Top 12 Most Fascinating Takeaways from Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald’s Reddit AMA

Q: How did you guys feel about Neil Patrick Harris’s “for some treason” joke last night?

Snowden: Wow the questions really blew up on this one. Let me start digging in…

To be honest, I laughed at NPH. I don’t think it was meant as a political statement, but even if it was, that’s not so bad. My perspective is if you’re not willing to be called a few names to help out your country, you don’t care enough.

“If this be treason, then let us make the most of it.”

Greenwald: Here’s a little insight into how digital age media works:

I learned of NPH’s joke after I left the stage (he said it as we were walking off). I was going to tweet something about it and decided it was too petty and inconsequential even to tweet about—just some lame word-play Oscar joke from a guy who had just been running around onstage in his underwear moments before. So I forgot about it. My reaction was similar to Ed’s, though I did think the joke was lame.

A couple hours later at a post-Oscar event, a BuzzFeed reporter saw me and asked me a bunch of questions about the film and the NSA reporting, one of which was about that “treason” joke. I laughed, said it was just a petty pun and I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but then said I thought it was stupid and irresponsible to stand in front of a billion people and accuse someone of “treason” who hasn’t even been charged with it, let alone convicted of it.

Knowing that would be the click-worthy comment, BuzzFeed highlighted that in a headline, making it seem like I had been on the warpath, enraged about this, convening a press conference to denounce this outrage. In fact, I was laughing about it the whole time when I said it, as the reporter noted. But all that gets washed away, and now I’m going to hear comments all day about how I’m a humorless scold who can’t take a good joke, who gets furious about everything, etc. etc.

Nobody did anything wrong here, including BuzzFeed. But it’s just a small anecdote illustrating how the imperatives of internet age media and need-for-click headlines can distort pretty much everything they touch.