practice at the University of Michigan Law School. She is also a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and a co-host of the podcast #SistersInLaw.

Our conversation explores how disinformation threatens democracy. It considers why it is easier to spread disinformation than to confront or challenge it. You’ll find in many ways the attack is from within ourselves, so the solution requires something more than a policy recommendation. It may require a moral reckoning.

This episode was made in partnership with the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. The Mitchell Center sponsors research and scholarship on a wide range of topics on democracy. The Mitchell Center podcast has 76 episodes and counting. Learn more in the link in the show notes.

The podcast is also sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The Kellogg Institute was founded by Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the giants of democratic thought, more than 40 years ago. It continues to sponsor research on democracy and human development. Check them out at Kellogg.nd.edu. You’ll find a link in the show notes to their website. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of the podcast, please send me an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com.

But for now… This is my conversation with Barbara McQuade…

jmk

Barbara McQuade, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Barbara McQuade

Thanks very much, Justin. Great to be with you.

jmk

Barb, I really loved your book. It's called Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. It's a great book on a topic that I feel like is one that this podcast continues to come back to. In fact, a lot of the people that you referenced within the book are people that I've read extensively and some that I've even had on the podcast. In fact, Peter Pomerantsev is one that comes to mind. He was just on the podcast two weeks ago. So, this is a topic that I feel like is very important to understand democracy and to really wrestle with some of the problems that we're dealing with.

One of the things I was talking to Peter about was that a lot of these topics are not new. They've been with us for a very long time. In fact, it feels like there's a little bit of a resurgence in terms of some of the literature that comes back from even the 1920s with Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays in terms of thoughts about public opinion and propaganda and how it affects things. So just to kind of kick off, I'd like to know about how we actually think about disinformation. Is there a meaningful distinction between how we should think about disinformation today versus how we thought about propaganda in the past?

Barbara McQuade

I think they're all of the same family and certainly some of the same tactics that we have seen used by authoritarians throughout history, fear and conspiracy theories, repetition and big lies, all of those things are being done today. I think that when I use the word disinformation, I encompass not just lies, but also misleading things designed to push our buttons in the way we have online trolls who are out there deliberately provoking fights to pit us against each other. I think that's all part of disinformation. So, it's maybe a little broader than just talking about lies or propaganda. The thing that’s different today from the 1920s and other areas in American history, of course, is social media which gives purveyors of disinformation this incredible weapon to spread their lies quickly, broadly, and anonymously.

jmk

We also talk a lot about misinformation and sometimes I hear the terms misinformation and disinformation used interchangeably. I know that there's a difference, but it's sometimes still blurred. Do you see a meaningful distinction that actually matters in how we approach the two?

Barbara McQuade

Yes. I know lots of people use the two terms interchangeably. I just defined it in my book because I wanted to talk about the two in different ways. Disinformation is the deliberate use of lies and deceptions, whereas misinformation is its unwitting cousin. So, when we read something that we believe to be true and then we spread that on with social media, it's so easy to be a spreader, an unwitting spreader of disinformation. I refer to that as misinformation because I think that some of us are guilty of that without even trying.

jmk

Does it matter that somebody isn't deliberate about spreading the misinformation?

Barbara McQuade

Oh, I think so, because I think those of us who are acting in good faith can be trained to avoid being useful idiots. I think that some of us will share something that we see online because we read it and we believe it and I think that there are things we can do through critical thinking and media literacy that can help us avoid, I think most of us want to avoid, being unwitting accomplices to disinformation. But there are those out there who are deliberately spreading lies. I think those people are far more nefarious. So, I think there is a meaningful distinction between the two.

jmk

You mentioned earlier the importance of social media and how that's really changed the way that disinformation operates today. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Why is it that social media has really fundamentally changed the way that propaganda and disinformation work in today's society?

Barbara McQuade

Yeah, this is something that really got me interested in studying this area of disinformation in my background as a national security prosecutor. I now teach a course on national security at the University of Michigan Law School and I began teaching disinformation by teaching Russian disinformation and the 2016 efforts by Russia to influence the election. I have my students read some portions of the Mueller Report, which I think most people think about as being all about Donald Trump. But in fact, it's all about Russia. It talks about how Russia used social media to spread false claims and create false impressions. So, for example, they created accounts designed to look like they were run by American political activists when instead the account users on these accounts were Russian operatives working for an organization called the Internet Research Agency sitting in Russia.

They created accounts with names like Blacktivist and United Muslims of America and Tennessee GOP and Heart of Texas and tons of others. They looked like they were real Americans. They look like they were likable, interesting, reasonable people who said things that would resonate with the group they purported to be a member of. So, for many months, they attracted followers and grew really large profiles on social media. Then before the election, they started doing things to either stoke division or mislead voters. For example, Blacktivist started posting things like Hillary Clinton has never done anything for our community, meaning the black community. She's taking us for granted. Therefore, we should send her a message by not going to the polls on election day. Let's teach her that we are a powerful force and she should not take us for granted in the future.

Really interesting message and you never know how many people might have taken that bait. In a swing state where the margin of victory was very narrow, even a few people who may have fallen for that could have tilted the outcome of the election. So, in this way, social media can be weaponized against us. Now there can be all kinds of Americans following this same strategy. Part of the reason is we can reach millions of people in an instant. So, the time is quick. The scope is quick. We can react to the things in the news immediately and we don't have to use our real names.

So, you know, Blacktivist, we don't know his real name, but we know he wasn't an African American. He was some Russian. There is also this phenomenon where there are bots online, which are AI generated accounts that look like real people. But in fact, are just robots that are programmed to argue with people so they can say nasty things to you when you post something online. But they can also amplify these false claims posted by people like Blacktivist, so it looks like their message is even more popular than it was because it's been liked and shared millions and billions of times. But of course, those liking and sharing it are actually just bot accounts. So, it's a powerful new weapon that expands the reach and the speed and the anonymity of these messages.

jmk

How do you feel like the comments feature has really changed the way that we interact with disinformation or propaganda because in the old days, you could print out information and people might be able to comment on it with their friends and neighbors, but the reach was very limited and the ability to be able to interact with high profile people was very difficult and was difficult to interact with people from different places as well. How do you think that's really changed the way that disinformation operates today?

Barbara McQuade

So, in some ways, this ability to communicate with anybody in the world online is really a wonderful thing. In my own book, I reached out to Martina Navratilova and Henry Winkler and other people I admire who I knew followed me on social media and shared with them a copy of my book and they read it and then they endorsed it. I mean, it's amazing. These are heroes of mine as a child who grew up in the 1970s. You know, in those days, you could never imagine that you would ever possibly have an opportunity to communicate with them. Now I communicate with them all the time. It's amazing. So, I think social media is an incredible tool.

However, the anonymous features of it allow us to behave very badly. It also allows us to sometimes pretend to be someone we're not simply to poke a fight, to stoke division. I think that's the thing that's so insidious. So, let me take those in order. One is even ordinary people, when they are anonymous online, or even, I just don't have to face this person in real life, are apt to say things that are just cruel, ugly, faultless, less polite. So, it takes the level of discourse down to the gutter really quickly. You know, you post something really innocuous, like, welcome back to students, Michigan Law students and you get a lot of nice things like, ‘Oh, thank you, Professor. Great day.’

Then, you know, you'll start seeing things like, ‘There's nothing great about it, you disparaging name, disparaging name, disparaging name.’ It's just all kinds of stuff like that and it'll be from somebody who calls himself true patriot or something like that. I don't know who it is. I think all of us are wired to be far more polite in public in the real world than we are when we think that we're anonymous. If you think about how we behave if we're in a line at the bank or the grocery store, people are pretty well behaved. They might chit chat. They would never cut you off, because they know there'd be consequences. They have to face you. So, people are lovely when you run into them with some exceptions, but mostly people behave themselves very well in the real world.

But if you give them an anonymity, we become animals. Think about the way we behave in traffic. If we think we never have to see each other, we'll cut you off when it says lane ends merge right. You know, people will try to shoot past the line and cut to the very front of it. Why do they do that? Because they think they have no accountability. No one's going to know who I am. I'll never face these people again. No one's going to say, ‘You're being rude. Get to the back of the line.’ I think online culture is the same way. If we don't have to actually face people, you'll see people immediately descend into insults as opposed to actual discourse and arguments about legitimate issues of disagreement.

So, I think the anonymity of being online causes even good people to behave poorly. But I also think it gives cover to people who want to pretend to be someone they're not. So, as Robert Mueller found with Blacktivist, people can pretend to be a black political activist when they're no such thing. It allows people to go online and stoke anger by pretending to be a member of a group and then saying something highly offensive to people who are not members of that group. Then the people who read it say, ‘Oh my gosh, look what these people think. Look how awful they are. Look at what they said.’

I saw something online the other day, Justin, and I still don't know whether it was true or not, but I suspect it was false and designed to sow racial division in our country. It was a photo of a teenage boy and girl, purportedly prom dates, white girl, black boy, you know, 16 years old, maybe. Then a series of text messages purportedly between father and daughter saying, ‘I can't believe you brought this such and such horrible racial slur home as your prom date. You're dead to me. I'm canceling your phone.’ ‘Oh dad, please, please don't do this. Please don't be this way.’ Maybe it's real, but I think it's not. You know, part of the harm of all of this is we don't really know what to believe and what not to believe.

But my first reaction to it and probably most people's first reaction to it is I can't believe we have such horribly racist people in this country as this girl's dad, who would react so horribly to this very nice young man who's dressed very neatly in his tuxedo for the prom. This is horrible. This is awful. Those awful racists. I think there are people out there deliberately sowing division in society to create an us versus them culture so that they can attract voters to be part of their team, you know, the red team, the Christian nationalist team, whatever it is or to turn people off of that team. I don't want anything to do with that team because they're so horrible that I'm going to gravitate to the other team.

That was part of Russia's strategy that Robert Mueller found in 2016. They chose all of the fault lines in society, race, guns, abortion, immigration, whatever you can imagine is an area of deep division. Then really stoked those divides by saying outrageous things on both sides of the debate to get people to hate the people on the other side. If you wonder why we're so polarized, it's because there are people are out there pushing us apart.

jmk

I think it's deeper, though than just anonymity. I mean, obviously, the ability to be anonymous exacerbates the hatefulness and just the rudeness that you see online. But at the same time, people act differently in different ways and contexts. Somebody might be a very abrasive writer, but be very polite in a one-on-one situation. They might be very affable just naturally, but when they put pen to paper, they approach things much more critically than they ever would do so in person. Other people are much more critical and maybe abrasive in person, and yet they watch their words a little bit more closely when they actually have time to think about it and put pen to paper. We've seen this happen a lot.

In fact, I remember there was an Ezra Klein episode where he's talking about how people will have completely different personalities when they're on his podcast than when he sees them on Twitter, and then they'll have a completely different context in their books. So, the ability to be online allows you to create an entirely new persona and in a lot of ways, the way that the reward mechanisms work, it definitely encourages you to have a much more abrasive tone, because that's going to be what gets likes. That's going to be what gets retweets. And if you don't get the likes and the retweets, eventually you become invisible online. So, there's an even greater incentive to be able to put out stuff that's controversial just so to get the visibility for the content that you really want out there.

Barbara McQuade

In fact, I've got a note about this in my book where I recount a story from a friend when I first got on Twitter who explained to me that Twitter is for snark and boy, it really stuck with me. I try really hard whenever I write something that is a little bit snarky to self-regulate and say don't do this because it's very tempting and that is what generates likes and shares. I think that you're right. There's something about the way we behave in mobs, mob mentality. It's one of the reasons that I teach in my criminal law class that conspiracy and accomplice liability is considered a serious crime. That is because group behavior can tend to be lawless. People egg each other on.

Sometimes in our group people can check bad behavior and say, ‘Come on. Let's not do that. It's a bad idea.’ But oftentimes when we're in a group, one kind of eggs the other on. I've even seen this mob mentality in action when the Detroit Tigers won the World Series in 1984. I happened to be at game five when they won it. One of the great sports moments of my life. After the game, everybody spilled out onto the street and it was a joyful celebration. Car horns were honking. People were high fiving. It was wonderful. It was beautiful. Then it kind of turned where people just started doing things like climbing on lampposts and people were chanting jump, jump, jump, and all kinds of really crazy things and throwing bottles. So, I knew it was time to go home.

Eventually there was a famous photo of a taxi cab on fire. It just got out of hand. I think there is that mob mentality of people cheering you on and you like the attention a little bit. So, you're inclined to do things you might not otherwise do, if it was you making your own rational choice. I think it's the same thing online. I think we also see it to some extent on cable television. The shrillest, loudest, most outrageous, extreme voices are the ones that get the most attention and the same thing online. If you want to build a profile and be a spokesperson and have a lot of followers, saying things that are provocative is what gets you there.

So, instead of having interesting novel ideas, sometimes people will just say something snarky or clever, a zinger, ouch, ooh. I'm going to own my opponent. That's really destructive to discourse in society. We really need to engage in respectful civil discourse if we're going to expect to make any progress as a society. When all we do is criticize each other and play the one upsmanship, it's really destructive to society, and I agree with you that I think the social media platforms really foster that kind of communication.

jmk

But none of that is necessarily disinformation. Just because you're saying something crazy to be able to get attention… Disinformation is different. I mean, it's where you're making a statement that you're hoping that people gravitate towards, that people believe that is deliberately false.

Barbara McQuade

Yes, although I do think that one of the tactics that is being used, and one of the reasons disinformation works, is there are people deliberately pushing our society apart. You mentioned Ezra Klein and I cite his excellent book, Why We're so Polarized, in my book. He talks about how politicians in the 1990s switched their strategy. It used to be that they sought the votes of swing voters and the moderate middle. Then they realized that they can actually be more successful if they tried to solidify their base and stir up their base and get them to actually turn out. Because they have a lot of supporters, they just need to fire them up so that they'll actually show up on election day.

So how do you do that? You do that by really stirring the pot and talking about appealing to the interests of the most extreme members of your own party and demonizing the most extreme members of the other party. So, I think that sets it up. So how do you do that? Well, you do it with disinformation. You say things like, ‘The Democrat Party,’ as they call them to indicate their membership in the tribe, ‘wants to have open borders and allow,’ the term they're using now is ‘illegals to enter our country.’ You hear Donald Trump talk about vermin and animals and other kinds of things. That's disinformation.

To suggest that everyone who wants to come to our country is somehow less than human and wants to come here to commit crimes, they're doing it because it helps to fulfill this narrative that the other side is evil and we are good and we need to stop them from what they're doing. This idea is referred to by debaters as the either/or fallacy. That is there are only two choices on any issue in this world. There's my side and there's this awful other side over here and there's no room for nuance. There's no room for compromise. We demand political purity and everything that other side says is awful. Where some of this vitriol comes from is the need to portray my opponent as so awful that they will be an untenable choice for you.

jmk

When you said Democrat Party, it reminded me of that new book that came out from Mark Levin a few months ago, The Democrat Party Hates America.

Barbara McQuade

Yeah, there you go. This is exactly what we're talking about.

jmk

The fact that it creates a false narrative right off the bat, but it also tries to project that hate onto other people. Instead of saying, ‘I hate Democrats,’ it says, ‘No, it's not that I hate them. It's that they hate us.’ So, it's trying to play different types of jujitsu, if you will, with different ideas to create this narrative that other people are the ones that are a danger to you and to your values and the things that you believe. Why is that so effective, Barb? Why does that work? Why don't people see through that?

Barbara McQuade

I don't know why people don't see through it, but I do think that's a common narrative. I suppose it preys upon some of our cognitive biases. You know, we have these confirmation biases where we will believe things that are consistent with our worldview. So, if we are told that members of this radical Democrat Leftist Party hate America, they're not patriotic like us, that's a narrative that can… And I suppose it goes back to the 1960s when people were burning flags and protesting against the Vietnam War. Rather than saying, we want peace, you can portray them as they hate America. It's a way to demonize and minimize and undermine their credibility.

I suppose the same thing, the same arguments, are being used as a basis to avoid teaching racial history in our schools. Critical race theory - as if that's something very bad - but it's because they're teaching our children to hate America. You know, looking at our country critically, I think is a love of America and I don't think we should cede patriotism to anybody. I mean, I love America and what I love about it is our ability to be self-critical and to change and to constantly evolve and make our lives better. But I think there are some who have a vision of America as a white Christian nation and that anything that threatens it is an attack on their way of life. So, people must hate America if they don't want to continue that white Christian nationalism view of our country.

jmk

In your book, you make the case that America is particularly vulnerable to disinformation. Why is that?

Barbara McQuade

Yeah, one of the things about America that's so great is our freedom, our open society, and a hallmark of that, of course, is our First Amendment. Our right to free speech and free press and free exercise of religion. But there are some who will exploit those freedoms in an effort to propagate disinformation. I'll tell you what I mean by that. So, like all rights, the First Amendment is not absolute. There's a very strong presumption in favor of avoiding limitations on all fundamental rights. But like all rights, there may be limits as long as they satisfy what is referred to as strict scrutiny, which means that it's supported by a compelling governmental interest. The limitation is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. So, for example, when it comes to speech, we have made it a crime to communicate a threat.

Sometimes people even say it's a violation of my First Amendment rights that I can't communicate a threat. No. Congress has made findings that say this is permissible and the courts have upheld it. Same with conspiracy, which is achieved through speech, or fraud, which is often achieved through speech. These are crimes. They're limitations on what we can say. We can limit time, place, and manner of communication. So, there are all kinds of ways that we can have limits on our First Amendment rights, but now whenever anybody wants to, in any way, regulate disinformation or social media, we hear the word censorship, because censorship is a bad word. Everybody on the left and everybody on the right knows that censorship is anathema to democracy. We treasure and cherish our first amendment rights of free speech.

So, we hear the C word and everybody goes running and raises the white flag and says, ‘Please don't call me a censor, because that's the worst thing you could be.’ The Biden administration had set up an agency to defend against disinformation run by a woman named Nina Jenkiewicz who's a disinformation scholar and within a week they had to shut it down because they were getting criticism from the right that this was all about the thought police and censorship in American society, when it was nothing of the sort.

It was an effort to detect disinformation coming into us from overseas to help build resilience against it. Nina Jenkiewicz got so many death threats that she had to step down from that job from people who said she wanted to be a censor and the thought police. So, for that reason, because we have this commitment to free speech, I think there's some who are able to use the very notion of censorship as a cudgel to bully anybody into any sorts of limitation on disinformation online.

jmk

I definitely agree with you that there is some misunderstanding about the idea of free speech, particularly from a legal perspective where people think that the first amendment protects speech outside of the legal context. That if you want to make a statement on Twitter, that Twitter can't take it down. That it violates the First Amendment when really the First Amendment is about what the government can or can't do. It's not about what private companies or publications or other actors can or cannot do. But at the same time, there is a case to be made about free speech as a value rather than a legal construct.

The idea that if you value free speech within particular environments, you might decide not to be able to moderate things in different ways, because of the value not because you have to, but because you choose to, because you think that's what you stand for. I mean, if we're going to give Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt, and I mean absolute best benefit of the doubt, you would make the case that he saw it as a value at least in terms of social media. I mean, isn't there a case to be made that if you value the idea of free speech, maybe you would hold back on some of the moderation that some of the social media companies have attempted to do?

Barbara McQuade

Well, sure, but only to a point because one of the issues before the Supreme Court at the moment is when the Biden administration flagged for social media companies that there were quick cures for COVID online that were dangerous to public health, you know, drinking chlorine and things like that. They said to them you ought to consider whether this violates your terms of service because it could be very dangerous if somebody drinks bleach. ISIS recruiting videos, beheading videos, threats, harassment, other kinds of things online. I think there is a place where we need to draw the line even if we do treasure and cherish our First Amendment rights to free speech.

But I think we still haven't quite gotten our head around how First Amendment free speech concepts work in the online world, because it's not quite the same as the real world. You know, Elon Musk, as you say, is this First Amendment absolutist who thinks anybody should be able to say anything. Because he says that social media is now the digital town square, it's just like the town square, so we should be able to say whatever we wanted there. But there's some really stark differences between social media platforms and the town square. I mean, in the town square, for one, you can see who's speaking. Online, it could be a Russian operative. It could be a bot. We don't know that.

In the real world, in the town square, we will know whether people are cheering the speaker or booing the speaker or ignoring the speaker. Online, we don't know that because it could be that these are bots that are amplifying the message. We have no idea whether people like this or hate it or are ignoring it. So, it's not the same thing. It's like when he decided whether to restore Donald Trump's account online and he said, ‘I'm going to put it up to a vote of all of our users. So, here's a little poll. Yes, Trump's account should be restored. No, it should not be restored. Go ahead and vote. I'll keep it open until such and such day.’ So, people cast their votes. Then he says, ‘Well, the votes are in and the majority favored restoring the account, so the people have spoken.’

Of course, what he doesn't say is that the people might've had ten or a hundred or a thousand votes each or that only some people voted. Some of them might've been bots. So, it's far from democracy. It's far from the town square, but it's difficult to figure out how to treat these. One of the arguments that social media companies have made in recent cases are in direct conflict with each other. On the one hand, they want immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which provides immunity from liability on live newspapers and other publishers because they say ‘We're not really a publisher. We're just a platform where other publishers can come and use it and post their message.’

On the other hand, in this recent case, they said, ‘Just like publishers, we engage in editorial content decisions and we have discretion and we get to take down content that we think violates our editorial standards.’ Well, so which is it? Are you a publisher or are you not a publisher? It may be that the answer is they are for some purposes and not for others or maybe there's some new creature that we just haven't thought of before. So, I agree with you that getting our arms around what the rules of engagement ought to be online are difficult and we don't know what they are yet. This has been a real disruptor of how we think of the First Amendment, but at some point, we've got to get our arms around it. But I don't agree that anything goes just because it's social media.

jmk

I think one of the challenges with social media specifically in terms of how we think about free speech, again, more as a value than as a legal concept, is that if somebody says something that they truly believe in or they give a story about themselves and then the responses to it aren't criticism about the ideas or the arguments, but actual harassment and attacks about the person's character and misogynistic statements and just vitriol that comes out against the person, then some of that actually extends to things offline as well. The person is continuously harassed. That raises questions about whether or not that actually allows for free speech where we're actually encouraging to silence certain voices and we're allowing others that are much more critical, much more violent, much more harsh to be elevated.

It makes it a lot more complex when we say free speech absolutism because some voices still might not get heard in that type of environment. In fact, some voices definitely will not get heard because people will be too afraid to say things.

Barbara McQuade

Yeah, it's definitely a real threat. I have friends I know who we have withdrawn from social media for that very reason. It does seem that women and people of color are targeted much more so than others. I myself, since my book has come out, have received hate messages on social media in reply to some of my posts. They're not necessarily about the ideas. Sometimes they are, but sometimes they're just about the individual, ad hominem attacks, attacks against the person. ‘You are this,’ and really awful - think about the worst slurs you can imagine and I've received them. I think this is an effort to intimidate, to bully and to chill free speech, which is of course the opposite of free speech.

So, I find it ironic, if not amusing that people say, ‘You awful such and such and such and such and such talking in favor of advocating for censorship.’ They are criticizing me because they are framing what I just discussed with you in all its complexity and all its nuance about how the First Amendment works saying that I advocate for censorship, which I most certainly do not. Then calling me all kinds of awful names in an effort to browbeat me and silence me. So, you know, who's the censor here? There is some irony in all of that, but it is one of the attributes I think of social media and for all the reasons we discussed earlier with anonymity. People don't have to tell you their real name, so they feel free to say all of these awful things about you.

I also think that there is this idea, Justin, that people have, and I talk about this in the book, of cognitive dissonance. That is they really want their ideas and the people they admire to align. So, if I admire Barack Obama and Barack Obama says something that I really disagree with in all my heart and soul, like say Barack Obama starts advocating for a law banning abortion. That blows up my mind. I can't stand it. I don't want to listen to him. So, I have to do one of two things. I either have to change the way I feel about Barack Obama or to change the way I feel about this issue. I don't really want to do either.

But what it tends to do is to make me like Barack Obama less. And by the way, he has not said such a thing. I use it as an example only because I can't imagine that such a thing could happen. But this cognitive dissonance is what causes people to sometimes repeat the party line. On social media, we care about being a member of our digital tribe. So, we will say things, even if we don't believe them to be true, because we don't want to be ousted by our team. You know, Liz Cheney, one of the few people who went against the tide and spoke out and said, there was no stolen election. There was no election fraud. What Donald Trump did is an egregious crime.

She got kicked out of her party leadership and lost her seat in Congress for daring to say and speak the truth. There are other people. Some I'm sure have been fooled by these lies, but others know that our team is standing by this position. This is the position of our team. So, we don't say other things because if you do, you will be castigated.

Judge Michael Luttig, a very conservative retired judge, spoke out and testified at the January 6 hearings. He was the one who advised Mike Flynn that you can't just accept as an alternate slate of electors and toss out the certification. He's been castigated from his conservative community. People say you're not one of us anymore. So, I think there's pressure on people to toe the party line in their public statements, including on social media, because they don't want to be cast out.

When we demand political purity with no room for nuance and no room for any disagreement whatsoever on an issue, then we're never going to advance society because we're never going to convince everybody that they're completely wrong - Everything about what you've said. There's no room for compromise. It's all our side or nothing. I think that is another one of the challenges that social media creates.

jmk

So, Barb, I want to ask you about the title of the book. As I read it, I was thinking a lot about what it means, because when I think about disinformation, my mind immediately goes to Russia and what happened in the 2016 election. I think of it as an attack from outside of America that comes to us. Your book isn't about somebody from the outside. Your book is titled Attack from Within and it makes me wonder whether you're referring to the attack from within our country, people within our country attacking it, or if you mean the attack from within ourselves.

The fact that we are listening to disinformation and we are manipulated and to some extent, a lot of people, maybe even most people want to be manipulated. They want to believe that the truth is comforting and aligns with their vision of the world rather than wrestling with difficult, nuanced, complicated ideas. In your mind, what does the title mean? What does attack from within mean to you?

Barbara McQuade

Yeah, it means both. There's a chapter in the book that talks about some of these cognitive biases that we have that caused us to fool ourselves, I suppose, and not be truthful with ourselves. So, at the one level, you know, attack from within is about political operatives who are sacrificing our democracy and public safety and the rule of law to advance their own political agenda or their own personal agenda or their own career. That's one aspect of it, because I believe that these lies about stolen election are driving voter suppression laws in a number of states. We've seen new laws in Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona. It's harming democracy.

I think it's harming public safety because we're hearing about threats against public officials. We are seeing incidents of swatting. We are seeing vigilante violence, so the attack on the Capitol itself. It's harming the rule of law when people undermine the credibility of courts and law enforcement. It drives people, instead of resolving their disputes in courts, to take the law into their own hands and engage in political violence, which is a very dangerous place for us to be. So that's one level. But the other is we're being attacked individually. Our minds are designed to recognize the power of fear. Fear is a very real emotion and we feel fear because it means there's something wrong and we should change our behavior. We should huddle, hunker down because something that can harm us is out there.

There are people who prey upon that fear and suggest to us that bad people are coming to take away what's ours whether it's immigrants or minorities through diversity, equity and inclusion programs or the LGBTQ community wants to groom your children for pedophilia. There are people who are willing to prey on those fears in order to advance their own agenda and to divide and conquer. We are wired to believe in conspiracy theories because we're wired to recognize patterns. We don't have to reinvent our knowledge every time we encounter a situation. It's actually one of the things that drives implicit bias. We make assumptions about people we see based on past experience and stereotypes and other things that we know.

But if we see black clouds gathering in the sky, we say to ourselves I've seen that before. That means a storm might be coming. I better take caution and prepare for a storm and take shelter. We like a good conspiracy theory and it's easy for us to fall for things. So, if we have a narrative that makes sense to us, we say, ‘Oh, that's what they want you to think.’ It's easy for people to make up things about Hunter Biden's laptop or COVID being invented in a lab and being used as a biological weapon. We are easy marks. We’re easy prey for these kinds of things because we believe these things.

But some of these simple narratives are things Hitler spoke about in Mein Kampf. People want to believe simple, comforting narratives that are easy to understand and can be communicated in simple terms with repeatable phrases. America is a Christian nationalist country and all of these other outsiders want to take what's ours - It hits home for some people. So, when someone comes along and says everything is bad, but I'm strong and I can fix it for you, that can be very comforting if we're fearful and we're afraid of what's happening in our country.

One of the things I asked for in my book is that we have a national reckoning within ourselves. When you are tweeting in support of something that you saw online are you just trying to signal your membership in a particular team or tribe or do you really believe that thing to be true? You know, one of the examples in the book - I'm a big sports fan - is this idea that Boston Red Sox fans will say Yankees suck no matter how good the Yankees are that particular year. Whether they're last place or first place, it's Yankees suck because it's about my identity. I'm part of Red Sox nation and I hate the Yankees. I say Yankees suck even if they don't suck. They might be really good.

So, in the same way, when you are expressing your view on certain things, do you really have that view? Are you just saying so because you want to signal your membership in your preferred tribe? I think we need to have the courage as Liz Cheney did to step out of that. When we agree or disagree with something to say so. I'll just give you one example. Very recently, the Supreme Court decided that Colorado could not remove Donald Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment, Section 3 based on engaging in an insurrection. They said that's only for Congress to do. I don't like that decision because I don't like Donald Trump and I'd love to see him off the ballot. But I read the decision and I see it's not crazy. It kind of makes sense.

It's a really hard constitutional issue. It has a lot of moving parts. It's really difficult to assess exactly how it's supposed to work. I mean, we all agree on what it says, but how does it work? Can a state do it or does Congress have to do it? Is it automatic? Do you need executing legislation? So, to say I think they got right, draws a lot of ire. People say, ‘How dare you say that? I'm really disappointed that you said that.’ Well, why are you disappointed? Because you want me to be on your team and you thought I was on your team and that cognitive dissonance kicks in again because you're mad at me because I said something that you disagree with. So, there is that human nature and I think those who traffic in lies know that and use that against us.

jmk

We used to talk a lot more about civic virtue and the public actually holding certain values to be able to make democracy succeed, to be able to make democracy work. We don't talk as much about that anymore. A lot of the focus is on the role of politicians, the role of elites and what elites do to the public rather than what the public does to buttress democracy, what the public does to create the environment where Republican government, Democratic government can really thrive.

When you say national reckoning, it really sounds to me like you think we need to find a way to get closer towards that ideal once again, where we're thinking about our own role and what we can actually do just as regular everyday citizens to be able to create the environment that makes democratic governance work. I mean, am I understanding that right? That that's kind of the approach that you're taking.

Barbara McQuade

Yes, absolutely. I think that there are people and forces in our country that have put self-interest above all else to the detriment of community and society and country. I think some of it, most of it, is derived from incredible greed and capacious capitalism. Now I'm not suggesting we kill capitalism. Capitalism is what makes the country go. We are a capitalist society. You know, I'm a capitalist. I take a salary. I'm happy to do it. But we now live in a society where we want to squeeze every penny out of everything. It's not enough that people make money. They want more money. It's not enough that they have a vacation house. They want two vacation houses.

So, we have seen this huge disparity in income from the haves and the have nots, because of this idea that we have to maximize profits. These hedge funds come in and buy up hospitals and media outlets and turnaround specialists figure out ways to make them more profitable. But it turns out that there are fewer services for the customers who actually want to use it and it’s less user friendly for the patients who are in the hospital. CEO salaries are off the charts. We have sent good jobs overseas because labor is cheaper there. All of these things are about maximizing profit for some people.

So those who are at the top of the financial food chain need to look to someone to blame. Who can we blame for this? Well, we don't want them asking too many questions about the people at the top, so we talk about either it's those other people, it's the immigrants who are causing your problems, they're taking your jobs or it's minorities who through their diversity, equity, inclusion programs are taking away your rightful place in employment and education. It's the LGBTQ community who are creating all of these dangers for society and hate religion. These are the people that we should blame or elites, elites in society. It's the people who are part of the other party, the knowledge class, people who are professionals. They're elites and they are parasites on society.

It has caused everybody to just want to maximize their own wealth. That's all we care about is money. Look at all the things that are popular. You know, bling, wealth and just lavish displays of jewelry and clothing and travel and all of these things. I think there's a time in our country when we would have been disgusted by that not that long ago. I remember during the campaign between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, there was a lot of criticism on Mitt Romney as being out of touch with the regular person because he had his own jet and he had his own elevator for his car. People were turned off by all of that. Now there's this embrace of greed as sort of like the Gordon Gekko of the 80s, that greed is good.

But this idea of civic virtue is not something that we talk about anymore or the social contract. That we want to have a good public education system for our students so that the next generation will be better than the last after we're gone. You know, where's that? Where's that commitment? I think we need to get back to that and being truthful about our debate in politics is an essential part of that. But I think you've really hit on the central theme of this book, which is we have to care more about truth than tribe. We have to care more about each other than about profit.

jmk

Well, Barb, thank you so much for joining me today. The book, once again, is called Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. Thank you so much for writing the book. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Barbara McQuade

Thank you, Justin.