Russia and The Information War — With Miriam Elder

Miriam Elder is the executive editor at Vanity Fair Hive and former Moscow correspondent at The Guardian. She joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss Russia's information war, which the Kremlin is running alongside its physical war in Ukraine. Russia's supposedly formidable social media power seems to be falling flat, and Miriam explains why — and what's to come. Stick around for the second half where we discuss the impact of sanctions and why Bitcoin is failing to capitalize on this moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:03Speaker 01

  LinkedIn Presents.

• 1:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. The thing about living through history is it always gives a chance to question our assumptions, things like how skilled Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin are at social media and social media warfare. And this is an opportune time to start thinking about the ways that we've looked at the world, the ways that we've looked at information warfare, and ask some basic questions about the nature of it and the power of the platforms. And here to do it with us is Miriam Elder. She's the executive editor at Vanity Fair Hive, the former Moscow correspondent for The Guardian, and a former colleague of mine at BuzzFeed News. So it's great to be on the line with her today. Miriam, welcome to the show.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. I know things are busy and intense and I appreciate your time very much. So I'd like to start just with an introduction to you. I mean, maybe we can start just talking a little bit about what brought you to Moscow, initially, how long you were there. And then also, for those who aren't familiar with Russian society, can you share a little bit about what it's like, what you know, what might surprise people who haven't spent time there?

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, both of my parents are from Russia. They fled the Soviet Union separately, met in New York, raised us here very American, like changed our last name, really tried to integrate us into American society, but something pulled me back there. It was a combined interest in international relations and journalism, I guess. So while I visited for the first time in 99, I worked there as a reporter from 2002 to 2003, which was the lead up to the Iraq War, which was an interesting time. And then the bulk of time that I spent there was from 2006 to 2013. I worked at a local paper called The Moscow Times, an incredible paper that is still doing great coverage. I freelanced a bit and then ended up at The

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Guardian and was there for like Moscow's real heyday, I guess. Oil prices were high, money was coming in. And then these massive protests against Vladimir Putin broke out in 2011, 2012, and that launched the crackdown that kind of set the stage for what we're what we're seeing today. The last story I did was Ed Snowden arriving in Moscow and I fled, well fled, I left a couple of days later. So I always said it was a trade off. He gets to live in Moscow and I get to leave.

• 3:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wild, yeah. We should talk about Snowden also at some point during this conversation because he's in a very interesting spot. But okay, Russian society.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  I mean, what's surprising about Russian society, it's such a big question, you know. I would say, just like, just like any country, America included, it's not a monolith. I think often people want to hear, you know, what Russians think. There's obviously all, all different kinds of people there. I would just say, it's been, you know, it's been a very long, 23 years under, under Vladimir Putin, and that on top of a very, very difficult history that stretches over, over centuries. I don't, I don't know what to say beyond that.

• 4:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so let's go right into, into what's happening now in Ukraine. The first thing that I want to talk to you about is the information war, because clearly there's an information war that's accompanying the physical war in Ukraine. And Ukraine is winning that war, I would say, without any question. It's used information to build sympathy and, you know, help push forward sanctions against Russia in ways that is surprising to a lot of people, probably surprised Putin as well. So I want to ask you this. For a long time, at least in the US, we've talked about Vladimir Putin's ability as like a master of social media warfare. You know, people have talked about how, you know, he alone with a troll farm shook the US presidential election in 2016.

• 5:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  So how do you look at the image of Putin as this skilled online warrior compared to the fact that he's getting his butt kicked right now in the current conflict?

• 5:31Speaker 02

  There's a couple of ways to answer that. The first thing is, I always think that a method of warfare always has to serve a political goal, and that's the way that we should be analyzing the information warfare, war around Russia and Ukraine. So Putin's number one goal is normally just to stay in power, maintain power, so he can continue becoming one of the wealthiest men on the planet. The reason that this decision to go to war was called by some people as a sign, you know, that he was losing his mind or something, was more that this wasn't about maintaining his control, it was about securing his legacy. So what he's worried about right now in terms of the information warfare...

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Is how it's playing domestically in Russia. The way that I see it is that almost all of their propaganda efforts are focused on state TV. They're focused on handing out instruction booklets to teachers across the country to tell them how to tell students about what's really quote unquote going on in Ukraine. It's about building up a force of like patriotic, you know, videos that are all in Russia and are really primed for a domestic audience. The goal for Ukraine is different. Ukraine can't win this on its own. It needs international support.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  So a lot of their efforts are focused on, yes, Zelensky in particular, President Zelensky in particular, you know, keeping the morale up among his people, but it's also very much targeted to the West because he needs Western support. The second thing I'll say is, you know, the image of Russia's capabilities around the 2016 election, I think, were always not quite understood in the US. And I think that people saw Russia's campaign, which was very real. The hacking of the DNC was very real.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Some of the messaging campaigns were real, but they were probably not the reason that Donald Trump got elected. Donald Trump got elected because he appealed to white grievances, because he spoke to parts of the Republican Party that got excited about voting for him. There are a lot of like domestic ills that we can analyze that explain why Donald Trump got elected. And I think people saw something of a cure all in blaming it entirely on Russia when Russia's success has not been really quantifiable.

• 8:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. Yeah, definitely. And I touched on this a little bit in Big Technology last week in the newsletter. But this idea that, you know, Russia was all powerful, A, I think was probably exaggerated in some ways, well, definitely exaggerated. And then B, the propaganda only works if you have something to build off of. And at least for the rest of the world right now, what we're seeing, there's no real spin that you can put on. Doesn't matter how skilled your trolls are, you can't try to spin it in a way that's going to make Russia look good.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Well, I think what they can do is plant the seeds. They don't need to necessarily make Russia look good. Like, the point of Russia honed its propaganda, let me say Putin honed his propaganda machine domestically before deploying it abroad in some certain ways. And the way that it really works isn't always that you have to believe the line that they're pushing. The point is to make the very idea of truth unknowable. So it's just to kind of muddy the waters. So, you know, Russia today doesn't really exist anymore as it did. And we can talk about its

• 9:21Speaker 02

  influence generally and how big that really was. But I think what they were always really, I don't want to say they were really good at it, but what they did was, you know, just plant narratives. Well, the US did this. Well, the US did that. Nobody is saying that the US is a, you know, a perfect country that has not committed grievous, grievous errors in its history. But the point is to take the attention off of what Russia is doing, make it not seem as bad, make it not seem as much of a big deal. It's just what great powers do.

• 9:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And then so why wouldn't, I mean, you mentioned that this is something that they're working on at home. It's surprising to me that they're not pushing harder abroad. Yeah, for exactly the reason that you're talking about, sort of muddy the waters about this, and then sort of prevent some of that support from coming to Ukraine the way that it is. Because as you mentioned, Ukraine is, Ukraine needs the international support in order to stand a chance. And so it is interesting to me that like, that seems to have either been ignored. But I think this goes back to the central point here, which is that Russia's social media capabilities are a little bit exaggerated. And also, I think that like, people tend to sometimes be social media deterministic, where they say what happens on social media is what happens in the world. And clearly, you know, there's more to it than that.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I also think that the way this war was launched was really strange.

• 10:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Military strategy doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Like, a lot of things about it don't make sense. And, you know, the thinking is that Putin really made this decision on his own, maybe with a couple of advisers. I think what the Biden administration did also, you know, with releasing the intelligence and just taking away his ability to carry out a false flag operation and blame it on the Ukrainians, changed the calculus a bit. But it doesn't look like you had the entire infrastructure of the Russian state ready to jump into action on this. So just because it hasn't been a concern yet, and they're falling back on old standards of thinking about domestic propaganda, doesn't mean that it won't come in the future.

• 11:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, that could be coming, yeah. I do want to talk about the RT stuff. Well, there's so many different things to talk about here. But let's quickly go back to the domestic side in Russia. How is it actually that effective? I'm gonna ask, put some two data points in front of you and ask you if this is really working there. One, The Washington Post did a poll right before the invasion, and only 8% of Russians actually supported this, according to that poll. So clearly, it's very unpopular, or at least was beforehand. And second, we're seeing these massive protests that are happening in places like St. Petersburg, where it's like, actually fairly dangerous to go out in the street. You could get arrested in Russia, or, you know, I think there's a bill now, I don't know if it's passed yet,

• 12:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  but definitely has been circulated, that says if we catch you protesting the war, we'll send you to the front line. So even if they're trying to do a propaganda campaign internally, yes, they're, you know, deploying everything they can there, but it does seem like it's not really working.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  I think on polls, I haven't seen that specific one, but with polling in Russia in general, you have to be really careful. There isn't a lot of independent polling, and because of this general climate of fear, you can't assume that people are gonna tell, like, a random phone caller, you know, what they, what they really think. But also, Russia isn't a monolith. The protests on the street are incredible. St. Petersburg is less surprising than some of the Siberian cities that you're seeing, that really don't have a history of more than, you know, maybe 100 people coming out. So the protest movement is real, and it's big, considering the conditions they're protesting under. But it is working among a lot of, a lot of people,

• 13:11Speaker 02

  partly because of the state propaganda that's circulating now, but because Putin has been waging a propaganda campaign for more than 10 years glorifying Russia's role, which was very real in World War II. But they're now calling upon that language that they started deploying about fighting Nazis and that this is the greatest glory to ever come to the motherland. You're hearing the exact same language now in some of these videos that are, that are going around, that are supportive of the war. And, you know, The Times had a story about it today or yesterday. But I also, I have friends who are, who are not talking to family members because they refuse to accept that the war is real.

• 13:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, say more about that because, you know, there has been these, some reports of like people in Ukraine calling family members in Russia. And the Russian family members are like, yeah, this is, this is a just war and a denazification. And they, the family members in Ukraine can't believe, can't believe it. So what's going on there? And how widespread do you think that is?

• 14:17Speaker 02

  I think, I mean, it's, it's hard for me to judge how widespread it is, but this is a country, like I said, that's not a monolith. And the fact that I can think of two examples immediately in my immediate circle makes me think, anecdotally at least, that this is not some rare occurrence that reporters are just kind of picking up on. You kind of have to, like, I, I kind of think that Americans should understand it better after having gone through the Trump years. There were so many stories of families being torn apart because people, you know, let's say a kid calls their mom and the mom is either down a QAnon hole or is, you know, obsessed with the deep state.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  And you just can't get through to them. These people are gone. And that's, that's really what it's like. And just like in America, you have people who believe in reality, and then you have people who, who believe in a curated reality. It's a very similar situation over there, except there, it would be like if the President of the United States, huh, well, were pushing QAnon.

• 15:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, can't imagine that would happen.

• 15:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  So but but let me ask you this, it seems so we talk a lot about top down, bottom up when it comes to social media, right? The you know, we have movements that come from the bottom up in ways that we never have. It's we're so used to top down messaging in the history of information war and information dissemination and bottom up. You mentioned QAnon, right? Like, stuff can come from the bottom up in ways that we haven't seen before. I would imagine in that climate, it's so much more difficult to actually, you know, do run a propaganda campaign domestically, in particular, that ends up building popular support, because you'll always have like, if the point is to wash out the images, to not call this a war, to call it a special operation,

• 16:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  you'll always have stuff coming through bottom up to disprove that, you know, images of warfare, or, you know, messages from other people, or maybe videos, you know, of POWs that we're starting to see circulate. So is it is it going to be effective? Like, or does this bottom up stuff make it more difficult for Putin to actually rally people in Russia the way that he's he's gonna attempt to?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Well, I think, you know, you're talking about like a very internet phenomenon, and Russia domestically is still like a very TV country. But there's a reason that he banned Facebook and banned Twitter. You know, we'll see what happens with Telegram, which is probably the most important app over there. But also, it goes back to the purpose of propaganda and conspiracy theories, which is diluting your understanding of truth. So all they have to do is make you question that these photos aren't real. So what you have seen, for example, there was one photo or video going around of like, people in body bags, and they start to

• 17:24Speaker 02

  stand up out of the body bags. And the Russian media was saying like, well, here you go. It's just

• 17:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Crisis actors.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  in Ukraine.

• 17:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my god, yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  But it was from, I'm gonna forget the details now, but it was from a protest somewhere in Western Europe. And it was part of like, you know, it was a very obvious, like curated statement protest. So all they have to do is make you question your own eyes. So I just, I, I take your point. And I think like, the hope is there. But when you've forced people to not believe their own eyes, it makes it all the more difficult.

• 17:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  I get what you're saying. So again, it's not to push forward this version of reality. It's mostly to make people question the obvious reality on the ground.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me ask you about Telegram. You mentioned Telegram, still operating in Russia, pretty big in Russia, founded by Pavel Durov, who also was the founder of VK, which is like the Russian version of Facebook. Pavel Durov, actually, this week, sent a message out on Telegram, trying to reassure people, especially in Ukraine, where it's used pretty intensely, that he won't pass along information that he gets to the Russian government. And he says, you know, when he was at VK, he was actually asked by the Russian security agency FSB to provide private data of Ukrainians. He refused and eventually had, he lost his company at home and had to leave Russia. There's still people who are saying that,

• 18:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  and it's interesting that Telegram's still up, right? There are still people that are saying that don't trust Telegram. They will pass that information along to Russia. What's your read on that situation? And how important is Telegram in this, in this conflict?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  It's so hard to say because Durov like doesn't love the media and hasn't told his full story. I went back the other day and read some of the, some of the coverage, you know, when he, when he left the company. And it wasn't entirely clear what the last straw was that prompted the takeover by two of Putin's closest advisers. So I think, I don't know. I think it's, I think it's, it's hard to say Telegram has like a weird history, right? The, the calls around ISIS in particular were like very loud and Telegram was a holdout. You would, there was a time when Twitter and Facebook. Finally realized very late, like, okay, we need to deal with these ISIS accounts

• 19:52Speaker 02

  who are using our platforms, not just to spread information, but to recruit people to, you know, to, to join this fight. And Telegram, as far as I remember, like, was super hands off. Durv is like, you could not get more libertarian than Durv. It's just, I don't touch anything. But he's also had a direct experience with the Russian government and being taken over by, by what sounds like no choice of his own. So I don't know, what is, would I trust it? I think at this point, what Telegram is most useful for is like, these kind of large public accounts to, to keep up with the news on the ground. It's a ridiculous amount of information. I commend all Ukrainians and Russians that

• 20:36Speaker 02

  manage to keep up with it. It's, it's a lot.

• 20:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a lot. Yep. All right. Going back to RT. RT is fascinating. Obviously, it's a big campaign by Russia to influence the way that people outside Russia look at the country. Carried on the airwaves in the US. It had like some pretty high profile guests or hosts, including Larry King was there for a while. I was just speaking with, with Max Kaiser, who's a big Bitcoin guy in El Salvador. And I was like, you have a show on RT, like, what do you think about the fact that, like, you know, some people say that this is a Russian propaganda network? And he told me, you know, that would be slander, like, basically, you know, wink, wink, stop talking about it. He just dropped the show. But I also like, wonder how many people actually watch RT? And is it actually influential?

• 21:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, yeah, your thoughts on that one?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  I think it's probably influential among a certain set. Like, it's influential among, you know, what we call tankies, I guess, or anti-imperialists.

• 21:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, I don't know anyone that watches that channel.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  It did. I've watched it on YouTube sometimes. It did have some YouTube, like, a very popular YouTube following.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Well, like, you would go, sometimes you'd go to hotels and it would be like playing in the lobby, you know? They did have some weird contracts. I don't know that anybody, like, turned on. Russia Today or RT, which I always refuse to call it.

• 21:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Um.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Uh, and just like sat there for hours and watched it. But, you know, I think it was like, it provided a platform to a lot of people that I think of as useful idiots, you know, people who are like aligned with, uh, with the Kremlin's more toxic views. Uh, and it would kind of, it was almost like bad reputation laundering. It provided them a platform and allowed them to get ever bigger. And then, of course, you know, they have their, um, presence on social media with these little clips where things will like be not quite right, what have you. But, you know, it's like the past few years, also the, the head of Russia Today, this

• 22:39Speaker 02

  woman, Margarita Semanyan, who's been the head of it from the beginning, um, who used to be a fairly big voice on like English language Twitter, just went like completely in Russian, sounds like she's talking to, uh, she talks to like foreign reporters in Russia and just issued some of the most horrific statements ever. The other day, she basically called foreign reporters in Russia like an invading army. So the influence is like real and toxic, but again, it, when, if you're talking about the success in like, suddenly, you know, half of America is watching Russia Today and thinks Vladimir Putin is awesome, like that definitely never happened.

• 23:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Where do you stand on, on whether they should be removed from US airwaves or even be allowed to advertise on like US social media platforms? I mean, when we were at BuzzFeed, we worked on a story together about how Twitter offered 15% of its 2016 election inventory to RT, which I found that pretty, pretty amazing. But there's also a, a argument that like, let it be there, let me watch it and I'll make the decision. So what do you think should be done on that front?

• 23:45Speaker 02

  I find these questions so hard because I do think like free speech is so important and you don't want to set precedents that can then be used in poisonous ways. But to me, I never thought of Russia Today as a news channel.

• 24:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Even the people who were on there and thought that they were doing news, they were not doing news. It had one purpose and its purpose was like toxic propaganda and you know, a news gathering operation that overlapped with like intelligence sensibilities. So the way they frame themselves is as a news organization, but I don't know from their very early days, it's just, it's never how I thought of them. I certainly don't think like Western companies should be giving them any money.

• 24:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Oh, they would pay actually to be carried on from my understanding.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And for me, the bigger, you know, like, I don't know. Yeah. I'll leave it at that.

• 24:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Oh, are you sure? It seems like you're gonna, okay.

• 24:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. I, I have so many more questions. So let's, we can move on to some other stuff. So this is one that I found interesting. So with the Trump Russia story, right? People saying that Russia helped throw the election for Trump in Trump's favor in the US. We've already talked about how that was probably overblown a little bit. There are some people in the media who, who were so upset at the role that that played. They almost boomeranged on the opposite way and were starting to say that any narrative about Russia was sort of overblown by a press that had like Russia fever or like, you know, would use Putin as the scapegoat for everything. And I don't know if that caused tentativeness around the media to report on the fact that this might have happened, but it certainly surprised

• 25:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  these people. I mean, Matt Taibbi, you know, maybe he doesn't fall squarely into that camp, but he, he issued a really interesting note to readers talking about how he apologized for saying that this invasion was similar to, you know, I, I don't have the words in front of me exactly, but he basically said he apologized for, for saying this invasion wasn't going to happen when it happened. What do you make of the fact that we've had this sort of, you know, boomerang back and forth on, you know, the role of Putin and world affairs in the US media? Yeah, I'm just curious, curious what you think. And did it cause the US media to be sort of gun shy and, and doing this story and, and not actually, you know, cover the fact serious enough that there were a hundred thousand troops on the Ukrainian border?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And Taibbi was, you know, far from the only one. You had people who were much more serious than he is who also, including, you know, people in Russia, analysts here who. We're completely shocked that this, that this happened. And it's interesting that, I don't know, I think I'm so traumatized by Russiagate that I don't even like think about it half the time. The way I've been talking about it with people is that the US intelligence community is so, all of this is happening in the shadow of the Iraq war, even though the Iraq war was so long ago now, right? But like, that, to me, murdered the reputation of US intelligence and its relationship with politics.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Because a politician so blatantly used intel to get, to start, you know, an unjust war. But you're probably right. Yeah, you're probably right. I think that, you know, I'm, it would make sense to me that that would, that that would feed into it. But it's probably like a confluence of factors, right? Like, there isn't a lot of trust in government generally. Then you do have reporters who might have felt they went too far on the Russiagate stuff and so didn't want to go down that path again. It was like a perfect storm.

• 27:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  How does it change from here?

• 27:42Speaker 02

  How does what change?

• 27:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  The coverage of Russia.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Well, right now, there's no reporters there. So that's the number one problem, right? Like, to me, and the way that I stayed sane throughout Russiagate, was reading and focusing on what reporters there were working on. That story got out of control because it got into the hands of American reporters in DC and in New York. But if you, you know, if you keep your eye on what's going on there, you're gonna get a much more realistic story. But at this point, you have more than 150 Russian reporters that have fled in the past four days after some of the main independent outlets were shut down.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  TV Rain, Echo Moskvi, you have foreign reporters who have fled. So, you know, overnight, it's, it's really like a black box at this point. I don't know what it will be like going forward, but that's obviously a huge concern.

• 28:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it'll be much more difficult to get realistic reports out of there. Yeah, if there are no reporters out of the ground. That's kind of nerve wracking. Especially given where the role that Russia is playing right now on the world stage.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the dangers are just so high, you know, the one law that did pass already is you can get up to 15 years in prison if you call the war a war, you know, and I had this one friend the other day ask me, do you think that they're going to apply that to foreign journalists? I'm like, you're thinking in a Western like construct of this, that's not how law works in Russia. They're going to decide if they want to go after foreign reporters and if they want to, they'll figure out a way to do it. Everybody is, you know, is justifiably scared right now.

• 29:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Miriam Elder is with us. She's the executive editor at Vanity Fair Hive, a former Moscow correspondent at The Guardian and a former colleague of mine at the BuzzFeed News Organization. It's good to be here with her. We'll be back after the break to talk a little bit more about the information war and then we're going to move on to sanctions. I'm going to ask a Bitcoin question, so if you're interested in the crypto implications of this, hang on with us and yeah, it's been a fascinating discussion up until this point and I promise it will continue to deliver. So stick around, we'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about.

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• 32:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on the Big Technology Podcast with Miriam Elder, the executive editor at Vanity Fair Hive, former Moscow correspondent for The Guardian. How long were you in Moscow for, Miriam?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  So at first, I did a year and then seven years, so eight years total.

• 32:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wow, when was the last time you were back?

• 32:23Speaker 02

  I was back, I want to say, two years before the pandemic or a year before the pandemic.

• 32:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, wow. Do you think you're going to go back again?

• 32:33Speaker 02

  You know...

• 32:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Especially after doing this podcast, you could be in some trouble.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  With everything that's happening, and I should say that, obviously, the bulk of attention deserves to be on Ukraine at this moment rather than Russia. But for the first time, when all this started, I just had this very visceral feeling of wanting to be in Moscow, which is not something I've had since I left. I was decompressing for all those years. But right now, it's an impossible question to answer because we have to see how bad the... I don't even want like crackdown is too light a word. We have to see how bad the terror that Putin is going to inflict on society is before there's any understanding of if it's safe to go.

• 33:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. On the ground now, I know you've mentioned some people are leaving, but how are the sanctions being felt at the moment? And yeah, what is it like for people on the ground in Russia? And I agree with definitely the focus belongs on Ukraine. However, I do think these are some important questions to ask about Russia in particular.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  So, you know, the economy collapsed overnight. The ruble is at like, it's over a hundred, it's over a hundred rubles to the dollar at this point. There are continuing bank runs. You're starting to see some signs of like potential protest with people, you know, they're especially among foreign workers who are in Moscow, like a day, like construction workers and stuff like that. You know, for them, like their salaries have been just completely degraded overnight. So for regular people, like it's, you know, who are in Russia, I don't think any of the sanctioned people are in Russia right now. These are, you know,

• 34:22Speaker 02

  or most of them, the oligarchs anyway, these are people who live very international lives. And then, you know, a hard thing that I will mention is, so Visa, Mastercard and Amex announced pretty late that they were pulling out of Russia. And so far, the biggest effect I can see of that is that among these, like these independent minded Russians who have fled the country, it's made it very hard for them to access any money once they land in, you know, Poland, Latvia, Turkey, wherever they are. But overnight, it's just, it's catastrophic. The stock market still isn't open. They're in for, they've gone through so much economic turmoil and I don't, you know, this is, this is going to rival the worst of it all because

• 35:05Speaker 02

  of the actions of one terrible man.

• 35:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. How long can this go on without the population? I mean, they're going to feel these impacts. They already are. How long can this go on without the population starting to increase the intensity of those, these protests? I mean, it doesn't, it never really bodes well for a regime to, you know, take the economy in this way. It doesn't usually end well for those leaders.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  It doesn't, but that's the purpose of these increasingly restrictive laws that we're seeing now. You really can't underestimate the climate of fear, especially outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg. So the purpose of these laws is to, yes, stop the protests that are happening now, but they're also to lay the groundwork, you know, for any protests in the future. I've covered so many Russian protests, and you see violence at all of them. The riot police are easy to, you know, hit like a 70-year-old lady and drag her into an arrest van. But for the first time, or maybe the second time, you know, my big

• 36:12Speaker 02

  worry is that we're gonna get to a point where, like, they start shooting at protesters or something like that. Like, all bets are off, and as horrible as everything seems right now, both in Ukraine and then also in Russia in terms of freedoms, it's going to get so much worse.

• 36:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I saw a tweet that, maybe it was you, who said that Russia has moved from authoritarian to totalitarian. Do you believe that?

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, at this point, and this is something that I really didn't do a few years ago, but at this point, I have no qualms calling it a dictatorship. This is ruled by one man who has maybe three advisers that he is talking to, but at this point, he's like consolidated, complete control in the country, and there really are no checks on him. And so I take your point about people coming out into the streets and protesting, and I always try to work through, like, how that brings him down. And when you're a leader, a dictator, ready to deploy all sorts of violence...

• 37:23Speaker 02

  I just, I, I find it hard to work through how that happens.

• 37:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So let me ask you about cryptocurrency because the promise and it's a, I don't know. It's a weird question to ask, but it's important to ask, I think, because we talk about sanctions and the promise of something like Bitcoin was always that, uh, you know, you didn't need to have permission to use it, AKA if there are massive sanctions on you, you can move to cryptocurrency and sort of avoid them. And of course, there are other uses of it. But I would imagine that, that, you know, given the crippling effect that Russia is gonna feel from this, you know, there, there would be a move to, uh, to Bitcoin there. I mean, that's at least what the Bitcoin maximalists have been saying. It's so funny. Yeah. You do get crypto people who look at any world event. I just got a meme, uh, in

• 38:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  my, in my at mentions from someone who was like, you know, crypto people, any world event is this bullish? And they have been bullish about this. And but still, you look at the price of Bitcoin, it's dropped 14% um, over the past week and it doesn't seem like there's any movement there. And, you know, it's not the most important question, but I do think it's an important question to ask. What do you think's going on on that front?

• 38:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it is, it is, it's an important question because this is the first time that um, cryptocurrencies are like wrapped up in a, in a war like this. Like all these people were saying it's the first social media war and then and ah, that's absolutely not true. But I think with crypto, like it, it is interesting. You know, Russia was making some moves before all this to try to like legitimize crypto more in the, in the country. Um, I guess it depends on like, what, what does it mean? How do you use it? When you're talking about oligarchs who are worth like billions and billions of dollars, I don't know, is it physically possible to like park that much in crypto at this point? You tell me, you're the expert.

• 39:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I was just in El Salvador, the country is investing, you know, talk about the Russia's, uh, reserves, right? Um, that have been frozen in international bank accounts. Look, I'm not advocating they do this. I'm just trying to work through the, the, you know, the way that this, these systems work. But El Salvador is putting mil- hundreds of millions of its national wealth, uh, into Bitcoin. Um, they've lost a ton of money on it. Um, but you know, it's extremely volatile, uh, of, it's an extremely volatile currency.

• 39:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know. But again, like, and I also wonder, like, you know, I'm curious what you think. Can international bodies actually freeze that Bitcoin if they do that? Yeah, I don't know. This is new territory for me. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go ahead.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  No, no, I was interrupting you. I'm sorry. But, you know, it's Russia's not the first country to be sanctioned and use Bitcoin. North Korea has been around for a long time, right? And has been to some degree using it to avoid sanctions. So I think that there's probably some, you know, there's some precedent there to read up on.

• 40:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, North Korea has been using Bitcoin to avoid sanctions? I didn't know that. Can you share a little bit more about what's going on there?

• 40:17Speaker 02

  No, because I'll sound like an idiot. I'm not an expert enough to talk about it.

• 40:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ah, okay. But it is happening there.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  As far as I've read, yeah.

• 40:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's wild. So you said this isn't the, we'll get back to some of these sanctions a little bit in a minute. But I want to pick up on something you said, that this isn't the first social media war. And I think you're, by that, you're talking about how this isn't the first time a war is like sort of being documented on social media. To me, I mean, you know, there've been many, but Syria obviously is one that comes to mind, the Syrian civil war. What, you know, talking about it from a news judgment perspective, this is like, whenever I have an editor on, I want to ask about what's get, what gets covered and what doesn't. It does seem like this war has gotten a lot more coverage than Syria, definitely the onset of it. And obviously, the casualties in Syria were much higher, the damage was much greater.

• 41:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's your perspective on why that's happening?

• 41:12Speaker 02

  I think it's multiple reasons. I do think, like, racism is part of it, for sure. Think like, there's some expectation that war happens in places like, or strife happens in places like Syria, or Yemen, or even Afghanistan, where the US is directly involved. And there is something racist, you know, about like, the heart of Europe, it doesn't happen here. Where like, sitting here, you know, as a Jew, I'm like, yeah, I'm like, you guys actually are, you know, have your own rich history with this. And this also fed into Russiagate stuff, like.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  The image of Russia looms so large over the United States, whether it be among like an expert class that's a bit older and was really raised in the Cold War. Yeah, so that and then I also think the nuclear weapons aspect is very real. And it's so it's so easy to imagine how this goes so horribly wrong. And I think that

• 42:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  You think that's possible, that this will end up in a nuclear confrontation?

• 42:26Speaker 02

  It's not an easy question to answer straightforwardly.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Like the it's kind of being discussed in two separate ways, not separate, but in two ways. One is like, will he be willing to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine? Like, yes, probably. And then in terms of, you know, something even bigger than that. I don't know. My approach with Russia has always been. My approach with Vladimir Putin in particular has always been. If you assume the worst, you'll more often than not be right.

• 43:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's scary.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  I really well, I really do think that. You know, and there's all this talk about off ramps, diplomatic off ramps and how to get him to the table and it's fantastic that people are thinking that way. And it's important that people are thinking that way. I haven't been able to find an answer that works. I don't see how he lets himself lose this. If he does, I just kind of, I don't know, I just fear the worst.

• 43:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, just returning to the news judgment question. Sorry, I derailed us. That was me. But another part of it, and maybe this sort of piggybacks on the nuclear thing is that, you know, I'm not a classically trained journalist. I went to school for industrial labor relations and took like, you know, one class at NYU School of Continuing Professional Studies and then Ben Smith just did the rest for me. But I was always taught that when it comes to news judgment, it's what has a greater chance of impacting the readers' everyday life. And of course, Syria can have spillover from ISIS. But, you know, this if this goes to Ukraine, it can make its way into, you know, the rest of Europe and Seemingly easily either go to like a place like Poland or Moldova. We already know Belarus is aligned with Russia.

• 44:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think that that has, that might be the answer that, that folks are also looking for in terms of like, why this is getting so much more coverage is it, it can start to spill over into places, you know, that they've spent more time in or into their homes?

• 44:30Speaker 02

  I think that that's still like, I think that's still a point of view that like, that has its own biases, you know, because Syria also had a ton of spillover everywhere from Jordan to Turkey. So I think, you know, as, as an editor, as we expand our, rightly expand our understanding of who our audience is and who we're serving. And we don't just sort of picture them as like, you know, purely European heritage, uh, white, uh, readers, then that should be reflected in the coverage. Um, and certainly when I was at BuzzFeed, you know, we treated Syria like this.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  I like to think so. We had, you know, every report was on it.

• 45:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I mean, also, I mean, we had people covering stuff in Xinjiang that ended up winning Pulitzer Prize. That was, and Meg has been on the show. Um, that, that was crucial. That was, you know, Xinjiang is like one of the things that gets ignored the most. What's happening in China to the Uyghurs?

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. And if, you know, you can, it's, you can praise Apple, I suppose, uh, for deciding not to sell its products in Russia, but then it's like, okay, should we revisit your production facilities in China?

• 45:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  They're so hypocritical. Of course, they're going to pull out of doing retail in Russia because no one's going to be able to afford any iPads or whatever, because the ruble's dropping. So, yeah, they always, uh, find a way to score reputation points by, but still remain extremely hypocritical on many fronts. Anything from privacy to human rights. Yeah. So anyway, I mean, Apple does some good things, but like this idea of Apple being this great global citizen is, uh, sort of fallen by the wayside, at least for me.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, uh, I tend to think like that about most companies, but just one last thing on Syria, if I could, you know, I, I think, you know,

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Syria mattered and continues to matter so much primarily because I think of the suffering that regular people are going through there, but also, you know, it, the way that the US handled it says something about US power that figured into Vladimir Putin's calculations. Putin, it was his first sort of like real far away military adventure for a while. They developed tactics there that they are now deploying in Ukraine. Like it's all, it's all connected. So I get frustrated when people say that, you know, this is the first X, Y, or Z and that we should care about this more because the suffering of all people, all people matters, but also especially in today's world, it's all interconnected

• 47:11Speaker 02

  and you ignore one, you know, at your peril.

• 47:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's a great point. And it is, you know, I think Syria in particular was a place that could have used, you know, way more coverage and there's crises going around, going on around the world that don't get that. So I wonder, do you think that we're going to see, I mean, it's kind of a big ask, but do you think that we're going to see more coverage of, of war zones in places that are not just like attached to Europe or in Europe? You know, there was this, this CNN, for instance, is, is under its new leadership is actually going to go to do more reporting and less like, you know, talking heads. And I, I wonder if there's, I mean, obviously it's important. I just wonder if it'll actually happen.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  It's so hard for me to imagine what the world is even going to look like in a couple of months, you know, like we're in this, in the, we're in the very, very, very early days of something that is going to change our lives so much, like the economic, the global economic disaster that is coming, whatever Putin decides to do in Ukraine, which I think is the worst, how the European like security structure changes, the like life is changing before our eyes for me to even think about like how news organizations are going to, it's just, it's like, let us survive, you know?

• 48:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. How do you, so, so let's talk about that. How do you think that, you know, that things are going to change after this or because of this?

• 48:40Speaker 02

  I mean, how did things change after? And I'm I'm not calling this World War III.

• 48:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Not that it can't turn into it, but I'm not calling it that right now.

• 48:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  I I so appreciate that restraint because once people start calling it World War III, it's sort of like, OK, well, it's World War III. All bets are off. Like, do whatever you need to. And I think there is there a case to, like, you know, not go to full fledged World War right away as a first instinct. But I know that might be controversial.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  You know, you don't have foreign armies.

• 49:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm. It's definitely not. Yeah. Not World War III. Exactly. So, sorry. Go ahead.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  But when I think of this time, like, well, all the craziness the world has been through since, like, really, like, 2014 or 2016, you know, um, through to today, like, from the politics, rise of the far right around the world, a pandemic. And now, um, you know, a horrific, horrific war, uh, in Ukraine that can canon probably will get so much worse. I don't know. That's like some existential stuff. You got to go back to the history books. And there's no way to predict it.

• 49:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's fairly scary.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 49:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't even know how to ask a follow up to that. I mean.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Sorry, I'm so I'm.

• 49:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, it's it is. It's dark. It's really what the case is. Sorry, go ahead.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just, uh, you know, I think it's it's also a very American instinct to, like, try to find hope. And I'm just, I don't know, I'm finding it impossible these days.

• 50:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Is the global you mentioned global economy. Uh, what's going to happen there?

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Well, uh, you know, the main the main fight in, uh, or the main focus in DC right now and also in Europe is trying to cut, uh, trying to sanction Russian oil and cut, you know, basically stop importing, uh, oil here and oil and gas into into Europe. It looks like they're moving in that direction, at least here. I think that's. The oil price is already over, you know, it reached over a hundred thirty dollars a barrel today. I remember at the peak of the Iraq war, and I know this was a long time ago, so inflation, et cetera. But it hit a hundred forty seven dollars a barrel. Like, so it's, you know, again, you have to adjust for inflation, but it's not that far off.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Crazy energy prices, crazy inflation. You're potentially going to have all the financial institutions reassessing the soundness of basing growth strategies on emerging markets. I mean, I don't know, the repercussions can, can and will probably be huge.

• 51:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Could you see like a global recession coming from this?

• 51:22Speaker 02

  I'm not an economist, so I don't want to answer that, but the people that I am talking to are certainly talking in those terms.

• 51:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, okay, one final question on the internet, then we'll let you get back to your day. So just a, the New York Times just had an article about all the different action that was taken against Western tech companies or was voluntarily taken after this. Law went into place that could, you know, put you in jail for fifteen years on, on, on charges that are, are pretty wild. If you like, share fake news or whatever it is on, on the election. So here, here they are, it's from the Times article. TikTok and Netflix are suspending their services in the country. Facebook has been blocked. Twitter has been partially blocked and YouTube's future is in doubt. Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco and others have pulled back or withdrawn entirely from Russia. Even online video games like Minecraft are no longer available.

• 52:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  The actions have turned Russia into a walled off digital state akin to China and Iran, which tightly control the internet and censor foreign websites and dissent. So is this the beginning of like a totally walled off Russia only internet? From, from here on in and, and can you see any of these US service, US based services or international services making their way back in at any point?

• 52:41Speaker 02

  I mean, again, there's like a couple of things going on there. One is like Russia's attack on Facebook is different than Netflix pulling out, you know, which is also probably like, how are Russians going to pay for any of this stuff, like both in a practical sense, but also like, where will they get the money to pay for it? So I think that some of those steps are symbolic and some of them are are real. But yes, it's truly, it feels like overnight, some sort of an iron curtain came down, both and most horrifically instituted by Vladimir Putin, who finalized his all out assault on an independent press and on the internet,

• 53:24Speaker 02

  and then by, you know, Russian or sorry, American companies, Western companies falling in line with the sanctions. But yeah, overnight, it's become, it's become a very different country. I will say, you know, a lot of friends are asking about which VPNs are best and this and that. So it'll be like China, where you have certain, like a certain class of people who go the extra step so they can access these services that have been banned. But for for most people, sure seems like it.

• 53:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  I see. Usually at the end of a podcast, I like to ask for, you know, predictions of what happens next. But maybe we stay away from that.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Probably wise.

• 54:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  If in the conversation, I am hoping for the best. And look, right now, the best we can do is try to understand what's happening. And I appreciate you, Miriam, for coming in and sharing your expertise and wisdom and leaving definitely me with a better picture of what's happening on over there and how to view this information more. So I appreciate you coming on.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me, Alex.

• 54:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks for being here. Thank you, Nate Quatney, for mastering the audio. Much appreciated. Looking forward to seeing you in Austin this week, Nate. And for those listening, I'll be in Austin at South by Southwest, doing a discussion with last week's guest, Jim McKelvey, at 2:30 PM in Austin. Thank you to LinkedIn for having me as part of your great podcast network. Really appreciate it. Thank you for all the help and for some of the ads. And thanks to all of you, the listeners. Appreciate you coming back week after week to be here with us on Big Technology Podcast. We hope to see you next week for a new episode with a tech insider or outside agitator. And until then, take care.

• 55:11Speaker 03

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