-[quirky pop] -[mouse clicking]
-[eraser shuffles] -[mouse clicks]
[determined music playing]
Well, when I was running Microsoft…
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Bill Gates.
[audience applauds]
[Gates] …you know, we were incredibly successful,
but I understood then that there'd be a range of opinions.
[man 1] Log on to the Internet
and you'll soon find what some people think of Bill Gates.
-You can punch him. -[punches thud]
[man 1] You can even put a pie in his eye.
It was later, you know, when I'm full time doing philanthropy,
it really started getting crazy.
Is it true if you dropped a 10,000 dollar bill,
it wasn't worth your time to bend down to pick it up again?
-No. -[audience chuckles]
[Gates] You know, extreme wealth
certainly triggers questions about your motives,
but, you know, this is on a whole new level.
[dramatic sting]
[producer] Uh, let's go with number one. Let's see.
[inquisitive music playing]
"Bill Gates and the liberal world order are orchestrating a scheme
to force people to eat bugs." Hmm.
"Their agenda is to weaken the lower classes
with protein-poor insect diets."
[chef chuckles maniacally]
Uh, I'd feel bad if I was doing that.
[producer] Okay. Next.
Oh, this is even better. "Bill Gates is a shapeshifting lizard,
part of the reptilian race that includes Tom Hanks and Lady Gaga."
"These lizard people are secretly exerting global control."
["Poker Face" by Lady Gaga playing]
Someone mentioned this one to me.
I didn't know we had Tom Hanks in on it, though.
I mean, that's great.
[producer] Next.
Hmm. "Bill Gates is pursuing immortality by consuming babies' blood."
"Bill Gates' massive farmland holdings
are secretly supplying potatoes to McDonald's
to embed their french fries with vaccines one Happy Meal at a time."
I eat McDonald's.
[producer] Okay, one last one.
-[Gates] "After a fatal car crash… -[car thuds]
[Gates] …Bill Gates and ex-wife Melinda have been replaced by clones."
[water bubbling]
[Gates] "A team of scientists created replacements
to keep his control over the world never-ending."
[producer] Have you heard that before?
No, Melinda, I think, is still a real person.
[producer] And you?
-I'm… I do my best. -[producer chuckles]
[opening theme music playing]
-[electronic buzz] -[music halts]
[mouse clicks]
[producer] So, I wanted to ask you about truth.
Uh, you strike me as somebody who's driven by data and numbers.
Do you think there's a difference between data and truth?
Not really. I mean, data…
is the
set of facts
about, you know, how much stuff is being sold,
how many people are there,
uh, what activities do they engage in?
You know, it's kind of how we make decisions.
[producer] Except sometimes people don't make decisions based on facts.
They make it based on emotions or narrative
or, you know, something that people feel they believe to be true.
[inhales deeply]
"How do I think about a concept like truth?"
[laughs]
You wanted to come in with a sort of, like, softball there.
Well, I think there are things called facts.
If I put my hand in that fire, it is going to hurt.
But people have different ways of reasoning, rationalizing,
their claims to know something.
I've started to think much more intentionally
about how we create truth.
Truth to whom?
And so, truth becomes something negotiable,
and it becomes something more akin to opinion
or even worse, like belief.
[music fades]
Well, the world is far, far too complicated
to have a complete fact-based way of understanding behavior
and weather and economics and all these things,
so we use shortcuts like, "I trust this person."
[film beeps]
[reporter 1]
the distinguished reporter and news analyst Edward R. Murrow.
[Murrow] For the first time,
man's been able to sit at home and look at two oceans at the same time.
We're impressed with the importance of this medium.
We shall hope to learn to use it and not to abuse it.
[Wang] That was a brief period where we thought of ourselves as rational beings
who had beliefs that were based on sort of verifiable facts,
but that's not how we exist.
It just would take too long if you didn't believe what people told you.
[reporter 2] "Don't believe it
just because it's posted."
[reporter 3] like wildfire in recent months.
[Wang] The Internet kind of enables this fantasy
that we are actually figuring these things out all alone,
but trust is a single dial.
You can't dial down trust in one area of society
and dial it up in the other.
You can either go up or down.
And if you decide to go down,
you've really destabilized a lot of things.
Anything you hear, you sit there, and you're like, "Uh…"
No one knows what to trust and what not to trust.
[Wang] Peoples' trust in their neighbors, in their leaders…
[protester 1] People, wake up!
[Wang] …and institutions of knowledge…
You're CNN. You're fake news.
…and that will come back and turn on you.
Don't you understand I'm trying to protect you?
-[protester 2] Why is there… -Freedom!
[inquisitive music plays, fades]
[man 2] There's always been conspiracy theories out there.
We underestimate how creative Americans are,
and I think I oftentimes go out into the field
with an idea, a question, and perhaps a rational argument around that question.
[Klepper] I headed to Trump rallies in the crucial swing states
of Ohio and Wisconsin
to discover what his supporters know that the rest of us don't.
-Barack Obama had big part of 9/11. -Which part?
Not being around, always on vacation, never in the office.
Why do you think Barack Obama wasn't in the Oval Office on 9/11?
That I don't know.
Really starting in that Trump era,
we were getting stories and theories that were outside of the norm.
That went beyond just
"I disagree with your point of view. I hold the conservative point of view,"
to "I've concocted a new reality,"
and also stuff I just hadn't heard about. Bonkers shit.
So, at that point, you're like, "I want to know more about where this gestates."
[switch clicks]
Uh, if you're into conspiracies and/or computers,
you may have heard of Bill Gates. I hope I'm saying that correctly.
Whether it's from population control to vaccine microchips,
the theories are vast, and the real world consequences are real.
So to help me dig into that, I have Kathryn Joyce and Ike Sriskandarajah.
You guys are gonna help me unpack
how these conspiracies get attached to someone like that,
what the veracity in some of these theories are,
and which ones I should believe
because I'm always looking for a good conspiracy to sink my teeth into
and/or give my money to. So hopefully you can help me with that.
[chuckles]
Let's go back a little bit in time. All right?
Let's go back to 2010.
When our foundation first started up, it was focused on reproductive health
because population growth in poor countries
is the biggest problem they face.
You've got to help mothers who want to limit family size
have the tools and education to do that.
[Joyce] So, the Gates Foundation,
they were looking at this rural community in Ghana,
and they were looking at ways to expand access to contraceptive safety
for women who wanted to be able to regulate their fertility
or plan their births.
This turned into this really complicated conspiracy theory
that claimed the Gates Foundation
was funding a population control experiment
to limit the African population.
Where does this distrust come from?
In… This is tapping into a lot of really potent old stuff.
Um, you know, there have been human rights abuses.
In the 1960s,
a third of all Puerto Rican women ended up being sterilized.
You know, there is the Tuskegee Study.
There's lots of stuff.
We, as a society, have done this.
-We have forcibly sterilized people. -To… To be clear, I have not done that.
I can tell you there were some years in my college time
that I'm a little hazy about what I did, but I can assure you, it was not that.
-That's good. -[Klepper] Thank you.
But how does it go so quickly from zero to population control,
specifically with Bill Gates here?
Well, it involves anti-abortion activists…
[crowd chanting]
[Joyce] …and very cynically co-opting these legitimate concerns.
And then in 2012
when the Gates Foundation gets really involved in this new large campaign,
all of this just sort of clicks into place.
These wealthy Western organizations,
not only were they telling us to control our population,
they came with their own drugs.
[man 3] This is a tragedy!
It's genocidal.
[crowd cheering]
Part of the reason these conspiracy theories become so electric
is because there is this little kernel of truth
that health care is not and has not been equitable.
[woman 1] I spend a lot of time telling people Bill is not Darth Vader.
"How do you know?"
"I know him. He's not doing it. He's busy doing these things."
-You know, I literally met him 109 times. -[bell chimes]
Well, how do you look at the landscape at this moment,
especially in the Internet space?
We'll look back at this as one of the great periods of invention.
[Swisher] I think a lot of people that started the Internet
saw it as a way to bring us together, to expand knowledge,
and a lot of the early stuff was like that.
[producer] What happened?
Well, it took a turn, right?
[dial-up tone]
[AOL voice]
[upbeat music playing]
[Roberts] It was a business decision very early on to create a platform,
create a sandbox, create a playground,
and invite everyone in.
When we first launched, we were hoping for maybe 400, 500 people.
Now we're at 100,000 people, so who knows where we're going next. Um…
[Roberts] Because without all of us around the world
constantly filling up these spaces with our self-expression,
you know, whatever form that takes,
these would be essentially empty vessels,
so it became a business model of "We'll sort it out later."
This law is truly revolutionary legislation
that will bring the future to our doorstep.
In the early days, if you were responsible for everything on your platform,
you could get sued out of existence before you were even out of the crib.
And so they tried to create some protection
for these companies to grow.
[man 4] The Internet changes too fast. Its content changes too fast.
If the government takes the view
that it can control it, define it, and regulate it
while it's still in embryonic form,
it's bound to fail.
[Roberts] So, this particular piece of legislation, called Section 230,
decided that rather than platforms be responsible
for things that flowed over their wires,
they in fact were indemnified from responsibility for that material.
This bill protects consumers against monopolies.
It guarantees the diversity of voices our democracy depends upon.
Perhaps most of all, it enhances the common good.
[Roberts] But at the time Section 230 came into being,
we were talking about a company that had a wall of modems
and a T1 connection to the Internet,
so it made sense to consider these companies to be nothing more
than this neutral conduit for information that Section 230 envisioned.
[Swisher] And now this law protects the richest
and most powerful companies in the history of the world.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Swisher] I think what they didn't anticipate
was what a good medium it is for hiding
and for being anonymous in a malevolent way.
You know, TV and broadcast, broadcast even has limits.
Newspapers have limits. Physical things have limits.
But then you introduce this thing that's addictive and fun
and full of crazy stuff.
It's so pretty. It's so shiny.
It's so interesting, and your life is boring.
It's to have you lean forward, right?
And if it keeps you there, and then it starts spinning things
that continue to drag you down a rabbit hole,
then you'd never come back.
-[Gates] -
Our backgrounds are pretty different.
I'm not an artist, and you're not a programmer.
Okay, but to say you're not an artist, I feel like is not really entirely fair.
-Well, that's being nice. -I'm definitely not a programmer, though.
You know, given all the things that have happened to us with misinformation,
do you feel like it's more intense the last four years?
I think we've both seen in different ways
the way that misinformation can destroy people's lives.
Absolutely.
There's a way that we experience information now
that has a lot to do with entertainment
and information being a lot closer together
than they ever have been before.
Yeah, the idea that if it's kind of outrageous and funny,
it's almost like,
"Well, okay, maybe it's not true, but it made me laugh,"
or, you know, "I kind of wish it was true."
Yeah, the entertaining story is, you know,
that "Bill Gates hates what people say about him in relation to vaccines,"
or "Lady Gaga is, you know, mortified at these rumors."
But for me,
I've been used to lies being printed about me since I was 20 years old,
so I'm a performer. I think it's kind of funny.
[Cooper] People obviously think you're not being who you are
because you are wearing a lot of makeup and…
This is what I'm really like.
This is exactly what I'm really like.
This… This is the cup I drink out of every day.
This is the diamond I put in my coffee when I get nervous.
It's not a real diamond. It's fake.
I feel like I know firsthand how much the public really hates being manipulated.
Entertainment as a form of manipulation is a big part of my career.
When I went to the MTV Awards with discharged soldiers
during "Don't Ask, Don't Tell,"
I wore the meat dress,
and there were fans I had that loved it 'cause they thought it was smart.
They said, "Oh, she's using entertainment to further her political agenda,"
but it really bothered people
that didn't wanna talk about LGBTQ+ rights at the time.
[all chanting] Stop the Lady Gaga concert!
[Gaga] So, by doing something disruptive, I guess what I'm trying to say is
I know firsthand as a performer how much the public hates that.
You know, in my case, a lot of it's all vaccine-related,
which I am connected to vaccines.
That part is true,
but if there was only one or two of them, and it wasn't a broad phenomenon,
I would attempt to say,
"Hey, wait a minute. Pick on something else."
"Don't pick on vaccines."
You might not personally feel offended by it,
but it could affect a decade's worth
of people's relationship with vaccines and their trust.
And if the public loses their trust, there's no way to stop it.
Yeah. [chuckles]
[Klepper] Now, Ike, I want to bring you into the conversation here too.
I feel there's something in the America character,
this need for embellishment.
At every step, you regurgitate an idea and then embellish one extra fact.
[Sriskandarajah] It's the game of telephone on steroids.
That's where we get the microchip vaccine conspiracy theory.
Do we have a good name for it yet?
Is it the COVID conspiracy? Is it the microchip conspiracy?
I think I would call it the microchip vaccine conspiracy theory.
-Okay. Yeah. -Do you have a better…?
No. I mean, it's wordy, but, uh, it has all the searchable terms,
which is helpful on a Reddit board.
-It's search engine optimized. -What is that? Give me the broad strokes.
Okay, so I was listening to The Breakfast Club…
[DJ Envy] Morning, everybody. It's
Now if you just joined us, we were talking about Donald Trump.
It came out yesterday that him and his wife have coronavirus,
so, do you think it's real? Do you think it's a hoax?
Do you think he really has the coronavirus?
So, he's riffing in the morning
and then takes the conversation in a direction I did not expect.
This is Charlamagne Tha God, Lenard McKelvey talking.
I don't believe it.
And I think this could all be a stunt to make one of those
value-menu vaccines they're rushing out look safe.
He'll take it on national TV, all of a sudden be well,
and give the illusion to the public that the vaccine is safe.
He'll look like a hero because he's one of the first to try it.
Millions of people will line up to get it and boom!
Microchip implants for all y'all.
And I was like, "Whoa. He's-- I mean, everybody knows he's joking, right?"
I remember that during COVID too.
COVID's a time of everybody's going a little bit stir-crazy,
and this idea of whether we should trust this vaccine,
that was a point of conversation.
Yes, but he said it four times.
Microchip. Microchip implant! Microchips. In your ***.
I was like, "Whoa."
"I'm worried people are gonna hear this and not think that he's joking,"
and I had this reporting question.
"Do people believe this?"
"How many people believe this?"
"And what effect could this have on our fight against COVID?"
I'm actually surprised that at that point,
you still had hope that messaging could be clear.
[chuckles] Yeah.
My memory of it at that point, our minds were all messed up,
thinking about and sourdough recipes.
So I was wondering if you could apply the methodology of contact tracing
to tracing a lie to its origin.
And the beginning of this particular microchip vaccine conspiracy theory starts
with a Reddit AMA that Bill Gates hosted.
And he predicts that the future will involve us
all having some kind of digital passport.
Not a microchip, not something implanted into your body,
but, like, that's where it starts.
And so, to pick up then, what happens after people see this AMA?
-It travels across the Internet… -[Klepper] Mm-hmm.
[Sriskandarajah] …to Sweden.
Where some biohackers--
Those are the people who like to inject technology into their bodies,
so they can turn into Iron Man?
Well, these guys are advocates.
They're shooting lead into their veins,
and they're advocating for the idea of man becoming robot?
They're strong proponents of implantable technology.
-I'm not here on behalf of biohacking. -Come on.
This is why people can't trust the media. All right? Give it to me straight.
-Okay, these guys are a little unhinged. -Thank you.
You see that's two by twelve millimeters.
It's the size of a luxurious grain of rice.
These biohackers are looking for opportunities
to advance the issue of human-implantable microchips.
[man 5] I do single sign-on on my laptop,
unlocking your phone, getting into my house.
[lock beeps, unlocks]
Cypher, the biohacker who's paying attention to this,
posts a headline, a little provocative, a little misleading.
It goes, "Bill Gates will use microchip implants
to fight coronavirus."
[Klepper] He posts a headline.
What does that mean? Does he own a newspaper?
[laughs]
This is the problem right here.
You could post a headline like it's a fact.
So, he takes a leap of faith, and he says,
"This is gonna be something that will be injected into your body."
Yeah. You know how the Internet works.
Mm-hmm. It destroys humanity faster than we ever could have expected?
[Sriskandarajah] You know…
We should talk to the guy who really was at the beginning
of this whole computer movement. What's his name?
Uh, Bill. Bill Gates.
-[music halts] -[Bill slurps]
[gulps]
[upbeat music playing]
Hello, this is Adam with I want to share an article with you today.
Look at this.
So, this article lands on the desk of a Jacksonville pastor,
so he makes a YouTube video.
[Adam] The article reads,
"Bill Gates will launch human-implantable capsules
that have 'digital certificates'
which can show who has been tested for the coronavirus."
Now, this is quite a concern for any Bible-believing Christians
knowing what the Bible says about the end times.
Knowing that the Bible says there will be an Antichrist,
a man that proclaims to be God that gives glory to the Dragon,
which is the Devil.
He titles his video "Bill Gates Microchip Vaccine Implants to fight Coronavirus."
So, he adds the word "vaccine."
-[tense music playing] -[crowd angrily shouting]
[man 6] I've read articles about putting a little chip in with the vaccine.
When is Bill Gates' serpent tongue gonna come out of his mouth,
and… and when will his horns and tail appear?
So, when the… the cameras, the 5G comes out, what?
They're gonna scan everybody? We gotta get scanned?
[Klepper] Yeah, I remember I was at an anti-vaxx rally in Orange County,
and people were talking a lot about Bill Gates.
They were talking about him almost like he was Thanos.
Like he wanted a sixth of the population to just disappear.
[electronic whir]
-[fingers snap] -[loud explosion]
Well, I guess it's important to say that even before the pandemic,
there is a group of people who were anti-vaccine.
[indistinct shouting]
[Gates] There's some that you'd think of as more on the left,
some more on the right,
and with both there's the sense of freedom
and does the government know what they're doing?
How it turned into, "There's a chip in the vaccine,"
which, how does it get through the needle? I don't know.
And what's the power source?
That's the first time I experienced a complete conspiracy theory
that say I had something to do with the creation of the pandemic.
That's one of the more extreme ones,
so that was a very new thing and… and very surprising.
[birds tweeting]
[Gates] Well, during the pandemic, we would talk on a regular basis.
A lot of it was "Okay, wow. The world's gotten a bit crazy."
"Are you doing okay?"
And, "Do you see this the same way I do?" And "Did you hear the latest?"
Our constant communication over that was very psychologically, uh, therapeutic.
[both laugh]
[Fauci] Because I'd say
at least I know somebody understands what I'm going through.
[crowd chanting] Kill Bill Gates! Kill Bill Gates! Kill…
[Gates] At the beginning of the pandemic, people accused me of making money
and went as far as to say that intentionally I get vaccines out
that literally have caused millions of deaths.
-Right. -[Gates] It's kind of inverting the truth.
Instead of spending billions to save millions,
I kill millions to make billions.
[Fauci] Yeah, and when you talk to people
who come up with something that's outlandishly untrue,
and you say, "That's just not true. How did you come to that conclusion?"
I gotta tell you, more often than not it's, "Somebody showed me a tweet."
-[Gates] Yeah. -[Fauci] So, you can take an untruth,
tweet it, and retweet it 100,000 times, and then it becomes a fact.
[horns honking]
[Gates] I remember we had these rules
that there was a certain time of night you weren't supposed to get your phone,
and so sometimes Mom would go to bed, and I was supposed to enforce the rules,
but then you ended up having a second phone or something.
But do you find yourself, even at this age, using your phone
and staying on social media more than you want to?
Oh my gosh, yeah.
TikTok is so addictive. I'm on it, like, all the time.
And have you ever run into crazy misinformation about me?
Crazy misinformation about you? All the time.
I've even had friends cut me off because of these vaccine rumors.
But I'm a public health student at Stanford,
and I think that there's just so much nuance
on how do you communicate, like, accurate public health information
or scientific data.
I don't know. I… I need to learn more, um, because I naively still believe that
digital communication can be a force to bring us together,
to have reasonable debate.
I think one thing, like, you don't really understand about online is, like,
it's not really, like, logic and fact that win out.
Like, people want an escape.
They want to, like, laugh. They want an engaging video.
They want to, you know, be taken away from boring reality.
And so, like, the most popular video of you online
is you literally trying to do the dab.
[man 7] Uh, Bill, can you do the dab real quick?
Damn, Bill! [laughs]
Or you jumping over the chair.
Is it true that you can leap over a chair from a standing position?
It depends on the size of the chair.
Uh, I'll cheat a little bit.
Yes!
Those were the most popular 'cause people want to escape from things,
so I don't think fact and reason always win out online.
But the thing about, you know, I make lots of money from vaccines,
it's hard for me to figure out where that comes from.
It's not like a political organization. It's just madness, and who promotes that?
I think it's fear. Everyone was stuck at home during a pandemic.
We're all scared for our lives.
No one really knows what to trust or what to believe,
so that's what our society does.
Yeah, the pandemic was definitely, uh, social media at its worst.
-[chuckles] -[Gates] Uh, oversimplifying things.
You know, it's so scary to me that
I think of democracy as a debate over a set of issues
as opposed to this complete separation of us and them,
and what if we have a pandemic that's ten times worse--
Don't say that. They're gonna think you're gonna cause it then.
-That's right. I'm working on it. -Don't you say that. Cut that.
[both laugh]
You can't go telling people something's gonna happen,
and then when it happens, they're like, "Oh!"
[Gates] This is not funny? [chuckles]
This is bad short-form content
that'll go everywhere, millions of views, if you say it.
Okay. [chuckles]
[inquisitive music plays]
So, I work in medieval legal history, and I look at how the histories are made.
So the official histories, how do they get constructed?
What pieces go into them?
It's always a sort of combination of factors,
but a conspiracy theory always has kind of the same story.
[soft music playing]
[Wang] Once upon a time, we were happy, and everything was good.
We were in charge, and we were safe.
[Wang] And then the monsters took hold, but no one knew that they had.
[faint grumbles]
[Wang] Everything seemed fine
because the monsters made sure this was all kept secret.
They could change shapes and sizes, and they could look like anything.
[children gasp]
[Wang] But the thing about these monsters is that they're in control of the media.
They're in control of their own image,
and so only a very few people can actually see these monsters.
And if… if you're special enough,
you could spot the monsters no matter what they looked like.
[soft music continues]
[Wang] Only the heroes of the story knew the truth,
and then they arrived to save the world.
Of course this is a compelling story.
Like, I'm a dragon slayer? Yeah, sign me up!
And then came a magical device called the Internet.
[Wang] It's a fairy tale about who you are,
and it's a sort of hero's journey about yourself,
and that's the core of a conspiracy theory is the way that it helps you see yourself.
This was a battle of good versus evil, and that's how they saw the world.
-[children] The end. -[teacher] The end. [chuckles]
[child 1] That's a weird book.
-Should we read it again? -[children] No!
[teacher] Okay, okay.
[man 8] We didn't start structurally tracking misinformation
until really the beginning of the pandemic.
-[woman 2] Hello. -[man 8] Hey, Bill.
-Hi. -[man 9] Hi, Bill.
[man 8] I think Bill's biggest concern
is misinformation about the topics and the issues he works on.
So whether that's climate change, pandemic preparedness,
whether that's global health more broadly,
you know, we just have to be equipped with what's happening in that sector.
[Cook] So, we're gonna take you through something you haven't seen yet.
We're gonna show you some of the things that are hot right now,
and I also have to apologize. Some of this stuff is dark.
So, if there was an arc of what happened in misinformation,
it used to be à la carte issues.
What has happened, though, is people have done really good
at conflating things into these massive conspiracy theories
that include microchips, farmland,
vaccine technology, about puppeteering world affairs,
so this is a real-time dashboard of all the misinformation about you.
So, what you're seeing right now,
these are all the posts and issues contributing to all that volume.
But I wonder if some things like the microchipping thing,
has that dropped to zero, or is that still there?
No, that's, like, a quarter of so many of those sections.
[Cook] This is a pretty interesting one.
This blue line is really just about climate.
A lot of this is about puppeteering the food supply.
Let me take you down a little bit here.
So, one of the emerging rumors and conspiracy theories is
you've engineered ticks that when they bite people,
they make people allergic to traditional meat,
and that this is a theory in order to drive demand for synthetic meats.
So, apparently, um, 450,000 Americans have been bitten by these ticks,
and they are gonna now switch over to meat substitutes,
and that's part of a profiteering plan around synthetic meats.
Obviously, the bizarre nature of this,
I think this is being shared a little bit more broadly
because it's just so incredible
that actual normal people are like, "This is wack,"
and it gets counted as either a neutral or a positive one.
Glad you're laughing. Uh, I found this to be particularly depressing.
It's interesting to know how to fight back, though, you know,
'cause a lot of ways to fight back could even make it worse.
Right. We noticed that, like, if you do fact checking,
often that's actually just highlighting the story to more people.
[Cook] Yeah.
I love that word cluster. It's fantastic.
-[Cook] Yeah. -[Gates] That's my to-do list.
[woman 2 chuckles]
When it comes to misinformation, Bill's pretty tough-skinned.
Some of this stuff is so wild.
You know, so wild that it almost makes him laugh.
But when you talk to Bill,
I think misinformation is incredibly perplexing to him
because it's still not clear how we address the issue
in some way that's systemic and foundational.
You know, in the pandemic,
when we'd watch those videos of people in the hospital saying,
"Now I want the vaccine,"
and you see it explained to them that it's just too late.
You can ascribe millions of deaths
as a result of some of this misinformation.
It's just sort of hard to get your head and your heart wrapped around that.
So, when I was in my early twenties, there was a rumor that I was a man,
and I went all over the world.
I mean, I traveled for tours, for promoting my records,
and almost every interview I sat in, they said, "You know, we--"
Well, there was this image on the Internet that had been doctored.
Oh wow.
And they were like, you know, "There's this rumor that you're a man."
"What do you have to say about that?"
Do you ever go on the Internet, Lady Gaga?
-I try to stay away. -Yeah. 'Cause it's filled with mad rumors.
-Really? -Oh yeah.
[audience chuckles]
-Would you like to hear a couple? -I'm sure I don't have a choice. [laughs]
Someone said that Lady Gaga is actually a very well-endowed young man.
What about the crazy rumors about you being a hermaphrodite?
How do you feel about that when you read that?
[Cooper] A lot of artists would've put out a statement saying,
"This is absolutely not true." You have fun with it.
Why the hell am I gonna waste my time
and give a press release about whether or not I have a penis?
My fans don't care and neither do I.
The reason I didn't answer the question was because
I didn't feel like a victim with that lie,
but I thought about, like, what about a kid that's being accused of that
that would think a public figure like me would feel shame?
It's like… Sometimes… I guess what I'm saying is I've been in situations
where fixing a rumor was not in the best interest of…
I thought of, like, the well-being of other people.
-Huh. -[Gaga] So, in that case,
I try to be thought-provoking and disruptive in another way.
I tried to use the misinformation to create another disruptive point.
People, I think, assume that someone like me that performs,
that my performance is what's not real,
but to me that's the most real thing that you'll see about me.
That is so much more real than, um,
all of the rumors that are designed to orbit me to gain more clicks.
Yeah. [chuckles]
Do you think we have tactics for reducing this?
That is a very sensitive issue because we wanna make sure
that there is this very strong element of freedom of speech.
Mm-hmm.
Except freedom of speech does not allow you to cry, "Fire" in a movie theater,
then you have to reconsider what can you do about that?
[reporter 4] A new study suggests that TikTok
may be pushing harmful content to its young users.
[man 10] You basically have to make a choice.
Do you err on the side of free speech and voice,
or do you err on the side of wanting to remove harmful content?
[Musk] It seems to me that there's a severe violation of the First Amendment
in terms of how much control the government had over old Twitter,
and, uh, it no longer does,
so, you know, there's a reason for the First Amendment.
I don't need a lecture on free speech from Elon Musk. I don't.
He just decides when he's gonna do free speech on his platform that he owns.
Free speech was not conceived on such a scale,
and therefore it gives enormous power to malevolent players.
[soft music playing]
[Boyd] I often come back to this court case called Packer v. Utah.
Utah had outlawed putting tobacco ads in its state,
and Packer, which was a tobacco company, said,
"Ah, we have free speech rights. We can put up an ad."
The case worked its way up to the Supreme Court,
and the ruling is written by Justice Brandeis,
and he basically argues that,
actually, the act of putting it in a billboard in a community space
was creating the conditions that people had to look away.
They had to avert their eyes.
You have given too much privilege to the speech act
and not enough to the listener.
Social media is not a question of… of speech or speech acts.
It's a question of amplification.
If I choose to subscribe to your information, fine.
But what does it mean to be forced to see?
Those are different things.
[Diresta] Your right to be a jerk, your right to be hateful.
You can do that, and the content can continue to exist.
It can be on the platform.
People who want to go looking for it can find it.
But the platform's not under any obligation
to push it out into an algorithmic feed.
So, this question of who draws the lines
between your right to free expression and real world harm
is actually, I think, the question for our time.
Everything that is built today is built in the era of polarization.
Which is something that, as social scientists have pointed out,
-predates the Internet. -Yeah.
[man 11] We talk about disinformation, rumors, misinformation,
and it becomes personal for individuals.
Mr. Gates, did you see this happening?
Was this on your radar at all,
or was this a… was this a completely surprising phenomenon?
I didn't realize the digital realm would let people sort of cluster
and revel in often things that are not real,
so I'm actually quite concerned about that.
[Stamos] Is this something that's only getting worse,
or is there some kind of turning point where… where maybe things improve a bit?
So, I think there's technological problems and there's social problems,
and, of course, there's this intersection.
And since social media brought everybody into the same spaces,
put them on the same infrastructure, you have this interesting dynamic
where some recommendation and curation decisions,
just some really bad design decisions that were made very unintentionally.
[birds squawking]
[Diresta] The way most platforms keep people online
is they give you a sense of community.
I've used the metaphor of flocks of starlings.
There's these murmurations.
They careen around,
and it happens because each bird can see the seven birds nearest it.
So one bird kinda changes direction,
and then it has this cascading effect where things move very quickly.
But it has no idea what the rest of the flock is doing.
You see something. It comes across your feed,
and you hit the like button,
and you don't necessarily think that has an impact,
but once you engage, you're feeding it more information about your interests.
If you're in an anti-vaccine group, you're probably gonna like chemtrails.
If you like chemtrails, here's some flat earth,
and so it is constantly pushing you recommendations
because it's competing for your attention against the other platforms
that are doing the same thing.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Gates] I think the mistake I made was thinking when people were sitting there,
they were mostly just trying to gather facts
and there would be less misinformation,
but as we connect to things over the Internet,
even myself,
if an article has a headline that says,
"People You Disagree With Politically Are Even Stupider Than You Thought,"
you know, I might click on that and think, "Hey, yeah! They really are. Yeah."
As a result of that, as a result of the polarization in the United States,
this conversation has become a very partisan fight
when it's actually happening globally.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Diresta] In 2010, activist groups began to realize
that the Internet actually is a powerful tool for organizing.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the Arab Spring.
[indistinct shouting]
[Diresta] This wakes up governments.
They no longer think about this as some people talking on the Internet.
Now it's toppling regimes.
So, what you start to see is governments incorporating the Internet
into their propaganda apparatus.
[reporter 5] The Islamic State,
they're producing propaganda pieces every single day.
What ISIS does very overtly, Russia goes and does very covertly,
and all of a sudden, you have this kind of war of all against all
where different factions are fighting for attention and clout
and then real power in the real world.
We've seen influence operations originated by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India,
Pakistan, Jordan, gosh, the United States.
-[Santos] United States. -Right? [chuckles]
[Diresta] There's nobody that isn't doing it
to try to manipulate the information space of their enemy.
And again, this ties back to very old concepts of war and dominance
where if you can activate a small group of people within one country
to fight against a group of people in another country,
you can destabilize your enemy
purely using real existing tensions that exist within the world.
[Srinivasan] This issue of disinformation has really gone on steroids
because we are overwhelmed and inundated with information.
We barely have time or space to reflect, let alone process something deeply,
so, as a result, we're just gonna accept what is coming at us.
And I think people are suspicious and skeptical
of the world that's being presented to them,
but we have no other choice.
Well, in the end, this is a societal problem,
and there will have to be laws and regulations
that drive the solution to this.
Obviously, different countries will deal with this in different ways,
but in the US, it's immensely complicated.
[Kennedy] I've heard you talk about the reforms you've made,
but I don't think you're gonna solve the problem.
I think Congress is gonna have to help you.
We can no longer trust Meta and, frankly, any of the other social media
to provide the kind of safeguards that children and parents deserve.
Mr. Zuckerberg, why should your company not be sued for this?
Shouldn't you be held accountable?
Senator, I… I think I've already answered this. This is--
[Hawley] Well, try us again. Will you take personal responsibility?
There's families of victims here today.
Would you like now
to apologize to the victims who've been harmed by your posts?
Show him the pictures.
[Srinivasan] You can't expect them to take responsibility to regulate themselves.
We have to restructure the entire apparatus
within which these technology corporations operate
to ensure that the people are actually protected,
especially those most vulnerable in our society.
I am a believer in a more decentralized content moderation sphere
where users have more, uh, control
rather than Mark Zuckerberg or others having to decide
these are the policies,
and they will then apply to two billion people.
[Swisher] The Internet was paid for by taxpayers.
So they took a thing we paid for,
and then they make the decisions that affect society,
that actually cause impact,
whether it's addiction or insurrection or radicalization,
but then have no responsibility for that.
We've done nothing about it. Nothing. Nothing. Zero.
[dramatic music plays]
I think disinformation is perpetuated by all of us.
Absolutely.
I think it's not something that we can just blame social media
for not making sure that they have better practices.
I think that we also have to hold ourselves to a standard
of what we are willing to perpetuate on our own platforms.
Well, we've made it so easy
to just post anything.
You know, so somebody who,
you know, on the playground would have been rude and nasty,
okay, a few dozen kids hear that, that's not great, you know,
but hopefully they'll grow up.
But you're sitting in your own home,
and if somebody is questioning your traditional values,
it's just, you know, you just sit there and type,
and then the system takes that and it's not just the playground,
it's millions of people.
So, blaming the individuals is hard
because it's kind of human nature but just blasted out.
[Gaga] When I hear you talk about the playground,
what I think right away is,
if enough people were on the playground shouting at each other at the same time,
I feel like someone might calm it down.
No, you're right.
On that playground, if, you know, things go too out of control,
there was some adult who would show up.
And even when you attack somebody on the playground,
you can see their face, you know.
And maybe they'll cry, or maybe they'll, you know, run away,
and you're like, "Was that my intention?"
"I did make that person feel bad."
Whereas when you're sitting there typing, and you're feeling like you're so clever,
you don't see that human reaction that makes you think twice about it.
Say you wanted to understand people with different viewpoints,
is there any way to get exposed to that broader?
Yeah, I'd say that you have to definitely intentionally seek it out.
If you wanna get the other side, you have to literally search that out,
especially because the algorithm tailors towards your views
or the content you're engaging with the most.
We're just gonna have to be even more aware
of what's true and what's not true.
Yeah, you know, I'd love a little bit that every once in a while
if there's really a well-reasoned kind of right wing,
why do they see it differently, you know, understand our perspective.
-I'd love to get that into your theme. -Same. Same.
Because I'm big about moving people to the middle.
That's why tweaking the algorithm would be so important.
If I could say to it, "Hey, today I wanna see content from both sides."
"Don't just label me as left."
I wish I could tweak the algorithm to say,
"I don't wanna see this today. I wanna see this."
If I could really play around with it, that would be really fun.
[inspiring music playing]
[Wang] So, right now the problem with social media is
that we are actually destabilizing trust more broadly within the society.
And once you sort of break trust, you have to replace it with something.
You can't just continue being skeptical
because skepticism doesn't produce knowledge.
If your only sort of premise is what you think you know, you don't know,
you can't actually go anywhere from there. That doesn't lead you in any directions.
[man 12] It's no longer a conspiracy when you do your own homework.
You're trying to get us 'cause you're obviously not,
so you're trying to make us seem bad, but you're the bad guy.
I can't hear you 'cause you have a stupid mask on your face.
[Diresta] Right now, you see that kind of conspiracy without the theory
almost replacing the actual conspiracy theories.
They are against us.
The theory of why they don't want you to know is completely absent.
The reason why "they" are doing this is not even discussed.
[Srinivasan] I think we're getting to some tipping points here
where a lot of us are recognizing
that this current system as it stands is overwhelming us.
It's… It's isolating us. It's fragmenting us.
It's driving us all a little crazy.
Bill Gates thinks of himself as God, in control of the solar system,
and that's why Bill Gates is now backing something called sun-dimming technology.
[woman 3] Thank you, Bill Gates,
for trying to fuckin' trick us that this is real snow.
Snow fuckin' melts.
[inhales]
What can you do?
You know, I can't let it bother me
that some people have even the most negative view of my work,
but I need a certain level of acceptance
to be able to partner with governments and other philanthropists
and recruit the best scientists.
So anything that starts to undermine understanding of what we're about,
what we've achieved, that's problematic.
Do you think that we're entering an era now
where putting humanity back into things is gonna be possible?
I do, but partly it's not that I have a specific plan.
Come on, Bill.
[both laugh]
No, I sometimes… My ultimate cop out is I say,
"Hey, my generation did a lot of things,
but we gifted to the next generation a… a bit of a mess."
We have a digital polarization thing
that outweighs the access to information thing,
and, you know, hey, young people, make some new rules.
Right.
Or have competition in excellence, not competition in insanity.
But I feel bad that I… I don't have the… the solution.
[Stamos] So, for the students here, as, uh, mostly Gen Zers,
do you think there's a generation gap here on disinformation?
I would not say that younger people are necessarily doing it better.
I actually think younger generations now have almost a social incentive
to share a stance,
so while I think older generations might see something and be outraged,
and maybe they'll share it,
I think people who are younger are incentivized to share that
and pretend to be an expert.
So I think that can be almost more dangerous.
Yes, I'm skeptical of what's on my feed.
I know that I can't be manipulated,
so with that confidence you kind of just go into these algorithms saying,
"Yeah, give me more. Tell me more about, like…"
I'll keep scrolling 'cause I won't be manipulated.
My youngest sister is almost nine years younger than me.
She's 20, so she's very much Gen Z,
and I see a huge difference even between us.
[metal rattles]
[Gates] I get out of date, you know, pretty quickly.
Like, you know, Facebook, I guess that's not like a big thing.
-Do you do any? -No, I don't do any Facebook.
And how many IDs do you typically have on a system?
How many what?
Do you have multiple personas on the same system?
Oh, you mean accounts? Uh, yeah, yeah, I do.
Usually you have, like, your big public account,
and then you'll have a spam one that's, like, for your closer friends
that's just, like, funny stuff that you put up.
Yeah, I hear you, but, you know, I'm a serious person.
So how do I keep that serious persona and not be a… a boring guy?
I think people want to see that person
that they don't understand living their day-to-day life.
Like, I understand a lot of times when people come to my page,
they're coming to my page because of my last name
or interest in our family.
And then I can sow in there between, like, you know,
a lot of times it's photos of my face or when I show skin, I get more likes,
but I can sow…
No, but I can sow in there stuff about reproductive health and stuff
and then people are learning that content as well,
and because I'm doing a lot of this work
spreading information about reproductive justice
or women making decisions about their own bodies.
I've even seen the amount of, like, abuse I get online go up
since I've gotten more followers.
You're choosing to use social media to educate and to activate.
Yeah, so it's a fine line between being personable
but also then weaving in your real agenda.
Okay. Here's the numbers. Here's the science. Here's the facts.
Just literally, like, a livestream video of you talking through your day
I think would be, like, really cool.
All right.
And text me. Don't email me.
What's wrong with email?
No one uses email for personal communications.
-Forty years ago, we did that a lot. -Forty years ago, I'm sure that they did.
Not this year and never, ever, ever in the future.
[distorted music plays]
-[producer] Are you good? -[man 13] Yeah.
[producer] We got it. Thank you.
So, what do you want me to do? Get up and walk?
-[producer] Thank you. -[Boyd] No, thank you.
Our human desire to be able to coexist and think about the country or the world
instead of us versus them within the country, it's a challenge.
I mean, climate change is just one example
of something we have to work together to solve.
Yet now with misinformation, that progress is at risk,
but I'm really hoping that we'll minimize the damage from misinformation
and continue to improve the human condition.
I will say there's a few things you can do to be a bit less of an asshole
with that person you disagree with.
One, read a book. [chuckles]
Sit in your thoughts for a while and somebody else's head for a while.
Two, travel. Anywhere.
Just have a different experience, even if it's down the block.
And three, concede something.
You wanna know what I'd like about somebody?
When they think I'm right,
and when they can admit a vulnerability they could be wrong.
And I think we never have conversations where there's any concessions.
If we can create healthy enough human beings who can say,
"I think I might've been wrong about this…"
[exhales] …little crack of light.
[inquisitive music playing]
[closing theme music playing]
[music fades]