HEFFNER: I’m Alexander Heffner,
your host on The Open Mind.
Our guest today
exposes the dis and
misinformation, the scams,
hucksters and deceit
across the web,
especially on health,
social and
political matters.
A former staffer with the
Burlington Public Library,
this librarian
turned senior researcher,
has reported for the
Daily Beast and is now a
national
reporter for NBC News.
As David Beard writes
of Brandy Zadrozny,
“She’s one of several news
librarians and researchers
who’ve made a huge
difference on big stories
and journalism is grateful.”
Thank you for your
important work.
It’s a pleasure
to host you.
We really wanted to focus
on health concerns
and the proliferation of
conspiracy theory and real
concern about people’s
ability to handle crisis
situations online and what
that might for bode in
terms of our human
capacity to deal with
health related crises. 
The first is coronavirus.
In the immediate
aftermath of,
of the virus there’s
very little reliable
information coming out
of China and we saw an
explosion of victims of
fatalities and those who
are very critically ill
and in that void we saw a
lot of conspiracy theory,
but you in particular
have been tracking that.
And I just wanted you
to give our viewers a,
a holistic view of
what’s going on with the
coronavirus in reality and
then in online where the
mythology and fantasy
sometimes take over.ZADROZNY: Sure.
So, in reality, there is a
coronavirus that has sort
swept across China,
started in Wuhan and now
it’s traveled to
several other countries.
It’s gotten to the United
States and people are sick
and some are mostly older 
people are dying. It’s scary.
There are
thousands of cases.
It’s really,
it’s really moving.
But we don’t
really know why.
We don’t know why
for a lot of reasons.
We don’t know why because
maybe China has a history
of not really releasing
things that might be
politically embarrassing.
We don’t know why because
epidemiology is hard, right?
It’s difficult scientific,
messy work sometimes.
So we have a flood of
scientists doing work
right now to
sort of find the,
where it originated
and find a vaccine.
So in that space, there’s lots
of questions, right?
Fair questions.
But when we have a
situation where there are
lots of questions and not
a lot of answers and there are
real stakes, right, people’s
lives are on the line. 
It’s scary.
So you have a scary
situation dealing with
countries that
have been, you know,
normally pretty secretive
and it deals with health
and science and things that
people don’t really understand.
So when you have a vacuum
of information like this,
you know, there are going
to be people that rush tofill that vacuum.
It’s not always
for you know,
dastardly purposes, but
just you want answers,
you know, and
you know when,
when you start
looking for,
or when you start trying
to answer questions like
that, sometimes the answers
aren’t always right.
So what has popped up
in the online space and
offline too, because I talk
to people all the time and
I hear this in real
life is just a host of,
you know, crazy
conspiracies that
sometimes have a
seed of truth,
sometimes don’t, they’re
pushed by a couple of
classifications of people.
I would say one is medical
disinformation agents that
want to sell
you something,
maybe a gas mask,
maybe a supplement,
maybe vitamin C
that they say,
will cure your coronavirus,
maybe a dangerous type of
bleach that’s being sold
for this purpose
on Facebook right,
now, so you
have those guys.
And then you have
political ideologues that
want to sell you maybe an
anti-China message that
want to increase
your distrust of China.
So we have Senator Tom
Cotton who sort of made
the rounds on Fox News and
other places just asking,asking questions.
Maybe the virus developed in a
research facility in Wuhan.
What could be the
purpose of that?
And the implication is he’s,
what he’s doing is he’s
dog whistling these online
articles that have been
claiming that the Wuhan
virus escaped or was
released as some sort of
biomedical weapon to
the Chinese people for
population control.
Maybe the
Americans engineered it.
There’s all these splinter
conspiracies that come off
of this, but those
are the main one.
And then you have the
clout chasers that just
sort of, it could
be anything really.
Coronavirus just happens
to have a very long tail.
So they’ve come because
they have Instagram
accounts that they want
to get lots of likes andfollowers for.
The most popular
coronavirus video on
Instagram had
millions of views,
like 42 million views or
something and it was like
a guy eating a
bat and mice.
So that sort of
spread xenophobia,
it gets people to
like be shocked.
And that’s what shocking
content really moves online.
So this guy, he was he
was a penny stock guy.
He’s not a doctor and
not any sort of expert in
coronavirus
but he was the,
his video was the
video that everybody saw.
So those are the main
people that are sort of
leaping on to this virus
and spreading them the
worst of it.
HEFFNER: It comes
in a climate
where anti-vaxxers on
YouTube and Twitter and
Facebook have made huge
inroads in attempting to
persuade people that
vaccinations will kill
their children.
And so, it’s in this
climate too of distrust
within the American
information ecosystem.
But did it make
it more difficult,
and does it make it more
difficult because we see
China reporting
thousands of,
now thousands of
deceased people,
but certainly tens of thousands
of critically ill people.
And that is a country that
doesn’t have an open web.
So what’s filling our
knowledge base is the
combination of a
propaganda machine in
China that may or may not
be telling the truth and
then anything else we
can kind of fish out.
And like you’re saying,
they’re also really
important scientists on
Twitter who are constantly
sharing scholarly work and
a lot of the European and
American doctors have what
we could consider trusted
Twitter handles and a trusted
social media presence.
But does that particular
situation of China
and the lack of an open web
there complicate this further?
ZADROZNY: Oh, it’s super
complicated just for that
reason.Yeah.
And I mean, the basis of
any good conspiracy is a
seed of truth, right?
So we’re not getting a lot of
information out of there.
And we’ve saw
how, you know,
China famously dealt
with the SARS epidemic,
which was not being
completely open and honest
about when it originated,
how fast it was spreading,
so, so yes, and that
complicates things.
It also, you know, it
complicates things even
further not having
an open web and not,
and being, having such a
hold on information that
they do, that
it’s almost like,
it’s almost like
a game, right,
in terms of research or
people who are researching
themselves are
really looking to find
information and
because you’re looking for
that information because 
it’s a riddle. It’s a quest.
It’s been locked down.
So just, our natural
inclination is to find it,
find what‘s in hiding.
HEFFNER: Brandy, there
doesn’t seem to be any
conspiracy or question
about the fact that over
100 million people are on
quarantine at this moment
as of our recording.
And that’s something that
might be exaggerated or
hyperbolized in the past.
But that is unprecedented
that in the midst of this,
you have tens of millions
of people who have been
relegated to their homes
and also we should believe
that because
China is saying that,
but also because there are
travel policies that have
been amended to try to stop 
the spread of the disease.
But I guess that is
a stunning figure,
which if true is something
that you might think is a
conspiracy but is not,
is fact: 100 million
people plus under
home quarantine,
ZADROZNY: Sometimes truth
is stranger than fiction.HEFFNER: Right.
ZADROZNY: I
mean, the things,
again, we’re talking about
anti-vaxxers or we’re
talking about people who
distrust the medical community.
What you often see them
using to fuel a conspiracy
theory that has no basis
in fact that we know of
are real things that
has have happened,
right, medical
mistakes, mishaps,
you know Tuskegee,
like you have these,
these things that
happened in the world and,
but they’re re-purposing
truthful things that have
been reported by
mainstream media to make
you believe in this insanity.
And yeah.
HEFFNER: So in this
particular instance,
Senator Cotton pointed
to and others pointed to,
and you got into a little
tit-for-tat on social
media with him and
his chief of staff,
or one of the staffers,
correctly pointing out that,
you know,
you shouldn’t make a
suggestion of a bio weapon when
there’s no evidence of that.
But interestingly,
in this case,
there’s also no evidence
yet of an intermediary
source because typically
with SARS or MERS
originally, and this
is sort of SARS 2.0,
which is why it’s
so frightening,
there have been identified
by scientists these
intermediary
hosts, if it’s in fact,
whether at a
market or elsewhere,
it’s being
transported from bat to,
in the case of
MERS, camel to human.
And the Chinese while
there give this list of
deaths that just keep
popping up and popping up.
There’s, there’s no, at
this particular moment,
there is no evidence with,
with any certainty other
than there, there is RNA
that relates to bat has a
common features
of bat viruses,
but there is no evidence
of that particular link to
how it got to a human
because in almost every
circumstance it would have to
have an intermediary source.
And the absence of that
led Senator Cotton and
others to say, oh, here
are two facilities that
study MERS and SARS
and coronaviruses.
And is it possible what
he’s suggesting in sort of
more believable
or let’s say in,
in more
responsible languages,
could there have
been a contaminant?
What you’re saying is he
is as someone who prides
himself on foreign
policy credentials,
making a
suggestion of sort of a,
an innuendo that the Chinese
are not to be trusted.
And there was
a bio weapon.
But more realistically,
this is something that
ought to be
considered as, you know,
a potential contaminant
from research based on the
transmissibility of this,
a spec could have gotten
on someone who was
studying in a lab and it
could have originated that
way and not at a market.
So the absence of knowing
the intermediary host,
I suppose, has generated
some alternative theories.ZADROZNY: Sure.
Another one is that Bill
and Melinda Gates have
released it and had a
patent for it as a form of
population control.
I mean you can pick
anything to fit your
narrative, right, so
Senator Cotton has his
anti-China -
China hawk narrative,HEFFNER: Right.
ZADROZNY: And the
anti-vaxxers have their
Bill Gates narrative and
anything can fit in there
because there’s an
open question and it’s,
again, it’s fine to ask
those questions but as
someone who
tracks this, you know,
this paper
that came out-
HEFFNER: Yes. Tell
us about this.
ZADROZNY: So this paper
came out on Research Gate.
It was from a couple
of scientists and they
haven’t spoken to media.
We don’t, again, this is
a whole other conspiracy
because they released
this paper that said,
okay, you know,
what if basic,
the basic idea was what
if it was from a bat,
which we don’t
know yet right.
More recent research has
suggested possibly snakes.
So what if it, if it
did come from a bat,
then what if this
lab who had worked,
that had worked with
bats, what if some sort of
unsafe handling had caused
it to leak and then that’s
how we have,
that’s how it came.
This paper, it
wasn’t very good.
I mean, other scientists
have jumped on it wasn’t
it didn’t go through peer
review. It didn’t have time.
This research is
coming out so quickly.
So other scientists
leapt on to the paper
immediately and said,
this is really just
circumstantial, you’re
just guessing basically.HEFFNER: Right.
ZADROZNY: And then it was
taken down by the author,
Research Gate told me, so,
it was taken down by the
author and then he
deleted his account.
HEFFNER: And this was
supposedly written by two
Chinese scientists in a
Beijing-funded university.
ZADROZNY: Yes.
HEFFNER: And the one
piece of innuendo,
if you will, that was
tracked I think in this
report was the
suggestion, and again,
there’s no
verifiable fact here.
It was a suggestion and
then no evidentiary basis
of this, that a lab
official was bitten,
right, and that as a
result of not taking
proper precautions, right?
ZADROZNY: That
was a fairy tale.
HEFFNER: So everyone
is theorizing and,
and Twitter of course
is no sane ground for
building anything.
It’s building an
evidence-based approach tolearning about this.
But, you know, the fact is
that in a climate absent
trust we’re going to have
a hard time in real life
responding to crises.
So I don’t know, what
can, what can we learn as
Americans in
the aftermath,
in the ongoing epidemic or
pandemic of coronavirus
so that, you know, in
this instance or other
instances, we can
safeguard our information
in a way that is going
to be more helpful to
resolving an outbreak or
an election malfunction or
whatever it might be.
Is there anything we
can learn from what’s
transpired in these
last couple of months?
ZADROZNY: Ever
the librarian,
I believe that yes,
people can always learn.
We think of this space
and Claire Wardle at
First Draft and Whitney
Phillips of Syracuse
are two of my heroes as
information pollution, right.
And so when you have a
polluted environment,
there are really two sets of
actors who can make it better.
You have the
institutional reaction.
So if you have a
dirty factory,
that factory
cleans it up, right.
So that’s where we’re
hoping that Facebook and
Twitter who all met
with the WHO last week and
really made some real
efforts to sort of get on
the same page and work
together to quell the
misinformation that was
ramping on the platforms.
So you have that, but then
you also have personal
responsibility, right?
So I recycle, I, you
know, don’t litter,
those sorts of things.
And I think that that’s
true for informationpollution too.
So you hopefully we all
have a responsibility to
get our news on something
that’s so important from
trusted news
outlets, from,
you know, peer-review
papers from places like
The Lancet from the World
Health Organization that
all have done a
really good job,
especially now, sort of
getting up to speed on the
way information
spreads on social media.
So they have, you know,
debunking websites now
they have trackers where
you can get that bit of
information that
we’re so hungry for you,
we want to know, right?
It’s serious and we
want to know what that is.
So they’ve done a really
good job sort of doing
that and it’s up to us
to not feed into the junk
food diet of Facebook
and Twitter and conspiracy
sites and look for those,
for those real sources of
information and
together those two working
hand-in-hand I think
we can do it
HEFFNER: In combating
the anti-vax folks
on these sites have there
also been some advances
to deafen or at least
dampen the proliferation
of unscientific or
anti-science on these sites?
ZADROZNY: The anti-vaccine
community is very
different than something
like coronavirus,
right, because coronavirus
is a new phenomenon.It’s a news event.
People are following and
for that specific point
in time, and it will
be gone, you know,
we hope soon, but
anti-vax you know,
as long as
there’s been vaccines,
there’s been an anti-vaccine
coalition, right?
What happened with
Facebook and Instagram
and Twitter and some other
places was it created
meeting places for
them to organize,
fundraise and grow,
and they’ve grown.
Facebook is probably
the worst of it, I would say.
They’ve created
these groups,
which are, you know,
private spaces for
hundreds of thousands of
people to collectively
meet and scare the bejesus
out of each other and a
couple of profiteers
to run it who have fake
stories of dead children. 
And it’s heartbreaking.
It’s harmful.
And the steps that
Facebook has taken that
have been really great
with coronavirus put a
pop-up that says
vaccines are fine,
and here’s the CDC that’s 
not going to work for a cult.
Like Facebook has helped
engineer and organize a
cult around
anti-vaccination and a
business around it
for several people.
And now it’s saying, well
we’ll put a link up at the
top that says,
go to the CDC.
What is that going to do?
HEFFNER: So there’s
been no stoppage in the
monetization of dis and
misinformation around
vaccinations.ZADROZNY: I
mean, the worst,
the worst among them is 
this guy out of California.
He’s not a doctor,
he’s not even a parent,
and he has this website
called stop mandatory
vaccination, which he promotes
endlessly on Facebook.
He does lives, he
sells supplements.
It’s still operating even
though it’s clear what
he’s doing is
spreading misinformation.
Facebook says that they’re
going to stop that.
His group remains.
I don’t, I’ve talked
with, I don’t know,
dozens of
Facebook employees.
And that’s always the
first question I ask.
How, how can you claim to stop
misinformation around vaccines?
And then you allow this 
group to exist and to thrive.
I mean, they put
them down lower,
so maybe he’s not
in your news feed,but it still does pop up.
It just, it doesn’t make sense
to me. So it’s baby steps.
I wouldn’t say
nothing, you know,
something but baby steps.
HEFFNER: A lot of these
folks want to bring their
own children into the
conversation as the evidence.
And is that still the case?
ZADROZNY: Yeah.
So, that’s what, that’s
what the whole, stories are
what is the coin of
the realm, right.
It’s because who wants
to call a mother
of an injured child vaccine or
other a liar. You know?
And why I think it’s
really important to put
these people into groups.
And I would say 99.9%
of the people in
these groups, even some
of them running their own
groups are there because
they care about their
children and they think
they’ve been sold a bill
of goods for an
unanswerable question:
Why is my child autistic? 
I have an autistic son.
I’ve asked
myself that question.
And sometimes there
just isn’t an answer,
but I understand the
desire to want to be able
to answer that and to do the
best for your children.
Now the 0.1% of
people like the guy in
California and you know,
a lady that’s in the U.K.
right now selling
bleach, and a doctor,
a naturopathic doctor in
Canada that’s busing kids
down to Mexico to give them an
unapproved fecal stool
injections,
those are all swarming
online and those are the
people that I think, I don’t
want to finish that thought.
I think that Facebook and
social media companies can
do something about
protecting their own,
their members, their users
from the misinformation
and disinformation that
these peddlers spread.
HEFFNER: Is that why it
may be harder than the
political manipulation
ultimately even and
coronavirus to tackle this
issue because of the human
and parental story?
ZADROZNY: Yeah. Again, 
you can’t, I can’t argue.
You can’t. Facts-
facts don’t matter when
you’re sitting across
from a mother and her child.
Like it doesn’t
matter to that mother.
HEFFNER: Has Facebook
attempted to intervene in
a way that is
sensitive to their needs,
at the same time trying to
correct the problem at scale?
ZADROZNY: That’s
specifically what they
don’t want to be in the 
business of arbitrating, right?
Like they don’t want to be
arbiters of truth and they
specifically don’t want to
be the person that’s going
to say this story is false
and this story is real.
And people can tell their
stories and what they
think happened, you know
you’re allowed to do that.
But the problem is you
don’t create a pedestal
and say come here and do
it all together and buy
this guy’s product, which
if you’re allowing them to be,
you’re in a, you’re in effect,
you’re hosting that person.
You’re saying that this is all
right with me. Same thing,
the Amazon store fronts
that these hucksters have.
They all send out
newsletters and say,
come to my Amazon
storefront where they sell
anti-vax books and
supplements and then
Amazon gets a cut and
these guys get a cut and
it’s all, they all
work together so nicely.
That’s easy to stop.
This is so easy to stop.
My brain does
not wrap around it.
HEFFNER: And what percent
of the group activity is
in this area of deep wounded
conspiracy, nuttiness?
ZADROWSKY: I mean, there is a
hundreds of millions of groups,right now on Facebook.
HEFFNER: It doesn’t really
matter what percentage ofthere is because-ZADROWSKY: Yeah, I mean, if
I gave you a glass of water
and I put a tiny bit of 
poison in it and I say,
It’s mostly water. That’s not
good enough, right.
This is not good enough for a
bajillion dollar company that
runs our lives and wants to be
the stewards of all of
our relationships,
our connections, our politics,
our news, our health, our money.HEFFNER: For sure.
And of course it was Mark
Zuckerberg in the run up
to the 2016 campaign
who said his new year’s
resolution in that year
was to visit every state.
And I mean, he was
supposed to be sensitive
to all these people and
places he’s hasn’t been.
And everything that’s
transpired since then has
been just the
complete opposite.
ZADROZNY: Mark Zuckerberg
has reportedly said that
he is a wartime CEO right now
and he’s operating as such.
They continue to circle
the wagons and close any
window into what’s
happening in the company.
So Facebook, it’s sort
of a lost cause for me.
I mean journalists are working
as unpaid content moderators.
They have fact
checking organizations,
which are great
from PolitiFact to,
you know, Lead Stories,
which has this really cool
thing called
the Trendolizer.
But even that, it’s so,
it’s so slow when you,
when you outsource all of
your responsibility and
then they’re like
processes and it’s like
the stuff that was
spreading around the
Iowa caucuses, the
disinformation,
it took eight hours for
them to do anything about
it once it got
through fact checkers,
and by that
point, the lie is out.
HEFFNER: George Soros has
said Zuckerberg explicitly
made a deal with the
devil not just with Trump,
but with his refusal to be the
arbiter of real information.
But do you buy the
Soros idea that in effect
Zuckerberg has sold
out to these entities,
whether it’s on
health or politics,
that are going to bring
home the bacon but that
are going to misinform and
disinform a lot of people.
Has he made that
deal with the devil?
ZADROZNY: That seems
to rely on some sort of
belief that he had an
altruistic idea for
information sharing and
didn’t start this as some
sort of hotness reading
for a female coeds.
He likes to
reinvent that story,
but that’s where it
started and this is where
we are and I think if you
look at the trajectory,
it doesn’t
breed much hope.
HEFFNER: Okay.
Hopeful, hopeless,
some middle ground.
ZADROZNY: My hope
is with people.
HEFFNER: I know.
Thank you so much.ZADROZNY: Thank you.HEFFNER: And thanks to
you in the audience.
I hope you join us again
next time for a thoughtful
excursion into
the world of ideas.
Until then,
keep an open mind.
Please visit The
Open Mind website at
Thirteen.org/OpenMind to
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