How disinformation 'sabotages America'; WBUR, March 21, 2024

Jonathan Chang 

Meghna Chakrabarti

, WBUR; How disinformation 'sabotages America'

"CHAKRABARTI: By the way, I was really taken with the dedication that you put in the front of the book, and I just want to read it here for a second.

You said, "To all of the brave American heroes who have given their lives to defend democracy from fascism, a trip to Normandy where more than 9,000 American service members are buried, left me in awe of their courage and selflessness. We owe them and other American patriots our vigilance so that their sacrifices will not have been in vain."

Why are you dedicating the book to them?

McQUADE: Yeah, I had the opportunity to visit Normandy a couple of years ago, and anybody who's ever been there, I know, must feel that moving sense of awe to see all of those white crosses and stars of David representing the 9,000 young people who gave their lives for our democracy, and they're all, young, 19, 20 years old.

And then you think about the crass, lying power grabs that we're seeing today. It's really disgusting. And it is an insult to people who sacrifice their lives for democracy. To simply lie and try to steal the power of the people through lies to advance a party's power or an individual's power...

CHAKRABARTI: We're rounding towards the last few minutes of the conversation, Barbara. I would love to hear more about, given your experience inside government, within the law and the research that you did for this book, you have a couple of chapters of what can we do about it? So what are a couple of your other proposed solutions that we haven't already potentially touched on in this show?

McQUADE: Yeah. So I think there are a few things that can be done. One is I think we need some meaningful regulation of social media. It's been an incredible explosion of technology to have social media, especially those based in the United States, these tech companies, but they've allowed, they've been allowed to grow unregulated since the 1990s.

And now that we have seen the harms of it, I think in retrospect, we ought to have some controls. So one of them is to control these algorithms. The idea that they have computer programs, computer code. This is not speech. This is a process. And so I think without running afoul of the first amendment, we could regulate the processes that social media companies are allowed to use.

Some of these that manipulate us, that push us toward this content designed to engender outrage, I think, is certainly something that we could prohibit, or at least require disclosure, so people know when they are being manipulated."