Dystopia Incorporated

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Ben Collins, NBC News dystopia beat reporter. He covers the dark underbellies of the web, dis and misinformation, conspiracy theories and political vendettas, lies and corruption.
Excerpt:
HEFFNER: In the case of this political season, what has struck you as the approach of the conspiracy mongers?
COLLINS: I think we saw a dry run with the Joe Biden stuff that happened, you know, this is stuff that starts in the same places. This, that starts in literally start started on 4chan, which is like an extremist website, bubbles its way up to other spaces like it starts there, it starts in foreign media. It starts with, you know, with the Joe Biden stuff, it literally started with indicted people who are trying to fight back in Ukraine.
Those people go to soft targets that are journalists with, journalists with something to push. It was John Solomon from The Hill who has long had a grudge against this sort of thing and he’s, you know, trying to make a name for himself. And he pushed reporting under what was an opinion column. And then from there that got bubbled up through places like Breitbart and Fox news. Eventually he becomes a contributor at Fox News. And then all of these lies about Joe Biden start to surface, even though they are completely invented - like nonsense stuff. It mostly about, you know, they, they built in another conspiracy theory doesn’t make any sense about this thing called CrowdStrike, which is another company that just got defamed here. So look, we saw the same playbook as last time. It did not change the pipeline was the same. You start at 4chan and you start at these anonymous websites, you go to soft targets from places like Breitbart and you know, contributors at various websites and then eventually it starts to bubble up in the mainstream media. And that’s the problem. Once it gets to that point, it’s hard to rein all that stuff in and there’s really not a lot of people enlisted in doing that.