[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. To set up this experiment, here's a surprising, or not so surprising, statistic depending on how optimistic you are about unity in this country. 52% of Trump supporters believe that Red states should split off from the rest of the country, in one survey. 41%, almost as much, of Biden's supporters, believe that, too. That's according to a poll from the University of Virginia, Center for Politics. They find disunity, or the desire to have nothing to do with the other side is actually and ironically something a lot of us have in common.

Our friends over at our Sunday night live show, The United States of Anxiety have been thinking a lot about disunity, lately, wondering if it's a glitch or something baked into the history of this country. Now that we're on the subject of baking, they have a new social experiment they'd like you to try around the Thanksgiving table, around your holiday mix of baked goods and political grievances. It's all about how we are fed, or stuffed-- to torture the Thanksgiving metaphor-- stuffed with disparate information online that might push us further and further apart.

The experiment has something to do with the term filter bubbles, and I will let my guests explain. With me now are host Kai Wright and senior digital producer of The United States of Anxiety, Kousha Navidar. Kai, welcome back, and Kousha, welcome to the show.

Kai Wright: Hey, Brian.

Kousha Navidar: Hey, Brian. Great to meet you.

Brian: Okay, Kousha, what's a filter bubble. Where does the term come from?

Kousha: To use the tortured metaphor that you just brought up, imagine that you're sitting at that Thanksgiving table, and you're sitting across from the relative you disagree with, or the random stranger that just showed up that you also happen to disagree with. You see at the table what you're eating, but do you know what you're each being fed individually on the websites and the apps that you use. That, in a nutshell, is what the filter bubble is about and what it causes. Websites and apps, generally, they want you to stay on there as long as possible. They'll often personalize content, based on a bunch of different factors to give you things that they think will make you stay there longer.

One of the risks of that is the kind of content that you're receiving, videos, articles, posts, whatever, might fit into your point of view and might leave out things that you might otherwise disagree with. That's the phenomenon. It's been around for a while, the term itself, but it's important to always think about it. If you think about, every four years we relearn what the electoral college is, part of it is that you kind of have to relearn every four years, because it's so dang complicated in some situations. Part of being a good digital citizen is understanding how the forces online drive you to the content that you consume.

Brian: All right. You've got an experiment. We're going to start this, I gather, with you asking Kai and me to do something, then we're going to invite our listeners.

Kousha: Yes, exactly. If you would be so kind, can you take your cell phone out for me?

Brian: Now, I've got my iPad all fired up for this, is that okay?

Kousha: Totally. As long as it's connected to Wi-Fi or if you've got that fancy 5G, totally cool.

Brian: Yes.

Kousha: Great. Okay. What we're going to do is go on to one of the world's largest search engines, not Google, at least not Google search specifically, but one of the ones that's right after it. Do you want to guess what the second largest search engine is?

Brian: Well, I already know.

Kousha: You [crosstalk] know. For those of you at home, YouTube is, interestingly, one of the largest search engines in the world, based on volume and number of searches that happen. If you could--

Brian: Which, by the way, is owned by Google, so-

Kousha: Yes, exactly.

Brian: - it’s one and one A, I guess.

Kousha: Yes. What we're going to do together right now is search for a term that might appear differently in different search results. Kai, do you have your cell phone?

Kai: I'm ready.

Kousha: Great. Awesome. Open up YouTube, go to the search bar. If you could please enter in the word "patriots". If you're listening right now, the Brian Lehrer Show, feel free to go along with us and see what you get.

Brian: Listeners do it, too, go to YouTube and search. Did you say singular, patriot or plural, patriots?

Kousha: Singular, patriot. Then on the count of three press Search.

Brian: Because if we did patriots, all these football stories would [unintelligible 00:04:32].

Kousha: Oh, you say that now. Just wait, let's see what happens. I see your controller is doing this with us. Okay. On the count of three, press Enter, one, two, three. All right. Now, Brian, could you tell me just what the first few hits are that you get [crosstalk]?

Brian: Yes. It's a Steven Seagal movie, The Patriot. Then, sure enough, Patriots vs Falcons, NFL week 11 highlights. Then the Patriot-- is that a different version of a movie with the same title from the year 2000? Action-adventure. Then the fourth one, "Trump outsmarts TDS libs again. Whoa. Guess what Texas is doing right now to prepare for invasion--" That's from something called Black Conservative Patriot.

Kousha: Interesting. Okay. If I heard correctly, it's movie, and then it kind of went down into news. Is that a fair assumption [crosstalk] description?

Brian: Yes. Movie, football, movie, news.

Kousha: Yes. For me, interestingly, first hit is a music video, and then, after that, I get a title that says Patriot Purge, Part 1, Tucker Carlson Documentary 2021. Then, after that, I get a clip from a political commentary show on Netflix that I can tell you leans pretty far left. Kai, what did you get?

Kai: Well, we did this before, and I got it again. My first hit is a hip-hop artist who I know-- it’s Topher, The Patriot-- who has become quite famous for targeting Black people. Not target-- I don't know what he's doing, but he's famous as a Black conservative, who is sort of in the conversation for getting Black men to vote for Donald Trump.

Brian: I got that one, too, as number five, the Topher-- a music video there.

Kousha: That's just one example. You have to imagine, if you are behaving a lot in specific ways on YouTube, where you're clicking on similar things, it's part of the struggle of the Internet. The paradox of there's so much stuff out there to consume, you need some kind of curation, but at what level, and how is it influencing you versus the person that's sitting across the dinner table? Our experiment is asking folks, if you get into a heated argument, instead of going down that rabbit hole, try to pivot the conversation, search online with that person to see, where you are getting your news, and on the same platform, do the same search about that topic and see how your results look.

Brian: Interpret this for us, Kousha, what do you take just from Kai's and my search results for the word patriot on YouTube, the ways they were similar or the ways they were different?

Kousha: Well, I think the most interesting reflection is actually yours compared to mine, specifically, Brian, because I know that I am signed in right now on Google. I don't know if you're signed in, which can make a big difference with your account. I happen to watch a lot of that Netflix show that I mentioned before. It makes sense that I would get clips of that brought back to me. Versus where you were going, it was more of a, I think, diverse collection of different-- you had the movie, you had the sports coming up, all different versions of what patriot could look like. That, right there, it's just a small look into if you multiply this a million, a billion times over with every search, those differences can kind of compound.

Kai: If I could add to that quick, Brian-- we're going to be talking about next week on the show too-- the way in which in particular for conservative media, that there's a way in which-- Kousha makes the point about being logged in-- that you end up surrounded with a particular idea over and over, and over again from different places. You might search YouTube and see it 10 times. You might turn on the TV and then see it 10 times. It surrounds you and it creates this notion of inevitability and that it's a saturated fact in the world. When in fact it might be this very small segment of the Internet and of the world that's actually saying this thing.

Brian: This has WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 80.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcon, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio, as I think we established with Assemblyman Freiman before, and with Kai Wright and Kousha Navidar from The United States of Anxiety, doing this filter bubble experiment with us that you can also do at your Thanksgiving table, and that people can also do right now.

Listeners if you did it, if you went or if you want to do it right now, go to YouTube and search the word patriot, and see what comes up. We would love to hear from you right now. If you are politically conservative, if you voted for Trump. If you otherwise consider yourself a conservative, if you seek out conservative media, if you watch Tucker Carlson, we want to hear the diverse search results that people might get depending on where you're starting from, politically.

If you're willing to do that right now, people from across the political spectrum-- I realize we're in New York, we're mostly going to get Democrats, but those conservatives among us, do it, too. Let's compare notes here. Maybe we will all red, blue, pink, yellow, green learn from this, 212-433-WNYC, after you do it. 212-433-9692. Kousha, do you want to lay out a little more of what you hope will happen on Thanksgiving, when people will do this with the uncle who they don't even know what to say too, because they're so politically different?

Kousha: Absolutely. If you can't talk about the elephant in the room, how are you going to get rid of it? It's important to pivot difficult conversations in a way that you both can come to the table and decrease the heat. The heat's on the turkey-- if we're going to keep making these metaphors-- but the other thing, I think, worth pointing out is that it's common ground that is a little bit eye opening about how influential digital life is, but also how it can be a black box. Because the thing we're not trying to say is, "Man, social media, it's the root of all evil," which, I think, is a big part of a conversation today, but it's very likely way more complicated than that.

A lot of these search engines do actually put in effort to curb exactly what we're talking about. It's really hard to track, and it's really hard to tell what the big influence is, which makes it all the more important that individuals are responsible digital citizens, and that they are able to engage in this conversation in a way that is not so heady. It's not so technical. It's really bras tacks, like you're sitting there, what is the effect? It’s better to know than to just assume and to be a passive consumer. Kai, you were talking about that town square idea that I thought was really valuable, with the internet being the new town square, right?

Kai: Yes. This is a big part of what we're doing on the show, and what you do every day, Brian. It’s just trying to foster a more productive conversation, and most of what we do, most of where we debate our political ideas at this point is on the Internet. Or where we gather the information for our political ideas, and then when we sit down with each other, we’re rarely actually-- I mean, how often do you find yourself, when you are in a conversation with somebody with different political ideas, where you're not actually talking about, you're just spewing things back at each other.

I guess we kind of hope this is a tool to interrupt that process so that you sort of stop with the spewing and say, "Well, wait a minute, for a second, let's just back up and see where we each got this information," and at least be talking about that for a minute and sort of relearn the literacy we need in to bring into a political conversation in the first place.

Brian: By the way, Kai, I know you recently did a show exploring the history of the United States through disunity, you and historian Richard Kreitner posited that conflict is the rule, not the exception, all the way back to the country's founding that, obviously, way precedes the Internet. Do we have kind of a present day bias in thinking that today's disunity is worse than yesterday's?

Kai: Absolutely. Well, this is certainly Richard Kreitner's argument that literally the country was founded in an act of secession from the Church of England. Then each state that was founded thereafter was an act of secession. They were separatist from the start, and that from then through to today’s separatism and the desire to have nothing to do with one another has been a defining part of our politics in our country, and that in fact, the effort at maintaining the myth of unity comes at a cost. It's often born by people of color, Black people, and immigrants.

Where we land in that conversation, and what brought us to this piece of it is Richard's call which I agree with, it’s like, "Okay, well, so, but having said that, at some point, we have to stop just sort of with the cont of unity and start actually doing the work of being unified or give up the ghost." We cannot continue to just sort of claim, "Well, we were unified in the past, and now there's this problem, and that keeps us from being unified." We have to actually at some point just say, "Okay. Well, we don't all get along, we don't all agree. We're not going to come to agreement by just throwing Black people in to the bus.

Let's start doing the work of figuring out how we can get on," and so in modern times, right now, we want to start on our show being like, "Okay, well the place where we're having that conversation a lot is on the Internet, so let's figure out how to do it. What are the tools we need? What are the tools we need to engage in this democracy?"

Brian: Cool. Let's go through a few callers and see what results they got when they searched patriot on YouTube. Deborah in Branchville on WNYC, hi, Deborah.

Deborah: Hi. It was very eclectic. The very first thing that popped up was an ad for Pluto television, and maybe that's just dismiss. Then I got the references to the two [inaudible 00:15:22] movies. I got interspersed with odd pictures of Trump, which surprised me because I hate Trump. There was something about Barron Trump came up, and then there was-- it looked like a still of a video of a woman singing at some kind of, I don't know, political gathering. Then there was an actual picture of people dressed in colonial outfits from the American Revolution, so it was all over the place.

If I had to guess, I think it might be because I do have an interest in film, and I do a lot of questions about film, so maybe it was more pop culture reference than news reference for me, but what did come up, it was a little disturbing, some of it.

Brian: Interesting, Deborah, really interesting. Thank you very much. How about Jody in Westfield, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jody.

Jody: Hi, Brian. Well, the first thing I got was the Patriots football team and the gear that you can buy, and then the Mel Gibson movie. Then I got an energy company, Patriot Energy, and then Jeep, an advertisement for a car, Jeep, and then my Patriot food supply, which is emergency food [inaudible 00:16:36], I guess, when everything falls apart.

Brian: Wow. Yes, you can become a survivalist, a rightwing survivalist, I guess, in that ad. Jody, thank you. Tulis in Harlem, you're on WNYC, hi, Tulis. Did you do it?

Tulis: Hey, Brian. Yes, I did. Whoa, this is scary. I just set up a brand new email account for another business that I'm doing. I type in patriot, and I get Patriots Pledge, support and uphold our servicemen and women. But the website is Redneck Nation Strong.

Brian: Redneck nation strong. You, I'm guessing, are not on the political right yourself?

Tulis: Correct [unintelligible 00:17:22].

Brian: Yet, that was--

Tulis: Then the next one I got was the patriots post founding principles for the modern American patriot, and then combat proven missile defense.

Brian: Defence. Missile defense? Somebody's trying to sell you missiles.

Tulis: Direct, identify, and defeat threats. Ready for today, right for tomorrow.

Brian: Well, really interesting. Tulis, thank you so much. Well, Kousha, what are you making of all this? Every caller's results-- and I think that we could tell that the callers so far have been politically liberal or progressive-- they are getting a wide array of things. Tulis there got a lot of right wing stuff, even though Tulis says not right wing.

Kousha: Two things. First, thank you all for trying that out, because it's so much more, I think, insightful when you get all different folks put in. One interesting part that, I think, I picked up on Tulis was, you set up a new address, which means you probably haven't used it a lot, which might have fewer personal points of contact between you and the service you searched on. That might be part of the reason why. Also, quick anecdote for Deborah, which I love. After this segment aired on our show, I'm in a family text thread with some of my relatives, and they all listen to the segment because they're loving relatives.

Then they started sending screenshots of each other of their search results on this thread. One of those relatives had exactly what Deborah described with that Barron Trump video. It was a total surprise, and the family was like, "Whoa, what's going on here? Where did this come from?" It's interesting to hear it repeated, but also how varied they can be, depending on how personalized your own profile is.

Brian: Let's take a caller who, I think, has identified himself as coming from the political right. Frank on Long Island, hi, Frank. Did you do the search?

Frank: Hey, Brian. I did. Good morning. Thank you for taking my call this time, and I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving.

Brian: And to you, Frank. So, you searched patriot on YouTube, and what came up?

Frank: I did. I searched patriot, I have some Tropher, The Patriot came up, then two movies, and then Mike Pence stabs MAGA in the back, again. Then, of course, Aaron Lewis sings his patriot anthem, [sings] "Am I the only one" which is a good one. Then, a little further down, Trump outsmarts the libs again, that did pop up on my page. Brian, I'd like to just reflect that it's very important what we listen to and what we absorb. I want to reflect back to a CNN poll that went out. There were CNN viewers believed that over 50% of COVID patients ended up in a hospital. False.

You, of course, recognized the weapons of mass destruction lie that the Bush administration propaganded, and all of the news outlets following lies, again. It's important what we listen to and what we believe as truth.

Brian: Okay. We’re going to leave it there. Frank, thank you very much. We're just about out of time for the segment. Kai, you want to wrap it up, and we'll give Kousha a final, final word here, since this, I think, has been his idea for how people can do this and make productive across-political-lines conversation with it, or even not, on Thanksgiving.

Kai: Yes. We've chosen a word here patriot that was deliberately a politically-loaded word, and just search for that, because we knew you would get political responses for many people. One of the things we're seeing is that regardless of whether you're left or right, you're getting some conservative ideas with the word patriot. That makes sense. The point here is, whatever the specific thing that you are arguing about, that you don't share an opinion about, search that, because it will at minimum establish, "Okay. W are receiving different information, we are getting different information."

Then that is at least a point to begin a conversation. You at least have some shared set of fact, which is that, "We got different facts." Hopefully, that can at least interrupt the just spewing of things back at each other.

Brian: Are you going to do results live on The United States of Anxiety this Sunday night? Are you doing a live show on Thanksgiving weekend?

Kai: We are not. We're revisiting some previous conversations we had for this weekend. We're hoping, we're asking everybody, and we're asking you now to please, if you do it, send us your results so that we can revisit it in a show after that. You can always record a voice memo and send it to us at anxiety@wnyc.org to explain what happened, if you do it over Thanksgiving.

Brian: Anxiety@wnyc.org. That's where you send your results, folks, anxiety@wnyc.org. You guys definitely deserve Thanksgiving weekend off, and we will be listening for the results the following Sunday. Once again, Kai Wright, host of our live Sunday night calling show, like we do this on the weekdays, he does it on Sunday night, 6:00 PM on WNYC, and Kousha Navidar is the senior digital producer of the United States of Anxiety. Kousha, thanks for this experiment.

Kousha: Thank you.

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.