In Reality

Social media platforms know a ton about who you are from your online behavior, but there’s one thing they can’t yet know: what you’re thinking at any given moment. That is the last stronghold of privacy in the digital age, except our next guest believes that could be about to fall, too. Nita Farahany is a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and a leading scholar on the social implications of new technologies. Her new book, The Battle for Your Brain, discusses rapid advances in neurotechnology, the marriage of brain science and AI and what it means for us all. In our conversation, Nita and I cover what exactly science can infer about your thoughts from brain data, about the risk that poses to mental privacy, and how we can avoid with this new technology the kinds of errors we made with social media.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

It’s received wisdom today that tribalism, confirmation bias and other mentalerrors are deeply embedded in human nature. And once social media began exploiting these forces, truth didn’t stand a chance. Well, not so fast. Today’sguest is David Rand, professor of management and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. To cite a very incomplete list of his accolades, he has been recognized by the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarship; the Poynter Institute, which named him fact-checking researcher of the year,and just this past fall by the Thinkers 50 Radar List. His research bridges cognitive science, behavioral economics and social psychology, and from that vantage, he argues that consumers of media have more free will than you might think and that there are ways out of our information dystopia. Dave and I will cover the role of distraction in the spread of misinformation, how fact-checking might actually scale, and why Americans are actually receptiveto other points of view, if you just give them a chance.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

The first casualty of polarization is not truth, perhaps, but rather empathy. Your opponent is not just wrong, but contemptible, their behavior not just troubling to you but beyond comprehension. These are earmarks of what today’s guest calls high conflict, and it characterizes much public discourse today. Amanda Ripley is a journalist who has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic, among other places, and is the author of the book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Can Get Out. She’s also the co-founder of Good Conflict, a non-profit that trains organizations to keep normal disagreement from turning toxic. Amanda and I talk about the difference between good conflict and high conflict, why anger is fine but contempt is not, why the apparent cause of high conflict is rarely the real story, and why journalists need help not just covering conflict but managing it in their own newsrooms. Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

At one point in the post-truth era, fact-checking seemed like the way back to a shared reality. Just get evidence-based truth out there, and disinformation would slink away in disgrace. Snopes, Kinzen, Meedan and others are built on that belief. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. Falsehood still seems to have the drop on truth. So, today’s guest joins me to help us understand why. Angie Drobnic Holan is a journalist and long-time editor-in-chief of Poltifact, one of the world’s premier fact-checkers. She was also recently named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard to examine the role of journalism in democracy. Angie and I will cover the role of fact-checking in social media today; the case for and limits of objective truth; and the practice of fact-checking when evidence is evolving, as in the case of the origins of Covid-19.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Outside the friendly confines of this podcast, it’s hard to talk about truth and media without the discussion turning emotional. These are incendiary topics, which is why it’s especially useful to be able to draw on cool analysis. This is how many people characterize the work of this episode’s guest, Michael Rich, president emeritus of the think tank RAND Corporation and co-author of one of the seminal books on facts and media in American public discourse, written with fellow RAND analyst Jennifer Kavanaugh, Truth Decay. Truth Decay was published in 2019, and the analytical framework that it proposed still holds true four years later. In this episode, Michael and Eric discuss the four forces that he believes caused truth to decay in public life; why the current period of misinformation started much earlier than you think; and how media endured several earlier periods of mistrust and how it recovered each time.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

You can’t get more than a few minutes into any conversation about trust in media today before Walter Cronkite makes an appearance. People say they long for those days when everyone believed TV news, their hometown daily gave facts without slant, and CBS news reader Cronkite was the most trusted person in America. Well, to paraphrase Cronkite’s signature signoff, that’s not the way it was. He was never the most trusted man, just the facts news was almost never the profession’s default setting, and when it was, it made for pretty thin journalism. This episode’s guest, Professor Michael Schudson of Columbia Journalism School, has written or co-authored 15 books about the history and sociology of the American media landscape and he brings a historical lens to the question of what news was, is, and ought to aspire to be. In this episode, Eric and Michael cover the myth of news media’s golden age, the thorny question of objectivity, journalism as a check on tyranny, and what an informed citizen in a liberal democracy really needs to know.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

One of the goals of In Reality is to introduce our listeners to people who are on the front lines of the battle against disinformation. But battles have casualties, and Nina Jankowicz is one of them. Nina is a highly respected expert on Russian disinformation strategies and the author of two books, How to Lose the Information War and How to Be a Woman Online. In the spring of 2022, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of what it called the Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate the department’s defenses against networked propaganda, and named Nina as director. Disinformation forces attacked instantly. Social media was swamped by figures inside and outside of government  who deliberately mischaracterized the role of the board and Nina’s qualifications to run it. After two weeks of unrelenting attacks, the D.H.S. dissolved the board, and Nina resigned. In this episode, Eric and Nina talk about how it felt to go through that, why the D.H.S. was so helpless in the face of a homegrown disinformation attack, and about the personal attacks that besiege Nina to this day. They also cover the failures of the social media giants to police their own sites, the true meaning of free speech, and what the U.S. can learn from European democracies about countering disinformation.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Polarization has reached such a fever pitch in the United States that each side of the political divide sees the other as an existential threat to democracy. Partisans use the same pejoratives to describe the other’s beliefs: arrogant, uninformed, incomprehensible. But what if people are wrong about what the other side thinks? What if we’ve actually got more in common? This idea has come up before on In Reality with the survey firm Populace, but its best-known support derives from work done by the global research firm, More in Common. Today, host Eric Schurenberg joins the co-founder and CEO of More in Common, Mathieu Lefevre, to discuss the gaps in perception between what people think the other side thinks and what they really do, why those gaps persist, whether More in Common is subject to its own confirmation bias, and why content moderation is a losing game.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

If social media platforms don’t directly cause polarization, they do, at least, give oxygen to smoldering divisions that can erupt into tragedies like the Myanmar genocide, Brexit, and January 6th. Why is social media so effective at unleashing the worst in us, and how do we break its hold? This episode’s guest, Christopher Bail, pursues those questions as the director of Duke University’s Polarization Lab. He’s also the author of Breaking the Social Media Prism, which was named one of the top five non-fiction books of 2021. Chris and host Eric Schurenberg discuss the role of status-seeking on social media, the personality types most susceptible to online radicalization, and an intriguing experimental platform his team designed that actually encouraged civil discourse.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

At some point in conversations about the media, somebody inevitably says, “I just want a single source of true, instantaneous, and uplifting information so that I don't have to think about it.” The longing is understandable—but let's get real. In this era of unlimited and ungoverned information, you have to construct your own trusted news environment and weed out what is unreliable. Helping people do that is the mission of today’s guest, Alan Miller, the founder of The News Literacy Project. This 14-year-old non-partisan organization trains students and adults on how to tell fact from fiction in media. Together, Eric and Alan talk about standing up for factuality in a world of alternate realities, remaining non-partisan while defending truth, and how to have constructive conversations with those who disagree with you.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com