I spent the past three years talking to some of the worst people on the internet. Now, if you've been online recently, you may have noticed that there's a lot of toxic garbage out there: racist memes, misogynist propaganda, viral misinformation. So I wanted to know who was making this stuff. I wanted to understand how they were spreading it. Ultimately, I wanted to know what kind of impact it might be having on our society.
我花了三年的时间在互联网上与一些最糟糕的人交谈。如果你最近有上网，你可能注意到网上有大量的有害信息：种族主义表情包，厌恶女性的宣传，病毒式的错误信息。我想要知道是谁制造了这些东西。我想要理解他们如何传播它们。最终，我想要知道它们会对我们的社会造成了怎样的影响。So in 2016, I started tracing some of these memes back to their source, back to the people who were making them or who were making them go viral. I'd approach those people and say, "Hey, I'm a journalist. Can I come watch you do what you do?" Now, often the response would be, "Why in hell would I want to talk to some low-t soy-boy Brooklyn globalist Jew cuck who's in cahoots with the Democrat Party?"所以在 2016 年，我开始追踪其中一些表情包的源头，回到制造它们或令它们病毒式传播的人那里，我接近那些人说，“嘿，我是记者，我可以来看看你做什么吗？”通常我得到的回应是，“我到底为什么要和一个支持民主党的、住在布鲁克林的全球主义犹太佬交谈？”
To which my response would be, "Look, man, that's only 57 percent true."对此我的回应是，“瞧，伙计，这只有 57% 是真的。”
But often I got the opposite response. "Yeah, sure, come on by." So that's how I ended up in the living room of a social media propagandist in Southern California. He was a married white guy in his late 30s. He had a table in front of him with a mug of coffee, a laptop for tweeting, a phone for texting and an iPad for livestreaming to Periscope and YouTube. That was it. And yet, with those tools, he was able to propel his fringe, noxious talking points into the heart of the American conversation.但常常我也得到相反的回应。“好的，当然，来吧。”于是我出现在了一个住在南加州的社交媒体推手的客厅里。他是一个 30 多岁的已婚白人。他面前是一张桌子，桌子上放着咖啡，一台用来发推特的笔记本电脑，一台发短信的手机和一台用来在 Periscope 和 YouTube 上直播的iPad。就这些了。然而，通过这些工具，他能够将他那些边缘的、有害的谈资推进到美国人交谈的中心。
For example, one of the days I was there, a bomb had just exploded in New York, and the guy accused of planting the bomb had a Muslim-sounding name. Now, to the propagandist in California, this seemed like an opportunity, because one of the things he wanted was for the US to cut off almost all immigration, especially from Muslim-majority countries. 比如，我在那的某个日子，一个炸弹刚好在纽约爆炸，而被指控安置炸弹的人有一个穆斯林名字。对这个加州的社交推手来说，这似乎是个机会，因为他想要让美国切断几乎所有的移民，尤其是来自穆斯林国家的移民。
So he started livestreaming, getting his followers worked up into a frenzy about how the open borders agenda was going to kill us all and asking them to tweet about this, and use specific hashtags, trying to get those hashtags trending. And tweet they did -- hundreds and hundreds of tweets, a lot of them featuring images like this one.于是他开始直播，让他的追随者们对开放边界的议程将如何杀死我们所有人感到愤怒，并要求他们在推特上谈论此事，使用特定的话题标签，试图上推特话题热门。他们发了很多推文——成百上千，很多都带着像这样的图片。
So that's George Soros. He's a Hungarian billionaire and philanthropist, and in the minds of some conspiracists online, George Soros is like a globalist bogeyman, one of a few elites who is secretly manipulating all of global affairs. 这是乔治·索罗斯。他是匈牙利裔的亿万富翁和慈善家，在一些网上阴谋家看来，乔治·索罗斯就像一个全球主义者，秘密操纵全球事务的精英之一。
Now, just to pause here: if this idea sounds familiar to you, that there are a few elites who control the world and a lot of them happen to be rich Jews, that's because it is one of the most anti-Semitic tropes in existence. I should also mention that the guy in New York who planted that bomb, he was an American citizen. So whatever else was going on there, immigration was not the main issue.这里暂停一下：如果这个你听起来熟悉，有少数精英控制全球，并且很多人碰巧是有钱的犹太人，因为它是现存最反犹太人的比喻之一。我还要提一下在纽约埋下炸弹的人，他是一个美国公民。所以不管发生了什么，移民并非主要问题。
And the propagandist in California, he understood all this. He was a well-read guy. He was actually a lawyer. He knew the underlying facts, but he also knew that facts do not drive conversation online. What drives conversation online is emotion.而这位加州推手，他知道所有这些。他是个博览群书的人，他其实是个律师。他知道基本事实，但他也知道事实不能推动网上的对话，驱动网上对话的是情绪。
See, the original premise of social media was that it was going to bring us all together, make the world more open and tolerant and fair ... And it did some of that. But the social media algorithms have never been built to distinguish between what's true or false, what's good or bad for society, what's prosocial and what's antisocial. That's just not what those algorithms do. 社交媒体的最初愿景是把我们连接在一起，让世界变得更开放，宽容和平等……它确实有这方面的作用。但社交媒体的算法却没被打造成可以区分真和假，对社会好还是坏，什么是亲社会和什么反社会。这些内容，算法都没有涉及到。
A lot of what they do is measure engagement: clicks, comments, shares, retweets, that kind of thing. And if you want your content to get engagement, it has to spark emotion, specifically, what behavioral scientists call "high-arousal emotion."他们做的很多事情只是评估互动：点击、评论、分享、转发之类的事情。如果你要让你的内容获得互动，它就得散播情绪，具体来说，就是行为科学家所说的那种“高唤醒情绪”。Now, "high arousal" doesn't only mean sexual arousal, although it's the internet, obviously that works. It means anything, positive or negative, that gets people's hearts pumping. So I would sit with these propagandists, not just the guy in California, but dozens of them, “高唤醒”不只是性唤起的意思，虽然是在互联网上，但显然这是可行的。它意味着任何事情，积极的或消极的，让人们心脏加速跳动的。所以我和这些推手坐在一起，不只是加州这个伙计，还有其他很多人，
and I would watch as they did this again and again successfully, not because they were Russian hackers, not because they were tech prodigies, not because they had unique political insights -- just because they understood how social media worked, and they were willing to exploit it to their advantage.我看着他们一次又一次地成功做这些事情，并非因为他们是俄罗斯黑客，并非因为他们是科技神童，并非因为他们有独特的政治洞察——只是因为他们理解社交媒体的运行方式，并且他们愿意为他们的利益利用它。
Now, at first I was able to tell myself this was a fringe phenomenon, something that was relegated to the internet. But there's really no separation anymore between the internet and everything else. This is an ad that ran on multiple TV stations during the 2018 congressional elections, alleging with very little evidence that one of the candidates was in the pocket of international manipulator George Soros, who is awkwardly photoshopped here next to stacks of cash. 一开始我告诉自己这是个边缘现象，这种跟互联网有关的东西。但互联网和其他东西没有任何区别。这是一则在 2018 年国会选举期间在多家电视台播放的广告，基本没有证据的指控，其中一名候选人受到了国际金融操纵者乔治·索罗斯的操控，他被 PS 到了成堆的现金旁边。
This is a tweet from the President of the United States, alleging, again with no evidence, that American politics is being manipulated by George Soros. This stuff that once seemed so shocking and marginal and, frankly, just ignorable, it's now so normalized that we hardly even notice it.这是一个来自美国总统的推特，同样没有证据的指控，美国政治被乔治·索罗斯操纵。这些东西看起来那么令人震惊却微不足道，坦白地说，简直是可以忽略不计，它现在是如此的平常化，以至于我们几乎没有注意到它。
So I spent about three years in this world. I talked to a lot of people. Some of them seemed to have no core beliefs at all. They just seemed to be betting, perfectly rationally, that if they wanted to make some money online or get some attention online, they should just be as outrageous as possible. 于是我在这个世界花了三年的时间。我跟很多人交谈过。他们中有些人似乎根本没有核心信仰。他们只是在完全理性地下注，如果他们想在网上赚钱或获得关注，他们就应该尽可能地离谱。
But I talked to other people who were true ideologues. And to be clear, their ideology was not traditional conservatism. These were people who wanted to revoke female suffrage. These were people who wanted to go back to racial segregation. Some of them wanted to do away with democracy altogether. 但我也和其他真正的意识形态拥护者谈过。需要明确的是，他们的意识形态不是传统的保守主义。这些人想要废除女性选举权。这些人想要回到种族隔离时代。他们中的一些人想彻底废除民主。
Now, obviously these people were not born believing these things. They didn't pick them up in elementary school. A lot of them, before they went down some internet rabbit hole, they had been libertarian or they had been socialist or they had been something else entirely. So what was going on?很明显，这些人并不是生来就相信这些事情的。他们不是小学的时候就学习这些。他们中的很多人，在他们掉进网络的泥潭前，他们要么是自由主义者，要么是社会主义者，要么是完全不同的人。那么到底发生了什么？Well, I can't generalize about every case, but a lot of the people I spoke to, they seem to have a combination of a high IQ and a low EQ. They seem to take comfort in anonymous, online spaces rather than connecting in the real world. So often they would retreat to these message boards or these subreddits, where their worst impulses would be magnified. 我不能对每个案例一概而论，但很多我交谈过的人，他们似乎是高智商和低情商的结合体。他们似乎对匿名和在线空间感到更舒服，而非在现实世界中的连接。他们经常会回到这些留言板或子版块上，在那里，他们糟糕的冲动会被放大。
They might start out saying something just as a sick joke, and then they would get so much positive reinforcement for that joke, so many meaningless "internet points," as they called it, that they might start believing their own joke.他们可能一开始说的只是个恶心的笑话，然后他们因为这个笑话而得到很多积极的支持，正如他们所说的，这么多毫无意义的“互联网观点”，他们可能会开始相信自己的笑话。
I talked a lot with one young woman who grew up in New Jersey, and then after high school, she moved to a new place and suddenly she just felt alienated and cut off and started retreating into her phone. She found some of these spaces on the internet where people would post the most shocking, heinous things. 我跟一个成长在新泽西的年轻姑娘聊过很多，在她高中毕业后，她搬到新地方并突然感到被疏远，开始迷失在手机里。她发现互联网上有一些空间，人们在那里发表一些最令人震惊、最令人发指的内容。
And she found this stuff really off-putting but also kind of engrossing, kind of like she couldn't look away from it. She started interacting with people in these online spaces, and they made her feel smart, they made her feel validated. She started feeling a sense of community, started wondering if maybe some of these shocking memes might actually contain a kernel of truth. 她觉得这些东西很讨厌，但也很吸引人，很难把视线从它们身上移开。她开始与这些线上空间的人交流，她觉得这些人很聪明，他们被认可了。她开始体会到社区的温暖，开始怀疑这些令人震惊的表情包中可能包含着真理。
A few months later, she was in a car with some of her new internet friends headed to Charlottesville, Virginia, to march with torches in the name of the white race. She'd gone, in a few months, from Obama supporter to fully radicalized white supremacist.几个月后，她跟她认识的几个新网友一起坐车前往弗吉尼亚州的夏洛茨维尔，以白种人的名义举着火炬游行。几个月的时间，她就从奥巴马的支持者变成了激进的白人至上主义者。
Now, in her particular case, she actually was able to find her way out of the cult of white supremacy. But a lot of the people I spoke to were not. And just to be clear: I was never so convinced that I had to find common ground with every single person I spoke to that I was willing to say,对于这种情况，她实际上能找到自己的方式来摆脱白人至上的崇拜。但很多与我交谈的人不能。说得更明白些：我从未如此确信我必须与每一个我愿意说这句话的人找到共同点，
"You know what, man, you're a fascist propagandist, I'm not, whatever, let's just hug it out, all our differences will melt away." No, absolutely not. But I did become convinced that we cannot just look away from this stuff. We have to try to understand it, because only by understanding it can we even start to inoculate ourselves against it.“你知道吗，伙计，你是法西斯拥护者，我不是，不管怎样，让我们拥抱彼此吧，我们所有的分歧都会消失。”不，绝对不会。但我的确变得确信，我们不能无视这些东西。我们必须试图理解它，因为只有通过理解它，我们才能开始预防它。
In my three years in this world, I got a few nasty phone calls, even some threats, but it wasn't a fraction of what female journalists get on this beat. And yeah, I am Jewish, although, weirdly, a lot of the Nazis couldn't tell I was Jewish, which I frankly just found kind of disappointing.在这个世界的三年时间中，我接到过一些让人不快的电话，甚至有些是威胁，但跟女记者收到的威胁相比算是小巫见大巫了。是的，我是犹太人，不过奇怪的是，很多纳粹分子看不出我是犹太人，坦白说这让我有点失望。
Seriously, like, your whole job is being a professional anti-Semite. Nothing about me is tipping you off at all? Nothing?说真的，你的工作就是一个专业的反犹份子。我就没有表露一丁点这种特征？一点都没有？
This is not a secret. My name is Andrew Marantz, I write for "The New Yorker," my personality type is like if a Seinfeld episode was taped at the Park Slope Food Coop. Nothing?这并不是个秘密。我叫安德鲁·马兰兹，为《纽约客》撰稿，我的性格类型就像《宋飞正传》里面在公园坡的食品店里录制的那一集。一点都没有？
Anyway, look -- ultimately, it would be nice if there were, like, a simple formula: smartphone plus alienated kid equals 12 percent chance of Nazi. It's obviously not that simple. And in my writing, I'm much more comfortable being descriptive, not prescriptive. But this is TED, so let's get practical. I want to share a few suggestions of things that citizens of the internet like you and I might be able to do to make things a little bit less toxic.不管怎样，最终，如果有一个简单的公式就好了：智能手机加上被疏远的孩子等于 12% 的纳粹几率。这当然不是那样简单。在我的文章中，我更喜欢用描述性的，而不是指令性的字眼。但这是 TED，所以让我们实际点。我想要分享几点能让像你和我这样的互联网公民去做的能够让事情变得不那么糟糕的建议。
So the first one is to be a smart skeptic. So, I think there are two kinds of skepticism. And I don't want to drown you in technical epistemological information here, but I call them smart and dumb skepticism. So, smart skepticism: thinking for yourself, questioning every claim, demanding evidence -- great, that's real skepticism.首先，要做一个聪明的怀疑论者。我认为有两种怀疑论。我不想让你们沉浸在技术认识论信息中，但我把它们称为聪明和愚蠢的怀疑主义。聪明的怀疑者是：独立思考，怀疑任何宣称，要求证据——很好，这是真正的怀疑。
Dumb skepticism: it sounds like skepticism, but it's actually closer to knee-jerk contrarianism. Everyone says the earth is round, you say it's flat. Everyone says racism is bad, you say, "I dunno, I'm skeptical about that." I cannot tell you how many young white men I have spoken to in the last few years who have said, 愚蠢的怀疑者：听起来像怀疑，但实际上它更接近于下意识的逆向抬杠。人人都说地球是圆的，你说它是平的。人人都说种族主义不好，你说，“我不知道，我对此表示怀疑。”我无法告诉你，在过去 5 年中我聊过的人中有多少年轻白人说过，
"You know, the media, my teachers, they're all trying to indoctrinate me into believing in male privilege and white privilege, but I don't know about that, man, I don't think so." Guys -- contrarian white teens of the world -- look: if you are being a round earth skeptic and a male privilege skeptic and a racism is bad skeptic, you're not being a skeptic, you're being a jerk.“媒体，我的老师，他们都试图向我灌输相信男性特权和白人特权的观念，但我不知道，我不这么认为。”伙计们——世界上叛逆的白人青少年——这么说吧：如果你质疑地球不是圆的，质疑男性至上这种说法是错的，或是质疑种族主义是不对的，你不是怀疑论者，你是个混蛋。
It's great to be independent-minded, we all should be independent-minded, but just be smart about it.有独立的思想很好，我们都应该有独立的思想，但要对此足够智慧。
So this next one is about free speech. You will hear smart, accomplished people who will say, "Well, I'm pro-free speech," and they say it in this way that it's like they're settling a debate, when actually, that is the very beginning of any meaningful conversation. All the interesting stuff happens after that point. 下一个是关于言论自由。你会听到聪明，有成就的人说：“我支持言论自由，”他们这样说，就像他们在终结一场辩论，实际上，这是任何有意义的对话的开始。所有有趣的事情都发生在这个观点后。
OK, you're pro-free speech. What does that mean? Does it mean that David Duke and Richard Spencer need to have active Twitter accounts? Does it mean that anyone can harass anyone else online for any reason? You know, I looked through the entire list of TED speakers this year. I didn't find a single round earth skeptic. 好的，你支持言论自由，那意味着啥？这意味着大卫·杜克和理查德·斯宾塞必须得激活推特账号吗？这意味着每个人都可因任何理由在网上攻击别人吗？我看了今年 TED 所有的演讲者清单。我并没有发现一个人怀疑地球是圆的。
Is that a violation of free speech norms? Look, we're all pro-free speech, it's wonderful to be pro-free speech, but if that's all you know how to say again and again, you're standing in the way of a more productive conversation.这违反了言论自由的准则吗？我们都是言论自由的支持者，支持言论自由很好，但如果你知道只是一次又一次地重复这句话，你就阻碍了一次更有成效的谈话。
Making decency cool again, so ... Great!让体面再次变酷，所以……很棒！
Yeah. I don't even need to explain it. So in my research, I would go to Reddit or YouTube or Facebook, and I would search for "sharia law" or I would search for "the Holocaust," and you might be able to guess what the algorithms showed me, right? "Is sharia law sweeping across the United States?" "Did the Holocaust really happen?" Dumb skepticism. 是的，我甚至都不需要解释它。在我的研究中，我会去 Reddit、 YouTube 或 Facebook，搜索“古兰经”，或是“反犹大屠杀”，你们可能能够猜到算法会向我展示啥，是吧？“可兰经正在席卷美国吗？”“反犹大屠杀真的发生过吗？”愚蠢的怀疑主义。
So we've ended up in this bizarre dynamic online, where some people see bigoted propaganda as being edgy or being dangerous and cool, and people see basic truth and human decency as pearl-clutching or virtue-signaling or just boring. 于是我们就陷入了这种奇怪的网络动态，有些人把看到的偏执的宣传看作是很新潮的、或是危险但又很酷的，人们反而觉得基本的真理和人类的尊严有些令人感到震惊，或是有些圣母，或是无聊的。
And the social media algorithms, whether intentionally or not, they have incentivized this, because bigoted propaganda is great for engagement. Everyone clicks on it, everyone comments on it, whether they love it or they hate it. So the number one thing that has to happen here is social networks need to fix their platforms.社交媒体算法，不管是有意还是无意，一直都在火上浇油，因为偏执的煽动对于互动很有帮助。每个人都点击它，每个人都评论它，不管他们爱它还是讨厌它。所以当务之急就是，社交网络需要修复它们的平台。
So if you're listening to my voice and you work at a social media company or you invest in one or, I don't know, own one, this tip is for you. If you have been optimizing for maximum emotional engagement and maximum emotional engagement turns out to be actively harming the world, it's time to optimize for something else.那么，如果你在听我的演讲，你在社交媒体公司工作，或你投资了一家，或者拥有一家，这条建议是给你的。如果你一直在优化以实现最大化情感式的互动，而最大化的情感式互动实际上正在伤害着这个世界，是时候以其他事情为优化目标了。
But in addition to putting pressure on them to do that and waiting for them and hoping that they'll do that, there's some stuff that the rest of us can do, too. So, we can create some better pathways or suggest some better pathways for angsty teens to go down. 但除了向社交平台施加压力并等待和希望他们会行动之外，有一些事情其他人也可以去做。这样，我们就能够创造一些更好的途径，或者找到一些更好的途径，减少青少年中的焦虑情绪。
If you see something that you think is really creative and thoughtful and you want to share that thing, you can share that thing, even if it's not flooding you with high arousal emotion. Now that is a very small step, I realize, but in the aggregate, this stuff does matter, because these algorithms, as powerful as they are, they are taking their behavioral cues from us.如果你看到一些你认为真的有创意和有思想的东西，并且你想要分享那个东西，你就可以分享，即使它没有让你充满高度兴奋的情绪。我发现那真是很小的一步，但总的来说，这些东西真的很重要，因为这些算法本身非常强大，它们会从我们身上获取行为线索。
So let me leave you with this. You know, a few years ago it was really fashionable to say that the internet was a revolutionary tool that was going to bring us all together. It's now more fashionable to say that the internet is a huge, irredeemable dumpster fire. Neither caricature is really true. We know the internet is just too vast and complex to be all good or all bad. 我还想告诉大家，几年前，非常时尚的说法是互联网是革命性的工具，将会把我们聚在一起。如今更时尚的说法是互联网是一场不可挽回的垃圾箱火灾。两种说法都不完全正确。我们知道互联网太大太复杂，以至于不可能是全好或全不好的。
And the danger with these ways of thinking, whether it's the utopian view that the internet will inevitably save us or the dystopian view that it will inevitably destroy us, either way, we're letting ourselves off the hook. There is nothing inevitable about our future. 这种思考方式的危险在于，无论是乌托邦的观点——互联网将不可避免地拯救我们，还是反乌托邦式的观点——互联网将不可避免地摧毁我们，不管怎样，我们要让自己摆脱困境。我们的未来没有什么是不可避免的。
The internet is made of people. People make decisions at social media companies. People make hashtags trend or not trend. People make societies progress or regress. When we internalize that fact, we can stop waiting for some inevitable future to arrive and actually get to work now.互联网由人组成。是人们在社交媒体公司中做决定。是人们让话题标签热门或不热门。是人们让社会进步或退步。当我们内化这个事实时，就不会坐以待毙，现在就开始着手应对。
You know, we've all been taught that the arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends toward justice. Maybe. Maybe it will. But that has always been an aspiration. It is not a guarantee. The arc doesn't bend itself. It's not bent inevitably by some mysterious force. The real truth, which is scarier and also more liberating, is that we bend it.我们都被教育过人类的道德轨迹绵长，但它终归正义。也许。也许会的。但这一直是一个愿望。它不是个保证。道德轨迹并不会自己转向。它不会被某种神秘力量改变轨迹。真正的事实，有些可怕但也更加令人舒心，是我们能够改变它。
Thank you.谢谢。
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