S8 Ep55: How autocracies try to undermine democracy with Anne Applebaum

[00:00:01] Due to the themes of this podcast, listener discretion is advised. Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies. Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics and intrigue.

[00:00:34] This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr. On today's podcast I'm joined by whole it's surprise winning author, journalist and historian Anne Applebaum. And we discuss her latest book Autocracy Inc. which gives a detailed look at the assaults by

[00:00:49] autocrats everywhere, both overt and covert on liberal democracies and open societies. I've been wanting to get Anne on the podcast for quite some time so I'm really looking forward to sharing this interview. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

[00:01:03] Just before we begin, if you're enjoying this podcast please consider supporting us directly by becoming a Patreon subscriber. All you need to do is just go to patreon.com forward slash secrets and spies. And depending on which level you pick you'll get a free coaster

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[00:01:33] of the producers and sponsors of this podcast. Anne, welcome to the podcast. The benefit of listeners not familiar with you and your work please can just tell us a little bit about yourself. I'm Anne Appelbaum. I'm a historian and writer. I wrote several books about Soviet

[00:02:04] and East European history, history of the Gulag, history of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, history of Ukrainian famine. I'm also a reporter. I write about US and European politics and I've

[00:02:17] just written a new book called Autocracy Inc. Yeah, which is what we're here to talk about today. It's a great book. So who or what is Autocracy Inc? The book describes a network. It's not an alliance,

[00:02:29] it's not an axis. We're not in a cold war with it. It's a network of countries who don't necessarily have anything in common ideologically but who work together around certain things, Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, plus others, Belarus, Zimbabwe, others around the world.

[00:02:50] There are some other, some states that cooperate with them sometimes and sometimes don't. Yes. But in essence, there are a group of countries who seek to maintain their power and maintain their regime stability partly through their use of

[00:03:06] money and partly through their desire to fight back and undermine us and against, to undermine our language. And I'm sure we'll talk about that more. Well, yeah, why do autocracy seek to undermine democracy? What are they afraid of?

[00:03:25] Mostly they're afraid of their own domestic opposition. So whether it was the Navalny movement in Russia which talked about corruption and demanded transparency and justice or whether it was the Hong Kong movement that demanded democracy and a lighter touch from the Communist Party

[00:03:43] or whether it's Iranian women's movement which demands an end to theocracy and the forced veil, these are all movements that use the language of civic organization. They talk about freedom. They talk about transparency. They talk about justice.

[00:04:01] They talk about the rule of law. And those are very popular ideas in those countries. And they have a deep appeal to people who live in brutal dictatorships. And the regimes understand that. And so their aim, first of all, has always been to crush and

[00:04:21] undermine those ideas inside their own countries. But increasingly as the world becomes more global and as the people are able to move around, they also want to undermine those ideas wherever they appear. And so they have begun to seek to use authoritarian narratives, not just inside

[00:04:45] Russia or China but also to promote them in Africa and Latin America but also even in the United States. Yeah, well how does that sort of online propaganda work? What kind of techniques are they using?

[00:04:57] I mean some of it's not really a matter of techniques. I mean so the Chinese for example have spent a huge amount of money buying media in, for example, in Africa. Television stations but

[00:05:09] also they have content sharing agreements with a lot of countries. So some of it is just that. They all of them have their own networks, their own broadcasting systems, their own radio and so

[00:05:22] on. Of course they have that often in many, many languages. But they also have a couple of other things they do. So the Russians are particularly good at creating media properties or websites that look native, that look like they're whatever Peruvian or South African,

[00:05:40] but are in fact Russian and are used to launder Russian propaganda. This is called information laundering. So people reading them don't think they're reading Russian propaganda but actually that's what it is. The Chinese have a version of this which also

[00:05:55] involves outreach to journalists and as I said content sharing agreements so that Chinese material will often appear in a native language or in a local market elsewhere in the world. They have really a pretty big network of media properties both legitimate and illegitimate

[00:06:16] that they speak through. Of course all of them use social media as well. I mean I think since 2016 everybody has been familiar with the concept of Russian trolling and Russian online anonymous online campaigns which they do on Twitter and Facebook and Telegram

[00:06:32] and many other forms of media. Anywhere where there's anonymity is allowed, where people can anonymously post. They take advantage of it. Those are the tactics but there's also a strategy as well and the strategy is about creating an authoritarian narrative.

[00:06:57] It's about creating an idea that autocracies and dictatorships are more stable, they're safer. They respond to what people really want which is traditional society or sometimes traditional morality. They seek to undermine democracies as chaotic, as violent, as dangerous,

[00:07:20] as unfair but also as degenerate. I mean literally sexually degenerate and morally degenerate. Make that contrast all the time so that they consolidate a set of ideas around themselves and then sometimes they seek to do the same. In Europe and America they've targeted very

[00:07:44] carefully the far right and it's very, very hard to tell when you're dealing with a far right German troll or is he a Russian troll because they use the same language, they have the same ideas,

[00:07:57] same metaphors and they all borrow the same memes in the same pictures and the same ideas from one another. That's a big part of what they do both inside their own countries and around the

[00:08:08] world. Yeah and I'm interested by that sort of appeal to the far right and even far left as well of Western cultures. Can you talk just a little bit about sort of that commonality that seems to

[00:08:19] appeal to the far left and the far right? I mean the far left and the far right in democracies are united by their dislike of their own political systems. Sometimes they have a slightly different reason for why they dislike them whether it's, I don't know,

[00:08:36] whether it's capitalist domination or whether it's dislike of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity there can be different reasons for it but they very much dislike their own countries. They seek to overthrow or undermine them. Sometimes they even use the language of

[00:08:58] the American right has started using the language of revolution. The head of the Heritage Foundation which is a long-standing, once upon a time conservative think tank recently said in an interview that there was a revolution coming and it would be bloodless as long as the left

[00:09:12] allowed it to be whatever that means. So increasingly they talk about overthrowing or changing or altering the system and JD Vance who's just been named as Donald Trump's vice presidential candidate is somebody who's talked pretty openly on numerous occasions about

[00:09:30] very radical changes that would fire everybody in the federal government and replace them with loyalists. Ideas that you would expect to hear in an illiberal or autocratic regime that had just taken power. So the far right has borrowed a lot from the autocratic world

[00:09:51] and I think seeks to imitate it. Yeah indeed and you see a lot of open far right support for Putin especially in regards to the war on Ukraine. Yes, I mean that's because the people who read the

[00:10:05] who are part of the network that reads material that originates in Russia also reads lies about Ukraine. One of the extraordinary things about Ukraine is how really quite blatant lies. I mean for example there was a story about President

[00:10:20] Zelensky owning yachts. You know, the person who doesn't own any yachts but there was a thing about how he owns two very big yachts and so on and that story was I think it was Mitch McConnell

[00:10:31] I may be misremembered but I know that one Republican senator said that he had heard his colleagues citing that story in arguments on the Senate floor. In other words American senators are now part of networks that pick up these fake stories about Ukraine and use

[00:10:47] them and use them in oral arguments. So it's now a very very successful way to get false information into people's heads is by attracting them to these autocratic networks and narratives and then using that to do Russian propaganda. So and that's you know,

[00:11:04] you can see the effect of it I mean you can see the effect on Vance and on Trump and on other American politicians as well. Yeah well let's talk a little bit more about that. How do autocracies use conspiracy theories, political cynicism and apathy to their advantage

[00:11:19] and kind of what's the goal of all that? Well the ultimate goal I mean one of the things that you achieve by lying all the time and by lying in a way that everybody knows it's lying or by lying

[00:11:31] in a contradictory way so whatever something happens there will be multiple different explanations but that actually happened on the day after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. There were dozens of different explanations you know it was a left-wing plot, it was a

[00:11:47] Biden administration plot, it was a and you heard this coming from different people in politics not just from trolls but from members of Congress. And one of the effects of all that

[00:11:58] is that it makes a lot of people say I don't want to watch television anymore and I don't want to be involved in politics and I don't want to listen to any of this because I have no

[00:12:07] way of knowing what's true and also it's very ugly and confusing. And if you can get people out of politics, if you can remove them from the public sphere, if you can convince them that there's

[00:12:20] nothing to be achieved there and that they can't have any influence and every and it's impossible to know what's true and what's not true then you're on a path in the direction of autocracy because that's what autocrats do they don't want the public involved in politics they want

[00:12:37] them out you know they want them they want to control the public sphere themselves and to dominate the economy and to dominate the political sphere without the intervention of ordinary people. And that's a that that and you can see that beginning to happen I think especially in the

[00:12:52] United States actually but there's versions of it in a lot of European countries too. Oh yeah I see I mean I'm in my early 40s technically middle age now but I noticed

[00:13:02] that a lot of people of my generation who kind of grew up in the 90s apathy was quite big and people 10 years younger than me and even 20 years younger me apathy is huge and a lot of people don't

[00:13:13] watch the news anymore don't like to be informed and try and find every way possible to escape reality. I think it does unfortunately seem to be working and youth voter turnout is very low

[00:13:25] now especially in the UK and to some extent the US. Yeah I mean it's been it's been successful and actually in the one or two examples of moments when an autocratic regime

[00:13:36] has been or an illiberal party has been taken out of office a lot of times it happens because of a big turnout. There was an election in Poland in October there they'd had a government that

[00:13:47] had been for eight years slowly undermining institutions and they were finally evicted mostly because of an election that produced an enormous turnout so millions more people than usually vote I think it was something like 73% turnout and in the cities it was 85% so it was a very

[00:14:05] big vote and that was instrumental in changing the country and in removing the sort of autocratic populist ruling party. So the public involvement and civic engagement is part of what is needed to push back against these kinds of changes but of course you know

[00:14:23] that that's precisely what autocratic and illiberal leaders don't want. Well yeah yeah I mean in your book you say that we should undermine the information war rather

[00:14:32] than sort of fight it can you talk to us a little bit about that? Well I think I just meant that it's you know simply fact-checking simply saying no that's not true doesn't help I mean it's been

[00:14:46] pretty clear that there's no longer you know because the fact-checkers themselves don't have authority among people and they aren't necessarily believed although I should say in Brazil there was a fact-checking political movement I mean people organized almost a kind of

[00:15:03] political party or political movement around the idea of fact-checking and around the idea of establishing the truth so you can imagine a way in which you could empower people who did that to you know or people could create a larger sense of momentum around doing that if you

[00:15:25] had the right people doing it but I mean I think one of the things that we can do is begin to expose how some of this works I mean if you can tell people if you can teach people

[00:15:38] how to understand what they read if you can explain how in some cases we've been successful for example the US has been successful in exposing some of these information laundering operations so websites and and and other news outlets that aren't real when they're exposed is not real and

[00:15:57] when that's communicated in the right way to enough people you can you know you can you can you can take away some of their power so you know there are things that can be done I mean I

[00:16:07] think people who want to be as truthful as possible and who want to reach you know and you know attain a custom kind of engagement need to also think about how they use emotion and how they use

[00:16:23] even even even emotions like optimism and hope and you know an idea about the future how they communicate that to people in a way that that that brings them back into the into the conversation

[00:16:36] so there are a lot of different ways of thinking about how to do it. Yeah and it is an interesting time we're in the moment as well because traditional media trust in it does appear to be kind of in a

[00:16:46] decline and at the same time a lot of traditional media is becoming kind of more corporatized and it's sort of getting he's getting harder and harder for people to sort of um sort of be able to

[00:16:58] reliably turn to those sources without and a lot of people sort of will point to any media bias as an example of well you shouldn't trust that sourcing how do we navigate that

[00:17:08] because it's quite a kind of complicated area. Well first of all the undermining of media is an authoritarian project there are people who've been seeking to do it deliberately and on purpose as a way of creating a veil of untransparency around themselves I mean this is what Donald

[00:17:25] Trump has done for the last eight or even ten years by constantly attacking the media he's neutered the stories the true stories about him you know whether it's financial shenanigans or you know rape or or other forms of misbehavior by and that's

[00:17:42] that's why he does what he does is is to deliberately undermine and you know there's a version of that that Nigel Farage does in the UK so it's not a it's it's something you can see in

[00:17:51] a lot of countries I would also say that there's another thing going on which is that media are genuinely weaker than they were because the business model of media has been undermined and

[00:18:03] it's you know it's not wrong to say that some media outlets that were better you know a decade ago are worse now and so I think there's a combination of finding a way to support them

[00:18:15] I mean I think a lot of it's going to have to be done through philanthropy or foundations and finding a way of you know for those outlets to reconnect with people whether it's through

[00:18:28] becoming forms of civic engagement themselves I mean I know that the magazine I work for the Atlantic thinks a lot about how to create a community around the Atlantic or how to

[00:18:38] how to bring people in and talk to them and create events for them and offer them something other than just a magazine subscription and and the the the media outlets that have been most

[00:18:47] successful are the ones that can do that yes the New York Times does it a little bit you know but and and so thinking about what media is I think has to be it has you it's not just

[00:18:59] you're not I mean of course you're reporting the news and you're saying what happened yesterday but you also need to think about how you're reaching people and how how they're hearing it

[00:19:07] and some some media is better at that than others yeah indeed indeed well let's take a quick break and then we'll be right back well America and Europe are not the only targets of autocratic

[00:19:39] states so how do they target other parts of the world such as Africa Latin America in the Middle East and what kind of talking points do they use so Africa and the Middle East are both and

[00:19:51] and South America I should say are major targets for Russia for China and for Iran as well as for other local or regional autocracies you know the Chinese consider Africa to be very important

[00:20:06] they have it as I said they have this huge media network there they have a few huge investment network there their way of investing is very often conducive to autocratic regimes they you know they'll they'll invest in a project and they'll be a kickback to politicians you know

[00:20:23] they're not they're not overly concerned about corruption and and much of what they do has the effect of entrenching people who are in power and some of the kind of investment they do is also

[00:20:35] you know they'll you know a country will borrow a lot of money to build a bridge or build a highway they won't be able to pay it back and then the Chinese will take possession of those properties

[00:20:45] and there have been some instances of that so there a lot of what they do is not necessarily good for the country but my maybe it's good for the people who took the bribes or who set up the deal

[00:20:56] and and so there so there so some some of that helps I mean the Russians have a much more aggressive and frankly old-fashioned way of of intervening in Africa which is they have the Wagner

[00:21:08] mercenaries who became famous for their work in Ukraine are active all over Africa but particularly in West Africa and the Sahel and they and and they help you know they it's almost

[00:21:19] like there's a there's a kind of playbook I mean they they'll go to dictators this or you know or or military leaders and they'll say you want to stay in power or you want to gain power

[00:21:30] you know employ us will help you and then Wagner mercenaries will come and help them fight off their enemies and in return you know give us a diamond mine

[00:21:38] you know or give us a gold mine and so there's quite a lot of evidence of this I mean I'm talking about it very generally here but the you know there the the deal is that then Wagner will

[00:21:48] control some kind of resources and they'll have special access and they'll be able to export whatever materials it is whether it's gold or gems or something else and and that's their arrangement I mean it's a kind of almost primitive colonial arrangement it's almost I don't know kind of

[00:22:04] kind of clive of India stuff you know we're bringing some mercenaries will beat up your enemies in exchange we're gonna we're gonna steal your resources and and so that and that and that's

[00:22:14] what they do and again it works because there are there are regimes in in in West Africa who want that I mean they they'd rather have that than some UN people telling them what to do and they'd

[00:22:26] rather and and that's you know I I'm guessing there will eventually be more more of a push back to that than there is now but right now it's um they get they get away with it

[00:22:37] I mean generally speaking one of the one of the big ideas of the book is is that for a lot of autocratic regimes it makes sense to support their you know their their colleagues you know the you

[00:22:52] know the whether it's the leaders of Russia supporting the leaders of Venezuela whether it's the Chinese investing in Venezuela you know there's they they see they see one another so we tend to look at the world as these kind of geographic bubbles you know we have whatever

[00:23:08] Middle East experts and we have Central American experts and we have African experts but they don't see the world that way they see it as connected and they are interested in doing deals and having alliances and economic relationships with like-minded dictators in other places

[00:23:24] and that explains a lot of Russian or Chinese or indeed Iranian foreign policy no indeed how can we I suppose in a sense better train Western students of foreign policy to

[00:23:38] sort of look at the world in a more whole way rather than just in separate sort of regions like you just described I mean I didn't know that you need a special program

[00:23:47] you know you you simply need to talk about it in that way I mean that one of the points of me writing this book which is you know is a very short book it's just a it's a little

[00:23:56] essay really yeah is to provoke those kinds of conversations you know how do we how do we start looking at these relationships and not just talking about having a Russia policy or a China policy how do we have a policy towards the Russian-Chinese alliance

[00:24:10] you know the Russians have proved to be very good at dodging certain kinds of sanctions and export controls because of their relationship with Russia because of their relationship with Turkey I mean China sorry Turkey and especially Iran and North Korea who've been

[00:24:26] supplying the Russians with ammunition so they you know I think simply you know once you start seeing that once you begin to see their relationships it's hard to unsee them because it explains so much of how particularly the weaker regimes manage to stay in power I mean

[00:24:43] the you know Belarusian dictator is profoundly unpopular he would not win a free election Maduro the Venezuelan dictator profoundly unpopular he would not win a free election they're they're in power because they've been helped out by these other states and as I said

[00:25:01] identifying that and understanding it would help us understand the world a lot better and you don't need I should say you don't need like international relations theory or I mean just I mean observing the world as it is and watching what they do and putting together

[00:25:16] some of the stories I mean one of the other things about this book was while I was writing it I realized that almost everything has been written already in other words a lot of my material comes

[00:25:26] from think tank reports or other other government reports or sometimes academic research or journalism you know there are people who've been telling parts of the story you know and it's all

[00:25:40] the materials available it's not like it's a secret I mean there's there was you know I met somebody who was an who was an expert on the relationship between Iran and Venezuela you know two countries that have nothing in common culturally or historically or anything else except that

[00:25:54] they're both under sanctions they both produce oil and they help one another out and so his expertise was there it's just a question of putting it together and and and understanding how

[00:26:06] common these patterns are and how they work yes I've been careful not to sort of silo that sort of information now many commentators like to kind of say the current situation between

[00:26:18] democracies and autocracies is sort of akin to a new cold war what do you think or feel about that analogy so I dislike that analogy because the cold war implies that there are two blocks

[00:26:31] they each have a clear ideology there's some kind of geographic divide between them you know there's the Berlin wall that separates one half from the other half and I don't think it works like

[00:26:42] that anymore as I as we as I've said already the the autocratic alliance is is not based on ideology it's based on some common interests and you know and they have other in other areas they

[00:26:56] have different interests and they can be and lines can be drawn between them and you know and and they also have an enormous amount of influence inside the democratic world I mean there you know there

[00:27:10] are as we just talked about the far right is it is effectively no different from uses the same language as as the Russians do you know and the and the reverse is also true I mean there are very

[00:27:21] big democratic movements inside the autocratic world and we should be aligned with them and we should listen to them also by the way because they often understand those states and how they operate a lot better than anyone else I mean the Russian opposition understood the degree

[00:27:37] to which the regime was dependent on western financial institutions before anybody in in the west was really paying attention to that they've been talking about it for years I was that was

[00:27:46] what Alexi Navalny was most famous for doing so so so under so it's a bit more porous I mean it's not like there's a we can geographically separate these two groups because there's there are autocratic movements inside our own societies which are very powerful I mean one of

[00:28:03] them controls the American Republican Party now. Well what what can be done to tackle these sort of autocratic leanings in the UK Europe and America. You know a lot of politicians are seeking

[00:28:16] the answer to that I mean Kier Starmor and the people around him think about that a lot actually I mean that I don't know that the UK was threatened with autocracy but they certainly think about

[00:28:25] populism and they have and they talk a lot about how I was just in I was just in Britain just in the run up to the election and a lot a lot of people who work for labour

[00:28:36] are thinking about what are we going to do you know they see the next threat as a you know as a kind of populist movement how do we head it off and they you know there are people who think they

[00:28:46] have economic answers you know if we can make changes to the economy if we can make it more fair if we can involve more people I mean there's there's an economic answer but there may also be

[00:28:56] a cultural answer. And as I said in Poland part of the answer in the in an election that was won against autocratic populists part of the part of the answer was to do with

[00:29:09] motivating people to vote or finding ways to reengage people who'd been put off by politics. So there's a there's a there there are different answers in different countries I mean I actually thought the Biden campaign in 2020 was a pretty good anti-populist campaign you know Biden talked

[00:29:26] a lot about ordinary people I remember an ad he made that was about ordinary people trying to get through their day you know where we all we want to do is help you do that and we know that

[00:29:37] you go to work in order to take care of your families and we want to be partners something like that and I thought that was very effective you know what is the role of government the

[00:29:45] role of government is to help you a bit and not you know terrorize you or frighten you or or or create culture wars you know that that involve you and so so there is there is

[00:29:56] campaigning language I mean there there there it's also true that we have in these profoundly unequal societies that we live in the the space for you know the feelings of unfairness or feelings

[00:30:11] of exclusion are easier and finding some way to end that would help and then I think I mean I have a I've been saying for years that there are ways to regulate social media that you know

[00:30:21] I didn't I don't even know if it's worth talking about anymore because it's so far away from reality that nobody seems willing to do it maybe the european union will do it but but um it's it's uh

[00:30:32] you know you have to be willing to take on some of the platforms and whether it's regulating algorithms or just demanding transparency we you know nobody seems willing to do it right now

[00:30:43] but that's obviously has to be part of the part of the solution yeah indeed indeed well on a more sort of personal level what can listeners listening to us chatty today do to both protect themselves from anti-democratic propaganda and also sort of tackle the growing power of autocracy

[00:31:00] ink you mean other than read my book well other than really but I mean read your book which should be number one definitely and your articles too they're very good subscribe to the Atlantic there's part one subscribe to the Atlantic exactly right

[00:31:19] no I mean the you know I think it's it's you know understanding where your information is coming from and being conscious all the time of who's producing it asking yourself when you hear a story

[00:31:34] does it come from an organization that at least tries to fact check you know that at least tries to that has some rules about reporting or does it come from you know your cousin who is might be

[00:31:46] making it up um thinking thinking very hard about what kind of information you believe I think I think having a role whether it's just inside your community or in a in a political campaign

[00:31:57] or in a if you're in the US working in a in a in a you know in a for an election or in a in a polling booth having some thinking about what role you can personally play I mean I found that during the 2020

[00:32:10] election which was in some ways a strange moment it was very it was because it was the middle of pandemic people were very panicky and anxious um and a lot of people and I told a lot of people

[00:32:21] you know if you feel panicky and anxious it's partly because you feel helpless you can't do anything and so sometimes it helps to just do something you know what is the you know what is

[00:32:31] the low who is the local candidate in your state senate election or who is the you know where is there a local polling booth you can work in or is there something that you can do that makes

[00:32:43] you feel engaged or I don't know maybe there maybe it doesn't even have to be political I mean just be some some form of community engagement I think that helps people a lot feel feel connected

[00:32:53] to other people with the same concerns and and and ultimately that's what it's it's those kinds of independent civic organizations and people who work for them that autocrats seek to push back

[00:33:05] against and making sure that you're you know you're not a victim of that propaganda I think is very important yeah I think finding that human connection is very important because it's very easy to read the internet I think everybody um hates you or you can hate everybody

[00:33:20] but when you start meeting everybody you start to realize actually things are not quite the easy yeah I mean the online the online world is horrible you know the online world is you know

[00:33:30] think think about it if you're in a room and somebody walked in with a mask on and started shouting at you what would you say you would say get out I mean why what right do you have

[00:33:39] to talk to me you have a mask on I don't even know who you are but on the internet you know anonymous people shout at you and you get upset you know why I mean you should just block them or

[00:33:50] I don't know move on but yeah but the I I thought for a long time that the anonymity is the real is the is the is the crux of the problem at least on the mainstream social media on

[00:34:03] you know on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram but I don't think actually in Instagram it's hard to be honest yeah I think am I right in thinking Estonia with their digital citizenship

[00:34:11] of sort of addressed that a little bit to counter yeah I mean that there's an a whole nother set of interesting issues which is could there be ways more creative ways of using the internet to

[00:34:23] have political debate or there's any debate doesn't have to be political and there are some experiments where the Taiwanese for example have a you know occasionally have big public discussions using a you know a kind of bespoke internet platform that whose algorithm is

[00:34:41] designed to pull together people with similar views so that and to look for compromises I mean there's there are ways in which we could use if we were creative we could use technology

[00:34:52] to debate and discuss the world in a way that doesn't you know turn into chaos I mean remember that the existing big social media companies their algorithms are based on what travels the fastest is whatever's the most emotional sometimes the angriest and sometimes the most

[00:35:14] in divisive material and and so and so priority goes to people who are good at that you know who are good at anger and emotion and a social media platform that didn't prioritize that but

[00:35:27] instead prioritized you know I don't know rational debate might might solve some of the problem but those are as I said I two or three years ago I worked on a project where we looked at all these

[00:35:40] different ways you might reform the internet and what would the alternatives to the platforms be and I wrote with a colleague Peter Pomerance if we wrote a big piece about it and then

[00:35:49] and then I slowly realized that nobody wants to deal with it and people are afraid of it and a lot of our politicians aren't technically competent to understand it and it disappeared

[00:36:00] I mean it's a there's kind of a moment when people started to talk about it but now it feels impossible I know we have politics politicians would have to care you know and they don't yeah yeah it's true

[00:36:09] it's very complicated especially in America because there's obviously the first amendment issues but then you've got a lot of these tech companies I'm talking a bit widely here but a lot of them tend to be run by libertarians who seem to be these free speech absolutists

[00:36:22] and don't seem to really understand except that they're not free speech absolutists I mean Elon must describe himself as that but he'll he's perfectly happy to censor Twitter on behalf of the Indian

[00:36:32] government which you know or I mean he and he you know a lot of the and he's also perfectly willing to to manipulate and promote lies and conspiracy theories so he's that's all fake

[00:36:45] I mean the free speech thing is entirely false oh yeah totally totally and how do we navigate that because it again like Facebook it famously in 2016 you know not not well it was a platform that

[00:36:58] was allowed to pump a lot of disinformation and the tech company seemed very slow and almost a bit unwilling to really take responsibility for this yep they were I mean they've gone in different directions since then I mean I think Metta which owns Facebook and Instagram and threads

[00:37:17] has tried to downplay political and even information and journalism altogether so that they don't even really appear on the site which has its other side effect which is that was though it was through those platforms that people were getting

[00:37:31] you know we're getting journalism and now they don't get it and Twitter's done the same I should say and you know and at the same time Twitter has become worse it's it's a

[00:37:42] the you know there's a clear presence of both people who do active disinformation but as well as Russian Russian and other you know other other states have you know clearly trying to manipulate algorithms and and and spread false narratives there and that doesn't seem to be a priority

[00:38:00] anymore I mean there may be an EU pushback against Twitter because the EU is I think might be the only institution in the world that could control it because it's a well because

[00:38:10] it's a that's what they do they regulate things you know they think a lot about regulation and and also these aren't their companies so in the US it's difficult because these are American

[00:38:20] companies and they have a lot of influence in Congress and they have you know Silicon Valley is very powerful in lots of ways and gives a lot of money to politics and so so it's harder

[00:38:32] there maybe that the EU is able to do it that you know later down the road I know they talk about it a lot but anyway we'll see yeah yeah we'll have to keep an eye on that well and

[00:38:41] before you go is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up today I think I think it's important if you're going to read the book to remember that it's a first draft kind of argument

[00:38:51] I I'm trying to describe what's something that's emerging I don't have all the answers and I don't have not every fact that that would prove my thesis is in the book

[00:39:03] and I'm hoping that people pay attention to the story how or how does how do autocracies work how do they work together how do they influence us and that other people take it farther so please

[00:39:15] please think of the book as an introduction to the subject yeah fantastic well where can listeners sort of find out more about you and your other work and obviously more about the book well

[00:39:24] I have a website which is an applebaum.com you can read me in the Atlantic I published fairly regularly I have a sub-stack which is maybe not as I only started it recently and I

[00:39:39] I have to juggle it with my Atlantic work but I do yes publish on that and pretty I think a lot of my new work will be available on that so and that's I don't know it's an apple on

[00:39:49] dot sub-stack.com or something so it's very easy to find and and you know I've written several other books in the past which you can look up Twilight of Democracy was published

[00:39:59] in 2020 is another short book that was more focused on decline of western democracies as opposed to the autocratic world and then you know my other books as I said are mostly history books but

[00:40:16] history is also important so I know there are lots of places to find me if you you know if you if you search not very hard so cool fantastic well thank you very much your time today thank you thanks for listening this is secrets and spies