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Does your favorite movie star or pop singer really love the Kremlin? Though the ads in your Facebook feed may lead you to believe such a thing, it’s just not true. In recent months, a major disinformation campaign has run rampant on Meta and X (aka Facebook and Twitter). The campaign uses fake ads that show existing photos of extremely famous celebrities—Beyoncé, Oprah, Justin Bieber, Shakira, Cristiano Ronaldo—which have been doctored with fake quotes that back Russia and criticize Ukraine. The campaign, which is still in progress, was perpetrated by a pre-Kremlin group known as Doppelgänger. Information shared exclusively with WIRED has also linked this disinformation campaign to Russia’s GRU military spy agency.
On this week’s show, we talk with WIRED contributor David Gilbert, who reports on digital disinformation. David says Doppelgänger has been acting in plain sight for over a year, buying targeted ads and using networks of bots and fake Facebook pages to get its pro-Russia propaganda in front of millions of people.
Show Notes
Read David’s story about Doppelgänger’s campaign. Read all of David’s recent coverage. Also read our coverage of other online propaganda campaigns.
Recommendations
David recommends the movie Saltburn. Mike recommends buying Italian blood orange soda instead of sparkling cider for your next holiday part. Lauren recommends supporting a union!
David Gilbert can be found wrangling all kinds of disinformation on social media @daithaigilbert. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: How many celebrity accounts do you follow on X or Instagram?
Michael Calore: Just a handful. I would say major celebrities, just a handful. Minor celebrities, probably more.
Lauren Goode: And do you generally assume that whatever captions or comments the major celebs are posting have been carefully vetted by their PR teams, or at least the person themself has given consideration to what they're putting out there?
Michael Calore: Oh yeah, for sure. It's all just part of a machine.
Lauren Goode: What if I told you it really was all part of a machine, a Russian propaganda machine that's posting alongside these celebrity doppelgängers?
Michael Calore: I would say shut it all down. Just shut down the internet and we all go home.
Lauren Goode: Well, we should probably wait until we finish this podcast, and then we'll shut it all down.
Michael Calore: OK. It's a deal.
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Lauren Goode: Let's do it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]Lauren Goode: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: And I'm Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: And we're joined this week by WIRED reporter David Gilbert, who joins us from Cork, Ireland. David is our resident U2 reporter for those of you who have listened to our previous episode with him. David, welcome back to the show.
David Gilbert: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Lauren. And I did actually get some negative feedback about my praise for Bono here in Ireland, so that all matches up, because people in Ireland don't like Bono.
Lauren Goode: We expect nothing less from your peers. All right, well, on this episode, and you really should go back and listen to our prior episode with David, if you're interested in misinformation and disinformation, which is what David covers for us at WIRED. But for this episode, we need to talk about fake celebrity ads. David, you've been reporting on this for WIRED for weeks now. Since November, a major disinformation campaign has taken over Meta and X, or as we like to refer to them, Facebook and Twitter. This campaign includes a bunch of ads featuring extremely famous celebrities backing Russia and criticizing Ukraine. The campaign itself is called Doppelgänger and information shared exclusively with you has linked this disinformation campaign to Russia's GRU military spy agency. So David, first off, how did you first hear about or notice this disinformation campaign involving celebrity doppelgängers? Where did your reporting really start?
David Gilbert: Where all good reporting starts these days, it seems, on Signal. Someone sent me a message telling me, just outlining this campaign. It sounded a bit crazy, and because they didn't send any pictures or anything, I didn't really understand what it was about. But that person worked with Reset, which is a nonprofit that tracks disinformation campaigns, and they then sent me, not really a report, but they sent out a newsletter periodically, they don't publish it publicly, but they sent it out to reporters and academics and researchers. And in that they outlined this, what they said, “Hollywood hates Ukraine” I think is how they titled this. And they just shared some of the images, and there was Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, I think, and Shakira were the three they chose. And next to them were quotes in French and German. And the figures were pretty startling. They said that there was 7.6 million users, I think, in France and Germany who had seen these ads, that there was 550 different specific Facebook ads, and that it was using images from the most famous people in the world, effectively, from Christiano Ronaldo to Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga—
Lauren Goode: Taylor Swift, right?
David Gilbert: Taylor Swift was a part of it as well. Interestingly, the Reset researchers didn't mention Taylor Swift until I spoke to them. So maybe they don't see Taylor Swift as being as famous. Maybe they wouldn't know because she's the Person of the Year. I'm not sure.
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Lauren Goode: Well, she's no Bono, but yes, please continue.
David Gilbert: She is no Bono in many, many ways. So yeah, obviously it caught my attention. So I then decided that I needed to talk to the researchers because the newsletter they put out was pretty scant on how this campaign came about and the size of it and who was behind it. So I decided at that point that I needed to talk to the researchers. So I got on the call with one of the researchers who wants to remain anonymous because she, out of respect for her privacy and does not want to be targeted, I guess, by the people who ran the campaign.
Michael Calore: So these ads that they were running, that the researchers showed you, they have a photograph of a celebrity and then a quote next to it. And these are not real quotes, these are fake quotes. What sorts of things are they saying? What's the messaging?
David Gilbert: So the messaging, as Lauren said, it's very much pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine, similar things we've seen in many other kinds of campaigns by Russian disinformation outfits for the last couple of years. So they had Taylor Swift, I think, saying, “How long will this take? The Ukrainians behave like charlatans and we continue to pay. This is not right.” Or Selena Gomez in German was saying, “Every time the Ukrainians get money, everything goes wrong.” And then they had Kim Kardashian, and in the picture that they chose for Kim Kardashian, she's actually holding a microphone to make it look even more realistic, I guess, that this is something that she actually said while she was holding the microphone. She said, “It's just disappointing how do Ukrainians use our help. Someone needs to stop this, seriously.” So that's the kind of flavor of what the quotes were saying. As I said, they're all in French and German. The ones in this particular campaign that the Reset researchers have identified. And because there are Facebook ads, they were all targeted very specifically at people at different cities across Facebook in Germany.
Lauren Goode: How have the celebrities responded to this?
David Gilbert: I don't know. They haven't publicly responded to the news that the campaign has taken place. We contacted the people, I guess is how you put it, for all the celebrities who we mentioned in the piece. But while I think Kim Kardashian's publicist got back, they didn't offer a quote or a reaction or anything. So it's hard to know if the celebrities are even aware that this is happening.
Michael Calore: Tell us about the organization behind this ad campaign. They're called Doppelgänger, and they're not exactly new, but briefly tell us about their history and their links to various institutions inside Russia.
David Gilbert: Sure. So when, as I said, Reset got in touch, and when they actually initially found the campaign, they didn't link it to Doppelgänger. That only happened when I got in touch with another researcher in Russia, because I was talking about a different story with them, and I just mentioned this campaign to them and they said, “Oh, that's Doppelgänger.” And then they showed me how that campaign was running on Twitter at the same time. So they were able to kind of show that because the bots that they had been tracking were sharing disinformation or sharing these fake ads, they were then able to confidently say that it was Doppelgänger, and Reset subsequently said the same thing. So the group Doppelganger, I guess it's been around or it's been known about since September 2022, but it's been running since at least May 2022. In September 2022, EU Disinfo, which is a group that tracks disinformation campaigns, outed this as a Russian influence campaign.
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And at the time, what it showed that it was doing is that it was creating fake versions of real websites and pushing links to those fake websites on social media. And when people clicked on the fake website, it looked like The Guardian or Le Monde in France or Bild in Germany. But the contents that they were reading were fake. And again, it was very much pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine content that it was pushing out. So that was highlighted in September. Also, September 2022, Facebook came out and they shared a lot of indicators with researchers about this group, and they linked it to two Russian companies with links to the Kremlin. But despite this, the campaign continued. And in June this year, the French government came out and it publicly for the first time alleged that the Kremlin was behind it. Because again, there was another French-targeted campaign running against French websites like Le Monde, as I said, and Figaro and La Parisian.
And they were all fake versions of the real websites. It looked fake. The masthead was the same, the journalists were the same, but the contents of the actual articles were fake and those were being pushed out by the bots on Twitter and on Facebook. And then just most recently, the same group was accused of being behind an influence operation in targeting the Israel-Hamas war. And that was, again, fake websites this time, some Israeli websites, some US websites such as Fox Business, and it wasn't necessarily pro-Israel and anti-Hamas, it was just designed to sow confusion by spreading disinformation. And so that is what the group has been up to for the last 18 months. And now it seems that it's looking to use Facebook or loopholes in Facebook's ad system to push those messages as well as using the fake websites.
Lauren Goode: How is this different, or is it at all different, from the Russian disinformation campaigns we saw being tracked across social media around 2016?
David Gilbert: I suppose the ultimate goal of it is exactly the same. It's to sow chaos, it's to sow confusion. It's to make people second-guess what they see online, not trust us, but then at the same time, to believe the wildest, craziest things that they see online. The tactics that they're using this time are quite different. The fake websites, we didn't see that really in 2020 or 2016 as much as we are seeing it now from them, the use of ads on a scale like this is also different and they're also using tactics. Whereas this ad campaign that was uncovered happened over the course of days. It started, it was paid for, it targeted, and it was deactivated a couple of days later. The researchers called it kind of a blitz campaign. So it was up and down before Facebook could really do anything about it, because the people behind it knew that Facebook would ultimately take it down. So they decided that they would just target a lot of people very quickly and then move on.
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So that's definitely different from what we saw in 2016, where 2016 was more where people were not aware of what was really happening in both the platforms and the people who were using it. And therefore the Russian campaigns were able to conduct more long-term campaigns where they're able to use Twitter accounts that they were able to build up slowly over the course of months and years to garner huge followings and to look as if they were genuine real accounts. Whereas this time they seem to be trying to get in and out quickly, before Facebook detects what's happening and they're gone again.
Lauren Goode: All right, let's take a quick break and when we come back, I want to ask you more about how the platforms are handling these disinformation campaigns.
[Break]Lauren Goode: Social media companies are definitely not strangers to disinformation campaigns at this point. In fact, some of them have established war rooms or specific teams that they've spun up to try to combat this around high-stakes events, like say critical election seasons or major violent conflicts. But David, in this case, the Doppelgänger campaign has managed to exploit a certain loophole in Facebook's ad verification system. How has this worked?
David Gilbert: So it's actually really interesting how they go about doing this. The first thing they do is, or not necessarily Doppelgänger, but someone creates these networks of … Reset researchers have found networks. The two networks involved in this were 25,000 and 52,000 pages, fake pages, but they have previously found networks of 346,000 pages. So this is something that's happening constantly. So what they do is they automate the creation of pages by iterating through three different verbs or nouns so that they can create just generic-sounding Facebook pages. And they can do that with a pretty rudimentary script. And as the research shows, they can create massive, massive networks. In this case, the people who were running the Doppelgänger campaign, they didn't use all of this network. They just hired or purchased a portion of it, and they ran 552 ads on 552 pages for a period of time.
So that's one way, by automating the creation of ads, they were able to get around one of the issues, which is scale. The other thing that they did is that the ads that they produced didn't have any text, didn't have any links. All it was was an image with a text embedded in the image. Why that's important is that it makes it hard for Facebook to know what exactly the ad is saying, because they can't easily read text embedded in image. They can read it, but it's more difficult to do it at scale. And because there's no link, they can't see a pattern. Because there's no text underneath it, they can't see a pattern in that. And therefore, the people running the campaign were able to get the campaign up and running, get it viewed by millions of people, and by the time it was deactivated they were gone.
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Lauren Goode: Interesting.
David Gilbert: So in some ways the images are pretty rudimentary. All they did is, it's pretty basic Photoshop work putting a picture of a celebrity, put some text next to it, and that's it. But the way that they did it is pretty sophisticated and shows just how advanced and willing to go the extra mile these groups are in order to circumvent whatever measures Facebook or Meta put in place.
Michael Calore: Speaking of those methods, what sorts of tactics does Facebook employ to prevent people from creating a bunch of pages or at least spotting the ones that are participating in bad actions like this?
David Gilbert: They do a lot. If you read Facebook's transparency reports, in some quarters they have said that they have actually deleted billions of fake pages. Most quarters, it's hundreds of millions of fake pages, which is just … the scale of it is kind of mind-boggling. And they say that most of those are deleted within seconds or minutes of being created. Because what they're looking for is they're looking for patterns. They're looking for this automation system that's in place. So they're looking at IP addresses. If the same IP address is trying to create tens or hundreds of thousands of pages in the space of minutes, then that's all going to get shut down. But obviously, the people behind this campaign have found a way to circumvent that. Maybe not necessarily the people behind this campaign, but the people behind the networks of pages that they're using to run the campaign.
Those networks of pages are typically created by groups who are in it for the money. They rent out or hire out or sell those pages to whoever wants to use them. A lot of the time it's for scam adverts or for trying to redirect people to buy gold or buy silver online or buy Trump digital trading cards, whatever the latest grift is that's out there. And while Facebook has done a lot to tackle the problem, it's clearly not something that they're on top of, because they know about these networks of accounts. Reset has published research about it as recently as October, and yet those networks are still active, because even some of the ads that I've seen, you can still see the ads in the Facebook library right now. You can click on them, you can see what city was targeted, how many people viewed it. You can't see how much they paid for it, because Facebook doesn't have to tell you that kind of stuff, even here in Europe.
So you can see that some of the pages that were posting these ads, a lot of them have been taken down by Facebook, but some of them are still active. So even when they're publicly outed like this, Facebook still struggles to take down every one of them that's been involved in a campaign like this.
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Lauren Goode: This isn't just affecting Facebook, this is also targeting users of Twitter. We're still going to call it Twitter. But you reported in WIRED that the campaign on X used over 10,000 bot accounts, and at one point there was one eight-hour period where the bots posted over 27,000 messages. This is just, it's like pure bot behavior. We've seen this on the internet for years. How is this happening? And what do we know about how X or Twitter is handling this?
David Gilbert: Well, we know very little about how X is handling it, because they don't answer press queries anymore, or they do actually respond, but it's with a “busy, check back soon” or something like that is the line they're using at the moment.
Lauren Goode: Slight improvement from the poop emoji, they sent for a while.
David Gilbert: A little bit better. So we don't know. But as you said, even back in 2016, if this stuff was being done, they would've caught it then. This is any decent social media platform that employs any level of trust and safety teams will easily be able to spot this and not even need a human to do it. It should be built into the system that if this is happening, that it's automatically detected and automatically taken down. But that's just not happening on Twitter at the moment because of what Elon Musk has done. So the campaign itself on Twitter didn't have as much reach as it did on Facebook because on Twitter they posted the same images, but they weren't ads, so they weren't put in front of as many people. It was more of a spam campaign where they just used as many of the bot accounts that they could find and they put it out as quickly as possible. I think at one point they were doing two posts every second, so 120 posts a minute, which is just mind-boggling that that kind of stuff is still allowed in 2023. But here we are.
Michael Calore: So the campaign on Twitter was the same images as the campaign on Facebook, or were they also posting links to the fake news websites, like the sort of Fox News and Air SATs build?
David Gilbert: Both. Yeah. So the Twitter bot army has been kind of the backbone of the campaign. It's been used in all those iterations I was talking about earlier, where when they build the fake websites, they then use the Twitter bot army to spread those links. But then in the most recent campaign, it was spreading just the images and not links to any website. But it was because this bot army was used to share links to two specific websites that we were able to link it to the GRU, the military spy agency in Russia, because the two websites that the Twitter bots linked to have direct links to the GRU, and the Russian researchers who I spoke to have been tracking these bots consistently for months or years. They were able to flag that these guys are now sharing disinformation that's coming direct from the GRU. So yeah, they have been used to post links to the fake websites, but most recently they've been used to post the fake images rather than any links.
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Lauren Goode: So David, is this campaign still active right now?
David Gilbert: Yeah, the campaign is active, and we've seen this campaign has been around since May 2022. It's been repeatedly outed or written about in the press, and it just continues. I was speaking to one of the researchers a couple of days ago, and they said what's happening now is some of the ads are, they're posting images of celebrities, verified Instagram pages, which have been just changed to alter the comment on the post to be, again, pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian. They've also started publishing videos, which one of the videos was the filmmaker Wim Wenders, he was speaking, and they've dubbed over it in a different language, in French, a pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian message. So the campaign is obviously continuously evolving, and it doesn't seem to matter how many times it's spoken about in the press, it's just going to continue to run and run.
Lauren Goode: Well, I wish we could leave listeners with something more optimistic, but it sounds like just all we can say is be careful out there folks. If you suddenly see Taylor Swift or Christiano Ronaldo speaking out in favor of Russia, maybe be a little suspicious.
David Gilbert: Yeah, that's good advice.
Lauren Goode: All right, David, thank you for that. Let's take another quick break and then we'll come back with our recommendations.
[Break]Lauren Goode: All right, David, what is your recommendation?
David Gilbert: My recommendation is a film that I went to see a couple of days ago called Saltburn. I don't know if either of you guys have seen it or heard of us.
Lauren Goode: Have not. No. Tell us about it.
David Gilbert: So it's a film about class and society in England. It stars Barry Keoghan, an Irish actor who is one of my favorite actors at the moment, and Jacob Elordi, an Australian actor who was in Euphoria. And they both play English kids, 18 years old. It's about them going to Oxford. And Jacob Elordi's character comes from a hugely wealthy family, and Barry Keoghan comes from a working-class family in Liverpool, and he's trying to fit in, and he just can't fit in because he just doesn't have the money and he just doesn't understand wealth and society and class. And so they kind of strike up a friendship and at the end of the semester, Jacob Elordi's character invites Barry Keoghan to go to his house, which is called Saltburn, and it is just this massive English country house.
And from there it goes over the course of a summer, what happens at the house, and it just gets increasingly dark and increasingly disturbing, and there are lots of really, really creepy and weird scenes in it. And it ends with a scene that I won't spoil for anyone, but it's soundtrack by “Murder on the Dance Floor” that is just a perfect way to end the film. Yeah, it's brilliant. I loved it.
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Michael Calore: Is this a squirmy movie?
David Gilbert: It is, yeah. There are at least three scenes where you just don't want to be looking at the screen about what's happening. It's not gory as such, but it's just the stuff that happens is unnerving, but in a really brilliant way. And it's about what lies under the surface. And it's by Emerald Fennell, who is a filmmaker and actress from England. She made A Promising Young Woman, was her previous film, and she had also played Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown.
Lauren Goode: Oh, oh wow.
David Gilbert: I've followed what she's done.
Lauren Goode: Fantastic. Yeah. Promising Young Woman had a couple scenes where I was like, did that just happen?
David Gilbert: Yeah, this kind of ratchets it up a little bit.
Lauren Goode: This sounds totally intriguing.
Michael Calore: Awesome.
Lauren Goode: It sounds a little bit like John Knowles, A Separate Piece, a novel some of you may know, meets The Talented Mr. Ripley a little bit.
David Gilbert: Yeah, there's definitely The Talented Mr. Ripley, but way grungier and I don't know. Yeah, I understand where you compare Talented Mr. Ripley, but it's just a completely different film.
Lauren Goode: I can't wait to see it. This is a great recommendation.
David Gilbert: Yeah, it's really good.
Lauren Goode: Also, David, I'll have you know that prior to our taping today, I said to Mike, I kind of want to recommend this thing, but I feel like all I keep doing is recommending cute British actors, something with cute British actors. And I'm glad that you now have taken over that role. So thank you.
David Gilbert: Neither of those actors are British.
Lauren Goode: That's true. Irish—
David Gilbert: One's Australian, ones Irish.
Lauren Goode: Sorry. That is correct. Let's make the distinction here. Irish and Australian.
David Gilbert: You can recommend all the British cute actors you want.
Lauren Goode: Perfect.
David Gilbert: You can hold onto that.
Lauren Goode: Thank you for that recommendation. Adding it to the list. Mike, what's your recommendation?
Michael Calore: OK. My recommendation is another culinary recommendation.
Lauren Goode: Yes.
Michael Calore: If you are entertaining for the holidays, or if you are going to a holiday party and you want to take care of your teetotaling friends, you may want to bring or supply a nonalcoholic beverage to this fest. Don't bring the sparkling apple cider. All right?
Lauren Goode: Martinelli's.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Don't bring that. Don't bring LaCroix. Bring something better, something that is much tastier and will be greatly appreciated by your teetotaling friends. Because I think the thing is that if you have a boozy party and there's nonboozy options, they usually have no imagination whatsoever. So use your imagination. Get Italian blood orange soda. Italian blood orange soda. This is my recommendation.
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Lauren Goode: Where does one find it?
Michael Calore: Oh, there are so many brands, Lauren, I'm so glad you asked. The ones that I would specifically recommend are A'Siciliana. That's what it's called, A, apostrophe, Siciliana, like the country. San Pellegrino Aranciata Rossa. So the San Pellegrino comes in a can, there's the Aranciata with the blood orange.
Lauren Goode: We have a whole pack of that here, by the way.
Michael Calore: We do.
Lauren Goode: For the Start lounge, I noticed it.
Michael Calore: It's warm. I should chill it. There's also one from a brand called Tomarchio, which I've had a few times. That's the hard C-H-I-O at the end. But there's also house brands. Trader Joe's makes one. There's a Fever Tree.
Lauren Goode: Pardon me, I think you meant Giuseppe's.
Michael Calore: Giuseppe's.
Lauren Goode: Trader Giuseppe's.
Michael Calore: Yes, exactly. They make one. Fever Tree, the tonic water people, they make one. Cadia, the organic drink supplier makes one. So if you get the blood orange soda, it's important to serve it chilled. But over ice is excellent. Also in a flute is excellent. You can toast with it. So all I'm saying is if you don't drink alcohol and you go to a party and you're like, what is there for me to drink? It's almost always something silly and pedestrian. Live a little bit. Make it so that you are thinking of all of your friends, including your teetotaling friends whenever you throw a party, they will thank you for it and it will be a better party because of it.
Lauren Goode: Appreciate you, Mike.
Michael Calore: You're welcome.
Lauren Goode: Thanks for the recommendation.
Michael Calore: What's your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: I had a fantastic mocktail this weekend at a holiday party. I don't even remember what was in it, but there was a lot of stuff in there, ginger and crushed mint, and I'm going to have to replicate it. But yeah, the TJ's blood orange soda, very, very good.
Michael Calore: Nice.
Lauren Goode: My recommendation, because I'm not actually going to recommend Slow Horses, even though that was going to be my initial recommendation. It's pretty good. It's on Apple TV+.
Michael Calore: Gary Oldman is your favorite cute British actor?
Lauren Goode: That's exactly right. I love a Gary Oldman with greasy hair and unfettered alcoholism.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: But no, he's a fantastic actor, by the way. Let's not. It's just his character we're talking about folks.
David Gilbert: And there's less alcoholism in this season.
Lauren Goode: In season three? Yeah, that's true actually.
David Gilbert: Yeah, he's cutting back.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. You remember the scene where he goes to his doctor and his doctor's like, “How many units per week are you drinking? The limits 14 for service agents.” And he's like, “Yeah, 14.” Anyway, so no, my recommendation is support your union. That's my recommendation this week.
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Michael Calore: How can one support their union?
Lauren Goode: Well, you can, first of all, join a union. You can be part of an organizing committee to start a union in your workforce. If your workforce doesn't have one, you can … And even if one already exists and you're someone who's been on the fence, or maybe just thinking you're not sure that you're aligned with all the beliefs of the union or whatever it is, look, it doesn't hurt. Support your union. It's really important. And in this day and age, I think where a lot of us are feeling overworked and just sort of caught in the endless machine of capitalism and outputs, I think it's really important to take a step back and support your colleagues and stand up for your colleagues and support your union. So that's my recommendation.
Michael Calore: Can I add to that?
Lauren Goode: You can.
Michael Calore: I would say that if there's a union in your neighborhood or your town that you want to support, and they're currently striking or they're threatening to strike, you can donate to their strike fund.
Lauren Goode: That is very true. You can donate to their strike fund and listen to what they're asking for as part of that strike too. For example, some journalism organizations might say, while they're striking, “Please don't click on our stories.” It may seem counterintuitive because you're thinking, wait, I want to support their journalism. During a strike, though, it's critical to show that those workers are not dispensable, right? And can't be replaced with robots. They bring a human value to the job. And by you then not participating in that sort of machine during their strike, you're helping to underscore that. So listen to their demands, understand their demands, listen to what they're asking for. And yeah, to Mike's point, you can support strike funds when people are striking too.
Michael Calore: I like it.
Lauren Goode: So that's my recommendation this week.
David Gilbert: It's a good one.
Lauren Goode: All right, all. Thank you so much for being part of this. David, thank you for joining us, especially because it's so late on your end. I really appreciate you being here.
David Gilbert: No, it's been a pleasure.
Lauren Goode: And Mike, thanks as always for being a great cohost.
Michael Calore: Of course.
Lauren Goode: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, first of all, we'd love to hear from you on Apple Podcasts. We do read the reviews. Google Podcast is going away, right? It's now being folded into YouTube or something like that.
Michael Calore: Something like that.
Lauren Goode: We haven't quite figured that one out, folks. But leave us a review, because we do read them, and you can also find us on all the socials. So just check the show notes.
Michael Calore: Yeah. What you can do is you can get a photograph of Taylor Swift and then Photoshop in a quote, talking about how much she loves the Gadget Lab podcast in German, and then disseminate that through your bot army.
Lauren Goode: Yes, exactly. Gadget Lab is my favorite podcast. Don't shake off Gadget Lab. It would be a cruel summer not being able to listen to Gadget Lab. I know the Gadget Lab all too well. You guys, this easy. OK, just do it. Spread it. Spread the word. Spread the love. Thank you so much. Our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth, who was born in 1989. Goodbye for now. We'll be back next week.
[Everybody laughs and there is indistinct mumbling in the background.]Lauren Goode: [Whispering] He says it's not true.
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