The Gray Area with Sean Illing

How Big Tech benefits from the disinformation panic

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Sean Illing talks with Joe Bernstein of BuzzFeed News about online disinformation and what — if anything — can be done about it. They discuss the role of tech giants in the spread of propaganda, why it's been impossible for researchers to agree on what disinformation even is, and how the nature of both mass media and democracy means that disinformation is here to stay.

Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, Vox

Guest: Joe Bernstein (@Bernstein), Senior Reporter, BuzzFeed News

References: 

  • "Bad News: Selling the story of disinformation" by Joseph Bernstein (Harper's; Sept. 2021)
  • "Civil Society Must Be Defended: Misinformation, Moral Panics, and Wars of Restoration" by Jack Bratich (Communication, Culture & Critique 13 (3); Sept. 2020)
  • "The Priest in Politics: Father Charles E. Coughlin and the Presidential Election of 1936" by Philip A. Grant Jr. (Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 101 (1); 1990)
  • "Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers" by Hannah Arendt (NYRB; Nov. 18, 1971)
  • Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet by Tim Hwang (FSG Originals; 2020)
  • "Does Instagram Harm Girls? No One Actually Knows" by Laurence Steinberg (New York Times; Oct. 10)
  • The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement by Paul Matzko (Oxford; 2020)
  • "What's so bad about scientism?" by Moti Mizrahi (Social Epistemology 31 (4); 2017)


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    This episode was made by: 

    • Producer: Erikk Geannikis
    • Editor: Amy Drozdowska
    • Engineer: Paul Robert Mounsey
    • Deputy Editorial Director, Vox Talk: Amber Hall

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