American Hysteria explores how fantastical thinking has shaped our culture – moral panics, urban legends, hoaxes, crazes, fringe beliefs, and national misunderstandings. Poet-turned-podcaster Chelsey Weber-Smith tells the strangest stories from American history and examines the forces that create the reality we share, and sometimes, the reality we don't.
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American Hysteria explores how fantastical thinking has shaped our culture – moral panics, urban legends, hoaxes, crazes, fringe beliefs, and national misunderstandings. Poet-turned-podcaster Chelsey Weber-Smith tells the strangest stories from American history and examines the forces that create the reality we share, and sometimes, the reality we don't.
Have you ever wondered if the person you are arguing with in a social media comment section is really a person at all? Perry Carpenter is a cybersecurity expert, author of FAIK: A Practical Guide to Living in a World of Deepfakes, Disinformation, and AI-Generated Deceptions, and host of The Faik Files podcast. I asked Perry to explain the phenomenon of social media bots and troll farms; who might be commanding these faceless humans and robots? What might their goal be? And how do we tell the difference between a genuine comment or post and one manufactured with a particular objective in mind?
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Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Additional editing by AJ McKinley
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
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American Hysteria
American Hysteria explores how fantastical thinking has shaped our culture – moral panics, urban legends, hoaxes, crazes, fringe beliefs, and national misunderstandings. Poet-turned-podcaster Chelsey Weber-Smith tells the strangest stories from American history and examines the forces that create the reality we share, and sometimes, the reality we don't.
