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This One Weird Trick to Save the Open Internet · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Mike Masnick: In the words of the now, I guess, pretty long gone Google Plus, Alex, what's on your mind?
• 0:07
  Alex Feerst: Well, I mean, it depends in which of my circles you're in, like, uh, uh, which version you get, but I have lately been thinking about scooter safety since, uh, I've been wondering how long before San Francisco, passes a law stopping everybody from.
• 0:23
  Alex Feerst: Buying like a non speed governed scooters and doing 35 in the bike lane.
• 0:29
  Alex Feerst: Um, it's, it's like, it's also like the paradigmatic case of tech regulations.
• 0:33
  Alex Feerst: I think about it a lot while I'm scootering around San Francisco and hoping that they forget to regulate this one for a while.
• 0:42
  Mike Masnick: Excellent.
• 0:43
  Mike Masnick: Excellent.
• 0:44
  Alex Feerst: How about you?
• 0:46
  Mike Masnick: Uh, I, I am trying to figure out how to, how to run this podcast because normally, uh, it's been doing this part of the discussion and I'm trying not to mess stuff up.
• 0:58
  Mike Masnick: So that's, that's how I'm doing.
• 1:00
  Alex Feerst: Fair enough.
• 1:01
  Alex Feerst: I remember being at an EFF cyber law trivia event in like 20.
• 1:06
  Alex Feerst: 12 or 2011 when the Google team like named their team plus, cause they were super proud of it.
• 1:11
  Alex Feerst: Well, we go that week and we're just like, wait for us to dominate social media.
• 1:16
  Alex Feerst: You fools.
• 1:19
  Alex Feerst: And we're, and we're all very scared.
• 1:31
  Mike Masnick: Hello and welcome to Ctrl-Alt-Speech, your weekly roundup of all the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation.
• 1:40
  Mike Masnick: Uh, this week's episode is brought to you with speech.
• 1:42
  Mike Masnick: financial support from the Future of Online Trust and Safety Fund.
• 1:47
  Mike Masnick: I am Mike Masnick from TechTert, and you may notice that for the first time on Ctrl-Alt-Speech, there is no British accent leading the way.
• 1:56
  Mike Masnick: Uh, Ben is traveling for work, and so suddenly I need to learn how to steer this particular ship and sitting in for Ben.
• 2:03
  Mike Masnick: Though, in some cases, I'm sitting in for Ben and sitting in for me, is Alex Feerst, who you just heard.
• 2:09
  Mike Masnick: Welcome,
• 2:09
  Alex Feerst: Great to be here.
• 2:11
  Mike Masnick: And, uh, for those who don't know, Alex is a lawyer and trust and safety expert who was general counsel and head of trust and safety at Medium for many years, and also co founded the Digital Trust and Safety Partnership.
• 2:25
  Mike Masnick: And whenever I want, uh, someone to better understand trust and safety.
• 2:29
  Mike Masnick: Alex is usually one of the people I try and get to talk to, to someone who is misunderstanding stuff because he's, one of the best trust and safety explainers that I know.
• 2:40
  Mike Masnick: So
• 2:42
  Alex Feerst: thanks Mike.
• 2:42
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 2:42
  Alex Feerst: And I first we find the facts and then we can distort them at our leisure.
• 2:48
  Alex Feerst: Part of, part of my favorite pro bono practice.
• 2:53
  Mike Masnick: Excellent.
• 2:54
  Mike Masnick: Excellent.
• 2:54
  Mike Masnick: Um, so, just before we get into our, big stories of the week, is there anything interesting that you're working on these days besides, uh, preventing regulation of scooters in San Francisco?
• 3:04
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 3:04
  Alex Feerst: So in the, in the more, it's, it's funny cause I'm writing, I'm working on a thing that I'm like tentatively calling against safety, um, about sort of trying to take a more historical view of what are the baselines of how much safety people expect from the world at different, um, Places and times, because it feels like now we're on like a one way ratchet to safetyville.
• 3:28
  Alex Feerst: Um, and, and, and I may be one of the people who helped cause this and without politicizing it, it does feel like there's an, it may be that human beings will spend an infinite amount of resources and time trying to make the world safer for themselves and others, which is in some ways a nice thing.
• 3:43
  Alex Feerst: It, you know, it has all the like trade off problems with the other things.
• 3:47
  Alex Feerst: We care about, but I have sort of started to think about it started with thinking about like whether young people just have a higher expectation of safety.
• 3:57
  Alex Feerst: And that sort of the concepts of like physical harm had migrated to psychological harm in a big way as like younger people or maybe more mentally health aware.
• 4:05
  Alex Feerst: And so I just was sort of thinking about like, how much safety we expect the government or, or private companies to provide us at any given time and place and whether it's moving in a particular direction.
• 4:17
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 4:17
  Alex Feerst: and what that, you know, and again, sort of like migration from offline safety to, online safety.
• 4:22
  Alex Feerst: This is like, I sometimes wonder about like, are there more narcissists in the world now?
• 4:26
  Alex Feerst: Like when was the high point of narcissism in human society globally?
• 4:30
  Alex Feerst: Like, so, yeah, so I'm, I'm, I'm a, amateur historian who likes doing this stuff.
• 4:39
  Mike Masnick: that's, that's interesting.
• 4:40
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I would definitely be very interested in, in reading about it and maybe discussing it on the podcast, uh, when you've written it.
• 4:48
  Mike Masnick: So,
• 4:48
  Alex Feerst: Thanks.
• 4:49
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 4:49
  Alex Feerst: I mean, I think the basic idea of like what we often talk about, even trust and safety.
• 4:52
  Alex Feerst: So in terms of like, this was insufficient.
• 4:55
  Alex Feerst: And so part of the question is like insufficient relative to what?
• 4:58
  Alex Feerst: And if, if we're doing in a democratic way, like, how do we come to an aggregate belief about how much safety is the right amount, you know, for
• 5:05
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 5:07
  Mike Masnick: Interesting.
• 5:08
  Mike Masnick: Very interesting.
• 5:10
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 5:11
  Mike Masnick: Well, let us jump into our stories of the week.
• 5:13
  Mike Masnick: As always, we're going to try and do two larger, more in depth stories, and then a somewhat lightning round, of faster stories.
• 5:22
  Mike Masnick: We'll see how we do on any of that.
• 5:25
  Mike Masnick: We're not always great at timekeeping here, but I want to start with this lawsuit that was filed earlier this week, where I've been jokingly referring to it as Zuckerman versus Zuckerberg, though I was corrected by Ethan Zuckerman that he pronounces his name Zuckerman and not Zuckerman, so it's Zuckerman versus Zuckerberg.
• 5:47
  Mike Masnick: Zuckerberg or Zuck versus Zuck, uh, and that Ethan Zuckerman, who is a professor, and has done a whole bunch of stuff has been around.
• 5:56
  Mike Masnick: He's one of the, you know, open internet, early folks.
• 6:00
  Mike Masnick: Though he also created the original pop up ad, uh, and much of his, his, his work since then has been as penance
• 6:10
  Alex Feerst: that's, that's one for the tombstone, like you have like a second pop up tombstone over your, over your normal one.
• 6:18
  Mike Masnick: Uh, so he has been working on a whole bunch of projects related to, sort of a more civic and democratic internet and trying to, bring back better spaces in which to communicate.
• 6:30
  Mike Masnick: And, he has now filed a lawsuit against META, represented by the folks at the Knight First Amendment.
• 6:38
  Mike Masnick: Institute at Columbia University.
• 6:40
  Mike Masnick: And the basic claim is that he wants to recreate, an app.
• 6:46
  Mike Masnick: that somebody else had created a few years ago called unfollow everything or everyone.
• 6:51
  Mike Masnick: I'm suddenly blanking.
• 6:53
  Mike Masnick: And, and the original version of that someone had created, and it was just an app that automated the ability to do what it says, unfollow absolutely everyone on Facebook and have a blank feed.
• 7:05
  Mike Masnick: So you would no longer have a feed when you log into Facebook.
• 7:09
  Mike Masnick: You could still go and check out people's accounts if they allowed non followers to see those accounts.
• 7:14
  Mike Masnick: And when that guy published the original one, he was blocked and banned from Facebook for life.
• 7:22
  Mike Masnick: And so Ethan wants to reintroduce it, but also include an academic research component to it, which is that you can, through checking a box when you sign up also.
• 7:32
  Mike Masnick: agree to submit back some anonymized data so that on the academic side they can study what happens if you don't follow anyone on Facebook and what sorts of information you are exposed to.
• 7:43
  Mike Masnick: So they are suing Meta for declaratory judgment that they are not infringing on any of Meta's rights.
• 7:51
  Mike Masnick: And the interesting element to the case is that they are using section 230 to do this, which is, um, surprising
• 7:59
  Alex Feerst: Yes, this is Unlev 230 C2B.
• 8:03
  Mike Masnick: C2B, right?
• 8:05
  Mike Masnick: So when everyone talks about, section 230, they're usually talking about section C1, which is the 26 words, the, the infamous or famous, depending on where you sit, uh, 26 words that.
• 8:17
  Mike Masnick: you know, says you're not liable for the stuff that someone else has done effectively.
• 8:22
  Alex Feerst: is the other stuff that then I guess representative Cox wrote while he was sitting on an airplane.
• 8:28
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 8:29
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 8:29
  Mike Masnick: Famously.
• 8:31
  Mike Masnick: And so C2A comes up in some conversations, because that's the part that says, you know, you can block for things that are lewd.
• 8:40
  Mike Masnick: whatever, uh, otherwise objectionable content that a site can block.
• 8:45
  Mike Masnick: But C2B is like, it basically never comes up, but basically this is no liability for, tools that, remove access to content.
• 8:55
  Mike Masnick: So it was basically designed to be about filtering, I think.
• 8:58
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 8:58
  Alex Feerst: Right, exactly.
• 8:59
  Alex Feerst: And, and, I don't think there was great distinction between like things that were made by users, things that were made by the platform.
• 9:04
  Alex Feerst: It's just sort of like tools, like ways to make it better.
• 9:07
  Alex Feerst: And as happens with statutes, this is sort of like a Chekhovian pistol lying on the mantelpiece for the last.
• 9:14
  Alex Feerst: And somebody who decides to like weaponize it and be like, let's see if it still shoots.
• 9:19
  Alex Feerst: Um, I feel like in law school, I knew people who like wanted to bring the third amendment case about quartering soldiers that was going to make their career.
• 9:28
  Alex Feerst: And so, yeah, it's, it's nice when you have like a relatively.
• 9:32
  Alex Feerst: You have a law and then you watch it make its way in the world.
• 9:34
  Alex Feerst: And it has this like lopsided life.
• 9:36
  Alex Feerst: Um, and you know, possibly nobody would have predicted that like those words would have become a 20 year confusing debate about platforms versus publishers.
• 9:46
  Alex Feerst: But then you have these other like moderation protections, that are lying around.
• 9:52
  Alex Feerst: And so it's definitely cool at minimum, cool and clever to like, Style the lawsuit this way.
• 9:58
  Alex Feerst: And to see like, I think whether this part of CD 230 could be used as maybe not a sword exactly, but like not a shield or like a, like a, a shield that you use to hit people,
• 10:11
  Mike Masnick: A weaponized shield, right?
• 10:12
  Mike Masnick: Because, because 230 is normally like a defensive thing, right?
• 10:15
  Mike Masnick: Somebody sues you and you say, I'm immune because of 230.
• 10:18
  Mike Masnick: And here they're using it, you know, I mean, it is still a shield, right?
• 10:22
  Mike Masnick: Because they're trying to say like, Meta can't sue us, but we just want to find out ahead of time., And so we should know that there are some like procedural concerns about standing and whether or not you can really bring a declaratory judgment for this kind of thing.
• 10:36
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 10:37
  Alex Feerst: From, from the day that I was awake in Civ Pro, it's like, you can bring a DJ action because somebody sort of, sort of like puts a cloud, you know, of doubt over whether the thing that you're doing is legal, whether it's a breach of a contract or some other thing.
• 10:48
  Alex Feerst: And so in order to like get clarity around whether your conduct is okay or not, before you start doing it, investing in it, you sort of asked the court, like, could you like tell us, we're going to sue you in advance because somebody did a thing that scared me about my legal rights, which, but normally like they have to scare you by like threatening you.
• 11:07
  Alex Feerst: Um, this is like somebody threatened.
• 11:10
  Alex Feerst: Another guy who I am sort of following.
• 11:14
  Mike Masnick: right.
• 11:16
  Alex Feerst: and so maybe this is also a cloud of danger over me that the court should clear up and and sort of clear the path for other people.
• 11:23
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, but the, you know, the more interesting thing to me and, and I think probably to people who are listeners to this podcast is, what this could mean if it succeeds.
• 11:35
  Mike Masnick: And again, there are lots of procedural reasons why it might not, but if it actually succeeds in theory, it would mean that at least a certain class of middleware you know, middleware being third party apps that can interact with content on social media or other platform, could not face legal liability from those platforms.
• 11:53
  Mike Masnick: So they couldn't sue them for like a CFAA violation, which is the most standard thing that has happened.
• 11:58
  Mike Masnick: There's been a bunch of those related cases in the past about like, apps that we're trying to build on Meta or Craigslist or LinkedIn, or, sometimes scraping data that were, you know, face CFAA lawsuits.
• 12:11
  Mike Masnick: And so part of the argument here is that we, we can't face the CFAA lawsuit for this is
• 12:16
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 12:16
  Alex Feerst: And so, here, like 230 C2B is sort of like the advanced phalanx of shields behind which middleware can sort of advance and start doing things in the world for people.
• 12:28
  Alex Feerst: Such as getting data and also, creating middleware API, you know, using API APIs and it's a little bit of a, like a hearkening back to the olden times of like 2006 through 12 say of like when things tended to be more open,, like the Twitter API and Facebook API before things got shut down, nominally for security reasons.
• 12:50
  Alex Feerst: And like quality control reasons.
• 12:52
  Alex Feerst: And so this would be like an interesting return to the source to like re enable a path that sort of withered a long time ago.
• 13:00
  Alex Feerst: And it's like sort of interestingly different than the high Q stuff and other scraping things.
• 13:06
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 13:06
  Mike Masnick: Because Haikyuu is just about like collecting data from LinkedIn and whether or not LinkedIn could use the law to block that, whereas this would be empowering users rather than just like pure data collection.
• 13:17
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 13:17
  Alex Feerst: Yeah, so it's definitely it's like I said, it's cool and interesting.
• 13:22
  Alex Feerst: The app itself, I sort of, we were talking about, I sort of wonder about like, it pushes back like there's like middleware is potentially good part of it.
• 13:31
  Alex Feerst: Um, and like, People should not fear a CFA violation for noodling around.
• 13:36
  Alex Feerst: And they also ask for sort of a DJ that the terms of service about like something, which is, which is both interesting.
• 13:43
  Alex Feerst: I guess I've always thought you can sort of change the terms of service pretty easily, but maybe this is sort of like a, um, nevertheless, it's like an advanced pronouncement on how this stuff works.
• 13:52
  Alex Feerst: Um, the app itself to me gets it part of like the reality of personalization of like.
• 14:00
  Alex Feerst: I feel like if you go to Facebook and follow nobody and, you know, and you could manually unfollow everybody in every group and leave everything, you just get that like matrix with no people version.
• 14:13
  Alex Feerst: Um, and so you get, you get, in some ways you get a, you get your own reflection and you get the thoughts in your head, but you're not immersed in a personalized, like algorithmically created reality, which is sort of the whole.
• 14:25
  Alex Feerst: Uh, you know, um, and it's not for you to, to, to edit it.
• 14:26
  Alex Feerst: It's for, it's for it to be a fun environment.
• 14:27
  Alex Feerst: That social media creates.
• 14:28
  Alex Feerst: And so in some ways.
• 14:28
  Alex Feerst: It's like.
• 14:29
  Alex Feerst: The right to have a social media.
• 14:32
  Alex Feerst: Or the rights to like have social media.
• 14:33
  Alex Feerst: That is on, like, does not do the thing that it's creators really want you to do with it.
• 14:39
  Alex Feerst: Um,
• 14:42
  Mike Masnick: so there is a question of like.
• 14:45
  Mike Masnick: How many people would actually use something like that?
• 14:47
  Mike Masnick: Or, what is the likelihood that there is a, this big marketplace for these kinds of services, right?
• 14:54
  Alex Feerst: yeah, but it's like, you know, it could be, it could be a first shot and like.
• 14:59
  Alex Feerst: What some people think could become like a flourishing marketplace of like middleware that lets people structure their own social media and internet experiences, better.
• 15:09
  Mike Masnick: And I saw, I mean, I've seen a few people who have been somewhat concerned about the potential, they think negative.
• 15:16
  Mike Masnick: downsides to this.
• 15:17
  Mike Masnick: And you had raised the fact that, you know, in the earlier era, when everyone was more open and had APIs and were willing to sort of encourage this sort of middleware type of behavior, and then they locked it down.
• 15:28
  Mike Masnick: And one of the reasons you mentioned was for security.
• 15:30
  Mike Masnick: So there is an argument.
• 15:31
  Mike Masnick: Some people are saying is that this could harm.
• 15:33
  Mike Masnick: Privacy and security.
• 15:35
  Mike Masnick: You could have, I mean, the examples people just bring up, or you have the sort of Cambridge Analytica or the Clearview AI kind of situation where are you enabling something that then creates like a major security or privacy concern?
• 15:48
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 15:49
  Alex Feerst: And this, and this is like an interesting, to me, there's an interesting layer of trust and safety work, which is like, you're entrusted aside from like the legal requirements of the toss and whatever, like you're sort of taking on the idea that you're entrusted with protecting the folks.
• 16:02
  Alex Feerst: who are using your site as users from bad actors who are using your site to do bad things.
• 16:08
  Alex Feerst: And I've definitely had the experience sometimes where, you know, those third parties will be like, well, who are you?
• 16:14
  Alex Feerst: Like, we're, you know, who are, like, who are you to say what's bad or good?
• 16:17
  Alex Feerst: We're offering a service.
• 16:19
  Alex Feerst: And it's, it's a curious thing because you're, you know, it's one of these things that to me is a, Sort of soft layer that sits on top of the legalistic parts of trust and safety, which is like, yes, you sort of self deputized as the sheriff of whatever platform to protect people from the people you deem to be bad actors.
• 16:40
  Alex Feerst: You're like highly incentivized to deem anybody who messes with your business as a bad actor.
• 16:46
  Alex Feerst: Or anybody who like uses the platform in a way that's different than like your product vision as a bad actor.
• 16:52
  Alex Feerst: And so you get this like inevitable problem of like, um, it's not exactly biased, but like your judgment about what is really bothering people, is, is certainly is, is not objective and it's potentially very questionable.
• 17:05
  Alex Feerst: I just call this like the citizens of Gotham problem, which is like the citizens of Gotham, like getting caught in the crossfire when, whenever Platforms enable non platform actors to gain power and control and access.
• 17:17
  Alex Feerst: There's always this tug of war between them and the platform potentially.
• 17:20
  Alex Feerst: And then everybody sort of says they're acting in the name of the people and maybe believes it, but then the citizens of Gotham are just like taking on all these bullets as, as you like, figure out who can scrape.
• 17:32
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 17:33
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 17:34
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 17:34
  Mike Masnick: Well, uh, I do think this is going to be a really interesting case to follow.
• 17:38
  Mike Masnick: I think there's some interesting challenges involved with it, but, it's a really unique way of using Section 230.
• 17:45
  Mike Masnick: And it'll be fascinating to see how the case goes.
• 17:48
  Mike Masnick: I do think there's a little bit of potential irony in the idea that, um, you know, people have talked about Section 230, I think, Misleadingly, it's like a major gift to Big Tech, and here is a way that Section 230 might be used to sort of knock down some of the walls of Big Tech and potentially empower, I guess, the people of Gotham.
• 18:07
  Alex Feerst: Yeah, yeah, well, it'll be interesting to see what meta how meta responds and they may very well file like a motion to dismiss.
• 18:13
  Alex Feerst: That's sort of like, there's nothing to see here.
• 18:16
  Alex Feerst: Um, is my guess, but but we'll see.
• 18:19
  Alex Feerst: And just to touch on briefly, we talked a little bit about, like, this also sort of contemplates like, that there's more than one type of interactive computer service under 230.
• 18:28
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 18:28
  Alex Feerst: for a lot of years, when you put the statute in front of somebody who hasn't spent 20 years fighting about like the word platform.
• 18:35
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 18:35
  Alex Feerst: They'll find the, like the word platforming in there.
• 18:37
  Alex Feerst: And there's this thing called an interactive computer service, which like from what we can tell was like what people thought prodigy was at the time, you know?
• 18:45
  Alex Feerst: And so it certainly migrated a whole bunch.
• 18:47
  Alex Feerst: And if your Facebook app or whatever is one type of ICS, you now have these unfollow apps that are like a different type of ICS.
• 18:55
  Alex Feerst: And so this is like.
• 18:57
  Alex Feerst: Maybe the first time I think this like a pluralistic interpretation of like interactive computer service types, um, or like ICS is are sort of being put on a collision course with themselves a little bit.
• 19:08
  Alex Feerst: Or at least like, you know, like, like Facebook's lawyers are potentially not used to arguing against interactive computer services being able to do what they want.
• 19:15
  Alex Feerst: Um, So it's like an interesting, flipping of the polarity in the fossil record, uh, to like, see, see where this goes.
• 19:23
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 19:26
  Mike Masnick: I mean, uh, and, and I know we should move on, but I'll bring up one other point.
• 19:30
  Mike Masnick: There's so many like little interesting nuggets in this particular case, but like, there's nothing in this case, or in Section 230, I think, that would stop Meta from using technical means to block the app.
• 19:41
  Mike Masnick: Um, there's nothing that says you have to, have to carry it.
• 19:44
  Mike Masnick: But there is an interesting component that some people have raised, which is that if, if it becomes a, sort of back and forth war of technical means, you know, Facebook tries to block, they come up with a workaround or whatever, in theory, the one avenue that is still open to meta then would be a DMCA 1201 claim for, uh, For circumvention of technology because section two 30 has an explicit exemption for IP claims.
• 20:14
  Mike Masnick: This is getting deep into the legal weeds, but like it's kind of this funny element, uh, I think that's, that's in
• 20:20
  Alex Feerst: This is like, this is like an action movie, like resurrecting somebody that we thought was dead for a long time.
• 20:26
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 20:30
  Alex Feerst: me to circumvent Facebook.
• 20:32
  Alex Feerst: Um,
• 20:35
  Mike Masnick: the printer and garage door opener cases from, from a decade ago, uh, arguing over this stuff.
• 20:41
  Mike Masnick: So it'll be fun to explore.
• 20:43
  Mike Masnick: We'll see how, how this battle goes, but I'm sure this is not the last we will hear of it.
• 20:48
  Mike Masnick: All right, but let, let us move on.
• 20:50
  Mike Masnick: And we're going to jump across the Atlantic ocean to the EU, which has opened a formal DSA investigation into Facebook and Instagram on a variety of different Things, related to information and the various elections that are happening, the EU election happening very soon, obviously, and there are a whole bunch of concerns in here, some of which seem contradictory, but they're worried about how well meta is handling deceptive advertising and disinformation, and, uh, About the visibility of political content, because, you know, Meta has made it clear in the last few months that they don't want very much political content because it's a seems to be a pain for them.
• 21:38
  Mike Masnick: A couple of other things in here, the, EU is concerned about the removal of CrowdTangle, which is a sort of transparency app.
• 21:46
  Mike Masnick: And then a little bit about the mechanisms to flag illegal content.
• 21:49
  Mike Masnick: So Alex, what, what is your reaction on seeing this particular bit of news?
• 21:54
  Alex Feerst: right.
• 21:55
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 21:55
  Alex Feerst: As, as often happens, I don't know who to root for or against.
• 21:58
  Alex Feerst: Um, this is like, I need like a big foam hand of like, can I root against everybody?
• 22:03
  Alex Feerst: Um, I do think as these things go, and I know I'm like a dyspeptic, skeptical of you, you stuff, but like, this feels to me like a, sort of a grab bag of stuff.
• 22:13
  Alex Feerst: We're unhappy about.
• 22:14
  Alex Feerst: As opposed to like a particularly focused, line of criticism about a phenomenon, because I think, you're not showing enough political, like the transparency aspects you know, and the servicing of political content are like related here, but I think they, they just strike me as like a bunch of things that were pissed about and let's just like, Open an investigation because we've been planning to do this since day one.
• 22:36
  Alex Feerst: Um, I think, I think we could like, talk about each of them in isolation.
• 22:39
  Alex Feerst: It does make me, you know, in a lot of the reporting to me, the reporting that I saw was just like, you says, you know, met his met his work is like, quote, unquote, insufficient
• 22:50
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 22:51
  Alex Feerst: area.
• 22:51
  Alex Feerst: And this is sort of like, gets back to what I was teasing earlier, which is just like insufficient compared to what?
• 22:56
  Alex Feerst: Like, if they show up and say, we spent like umpteen billion dollars on this, you can be like, well, you should spend umpteen plus 10 billion on it.
• 23:03
  Alex Feerst: It's not, it's not enough.
• 23:04
  Alex Feerst: Keep doing it.
• 23:05
  Alex Feerst: Or it's like, you're not spending your money wisely.
• 23:08
  Alex Feerst: We European commission or whatever, know how you should be spending your billions on this and it would be better if you did something, or is it just like generally the same enough?
• 23:17
  Alex Feerst: So anyway, yeah, it sort of feels like sending it back to the kitchen without really saying exactly what's wrong.
• 23:22
  Alex Feerst: It's just sort of like, we're not happy with you.
• 23:24
  Alex Feerst: So we, I think we talked about the isolated claims, but that, to me, that's like the vibes,
• 23:28
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 23:29
  Mike Masnick: And it's, you know, there, there are some parts that are interesting to me and like the argument that I've had, about the DSA is, is that the, the folks in Europe keep insisting that it is not, a law to regulate speech.
• 23:40
  Mike Masnick: And yet every time it seems to be like there's an investigation that happens, it seems to be about them regulating speech.
• 23:45
  Mike Masnick: Um, and so I have an issue with that.
• 23:49
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 23:49
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 23:49
  Alex Feerst: And I, I, I sort of described it as like, we.
• 23:52
  Alex Feerst: Folks don't want to talk in a purely consequential, consequence driven manner about like, which speech they want to get rid of or censor or whatever you want, whatever you want to use.
• 24:02
  Alex Feerst: And so we've gotten into this, like, very lawyerly, sort of, indirect proceduralism in the way that these laws are drafted, because in the US, at least, like, you're trying not to trip over your own feet on the First Amendment.
• 24:14
  Alex Feerst: And then I think even in Europe, there's a sense of like, It is not cool to just do direct, you know, naked speech regulation.
• 24:22
  Alex Feerst: And so we've got this sort of proceduralist approach to everything, which is what we do because we're lawyers, but it, when you do it in certain ways, it becomes sort of like gnarled and circuitous.
• 24:33
  Alex Feerst: You know what I mean?
• 24:33
  Alex Feerst: When the law is like, well, publish what you want.
• 24:36
  Alex Feerst: But you should publish like a transparency report in this font.
• 24:40
  Alex Feerst: And like, you should have like a piece of software that measures this other thing.
• 24:43
  Alex Feerst: And also like, there should be a minimum of X number of people who speak Y language.
• 24:49
  Alex Feerst: If your thing is, and like many of these are like perfectly good and understandable threshold mechanisms to about like the robustness of your trust and safety work.
• 24:56
  Alex Feerst: And like we did a lot of this at DTSP to think about like met, you know, things that are modular as opposed to absolute.
• 25:03
  Alex Feerst: But.
• 25:04
  Alex Feerst: I do think this is sort of what happens when you take this highly like process driven approach, which is like when you do openly consequence driven stuff, it just sort of looks weird and potentially like takes the veil off all that.
• 25:18
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, and we can look a little bit more at the different concerns.
• 25:22
  Mike Masnick: But, you know, the one that definitely stood out to me as like, this seems weird was the the visibility of political content one.
• 25:29
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 25:30
  Mike Masnick: Because, you know, the way it's written is that Meta has made clear Instagram and threads and Facebook that basically, I think, they're sort of sick of dealing with the controversy.
• 25:41
  Mike Masnick: And so the way they've decided to deal with that, especially in election years, basically, we're just going to, demote the value of political content and often that means news content in anything that you post on our platform.
• 25:54
  Mike Masnick: So they show up much
• 25:56
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 25:56
  Alex Feerst: This is, this is like a pox and all your feeds
• 25:59
  Mike Masnick: yes.
• 26:00
  Alex Feerst: just like go, just knock it off.
• 26:03
  Alex Feerst: Um, but it's, it's not, it's not exactly a scalpel.
• 26:06
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 26:06
  Mike Masnick: And, and like, that's, it's, it might be a position that I don't think is a good one for them to take, but it's one that I understand where they're coming from.
• 26:14
  Mike Masnick: And it strikes me as a little bit odd that that is, something that the EU has any legitimate concern over.
• 26:22
  Mike Masnick: To say like, you need to put more political speech into everyone's feed seems like a very weird stance that I don't fully understand.
• 26:28
  Alex Feerst: Right.
• 26:29
  Alex Feerst: And also there's like a two step there where it's like, you should have more political speech and it should be accurate.
• 26:34
  Alex Feerst: It's
• 26:35
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 26:36
  Mike Masnick: And less
• 26:37
  Alex Feerst: well, we should, it's like, we have plenty of political speech.
• 26:40
  Mike Masnick: right.
• 26:41
  Mike Masnick: Because, because like, you know, the fact is like, hopefully this doesn't surprise anyone.
• 26:47
  Mike Masnick: But like when you're dealing with political speech, there's often a fair amount of disinformation and propaganda included in that political speech.
• 26:55
  Mike Masnick: This investigation seems to be suggesting that they want more political speech, but less of the misleading political speech.
• 27:03
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 27:04
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 27:04
  Alex Feerst: And it's like, I, I get it.
• 27:06
  Alex Feerst: If you come at it from where they're coming at, it's like, we don't want our elections to get messed up.
• 27:11
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 27:11
  Alex Feerst: And, and for me, everybody I know who works at companies, large, small and in between, like nobody wants to be the platform that gets blamed for working some election or whatever.
• 27:22
  Alex Feerst: And I don't know what the correct amount to invest is, but I would say people.
• 27:28
  Alex Feerst: People invest plenty in election protection.
• 27:30
  Alex Feerst: Again, they may not invest it wisely, and it may just be an intrinsically hard thing to do.
• 27:34
  Alex Feerst: But the notion that platforms and other tech folks don't care about elections, I think, is important.
• 27:39
  Alex Feerst: It seems hard to believe at this point, um, because nobody, nobody wants to like be accused of messing up an election.
• 27:47
  Alex Feerst: So I totally get where they're coming from.
• 27:49
  Alex Feerst: They're just like, fix this in advance.
• 27:52
  Alex Feerst: But I also think this is one of those things where it's like, you know, Creating ever larger sticks does not create more precise sticks.
• 27:58
  Alex Feerst: It just gives you bigger sticks to hit people with.
• 28:01
  Alex Feerst: And I'm not sure like an infinite amount of clubbing the election protection team or whatever at Meta.
• 28:08
  Alex Feerst: I don't think is going to make them Work harder to, protect European elections.
• 28:12
  Alex Feerst: I don't know, maybe it will, but it just seems like we've gotten to like a very atavistic place on this
• 28:17
  Mike Masnick: right.
• 28:19
  Mike Masnick: I mean, there is, you know, the one specific thing that was raised here that is interesting, right, is the issue with CrowdTangle.
• 28:25
  Mike Masnick: And CrowdTangle, you know, is this tool that Meta had purchased a while ago.
• 28:29
  Mike Masnick: And, it became very useful for academics and journalists in particular, to, like, look at things that were happening on the platform and often, point out things that perhaps Meta was not doing well.
• 28:43
  Mike Masnick: Um, and so the shutting down of the tool has certainly raised eyebrows, not just in Europe, obviously in the U S I know a lot of academics and media folks are pretty upset by it.
• 28:53
  Mike Masnick: And, and people have been asking Meta to not shut it down.
• 28:57
  Alex Feerst: yeah, it's a bummer.
• 28:58
  Alex Feerst: It was a good tool.
• 28:59
  Alex Feerst: In fact, when some people when I first started them, they didn't even believe it existed because they were just like, how, how, how is it possible that they make this available?
• 29:06
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 29:07
  Alex Feerst: And I guess with, with my like platform lawyer hat on for a second, if like, I think part of the, the sense of dread when I think of this from the company side, it's like, okay, I'm for research.
• 29:18
  Alex Feerst: Like I want people to know stuff.
• 29:20
  Alex Feerst: The problem is there's like multiple, groups of chaos agents with different incentives.
• 29:25
  Alex Feerst: And so like for any given researcher, they're going to do some research on the data, like, great, knock yourself out, like let's learn something.
• 29:31
  Alex Feerst: But like they, and I, you know, I can't.
• 29:34
  Alex Feerst: Make them say anything or not say anything.
• 29:36
  Alex Feerst: It's tempting to like cut them off from the data.
• 29:38
  Alex Feerst: If they're say something I don't like, but and then some reporter for some other reason, like potentially.
• 29:44
  Alex Feerst: inadvertently mischaracterizes it or writes a headline that's like super spicy, but, from the platform's perspective is like misleading or, mischaracterizes the paper.
• 29:53
  Alex Feerst: And then by the time you get to like seven generations of reblogging of the spicy headline, like it's, it looks nothing like what the data that was picked up by the researcher.
• 30:03
  Alex Feerst: And then you have like a legislator hold up the like eighth generation Spicy, you know, misinformation headline and use it as the basis of a law.
• 30:13
  Alex Feerst: And so that chain of events is sort of what's in my head when I see people being like, Oh yeah, we're just going to look at some data and that's not a reason to not let them see data, but it's definitely an incentive to be like, no good deed goes unpunished.
• 30:26
  Alex Feerst: Let's shut up the free data thing because it's yet a different type of loaded weapons sitting around.
• 30:31
  Alex Feerst: For people to just like, and, and it's like, those groups are not coordinating, but it's just all the chaotic incentives or bad incentives.
• 30:37
  Alex Feerst: Everybody has to me, at least often leads to that kind of outcome.
• 30:41
  Alex Feerst: So you don't want, and if you're a decent lawyer, you're supposed to like, be responsible to the company to try to lower the probability that that happens.
• 30:49
  Mike Masnick: right.
• 30:51
  Mike Masnick: Well, as, as
• 30:52
  Alex Feerst: That's like the devil, the devil's advocate, but you know, that's how the world looks to them.
• 30:56
  Mike Masnick: I think that's, it's valuable perspective.
• 30:58
  Mike Masnick: I was going to say as the eighth generation blogger in this conversation, I'm going to take the other
• 31:02
  Alex Feerst: you're, you're, you're, you're, you're the first generation.
• 31:05
  Alex Feerst: Absolutely.
• 31:08
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I, I honestly, I do think like I, I understand that side of it.
• 31:12
  Mike Masnick: But I am also kind of annoyed by CrowdTangle going away because it was a really useful tool for those of us who think that we try and explain these things accurately and use the data, intelligently.
• 31:23
  Mike Masnick: But
• 31:25
  Alex Feerst: And it's like data, you know, I would say it sounds harmless, but like, information, great have some researchers poke around in it.
• 31:31
  Alex Feerst: And it was great to be able to reference some kind of ground truth.
• 31:34
  Alex Feerst: There were the days when, like, I remember after 2016, when you look at CrowdTangle and you'd be like, Oh, eight of the top trending stories today are like conservative stories.
• 31:45
  Alex Feerst: So like the notion that conservative stuff is being suppressed to the point where nobody's seeing it is just, is provably untrue.
• 31:52
  Alex Feerst: like that was useful for having some like basic conversations.
• 31:56
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 31:57
  Mike Masnick: And, and also, I mean, we should know, right, this is just an investigation at this stage, and it is entirely possible, if not probable, that, the investigation could turn up, that Meta is actually doing things okay, and that there is no, cause for further action.
• 32:12
  Mike Masnick: Um, so, you know, we'll see how this turns out, but it is
• 32:15
  Alex Feerst: Is there data on how often investigations and like, all right, good job, everyone.
• 32:20
  Alex Feerst: Here's a report.
• 32:21
  Alex Feerst: Everybody go home.
• 32:22
  Mike Masnick: Well, I mean, the DSA is new, so I don't know that any of any investigations have concluded yet.
• 32:28
  Mike Masnick: But yeah,
• 32:29
  Alex Feerst: third or fourth, I think.
• 32:30
  Mike Masnick: I think so.
• 32:31
  Mike Masnick: I think there's like two TikTok investigations.
• 32:33
  Mike Masnick: There's like a AliExpress investigation.
• 32:37
  Mike Masnick: So I don't know.
• 32:38
  Mike Masnick: It's still early.
• 32:40
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 32:40
  Alex Feerst: And I think nobody should be surprised that they were going to use this to mount some investigations.
• 32:45
  Alex Feerst: That's the whole point of part of the thing.
• 32:47
  Alex Feerst: Um, I think we're all interested to see what those investigations look like, and like, which things they chose to prioritize.
• 32:53
  Alex Feerst: And like I said, it's perfectly sensible that elections would be an important thing for them.
• 32:59
  Alex Feerst: And then maybe there is a greater sense of plan or structure as to like, how these different, Threads fit together into some sort of coherent, like, here's what we're trying to show is happening, but we'll, we'll learn something.
• 33:12
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, absolutely.
• 33:14
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 33:14
  Mike Masnick: Well, now that was our second big story.
• 33:16
  Mike Masnick: So we'll move on to our attempt at a lightning ish round.
• 33:20
  Mike Masnick: Um, and, uh, we're going to leave the EU.
• 33:24
  Mike Masnick: But just jump across the, uh, channel to the UK where Ofcom is apparently investigating OnlyFans for potentially violating some element of, their duties to protect people under 18 through its, age assurance system.
• 33:43
  Mike Masnick: So, Alex, do you want to explain what happened here?
• 33:45
  Alex Feerst: Yeah, so it looks like, um, only fans in, in trying to, uh, Sure.
• 33:53
  Alex Feerst: That only folks over the appropriate age are using it, where it was using this third party company called Yoti has a surface called FAE, which is facial something estimate age, age estimate.
• 34:04
  Alex Feerst: So you basically turn on your webcam, look at your face, and then it determines like how hard you've been living slash how, how old you are.
• 34:13
  Alex Feerst: Um, and then.
• 34:15
  Alex Feerst: You know, gives you access or not.
• 34:17
  Alex Feerst: And this is part of the sort of like third party age verification regime that's been talked about one way or another for the past couple of years.
• 34:24
  Alex Feerst: You know, he's like one of the main third party players that, as I understand it, like a bunch of porn sites and other folks use.
• 34:31
  Alex Feerst: So they are one of those like, um, infrastructure, load bearing, things for a lot of folks is age assurance.
• 34:37
  Alex Feerst: So what happened here is like, I, so supposedly, and the OT CEO sort of wrote some stuff trying to clarify what happened to explain it was not their fault, um, that only fans believed that they had set their filter age to 20 to 20 to 23 and therefore, it was using an age that didn't make sense.
• 35:03
  Alex Feerst: And so self reported to Ofcom that they had done something bad.
• 35:07
  Alex Feerst: And then it turns out that they actually weren't doing the thing that they had self reported for.
• 35:12
  Alex Feerst: Um, so that's, that's what I was seeing.
• 35:15
  Alex Feerst: And, and the OTCO's point was just like, whatever, it's not the app's fault.
• 35:20
  Alex Feerst: You got to like set the age in the right place.
• 35:22
  Alex Feerst: Brings like this interesting question of like, if you're trying to filter below 18, With current like accuracy confidence intervals, whatever, where do you set the age to like get the right optimal balance of false positive and false negatives and like people wearing Ronald Reagan masks or like whatever, whatever other weird, weird shit people do.
• 35:42
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 35:43
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, cause the idea is that, you wouldn't set the threshold to like 18, because obviously, if you get that wrong, you're going to let a lot of people under 18.
• 35:51
  Mike Masnick: So the normal thing is, you put some higher age on there with the, assumption that, some people are going to be over 18 but will still get caught and maybe there's like a secondary way of checking.
• 36:02
  Mike Masnick: If you don't pass, if they think you're, you know, under the age of 23 or whatever, then there's probably some sort of secondary check that might involve uploading an ID or something else which has privacy issues and, and all sorts of stuff.
• 36:15
  Mike Masnick: But the, the issue here was like everyone seemed to think that OnlyFans had set the thing at 23, but they'd really set it at 20.
• 36:22
  Mike Masnick: Um,
• 36:22
  Alex Feerst: And so the, all the baby face 22 year olds were suffering.
• 36:29
  Mike Masnick: right,
• 36:29
  Alex Feerst: were, they were the collateral damage here.
• 36:32
  Alex Feerst: Um, yeah.
• 36:33
  Alex Feerst: And as I said, the best thing about this would be that if it causes zoomers to start drinking and smoking more in order to, in order to like see porn, they can boomerize their life and like start aging, aging the way the rest of us have for once.
• 36:50
  Mike Masnick: yeah, you know, it's interesting because there's lots of talk all over the globe right now about, you know, age assurance, age verification, age estimation, and all these things.
• 36:59
  Mike Masnick: And it's interesting that we're, starting to learn about the, challenges in terms of, how this is all going to work out.
• 37:07
  Mike Masnick: Um, and so it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this particular
• 37:11
  Alex Feerst: Yeah, and if I made and DTSP put out a report on age verification practices that sort of goes through all the different it's like a pretty carefully well written report about like each of the different approaches and the trade offs and how to think about them.
• 37:25
  Alex Feerst: And it's, you know, was not written by me.
• 37:27
  Alex Feerst: So it's very good.
• 37:28
  Alex Feerst: Um, but it's in the family of what I would call like, everything is bad.
• 37:33
  Alex Feerst: Like, there's no good candidates.
• 37:35
  Alex Feerst: There's only bad candidates.
• 37:36
  Alex Feerst: These candidates and they all, as you say, there's the privacy problems, there's accuracy problems, there's how it affects people who are clearly old enough, but are still now having to submit an ID to do something that's perfectly lawful.
• 37:50
  Alex Feerst: Um, so yeah, I actually, gosh, where I was in Arkansas recently where one of these laws were.
• 37:55
  Alex Feerst: So like, these are now like,
• 37:58
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 37:58
  Alex Feerst: they're, they're out there in the world.
• 38:00
  Alex Feerst: Um,
• 38:00
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 38:01
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 38:01
  Mike Masnick: We have, there's like, you know, probably seven or eight states.
• 38:04
  Mike Masnick: I think that already have them and a bunch of others that have bills.
• 38:07
  Mike Masnick: Australia just announced that they're going to, do a pilot program, even though last summer they came out with a report that basically said none of these tools actually work very well.
• 38:16
  Mike Masnick: So we're not going to push forward with them, but now they're doing a pilot anyways.
• 38:20
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 38:20
  Alex Feerst: And I, interestingly, like I, I'm sort of.
• 38:23
  Alex Feerst: Ambivalent at best about the like, moral panic over children, getting porn brained.
• 38:29
  Alex Feerst: Um, I, I have even seen, like, I saw a tweet from recently from somebody who claimed to be, you know, a young person saying like, essentially like, I wish you all hadn't built this technology that porn brained us.
• 38:39
  Alex Feerst: Because it's like prevented me from having a healthy relationship in my twenties.
• 38:44
  Alex Feerst: Um, so whether that's like false consciousness or, generations speaking, you know.
• 38:49
  Alex Feerst: Speaking their truth, but like it's far far beyond for me to say where the right thing is.
• 38:53
  Alex Feerst: But I do wonder again, as a historical baseline, I guess, back in the era where people, I guess,, stole porn from a card store or like, stole it from their parents or something else, like, I imagine the volume on the Internet must be way, way, way, way higher.
• 39:06
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 39:07
  Alex Feerst: Um, but returning to the sort of like Victorian hypothesis of like protecting the children.
• 39:15
  Alex Feerst: In an airtight way from seeing adult things like this also strikes me as like yet another way that if you had like very, very tight enforcement, it creates an atmosphere.
• 39:25
  Alex Feerst: That's like way more stultifying than what we had before the internet
• 39:29
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 39:30
  Mike Masnick: Well, let's, let us move on to the next story.
• 39:33
  Mike Masnick: Uh, this one, we're going to bounce back across the Atlantic and to Canada.
• 39:37
  Mike Masnick: And this was a story, in the, the CBC had a story about Canadian banks, needing to deal with abusive e transfers.
• 39:47
  Mike Masnick: And this struck me as a really interesting story and kind of demonstrating where like trust and safety problems can show up in unexpected places.
• 39:56
  Mike Masnick: And, and the, the underlying story was effectively, acrimonious divorce happens.
• 40:02
  Mike Masnick: And former spouses are no longer speaking and have blocked each other on social media and all this stuff, but someone who still knows the bank account of the other, someone will send them a dollar or 5 along with a.
• 40:16
  Mike Masnick: Nasty message, and there's very little that the recipient can do.
• 40:20
  Mike Masnick: And so there's this sort of harassment angle.
• 40:23
  Mike Masnick: And apparently this happens more often than you would expect.
• 40:27
  Mike Masnick: According to the article, they have a bunch of examples of people getting harassed by exes or stalkers or whatever, who somehow had access to their bank account information.
• 40:37
  Alex Feerst: I feel like there's like a university of Chicago economist paper to be written here on like how much people are willing to pay to say, fuck you to their ex.
• 40:45
  Alex Feerst: Um, like if you set, set the bit above threshold of, because essentially like you, this is like reveal preference, natural experiment,
• 40:55
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 40:56
  Alex Feerst: in the price of being able to get the last word.
• 40:59
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 40:59
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 41:00
  Mike Masnick: You blocked me on Facebook.
• 41:02
  Mike Masnick: I will pay five dollars to tell you fuck you through your
• 41:04
  Alex Feerst: Right.
• 41:04
  Alex Feerst: Right.
• 41:04
  Alex Feerst: Well, it's, it's basically like functionally the same as like Facebook letting you pay 5 to get yourself unblocked.
• 41:10
  Alex Feerst: So you can like.
• 41:11
  Alex Feerst: Say what you want to say.
• 41:13
  Alex Feerst: Um, so yeah, I mean, I, I sort of love these.
• 41:16
  Alex Feerst: I mean, like, obviously it's jarring and harassing and not good.
• 41:20
  Alex Feerst: The banks should know, maybe not should know, but anytime you make a messaging app, you're inviting yourself into a world of pain and so calling it something innocuous, like a memo or whatever they call it, does not exempt you from the world of pain that creating DMs, um, advice, advice.
• 41:39
  Alex Feerst: I do think this is a great example of something that is both like.
• 41:41
  Alex Feerst: A trust and safety problem slash circumvention of the intended use, and also very core to how users think about the world, or at least the users we deal with and how tech thinks about the world is like, because you are inverting, or at least changing the relationship between like, the intended function and the, incidental payload.
• 42:01
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 42:01
  Alex Feerst: So it's just like.
• 42:03
  Alex Feerst: The point is to pay somebody the incidental thing is a memo, but like the real point is now to say something and like the fee is just like a whatever nominal thing.
• 42:11
  Alex Feerst: I'm not saying that the tracking pixel I feel like is like a similar example of inverting nominal function to like do something interesting.
• 42:19
  Alex Feerst: Another one was, um, part of Bob Lee's like great insight when he was at square.
• 42:24
  Alex Feerst: Was using the refund rails for payments because there was a very low statutory fee on refunds.
• 42:32
  Alex Feerst: And so part of the way that cash, as I understand it, I saw him give a really great talk on it once was like, the first insight was like, if you use the normal payment rails, you're going to be paying percentages as the.
• 42:41
  Mike Masnick: Uh huh.
• 42:41
  Alex Feerst: networks require you to over the bank networks, but if you do, but if you do things as a refund, even if it's like not really a refund, you're basically getting this like statutory maximum rate that was in pennies, um, that had been said, I can't remember the law.
• 42:55
  Alex Feerst: It might've been Dodd Frank, but, but essentially that, that is like a product insight that launched a giant product.
• 43:00
  Alex Feerst: And it's not really different than the logic of like, let's use the bank to like tell off my ex.
• 43:07
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 43:08
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 43:09
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 43:10
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it's, it's interesting how you see this sort of like this weird emergent behavior, which is like people are going to communicate, like the other example that I thought of that was, again, not the same thing, but.
• 43:20
  Mike Masnick: In the same vein was, there were schools that were for fairly obvious reasons blocking access to social media on school computers but then giving kids access to Google Docs because that's where they were doing all of their work and stuff and kids immediately effectively recreated social media through Google Docs comments because they could comment on each other's work and that was a way of of creating the social media system.
• 43:44
  Mike Masnick: And so suddenly there are these weird trust and safety content moderation questions that come up in places that you don't expect.
• 43:50
  Mike Masnick: And what it seems like in this particular story is that the banks are completely taken by surprise.
• 43:55
  Mike Masnick: And we're just like, you know, Oh shit, what do we do?
• 43:58
  Mike Masnick: And, at best are like looking into like, you know, curse word filters or
• 44:03
  Alex Feerst: Yeah, it's actually a really rich little topic because I think also part of going back to like the only fans dust up of a couple of years back, like the, um, banks are generally number one, they're like in this highly regulated space and they're used to like.
• 44:15
  Alex Feerst: Acting like grownups, dealing with people acting like grownups.
• 44:18
  Alex Feerst: Um, second, they're not really about expression.
• 44:22
  Alex Feerst: They're really about payments.
• 44:23
  Alex Feerst: And so they're used to anti fraud and they're used to like social engineering and all sorts of uses of expression for like a very specific fraud purpose.
• 44:31
  Alex Feerst: But they're not used to like expression problems.
• 44:34
  Alex Feerst: Because it's just like not their beat.
• 44:35
  Alex Feerst: Their beat is like people stealing money.
• 44:38
  Alex Feerst: So here it's like nobody's stealing any money.
• 44:40
  Alex Feerst: They're just sort of fucking with you.
• 44:42
  Alex Feerst: It's just like not the normal way.
• 44:44
  Alex Feerst: And I feel like this is a little bit reminiscent in a very different way of how the, um, whatever it was when MasterCard had leaned on OnlyFans a while back, that was like a case of the payment rails becoming like the indirect Are aware of like expression upstream, but this is one where like the expression has like, sort of come home to roost.
• 45:01
  Alex Feerst: And it's like, well, if, if you're not going to let us use only fans, we'll just like send, we'll just like sext at each other through sending payments.
• 45:11
  Alex Feerst: Um, but you know, and again, I guess this is why some people think the perfect super app in the future will like, let us do all this stuff because maybe these like payments versus expression.
• 45:21
  Alex Feerst: Buckets that we currently have in our head are going to be obsolete soon.
• 45:25
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 45:27
  Mike Masnick: Interesting.
• 45:28
  Mike Masnick: All right, next story.
• 45:30
  Mike Masnick: Uh, this one, we sort of head over to the Middle East, I guess we're bouncing around the globe this time, which is, there was a really good and interesting story in Forbes, by Emily Baker White, who does some really amazing reporting on, on all things sort of trust and safety, about how TikTok and Meta have not The war in Israel and Gaza, and what is happening there.
• 45:55
  Mike Masnick: And this I thought was just a really interesting and thoughtful read, but raises a bunch of the questions and trade offs around what the hell is state propaganda and how do you label it?
• 46:08
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, we had some questions, there was a whole dust up last year where Elon and Twitter labeled NPR and the BBC as state media.
• 46:19
  Mike Masnick: And everyone was up in arms.
• 46:20
  Mike Masnick: And now we have this situation in the Middle East where Meta and TikTok, there, there are a bunch of news organizations that are at least somewhat partially funded by various Arab states and are not labeled as such.
• 46:36
  Mike Masnick: And so there are questions about how you handle that.
• 46:39
  Alex Feerst: Totally.
• 46:39
  Alex Feerst: And this is one of those things where I think in the early, in the early days of trust and safety, we knew immediately we were out of our depth on this one.
• 46:47
  Alex Feerst: Um, because this is like the interface of like state department intelligence agencies, state diplomacy, at least for my sense where it's like.
• 46:56
  Alex Feerst: If you're working test for what is state propaganda is like, it should be funded partially or wholly by the state and the state should have some serious level of control over what gets published or at least the ability to like threaten people or manipulate them when they need to.
• 47:12
  Alex Feerst: The thing that would generally happen would be that all of the.
• 47:15
  Alex Feerst: Various sort of the other side of the joke that Elon was doing was like, you, if you ask, some publication of like, of course we're not state run like we have editorial independence and they sort of like by Fiat, we'll just be like, well, we're independent.
• 47:28
  Alex Feerst: Um, and then if it becomes on you as a platform to be like, um, Well, actually we have a mole and, you know, so it's like, so it's like, it's sort of, it's sort of in order to solve the question, in order to answer the question with any level of like rigor and integrity, you essentially needed like intelligence style resources.
• 47:47
  Alex Feerst: Um, so otherwise you were just having to take people at their word.
• 47:51
  Alex Feerst: Um, so there's, there's like a big conundrum for It's an interesting one, and I don't know that labeling NPR State Media was like, you know, dunno is right or wrong.
• 48:00
  Alex Feerst: It was definitely provocative and it like weirdly mirrors some of the recent like NPR stuff in the news, right.
• 48:06
  Alex Feerst: That like
• 48:06
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, yeah.
• 48:08
  Alex Feerst: folks who was more Right.
• 48:09
  Alex Feerst: Sort of resigned or was fired.
• 48:11
  Alex Feerst: Um, and yeah.
• 48:13
  Alex Feerst: Resigned.
• 48:14
  Alex Feerst: It, it, it also, I mean, to one of the, the things that I, that you and I talked about other time was that.
• 48:19
  Alex Feerst: To me the more complex an issue is, and this may be one of the most complicated issues where none of us know very much, I, I definitely know how little I know about Middle Eastern politics, but it just seems like virtually everything is potentially some regurgitated form of state propaganda because the amount of like independent reporting as opposed to like motivated reporting or reporting that is funded by one or another side is like Seems to be very little.
• 48:45
  Alex Feerst: So I think a lot of us are sort of reciting state propaganda probably without knowing it all the time.
• 48:52
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 48:53
  Mike Masnick: And, and in that, in that realm, does adding a state funded media label actually do anything if all of the information is, you know, in some way, state funded effectively?
• 49:03
  Alex Feerst: Right.
• 49:04
  Alex Feerst: And I think also because the flood really is downstream from the state.
• 49:08
  Alex Feerst: So it's like, even if you have like a fastidious person who like looks at the little badge and it's like, okay.
• 49:14
  Alex Feerst: You know, good to know state funded when they talk about it and they repost it and share it and do all this other stuff that, metadata doesn't really make it downstream.
• 49:23
  Alex Feerst: I think this is like the classic problem of just like all of these, like ostensibly useful labeling metadata projects have yet to figure out how to address the fact that most stuff is like half remembered downstream.
• 49:39
  Alex Feerst: You know, or, or share it in a format where it's like, you know, not, not going to be the badge.
• 49:44
  Alex Feerst: Um, I feel like some of the badge people would like badge to be like the blockchain where it's like, thou shalt only ever badge.
• 49:49
  Alex Feerst: You cannot repost this
• 49:50
  Mike Masnick: Yes
• 49:51
  Alex Feerst: without like a dunce cap and a badge, but, um, but it doesn't seem like it's going to work that way.
• 49:57
  Mike Masnick: Yeah Yeah.
• 49:58
  Mike Masnick: No, it's, it's an interesting question.
• 50:00
  Mike Masnick: Interesting to think about an interesting challenge.
• 50:02
  Mike Masnick: All right, moving on.
• 50:05
  Mike Masnick: We also saw it was interesting.
• 50:06
  Mike Masnick: Google released some details about, how they're dealing with bad apps.
• 50:11
  Mike Masnick: And so this was just, you know, one of the things that we've noticed these days is how important the app stores have become as a sort of like trust and safety layer in terms of blocking bad apps or, preventing them from, from reaching phones.
• 50:25
  Mike Masnick: And obviously it's like, is a part of the TikTok ban bill.
• 50:29
  Mike Masnick: It's based on the app stores.
• 50:30
  Mike Masnick: And it was interesting to see just how much they're actually blocking.
• 50:34
  Mike Masnick: Uh, so, you know, Google said that they prevented 2.
• 50:37
  Mike Masnick: 28 million policy violating apps from being published in the store and they.
• 50:42
  Mike Masnick: Went after a bunch of others that had changed things or misused, permissions in the store.
• 50:47
  Mike Masnick: It's just interesting to think about how much they've become.
• 50:51
  Mike Masnick: I don't think Apple has released similar numbers for 2023, but I did find their numbers for 2022.
• 50:59
  Mike Masnick: And it was similar.
• 50:59
  Mike Masnick: They had said they had, um, rejected 1.
• 51:02
  Mike Masnick: 7 million apps in the Apple app store.
• 51:05
  Mike Masnick: Um, and so did you, what's your
• 51:09
  Alex Feerst: No, no.
• 51:09
  Alex Feerst: I mean, I think it's, it's good that there's more general awareness of like How?
• 51:14
  Alex Feerst: At the app store and the play store or like upstream bottlenecks in a huge way.
• 51:19
  Alex Feerst: I feel like with Tumblr, I don't know how, how, how verified this is, but I feel like with the Tumblr stuff, it was really about the app store threatening to kick, kick Tumblr off, because of adult content.
• 51:31
  Alex Feerst: And so once you have a mental model of like all the different upstream dependencies, um, Where you have to sort of, please another company that you largely interact with, like through a help desk, unless, you know,
• 51:44
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 51:44
  Alex Feerst: unless you're like really important.
• 51:46
  Alex Feerst: It is an odd way to structure the world.
• 51:49
  Alex Feerst: Um, and I, you know, I, as I told you, like nowadays I practice in front of the court of Apple more than anything in terms of like trying to persuade somebody at the app store to do a thing or not do a thing.
• 52:00
  Alex Feerst: And like, It's their forum.
• 52:01
  Alex Feerst: They can do what they want.
• 52:03
  Alex Feerst: Um, but you know, the next generation perhaps will like be admitted to the Apple bar, you know, and have special, special privileges there.
• 52:13
  Alex Feerst: But it, but it is like, it is, it is that serious.
• 52:16
  Alex Feerst: And I have no like antitrust view on it, but I definitely think, The state of the world is like, you could sideload stuff or you could like load stuff off a link, but it just seems like realistically that is a drop in the bucket.
• 52:29
  Alex Feerst: Um, I feel like I've talked to tech talk people who are like, Oh yeah, people will just sideload tech talk.
• 52:33
  Alex Feerst: It'll be fine.
• 52:34
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 52:35
  Mike Masnick: I don't think so.
• 52:37
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 52:37
  Alex Feerst: And so I guess this also goes to like the power of defaults, and these ad mark was, and I think like to go back to the article, like the security teams at the app store and the play store, like Among the various undersung heroes of trust and safety, they're probably among the more undersung because like, um, the controversies are like one layer removed from pure expression.
• 52:59
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 53:00
  Alex Feerst: the types of disputes and controversies are also potentially just not, don't have the same texture as like, I wrote a politically important thing and you took it down as opposed to like, I made an app that's sort of like another app.
• 53:10
  Alex Feerst: And then you took it out.
• 53:11
  Alex Feerst: Um, um, but it, but it does just one last thing.
• 53:15
  Alex Feerst: It does get at the classic, like, In olden times when people said like, Oh, the, the whole point of the first amendment is that you need like a cushion around the conduct, because like, if everybody is afraid that their conduct might be close enough to violate it, according to some like, you know, faceless arbiter, then you get like the classic chilling effect of everybody, like self policing because of the unknown risk of like cutting it too close to the line.
• 53:40
  Alex Feerst: So that's why you need the like proverbial cushion here.
• 53:43
  Alex Feerst: Nobody knows where the cushion is.
• 53:44
  Alex Feerst: Um, you know, and that's not to criticize the app stores do process and like, they're doing a great job and they have a billion of these things process in the play store, but it's just like, that is a classic place.
• 53:57
  Alex Feerst: I think of like non cushioning, you know, risk management where people are going to think about all sorts of expression and whatever.
• 54:06
  Alex Feerst: Um, I think with, with adult content, it's probably, you know, it's a huge area.
• 54:10
  Alex Feerst: And so there's a lot of like.
• 54:12
  Alex Feerst: Below the surface or upstream decisions that cause things to not reach consumers.
• 54:17
  Alex Feerst: Yeah,
• 54:21
  Mike Masnick: point for on the political and regulatory side as well which you know we see with the TikTok set up.
• 54:27
  Mike Masnick: Um So let's, let's move on to our final story.
• 54:30
  Mike Masnick: We'll, we'll move from the Apple bar to the Facebook bar, I guess.
• 54:34
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and just very quickly, I think, there was a story this week about the Meta Oversight Board, uh, potentially preparing to lay off a bunch of workers.
• 54:44
  Mike Masnick: And there are questions about whether or not this is, the Meta Oversight Board has really been around for three plus years at this point.
• 54:52
  Mike Masnick: And there are questions about whether or not it's really sort of This is the, the end or has it, you know, has it, is it a failed project?
• 54:59
  Mike Masnick: Did it reach its potential?
• 55:01
  Mike Masnick: Whatever.
• 55:02
  Alex Feerst: yeah, yeah.
• 55:03
  Alex Feerst: And I'm, you know, I'm not, I feel like again, a lot of us, I would say wanted them to succeed, but like wanted to give them a fair shot.
• 55:11
  Alex Feerst: Um, and so like, like I said, I think I know lots of folks who like pulled their punches and some of the early criticism because they wanted to like, let the thing have a chance to live and, and show what they could do.
• 55:21
  Alex Feerst: And, you know, a lot of folks have worked hard at it.
• 55:23
  Alex Feerst: And so I'm sure nobody celebrates like, layoffs or whatever economic stuff they have to retool.
• 55:29
  Alex Feerst: But it, it, it does, it does sharpen the question of like, what is this for?
• 55:33
  Alex Feerst: Like, like to me again, like there's no circuit splits in social media.
• 55:37
  Alex Feerst: So like.
• 55:38
  Alex Feerst: And so I, I think the notion of like what, and I noticed that they, they, they were initially sort of criticized for not doing enough cases and then they like really got took on a whole bunch of cases like last year.
• 55:49
  Alex Feerst: So then they like really uptick their productivity.
• 55:52
  Alex Feerst: So, but they still do like 50 cases or something.
• 55:56
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I don't remember the exact number, but it is still a low number, especially given the size, obviously, of the properties overseen by the board.
• 56:04
  Alex Feerst: And so I think as a like we are settling important issues of like quote unquote like.
• 56:09
  Alex Feerst: Internal Facebook common law or whatever, like, sure, maybe, but like unclear that those things are like they're chosen because of like political importance for the chosen because of like relevance to how many what volume of complaints or other things.
• 56:21
  Alex Feerst: It just to me like it's structurally dissimilar enough to how the US Supreme Court works that I never fully understood exactly what it was going to do when it worked.
• 56:31
  Alex Feerst: Um, I also you know it was it was started I think in 2018 when like.
• 56:36
  Alex Feerst: calling something the Supreme Court made it sound more legitimate.
• 56:39
  Alex Feerst: In 2014, 2024, potentially like being like, we should get some of that legitimacy that the Supreme Court has, like seems, seems like, uh, not, you know, like better times.
• 56:52
  Alex Feerst: But yeah, and,
• 56:55
  Mike Masnick: I always got the, I always got the sense too, that, that the, the goal of the oversight board was not to just handle meta properties that they wanted to bring on board other companies.
• 57:03
  Mike Masnick: And so I think some of this is a recognition that they, were unsuccessful in convincing anyone else to use them.
• 57:14
  Alex Feerst: The aspiration of being a sort of like private speech arbitration.
• 57:18
  Alex Feerst: For lots of different low level disputes of it, like, I guess, you know, it was worthy.
• 57:25
  Alex Feerst: And I think there's other folks who like probably thought about getting into it, like consumer reports or, um, but I, but like, I, this is definitely the thing that I, I, I thought about writing a thing on this a while ago, but like there, there's, there's like adjudication in everyday life, which is like, how often does a thing happen?
• 57:40
  Alex Feerst: Then a third person has to be like, you're right.
• 57:43
  Alex Feerst: And I think in like pre internet or pre social speech land, sure, things would escalate to becoming a real defamation case occasionally.
• 57:51
  Alex Feerst: But the reality of it was like, you get into a fight with somebody and like, you leave the bar or you like, don't talk to them anymore or whatever.
• 57:58
  Alex Feerst: And so the, the way that social media brings to a head more disputes over expression, um, It just seems like the amount of adjudication of like these little disputes that we now see ourselves as needing today must be, I would speculate like exponentially a lot more than it used to be.
• 58:16
  Alex Feerst: There's just like more demand for lots of adjudication of disputes and it's got to, it doesn't have to come from somewhere, but when there's demand, it's like, okay, well, somebody is going to supply it and and I think part of like doing things industrially at scale is like.
• 58:31
  Alex Feerst: Having an unsentimental factual view of like how expensive is an adjudication?
• 58:36
  Alex Feerst: Um, cause like in federal court and adjudication is like many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• 58:41
  Alex Feerst: That's why they can't do that many of them.
• 58:42
  Alex Feerst: And so like with this one, it's like, what is the per unit cost of each like adjudication that would make this whole thing possible to run.
• 58:52
  Alex Feerst: And it seems like it potentially has to be really, really low.
• 58:55
  Alex Feerst: Like if it was like 12 cents per decision.
• 58:58
  Alex Feerst: And those were decisions like that would still cost a lot.
• 59:01
  Alex Feerst: And so to me, this is the Facebook Supreme court, like gets it trying to have a structure that sort of mimics the courts in some ways, but doesn't address this problem, which is that we have some people at least asking for a private speech arbitration system at a scale that like dwarves all the courts in the world put together.
• 59:18
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 59:18
  Alex Feerst: Um, and so endowing it was always going to be a challenge.
• 59:23
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 59:24
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I still think it's an interesting experiment.
• 59:26
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it is still existing and I think will continue to exist at least for some time.
• 59:29
  Mike Masnick: But, and certainly some of the decisions were interesting because they were sort of fairly thoughtful and gave some insight into ways to think about these things.
• 59:38
  Mike Masnick: and so I think that part of the experiment has been useful to see.
• 59:42
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 59:43
  Alex Feerst: And I, I always felt like, like, as, as like a, you know.
• 59:46
  Alex Feerst: a humble country tech lawyer.
• 59:48
  Alex Feerst: Like it was interesting to see the like really fancy people of substance show up in trust and safety land.
• 59:53
  Alex Feerst: Cause for me it was like, whoa, these are like really great first amendment scholars and, people with like moral authority and who, who are very thoughtful about all the, the non tech issues.
• 1:00:04
  Alex Feerst: And then I always felt like if they were lacking anything, it was somebody to be like, So here's how blocking works.
• 1:00:11
  Alex Feerst: And like, here's how muting works.
• 1:00:12
  Alex Feerst: And like when it's three dots, it's not two dots, but sometimes there's a pop over and like asking somebody who's like spent 30 years being a first amendment scholar to like, Engage seriously with like, whether the popover is too much speech was like, felt like this weird collision of like the very trivial and the very grave and August
• 1:00:28
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 1:00:29
  Mike Masnick: I mean the, the thing, I mean, I had done a panel, with members of the, the oversight board, uh, like a year and a half ago, or most, almost two years ago at this point.
• 1:00:38
  Mike Masnick: And like the question I asked and that got this like sort of stunned silence is like, why isn't there anyone on the oversight board who has any experience in trust and safety?
• 1:00:48
  Mike Masnick: Which.
• 1:00:49
  Mike Masnick: Seems like an important point that would be useful to have people there with some more experience in, in the actual practicalities.
• 1:00:56
  Alex Feerst: yeah.
• 1:00:57
  Alex Feerst: And I don't, what did, what did they say?
• 1:00:59
  Alex Feerst: I would guess what they would say is like, Well, they probably never thought of it or they said like, well, those people are implicated because they're like in the system already.
• 1:01:07
  Alex Feerst: They're going to
• 1:01:07
  Mike Masnick: wasn't even that it was, it was just kind of like, it's difficult to find the right people to, who can go from that to this, I think was, was more or less the answer that I got.
• 1:01:15
  Alex Feerst: Yeah.
• 1:01:16
  Alex Feerst: And that's, that's probably fair.
• 1:01:18
  Alex Feerst: But I do think it, it gets at a fundamental thing that really isn't about the legal system, but it's about like, I don't want to call it like the, the stylization and like, um, structuring of human experience through social, if you're not a social media person or an internet person, and you're just rather like.
• 1:01:34
  Alex Feerst: a senior professor who knows a lot of stuff about the world or a particular geopolitical problem or the law.
• 1:01:40
  Alex Feerst: It probably seems, I don't know if I'll say trivial, but like, when somebody is like, okay, so here's what happened.
• 1:01:46
  Alex Feerst: Like, first he muted her and then she went and screened it like a burner account and then that muted him back and then he blocked her but then he also sent a message like it seems like whenever I try to explain the mechanics of trust and safety tooling to like a serious intellectual person like that, I always feel like a teenager explaining, like, a fight at my high school
• 1:02:08
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 1:02:09
  Alex Feerst: and then asking him to like, write a reasoned opinion, but I mean, courts courts have to do this too now.
• 1:02:15
  Alex Feerst: So it's absolutely worked its way into life.
• 1:02:17
  Alex Feerst: But I think part of the, like, atmospherics of the oversight board was this collision of, like, very high in terms of, like, the prestige and the substantive, knowledge and seriousness of the people on it with the, like, bottom up aspects of, like, how do social media disputes happen?
• 1:02:34
  Alex Feerst: Now, many of these were not trivial.
• 1:02:36
  Alex Feerst: They were, like, very serious, disputes over important like social issues, but I just think that the mechanics of how social media works and the mechanics of how trust and safety tooling works was a very weird channel for this whole project to like orient around.
• 1:02:49
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:51
  Mike Masnick: Makes
• 1:02:51
  Alex Feerst: But great, you know, but like, you know, some, someday we'll have to have like AP muting and blocking in high schools so that like people.
• 1:03:00
  Mike Masnick: Oh my gosh.
• 1:03:01
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 1:03:02
  Mike Masnick: That'd be a fun curriculum to write.
• 1:03:04
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 1:03:04
  Mike Masnick: Well, uh, we, we, uh, didn't do so well at the lightning round, uh, but we are going to wrap up this, uh, particular episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech.
• 1:03:15
  Mike Masnick: Alex, thank you so much for stepping in, and providing your expert, analysis and opinions on these, these
• 1:03:22
  Alex Feerst: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:03:23
  Alex Feerst: This is a blast and an honor to get to be here.
• 1:03:27
  Mike Masnick: Excellent.
• 1:03:28
  Mike Masnick: And, uh, we'll be back next week and, uh, Ben will be back to guide this ship that I have, uh, steered into the, uh, into the shore here.
• 1:03:38
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 1:03:39
  Mike Masnick: Thanks everyone.
• 1:03:40
  Alex Feerst: take care.
• 1:03:43
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