And they just didn’t really have the opportunity to get books. So I was like: well, we need a library here. So I started to sort of build a library.

But then, because of union rules, I wasn’t allowed to because I was behaving as a librarian but I didn’t have a library degree. So it was this really weird union thing and they were like, “You can’t do it.” And I was like, well, I guess I’ll just go get a library degree. I like reading. And so I went and enrolled in a Master’s program at Pratt, and I got into English education because I love literature and reading and books and whatever.

So I started this library degree and one of the internship things was you could intern at a news library. I didn’t even know that was a thing. But there used to be — they’re all pretty much gone now, except for a couple — but like, there used to be these really big research departments and newsrooms where you could be like: “Hey, Janet, what’s the capital of Kansas?” Or, like: “Give me everything that we’ve ever written about the mayor of this town.” Or like: “We’re trying to find people who have been hurt by this doctor. Let’s like look at legal records.”

Just killer researchers … like, just “Jeopardy” people in these rooms, all just giving answers all day long for stuff.

I interned at ABC News’s library and it was so cool. I just loved it. I thought it was so fun. It was basically the reference desk, but for the news. So it’s fast-paced, and it was just great. And so I started working at that news library and I quit teaching.

Then my brother had gotten sick and I went off to Tampa for a little while to take care of him. And then when I came back, my job wasn’t there at the school anymore in the same way, so I was like: never mind, I’ll just go do this thing. Which I really loved. So I started working in news libraries.

And then I stopped for a little while, moved to Vermont, and couldn’t really get a job there. It was around the the financial crisis.

But Fox News … So, I worked in the brain room, which is the research department.

The brain room was supposed to be like any research department you would give context to. So you would make briefing books. I had women’s issues, statistics around crimes against women or abortion, stuff like that. I also had the Syria briefing book.

Different shows had, well … There’s a clear point of view at that network, which is clear to anyone who has eyeballs. But you had varying degrees of questions. Shep Smith’s team would ask for, like: this news event is happening, we need witnesses or user generated content. Stuff like that. And then, y’know, “Fox and Friends” would ask the kinds of questions that you might imagine “Fox and Friends” would ask. My favorite “Fox and Friends” question was some producer asking if dolphins raped people.

I mean, listen, there are no stupid questions. There are no stupid questions. But, you know, it was during the Obama years, so everything was like: the deficit, the debt, how can we show this with a pile of doughnuts?

They wanted the mathematical computations to be able to say, like, how many doughnuts equals the debt. That was actually an Eric Bolling segment that actually aired and I remember just screaming at the TV — like, we had all of these TVs, and I was like, nooooooooooo. So a lot of screaming.

But I started there, and then once you did that, you got reporting days. So you’d have four days on the Cheat Sheet and then one reporting day. Which isn’t that much. What I had to do was find a beat that nobody else wanted.

In my first couple months, I remember just scrolling on the internet, going down rabbit holes to be like: Is this a story that no one else knows about? I need to find a story that no one knows about — then no one can beat me and I have no competition inside or outside. The first story I ever wrote was about this internet subculture called Christian Domestic Discipline.

It’s BDSM, but for super-Christians. They have these cool, weird forums, And they have an influencer market, and bloggers. And I was just like: this is amazing.

I interviewed a bunch of people who talked about the forum. It was like most of the stories I do now, but that was the first one.

And then I kept telling those weird stories. Another piece I remember doing was on people who documented the loss of stillborns on YouTube. So, photos of their dead babies — which is weird, right? But actually it’s not very weird, because there’s a long history of people documenting death and we’re just weird about death now. It’s sort of the most normal thing in the world. That story got picked up by the BBC. There’s a general appetite for weird news stories that actually tell a story about human behavior, generally.

But like, even now, I’m in a weird lull. It’s been a week since I’ve had a good, strong story, and I’m like: Oh, that’s it. Journalism’s done with me. I’m quitting. I’m over. No one’s gonna know who I am. No one remembers me, I suck. I’m the worst.

Every single time. My husband — he’ll see it and he’ll be like, you don’t have a story? And I’ll be like, I don’t have anything …

It sucks. It’s so hard. It feels so bad. My process is to just be incredibly online, but I try to read more non-internet stuff when I’m broken. A lot of times ideas will sort of come out of the paper New Yorker, like the physical copy of The New Yorker — not from places where sometimes you just get stuck in this scrolling thing and it’s like, wait, this isn’t actually helping.

There are so many stories in the world, though. I never remember this at the time, but there are so many stories. And now I’ve gotten to a place where I’m not a baby reporter; I have people who will reach out to me and say: Here is my story. Which is really, really nice. But it’s still really hard.

But I think it’s really hard on this beat because most of the time what’s happening online is not a story for public consumption, especially at NBC News. I do not think it’s healthy for me — or anyone else really — to have that amount of internet drama. Especially now, where I have sort of a more dangerous beat.

You don’t want to know what’s happening in the QAnon spaces every day. They’re sad places. We didn’t do a story on QAnon until summer 2018, [even though] we had followed it the whole time. [You have to think about] when a story becomes responsible to report, or in some way informative, instead of just saying: here’s this stuff on the internet. It has to become…

I was doing [stories on] pickup artists and the crimes revolving around that. And he was doing conspiracy theories. And we started working on school shooter/mass shooter stuff, because that was happening more and more. We’d find their online profiles — I’m really good at finding stuff.

And Ben’s really good at finding things early; he’s one of the most online people I’ve ever met in my life. He’ll be like: I’m looking at this thing. What do you think of this? And he’s just as good now. And I’d [become] the researcher at the Daily Beast, too. I’d help people do all of the things that I would do as a researcher at Fox News or wherever else. I was really good at finding people and, you know, finding court cases and stuff like that. We sort of let our powers combine, and we started working together more and more. NBC started …

I mean, I guess I should think about that! I want to write stories. I want to write good stories. Technically, I think I’m a tech reporter. But I hardly know how to plug in my laptop. I’m not, like, a techy person. People tend to be like, you report on the dark web, and I’m like, I do not. I report on Facebook groups.

But my interest and my passion is how people are utilizing this new tool to communicate and decide what they believe, and decide how they’re going to raise their children or live their lives, or engage in politics.

I just think it’s so interesting how quickly these platforms and this medium … It feels like it has changed everything. Documenting that is really neat.

Suddenly Mike Cernovich becomes a political operative after spreading these Pizzagate rumors that are so stupid but fly because they’re on platforms that reward terrible behavior and bad faith and shocking content. And that somehow helped elect the President of the United States. Altogether, those pieces sort of became my beat.

Respectable reporters would go and talk about politics and important people in the world, interview Mark Zuckerberg — then you’d have all of a sudden, like, Pizzagate questions. Those reporters would come to us and be like: What is this thing?

Suddenly, the stupid stuff on the internet, the scary stuff on the internet, became just so mainstream and important. And that totally should not be.

I get really worried about my sort of status in journalism when I just don’t think this beat should be as important as it is right now. I’m hoping that it will become somehow less important in the days ahead. I’d be happy to go back to writing profiles of people, or, you know, the way that the internet is changing and shaping lives. That sounds great to me.

Let’s take Mike Cernovich, for example. Mike Cernovich used to have the Gorilla Mindset, right? Improve your life, take supplements — a little baby Alex Jones sort of thing. Then he got on the Trump train. He started being a political operative. And then you saw that sort of thing become replicated by a lot of folks from Laura Loomer to Ali Alexander to Jack Posobiec. All of the people in that crowd — I don’t know if they truly believe that Trump is the best thing ever. I don’t know. And it almost doesn’t matter, right? Because they have a formula that they know works.

Somebody like Roosh was a pickup artist, then he became a Trump supporter, blogger, whatever. Now he’s, like, an evangelical Christian, and he’s selling that sort of thing to his crew.

I think these people will pick up literally any ideology that will make them money or get them fame, or clout, or whatever it is. They’re just hucksters. And unfortunately, people have a very short memory and so these folks can reinvent themselves really easily.

Even when Laura Loomer was running for Congress and she had just gotten banned from Twitter for all that stuff — [it was] a very short history! Some people knew that she was a wild one. But generally, [audiences] don’t watch these spaces like we do. So I think that these people can reinvent themselves super easily. And I think that they can basically peddle whatever sort of far-right talking point they want and get into this new fan club or, you know, become leaders because they’re good at it. They’re good at media manipulation. They’re good at conversation hijacking.

They have a network and they utilize this network to go wherever the wind blows them and the dollars push them. And I think that will continue forever. Probably. God, I hope I’m not reporting on them forever. It’s so boring. Don’t you find it boring?

There was this standoff between Black Lives Matter protesters, who were standing on one side of the road saying the names of Black men and women who were killed for no reason, and then on the other side was an army of white people [in fatigues] with huge guns everywhere shouting, Go home! And it was just, like, terrifying.

I wrote the story. And then the next week it just happened again. The same in every town. It was just like: what is the point of this?

The only way I can sleep at night is by thinking like a librarian here. The point of this is to document it. We’re just documenting. The idea that we can change anything, I have given up on.

The other day, some tech executive was telling me how much power journalists have. And I was just like: Are you joking? Is this a joke? No one is listening. No one.

I mean, it doesn’t affect the way that people act, or behave, or the policies … it doesn’t matter to Facebook. Like, they don’t care about an article I write. Nothing changes for these people. And I’m just pulling my hair out getting emails every 20 seconds about what a liar and a shill I am, and I can’t put my children’s faces on Instagram.

I get like… I don’t know, 20 emails a day, on a day that I don’t have a story, just from randoms mostly telling me how terrible I am. And mostly you don’t do anything. You just, like, feel sad? I feel sad a lot. Is that a reaction?

There are these super-charismatic sociopaths that know how to … I don’t know. I’m not a good actress, I’m not a good performer, I’m not leading anybody. My goal in life, professionally, is to never manage anyone. So I don’t understand how these people operate, but it’s clear when someone has it, this charismatic skill. Alex Jones has it. President Trump has it. And you can use that for good or evil, and evil just seems like it pays more.

If I see people organizing on Facebook, I don’t call Facebook and ask, like, “Do you see this group?” I’ll just tell the story.

Once I saw this guy who was a QAnon person and he was saying that he was getting ready to go to one of the QAnon rallies, strapped in very serious weapons and ammo, and he made some scary hashtags on it. And I just, like, tweeted it out. I don’t think Facebook was very happy with that. They — whether it’s law enforcement or platforms — would much prefer for us to just quietly say: “Excuse me, do you see this thing is happening?”

But like: that’s not our job. That’s their job. My job is to inform the public about these activities in a way that informs them or helps them protect themselves or helps change policy or elevate marginalized voices or whatever the case may be. It’s not to tip off the cops.

QAnon is an umbrella of conspiracy theories that started on 4chan, and it posits that there is a secret cabal of demon-worshipping baby eaters and they are people who are mostly Democratic members of Congress or Democratic politicians. The Hollywood elite, like Tom Hanks, is the favorite. They sort of play this game online where they decode clues from a supposed government insider who’s leaking all these clues about the secret war to stop this cabal. Who’s leading the call? Donald Trump, of course. Notorious humanitarian and lover of women and children. He’s saving them all. And this moment when he will unveil what he has done to save all the children is called The Storm and that is when all these people will be executed. And we will all have the awakening. And we will all live in bliss with the knowledge that all the children are now safe.

For the boomers that are into it now and the general MAGA crowd that really made it balloon, I think they had never really played an online game like this before. And it is very game-y. I think it got big because it was this participatory game that involved politics, so you already had half the people interested. And it came at a time when the older folks — is it rude to call people boomers? I think it is? I’ll say baby boomers — so baby boomers, they just figured out Facebook, and now there was this cool new game to play. They remembered the Satanic Panic and I think they took a lot of the wrong lessons from it. They just remember, like: Oh, yeah, I think that was a thing. Now it’s still happening. And so yeah, it just got really big and then you had the Instagram people take it up as another MLM opportunity, a way to grow their brands, get clout … it sort of fit wherever you want it.

I used to sort of get involved emotionally. I do that less now. Because it’s like … it’s hard to feel so bad for these people when there are actual victims: people, lawmakers, and actors who are mercilessly harassed. And I’m harassed. I think it’s terrible. I don’t like it. It’s not nice. And it’s based on this incredibly dangerous anti-Semitic trope that is violent and dangerous. So like, I don’t want to over-empathize with people who choose to engage in this stuff all the time. It’s hard.

All of that’s there, right? Again, we’ve had televangelists forever. Snake oil salesmen are not new. But the ability to amplify these untalented grifters — not the Alex Joneses, I’m talking about all the baby ones that come together in Twitter DMs and hijack an election …

The scale is just too massive to actually do anything about it unless you unplug the website or drastically change the way that the feed works, which [Facebook is] just not gonna do. They are still in growth mode.

2016 was a stop point, like, whoa, something’s happening here, we’re just gonna take a big pause until we figure this out.

[But] nobody’s gonna do that. And it’s just … I think people will get tired of it eventually, though. Facebook is not long for this world. Like, it’s not a good platform. Lots of people don’t use it.

I think that maybe we’re in a moment right now where four years from now we’ll say: Oh, why didn’t they think to do X, Y, or Z? But I don’t know what that is. And that’s why I make the small bucks.

Because I think that does add to the noise, at this point. Everybody sort of knows Facebook’s complicity in this and they know how that stuff works. So to just keep doing [stories like that] is a little much.

Things that I’m interested in now, and the only way that I think you can differentiate the noise of tech criticism, is to have a good story. Right? And I don’t think that adds to the beast.

I’m proud of this story that I wrote about this woman who lost a baby at 45 weeks pregnant. She sort of fell down this internet rabbit hole of misinformation and freebirthing …

People are now googling what was an internet lack-of-knowledge vacuum and get her story first, instead of the freebirthing influencers who make a ton of cash off this. And [the story] is not so critical of the platforms, it’s just … it’s nuanced. And that’s good. More nuance is always good. It’s just, the internet is where nuance goes to die.

It is really, really boring writing the same story about how these liars on the internet are lying and the internet is built in a way that helps their lies grow over and over and over and over and over again. It’s very boring. And it makes everybody hate you even if it’s true. And I don’t know how much good it does. I mean, we’ve been doing it for years. And everything’s pretty bad.

Before my editor here I had an editor, Katie, at the Daily Beast, and I wrote to her as well because she’s like a friend. Someone I care about. I think about the public generally, but when I’m writing a story that I really like, I want to impress my editors because they’re good at their jobs. They’re good writers and people, and I want to make them feel something. If I can make them feel something, then I can probably make the reader feel something, and that’s the only way — when you touch someone in a way, whether it’s shocking them, or making them angry, or making them extremely empathetic with someone else.

Kevin Roose is great at this. I love the way he writes so many of his pieces, because at the end you just feel a surge of empathy. And that’s what I want from QAnon profiles to the medical misinformation stuff to whatever.

I’m so nervous about this. Because, as you know, I feel like I … do you feel like you have lost the ability, the longer you spend online, the worse you get at talking?

I’ve had a lot of jobs. I was a bartender, I loved it. I was a school teacher. It was great, really rewarding. I could do another job. But just recently I’ve just been thinking like: Maybe that is a good idea? Like, I don’t know — between the harassment, the brain brokenness, the … missing my children. Because you have to just be … you can’t log off. It’s just like: I don’t know if this is actually worth it.

I wish people understood how much we don’t report. If you think my published stories are depressing, you should see my browser history, right? Like, it’s just … we want to highlight stories where we think that maybe someone will read them and get something out of it that is good for their physical health, or their place in the democratic system, or their media literacy generally. Definitely not to just beat up on tech or yell about the right.