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In the Modi for Takedowns · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike, I've been looking forward to telling you, my funny internet content that I've been watching all this week.
• 0:05
  Ben Whitelaw: I found out about it on Monday, and I've been storing it up.
• 0:09
  Ben Whitelaw: But
• 0:09
  Mike Masnick: Ooh
• 0:12
  Ben Whitelaw: tell me what you've been enjoying online.
• 0:14
  Ben Whitelaw: What's what's been keeping you entertained?
• 0:15
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I had a bunch of things to pick from this week'cause I was like, I kept finding cool things.
• 0:20
  Mike Masnick: but I am going to point out, the Flushes app, which has been relaunched this week.
• 0:28
  Mike Masnick: it originally showed up about a, a year and a half ago, and I actually spoke about it on stage at South by Southwest when I was interviewing Jay Graber a year and a half ago.
• 0:39
  Mike Masnick: but it has been relaunched this week in a very cool way.
• 0:42
  Mike Masnick: But, the app itself is built on the At Protocol.
• 0:46
  Mike Masnick: and so we can ring the bell because that is the u- the underlying protocol that powers Blue Sky and now many, many other apps.
• 0:55
  Mike Masnick: But one of the, first ones that ever showed up was, the Flushes app, and it is silly and stupid in all the good ways that, fun internet projects are.
• 1:06
  Mike Masnick: It serves no purpose other than to indicate whether or not you have used the bathroom.
• 1:14
  Mike Masnick: All, all it does is, indicate to the internet that you have flushed.
• 1:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Interesting.
• 1:22
  Ben Whitelaw: And h- how does it know this?
• 1:24
  Mike Masnick: it is permanently stored on the At Protocol.
• 1:27
  Mike Masnick: so you can set it up in all different ways.
• 1:29
  Mike Masnick: The, person who created the app originally put a NFC tag on their bathroom door, and they could tap their phone as they entered or left the bathroom and indicate to the app that, that they had flushed their, toilet.
• 1:46
  Ben Whitelaw: And are we, are we, are we wanting people to flush their toilet?
• 1:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Are we saying that bad because we want them to
• 1:51
  Mike Masnick: flushing a toilet is, always a, a useful thing.
• 1:53
  Mike Masnick: But the thing that got me about it and the reason I want to talk about it is just because it is the sort of fun, silly app, right?
• 2:00
  Mike Masnick: This is the kind of thing that I remember from the early days of the internet.
• 2:03
  Mike Masnick: Like, you could build anything for no reason at all, and this is what this was.
• 2:07
  Mike Masnick: This was just a fun project to see, like, what could I do if, you know, we have this, protocol.
• 2:13
  Mike Masnick: We could build anything.
• 2:14
  Mike Masnick: It doesn't have to be serious.
• 2:15
  Mike Masnick: It doesn't have to be a business.
• 2:17
  Mike Masnick: It doesn't have to make sense.
• 2:19
  Mike Masnick: And a whole bunch of people just, ran to it and have been using it and it's been relaunched in a nice way, including a fundraiser for The Trevor Project, which I think you and I know, and many of our listeners know, is a very important, charity that's out there.
• 2:33
  Mike Masnick: And so beyond being able to indicate whether or not you have made use of your bathroom or anyone else's bathroom, I guess, uh, you can also contribute to, uh, a very important, charity out there.
• 2:46
  Ben Whitelaw: That's great and very creative use of, of the open web, I would say
• 2:50
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 2:51
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, m-my, my fun internet, content that I'm offering you up, that I'm bringing to the altar this week is, it kind of reflects the beauty of the internet as an archive, I would say.
• 3:01
  Ben Whitelaw: It's a video that has resurfaced from 1987 showing Nintendo's gameplay counselors answering a phone hotline to people who couldn't complete the level of the game they were playing Apparently, for like, I think almost 20 years between the late'80s and, and the kind of mid-2000s, there were four- 400 people within Nintendo's organization at one point, who would wait for the phone to ring, would answer it, and would talk people through how they, got through whatever challenge they were facing.
• 3:38
  Ben Whitelaw: And so this video is, pictures of a man with a, a beard who's kind of laying back on a, chair in front of a massive PC, with a headset who answers the phone and who then talks this very nice, very kind person on the other, other end of the line through how to get a white sword on"Zelda." And it is wicked.
• 3:58
  Mike Masnick: That's amazing.
• 3:59
  Ben Whitelaw: It's so good.
• 4:00
  Ben Whitelaw: It's so good.
• 4:01
  Mike Masnick: I was gonna say, that's all been replaced by YouTube videos now, but
• 4:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 4:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, exactly.
• 4:05
  Ben Whitelaw: That kind of very, you know, customer support style function, the idea of, of ringing somebody up in order to, fix a problem that you had with a game has been completely kind of eradicated.
• 4:14
  Ben Whitelaw: but it was very nice because not only do these videos exist still, but they kind of resurface in lots of ways.
• 4:20
  Ben Whitelaw: I found it on LinkedIn, but it's also appeared on Instagram, you know.
• 4:24
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's the way that these things never die because the internet kind of acts as a repository for them.
• 4:28
  Ben Whitelaw: I
• 4:28
  Mike Masnick: Absolutely.
• 4:29
  Mike Masnick: Absolutely.
• 4:30
  Mike Masnick: That's very cool
• 4:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 4:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Let's get going.
• 4:40
  Ben Whitelaw: Hello and welcome to Ctrl Alt Speech, the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation, and the future of the internet.
• 4:49
  Ben Whitelaw: It's August the 6th, 2026, and this week we're discussing an Indian summer of content moderation takedowns, Pavel and the Extortionists, which isn't the name of Mike and I's new band, and for
• 5:01
  Mike Masnick: It's a good band name though
• 5:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Right?
• 5:03
  Ben Whitelaw: I like it.
• 5:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, and for Patreon supporters, a major Bloomberg story that looks at TikTok's safety testing operations.
• 5:11
  Ben Whitelaw: Ctrl Alt Speech is the deliciously refreshing summer cocktail of internet speech stories brought to you by Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Techdirt, and me, Ben Whitelaw, founder and editor of Everything in Moderation.
• 5:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike, have you ever wanted to be a games counselor?
• 5:24
  Ben Whitelaw: did you ever grow up wanting to, you know, be on the end of a hotline?
• 5:28
  Mike Masnick: well, not quite, but, the thing that was close was when I was in high school and I was looking for summer jobs, and then again in college as well.
• 5:36
  Mike Masnick: right near where I lived was, Activision's headquarters, and they offered jobs where you were video game testers, and all you had to do was sit there and play through video games over and over again, which I understand would probably be mind-numbing.
• 5:51
  Mike Masnick: But as a high school kid looking for a summer job, that sounded pretty sweet.
• 5:58
  Mike Masnick: and I was never able to get that job.
• 6:00
  Mike Masnick: But I-- that was, that was my dream job in high school was testing video games.
• 6:04
  Mike Masnick: So
• 6:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I can imagine
• 6:06
  Mike Masnick: I, I never, I was never able to do it
• 6:08
  Ben Whitelaw: was it you, you weren't good enough at the game or ever so oversubscribed?
• 6:12
  Ben Whitelaw: How did it
• 6:13
  Mike Masnick: I I think there must've been so many applications, I never got past the application process.
• 6:17
  Mike Masnick: So, you know, instead I just ended up working at a bagel shop serving bagels, so
• 6:23
  Ben Whitelaw: not bad at all, you know?
• 6:24
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm guessing you got to take bagels home at the end of a shift
• 6:27
  Mike Masnick: Well, so, that's a whole other story.
• 6:29
  Mike Masnick: Technically, no, the, the store owner refused to allow you to do that, because was, was afraid of, of other things that, you know, s- people would not sell bagels on purpose to try and save them for the end of the shift.
• 6:42
  Mike Masnick: But if you were the one closing up the store at the end of the day, as I often was, because I was a fairly trusted employee, you could take some bagels home.
• 6:52
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm, I'm sure.
• 6:53
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm sure.
• 6:53
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm not, I'm, I'm not surprised at all that you're a trusted employee of the bagel shop.
• 6:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Makes total sense based upon what I know about you.
• 7:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, yeah, I mean, I, uh, the games counselor stuff just blew my mind, and it...
• 7:04
  Ben Whitelaw: But it kinda speaks, it speaks to this idea of, which I think trust and safety fits into, of people making sure that others are, helped thr- through their, online safety issues.
• 7:16
  Ben Whitelaw: that they're kind of shepherded through how they use the internet and, various digital platforms.
• 7:21
  Ben Whitelaw: and so I, I thought it spoke to Ctrl-Alt-Speech listeners, and I'm, I'm gonna share it in the show notes.
• 7:25
  Ben Whitelaw: I think people will love it.
• 7:26
  Mike Masnick: I wonder if, other platforms should have counselors now.
• 7:30
  Mike Masnick: Don't know how to use Facebook right?
• 7:32
  Mike Masnick: Call up.
• 7:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 7:34
  Mike Masnick: We'll walk you through it.
• 7:36
  Ben Whitelaw: there would be a lot of grandparents, I think, that would be calling up to ask questions.
• 7:41
  Ben Whitelaw: Some are very technically literate, I'm sure.
• 7:43
  Ben Whitelaw: but the ones that I know still, still struggle.
• 7:46
  Ben Whitelaw: Not, not unsurprisingly, given how often platforms change and features move around.
• 7:51
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike, we, we were going through today's stories just before we started.
• 7:55
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't know if we had a, have had a busier week for stories.
• 7:58
  Ben Whitelaw: It feels like everything is happening at once, and we've done our best to condense it down to a set of stories that, are interesting, that, differ from the last couple of weeks where we've been talking a lot about AI regulation.
• 8:09
  Ben Whitelaw: and so I'm really hopeful that listeners enjoy this week's episode.
• 8:13
  Ben Whitelaw: Before we get going, big thank you as ever to our Patreon subscribers, our, our supporters who pay$10 a month to get extended episodes and early access to the podcast.
• 8:22
  Ben Whitelaw: so people can listen well before the week is out.
• 8:25
  Ben Whitelaw: You're not forced to listen to it on the weekend.
• 8:27
  Ben Whitelaw: And our founder and insider supporters who get all of that and the chance to send us stories for us to cover.
• 8:34
  Ben Whitelaw: We've actually got one of those today from one of our, insider supporters, so, proof that it works.
• 8:40
  Ben Whitelaw: It's worth saying, Mike, that, you know, those free episodes are good.
• 8:42
  Ben Whitelaw: People might be listening on the free episodes, but there's a lot less of us.
• 8:45
  Ben Whitelaw: And yeah, you can't listen along on a Friday, which when, if you're me, you are kind of twiddling the mouse trying to or pretending to do work.
• 8:53
  Ben Whitelaw: So if you are like me and you want to have, Ctrl Alt Speech in the background while you do your work on a Friday, that's your call to sign up for our Patreon.
• 9:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Now is a great time to do it as well.
• 9:04
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• 9:08
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• 9:16
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• 9:21
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• 9:27
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• 9:28
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• 9:33
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• 9:40
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• 9:43
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike, we're gonna start with a, a story that I think has, has been kind of rumbling for years really.
• 9:49
  Ben Whitelaw: the latest episode has taken off over the last few months, and that is India's relationship as a country with big tech platforms.
• 9:56
  Ben Whitelaw: And we've seen, a series of interesting kind of, milestones in relation to this story over the last few months.
• 10:02
  Ben Whitelaw: And I wanted to kind of map out that story today in this episode, because I think a lot of people would've either seen aspects of it and not really seen how it all fits together or just, perhaps, had that pass them by.
• 10:14
  Ben Whitelaw: So I wanted to kind of map out what that looks like and, uh, it has a lot of implications for how big tech works in, in India, and also with countries, of a certain kind of authoritarian nature, let's say.
• 10:25
  Ben Whitelaw: so we're gonna, gonna start with a story that we touched on briefly on"Control Speech" a couple of months back, which was a test, an exam that more than two million people sat in India called the NEET test.
• 10:38
  Ben Whitelaw: And this is a, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, which many, many young people take, with the idea of becoming medical professionals and doctors.
• 10:47
  Ben Whitelaw: It's a big, big deal for a lot of people in India.
• 10:50
  Ben Whitelaw: A lot of people save up money, in order to do it.
• 10:53
  Ben Whitelaw: It's quite expensive for a lot of the country, and it's viewed as a kind of gateway to a more prosperous future.
• 10:58
  Ben Whitelaw: so people study for it for ages, and it's a massive deal.
• 11:02
  Ben Whitelaw: This year, not for the first time, but, there was some controversy around it because after the test was taken on May the 3rd, the results of that were canceled because the government found that there'd been exam test leaks and people were able to get the paper in advance, which led to huge anger, as you can expect.
• 11:20
  Ben Whitelaw: And, to make matters worse, the government actually banned Telegram, which is widely used in India and was one of the reasons why the, exam was leaked for a week in the lead up to the retake.
• 11:32
  Ben Whitelaw: So you had anger about the exam being retaken, and then you had anger about the fact that Telegram was, essentially banned for a week, not only for the students taking exams, but for everyone in the country, many of whom are kind of small business owners using Telegram to go about their work.
• 11:47
  Ben Whitelaw: So you have lots of disaffected youth at this point, people who are angry with the government, particularly the education department, and they kind of rally online under the guise of the Cockroach Janata Party.
• 12:00
  Ben Whitelaw: So this is a, kind of parody on, in terms of name on the ruling BJP party, and, takes the name, the kind of cockroach part of it takes the name from a comment by the chief justice who compared young people in India who were going into journalism and activism as cockroaches.
• 12:17
  Ben Whitelaw: So this youth movement kind of takes, that comment and, builds a kind of movement around it that not only, depicts Modi in, in less than favorable ways online, but then starts to gather in cities across India.
• 12:30
  Ben Whitelaw: the most notable of which was a, uh, big protest in New Delhi, actually, when we were in Trust Con on the 20th of July.
• 12:37
  Ben Whitelaw: So I- you might have seen stories around that time.
• 12:40
  Ben Whitelaw: That's all kind of, well and good.
• 12:41
  Ben Whitelaw: There's a, bit of a problem for the Indian government to face at that point.
• 12:44
  Ben Whitelaw: What happens afterwards is really where it comes into our sphere.
• 12:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Narendra Modi, who's the prime minister of India, the leader of the BJP, puts out a video on the 23rd of July, responding to the protests and the disenfranchised youth movement.
• 12:59
  Ben Whitelaw: It goes out on Instagram, it goes out on Meta, but only, only briefly.
• 13:03
  Ben Whitelaw: It gets taken down by Meta's automated content moderation system for a couple of hours.
• 13:10
  Ben Whitelaw: Understandably, the PM is not happy.
• 13:14
  Ben Whitelaw: you can imagine in that scenario, right, you know, you've got this, these protesters, in all of the major cities in India.
• 13:20
  Ben Whitelaw: You think,"I'm gonna do this video, try and quell things, try and make-- bring a bit of calm to proceedings," only for that video to kind of disappear for no, no apparent reason.
• 13:29
  Ben Whitelaw: Safe to say, government is not happy, and it, contacts Meta and calls its leaders to Delhi to basically have a, summons to discuss what happened and, to kind of thrash things out.
• 13:41
  Ben Whitelaw: That happened yesterday.
• 13:43
  Ben Whitelaw: Joel Kaplan, who is a senior global public policy person at Meta, took over from Nick Clegg, earlier this year.
• 13:50
  Ben Whitelaw: How-- W- Where are we in the year?
• 13:53
  Mike Masnick: time has no meaning.
• 13:54
  Mike Masnick: But yes, he, he became the new Nick Clegg,
• 13:56
  Ben Whitelaw: He became the new Nick Clegg.
• 13:57
  Ben Whitelaw: And, we've seen reports this week about Kaplan apologizing for an error in the AI-powered automated content filtering system, which is a bit of a mouthful.
• 14:07
  Ben Whitelaw: basically, why this happened.
• 14:10
  Ben Whitelaw: At the same time, the government in India have asked for a special system so that prominent users of Meta's products, such as the Prime Minister of India, don't have videos taken down like this in the future.
• 14:21
  Ben Whitelaw: and I'm hoping we can get into that conversation because it, it's an idea that is familiar to Meta and familiar to us.
• 14:27
  Ben Whitelaw: so a lot to discuss there.
• 14:29
  Ben Whitelaw: they were also pinned, the Meta leaders, on a story we discussed recently as well around Instagram ads being used to distribute CSAM, which is another big story that has dominated the kind of news cycle over the past couple of weeks.
• 14:43
  Ben Whitelaw: whether Meta does enough to vet ads, particularly when it comes to serious harms like CSAM, has been a, a real topic of discussion.
• 14:51
  Ben Whitelaw: And there is this kind of bubbling, sense online now which has been captured by the hashtag MetaCensorsIndia, that Meta is, doing too much in some areas and, and not enough in other areas related to content moderation.
• 15:02
  Ben Whitelaw: So I thought I'd just kind of try and lay out as much as possible.
• 15:05
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm sure there's things I've missed, Mike, and people who are listening to the podcast are very much invited to drop us a line, podcast@ctrl-alt-speech, if, if you have any further details or ideas about, that story.
• 15:15
  Ben Whitelaw: But I thought I'd just kind of, as best as I can, lay out what's been happening and, and'cause I think it's a massive, story when added all together.
• 15:21
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 15:22
  Mike Masnick: And I think it's interesting and it's just sort of reflective of the impossibility of content moderation, which is that the same people who are upset about the company not doing enough in certain areas then complains that they're doing too much in certain other areas and never sort of considers the fact that, like, dialing it in to the point that is exactly right is an impossible task because this is the challenge all the time.
• 15:46
  Mike Masnick: if you wanna say, you know, you have to take down anything bad, you're going to lead to a situation where you've dialed up either the rules or the automated systems or both in some form or another to take down too much content, then you're going to take down something like the prime minister's own video, and then you're gonna freak out about how dare they do that.
• 16:04
  Mike Masnick: And so there's a sort of cognitive dissonance here, this idea that, like, if you're complaining both about the company taking down too much and taking down too little without recognizing that you yourself are describing the impossibility here.
• 16:18
  Mike Masnick: there are always going to be challenges here.
• 16:19
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, one of the things that strikes me as interesting having followed the situation in India and the regulatory, structure of India and how they've dealt with, intermediary liability laws over the years is that, going back a decade, a little bit more, India actually had very, very protective, laws that were similar in some sense to Section two thirty in that they were very protective of platforms and their, moderation choices and, and saying that you couldn't hold them liable for those moderation choices.
• 16:51
  Mike Masnick: It was not as much, you know, where in the US was sort of written into law in Section two thirty.
• 16:56
  Mike Masnick: You did have these IT acts in India, that were by the courts to effectively be very, very similar.
• 17:03
  Mike Masnick: But then in the last decade or so, those have changed very dramatically, and India has very much gone in the other direction, starting from saying, like, moderation choices are protected and you don't hold the companies liable, to now it's, very much flipped.
• 17:19
  Mike Masnick: And so I thought, you know, one of the things that I saw with the Joel Kaplan going, to India and apologizing is that, you know, he got dressed down by, a BJP MP, who complained, Deleting the Prime Minister's video was not the work of an intermediary, but that of a publisher," which is such a, classic line of people who don't understand these issues.
• 17:42
  Mike Masnick: Whereas you know, going straight to this, like, idea that there's a distinction between an intermediary and a publisher.
• 17:49
  Mike Masnick: the whole point of intermediary liability is that you want them to act as a publisher.
• 17:55
  Mike Masnick: You're giving them liability protections.
• 17:56
  Mike Masnick: You're giving them protections so that they can moderate freely.
• 18:01
  Mike Masnick: and so anyone who says like,"Oh, you're...
• 18:03
  Mike Masnick: It's a work of a, publisher, not an intermediary," you're misunderstanding the assignment.
• 18:07
  Mike Masnick: You're misunderstanding what is happening.
• 18:10
  Mike Masnick: And then he, the same MP demanded that Zuckerberg will have to apologize within three days.
• 18:16
  Mike Masnick: You know, which sort of highlights this other element of this, this idea that, the people who run these companies are sitting there deliberately checking.
• 18:25
  Mike Masnick: You know, Meta has however many billions of users.
• 18:28
  Mike Masnick: The idea that, Zuckerberg had anything to do with Modi's video being taken down when it's clearly an automated system is somewhat ridiculous.
• 18:39
  Mike Masnick: Now, the other element of this is that it goes right back to the issues of the Cross Check or X Check system that Meta set up, years ago to try to prevent the taking down of big accounts, like famous accounts, which it started with, Obama's account was accidentally taken down, showing in some sense these issues are the same.
• 19:03
  Mike Masnick: They keep coming back in some form or another.
• 19:05
  Mike Masnick: So his account was taken down.
• 19:07
  Mike Masnick: I forget the exact details of why, but it was accidental.
• 19:10
  Mike Masnick: They put it back up, and they created this Cross Check, X Check program, basically saying,"We don't take down these certain designated accounts until there's been a more careful review, so we avoid the automated takedown." But then they got in trouble with that when You know, that, program was secret.
• 19:26
  Mike Masnick: It was revealed by The Wall Street Journal, and then there was this big complaint like,"How dare they?" it was the way it was reported, again, showing like how the reporting takes something and spins it.
• 19:36
  Mike Masnick: It was reported as, oh, they're protecting big name VIP accounts and allowing them to violate the rules.
• 19:44
  Ben Whitelaw: A two-tier, a two-tier class system kind of
• 19:46
  Mike Masnick: Exactly.
• 19:47
  Mike Masnick: Exactly.
• 19:48
  Mike Masnick: And so it's like no good deed goes unpunished, right?
• 19:50
  Mike Masnick: You know, every one of these approaches has trade-offs, and every one, you can put some in place for good reasons, but then the end result is like it allows important accounts to, violate the rules for a certain period of time at least.
• 20:02
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 20:02
  Ben Whitelaw: And there was, examples of, I don't know how it happened, but, you know, big names on Meta's products like Neymar, I think having undue influence on content that definitely should have come down, but was allowed to kind of stay up, I guess, because of the relationship he had with people at Meta.
• 20:19
  Ben Whitelaw: I, I, I forget what it was now, but it was-- it basically it's, it was hard.
• 20:22
  Ben Whitelaw: It was a, a hard thing to solve for.
• 20:24
  Ben Whitelaw: and then I think the oversight board came out and said that the XCheck system should be, at least made more transparent, potentially actually disbanded as a result of that story.
• 20:33
  Ben Whitelaw: So you-- we're end up, ending up a little bit back at where we started, aren't we?
• 20:37
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 20:37
  Mike Masnick: 'Cause now, and now you have Modi saying effectively like,"Recreate XCheck for me, but maybe only for me," right?
• 20:44
  Mike Masnick: It's like, you know, everyone thinks that they're the exception, and sort of all of these things highlight, how impossible it is.
• 20:50
  Mike Masnick: You're going to make type one and type two errors.
• 20:53
  Mike Masnick: You're going to have false positives and false negatives, and the question is, you know, you can minimize one or the other, but you're going to increase the opposite one, and anyone who is criticizing these things has to recognize that those are part of the trade-offs
• 21:06
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 21:07
  Ben Whitelaw: And I think the, the point around, Meta being pinned on both sides, being accused of removing too much political speech or, under-removing ads is, is a fair one, and I think we know that as a kind of consistent theme of Ctrl-Alt-Speech.
• 21:19
  Ben Whitelaw: You could argue, though, that Meta has somewhat created this system in India though, right?
• 21:24
  Ben Whitelaw: they've not been a kind of passive victim in the last decade of which they have gone into India, got a large amount of its citizens to have Meta products.
• 21:33
  Ben Whitelaw: you know, it's a massive market for them.
• 21:35
  Ben Whitelaw: They have probably engaged on, in, in the political sense in a way that has enabled them to do that.
• 21:40
  Ben Whitelaw: And they haven't pushed back on some of the ways that the BJP in particular have decided to use platforms now to, control narrative to their ends.
• 21:50
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, I was thinking about how I think as was then, pushed back against, a state law.
• 21:58
  Ben Whitelaw: That sought to have Twitter take down, I think it was 39 posts that the government disagreed with.
• 22:04
  Ben Whitelaw: And I appealed.
• 22:06
  Ben Whitelaw: it kind of brought a case against the state.
• 22:08
  Ben Whitelaw: the Supreme Court in that state actually rejected the appeal, so they had to take the post down anyway.
• 22:12
  Ben Whitelaw: But at least they were kind of standing up for their version or, the platform's idea of what speech was.
• 22:18
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't think, to my knowledge, that Meta have ever done that.
• 22:21
  Ben Whitelaw: to what extent has that then led to a situation where you have Kaplan going kind of cap in hand, so to speak, with an apology and an attempt to kind of smooth things over?
• 22:31
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 22:31
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it's always tricky, right?
• 22:33
  Mike Masnick: Because you're always dealing with the geopolitical realities of, of each country that you operate in, and I think I saw that, and this would totally make sense if you just think of, the math, like India is Meta's largest market in terms of most users anywhere in the world.
• 22:49
  Mike Masnick: and so you could see why they might wanna tiptoe around it a little, little more carefully.
• 22:56
  Mike Masnick: You also just have, the different personalities between like Zuckerberg or Musk in terms of deciding who they're willing to push back on and who they're willing to agree with.
• 23:04
  Mike Masnick: and you know, Zuckerberg has a history of, I'm trying to think of the right, the right word here that is not too obnoxious, uh, in terms of, you know, being willing to say what a leader of any particular country needs to hear at that moment to kind of appease them, uh,
• 23:24
  Ben Whitelaw: know exactly what you didn't say.
• 23:28
  Mike Masnick: as opposed to maybe being a little bit more in your face and a little bit more aggressive as Elon Musk has, been known to do.
• 23:35
  Ben Whitelaw: or principled, let's say.
• 23:37
  Ben Whitelaw: what- whatever, whether you agree with Musk's principles or not, I think principled is probably the thing that I'm looking for.
• 23:44
  Ben Whitelaw: But yeah, so I don't think this story's gonna go away.
• 23:47
  Ben Whitelaw: I think there's, we're seeing big names, people who have large followings on Instagram suddenly getting their content, taken down.
• 23:56
  Ben Whitelaw: journalists are sharing screenshots on Twitter in which it shows, y- photos are being removed from posts going as far back as two or three years.
• 24:05
  Ben Whitelaw: And there's a note that says, We've restricted this content through an automated system because of the IT rules in India." And, and there's actually a sense that the, Kaplan visit has coincided with a tightening of some of those rules.
• 24:18
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, people had photos and posts taken down previously, but it's happened all of a sudden in the last couple of days.
• 24:24
  Ben Whitelaw: and so people are putting two and two together, rightly or wrongly, and saying: Well, this is because Modi and, and the Meta leaders are in the same room, and they could, insist on things being a little bit more moderated.
• 24:34
  Ben Whitelaw: So I don't think this is going away.
• 24:37
  Ben Whitelaw: Obviously, the protests have been running for several months now, and so I thought it was an important point to check in and, and see, you know, what's going on.
• 24:44
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, no, I, I mean, I think it is, it is an important story.
• 24:46
  Mike Masnick: It's a large market, and I think as we've, noted in this discussion, it sort of highlights a bunch of the different points that we're constantly raising about the real challenges and trade-offs that are involved in, in moderating any large platform
• 24:59
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, for sure.
• 25:00
  Ben Whitelaw: let's go on to our kind of eye-catching stories now, Mike.
• 25:02
  Ben Whitelaw: We've got an absolute doozy to start with.
• 25:05
  Ben Whitelaw: my jaw dropped open when I read some of the coverage of this story that you're gonna talk about.
• 25:09
  Ben Whitelaw: it's, it's brilliant.
• 25:10
  Ben Whitelaw: us through it.
• 25:11
  Mike Masnick: so this story actually started, in 2019 and sort of got a bunch of attention in 2020, which was eBay suddenly apparently deciding to terrorize a husband and wife journalism team, and trying to destroy their lives.
• 25:26
  Mike Masnick: it was a crazy story that was completely unbelievable in terms of the, eBay head of security apparently mailing a preserved fetal pig to the family.
• 25:37
  Ben Whitelaw: That was a detail I had not
• 25:38
  Mike Masnick: e- that was one of the thing...
• 25:41
  Mike Masnick: It escalated very quickly.
• 25:42
  Mike Masnick: it started with, like, scary messages over DMs, and then things just started showing up at the house.
• 25:48
  Mike Masnick: In the middle of the night, like, 20 pizzas showed up, and then a fetal pig, a box full of live cockroaches at one point, a box full of, like, live maggots,
• 26:00
  Ben Whitelaw: All because of stuff that was written
• 26:01
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 26:02
  Mike Masnick: So the reporters, Ina or Ina Steiner and her husband David, they started this website, which was originally, It became EcommerceBytes, and it was all about auctions, and it was really designed initially for sellers on eBay as kind of a news, place to figure out how do you sell better and how do you, build up a business on eBay.
• 26:23
  Mike Masnick: It was launched around the time eBay launched.
• 26:25
  Mike Masnick: It was soon after eBay came around that they launched it, and it became very popular with eBay sellers.
• 26:30
  Mike Masnick: The site looks like it was created in the 1990s.
• 26:34
  Mike Masnick: It hasn't really been updated much, and I am not one to talk, having started a website in the 1990s that hasn't been updated very much.
• 26:41
  Mike Masnick: but it just became, like, the sort of place to go if you were an eBay seller and, and kept the news.
• 26:47
  Mike Masnick: and they just sud-suddenly started getting terrorized, and people, they would drive around town and suddenly notice that they were being followed.
• 26:53
  Mike Masnick: they had, people showing up in the middle of the night.
• 26:55
  Mike Masnick: I mean, the pig fetus was certainly scary.
• 26:58
  Mike Masnick: There was also...
• 26:58
  Mike Masnick: They sent, again, it's a married couple, and they sent a book called Surviving the Death of Your Spouse, and then the next day sent a funeral wreath.
• 27:08
  Mike Masnick: Uh, I mean, this is, like, absolutely terrifying.
• 27:11
  Mike Masnick: They sent, at one point to their next-door neighbor, they sent, pornography in the name of the husband.
• 27:18
  Mike Masnick: Um, just, like, all sorts of horrifying things.
• 27:22
  Mike Masnick: And the story came out was that, it was actually eBay employees, the eBay security, safety and security team that were doing this.
• 27:31
  Mike Masnick: and then later what came out, and there's now, and I just, like right about the same time that this latest story came out, I had just watched, there's a docu-documentary called Whatever It Takes all about this, which has all the video details.
• 27:45
  Mike Masnick: They had security camera footage.
• 27:47
  Mike Masnick: They got one of the eBay employees, who was actually a contractor not a full-time employee who went to jail for this to be a part of the documentary and tell the whole background story of what actually happened, which is really enlightening.
• 28:01
  Mike Masnick: Normally, those people don't show up on camera in these documentaries.
• 28:04
  Mike Masnick: just this, horrifying attack on these people, And the, a bunch of eBay security employees were eventually arrested.
• 28:12
  Mike Masnick: all of them ended up pleading guilty at some point and taking jail sentences or probation sentences of, of some form or another.
• 28:20
  Mike Masnick: And the whole story was crazy.
• 28:21
  Mike Masnick: But the people who weren't arrested were eBay's top executives: the CEO, the, head of communications, and the chief operating officer.
• 28:29
  Mike Masnick: And so the latest story, which just came out last week, was that eBay the company and those three top executives have all settled a civil lawsuit that the, Steiners had filed against them, paying out around$56 million, a little bit less than$56 million, with, uh...
• 28:47
  Mike Masnick: I forget the exact amounts.
• 28:48
  Mike Masnick: It's, it's a significant amount.
• 28:50
  Mike Masnick: 48 million or so, I think, went to the Steiners directly, and the rest going to various charities, including ones that support journalists and free speech and the First Amendment.
• 29:03
  Mike Masnick: but a pretty crazy story all around, and the, the title of that documentary, Whatever It Takes, comes from a message that the CEO, Devid Wenig, sent to the communications chief saying he wanted to take her down.
• 29:18
  Mike Masnick: The, the literal message was,"Take her down, whatever it takes," which then got passed along to the security chief, who, then, like, you know.
• 29:27
  Mike Masnick: The, i- in the movie, they talk about he, he was obsessed with all these, like, movies like Training Day and CIA films, and really thought of himself as, like, this, you know, action hero and, viewed the whole thing as cinematic.
• 29:40
  Mike Masnick: And the, the story which I hadn't realized was that the plan had been after they terrorized them for a few weeks, somebody officially was going to reach out from eBay claiming,"Oh, we saw that someone is trying to be mean to you, and we're going to protect you," to try and get on their good side.
• 29:56
  Mike Masnick: Which, like, is just ridiculous and makes no sense and, of course, only helped the case against these people.
• 30:03
  Mike Masnick: But to end up paying out,$56 million is, pretty crazy.
• 30:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 30:08
  Ben Whitelaw: What do we take from this then?
• 30:10
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and would it happen now?
• 30:11
  Ben Whitelaw: 'Cause my, my takeaway was that this was a big tech company doing whatever it wanted.
• 30:18
  Ben Whitelaw: It was a, it's a kind of sign of big tech culture in the 2000s and kind of early 2010s, you know, complete disregard for its users, any critics.
• 30:29
  Ben Whitelaw: some of the articles that they were writing was, fairly anodyne stuff.
• 30:32
  Ben Whitelaw: They're a very small outlet, even if they were read fairly well.
• 30:35
  Ben Whitelaw: Like, it's, it's almost like you being gone after in, in some way, right?
• 30:39
  Ben Whitelaw: How-- Could this happen nowadays, do you think?
• 30:42
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you know, it, yes, but I mean, this was obviously extreme.
• 30:46
  Mike Masnick: Like, I don't think anyone that's part of what's so crazy about this story is just how far they took it and how ridiculous, and I don't think we've seen anything quite like that.
• 30:55
  Mike Masnick: But we are living in a time where, like, especially within the tech industry, their view of journalists is not good, and they view journalists negatively, and they certainly, you could see, you know, within these companies, there is often a sense of, like, the journalists, they don't get us, they're treating us unfairly, they're reporting on us in ways that make us look bad, and they're not willing to, give a fair shake to us.
• 31:19
  Mike Masnick: and we see that over and over again, and you could see where if you get into your head enough and, you sort of have this, like, group of people all sort of egging each other on, you could get to a point where you're saying, like,"Well, we gotta, we gotta do something to get back at them." Normally, we see that in the form of, like, a SLAPP suit, a defamation lawsuit of some kind, which, you know, is also designed to sort of ruin a reporter's life.
• 31:41
  Mike Masnick: and that certainly happens, and that's, I think, a big problem, and it's something that, that I talk about a lot and why we need laws to protect against those, those sorts of things.
• 31:50
  Mike Masnick: and certainly in the UK, libel lawsuits are pretty common, and you have things like super injunctions that, block reporters from talking about certain topics.
• 31:58
  Mike Masnick: so there have always been attacks on journalists.
• 32:00
  Mike Masnick: This was just an absolute extreme situation, and I think it's just sort of this, like, psychosis kind of feeling that, some companies feel like,"Oh, we're constantly under attack, and this is so unfair." So, I don't think it's likely that anyone was gonna go to this kind of extreme again, but it is sort of notable how, the reaction is rather than, like, maybe let's talk to these journalists, let's, you know, share our side of the story or whatever.
• 32:31
  Mike Masnick: It was immediately like,"We have to take them down." And you see that, certainly in, a certain class of tech executive these days.
• 32:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, definitely.
• 32:40
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, I, I would also say that we talk a lot about how some of the safety laws that we discuss often insist on there being a executive in a particular country that is named, right?
• 32:52
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and I think that know that that is problematic in some ways, and doesn't necessarily do a lot.
• 32:57
  Ben Whitelaw: But I think it-- in my head, I tie it back to some stories like this, where you, you see leaders of particular companies who over time we hear about how they've, completely, done whatever they want.
• 33:11
  Ben Whitelaw: That they've, acted with a complete disregard for users or journalists or, been kind of tyrannical in, in many ways.
• 33:18
  Ben Whitelaw: And I think that, in my head, that's partly why some of those, you would call them hostage clauses, uh, which I think makes sense, actually exist, right?
• 33:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Because we know that companies are are driven culturally by the leadership o-of their top brass, however you want to kind of describe it.
• 33:34
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and I think there's a link there that, probably actually ties the Facebook Meta story in India to this one, which is that leaders decide how companies behave.
• 33:44
  Ben Whitelaw: You can either go and, you know, kowtow to a, prime minister, or you can insist that journalists are chased down the road and sent pig fetuses, or you can do something different.
• 33:55
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that's kind of would be
• 33:56
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 33:57
  Mike Masnick: Th-there's definitely a large cultural element to this, and in fact, one of the people who was arrested and, pleaded guilty and went to jail a few years ago claimed that it was part of eBay's hard-drinking culture, was the way it was described, in that it was, you know, it was a culture that, that, What's funny related to that, the hard-drinking culture, was that one of the stories that particularly pissed off the CEO was that eBay had redone their headquarters at the behest of the CEO, and part of that, complete rebuild of the headquarters included a replica of a famous New York City pub, that they wanted inside the headquarters.
• 34:35
  Mike Masnick: So, speaking of hard-drinking culture, that, that seemed to be an element of it.
• 34:41
  Mike Masnick: And that documentary also details how the head of security who ran this operation, and I believe might still be in prison for it, was really focused on...
• 34:50
  Mike Masnick: He hired a bunch of very young women just out of school, to be his team, and he often got them very drunk as part of, bonding with the team.
• 35:01
  Mike Masnick: So there did seem to be an element of that.
• 35:03
  Mike Masnick: the cultural elements at eBay at the time at least certainly seemed pretty, pretty sketchy in lots of ways.
• 35:10
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, for sure.
• 35:11
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, it's, it's a wild story.
• 35:12
  Ben Whitelaw: a number of folks contacted me, about it who listen to"Control or Speech." They wanted us to talk about it.
• 35:18
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm I'm glad we did.
• 35:20
  Ben Whitelaw: I think there's-- it's a, it's not directly about speech, I would say, but the kind of cultural element of these companies I think is a massive, massive factor.
• 35:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike, I'm gonna wrap up our free episode there.
• 35:30
  Ben Whitelaw: We have-- We're gonna do another eye-catching story in our Patreon episode.
• 35:35
  Ben Whitelaw: we've run a bit longer than we usually do.
• 35:37
  Ben Whitelaw: just talk about the TikTok A/B testing story and why it's worth, signing up with a TrustCon discount code to listen to that.
• 35:45
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, so in the, Patreon part of this, we're gonna talk-- There was a big article in Bloomberg this week about, TikTok running a test, a sort of safety feature where they had a control group that didn't have access to the safety protections that the rest of the, users were having, and one of those users ended up, taking their own life.
• 36:06
  Mike Masnick: and so there's a big lawsuit about it related to, whether or not that was appropriate that TikTok, was willing to turn off the safety features as part of this test.
• 36:17
  Mike Masnick: I think there's a lot of interesting things to talk about.
• 36:19
  Mike Masnick: The story is obviously very heart-wrenching and very disturbing in many ways, but I also think missed some of the larger point about how these companies operate and how they handle safety.
• 36:31
  Mike Masnick: And so that-that's what we're gonna discuss in the, uh, Patreon portion of it.
• 36:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Before we go, go and read one of our Patreon supporters, Emma's, legal case.
• 36:39
  Ben Whitelaw: she's, an artist who's been, working to get her Instagram account back.
• 36:44
  Ben Whitelaw: She is a really fascinating case, and we're gonna include the, that in the show notes.
• 36:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, we're gonna talk about not only TikTok, but a lot more in our special Patreon segment now
• 36:55
  Announcer: That's the end of this week's free edition of Ctrl Alt Speech.
• 36:59
  Announcer: To hear the extended episode with additional coverage, become a Patreon supporter at patreon.com/ctrlaltspeech.
• 37:06
  Announcer: That's C-T-R-L Alt Speech.
• 37:09
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• 37:16
  Announcer: Thanks for listening