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Once You Slop, You Can't Stop · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Ben Whitelaw: So Mike, I've been browsing the internet for some shelves, right?
• 0:03
  Ben Whitelaw: You know
• 0:04
  Mike Masnick: As one does.
• 0:04
  Ben Whitelaw: as one does, you know, this is the thing I do in my spare time.
• 0:07
  Ben Whitelaw: Now, my house renovations almost coming to an end.
• 0:10
  Ben Whitelaw: I've talked about it a bunch of this podcast.
• 0:12
  Ben Whitelaw: hope listeners aren't bored.
• 0:13
  Ben Whitelaw: but I'm basically at the shelf stage.
• 0:15
  Ben Whitelaw: So I was, looking around for some shelves and naturally I ended up on eBay.
• 0:20
  Ben Whitelaw: And I thought we haven't used eBay on control or speech.
• 0:22
  Ben Whitelaw: So, at least I don't think we have.
• 0:24
  Ben Whitelaw: So.
• 0:25
  Ben Whitelaw: They're prompts on eBay is search for anything, and you can take that as a kind of, you know, material, search, or you can think of it as a kind of philosophical prompt.
• 0:37
  Mike Masnick: I, well, I was going to say a few different ways where we could search for a different government for the U S but I think, I think I would like to search for more time.
• 0:46
  Mike Masnick: I feel like I don't have nearly enough time for anything as we were just discussing in terms of like how much stuff is going on.
• 0:54
  Mike Masnick: I could use more time.
• 0:56
  Mike Masnick: So if I could buy more time on eBay, I'd go with
• 0:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 0:59
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 1:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 1:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Maybe a, maybe a personal
• 1:01
  Mike Masnick: search for anything, Ben?
• 1:03
  Mike Masnick: Ha
• 1:03
  Ben Whitelaw: if I was to search for something, um, I would search for the kind of dying vestiges of a free speech platform.
• 1:12
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and, and that links to something that we'll talk about in today's podcast.
• 1:17
  Ben Whitelaw: so I'll explain more.
• 1:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Hello and welcome to control speech, your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation.
• 1:34
  Ben Whitelaw: it's March the 20th, 2025.
• 1:36
  Ben Whitelaw: And this week's episode is brought to you with financial support from the future of online trust and safety fund.
• 1:41
  Ben Whitelaw: This week, we're talking about AI slop, the online safety act coming into force and methods attempt to build a better community notes than X.
• 1:49
  Ben Whitelaw: My name is Ben Whitelaw.
• 1:50
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm the founder and editor of everything moderation.
• 1:53
  Ben Whitelaw: And one with a very time poor Mike Masnick.
• 1:57
  Ben Whitelaw: How much would you pay Mike to have an extra hour every day,
• 2:01
  Mike Masnick: Gosh, I don't know.
• 2:03
  Mike Masnick: That is a good question.
• 2:05
  Ben Whitelaw: just one hour.
• 2:07
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, one hour is not enough.
• 2:08
  Mike Masnick: I think, I think I need an extra day every week.
• 2:13
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah,
• 2:13
  Mike Masnick: Where nothing happens.
• 2:15
  Mike Masnick: Right?
• 2:15
  Mike Masnick: So.
• 2:16
  Mike Masnick: I need everybody else, like everybody else and stick with the seven day week.
• 2:20
  Mike Masnick: And I need that extra day where nothing is happening and it's just perfectly quiet and I can just catch up on stuff.
• 2:28
  Mike Masnick: I think that's what I would.
• 2:30
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 2:30
  Mike Masnick: Someone get me that.
• 2:31
  Mike Masnick: Some, someone get me that.
• 2:32
  Ben Whitelaw: So you're paying for the whole world to just stay still, essentially.
• 2:38
  Mike Masnick: No, I mean, you know, in their, in their lives, like they can just think that the world still has seven days, but I want, I want like this pause that I can still do stuff.
• 2:47
  Mike Masnick: Give me that extra day.
• 2:49
  Mike Masnick: I'm not greedy.
• 2:50
  Ben Whitelaw: No, no.
• 2:51
  Mike Masnick: don't, I don't need two days.
• 2:52
  Mike Masnick: Just, just one.
• 2:54
  Ben Whitelaw: It reminds me of a children's TV show in the UK called Bernard's Watch.
• 2:58
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't know if you ever came across this.
• 3:00
  Ben Whitelaw: It's kind of unhinged, um, but I used to love it as a kid.
• 3:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Naturally, he had a kind of pocket watch, an old antique watch that he used to click and stop.
• 3:08
  Ben Whitelaw: And he went about his day to day life and everyone else was frozen.
• 3:12
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, that's it.
• 3:13
  Ben Whitelaw: You want to, you want to burn his watch.
• 3:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Don't you?
• 3:15
  Mike Masnick: I think, yeah, yeah.
• 3:17
  Mike Masnick: I think there was a movie like a Hollywood movie on that premise too, but I didn't see it.
• 3:21
  Mike Masnick: I remember the preview with that, premise, but no, I, I just need that.
• 3:25
  Mike Masnick: But like, I wouldn't do anything nefarious, but I would literally just sit and work.
• 3:28
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 3:28
  Mike Masnick: I mean, everyone makes fun of me for that.
• 3:30
  Mike Masnick: Like, all I do is work, but that would be, you know, It would gimme back regular time.
• 3:35
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 3:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 3:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, you know, I hope you don't think this is work.
• 3:38
  Ben Whitelaw: This is, this is, this is our time.
• 3:40
  Ben Whitelaw: This is your time to decompress Mike.
• 3:42
  Mike Masnick: There we go.
• 3:44
  Ben Whitelaw: um, I think that's a sensible thing to buy.
• 3:46
  Ben Whitelaw: my purchase would be something very not sensible.
• 3:50
  Ben Whitelaw: and I was referring to it in the opening today.
• 3:52
  Ben Whitelaw: I want to buy the Twitter logo.
• 3:55
  Ben Whitelaw: That's up for sale again.
• 3:56
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't know if you saw this, the big bird that used to sit outside of Twitter's office back when it was called Twitter in San Francisco has gone up for sale again, and it is the perfect analogy for what has happened to Twitter slash X since it was bought by Elon Musk, so it was.
• 4:14
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't know if you remember in 2023, Musk sold it as part of a kind of fire sale, like a kind of garage sale.
• 4:20
  Ben Whitelaw: Is that what you call it in the US?
• 4:21
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 4:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 4:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, and it was, it sold for a hundred thousand dollars.
• 4:26
  Ben Whitelaw: It's currently up for sale now and you just looked right.
• 4:29
  Ben Whitelaw: And it was.
• 4:30
  Ben Whitelaw: 2, 27, 000.
• 4:35
  Mike Masnick: 7,500
• 4:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 4:37
  Ben Whitelaw: So yeah, just as Twitter's X's value plummeted over the last several years, although there's been some sort of correction this week, so has Larry Bird, the giant blue logo that used to sit outside the office in San Francisco.
• 4:52
  Ben Whitelaw: maybe I could use it as a shelf.
• 4:54
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, there you go.
• 4:55
  Mike Masnick: You take two birds with one stone.
• 4:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Oh, would you look at that?
• 5:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 5:01
  Mike Masnick: but the, uh, yeah, I mean, I guess it's just been sitting in storage.
• 5:05
  Mike Masnick: as I said, it was in a storage facility in San Francisco.
• 5:10
  Mike Masnick: And so, you'll have to pay for shipping to the UK if you get it.
• 5:15
  Mike Masnick: But I will note that it says there's about six hours left as we record this.
• 5:19
  Mike Masnick: So by the time this comes out, may only have a few minutes left.
• 5:24
  Mike Masnick: Uh, To, to bid on it and purchase it for Ben in case any of our listeners want to make a donation to control out speech and, to Ben shelving fund in particular, uh, you can purchase the bird and, send it off to London.
• 5:40
  Ben Whitelaw: You would get regular photos, uh, you contribute.
• 5:45
  Mike Masnick: wonder what your wife would feel about a giant bird showing up
• 5:51
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 5:51
  Mike Masnick: newly renovated home.
• 5:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 5:53
  Ben Whitelaw: I probably wouldn't love it.
• 5:54
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, but you know, it's funny to see such a kind of old, vestige of what, Twitter used to be come up for sale again in such circumstances.
• 6:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, cool.
• 6:05
  Ben Whitelaw: So purchasing power aside, you know, our wishlists we've kind of dealt with today now, but we have a lot of stories that we want to get through.
• 6:14
  Ben Whitelaw: we have some really interesting kind of notable stories that we're going to talk through and explain just as we always do in the podcast.
• 6:22
  Ben Whitelaw: before we do.
• 6:23
  Ben Whitelaw: A request for some help from our listeners.
• 6:26
  Ben Whitelaw: We haven't had a review of the podcast since I think September, 2024, Mike, isn't that tragic?
• 6:34
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 6:35
  Mike Masnick: That's
• 6:36
  Ben Whitelaw: if you don't hate listening to this podcast, let's, let's, let's mix it up a bit.
• 6:41
  Ben Whitelaw: If you don't hate listening to this podcast,
• 6:43
  Mike Masnick: very low bar you're setting there.
• 6:46
  Ben Whitelaw: I know, but it might prompt people to think, actually, this is me.
• 6:49
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, I, I'm somebody that doesn't hate this podcast.
• 6:52
  Ben Whitelaw: mean, maybe I'll spend some time helping Mike and Ben in their quest to have their podcast discovered across all of the platforms on which it is disseminated every week.
• 7:01
  Ben Whitelaw: So if you don't, if you don't hate it, Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get the podcast, leave a little review.
• 7:07
  Ben Whitelaw: It doesn't need to be very long.
• 7:08
  Mike Masnick: yeah, exactly.
• 7:09
  Mike Masnick: And you know, we look at the numbers and we've seen like download numbers increase.
• 7:13
  Mike Masnick: So there's more of you.
• 7:14
  Mike Masnick: There's definitely some of you who weren't listening.
• 7:17
  Mike Masnick: back in September of 2024.
• 7:19
  Mike Masnick: So someone out there must be listening to this and thinking, I have not written a review for controlled speech and I could write a review, like think positively.
• 7:29
  Mike Masnick: You can do it if you're listening to this and you haven't, haven't written, written a review.
• 7:34
  Ben Whitelaw: and we'll give you a shout out next week's podcast if you do you won't we won't shame you and it's not there's there's no shame in submitting a review But we will give you a shout out.
• 7:44
  Ben Whitelaw: there is a risk Mike that some of our Our listeners perhaps are connected to our first story of this week.
• 7:52
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm hoping that every single, download and listen is a real human person who works in the industry.
• 7:57
  Ben Whitelaw: There's a, there's a small chance.
• 7:58
  Ben Whitelaw: There's a few AI generated bots.
• 8:02
  Ben Whitelaw: There's how the internet works.
• 8:04
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm sorry to say it to you.
• 8:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, and the first story from 404 media really goes deep on this idea of.
• 8:11
  Ben Whitelaw: AI slop and content being kind of created as a result of, AI generated, systems and platforms, I got so deep into this, explain, explain what it is, why you picked it and why it's important to our listeners.
• 8:23
  Mike Masnick: yeah, it's I mean, obviously four or four media does such wonderful work, but, this is such a, such a wonderful story kind of laying out everybody's heard about, you know, the rise of AI and AI slop and four or four and in fact has done a lot of reporting in general on.
• 8:38
  Mike Masnick: And the fact that, you know, social media, especially meta properties in particular are sort of filling up with this stuff.
• 8:45
  Mike Masnick: And there's been this like confusion over why and how, but part of what's really interesting to me here is just like, not just How much is getting filled up with, just nonsense AI stuff.
• 8:58
  Mike Masnick: But the fact that there are these people, these, content creators who are basically saying like, we're fighting the algorithm and we're trying to figure out the best way to get the most click throughs.
• 9:10
  Mike Masnick: And the best way to do that is take as many shots on goal as we possibly can.
• 9:14
  Mike Masnick: And AI will just generate a ton of stuff.
• 9:17
  Mike Masnick: We don't have to put work into it.
• 9:18
  Mike Masnick: You look at the really successful content creators like Mr.
• 9:21
  Mike Masnick: Beast or whatever, who spends millions of dollars on every video and then, is able to pay that off because he gets tons and tons of views.
• 9:30
  Mike Masnick: But these guys are saying like that space is too expensive.
• 9:34
  Mike Masnick: There's too much capital costs up front to get there.
• 9:36
  Mike Masnick: And it's too competitive.
• 9:38
  Mike Masnick: And so the better thing to do is just use this.
• 9:40
  Mike Masnick: bullshit generator engine to generate as much bullshit as possible, put it all out there.
• 9:46
  Mike Masnick: If stuff doesn't work, it's no loss to us because it doesn't cost us anything.
• 9:50
  Mike Masnick: And therefore let's just get it out there.
• 9:52
  Mike Masnick: until we find something that, that hits.
• 9:54
  Mike Masnick: And so now you have a whole bunch of people doing that.
• 9:57
  Mike Masnick: And so that's sort of like the motivating engine behind a lot of this is this idea that, well, we need to get attention and the best way to get that attention is just to.
• 10:07
  Mike Masnick: Try as many things as possible and see what actually clicks.
• 10:10
  Mike Masnick: And then some of these guys are like teaching other people how to use a AI slop, and that's becoming like a, you just have this whole ecosystem of nonsense.
• 10:21
  Mike Masnick: Which is all about trying to game the algorithm.
• 10:24
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 10:24
  Ben Whitelaw: The, the bit that I really like about this piece is the comparisons to a kind of brute force attack, which is obviously a kind of cybersecurity term, you'll know more about it than me, but like talk us through like why AI slop is, is kind of like a brute force attack.
• 10:39
  Mike Masnick: right.
• 10:39
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it's just a question of like trying to get through.
• 10:41
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 10:42
  Mike Masnick: And so like a normal brute force attack is like, the simplest version of a brute force attack is like trying to guess a password or something.
• 10:49
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 10:49
  Mike Masnick: And so you just will generate as many random, not random, but you know, passwords that might get into an account, or if you're like looking for, some other way into a website, you'll go through like, Scrape the entire thing and try and find like every possible way in.
• 11:05
  Mike Masnick: It's just like trying as many things as possible.
• 11:07
  Mike Masnick: It's not very sophisticated.
• 11:08
  Mike Masnick: It's, you know, it's brute as it says on the tin.
• 11:12
  Mike Masnick: but this is that for the algorithm and, the thing that it, kind of reminds me of in a lot of ways is when Google came along, there were other search engines the 1990s and the rise of the web and, you know, none of the search engines were that good.
• 11:26
  Mike Masnick: And then Google sort of solved search by using this page rank system.
• 11:31
  Mike Masnick: And they said, you know, we have this system to actually make sure that the best stuff gets to the top.
• 11:34
  Mike Masnick: And the way it was originally done was based on how many links with the idea that things would only get links if, if they were good.
• 11:41
  Mike Masnick: but pretty quickly people figured out like, Oh, here's an algorithm that we can gain to our advantage is more people go to Google to figure out where to go if we can just get more links and then became this whole, crazy race and one upping each other of, search engine optimization and often.
• 11:59
  Mike Masnick: what's sometimes referred to as black hat methods, sort of, sneaky methods to try and get around it.
• 12:03
  Mike Masnick: I mean, not a day goes by when I don't get emails from Spammers asking to pay me to put links on TechDirt because TechDirt has, you know, a strong reputation within Google and they, offer me money to put links because they want those links to game the system.
• 12:21
  Ben Whitelaw: but you know you could use that money to buy more time.
• 12:26
  Mike Masnick: I thought you were going to say to buy the Twitter site.
• 12:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Oh yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 12:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Either one will do.
• 12:33
  Mike Masnick: I will say I every once in a while, when I'm really like in a cynical mood, I will respond to one of those, guys and say, sure, it's a hundred million dollars.
• 12:41
  Mike Masnick: and I've usually they disappear after that.
• 12:43
  Mike Masnick: occasionally I've had one come back and be like, no, what's the real number?
• 12:46
  Mike Masnick: And I'm like a hundred million dollars.
• 12:47
  Mike Masnick: I'm not.
• 12:48
  Mike Masnick: Joking about this.
• 12:49
  Mike Masnick: Like if I'm going to destroy the reputation and value of my site, I might as well get paid for real, you know, not, not whatever they're offering.
• 12:57
  Mike Masnick: They're always offering like a hundred bucks or something
• 12:59
  Ben Whitelaw: Right, yeah,
• 13:00
  Mike Masnick: you know, but every system gets gamed and it's just that in the past, like gaming, social media algorithms was, Tricky, right?
• 13:08
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you had to put in the work, which is what they're saying with, like, the successful ones, like, you know, there's some inexpensive YouTube channels or, Instagram things that have been successful, but, the really successful ones are a little bit more produced.
• 13:20
  Mike Masnick: And so what the AI is enabling them to do is to, like, make it cheaper to game the system.
• 13:27
  Mike Masnick: So now everybody's doing that.
• 13:29
  Mike Masnick: so to me, it sort of then becomes this arms race, you know, we saw this with Google and like at some point, in the sort of mid to early 2000s, Google completely revamped their ranking algorithm because they knew that they had so much search spam and they referred to it as search spam, that was clogging up the results and making the experience worse.
• 13:49
  Mike Masnick: And so they completely redid the algorithm, some companies that have sort of been built up around.
• 13:54
  Mike Masnick: Search spam got destroyed by it.
• 13:57
  Mike Masnick: And there was like the big shakeout.
• 13:59
  Mike Masnick: I'm guessing we're going to have to see something similar happen in the social media space.
• 14:04
  Mike Masnick: and that, there's gotta be some way that meta in particular, YouTube, to some extent have to figure out how to deal with this stuff.
• 14:14
  Mike Masnick: And whether or not people actually want this content, because I think, yeah, like people are clicking on some of it, but then I think people are getting annoyed or, or like people are clicking on it because of the novelty.
• 14:23
  Mike Masnick: And like, why am I seeing this nonsense?
• 14:25
  Mike Masnick: You know?
• 14:25
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah.
• 14:26
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean.
• 14:27
  Ben Whitelaw: To kind of emphasize the point and what the piece does really well, it's just emphasize the insanity of some of this content.
• 14:33
  Mike Masnick: yeah,
• 14:33
  Ben Whitelaw: It's bonkers, isn't it?
• 14:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Like there's, there's crazy stuff, like there's like giraffes eating people and spawning on subway platforms.
• 14:43
  Ben Whitelaw: There's like, it's, it's almost.
• 14:46
  Ben Whitelaw: bonkers.
• 14:46
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, there's like grannies kissing llamas and there's like heads appearing out of sharks and models sitting on the street of markets being fed food by like market traders.
• 15:00
  Ben Whitelaw: There's a man with, I can't even explain how crazy it is.
• 15:03
  Ben Whitelaw: but the weird thing is it's kind of watchable.
• 15:06
  Mike Masnick: yes.
• 15:06
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 15:07
  Ben Whitelaw: You kind of like, can't look away, which obviously is, why that content gets recommended to other people because people.
• 15:12
  Ben Whitelaw: are engaging with it to some degree.
• 15:14
  Ben Whitelaw: the thing that I, you talked about the kind of speed with which this has happened, Mike, it took, years for people to figure out how to game Google and to an extent game other social platforms.
• 15:26
  Ben Whitelaw: The speed with which this has happened is, I think what's Shocking to me, and I wondered like, if this is about the shift from social platforms that are based on following other people and then the shift of people being grouped into cohorts or segments and just being served content because.
• 15:43
  Ben Whitelaw: That shift means that AI slop can kind of proliferate, right?
• 15:47
  Ben Whitelaw: if this stuff had happened back in the day and you were following somebody on Twitter and they started sharing insane videos of a, of a man, you know, a pizza dough man, rolling out his own stomach.
• 15:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Which is one of the ones in the, the, in the 404 article, if somebody did that, you would unfollow them or, you know, you would, you have the option to opt out of that.
• 16:09
  Ben Whitelaw: You don't have that option when you're on Tik Tok or whether you're on reels on Instagram, when you're just serve this ongoing fire hose of posts.
• 16:17
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 16:17
  Mike Masnick: I mean,
• 16:17
  Ben Whitelaw: that what's changed?
• 16:19
  Mike Masnick: I think, yeah, it gets to this issue of like how social media for the most part, not entirely obviously, but for the most part switched from this thing that it was, the people that you followed, which then led to, the rise of the algorithmic feed and the algorithmic feed originally on social media was designed to sort of highlight it.
• 16:37
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 16:37
  Mike Masnick: The content from the people that you followed that would be most relevant to you because otherwise it was just, undifferentiated from people you follow you, but you would miss stuff.
• 16:46
  Mike Masnick: And so it was an attempt to do that.
• 16:48
  Mike Masnick: The big shift then was to go beyond that to the.
• 16:52
  Mike Masnick: sort of TikTok style for you page, which was beyond the stuff that you were directly following, having that algorithm try to pull in other stuff.
• 17:01
  Mike Masnick: And you can understand where there's like some element of value there, because like, maybe you don't know about some other people, but then that has introduced this thing where now it's entirely the algorithm.
• 17:11
  Mike Masnick: And so where the shift is, that it went from you saying who you want to follow being the signal for the kind of content you wanted to now the algorithm beginning to take on not just that as the signal, but also what things are you watching and then what might similar people want to watch.
• 17:30
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 17:30
  Mike Masnick: And so you have this, the concept of cohorts and everything like that.
• 17:33
  Mike Masnick: Whereas then you could opt out of following certain people.
• 17:36
  Mike Masnick: You can't opt out of your cohort that they sort of built for you.
• 17:40
  Mike Masnick: And that makes for a very.
• 17:42
  Mike Masnick: different experience.
• 17:43
  Mike Masnick: And so I, I mentioned this to you before the podcast.
• 17:46
  Mike Masnick: I just yesterday as we're recording this, I just interviewed Chris Hayes, who's the, cable news, journalist, really interesting guy who just came out with this book called the siren's call, which is all about how our world is now based on attention and fighting for attention, and business models built on attention.
• 18:04
  Mike Masnick: And I think all that plays into this.
• 18:06
  Mike Masnick: that interview will be on the tech dirt podcast soon.
• 18:10
  Mike Masnick: maybe next week we got to figure out which, which thing is rolling out when, but probably next week, but we had a really interesting discussion about this very thing and, how algorithms have sort of taken over our lives.
• 18:23
  Mike Masnick: Um, But, you know, one of the things that, we really tried to explore in that conversation, which went, I thought, thought went pretty deep was this idea that algorithms, like a lot of people right now want to blame the algorithms.
• 18:35
  Mike Masnick: And so I think it's really easy to look at this 404 story and say, like, this is the algorithms fault.
• 18:39
  Mike Masnick: Right?
• 18:40
  Mike Masnick: Like, oh, you know, algorithm stage.
• 18:41
  Mike Masnick: And you sort of, I'm not saying you did that, but you're, you're saying, we've switched from this thing where it was the people you follow to the algorithms.
• 18:47
  Mike Masnick: And that leads some people say, well, you know, the answer that then has to be like outlaw the algorithms or require you to have like a following feed or whatever.
• 18:54
  Mike Masnick: You know, what we've seen is that users don't actually really like that.
• 18:59
  Mike Masnick: Like the pure following feed doesn't work as well as like a good algorithmic feed.
• 19:03
  Mike Masnick: The issue to me And this is a lot of what I explored with Chris is who controls the algorithm and for what purpose, not so much the existence of the algorithm themselves.
• 19:13
  Mike Masnick: And as I said, like the early point of the algorithms was good.
• 19:16
  Mike Masnick: it was to sort of highlight the content that would be more valuable to you and would be more useful to you in the same way that like the success of Google early on was that it found stuff that you were searching for that was better and more useful.
• 19:28
  Mike Masnick: It's just the problem is that then people start to game it and then it becomes this, ongoing back and forth.
• 19:33
  Mike Masnick: And that's where the problem then comes in is whose incentives, you know, you're dealing with a bunch of different incentives.
• 19:39
  Mike Masnick: You have the company's incentives, they're trying to make money.
• 19:42
  Mike Masnick: You have the people who are trying to game the system.
• 19:44
  Mike Masnick: They're trying to make money.
• 19:45
  Mike Masnick: And then you just have like little old you who just is trying to find interesting information.
• 19:49
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and you're just kind of like at the.
• 19:52
  Mike Masnick: the whims of all this other stuff, but if you had more control over that algorithm, right?
• 19:57
  Mike Masnick: So, I mean, you were saying before, like it was people you were following that, that is still an algorithm, but it was one that you had control over.
• 20:04
  Mike Masnick: So you could remove someone.
• 20:06
  Mike Masnick: And so the thing to me that I keep coming back to is like, the real issue is who controls the algorithm.
• 20:11
  Mike Masnick: And what their intent is.
• 20:13
  Mike Masnick: So when it's a company that's just trying to keep you engaged or trying to sell you stuff or trying to, really sell your attention to advertisers, which is the way that most of these companies work right now, then their incentive is misaligned with you.
• 20:25
  Mike Masnick: That leads to the sort of insidification.
• 20:27
  Mike Masnick: And so that fits in neatly with then a bunch of, crazy people with access to these AI tools who can just pump out.
• 20:34
  Mike Masnick: so much slop and just throw it into the system.
• 20:37
  Mike Masnick: Doesn't matter to them if it, doesn't work because all the incentives are messed up for the users.
• 20:43
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 20:44
  Ben Whitelaw: so what you're saying is kind of the, the algorithms have algorithms as a term have been kind of associated with very centralized platforms, the ones that we've used for, over a decade now, but what you're saying is actually, if those algorithms are, controlled by users and there are dials and levers and you can tweak them, then actually the algorithms themselves on the issue, that makes sense.
• 21:03
  Ben Whitelaw: the kind of issue that I was wondering about was like something you touched on is when is the course correction going to happen?
• 21:10
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, when our platform is going to limit the visibility of this kind of AI content, do you think they have incentives to do so?
• 21:18
  Ben Whitelaw: And where does labeling fit into this?
• 21:20
  Ben Whitelaw: Because I remember last year around this time, Meta, which is where 404 Media focused much of its reporting in this piece, came out and said, we're going to label AI content, we're going to be able to detect, yeah, they said.
• 21:34
  Ben Whitelaw: We've got this covered.
• 21:35
  Ben Whitelaw: Don't worry about the rise of AI content.
• 21:38
  Ben Whitelaw: we're going to detect the signals, we're going to it's clearly labeled to users that this is AI generated content, and we're going to, we're work with other platforms and other partners, going to kind of.
• 21:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Embed ourselves into some of those existing initiatives.
• 21:51
  Ben Whitelaw: There's one called, C2PA, which has got a lot of the platforms signed up.
• 21:55
  Ben Whitelaw: And the suggestion was that they were going to make it very easy for us to kind of opt out of that content or for that content to be kind of downgraded if it was less quality.
• 22:02
  Ben Whitelaw: It doesn't feel like that's happening.
• 22:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, do you think it will?
• 22:05
  Ben Whitelaw: It goes back to incentives.
• 22:08
  Mike Masnick: yeah, it's a good question, right?
• 22:09
  Mike Masnick: I mean, Mark Zuckerberg seems to have this view that like AI content is actually a good thing for the platform.
• 22:15
  Mike Masnick: uh, he's making sort of a bet on that and he sort of talked about that.
• 22:17
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 22:17
  Mike Masnick: And they've talked about, building their own, like, AI generated users on social media that could interact.
• 22:23
  Mike Masnick: And we've talked about that in the past.
• 22:24
  Mike Masnick: and so.
• 22:25
  Mike Masnick: I think, his view and therefore the company's view is whatever keeps people coming back and using the platform is good.
• 22:34
  Mike Masnick: I do wonder how successful this could be long term, right?
• 22:37
  Mike Masnick: You know, if you're just getting all this garbage content, like sure, it is entertaining and amusing.
• 22:43
  Mike Masnick: the first few times, like, you know, check this shit out basically, but after a certain point, you have to be like, you know, come on, why am I spending all my time looking at this when I could have more sort of realistic engagement somewhere else.
• 22:56
  Mike Masnick: And so don't think this works long term.
• 22:59
  Mike Masnick: I sort of feel.
• 23:00
  Mike Masnick: If anything, the most likely scenario is that it follows the path that, Google followed at the time where they suddenly decided, okay, we need to crack down on this.
• 23:09
  Mike Masnick: And then it becomes a big project and they come up with some system to crack down on it.
• 23:13
  Mike Masnick: and that only lasts for so long.
• 23:14
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think a lot of people would argue.
• 23:16
  Mike Masnick: Probably correctly today.
• 23:18
  Mike Masnick: Like Google is, a bunch of garbage again.
• 23:20
  Mike Masnick: And, and the search engine optimizers have really won.
• 23:23
  Mike Masnick: and Google has made a lot of really bad decisions that have really sort of insidified the results some cases.
• 23:29
  Mike Masnick: know, it's a constant struggle and a constant battle, and you hope that they'll, reach the point that they'll fix it.
• 23:34
  Mike Masnick: But I sort of feel that meta in particular is going to have to realize that this, this kind of content is not a longterm sustainable success, especially as there are more and more alternatives that are sort of trying to take a different approach and, you know, one of the things that.
• 23:48
  Mike Masnick: And this is another thing that came up in the conversation that Chris and I had, which is that more and more people seem to be moving away from social media platforms like this to like group chats where there is no algorithm and it's much more authentic and you're able to engage and the feeling of fun that people had In the early MySpace, Facebook, Twitter years, people seem to be getting that feeling more from group chats than they are from global social media.
• 24:18
  Mike Masnick: And it's because you have all this other stuff sort of crowding their way into social media.
• 24:23
  Mike Masnick: And I think, there's gonna have to be a reckoning of some sort by meta, with that.
• 24:28
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 24:29
  Ben Whitelaw: So you're right.
• 24:29
  Ben Whitelaw: it could be that users vote with their feet and say, actually we want to spend more time elsewhere, but it could also be that regulation, dictates, and the government's dictate actually what content should be labeled as AI slop or otherwise, and you found a couple of stories that relate to that this week.
• 24:46
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 24:46
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 24:47
  Mike Masnick: And so this was interesting where, Spain announced that they were, I'm going to change the law so that there would be finding companies, for platforms if they don't label AI generated content.
• 24:58
  Mike Masnick: And then there's another one saying China is doing the same thing.
• 25:01
  Mike Masnick: And so there is this part of me that thinks, as I often do, like if Western countries are doing the same thing that China is doing.
• 25:10
  Mike Masnick: maybe think about that for, for a second.
• 25:12
  Mike Masnick: It's funny, the, the article, the one on China is from Bloomberg, and it, has the lead of.
• 25:17
  Mike Masnick: China joined the EU and U S and rolling out new regulations to control disinformation by requiring labeling of synthetic content online.
• 25:24
  Mike Masnick: And I was like, what are they talking about regarding the U S?
• 25:27
  Mike Masnick: Because we don't have a regulation requiring that at all.
• 25:30
  Mike Masnick: So I think reporting on this is a little bit confused.
• 25:33
  Mike Masnick: The Spain one.
• 25:34
  Mike Masnick: It was just from Reuters is interesting where they're saying they have this new bill that will impose massive fines on companies that use content generated by AI without properly labeling it as such.
• 25:45
  Mike Masnick: And you understand the thinking behind it, the.
• 25:50
  Mike Masnick: Chinese approach, like it's pretty clear that that law is designed to like stifle certain kinds of speech and use AI labeling as an excuse.
• 25:59
  Mike Masnick: the Spanish law I think is, is meant in, good faith cause they're scared about deep fakes, but I find these approaches also to be kind of silly and probably ineffective in part because like, where do you draw the line, right?
• 26:12
  Mike Masnick: I mean, everybody who's doing content creation these days uses AI tools in some form or another at some point.
• 26:18
  Mike Masnick: Okay, maybe not everyone, but a large percentage, right?
• 26:20
  Mike Masnick: So, if you're writing and you're using, like, Grammarly to check your grammar, that is an AI tool.
• 26:26
  Mike Masnick: Do you need to label it that it, told you you had a typo?
• 26:30
  Mike Masnick: Or maybe it suggested, you know, not ending a sentence in a preposition, right?
• 26:34
  Mike Masnick: Is that now AI generated?
• 26:36
  Mike Masnick: You know, I think most people would say no, but then that raises the question of where is the line?
• 26:41
  Mike Masnick: But same thing with like, Images and videos like if you're touching up an image if you're, Changing a video if you're editing something a lot of those tools are really AI.
• 26:51
  Mike Masnick: So where do you draw the line?
• 26:53
  Mike Masnick: between what needs to be labeled and what doesn't it feels like this is the kind of thing, this is my complaint with lots of regulations where it's like, okay, I see this thing, it is a problem.
• 27:03
  Mike Masnick: Therefore, let's just outlaw it without thinking through like, does that really make sense?
• 27:08
  Mike Masnick: Is that really targeting the thing or are you wiping out a whole bunch of other useful stuff with it?
• 27:13
  Ben Whitelaw: I think the line is pizza men rolling out their own stomach.
• 27:19
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that's for me.
• 27:20
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 27:21
  Mike Masnick: How?
• 27:21
  Mike Masnick: How do you write that into law though?
• 27:23
  Ben Whitelaw: easy, easy.
• 27:25
  Ben Whitelaw: No, I, I
• 27:26
  Mike Masnick: Just ask Ben.
• 27:28
  Mike Masnick: Ben is the decider.
• 27:29
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah.
• 27:29
  Ben Whitelaw: Once you, once you see it, you know, lemme tell you that I will, I will say that.
• 27:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Um.
• 27:34
  Ben Whitelaw: I've been thinking a lot about like what the terms we use to refer to content on social media platforms in the age of AI slop.
• 27:42
  Ben Whitelaw: And I wonder if we can, I'm going to use this opportunity to pitch you, Mike, a change in terminology.
• 27:47
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, we've been using the word feed for, as long as social media has been around.
• 27:53
  Ben Whitelaw: think it's time to end the use of feed.
• 27:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Now that we are consuming all this AI slop, I'm thinking we use the word trough.
• 28:01
  Ben Whitelaw: I think we, you know, we, I'm going to, we can say, I'm going to the trough to consume my news.
• 28:08
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm going to open my, you know, my app and go to my favorite trough.
• 28:14
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that's kind of a fitting of what, where we're going with, content on the internet.
• 28:18
  Ben Whitelaw: And we can all, you know, like little pigs around a trough, just consume all the, crazy images of pizza dough men and insane, human seals and whatever else AI generators have got for us.
• 28:29
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 28:30
  Mike Masnick: So, so Ben, just for you, I'm going to use an AI generator to generate a picture of pigs around a trough with, with social media content flowing through the trough.
• 28:39
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 28:40
  Mike Masnick: So I think, I think that's going to work.
• 28:41
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 28:42
  Ben Whitelaw: Coming to a platform near you.
• 28:43
  Mike Masnick: There you go.
• 28:44
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, okay.
• 28:45
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, we went a bit mad there, Mike, but I think that's a fascinating story.
• 28:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Do go and read that 404 media piece.
• 28:52
  Ben Whitelaw: We'll include it in the show notes.
• 28:54
  Ben Whitelaw: our next story is one that we've touched on a lot since the start of the year.
• 28:58
  Ben Whitelaw: It's big old question of what matters doing now that it's not fact checking.
• 29:04
  Ben Whitelaw: And many of you listeners will have seen this week that the company has announced that it's rolling out its community notes function.
• 29:12
  Ben Whitelaw: it's decided that this is the way forward.
• 29:14
  Ben Whitelaw: It's starting to test it with around 200, 000 people that have signed up.
• 29:18
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's some interesting details in there, Mike, in the, press release this week that I wanted to kind of talk a bit about and get your thoughts on basically the trial, the beta.
• 29:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, it's in six languages.
• 29:29
  Ben Whitelaw: It's only focused in the U S but it's covering six different languages.
• 29:32
  Ben Whitelaw: And, what's going to happen is that people are going to start to see the community notes underneath particular posts, and they're gonna be able to contribute to them.
• 29:40
  Ben Whitelaw: So if you're one of the 200, 000 that signed up, you're going to be able to, give your thoughts.
• 29:45
  Ben Whitelaw: Every community note is going to be 500.
• 29:47
  Ben Whitelaw: Characters has to include a link and, the community notes will be kind of, I think, validated and rolled out over time.
• 29:53
  Ben Whitelaw: And then fact checking will be scaled back.
• 29:55
  Ben Whitelaw: That's what the blog post says.
• 29:57
  Ben Whitelaw: really interestingly, the very end of the, press release, it says that the community notes are, it's just in the U S right now, but there's a plan for it to be.
• 30:06
  Ben Whitelaw: All over the world, there's a global domination, in aspects to the community note.
• 30:11
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's just the U S now, but there's clearly plans to do, it beyond that.
• 30:15
  Ben Whitelaw: And I think there's a couple of really interesting points to this month that for me, there's, the missed opportunity.
• 30:21
  Ben Whitelaw: And then there is the fact that they've somehow bungled this, that it's even worse than X's community notes.
• 30:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay, so I didn't realize this.
• 30:29
  Ben Whitelaw: did you know that when community notes are applied on X on Twitter, that actually it doesn't affect the distribution of that post?
• 30:38
  Ben Whitelaw: Did did you know about this properly?
• 30:40
  Mike Masnick: think I had heard that.
• 30:41
  Mike Masnick: I think I kind of knew that, but I hadn't thought deeply about it.
• 30:46
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 30:46
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, so Facebook is Meta is copying X Twitter in a number of different ways.
• 30:52
  Ben Whitelaw: It's using the open source code Twitter X has been putting out into the ether.
• 30:57
  Ben Whitelaw: It's taking a similar broad approach, but it's It's also deciding not to downrank posts that have, community notes that, contrast to the post itself.
• 31:06
  Ben Whitelaw: So, and I'm just thinking that's a clear missed opportunity.
• 31:09
  Ben Whitelaw: What, is the point of getting people to, input on a post and, have the process that goes on behind the scenes on a community notes post where you have people from different parts of the political spectrum inputting and potentially disagreeing, and then showing that community notes, if you're not going to then take.
• 31:25
  Ben Whitelaw: I kind of view on the distribution that seems like a mistake to me, or, you know, a decision, at least the matter is taking, in the way it's doing community notes.
• 31:35
  Ben Whitelaw: So I I take umbrage with that.
• 31:37
  Ben Whitelaw: Then there's also the fact that at least on X, there are community notes on ads.
• 31:41
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, some of the best community notes have been on random ads on the platform where it's calling out gambling companies for, crazy claims or, really low quality e commerce sites for, the bonkers stuff that they sell.
• 31:56
  Ben Whitelaw: And you get some kind of funny, interesting community notes.
• 31:59
  Ben Whitelaw: They're the ones I've seen the most, at least.
• 32:01
  Ben Whitelaw: Meta is deciding not to do that on its ads.
• 32:05
  Ben Whitelaw: And clearly, there's a kind of commercial imperative or incentive do that, but I'm like, that's another big missed opportunity.
• 32:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Like at least, you're going to take a lot of the broad approach of Twitter and X, at least do the kind of coverage of community notes that Twitter has.
• 32:21
  Ben Whitelaw: So Casey Newton on platform has written a bit about this as well.
• 32:25
  Ben Whitelaw: This week, he says that it's, flawed approach.
• 32:28
  Ben Whitelaw: It's unclear how it's going to affect the experience of people on platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp Facebook.
• 32:36
  Ben Whitelaw: But from the press release alone, you can see that there's, there's not been as much thought put into this as there could have been.
• 32:41
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, there's a question of how much thought went into all of this.
• 32:45
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 32:46
  Mike Masnick: I mean, the, the sort of the entire new approach, right.
• 32:48
  Mike Masnick: I mean, a lot of it really felt like Zuckerberg just sort of giving up on content moderation generally, and just being sick of it just not wanting to deal with it and sort of saying, well, you know, people seem to like community notes, so let's just go with that.
• 33:01
  Mike Masnick: and in fact, you know, just the fact that they're using the same code, which itself was based off of other open source code, is kind of interesting.
• 33:10
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 33:10
  Ben Whitelaw: This is what happens when I engage in ideas and good faith, Mike.
• 33:15
  Ben Whitelaw: You're right.
• 33:15
  Ben Whitelaw: this whole U turn was never, was never done for good reasons or for better outcomes.
• 33:20
  Mike Masnick: So, yeah, I don't know that necessarily.
• 33:22
  Mike Masnick: I like trying to.
• 33:23
  Mike Masnick: parse out, like, why exactly are they doing it this way?
• 33:26
  Mike Masnick: I'm not sure that there's a good answer for that.
• 33:29
  Mike Masnick: You know, I think also like just the fact that, on X, the fact that community notes does apply to ads may be a legacy issue as well.
• 33:37
  Mike Masnick: And that, ads on X were based on just taking tweet and promoting it.
• 33:42
  Mike Masnick: And therefore, you know, probably separating out that code, the community notes originally birdwatch code from those tweets.
• 33:50
  Mike Masnick: Probably was more difficult than it was worth.
• 33:52
  Mike Masnick: And so people were like, let's just leave it.
• 33:54
  Mike Masnick: And then, Musk fired everybody anyway.
• 33:56
  Mike Masnick: So there's like nobody to actually do that.
• 33:58
  Mike Masnick: I think if it became a big enough issue, they would probably remove it too.
• 34:02
  Ben Whitelaw: um,
• 34:02
  Mike Masnick: whereas meta is much more of an ads focused business, you know, that is their, business.
• 34:07
  Mike Masnick: And so I'm sure they were much more conscious how that would play.
• 34:10
  Mike Masnick: And also their ad system is a little bit different, and a little bit more evolved.
• 34:13
  Mike Masnick: And so I sort of understand probably the way that came down, but yeah, it does sort of give you a suggestion of like, this is not really about, you know, the whole sort of embrace of community notes was Zuckerberg to say like, here's a solution.
• 34:27
  Mike Masnick: It's like power to the people nonsense allows him to say something that is not entirely like we're turning off all of our moderation,
• 34:34
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah,
• 34:35
  Mike Masnick: and then, you know, sort of just hoping for the best.
• 34:38
  Mike Masnick: so, you know, the fact that it's not, floating back to the, the recommendation algorithm, interesting, I mean, it sort of goes into our, our first story and the AI slop, are there going to be community notes on the AI slop?
• 34:49
  Mike Masnick: That'll be interesting to see what happens there.
• 34:52
  Mike Masnick: And so I could see, there are arguments for having that play into the algorithm or not.
• 34:57
  Mike Masnick: You know, one of the arguments against it is like, if it does impact the distribution algorithm, then you're giving more incentives for people to game the community notes.
• 35:05
  Mike Masnick: And community notes, again, is designed to be resistant to gaming.
• 35:09
  Mike Masnick: It's actually very clever in terms of the way it is set up and the sort of consensus mechanisms that are built into it.
• 35:15
  Mike Masnick: But.
• 35:16
  Mike Masnick: That doesn't mean it's impossible to game.
• 35:18
  Mike Masnick: And so if you were to put it into the distribution part of the queue, that would create larger attack surface that people would go after.
• 35:26
  Mike Masnick: And then you would see brute force attempts on the community notes feature.
• 35:31
  Ben Whitelaw: that's a theme already of the, of the podcast.
• 35:33
  Ben Whitelaw: I actually went to look at what the eligibility criteria is for users on X who want to sign up as, contributors to community notes.
• 35:43
  Ben Whitelaw: Meta have said, you need to have an account for six months before you can join the program really aptly.
• 35:50
  Ben Whitelaw: if you go to the page on x.
• 35:52
  Ben Whitelaw: com that says become part of the community of reviewers, you get this 404, cannot access.
• 36:00
  Ben Whitelaw: basically it's broken, right?
• 36:03
  Mike Masnick: Well, it's, it does tell you the eligibility requirements, which are also the six months and a verified phone number, but then wait a second.
• 36:11
  Mike Masnick: Oh, not anymore.
• 36:13
  Mike Masnick: So we checked, we checked this right before you can check now, Ben, but you had me check right before we started recording and I got the 404 page and an error.
• 36:22
  Mike Masnick: And I just went again to click to open it again because I wanted to read the exact error message and now it is showing me a button to join community notes.
• 36:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Oh, okay.
• 36:32
  Ben Whitelaw: So somebody has been listening into a pre pre podcast preparation.
• 36:37
  Mike Masnick: There was definitely an error before
• 36:40
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 36:41
  Mike Masnick: because you sent it to me and I clicked on it and I got the error message and now I'm like, okay, so here's what it is.
• 36:48
  Mike Masnick: if I go directly to the link that you sent me, I get the error message and it says, oops, something went wrong.
• 36:54
  Mike Masnick: Please try again later.
• 36:56
  Mike Masnick: if I follow the, flow through reading the rules and then click to go, it does give me the chance to join community notes.
• 37:04
  Mike Masnick: And I'm actually going to click this button.
• 37:05
  Mike Masnick: I have no idea what is going to happen.
• 37:08
  Ben Whitelaw: do you know what it is, Mike?
• 37:09
  Ben Whitelaw: think it's the twitter.
• 37:11
  Ben Whitelaw: com versus the x.
• 37:12
  Ben Whitelaw: com.
• 37:13
  Mike Masnick: It could be.
• 37:14
  Ben Whitelaw: So I think that there's a page on the community notes, help center article that directs to a old URL.
• 37:24
  Ben Whitelaw: That's twitter.
• 37:25
  Ben Whitelaw: com forward slash flow forward slash join birdwatch.
• 37:29
  Ben Whitelaw: And that clearly is an old URL.
• 37:32
  Mike Masnick: Well, I do not, I have now found out I do not qualify to join Community Notes.
• 37:37
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I thought that,
• 37:38
  Mike Masnick: It does, it says, so there, there are five categories and I have checks on four of them, but I am rejected because my phone carrier is not trusted.
• 37:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Oh,
• 37:51
  Mike Masnick: So I have no recent rules violations.
• 37:53
  Mike Masnick: I joined at least six months ago.
• 37:54
  Mike Masnick: I have a verified phone number, which I probably should remove.
• 37:58
  Mike Masnick: Uh, And I'm not associated with any other community notes account.
• 38:03
  Mike Masnick: They do not trust my phone carrier.
• 38:06
  Ben Whitelaw: interesting.
• 38:07
  Mike Masnick: I am, blocked from joining community
• 38:09
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, we are all worse off for that because I'm sure you would have left some very good community notes.
• 38:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, Sorry, sorry to say that this is embarrassing for you to be recorded, isn't it?
• 38:20
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, a man of your standing being denied, it's a blow.
• 38:26
  Mike Masnick: I would expect nothing less, I would expect nothing less.
• 38:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, well, fingers
• 38:32
  Mike Masnick: I will say Meta did pop up a thing inviting me to join their community notes.
• 38:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Oh, are you in?
• 38:37
  Mike Masnick: and I clicked and I said, okay, and then it said, we'll, we'll let you know more.
• 38:41
  Mike Masnick: And I haven't heard anything more.
• 38:43
  Ben Whitelaw: probably won't hear back if,
• 38:44
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I might, I might not.
• 38:45
  Ben Whitelaw: if Twitter's anything to go by.
• 38:47
  Mike Masnick: I may get a notice that my, phone is not trustworthy.
• 38:51
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, indeed.
• 38:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Great.
• 38:53
  Ben Whitelaw: So there were our two kind of big stories that we selected.
• 38:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Obviously we, go a bit deeper on, the chunky, interesting stories that we feel merit most discussion this week might, but there's also third story this week that we both touched on.
• 39:06
  Ben Whitelaw: you know, happy online safety act week.
• 39:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh,
• 39:09
  Mike Masnick: To all who celebrate,
• 39:11
  Ben Whitelaw: to all who celebrate, you know, other, you know, regulatory.
• 39:14
  Ben Whitelaw: acts are available.
• 39:15
  Ben Whitelaw: So on Monday, the OSA in the UK came into force.
• 39:20
  Mike Masnick: I'm almost surprised we're allowed to talk, Ben.
• 39:22
  Mike Masnick: You're in the UK and, and I don't know our podcast recording doesn't violate the online safety act.
• 39:30
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, if, a lot of the coverage is anything to go by this week, then you would think so you would think so there's been a whole tranche of op eds and reports about what the duties are of the OSA.
• 39:42
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, we've touched on it a bunch of times, but this is the UK's.
• 39:46
  Ben Whitelaw: long in the making regulation about, platforms and intermediaries having to remove illegal content and reduce the risk of, UK users on the platform, if they don't, you're liable for an 18 million pound fine.
• 39:59
  Ben Whitelaw: Or 10 percent of the global revenue, whatever's greater that old chestnut that we've seen from other regulations.
• 40:05
  Ben Whitelaw: And we've touched on the OSA Mike in recent weeks, because a number of smaller sites and forums and communities have started to talk about the fact that they're nervous about whether they going to be caught up in, in the OSA.
• 40:17
  Ben Whitelaw: And.
• 40:18
  Ben Whitelaw: we've seen a couple more this week.
• 40:20
  Ben Whitelaw: my favorite was, uh, a website called lemme dot zip.
• 40:24
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't know if you came across this finish.
• 40:26
  Ben Whitelaw: It's a Finnish news aggregator kind of decentralized, platform, quite kind of quirky texts only.
• 40:33
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's got a very long and quite scathing.
• 40:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Review of the OSA in which it says, the act does not meaningfully protect users, the Ofcom, the regulator of the act has demonstrated a lack of technical understanding when drafting and enforcing these rules, very, very kind of.
• 40:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Pointed in its, criticism of the act continues a lot of, what we've seen in red and, but found a really interesting counterpoint to that Mike, which is a, a forum that you found is taking a different tact.
• 41:04
  Ben Whitelaw: It's going a different way.
• 41:06
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 41:06
  Mike Masnick: and so, you know, there are a number of different forms that are sort of reacting different ways.
• 41:10
  Mike Masnick: So one that, that I had seen was from lobsters.
• 41:14
  Mike Masnick: dot RS.
• 41:15
  Mike Masnick: The lobsters part is dot RS at the end.
• 41:17
  Mike Masnick: and it's sort of a techie focused forum.
• 41:19
  Mike Masnick: It's been around for a while.
• 41:21
  Mike Masnick: They had announced way back when that they were planning to block UK users, the founder of it, just, you know, explain that it would be effectively impossible.
• 41:30
  Mike Masnick: And then this week in the lead up to this, they announced that they had.
• 41:36
  Mike Masnick: Disabled the geo block.
• 41:37
  Mike Masnick: They were going to geo block UK users, but they had disabled and they wrote this very long and kind of interesting analysis of it where, I mean, there are a few different interesting elements to it to me where they said, basically, we're going to do this in part because we don't think they're, they're based somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
• 41:54
  Ben Whitelaw: Mm hmm.
• 41:55
  Mike Masnick: they're based in Oregon.
• 41:56
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, have no connection to the UK.
• 41:59
  Mike Masnick: And even though the online safety act claims to, cover every internet site that is accessible in the UK, part of what this guy is claiming is that, have no jurisdiction over me and, I doubt they're going to go after me because I'm a small forum, but if they do, I'm sort of willing to kind of fight the extra territoriality aspect of this.
• 42:20
  Mike Masnick: but what's interesting is like, he notes that he like reached out to Ofcom people multiple times trying to like have a discussion with them.
• 42:28
  Mike Masnick: And he goes through like all the reasons why it's effectively impossible to comply with how the fines are ridiculous and disconnected from reality for this, which is a hobby forum that, that he just, you know, runs on the side.
• 42:40
  Mike Masnick: He's not making any money from it.
• 42:42
  Mike Masnick: but it's basically like, it's just.
• 42:44
  Mike Masnick: Not worth it.
• 42:45
  Mike Masnick: And there are too many, too many questions and too many things to deal with.
• 42:49
  Mike Masnick: and so he just sort of gave up on the idea of, geo blocking it and just, figures he's, he's effectively going to take his chance.
• 42:56
  Mike Masnick: So there is this thing in here, which is that at one point.
• 43:00
  Mike Masnick: Ofcom, replied, and said, when we write to you to say that you're in breach, that is you are in breach, which, you know, like even though, you know, and I, this struck me as interesting because for years now, Ofcom has been running around and I saw them say this directly at TrustCon that they were not going to be this, like, Iron fisted enforcer of the law, but that they wanted it to be this sort of back and forth.
• 43:26
  Mike Masnick: And if they thought you were not in compliance, they would reach out to you and have a conversation and they would be the friendly regulator.
• 43:33
  Mike Masnick: And yet this message that even though it's kind of interesting that it's in this post where he's saying he's just going to ignore the law.
• 43:39
  Mike Masnick: They say, when we write to you to say that you're in breach, you are in breach.
• 43:43
  Mike Masnick: and basically saying, don't wait until you get that breach letter and says, reach out to us, work with us.
• 43:48
  Mike Masnick: So they still have that a little bit like work with us, but it's like.
• 43:51
  Mike Masnick: they're Not shying away from the fact that they could try and find you for millions of dollars.
• 43:55
  Mike Masnick: and so I thought it was a really interesting analysis at the same time as it's basically saying, look, we're not going to comply and we're just going to hope that they don't go after us.
• 44:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 44:04
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, that's, With a lot of the regulation that's come in, that's really the role that it plays.
• 44:09
  Ben Whitelaw: it's the kind of Damocles sword of that, that hangs over your head and that they can kind of dispatch at any moment.
• 44:15
  Ben Whitelaw: and the question will be is like, is Ofcom willing to, let that sword go against a relatively small forum based in, the Northwest of the States, like probably not.
• 44:24
  Ben Whitelaw: So we're seeing more and more reporting of.
• 44:26
  Ben Whitelaw: The implications of the act, which is, I think, interesting because right now it feels like people still don't understand the implications of, it and how it affects their access to the internet and communities that they've probably long been part of such as the cycling forum and such as the kind of developer website we talked about in previous
• 44:43
  Mike Masnick: And, and, and the hamster form, the hamster form has shut down
• 44:47
  Ben Whitelaw: oh man.
• 44:49
  Mike Masnick: and it says, we are sorry, the forum is closed down.
• 44:52
  Mike Masnick: You can now find us at Instagram.
• 44:54
  Mike Masnick: And so if the idea was, you know, again, this is the point that I've raised a bunch of times when you have these online regulations, they often give more power to the big companies that supposedly these regulations designed to deal with.
• 45:06
  Mike Masnick: And so.
• 45:07
  Mike Masnick: The hamster form, a form about hamsters has shut down
• 45:12
  Ben Whitelaw: uh,
• 45:13
  Mike Masnick: and moved to Instagram
• 45:14
  Ben Whitelaw: to, to listen this a controller speech that are users of the forum and who are hearing about this now.
• 45:19
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm sorry.
• 45:21
  Ben Whitelaw: it's not great.
• 45:22
  Ben Whitelaw: But yeah, this is, a theme that we are seeing.
• 45:24
  Ben Whitelaw: we won't figure out, uh, the online safety at this week, Mike, we are going to talk about it again and again, and again, I'm sure I wanted to bring a story to you that is actually a kind of positive story, a story that I really liked.
• 45:36
  Ben Whitelaw: I almost sent it to you.
• 45:38
  Ben Whitelaw: as soon as I read it, it's a guardian article about How tech experts keep their children safe online.
• 45:44
  Ben Whitelaw: And I love it because it says so much.
• 45:47
  Ben Whitelaw: It's kind of sensible stuff about kids safety and, children's use of, smartphones and internet devices.
• 45:54
  Ben Whitelaw: And in particular, says a couple of things that I think are just so worth reading if you're a parent, if you're not a parent, there's so much good stuff in this article the crux of it is, you know, and there's a few experts in there that both say the same thing, the crux of it is talking about the internet to your child early, and it's exactly what you've been saying in previous episodes of control or speech, there is no simple way to protect kids on the internet.
• 46:17
  Ben Whitelaw: They're going to see inappropriate content from time to time, just like they fall over and graze their knee.
• 46:22
  Ben Whitelaw: And, actually the only way you can deal with it is by broaching with them early, working with them, almost as, as adults and understanding that they know as much as you, or sometimes more than you, it's just such a great article.
• 46:33
  Ben Whitelaw: I've, very rarely seen anything like it.
• 46:35
  Ben Whitelaw: So, what did you think about it?
• 46:36
  Ben Whitelaw: It was,
• 46:37
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, it is a fantastic article.
• 46:38
  Mike Masnick: I'm definitely going to use this and send it to people as well.
• 46:41
  Mike Masnick: it makes the point that I've been trying to make, except coming from an actual expert as opposed to me, some doofus on the internet, talking about like.
• 46:48
  Mike Masnick: Part of it is modeling good behavior for your kids, but also just letting them know, like teaching them how to recognize that, they may come across things that are dangerous and learning how to do it and you can handhold with them.
• 46:59
  Mike Masnick: but the idea of like trying to lock down the internet and make sure that they never see anything bad is not only impossible, it is ineffective because it also doesn't teach kids how to use things appropriately.
• 47:11
  Mike Masnick: And so there's a lot of like, be open to conversation, let kids know that they might come across stuff if they have problems to come talk to the parents, to have that open line of communication, which I think is the most important thing and to just let them know that there are problematic things on the internet.
• 47:26
  Mike Masnick: And, teach them how to use it appropriately, maybe work with them to see how they're playing stuff or, you know, using different sites or different games or whatever it is, and make sure that you have that line of communication open is the most important thing.
• 47:40
  Mike Masnick: Because anything that you do that is like, try and cut them off or try and block them.
• 47:44
  Mike Masnick: Or it even says like, you know, kids are going to break the rules that you set for them.
• 47:47
  Mike Masnick: They're going to get around whatever blocks, but like, not freaking out about that and not coming down hard on them either, but like figuring out, like, what is it you're trying to do?
• 47:54
  Mike Masnick: Like, do you just want to.
• 47:55
  Mike Masnick: watch something a little bit more, like, let's talk about that.
• 47:58
  Mike Masnick: And, this is something that we've done in our family as well.
• 48:00
  Mike Masnick: Like we do have time limits set on things, but we have the ability.
• 48:04
  Mike Masnick: And this comes up relatively frequently where my kids will be using computers and they'll run out of time and they'll say like, Hey, can I get another half an hour?
• 48:12
  Mike Masnick: I was in the middle of this or whatever.
• 48:13
  Mike Masnick: And we talk about it and figure out, yeah, you know, it's usually okay.
• 48:17
  Mike Masnick: and like, that's what it's giving this sort of common sense approach where the big thing is Don't lock down everything that's not effective, but have those open lines of communication.
• 48:26
  Mike Masnick: And it's, it feels unsatisfactory for some people, but it's super important.
• 48:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 48:31
  Ben Whitelaw: and I'm not saying at all that it's not hard, um, for parents to figure out how to, set up particular platforms or set up their home wifi in a way that, screens out most of the risk.
• 48:42
  Ben Whitelaw: talked there about how you've done it in your home and I'm, I've got friends who are parents and they spend a lot of time thinking about this, but this article is great for acknowledging that, but also saying that there are, alternatives to it too.
• 48:52
  Ben Whitelaw: So great, great piece.
• 48:54
  Ben Whitelaw: Really recommend it.
• 48:55
  Ben Whitelaw: onto our last story, Mike, which is, is it a little bit linked?
• 48:58
  Ben Whitelaw: It's, it's about how teams use social media and this one scared the hell out of us.
• 49:04
  Ben Whitelaw: And I'm going to, I'm going to pose it to you directly.
• 49:07
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 49:08
  Ben Whitelaw: So I want your kind of honest answer.
• 49:10
  Ben Whitelaw: Are you a half swipe guy?
• 49:14
  Mike Masnick: Well, I will say I did not discover the concept of half swiping until last night, uh, when I read this article, so I did not know this was a thing.
• 49:24
  Ben Whitelaw: Got to explain it to us.
• 49:27
  Mike Masnick: Snapchat, there is the ability to half swipe, because apparently when you're, you know, like reading thing that was sent to you on Snapchat, the person who sent it to you can see whether or not you've, looked at the content that they sent you.
• 49:40
  Mike Masnick: So Snapchat had implemented this feature at an affordance within the app, where if you don't fully swipe in, but you half swipe, you could see the message.
• 49:50
  Mike Masnick: That was being sent to you without indicating back to them that you had seen it.
• 49:55
  Ben Whitelaw: so no read receipts.
• 49:56
  Mike Masnick: no read receipts.
• 49:57
  Mike Masnick: It was, it was a sort of a way of getting around the read receipt is you could do that.
• 50:01
  Mike Masnick: so people couldn't tell, but then they added this other like premium feature for some users.
• 50:06
  Mike Masnick: Like if you paid, you could see if someone was effectively doing the half swipe and then you would have the information you say, Oh, they're not really committing to seeing my content.
• 50:16
  Mike Masnick: And so.
• 50:17
  Mike Masnick: There's a lot of talk in here about how, for teenagers who are in different social relationships or, you know, interested in, people romantically, how they're like freaking out about this.
• 50:26
  Mike Masnick: Like, are they half swiping or, are they, not replying to me?
• 50:29
  Mike Masnick: Do they not really like me if they only half swipe all of this stuff?
• 50:33
  Mike Masnick: That's just like all of this social dynamic stuff that is.
• 50:36
  Mike Masnick: Heightened by the affordances specifically of the app.
• 50:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 50:40
  Mike Masnick: The developers of these apps, I'm sure I haven't really thought through.
• 50:43
  Mike Masnick: I think about this in the context of, there's all these, talks now, even with Snapchat, there've been a bunch of lawsuits about specific affordances within the app and how they're sort of negligent in some form or another,
• 50:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Hmm.
• 50:54
  Mike Masnick: you can see how these kinds of things develop.
• 50:56
  Mike Masnick: They're not developed to like, make a.
• 50:59
  Mike Masnick: teenage girl have her heart broken because someone half swipes instead of full swipes or like they have this example where there's one girl wanted to hang out with a boy and sent him a message and he apparently half swipe, but she had the premium account.
• 51:11
  Mike Masnick: So she could see that a half swipe and he didn't reply for a whole hour.
• 51:14
  Mike Masnick: And then he did say he wanted to hang out.
• 51:16
  Mike Masnick: And so they got to hang out, but she's still upset because he took an hour and he half swiped.
• 51:19
  Mike Masnick: And what does that mean?
• 51:20
  Mike Masnick: Maybe he doesn't really like me and all this stuff.
• 51:22
  Mike Masnick: And I'm just like, Oh my gosh.
• 51:23
  Mike Masnick: Like.
• 51:23
  Mike Masnick: This is, this is teenagers, right?
• 51:25
  Mike Masnick: Like this is always the way teenagers have been.
• 51:27
  Mike Masnick: And I talked about, I grew up in a time pre internet effectively and, calling, we had to use the phone and call.
• 51:34
  Mike Masnick: And there was all this nervousness.
• 51:35
  Mike Masnick: And if their parents pick up, what do you say?
• 51:37
  Mike Masnick: And how do you address and all of this kind of stuff?
• 51:39
  Mike Masnick: I think some of this is just the nature of like being a teenager.
• 51:43
  Mike Masnick: But it's sort of turned into this like big deal because of the, app itself.
• 51:48
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 51:49
  Mike Masnick: so to some extent, I think this is an exaggeration, but it's also kind of funny to see like how these things play out the nature of a teenager who's sort of like going through the things that teenagers go through.
• 51:59
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 51:59
  Ben Whitelaw: It's so true.
• 52:00
  Ben Whitelaw: It's the importance of product design and how it contributes to interactions.
• 52:05
  Ben Whitelaw: It's not necessarily a safety thing, but you can see how that half swipe and that delay in somebody replying could lead to, the kind of anxiety and stress that might lead to.
• 52:15
  Ben Whitelaw: safety issues to, bullying to, people to take decisions that they don't want to take.
• 52:20
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's a lighthearted story that has a serious element to it.
• 52:24
  Ben Whitelaw: And it goes back to the story we, touched on, that was published in the guardian about importance of conversations and a points of kind of talking to, Children and anyone, frankly, about, kind of different affordances of different platforms and technologies.
• 52:36
  Ben Whitelaw: there's no way out of it otherwise.
• 52:38
  Ben Whitelaw: And, this has been a conversation that has been, you know, helpful for me, Mike, and hopefully will be one for listeners as well.
• 52:45
  Ben Whitelaw: that's the point I think we should wrap up this week.
• 52:47
  Ben Whitelaw: We've really enjoyed talking about this week's news.
• 52:49
  Ben Whitelaw: thanks again, Mike, for joining.
• 52:51
  Ben Whitelaw: it's been great to chat to everyone.
• 52:52
  Ben Whitelaw: We'll see you next week.
• 52:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Don't forget that review.
• 52:54
  Ben Whitelaw: we'll see you in seven days.
• 52:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Bye.
• 52:59
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• 53:16
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