FRESH AIR: Andrew Marantz has spent the past three years reporting on the alt-right’s use of social media. He’s embedded with the people he describes as the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into policy. Marantz is a staff writer for The New Yorker and started this reporting project during the 2016 presidential campaign. He watched how extremist memes and lies were created and went viral, and he profiled the people creating the means. Marantz has also been reporting on social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, that claim they’re dedicated to free […]

FRESH AIR: When Christopher Wylie first began working for the British behavioral research company SCL Group, the company used data drawn from a number of sources as a means of potentially altering outcomes for their, sometimes military, clients. But over time, Wylie’s mission — and that of the company — expanded. Conservative strategist Steve Bannon, who later worked in President Trump’s White House, became involved with the SCL subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. Wylie, who served as Cambridge Analytica’s research director for a year and a half, watched as his group began to use of data from Facebook and other online sources […]

FRESH AIR: Some of today’s most divisive issues related to racial equality, voting rights and voter suppression, women’s rights, who gets to be a citizen, mass incarceration and what is the meaning of equal justice are issues you can’t fully understand without understanding the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. These are the amendments that were added to the Constitution after the Civil War in the era known as Reconstruction. The 13th ended slavery. The 14th made anyone born in the U.S. a citizen and said that the state can’t deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process […]

FRESH AIR: In 2013, Edward Snowden was an IT systems expert working under contract for the National Security Agency when he traveled to Hong Kong to provide three journalists with thousands of top-secret documents about U.S. intelligence agencies’ surveillance of American citizens. To Snowden, the classified information he shared with the journalists exposed privacy abuses by government intelligence agencies. He saw himself as a whistleblower. But the U.S. government considered him a traitor in violation of the Espionage Act. After meeting with the journalists, Snowden intended to leave Hong Kong and travel — via Russia — to Ecuador, where he […]

FRESH AIR: Several Democratic presidential candidates are calling for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after The New York Times published an essay Sept. 14 describing alleged sexual misconduct that occurred during his college years at Yale. New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, who penned the essay, covered Kavanaugh’s contentious 2018 confirmation hearings, in which Christine Blasey Ford alleged that he’d sexually assaulted her at a house party when they were both teenagers. The FBI conducted an investigation into Kavanaugh’s behavior, but it was restricted in terms of time and scope. The Senate ultimately voted […]

FRESH AIR: During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind-control drug that could be weaponized against enemies. MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early ’60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the “most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control.” Some of Gottlieb’s […]