YouTube Radicalizes, What's the Right Word for It?

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Hodehek: Social media is great for dissidents as well. But it's not an unalloyed good. The way they keep people on the site by keeping them interested, is a bit like keeping people in a cafeteria by giving them constant chips ice cream. When you sort of eat this manu indicatorios, people watch different things. And i think the problems here are that we have tried to do the same thing over and over again with no success. We're looking at very broad data,. because what we need is tubes, perhaps linked to a internal panel or something similar. Hodehek says he doesn't believe social media has radicalized anyone so far.

When Zeynep Tufekci penned a New York Times op-ed at the onset of the pandemic challenging the prevailing public health guidance that ordinary people should not wear masks, she thought it was the end of her public writing career. Instead, it helped provoke the CDC to reverse its guidance a few weeks later, and medical professionals privately thanked her for writing it. While relieved by the reception, she also saw it as a sign of a deeper dysfunction in the scientific establishment: why should she, a programmer and sociologist by training, have been the one to speak out rather than a credentialed expert? And yet realizing her outsider status and academic tenure allowed her to speak more freely than others, she continued writing and has become one of the leading public intellectuals covering the response to COVID-19.

Zeynep joined Tyler to discuss problems with the media and the scientific establishment, what made the lab-leak hypothesis unacceptable to talk about, how her background in sociology was key to getting so many things right about the pandemic, the pitfalls of academic contrarianism, what Max Weber understood about public health crises, the underrated aspects of Kemel Mustapha’s regime, how Game of Thrones interested her as a sociologist (until the final season), what Americans get wrong about Turkey, why internet-fueled movements like the Gezi protests fizzle out, whether Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise in Turkey, how she’d try to persuade a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic, whether public health authorities should ever lie for the greater good, why she thinks America is actually less racist than Europe, how her background as a programmer affects her work as a sociologist, the subject of her next book, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Note: This conversation was recorded on July 14th, 2021, before the FDA granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.

Other ways to connect

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
Follow Tyler on Twitter
Follow Zeynep on Twitter
Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

Thumbnail photo credit: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society