The Conspiracies Swarming Campus Protests
Leah Feiger, Makena Kelly, Vittoria Elliott, David Gilbert
podcasts, wired politics lab podcast, politics, protests, israel-hamas war
Disinformation and conspiracies spun out of control last week when police departments raided college campuses across the country during pro-Palestinian protests.

Campus protests over the war in Gaza have been going on for months at American universities. Now that they're at an all-time high, protests have been getting a lot more attention—and tons of disinformation and conspiracies are spreading. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we talk about some of that disinformation and what student journalists on the ground are doing to report the facts. Plus, we look at how foreign actors are exploiting the dissent.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Makena Kelly is @kellymakena. Vittoria Elliot is @telliotter. Write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Leah Feiger: Welcome to WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I'm Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. Since the October 7th massacre in Israel, a lot has happened. There's a devastating war in Gaza, heightened Islamophobia and antisemitism in the US, and protests have erupted on college campuses across the country over the last few weeks. These protests have become the largest student movement in the US in decades. And of course, disinformation and conspiracies on these issues have been everywhere. So today on the show, we're going to talk about how student journalists are covering the protests and dealing with this disinformation, and how foreign actors are exploiting the dissent. Joining me today are two reporters from the WIRED Politics Desk, Vittoria Elliott, and Makena Kelly. They've spent the last few days talking to student journalists from around the country. How's it going?

Makena Kelly: Hey there.

Vittoria Elliot: Hello. Hello.

Leah Feiger: Let's talk about why you both wanted to talk to student journalists for this episode and your upcoming story on WIRED.com about disinformation in these protests. What specifically about them and their situations made them the perfect people to learn from and understand what's been happening on the ground here?

Makena Kelly: Sure. So I think the big thing to note is that these student journalists have been covering their campus every day, not just for this semester, but last semester. And for many of them years and years before.

Leah Feiger: Local journalism, we love it.

Makena Kelly: And so they know these people, they know the administrators, they understand how the system works, and that's why they become such an important resource. Like what we saw with WKCR and all of these—

Leah Feiger: The Columbia student radio.

Makena Kelly: The student radio station. Yeah.

Leah Feiger: They were amazing.

Makena Kelly: They were reporting everything live, and they became one of the most important resources. I think CNN only had one reporter on campus reporting while the raid was going on, and it was because she was a student.

Vittoria Elliot: One of the things that I noticed in the national coverage was it seemed like there was a hesitance to just be like, "Yeah, we don't know." And a lot of these national outlets treated these student journalists like sources rather than reporters that maybe they could hire and had special access, which I thought was interesting. But I think the other big thing too that we saw a lot was not only did national media not have access, but also the students themselves who were participants in the protests didn't feel comfortable talking to national media. So the position of student journalists meant that there's peers there, they trust each other. And I think a lot of times, maybe national media didn't quite understand the stakes there. These students talking to the press, they could get doxxed, they could have their families threatened. And if you had a university like Columbia that was looking at disciplinary action, because it was a small group of students, in a lot of cases, they didn't want to talk to the media because that could come with disciplinary action. And that meant that for people on the outside, the statements and the information that was easiest to access was stuff coming from the police and stuff coming from the administration because those people aren't going to get in trouble if they speak. And that also creates this massive gap that then assumptions can percolate into and can make it very, very difficult to figure out what's actually going on and kind of blow this out of proportion in many ways.

Makena Kelly: These fears of doxxing weren't unjustified. Just a couple of months ago, many of these student protesters who have been speaking out on behalf of Palestine and Gaza have had their faces put on trucks that have been driving around Columbia's campus that have gotten a lot of national media coverage.

Leah Feiger: Right, absolutely. Which is where these student journalists come in so well positioned to do on-the-ground reporting and factual reporting. So one of the things that really caught my attention over the last few weeks with the protests, because of what we like to cover here on the WIRED Politics Desk, has been all the misinformation and disinformation swirling around what's going on. What have you both found?

Vittoria Elliot: Well, let's first talk about New York. So protests started at Columbia in mid-April, and it was actually one group of students that were arrested very peacefully. And by that I mean they recognized that they were facing arrest if they occupied the lawn, they sat in a circle, the police sort of came around, tapped people on the shoulder. They would get up, they would get zip tied, they'd walk away. It sort of wasn't a big hullabaloo. And then there was actually a second group of protesters after that first group was arrested, that occupied and encamped on the lawn. And the school reacted pretty strongly. They shut off access to campus. So if you're in New York, you can normally cut through Columbia's campus, you can walk through, it's open to the public. If you didn't have an ID or weren't a professor, you couldn't get in. And it also eventually ended up calling the NYPD on the students after they occupied one of the buildings, Hamilton Hall. By that time, the protests had spread to a ton of other college campuses as well, some of which reacted equally as strong as Columbia and some of which have been pretty chill. It's been really variable. But because there was not a ton of access to these student encampments, a lot of students didn't necessarily want to talk to the press. And we had a lot of statements that weren't necessarily accurate coming from police, from administrators. Again, it's created a ton of gaps where it just can be filled by disinformation, it can be filled by people's assumptions, and that has really been fodder for some wild times out here.

Leah Feiger: So what were some of the specific things that we were seeing?

Makena Kelly: Oh my gosh. In Columbia, there was a handful of things. The day after the protests and the NYPD raid, we saw police officers going on local television and showing these bike locks that could only be used by outside agitators. Students didn't know enough to be able to use these locks, when really these locks were sold on campus for bikes.

Leah Feiger: Very normal bike locks. And then, the tent thing as well.

Vittoria Elliot: Right? Yeah. So actually our colleague, David Gilbert, actually wrote about Tent Gate. A lot of the students had similar tents, and people on the internet saw that as an indication of a coordinated effort or some big backing by a big-tent corporate overlord.

Leah Feiger: Big tent is pro-Palestine.

Vittoria Elliot: Yeah. And it turned out it was just that was the cheapest tent and the one that came up most on Google search. And obviously if you're a student on a budget, trying to get a tent quickly makes sense.

Leah Feiger: Right, right. Well, let's get into one of these a little bit more. The outside agitator claim was made and boosted by the New York Police Department. Makena, you spoke with someone at Columbia's Newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, about how student journalists there were dealing with that. Talk me through that.

Makena Kelly: Right. I spoke with Esha Karam, who's the managing editor at the Spectator. Specifically on arrests, Esha explained the different types of information they were receiving from the NYPD and school administration.

Esha Karam [Archival audio clip]: The narrative that's being spun right now in the media is this outside agitators thing. Obviously the university has said one thing, the NYPD has said another thing. So we're really trying to independently verify everything that we hear.

Makena Kelly: NYPD was claiming that a majority of the people who were arrested that night were not students. Their numbers were extremely different than what administrators said. And even this week, as I was talking to Esha, she mentioned that reporters are still talking to people that they know who participate in the protests, who are students on campus, to try and fact-check all of these numbers.

Leah Feiger: Tori, get us a little bit more into the claims of non-affiliates or outside agitators and what was in there.

Vittoria Elliot: So I think to back up, similar to the tent conspiracy that David covered, I think a lot of conspiracies that we've seen, and frankly has even been repeated by CNN about these things. The coverage wasn't great that night. Dana Bash was on CNN for hours it seemed, talking about this outside agitator narrative without really any input from the school or students themself and just relying on the New York Police Department.

Dana Bash [Archival audio clip]: NYPD was able to clear Columbia University after protesters barricaded themselves inside a campus building, but it is unclear how many were actually students.

Leah Feiger: That was wild to watch.

Vittoria Elliot: It was crazy. And also, I think part of it is when you send police onto campus to arrest students, that's a bad look. So it makes sense for the New York Police Department and even Columbia to really lean into that narrative, but that also makes it so much harder for the students. And I actually spoke to Katrina Ventura, who is a graduate student at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, which had its own new service up and running for this. And she and her classmate reported a story about what exactly that meant there. At the time, Columbia was saying there were 13 non-affiliates. So that means people who are not students at the university and not working at the university. But what they actually found of these 13 non-affiliates, some of them were alumni or they were associated with groups that had chapters at Columbia, like Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice in Palestine. So they were people who worked with those organizations, but maybe just weren't students at the Columbia chapter of those organizations. But at no point did their reporting show that these were somehow just random outside people escalating the problem. In fact, most of the random outside people escalating the problem were outside the universities. And those were a lot of times the people that the media were talking to.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely. And even the number 13 there, the NYPD was claiming that almost everyone involved was an outside agitator. The numbers from Columbia itself, from the NYPD, these were very, very different. And now the students are still trying to figure out exactly what happened.

Vittoria Elliot: And this was also true at City College, New York, which is part of the CUNY system, the city university system. And so I actually spoke to a student journalist there, Leon Orlov-Sullivan, and he was talking about how with this outside agitator narrative, if you are a CUNY student at any one of the CUNY schools in New York, you can get into any of the CUNY campuses. So when we're talking about outside agitators, are we really just talking about students from other parts of the CUNY system?

Leah Feiger: Who use other schools, libraries, and study spaces all the time.

Vittoria Elliot: Totally. And again, they also had some alums. So when we're talking about outsiders, what does it really mean?

Leah Feiger: And historically, the idea of “outside agitators” have been used for decades. Frankly, it's as American as apple pie to call a protester an outside agitator. NYPD is just following a long, long tradition here. So Makena, in your conversation with Esha from Columbia Spectator, she walked you through their publishing process, right? And how they're actually able to fact-check all of this as it's happening. Talk to me about that.

Makena Kelly: Sure. So her paper had been covering these protests since the first one on Columbia's campus, which was October 12th.

Esha Karam: Since that time period. Really, it's the same group of students who are organizing these protests. And because we know these students, because we've talked to these students and we've reported on these issues before, we really have that advantage of being really close to the community that we cover. And developing that trust, which we've done over time, has really given us this unique insight into Columbia's campus at this moment.

Makena Kelly: They are the people who are on the ground who have been covering this every day. So when all that happened, it became very overwhelming. It was clear that much of what we heard play out over social media and even some national media outlets was either completely wrong or greatly exaggerated. And these students felt a kind of duty to do the reporting and to do it correctly.

Esha Karam: We are thinking deeply about can we stand behind every single thing we publish? And we're really taking extra steps, having those conversations about, do we have multiple sources that can corroborate this? Do we have video evidence? Sometimes we're not going to be the first one to break the news, but we're going to do it right.

Makena Kelly: Esha told me that when they do have a story where they can say something definitively, they can say something important, they're posting it on Instagram. Over the days of the protest last week, they gained 5,000 followers on Instagram, the Columbia Spectator did, and they turned everything into an easily shareable Instagram graphic on their grid. They were posting to their stories, they were doing all these kinds of stuff. And it reminds me of 2020 and the George Floyd protests, where a lot of Instagram slideshows and Instagram things were being around in stories to really educate people on what was going on. And it seems like this is just a lesson that Gen Z and these Columbia students have learned and have found to be a really major way to communicate with the students on campus.

Leah Feiger: That's definitely one way to counteract disinfo and misinfo in real time, to really stop it in its tracks by making sure that you are pushing out that accurate info.

Vittoria Elliot: I think also when I talked to a student journalist from The Daily Pennsylvanian, which is the University of Pennsylvania's newspaper, her name is Elea Castiglione, and she said that their encampment has been totally peaceful, hasn't been broken up by the police, but they had someone there for basically 10, 11 days. And the journalist I spoke to said that they created a system where they could do live updates, and they created a timeline on their website. So she was in the encampment, she'd be filing from her phone. Editors would pick it up within 15 to 30 minutes, and it would be on their website. And now there's an archive on their website of the day-to-day of everything that was happening at the encampment. So if you wanted to go back and check, is this what happened? Was there a thing on this day? You actually have that on the Daily Pennsylvanian website. And that's just the type of stuff that a lot of student papers were not doing before, but they really met the moment with it.

Makena Kelly: The same thing happened at the University of Wisconsin too. In the Badger Herald, I spoke with Kat Carroll, who is a reporter over there at the Herald, and she said that, yeah, they were really overwhelmed. They cannot be the people who are going out and debunking everything every day and being like, campus snopes, it's not going to happen. And so what they did do is they focused every day on having live coverage of everything that's going on. And also, she mentioned that a lot of the reporters were maybe on X-Twitter a bit more than they normally would be because now they're having these conversations that are outside of just their campus, but with reporters and people who are paying attention to it now.

Vittoria Elliot: A really important point, I think there's a tendency to use the most violent or shocking protests as the sort of overall narrative, but as the student I spoke to from Penn talked about, she said their encampment has been fine. The Philly PD has not wanted to break up the encampment unless there was actual issues there. It's been mostly peaceful. They haven't had student suspensions on it. There's tons of examples across the country of students not really having these issues of administrations, and students actually having really constructive dialog about the stuff. And that's really not getting covered. I think for a lot of the student papers, they have the ability to not really feel like they have to zoom out and have this national narrative or this overarching sort of thing that a lot of the more national outlets have. They can really focus on what's in front of them and worry about making sure that's accurate. And as much as this is an incredible watershed moment in terms of student movements, it's really important to talk about the way in which it is not uniform. It's really localized to these specific communities.

Leah Feiger: That's a really important note that I think we can end on, which is, these protests are really different, and I'm so continually impressed with the student journalists on the ground reporting it for us all. Check out more of Makena and Tori's reporting on this on WIRED.com. And after the break, I'm going to talk with WIRED senior reporter David Gilbert about how foreign influence campaigns are trying to exploit campus protests in the United States.

[Break]

Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. Tori and Makena will be back in just a little bit to talk about their favorite conspiracies this week. But first, David Gilbert, our favorite Cork, Ireland-based WIRED reporter, is joining us.

David Gilbert: Of course, I am the only Cork-based reporter, so you have to say favorite, but thank you very much anyway.

Leah Feiger: Still my favorite. Still my favorite. I stand by it.

David Gilbert: Thank you.

Leah Feiger: So let's get into it. We just published your piece on how foreign governments are looking to take advantage of the dissent we're seeing at American college campuses right now, specifically countries like Russia. Talk me through this.

David Gilbert: And we've seen other countries as well, Iran and China, but I suppose Russia is the kind of headline country here, and it has obviously got quite a long history of doing this. It's the kind of most famous nation-state for carrying out disinformation campaigns. Most notably in terms of the US in 2016 when it attempted quite successfully to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. And I guess over the course of the last decade, at this stage, it's consistently tried to stoke and inflame division in the US. Recently, for example, we've seen it do it around the border crisis in Texas and the convoy that was traveling down there. And we saw how they were using a lot of different levers in order to push the narrative and stoke tensions. They weren't necessarily coming down on one side or the other, which is something that they've consistently done. They're just trying to make people more angry in the US, and they've been quite successful at that.

Leah Feiger: So now it sounds like this Russian disinformation apparatus is really just taking a page out of their disinformation playbook to focus on campus protests. What does that look like so far?

David Gilbert: So this is, as the protests have continued over recent weeks, and initially there wasn't much of a reaction from Russia, but as they've sustained and as the response to them from authorities, both college authorities and the law enforcement has escalated, we've seen Russia really pick up its work in trying to use it as a way to attack the US effectively. So they've been using not only bots on social media platforms, but also telegram influencers who have massive followings in Russia, up to over a million followers, some of them, as well as state-run media. And they've kind of used this coordinated campaign, which is a tactic that they've used a lot over the years, where they all push out the same message at the same time in order for it to have an amplified effect than any one of those things doing so on their own would have.

Leah Feiger: Talk to me about the one that's going on right now—Doppelganger. Explain Doppelganger to us.

David Gilbert: So Doppelganger is a network of inauthentic accounts on social media platforms, notably Facebook and Twitter. And they are used to push the narratives that are already being pushed by Russian state media or Telegram channels out to wider audiences online. In the past, the Doppelganger network has been linked to the Kremlin by the French government and also by Meta, who took down a huge number of their accounts in the past. But they target audiences not only in the US but also in France, Germany, across Europe, and have campaigns operating around the clock 24/7. And in one recent example, the Doppelganger network has created a fake version of the Washington Post website, and it has used that to push the narrative around the college campus protests that George Soros is backing the protesters and paying them to be on campus around these protests. That was pushed out by hundreds and hundreds of these bot accounts to really amplify this message that they saw taking hold in the US already. The fact that people believed that there was some shadowy figure behind the protests paying for these protests. And so they pushed that out in conjunction with similar messages on state-run media and similar messages on Telegram. And so it just had this amplifying effect so that it reached more people.

Leah Feiger: And the Doppelganger fake Washington Post article looks kind of real on the first quick examination. Obviously the URL is slightly different, but it's just a small variation there. And like you said, it literally states out that the protests at US colleges are financed by the Rockefeller and Soros Foundations, pushing that narrative. But I guess I'm wondering, they're pushing multiple narratives here. It's not just one like these protests are planned. They're also pushing things in support of the protests too. What's happening there?

David Gilbert: It's something that Russia has been doing for years. Even back at the height of the 2016 campaign, they were pushing pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant messages at the same time, and managed to get people to join protests on both sides of the divide in the real world. We saw it around the protests following George Floyd's murder as well. They know that instead of trying to push one side or the other, the best action they can take is to push both sides at the same time. Everyone gets angry, not just one side or the other.

Leah Feiger: It's in favor of chaos. It's absolutely in favor of chaos.

David Gilbert: That is exactly their goal. They want chaos in the US, and it's very difficult at the moment to figure out how successful they're being at that, because things are quite chaotic as it is in the US.

Leah Feiger: We have plenty of chaos to contend with on our very own without foreign influence. Sorry, Russia, we're doing your job for you.

David Gilbert: But that's exactly what they were hoping for back in 2016. They have flooded the zone to the point where no one believes anything anyone else is saying. They only want to hear things that will back up their own opinions. And so Russia created this back in 2016 when it infiltrated social media accounts without people realizing. Now people see Russia everywhere. Whether they're there or not, it doesn't matter. Russia has done its job, and effectively the US is doing everything that Russia wants to do anyway. And these campaigns by Doppelganger and by other networks are just trying to make things even worse than they already are.

Leah Feiger: Icing on top basically. So for this specific campaign involving college campus protests, how much are people actually engaging with things like this fake Washington Post article?

David Gilbert: The number of engagements that they get from real people, it's not large, but we have seen some people respond to them. Some people in support of Palestine, some people have been against Palestine, so that's exactly what they want to happen. They want people to have different reactions to the same story, because people have just got these entrenched views about what's happening in the world, and therefore they will just respond automatically. It's a Pavlovian response if someone sees a Palestine flag, some people will say something in support of it, some people will say something against it. So it's very hard to gauge how successful it has been. But I guess the fact that we are even talking about it would probably count as success for Russia, because they're doing these campaigns all day every day, not just for audiences in the US, but audiences across Europe, Germany, and France. Doppelganger has huge campaigns targeting those countries. This is just part of their routine job now, when something major happens in one of these countries, they will roll out this tactic that they know works to an extent. And if it gets huge success, great. If it doesn't, we'll just move on to the next one.

Leah Feiger: And like you said earlier, this is happening in unison with other campaigns. It's the disinformation apparatus, as it were. So this is being pushed out on Russian state media. In your article, you mentioned a number of different pieces coming out from Sputnik that were on kind of the opposite side that was just like, “Oh, the US is cracking down on protesters, and this is the height of hypocrisy,” which isn't necessarily incorrect, but the fact that they're pushing these different claims everywhere. And then also in your reporting, you mentioned Telegram channels with just millions of subscribers and viewers that are getting access to this.

David Gilbert: The state-run media, a lot of those are English-language publications, so that they're obviously targeting US and Western audiences. The Telegram channels are typically Russian language, or the bigger ones anyway. So they're targeting a Russian audience who they want to push home the fact that the US is this crumbling civilization and that they're ... As you say, hypocrisy is one of the main things that they push. It's, “Oh, the land of the free, but look what they're doing to the college protesters. They're not allowing them free speech.” So that's a major narrative that they're pushing there. But it all kind of goes to the goal of undermining the US and showing how weak they believe it to be right now.

Leah Feiger: So that's what Russia is doing. You mentioned Iran and China earlier. They're doing something similar or what exactly is happening there?

David Gilbert: So in China, we've seen similar things. We've seen newspapers running with the headline that the government is showing double standards in terms of the actions it is taking against people who are trying to express free speech. Some researchers have told us that they've seen Spamouflage Dragon, which is the Chinese disinformation campaign. They've also been putting out messages, but as we reported on last week, this isn't necessarily anything that will have any impact, because for the last seven years, all of their campaigns have had pretty much zero impact.

Leah Feiger: In the article last week, we literally just stated, China is absolutely terrible at disinformation campaigns.

David Gilbert: But I haven't looked at this one.

Leah Feiger: No, no, fair, fair, fair, fair.

David Gilbert: I don't know if this could be the one where they finally get it right. So I'm just trying to hedge my bets a little bit.

Leah Feiger: Well, maybe, fingers crossed for you, China.

David Gilbert: Yeah. And Iran, we've seen one of the aspects of this is where we see this in Russia as well, where officials in the government, I think this was a spokesman for Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was depicting a student protester with the caption, “Imprisonment of Freedom in the USA.” We see these countries who are taking advantage of this—

Leah Feiger: Yeah, they're jumping on the moment.

David Gilbert: —point in time for the US, and they want to push home their belief that things aren't as great in the US as maybe the US would want you to think they are.

Leah Feiger:Right. David, do you think that these disinformation campaigns could continue with regards to the campus protests as well? What would that look like?

David Gilbert: I think there's little doubt they will continue. As long as the protests are happening in the US, then Russia will continue to push the narrative that the US is failing as a country, as a society. We've seen in the past where Russia has moved from the online sphere of influence to try and move things into real world. There's absolutely no evidence so far. There is the possibility that if Russia sees a significant opportunity, that it could escalate things and try and move people from online activity to offline activity and actually influence the protests on the ground. So again, that's something that we really need to keep an eye.

Leah Feiger: On that note, let's take a quick break and when we come back, Tori, Makena, and David are going to compete in our first ever three-person Conspiracy of the Week. It's going to be absolute chaos. Stay tuned.

[Break]

Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. I'm Leah Feiger, and this is Conspiracy of the Week, the part of the show where I force our team members to go head-to-head and bring me the best conspiracy they saw circulating online this week. David, take us away.

David Gilbert: This is one that popped up this morning on my feed, and I couldn't really ignore it. So I don't know if you've heard this news or not Leah, but the Boy Scouts of America is no longer.

Leah Feiger: What?

David Gilbert: They're changing their name. They're now calling themselves Scouting America to be more inclusive. So as you can imagine, for some people, that was probably a hard thing to hear.

Leah Feiger: Wait, this is amazing.

David Gilbert: So I've been seeing some of the responses and the conspiracies that have grown up around this. So worryingly, one of the first things I saw was the fact that the Proud Boys are talking about it and that they said, the only rational next step is to decide what the Junior Proud Boys will look like. So they feel they're going to be replacing the Boy Scouts. But generally it's this idea that the Boy Scouts have changed because of woke, is effectively what's being …

Leah Feiger: But this is just honestly lovely and inclusive.

David Gilbert: Now, what they're failing to realize is that of course girls have been in the Boy Scouts for six years and that there's currently about 180,000 girls and women in Boy Scouts.

Leah Feiger: Incredible.

David Gilbert: So having the name Boy Scouts doesn't really work. The conspiracy theorists missed the trick here, because obviously the reason that Boy Scouts is changing is that their numbers are way down, they're bankrupt, and they're dealing with sexual abuse claims.

Leah Feiger: Yeah, no, it's not good over there.

David Gilbert: There's a huge amount of content there that they could have worked with. But no, they've gone with blame the liberals, blame woke, blame the communists. And my favorite conspiracy was one guy just commented, “Defund white ladies.”

Leah Feiger: Oh my God, that's incredible. I too blame all of that. Amazing. OK, that was a really good one. Makena, hit me with yours.

Makena Kelly: Oh my gosh. OK, so I have not been as glued in to conspiracies this week because I've been paying a lot of attention to the Kendrick Lamar–Drake, beef.

Leah Feiger: Oh, of course. Good. Yes.

Makena Kelly: And I am so incredibly invested. It has been crazy to wake up and have a new diss track that is just absolutely bonkers the past couple of days.

Leah Feiger: Amazing.

Makena Kelly: And so the one I guess that I can say I've been paying attention to is that this beef is some kind of globalist plot to distract people.

Leah Feiger: Stop.

Makena Kelly: To distract people from all of the, of course, terrible and awful things happening around the world.

Leah Feiger: Where is that conspiracy coming from?

Makena Kelly: Just about everywhere. I'm seeing it on Twitter, I'm seeing it on TikTok. I'm seeing it a lot of places. And I do think, honestly, if I had to say that a conspiracy was actually occurring from this, it was a conspiracy to bring Macklemore back because now he's back with a song, which is something I was not expecting at all.

Leah Feiger: Incredible. OK. Another really good one.

Vittoria Elliot: It's beef and circuses.

Leah Feiger: I know. OK, Tori, hit us with what you've got.

Vittoria Elliot: So my favorite thing is one of the joys of the TikTok algorithm, is that it's non-chronological, so it'll just give you things when it feels you're ready for them. And so this isn't—

Leah Feiger: Also as a statement.

Vittoria Elliot: This one is actually from the fall, but TikTok decided now was my time. So now it's everybody's time. Which is in the fall, there was this woman who went viral and created a lot of follow on stitches because she was like, "Well, if dinosaurs are real, wouldn't there bones be everywhere?"

Leah Feiger: Oh my God.

Vittoria Elliot: And so my favorite conspiracy this week from TikTok, because now is my time in the sun, is that dinosaurs were not real because their bones are not everywhere.

Leah Feiger: Oh, that's a good one. Is she getting a lot of engagement on this?

Vittoria Elliot: She got so much engagement. Well, so it came to me via a stitch of, I think, a creator that I had recently followed. So then it was like, here's their viral thing. Right?

Leah Feiger: Gosh, incredible.

Vittoria Elliot: And so all these people were debunking this woman, explaining the way that things decompose and that fossils are only a very small percentage of what we have because of … And I was like, “Wow, science.”

Leah Feiger: Science coming through here, bringing the scientific community together, that's really what TikTok is for. Oh God, these are all so good. I feel I'm really struggling with this, but I think I have to go with Makena.

Makena Kelly: What?

Leah Feiger: I know. I just love the idea of this being used as a globalist takeover, rap diss tracks. This is fantastic. Also, the Macklemore angle. I love it all, but I love the dinosaurs and I love that wokeness has ended the Boy Scouts. I do not love that the Proud Boys want a Junior Proud Boys, but can't have it all, I suppose. This was a really good week. I want more of these.

Thanks so much everyone for joining us this week. I can't wait for next week already. And thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. We also have a newsletter, which Makena Kelly writes each week.

The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please write to PoliticsLab@WIRED.com. That's PoliticsLab@WIRED.com. We're excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer. Amar Lal makes this episode. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer. Jordan Bell is the executive producer of development, and Chris Bannon is the global head of audio at Condé Nast. And I'm your host, Leah Feiger. We'll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening.
Disinformation and conspiracies spun out of control last week when police departments raided college campuses across the country during pro-Palestinian protests.
Campus protests over the war in Gaza have been going on for months at American universities. Now that they're at an all-time high, protests have been getting a lot more attention—and tons of disinformation and conspiracies are spreading. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we talk about some of that disinformation and what student journalists on the ground are doing to report the facts. Plus, we look at how foreign actors are exploiting the dissent. Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Makena Kelly is @kellymakena. Vittoria Elliot is @telliotter. Write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here. You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for WIRED Politics Lab. We’re on Spotify too. Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Leah Feiger: Welcome to WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I'm Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. Since the October 7th massacre in Israel, a lot has happened. There's a devastating war in Gaza, heightened Islamophobia and antisemitism in the US, and protests have erupted on college campuses across the country over the last few weeks. These protests have become the largest student movement in the US in decades. And of course, disinformation and conspiracies on these issues have been everywhere. So today on the show, we're going to talk about how student journalists are covering the protests and dealing with this disinformation, and how foreign actors are exploiting the dissent. Joining me today are two reporters from the WIRED Politics Desk, Vittoria Elliott, and Makena Kelly. They've spent the last few days talking to student journalists from around the country. How's it going? Makena Kelly: Hey there. Vittoria Elliot: Hello. Hello. Leah Feiger: Let's talk about why you both wanted to talk to student journalists for this episode and your upcoming story on WIRED.com about disinformation in these protests. What specifically about them and their situations made them the perfect people to learn from and understand what's been happening on the ground here? Makena Kelly: Sure. So I think the big thing to note is that these student journalists have been covering their campus every day, not just for this semester, but last semester. And for many of them years and years before. Leah Feiger: Local journalism, we love it. Makena Kelly: And so they know these people, they know the administrators, they understand how the system works, and that's why they become such an important resource. Like what we saw with WKCR and all of these— Leah Feiger: The Columbia student radio. Makena Kelly: The student radio station. Yeah. Leah Feiger: They were amazing. Makena Kelly: They were reporting everything live, and they became one of the most important resources. I think CNN only had one reporter on campus reporting while the raid was going on, and it was because she was a student. Vittoria Elliot: One of the things that I noticed in the national coverage was it seemed like there was a hesitance to just be like, "Yeah, we don't know." And a lot of these national outlets treated these student journalists like sources rather than reporters that maybe they could hire and had special access, which I thought was interesting. But I think the other big thing too that we saw a lot was not only did national media not have access, but also the students themselves who were participants in the protests didn't feel comfortable talking to national media. So the position of student journalists meant that there's peers there, they trust each other. And I think a lot of times, maybe national media didn't quite understand the stakes there. These students talking to the press, they could get doxxed, they could have their families threatened. And if you had a university like Columbia that was looking at disciplinary action, because it was a small group of students, in a lot of cases, they didn't want to talk to the media because that could come with disciplinary action. And that meant that for people on the outside, the statements and the information that was easiest to access was stuff coming from the police and stuff coming from the administration because those people aren't going to get in trouble if they speak. And that also creates this massive gap that then assumptions can percolate into and can make it very, very difficult to figure out what's actually going on and kind of blow this out of proportion in many ways. Makena Kelly: These fears of doxxing weren't unjustified. Just a couple of months ago, many of these student protesters who have been speaking out on behalf of Palestine and Gaza have had their faces put on trucks that have been driving around Columbia's campus that have gotten a lot of national media coverage. Leah Feiger: Right, absolutely. Which is where these student journalists come in so well positioned to do on-the-ground reporting and factual reporting. So one of the things that really caught my attention over the last few weeks with the protests, because of what we like to cover here on the WIRED Politics Desk, has been all the misinformation and disinformation swirling around what's going on. What have you both found? Vittoria Elliot: Well, let's first talk about New York. So protests started at Columbia in mid-April, and it was actually one group of students that were arrested very peacefully. And by that I mean they recognized that they were facing arrest if they occupied the lawn, they sat in a circle, the police sort of came around, tapped people on the shoulder. They would get up, they would get zip tied, they'd walk away. It sort of wasn't a big hullabaloo. And then there was actually a second group of protesters after that first group was arrested, that occupied and encamped on the lawn. And the school reacted pretty strongly. They shut off access to campus. So if you're in New York, you can normally cut through Columbia's campus, you can walk through, it's open to the public. If you didn't have an ID or weren't a professor, you couldn't get in. And it also eventually ended up calling the NYPD on the students after they occupied one of the buildings, Hamilton Hall. By that time, the protests had spread to a ton of other college campuses as well, some of which reacted equally as strong as Columbia and some of which have been pretty chill. It's been really variable. But because there was not a ton of access to these student encampments, a lot of students didn't necessarily want to talk to the press. And we had a lot of statements that weren't necessarily accurate coming from police, from administrators. Again, it's created a ton of gaps where it just can be filled by disinformation, it can be filled by people's assumptions, and that has really been fodder for some wild times out here. Leah Feiger: So what were some of the specific things that we were seeing? Makena Kelly: Oh my gosh. In Columbia, there was a handful of things. The day after the protests and the NYPD raid, we saw police officers going on local television and showing these bike locks that could only be used by outside agitators. Students didn't know enough to be able to use these locks, when really these locks were sold on campus for bikes. Leah Feiger: Very normal bike locks. And then, the tent thing as well. Vittoria Elliot: Right? Yeah. So actually our colleague, David Gilbert, actually wrote about Tent Gate. A lot of the students had similar tents, and people on the internet saw that as an indication of a coordinated effort or some big backing by a big-tent corporate overlord. Leah Feiger: Big tent is pro-Palestine. Vittoria Elliot: Yeah. And it turned out it was just that was the cheapest tent and the one that came up most on Google search. And obviously if you're a student on a budget, trying to get a tent quickly makes sense. Leah Feiger: Right, right. Well, let's get into one of these a little bit more. The outside agitator claim was made and boosted by the New York Police Department. Makena, you spoke with someone at Columbia's Newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, about how student journalists there were dealing with that. Talk me through that. Makena Kelly: Right. I spoke with Esha Karam, who's the managing editor at the Spectator. Specifically on arrests, Esha explained the different types of information they were receiving from the NYPD and school administration. Esha Karam [Archival audio clip]: The narrative that's being spun right now in the media is this outside agitators thing. Obviously the university has said one thing, the NYPD has said another thing. So we're really trying to independently verify everything that we hear. Makena Kelly: NYPD was claiming that a majority of the people who were arrested that night were not students. Their numbers were extremely different than what administrators said. And even this week, as I was talking to Esha, she mentioned that reporters are still talking to people that they know who participate in the protests, who are students on campus, to try and fact-check all of these numbers. Leah Feiger: Tori, get us a little bit more into the claims of non-affiliates or outside agitators and what was in there. Vittoria Elliot: So I think to back up, similar to the tent conspiracy that David covered, I think a lot of conspiracies that we've seen, and frankly has even been repeated by CNN about these things. The coverage wasn't great that night. Dana Bash was on CNN for hours it seemed, talking about this outside agitator narrative without really any input from the school or students themself and just relying on the New York Police Department. Dana Bash [Archival audio clip]: NYPD was able to clear Columbia University after protesters barricaded themselves inside a campus building, but it is unclear how many were actually students. Leah Feiger: That was wild to watch. Vittoria Elliot: It was crazy. And also, I think part of it is when you send police onto campus to arrest students, that's a bad look. So it makes sense for the New York Police Department and even Columbia to really lean into that narrative, but that also makes it so much harder for the students. And I actually spoke to Katrina Ventura, who is a graduate student at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, which had its own new service up and running for this. And she and her classmate reported a story about what exactly that meant there. At the time, Columbia was saying there were 13 non-affiliates. So that means people who are not students at the university and not working at the university. But what they actually found of these 13 non-affiliates, some of them were alumni or they were associated with groups that had chapters at Columbia, like Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice in Palestine. So they were people who worked with those organizations, but maybe just weren't students at the Columbia chapter of those organizations. But at no point did their reporting show that these were somehow just random outside people escalating the problem. In fact, most of the random outside people escalating the problem were outside the universities. And those were a lot of times the people that the media were talking to. Leah Feiger: Absolutely. And even the number 13 there, the NYPD was claiming that almost everyone involved was an outside agitator. The numbers from Columbia itself, from the NYPD, these were very, very different. And now the students are still trying to figure out exactly what happened. Vittoria Elliot: And this was also true at City College, New York, which is part of the CUNY system, the city university system. And so I actually spoke to a student journalist there, Leon Orlov-Sullivan, and he was talking about how with this outside agitator narrative, if you are a CUNY student at any one of the CUNY schools in New York, you can get into any of the CUNY campuses. So when we're talking about outside agitators, are we really just talking about students from other parts of the CUNY system? Leah Feiger: Who use other schools, libraries, and study spaces all the time. Vittoria Elliot: Totally. And again, they also had some alums. So when we're talking about outsiders, what does it really mean? Leah Feiger: And historically, the idea of “outside agitators” have been used for decades. Frankly, it's as American as apple pie to call a protester an outside agitator. NYPD is just following a long, long tradition here. So Makena, in your conversation with Esha from Columbia Spectator, she walked you through their publishing process, right? And how they're actually able to fact-check all of this as it's happening. Talk to me about that. Makena Kelly: Sure. So her paper had been covering these protests since the first one on Columbia's campus, which was October 12th. Esha Karam: Since that time period. Really, it's the same group of students who are organizing these protests. And because we know these students, because we've talked to these students and we've reported on these issues before, we really have that advantage of being really close to the community that we cover. And developing that trust, which we've done over time, has really given us this unique insight into Columbia's campus at this moment. Makena Kelly: They are the people who are on the ground who have been covering this every day. So when all that happened, it became very overwhelming. It was clear that much of what we heard play out over social media and even some national media outlets was either completely wrong or greatly exaggerated. And these students felt a kind of duty to do the reporting and to do it correctly. Esha Karam: We are thinking deeply about can we stand behind every single thing we publish? And we're really taking extra steps, having those conversations about, do we have multiple sources that can corroborate this? Do we have video evidence? Sometimes we're not going to be the first one to break the news, but we're going to do it right. Makena Kelly: Esha told me that when they do have a story where they can say something definitively, they can say something important, they're posting it on Instagram. Over the days of the protest last week, they gained 5,000 followers on Instagram, the Columbia Spectator did, and they turned everything into an easily shareable Instagram graphic on their grid. They were posting to their stories, they were doing all these kinds of stuff. And it reminds me of 2020 and the George Floyd protests, where a lot of Instagram slideshows and Instagram things were being around in stories to really educate people on what was going on. And it seems like this is just a lesson that Gen Z and these Columbia students have learned and have found to be a really major way to communicate with the students on campus. Leah Feiger: That's definitely one way to counteract disinfo and misinfo in real time, to really stop it in its tracks by making sure that you are pushing out that accurate info. Vittoria Elliot: I think also when I talked to a student journalist from The Daily Pennsylvanian, which is the University of Pennsylvania's newspaper, her name is Elea Castiglione, and she said that their encampment has been totally peaceful, hasn't been broken up by the police, but they had someone there for basically 10, 11 days. And the journalist I spoke to said that they created a system where they could do live updates, and they created a timeline on their website. So she was in the encampment, she'd be filing from her phone. Editors would pick it up within 15 to 30 minutes, and it would be on their website. And now there's an archive on their website of the day-to-day of everything that was happening at the encampment. So if you wanted to go back and check, is this what happened? Was there a thing on this day? You actually have that on the Daily Pennsylvanian website. And that's just the type of stuff that a lot of student papers were not doing before, but they really met the moment with it. Makena Kelly: The same thing happened at the University of Wisconsin too. In the Badger Herald, I spoke with Kat Carroll, who is a reporter over there at the Herald, and she said that, yeah, they were really overwhelmed. They cannot be the people who are going out and debunking everything every day and being like, campus snopes, it's not going to happen. And so what they did do is they focused every day on having live coverage of everything that's going on. And also, she mentioned that a lot of the reporters were maybe on X-Twitter a bit more than they normally would be because now they're having these conversations that are outside of just their campus, but with reporters and people who are paying attention to it now. Vittoria Elliot: A really important point, I think there's a tendency to use the most violent or shocking protests as the sort of overall narrative, but as the student I spoke to from Penn talked about, she said their encampment has been fine. The Philly PD has not wanted to break up the encampment unless there was actual issues there. It's been mostly peaceful. They haven't had student suspensions on it. There's tons of examples across the country of students not really having these issues of administrations, and students actually having really constructive dialog about the stuff. And that's really not getting covered. I think for a lot of the student papers, they have the ability to not really feel like they have to zoom out and have this national narrative or this overarching sort of thing that a lot of the more national outlets have. They can really focus on what's in front of them and worry about making sure that's accurate. And as much as this is an incredible watershed moment in terms of student movements, it's really important to talk about the way in which it is not uniform. It's really localized to these specific communities. Leah Feiger: That's a really important note that I think we can end on, which is, these protests are really different, and I'm so continually impressed with the student journalists on the ground reporting it for us all. Check out more of Makena and Tori's reporting on this on WIRED.com. And after the break, I'm going to talk with WIRED senior reporter David Gilbert about how foreign influence campaigns are trying to exploit campus protests in the United States. [Break] Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. Tori and Makena will be back in just a little bit to talk about their favorite conspiracies this week. But first, David Gilbert, our favorite Cork, Ireland-based WIRED reporter, is joining us. David Gilbert: Of course, I am the only Cork-based reporter, so you have to say favorite, but thank you very much anyway. Leah Feiger: Still my favorite. Still my favorite. I stand by it. David Gilbert: Thank you. Leah Feiger: So let's get into it. We just published your piece on how foreign governments are looking to take advantage of the dissent we're seeing at American college campuses right now, specifically countries like Russia. Talk me through this. David Gilbert: And we've seen other countries as well, Iran and China, but I suppose Russia is the kind of headline country here, and it has obviously got quite a long history of doing this. It's the kind of most famous nation-state for carrying out disinformation campaigns. Most notably in terms of the US in 2016 when it attempted quite successfully to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. And I guess over the course of the last decade, at this stage, it's consistently tried to stoke and inflame division in the US. Recently, for example, we've seen it do it around the border crisis in Texas and the convoy that was traveling down there. And we saw how they were using a lot of different levers in order to push the narrative and stoke tensions. They weren't necessarily coming down on one side or the other, which is something that they've consistently done. They're just trying to make people more angry in the US, and they've been quite successful at that. Leah Feiger: So now it sounds like this Russian disinformation apparatus is really just taking a page out of their disinformation playbook to focus on campus protests. What does that look like so far? David Gilbert: So this is, as the protests have continued over recent weeks, and initially there wasn't much of a reaction from Russia, but as they've sustained and as the response to them from authorities, both college authorities and the law enforcement has escalated, we've seen Russia really pick up its work in trying to use it as a way to attack the US effectively. So they've been using not only bots on social media platforms, but also telegram influencers who have massive followings in Russia, up to over a million followers, some of them, as well as state-run media. And they've kind of used this coordinated campaign, which is a tactic that they've used a lot over the years, where they all push out the same message at the same time in order for it to have an amplified effect than any one of those things doing so on their own would have. Leah Feiger: Talk to me about the one that's going on right now—Doppelganger. Explain Doppelganger to us. David Gilbert: So Doppelganger is a network of inauthentic accounts on social media platforms, notably Facebook and Twitter. And they are used to push the narratives that are already being pushed by Russian state media or Telegram channels out to wider audiences online. In the past, the Doppelganger network has been linked to the Kremlin by the French government and also by Meta, who took down a huge number of their accounts in the past. But they target audiences not only in the US but also in France, Germany, across Europe, and have campaigns operating around the clock 24/7. And in one recent example, the Doppelganger network has created a fake version of the Washington Post website, and it has used that to push the narrative around the college campus protests that George Soros is backing the protesters and paying them to be on campus around these protests. That was pushed out by hundreds and hundreds of these bot accounts to really amplify this message that they saw taking hold in the US already. The fact that people believed that there was some shadowy figure behind the protests paying for these protests. And so they pushed that out in conjunction with similar messages on state-run media and similar messages on Telegram. And so it just had this amplifying effect so that it reached more people. Leah Feiger: And the Doppelganger fake Washington Post article looks kind of real on the first quick examination. Obviously the URL is slightly different, but it's just a small variation there. And like you said, it literally states out that the protests at US colleges are financed by the Rockefeller and Soros Foundations, pushing that narrative. But I guess I'm wondering, they're pushing multiple narratives here. It's not just one like these protests are planned. They're also pushing things in support of the protests too. What's happening there? David Gilbert: It's something that Russia has been doing for years. Even back at the height of the 2016 campaign, they were pushing pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant messages at the same time, and managed to get people to join protests on both sides of the divide in the real world. We saw it around the protests following George Floyd's murder as well. They know that instead of trying to push one side or the other, the best action they can take is to push both sides at the same time. Everyone gets angry, not just one side or the other. Leah Feiger: It's in favor of chaos. It's absolutely in favor of chaos. David Gilbert: That is exactly their goal. They want chaos in the US, and it's very difficult at the moment to figure out how successful they're being at that, because things are quite chaotic as it is in the US. Leah Feiger: We have plenty of chaos to contend with on our very own without foreign influence. Sorry, Russia, we're doing your job for you. David Gilbert: But that's exactly what they were hoping for back in 2016. They have flooded the zone to the point where no one believes anything anyone else is saying. They only want to hear things that will back up their own opinions. And so Russia created this back in 2016 when it infiltrated social media accounts without people realizing. Now people see Russia everywhere. Whether they're there or not, it doesn't matter. Russia has done its job, and effectively the US is doing everything that Russia wants to do anyway. And these campaigns by Doppelganger and by other networks are just trying to make things even worse than they already are. Leah Feiger: Icing on top basically. So for this specific campaign involving college campus protests, how much are people actually engaging with things like this fake Washington Post article? David Gilbert: The number of engagements that they get from real people, it's not large, but we have seen some people respond to them. Some people in support of Palestine, some people have been against Palestine, so that's exactly what they want to happen. They want people to have different reactions to the same story, because people have just got these entrenched views about what's happening in the world, and therefore they will just respond automatically. It's a Pavlovian response if someone sees a Palestine flag, some people will say something in support of it, some people will say something against it. So it's very hard to gauge how successful it has been. But I guess the fact that we are even talking about it would probably count as success for Russia, because they're doing these campaigns all day every day, not just for audiences in the US, but audiences across Europe, Germany, and France. Doppelganger has huge campaigns targeting those countries. This is just part of their routine job now, when something major happens in one of these countries, they will roll out this tactic that they know works to an extent. And if it gets huge success, great. If it doesn't, we'll just move on to the next one. Leah Feiger: And like you said earlier, this is happening in unison with other campaigns. It's the disinformation apparatus, as it were. So this is being pushed out on Russian state media. In your article, you mentioned a number of different pieces coming out from Sputnik that were on kind of the opposite side that was just like, “Oh, the US is cracking down on protesters, and this is the height of hypocrisy,” which isn't necessarily incorrect, but the fact that they're pushing these different claims everywhere. And then also in your reporting, you mentioned Telegram channels with just millions of subscribers and viewers that are getting access to this. David Gilbert: The state-run media, a lot of those are English-language publications, so that they're obviously targeting US and Western audiences. The Telegram channels are typically Russian language, or the bigger ones anyway. So they're targeting a Russian audience who they want to push home the fact that the US is this crumbling civilization and that they're ... As you say, hypocrisy is one of the main things that they push. It's, “Oh, the land of the free, but look what they're doing to the college protesters. They're not allowing them free speech.” So that's a major narrative that they're pushing there. But it all kind of goes to the goal of undermining the US and showing how weak they believe it to be right now. Leah Feiger: So that's what Russia is doing. You mentioned Iran and China earlier. They're doing something similar or what exactly is happening there? David Gilbert: So in China, we've seen similar things. We've seen newspapers running with the headline that the government is showing double standards in terms of the actions it is taking against people who are trying to express free speech. Some researchers have told us that they've seen Spamouflage Dragon, which is the Chinese disinformation campaign. They've also been putting out messages, but as we reported on last week, this isn't necessarily anything that will have any impact, because for the last seven years, all of their campaigns have had pretty much zero impact. Leah Feiger: In the article last week, we literally just stated, China is absolutely terrible at disinformation campaigns. David Gilbert: But I haven't looked at this one. Leah Feiger: No, no, fair, fair, fair, fair. David Gilbert: I don't know if this could be the one where they finally get it right. So I'm just trying to hedge my bets a little bit. Leah Feiger: Well, maybe, fingers crossed for you, China. David Gilbert: Yeah. And Iran, we've seen one of the aspects of this is where we see this in Russia as well, where officials in the government, I think this was a spokesman for Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was depicting a student protester with the caption, “Imprisonment of Freedom in the USA.” We see these countries who are taking advantage of this— Leah Feiger: Yeah, they're jumping on the moment. David Gilbert: —point in time for the US, and they want to push home their belief that things aren't as great in the US as maybe the US would want you to think they are. Leah Feiger:Right. David, do you think that these disinformation campaigns could continue with regards to the campus protests as well? What would that look like? David Gilbert: I think there's little doubt they will continue. As long as the protests are happening in the US, then Russia will continue to push the narrative that the US is failing as a country, as a society. We've seen in the past where Russia has moved from the online sphere of influence to try and move things into real world. There's absolutely no evidence so far. There is the possibility that if Russia sees a significant opportunity, that it could escalate things and try and move people from online activity to offline activity and actually influence the protests on the ground. So again, that's something that we really need to keep an eye. Leah Feiger: On that note, let's take a quick break and when we come back, Tori, Makena, and David are going to compete in our first ever three-person Conspiracy of the Week. It's going to be absolute chaos. Stay tuned. [Break] Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. I'm Leah Feiger, and this is Conspiracy of the Week, the part of the show where I force our team members to go head-to-head and bring me the best conspiracy they saw circulating online this week. David, take us away. David Gilbert: This is one that popped up this morning on my feed, and I couldn't really ignore it. So I don't know if you've heard this news or not Leah, but the Boy Scouts of America is no longer. Leah Feiger: What? David Gilbert: They're changing their name. They're now calling themselves Scouting America to be more inclusive. So as you can imagine, for some people, that was probably a hard thing to hear. Leah Feiger: Wait, this is amazing. David Gilbert: So I've been seeing some of the responses and the conspiracies that have grown up around this. So worryingly, one of the first things I saw was the fact that the Proud Boys are talking about it and that they said, the only rational next step is to decide what the Junior Proud Boys will look like. So they feel they're going to be replacing the Boy Scouts. But generally it's this idea that the Boy Scouts have changed because of woke, is effectively what's being … Leah Feiger: But this is just honestly lovely and inclusive. David Gilbert: Now, what they're failing to realize is that of course girls have been in the Boy Scouts for six years and that there's currently about 180,000 girls and women in Boy Scouts. Leah Feiger: Incredible. David Gilbert: So having the name Boy Scouts doesn't really work. The conspiracy theorists missed the trick here, because obviously the reason that Boy Scouts is changing is that their numbers are way down, they're bankrupt, and they're dealing with sexual abuse claims. Leah Feiger: Yeah, no, it's not good over there. David Gilbert: There's a huge amount of content there that they could have worked with. But no, they've gone with blame the liberals, blame woke, blame the communists. And my favorite conspiracy was one guy just commented, “Defund white ladies.” Leah Feiger: Oh my God, that's incredible. I too blame all of that. Amazing. OK, that was a really good one. Makena, hit me with yours. Makena Kelly: Oh my gosh. OK, so I have not been as glued in to conspiracies this week because I've been paying a lot of attention to the Kendrick Lamar–Drake, beef. Leah Feiger: Oh, of course. Good. Yes. Makena Kelly: And I am so incredibly invested. It has been crazy to wake up and have a new diss track that is just absolutely bonkers the past couple of days. Leah Feiger: Amazing. Makena Kelly: And so the one I guess that I can say I've been paying attention to is that this beef is some kind of globalist plot to distract people. Leah Feiger: Stop. Makena Kelly: To distract people from all of the, of course, terrible and awful things happening around the world. Leah Feiger: Where is that conspiracy coming from? Makena Kelly: Just about everywhere. I'm seeing it on Twitter, I'm seeing it on TikTok. I'm seeing it a lot of places. And I do think, honestly, if I had to say that a conspiracy was actually occurring from this, it was a conspiracy to bring Macklemore back because now he's back with a song, which is something I was not expecting at all. Leah Feiger: Incredible. OK. Another really good one. Vittoria Elliot: It's beef and circuses. Leah Feiger: I know. OK, Tori, hit us with what you've got. Vittoria Elliot: So my favorite thing is one of the joys of the TikTok algorithm, is that it's non-chronological, so it'll just give you things when it feels you're ready for them. And so this isn't— Leah Feiger: Also as a statement. Vittoria Elliot: This one is actually from the fall, but TikTok decided now was my time. So now it's everybody's time. Which is in the fall, there was this woman who went viral and created a lot of follow on stitches because she was like, "Well, if dinosaurs are real, wouldn't there bones be everywhere?" Leah Feiger: Oh my God. Vittoria Elliot: And so my favorite conspiracy this week from TikTok, because now is my time in the sun, is that dinosaurs were not real because their bones are not everywhere. Leah Feiger: Oh, that's a good one. Is she getting a lot of engagement on this? Vittoria Elliot: She got so much engagement. Well, so it came to me via a stitch of, I think, a creator that I had recently followed. So then it was like, here's their viral thing. Right? Leah Feiger: Gosh, incredible. Vittoria Elliot: And so all these people were debunking this woman, explaining the way that things decompose and that fossils are only a very small percentage of what we have because of … And I was like, “Wow, science.” Leah Feiger: Science coming through here, bringing the scientific community together, that's really what TikTok is for. Oh God, these are all so good. I feel I'm really struggling with this, but I think I have to go with Makena. Makena Kelly: What? Leah Feiger: I know. I just love the idea of this being used as a globalist takeover, rap diss tracks. This is fantastic. Also, the Macklemore angle. I love it all, but I love the dinosaurs and I love that wokeness has ended the Boy Scouts. I do not love that the Proud Boys want a Junior Proud Boys, but can't have it all, I suppose. This was a really good week. I want more of these. Thanks so much everyone for joining us this week. I can't wait for next week already. And thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. We also have a newsletter, which Makena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please write to PoliticsLab@WIRED.com. That's PoliticsLab@WIRED.com. We're excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer. Amar Lal makes this episode. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer. Jordan Bell is the executive producer of development, and Chris Bannon is the global head of audio at Condé Nast. And I'm your host, Leah Feiger. We'll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening.
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