Latest / Ctrl-Alt-Speech / Making the Best of a Ban Situation

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Making the Best of a Ban Situation · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Ben Whitelaw: So Cory, we, start every podcast on Ctrl-Alt-Speech with a little bit of fun, a little bit of frivolity.
• 0:06
  Ben Whitelaw: So I'm gonna ask you the question I always ask Mike, when he's here, and also our guest host.
• 0:10
  Ben Whitelaw: What fun have you seen or had on the internet this week?
• 0:14
  Cori Crider: Unbelievably, it's an ad.
• 0:16
  Cori Crider: So like, the, the thing, I'm about to talk about a company, and they should clearly pay for this podcast.
• 0:21
  Cori Crider: So even though this hasn't been brought to you by Polaroid, it damn well should've been.
• 0:24
  Cori Crider: So anyway, I don't know if you've seen it, but Polaroid have done this like hyper-viral ad campaign about summer.
• 0:31
  Cori Crider: and it's basically just trolling big tech and trolling the big tech companies.
• 0:35
  Cori Crider: And it says, it's got these, you know, cute little Polaroids, and then they say things like,"Go jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up," right?
• 0:43
  Cori Crider: Like, and, and, like, you know, and a, a Polaroid doesn't connect to the cloud, does connect you to each other, you know.
• 0:50
  Cori Crider: Or, you know, in the tube it's like,"What a beautiful day to go and like scroll through some screens at random," basically.
• 0:56
  Cori Crider: I don't know, but there's some...
• 0:57
  Cori Crider: Yeah, anyhow, but just like it's an absolutely epic ad campaign, I have to admit.
• 1:01
  Cori Crider: And I, particularly what I say...
• 1:03
  Cori Crider: 'Cause it's on like, I don't know, a beach, Coney Island Beach or something, and it's like,"Jump in the water before the data centers drink it all." And I was just like, do it.
• 1:10
  Cori Crider: Drag them.
• 1:11
  Cori Crider: Drag them.
• 1:12
  Cori Crider: Yeah.
• 1:12
  Cori Crider: So there you go.
• 1:13
  Cori Crider: Polaroid, brought to you by Polaroid, who really should pay for this podcast but probably won't.
• 1:17
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, like it, like it.
• 1:18
  Ben Whitelaw: we used to actually take a, platform prompt as the opening of our podcast, but we stopped doing it because people thought they were sponsoring the podcast and they, there was this confusion.
• 1:27
  Ben Whitelaw: So yeah, I'm glad to bring that confusion back.
• 1:29
  Ben Whitelaw: Polaroid, you know, you know where we are.
• 1:32
  Ben Whitelaw: My bank account details are available.
• 1:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Um,
• 1:34
  Cori Crider: Just Venmo.
• 1:35
  Cori Crider: Just, just hit, hit him with a Venmo.
• 1:37
  Cori Crider: Yeah, 100%.
• 1:38
  Ben Whitelaw: my one's not dissimilar to one.
• 1:40
  Ben Whitelaw: It's, it's a little bit more curious as to whether it's fun or not, but there's this new trend for dopamine sites that has emerged out of Korea, and, the dopamine sites are basically these quite sad websites that look and feel like apps that Gen Z consumers in Korea are going to so that they don't spend their actual cash.
• 1:59
  Ben Whitelaw: these are kind of sites that essentially act like food delivery services, that act like taxi services, but they don't take your money, so you just kind of randomly click around them ordering food that actually never comes.
• 2:13
  Ben Whitelaw: you can watch this food be delivered to a random house.
• 2:17
  Ben Whitelaw: It, it's, very obscure.
• 2:18
  Ben Whitelaw: It's a bit like Sims, but
• 2:20
  Cori Crider: I was about to say, it's like what if Uber were in fact a video game, right?
• 2:25
  Cori Crider: Like, or DoorD- God.
• 2:26
  Cori Crider: Uh, yours and mine are almost in like total silhouette images of one another.
• 2:31
  Cori Crider: Mine's like,"Look, the world's actually not so bad." You're like,"Isn't this terrible?" Like, people, you know, pl- they're playing like they're using Uber.
• 2:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I know, I
• 2:40
  Cori Crider: I don't see it taking off.
• 2:41
  Cori Crider: I'm just gonna say, I don't see it taking off.
• 2:42
  Cori Crider: Hmm.
• 2:43
  Cori Crider: Uh, but you're now gonna tell me it has 300 million users, right?
• 2:47
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 2:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Coming, coming to a, a new, uh,
• 2:50
  Cori Crider: Oh, God.
• 2:52
  Cori Crider: Oh, incredible.
• 2:53
  Cori Crider: There we go.
• 2:54
  Cori Crider: I thought there was shrimp Jesus.
• 2:55
  Cori Crider: All right.
• 2:55
  Cori Crider: Anyway, amazing
• 2:57
  Ben Whitelaw: Great.
• 3:06
  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.
• 3:14
  Ben Whitelaw: It's July the 2nd, 2026, and this week we're talking about what a better social media ban might look like, whether the Eurosky tech is gonna take off, and for our Patreon subscribers, are we seeing the last hurrah of human moderators?
• 3:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Ctrl Alt Speech is usually the weekly musings of Mike Masnick, the founder and editor of Techdirt, and me, Ben Whitelaw, from Everything in Moderation.
• 3:34
  Ben Whitelaw: But this week I'm joined by Cory Kridel as guest host.
• 3:37
  Ben Whitelaw: Welcome to the podcast, Cory.
• 3:39
  Cori Crider: Hey
• 3:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Cory is a lawyer, advocate, and senior fellow at Open Markets and Future of Tech.
• 3:44
  Ben Whitelaw: she has a, a very illustrious career that I'm gonna run through briefly.
• 3:47
  Ben Whitelaw: She was previously co-founder of the nonprofit Foxglove, which was founded to make the use of technology fair, and she was involved in a number of cases that we've talked about on the podcast, including Kenyan moderators working for Meta, uh, unfairly, losing their jobs after trying to form a union.
• 4:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Before that, she led national security litigation at Reprieve, and she now leads the Future of Tech Institute, an independent nonprofit focusing on technology that serves the public.
• 4:13
  Ben Whitelaw: quite the list, Cory.
• 4:14
  Cori Crider: Thank you.
• 4:15
  Cori Crider: Um, yeah, I think, yeah, pff.
• 4:17
  Cori Crider: I suppose one...
• 4:18
  Cori Crider: I, I know that the, Just imagining that a lot of your listeners are, you know, kind of work in tech or around tech.
• 4:23
  Cori Crider: I'm a, I'm a relatively recent kind of convert to working on tech.
• 4:27
  Cori Crider: I worked, I mean, my very first work was with detainees, you know, men in boxes, about as analog as it could get.
• 4:32
  Cori Crider: But over the course of my time doing these national security cases, and indeed some surveillance cases, we started to feel like the way that power was exercised was changing.
• 4:41
  Cori Crider: So we would interview people who had lost loved ones in drone attacks, for example.
• 4:45
  Cori Crider: And that was the first time I got onto the idea that, like, an algorithm could be used to do someone harm, right?
• 4:50
  Cori Crider: People would literally have their loved ones blown up as a result.
• 4:53
  Cori Crider: I don't know if you remember this, but back in the day, Michael Hayden, the then head of the CIA and NSA said we used to kill,"We kill people based on metadata," right?
• 5:00
  Cori Crider: And then, you know, myself and Martha Dark and Rosa Curling set up Foxglove because we're like,"Hang on a minute.
• 5:06
  Cori Crider: That sounds big." and you s- you see that these kind of algorithmic decisions are being used to make incredibly important decisions about people's lives, whether it's whether they get a, a grade that is fair or, you know, a they get a loan or they get hired for a job or what have you.
• 5:20
  Cori Crider: And so, so yeah, for several years we took these cases against either tech companies or, governments when they use tech to oppress or exclude.
• 5:28
  Cori Crider: But then I guess, what was my kind of come to Jesus moment?
• 5:31
  Cori Crider: I think in terms of what we're trying to do at Foti, and why I moved into this, I now don't litigate.
• 5:36
  Cori Crider: I don't actually sue anymore.
• 5:38
  Cori Crider: I think we kind of work with challenger companies and also with governments to try and, like, basically reduce the overall power of a handful of tech companies over our society and our economy.
• 5:49
  Cori Crider: And I guess I got to the point, looking at the content moderator cases that we did with Foxglove, you know, like watching the way that people were treated by some of these companies.
• 5:57
  Cori Crider: I, I, I was very, very skeptical of state power for a very long time, and I still am.
• 6:01
  Cori Crider: but I also watched like a handful of corporations Meta, Google, Microsoft, if we wanna be retro about it, Amazon and so forth, obtain a level of information about us, a level of economic power that would honestly be the envy of almost any government.
• 6:16
  Cori Crider: And it felt like almost, not nobody was doing anything about it, I mean, there is a tech lash, but people weren't really addressing themselves to this question of like concentration of power.
• 6:26
  Cori Crider: And so I think when we, when we think about what Foti's now aiming to achieve, it's really just rebalancing public power against private power.
• 6:33
  Cori Crider: We think that no company, wherever it is, however kind of beneficent its supposed CEO is, should really have that level of control over public discourse, over our economy, o- over the direction of innovation.
• 6:46
  Cori Crider: and so we wanna rebalance that out against and clear some space so that kind of public challengers can emerge, whether that's, you know, kind of Euro sky and alternative social media infrastructure, or maybe cloud that do- like data centers that don't drink all the water, uh, you know, stuff like that.
• 7:00
  Cori Crider: So just basically imagining that if we don't let those handful of companies decide, then we can have a completely different internet again, and therefore a different economy and a different society.
• 7:10
  Cori Crider: And I suppose it's that vision that we're trying to defend and pursue.
• 7:14
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and an interesting time to be obviously starting Foti.
• 7:18
  Ben Whitelaw: It's, you know, an independent kind of think tank, as I mentioned.
• 7:20
  Ben Whitelaw: How, do you think we're at in terms of those three areas that it covers?
• 7:24
  Ben Whitelaw: you know, this focus on, cloud defense, this idea of having a kind of greater choice, consumer choice for social media, and then social media bans.
• 7:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Like, how would you characterize the, the current state of play?
• 7:34
  Cori Crider: So I think how would I put this?
• 7:36
  Cori Crider: I think that the, like, long 1990s is over.
• 7:42
  Cori Crider: I read sometimes, a bit more tech-focused publications with people who are really, you know, who've been kind of around since the beginning, right?
• 7:52
  Cori Crider: I mean, with love to him, and I know he's not here, so we won't talk t- about Mike, Mike, who's done incredible work in many ways, very much.
• 7:57
  Cori Crider: But there's a feeling sometimes that, like, it's still 1997, and we're still at Burning Man, and like, the promise of the internet is still there.
• 8:06
  Cori Crider: It's just there.
• 8:07
  Cori Crider: If we could just get back to it, and like, it'll be cool again.
• 8:10
  Cori Crider: Like, it will...
• 8:11
  Cori Crider: Like, guys, it'll be cool again.
• 8:12
  Cori Crider: And it's like, y'all, y'all, that era has passed.
• 8:17
  Cori Crider: It has been absolutely occupied by corporate power.
• 8:20
  Cori Crider: I think, with love to that part of the movement and, you know, and the, uh, EFFs of the world and the rest of it, like, it has been totally dominated by corporate power for quite a long time.
• 8:29
  Cori Crider: I think we slept at the wheel while that corporate power consolidated.
• 8:33
  Cori Crider: And now, when you look at these, let's say, belated, sometimes ham-fisted, sometimes complicated efforts to, like, regulate one or another part of the internet, which I would just say is another part of the political economy, what you see is a society trying to flex a muscle that we let atrophy for, like, 20 years, right?
• 8:53
  Cori Crider: So, so when we think about what we work on, right, like, we're trying to move away.
• 8:58
  Cori Crider: We wanna see, Europe, because we mostly work in Europe, diversify away from big tech's cloud and AI.
• 9:03
  Cori Crider: Because, at the moment, it's just, it's a lever that the US can use to geostrategically bully Europe.
• 9:09
  Cori Crider: Like, I don't know if, how many of your users know what happened with the ICC, for example,
• 9:12
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I think probably quite a few
• 9:14
  Cori Crider: basically Donald Trump gets mad at some of the judges, and he presses a button, and they are sanctioned, and then they get a phone call, and basically they're chucked out of their Microsoft 365.
• 9:22
  Cori Crider: Like, that grinds the work of a supposedly sovereign international criminal court to a halt in, like, a 24 to 48-hour notice.
• 9:28
  Cori Crider: That's bad, right?
• 9:29
  Cori Crider: It's bad.
• 9:30
  Cori Crider: Whatever it is you think about the merits of the case, Donald Trump and those companies should not be able to do that.
• 9:34
  Cori Crider: So we wanna see diversification.
• 9:36
  Cori Crider: and then on interop, like, again, this is where I think I overlap with your, co-host and where I really, really share the view.
• 9:42
  Cori Crider: What I don't wanna see is us in five or you know, six or seven years, like, having the same fights about, how the same handful of companies behave, right?
• 9:52
  Cori Crider: And to constantly be chasing after Mark Zuckerberg for his bad behavior or to be wagging our finger at Elon Musk, who, surprise, will still be a member of the far right, right?
• 10:01
  Cori Crider: he will still be an anti-democratic, frankly slightly racist person.
• 10:04
  Cori Crider: and, you know, I would just like to see us help people move, to something else through interoperability so that the people who are building something better, more interesting, including the incredible work being done to build on top of the AT protocol.
• 10:17
  Cori Crider: I wanna see that stuff survive, get users, get scale, get investment, right?
• 10:21
  Cori Crider: that's the world we wanna see, and the question is kind of how you then get there.
• 10:25
  Cori Crider: And then as you, you mentioned the bans.
• 10:27
  Cori Crider: I mean, do you wanna talk about the bans, or do you, what do we think the status, or should we move into that when we talk about, like, the main news story, right?
• 10:32
  Cori Crider: 'Cause that's a, you know, that one is about...
• 10:34
  Cori Crider: I think the other thing, just very briefly about why we exist and why we position ourselves the way that we do, you do have to meet society where it is.
• 10:42
  Cori Crider: and I think for a very, very long time, tech policy debates were too narrow, and they sat in too rarefied a space.
• 10:48
  Cori Crider: and now what has happened is that, my fellow parents at the school gate recognize that this stuff affects them, their family, and so they see there's a kitchen table issue.
• 10:58
  Cori Crider: And so there is incredible public demand and hunger to try and regain a, a grip on this stuff, right?
• 11:05
  Cori Crider: Anyway, so, so it's engaging with the society where it is, is how I would put it
• 11:09
  Ben Whitelaw: And we're gonna come on to talk about that.
• 11:11
  Ben Whitelaw: I, you know, ironically, perfectly, the stories in, in the news this week coincide neatly with, expertise and the way-- the work that Foti's doing, which is always nice.
• 11:20
  Ben Whitelaw: I wanted just to kind of ask about whether you think there's a demand for the interoperability piece, and I guess to a lesser extent, the cloud defense piece.
• 11:28
  Ben Whitelaw: Because, is Foti about kind of creating that demand or, educating users so that they can advocate for themselves in the way that they have done with the social media bans?
• 11:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Or do you think there is this latent desire that you're, trying to kind of unplug?
• 11:41
  Ben Whitelaw: What's your thoughts?
• 11:42
  Cori Crider: Yeah.
• 11:42
  Cori Crider: I mean, I think what's the role of a small think tank in a, in a discussion like this?
• 11:46
  Cori Crider: I suppose it's to help people imagine and also to connect with where they are and and to say,"Well, thi- things could maybe be different," right?
• 11:52
  Cori Crider: Do I say the word interoperability, which has eight syllables, like in a mass mark?
• 11:57
  Cori Crider: No, obviously I don't.
• 11:58
  Cori Crider: But do I ask people, like, would they like to leave?
• 12:00
  Cori Crider: are they interested in an escape slide or click to switch?
• 12:03
  Cori Crider: Like, people can understand, for example, they understand things like th- used to not be able to take their phone number when they left.
• 12:08
  Cori Crider: Like, they have, they have certain ideas about how services, like people should be able to plug services on top or like, should have more control over it, even if they don't understand technical words or technical legal words like portability or interoperability.
• 12:21
  Cori Crider: That part doesn't matter, I don't think.
• 12:23
  Cori Crider: What matters is, do you like what you've got?
• 12:26
  Cori Crider: Would you like to move?
• 12:27
  Cori Crider: And you know, for example, we, there was a poll last year, I don't remember exactly the figure, but it's like, for Europeans, would you rather use a social media service based in Europe?
• 12:34
  Cori Crider: And that got around, if I remember, 60% support.
• 12:37
  Cori Crider: people would like, in principle, to move.
• 12:39
  Cori Crider: But you know, y- think about something like the Grok scandal breaking on X, in January, where 23,000 CSAM child abuse images are created in the course of about eight days, according to researchers.
• 12:50
  Cori Crider: And like, you know, I've phoned politicians, I've phoned reporters who were still on the dumpster fire that is X and said,"Well, if we didn't wanna move when it was the far right platform with the guy who literally did the Sieg Heil, like then maybe we wanna move when it's the child abuse platform." And you know, the lock-in is real.
• 13:08
  Cori Crider: People say,"Yeah, well, but still, I don't wanna start over with my friends and my followers.
• 13:13
  Cori Crider: I don't wanna, you know, I don't wanna lose my posts.
• 13:15
  Cori Crider: I don't wanna lose my network.
• 13:16
  Cori Crider: I don't wanna lose my content." That's what interoperability is supposed to fix.
• 13:20
  Cori Crider: That's what the whole point of the AT protocol and all these open protocol services is, right?
• 13:24
  Cori Crider: It's like, let's never let any of these guys buy something and get us stuck ever again, right?
• 13:31
  Cori Crider: And if you put it to people like that, then I think actually you do find that there's support.
• 13:34
  Cori Crider: And then on this question of like, do people care about cloud?
• 13:36
  Cori Crider: I mean, nobody cares about infrastructure until it falls over, is one answer, right?
• 13:41
  Cori Crider: Like, people don't care about...
• 13:43
  Cori Crider: People don't think about the road until there's a sinkhole or, you know, or until their access to the infrastructure that they depend on every day is in some way threatened or cut off.
• 13:51
  Cori Crider: But what this dependency has done is lead to some kinds of vulnerabilities.
• 13:56
  Cori Crider: So we talked about the ICC, but also like outages.
• 13:59
  Cori Crider: Th- there was a huge cloud outage like in October, like AWS was it east?
• 14:04
  Cori Crider: It's always AWS east isn't it?
• 14:05
  Cori Crider: Anyway, something goes down.
• 14:06
  Cori Crider: The one in Virginia.
• 14:07
  Cori Crider: It went down, like takes like a, I don't know, a third of the internet off with it, does billions of dollars in damage, flight chaos, hospital chaos, all that stuff.
• 14:15
  Cori Crider: People notice that.
• 14:16
  Cori Crider: I mean, that gets onto the evening news and they think,"Gosh, that seems bad.
• 14:18
  Cori Crider: What needs to happen there?" and also, I guess I just think- In Europe, there's also like, a hope, I think, that we could maybe invest and construct.
• 14:26
  Cori Crider: And, you know, I'm aware that there's this kind of debate which says,"Oh, well, yeah, but you have, you've spent too much time kind of passing all of these laws." Like, I guess the other thing I would say is, as somebody who lives in Spain, the thing that's holding us back i-in terms of the kind of tech and economic development is not the Digital Markets Act or the Digital Services Act or quite frankly, the AI Act.
• 14:47
  Cori Crider: It isn't.
• 14:47
  Cori Crider: It is a whole bunch of other like deeper economic stuff that is generic across the business world that is totally unrelated to...
• 14:54
  Cori Crider: It's like, it's how hard it is to start even a restaurant, much less to start you know, a tech company.
• 15:00
  Cori Crider: It's, uh, like the joke I tell now that I live in Spain is that I now know why there's a notary in every opera, right?
• 15:05
  Cori Crider: you know, like there's just like people who are involved in a process and that's like weirdly arcane and complicated, and that slows people's roll in my view, way more than...
• 15:15
  Cori Crider: It's just like deeper, deeper kind of bureaucratic business problems, much more than the DSA or the DMA, quite frankly.
• 15:21
  Cori Crider: Anyhow, so is there demand?
• 15:22
  Cori Crider: Like, kind of, but of course, if you're talking about it to a mass audience, then you need not to use kind of fiddly technocratic language, always,
• 15:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 15:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 15:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, that's interesting.
• 15:32
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, you don't have to be worried about language on this podcast.
• 15:34
  Ben Whitelaw: People, you know, our listeners are mostly, familiar with the ones that you use, so all good there.
• 15:39
  Ben Whitelaw: and we're gonna talk about the social media ban and a kind of plethora of news this week about it from Australia to, some new public polling in the US as well.
• 15:47
  Ben Whitelaw: So we'll get into that.
• 15:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Before we do, just wanted to kind of, greet and welcome our Patreon subscribers who support Ctrl Alt Speech with their hard-earned cash, our supporters who pay$10 a month to get extended and early episodes every single week, and our founders and insiders for whom they get, both the early and extended episodes, plus, the unique opportunity to recommend stories for us to talk about on the podcast.
• 16:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Not enough people make use of that, Corey, I'll be honest.
• 16:11
  Ben Whitelaw: It's a very, very powerful, responsibility they have.
• 16:13
  Ben Whitelaw: But, those that do have, used it wisely.
• 16:16
  Ben Whitelaw: if you want to become a Patreon supporter, go to patreon/ctrlaltspeech.
• 16:20
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• 16:24
  Ben Whitelaw: We are more than open to working with you, Polaroid in particular.
• 16:28
  Ben Whitelaw: Find out more at ctrlaltspeech.com.
• 16:31
  Cori Crider: Spain checked Palantir the, today apparently, by the way, just while
• 16:34
  Ben Whitelaw: oh, really?
• 16:35
  Cori Crider: Palantir.
• 16:36
  Cori Crider: Yeah, they ju- they apparently they announced today, following the lead of I think France, that they were gonna basically bar them from all public contracting, so it can
• 16:44
  Ben Whitelaw: Interesting.
• 16:45
  Ben Whitelaw: Interesting.
• 16:45
  Ben Whitelaw: I think, yeah.
• 16:48
  Ben Whitelaw: leading by example.
• 16:50
  Ben Whitelaw: okay.
• 16:50
  Ben Whitelaw: So let's get into the, social media ban stuff this week.
• 16:53
  Ben Whitelaw: there's a whole range of stories.
• 16:55
  Ben Whitelaw: I think we should start with kind of where we are.
• 16:57
  Ben Whitelaw: the ban that everyone knows about in Australia, that continues to be a kind of giant live experiment, I think, for, the rest of the world.
• 17:04
  Ben Whitelaw: there was news this week that the Australian government is going to extend new legislation, pass new legislation to double the fines that platforms can receive for not following, the social media ban.
• 17:16
  Ben Whitelaw: And they're going to give the regulator there, the eSafety Commission, more powers to enforce the ban.
• 17:22
  Ben Whitelaw: And so this is a doubling down of the existing ban.
• 17:25
  Ben Whitelaw: you shared an article, Cory, about, from the conversation about how we might need to rethink how we, measure the ban.
• 17:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Just give me your sense of like ban generally.
• 17:35
  Ben Whitelaw: When you look at it, do you see it as a kind of serious piece of policy?
• 17:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Is it political posturing?
• 17:41
  Ben Whitelaw: How would you characterize it?
• 17:42
  Cori Crider: Well, I mean, first of all to go back to something that I said earlier, what we're doing now is trying to flex a muscle that we let go for 20 years.
• 17:51
  Cori Crider: So, you know, we're taking our first baby steps in the idea that, the way these corporations behave should be a uniquely law-free zone.
• 17:57
  Cori Crider: but I think, look, it, it's definitely the case that this has been a tricky area to legislate in, and kids be getting round stuff, right?
• 18:05
  Cori Crider: I mean, they absolutely do.
• 18:06
  Cori Crider: there was a article in the British Medical Journal last week as well that actually showed that this, particular one has been even more circumvented than it was originally thought.
• 18:13
  Cori Crider: Like, kids do get around it.
• 18:14
  Cori Crider: Although there has been some research suggesting that if you weren't already using it, you might have been less likely to start.
• 18:20
  Cori Crider: So there's a kind of a k- there's a bit of an equivocal outcome.
• 18:23
  Cori Crider: But the, what's interesting about the report there, what's missing from it is something that happened this spring.
• 18:28
  Cori Crider: Because the fight to pass this law was so contentious and just got into its usual kind of culture war space, they don't say very much about the fact that they did this.
• 18:38
  Cori Crider: But they actually refined their own law kind of through rulemaking, you know.
• 18:44
  Cori Crider: So they didn't go back to the full parliament and have the whole hoo-ha, but they have the ability to just through rulemaking, like sharpen the law or change the law slightly.
• 18:51
  Cori Crider: And so what they did is move more towards targeting features by basically adjusting the definition of a social media service.
• 18:59
  Cori Crider: So now basically, like to be swept within the law, if you go and you look at the amended version from the spring, to be swept within the law, you've gotta have things like a certain kind of algorithmic feed, some of the other kinds of features that have tended to lay behind, the kind of addictive nature that, you know, lots of people, have had problems with and are the reason that there is so much overwhelming democratic demand.
• 19:20
  Cori Crider: And again, I just wanna say that again, the polling on this is clear, especially in Europe, right?
• 19:24
  Cori Crider: Like you poll Europeans about whether they want social media banned for their kids, and it's over 70% in every single member state.
• 19:31
  Cori Crider: In fact, if you poll kids, if you poll kids, like kids answer that they would like it banned.
• 19:35
  Cori Crider: Like, people know that something is broken, and I know, again, you're saying this is quite an expert tech audience, you know, I, there will be an inherent suspicion in this.
• 19:42
  Cori Crider: But I think, I would offer that in some ways, as imperfect as this is, this is kind of democracy in action, and this is democracy working out what we want the balance of power between us and let's say Mark Zuckerberg to be.
• 19:54
  Cori Crider: Anyway.
• 19:55
  Cori Crider: Well, I mean, what we would like to see at Foti, I think, is something that is like...
• 19:58
  Cori Crider: 'Cause these are imperfect policies that will be circumvented.
• 20:01
  Cori Crider: We can all, put our hand on our heart and say that that's clear.
• 20:04
  Cori Crider: what we would like to see is something that works with this momentum, meets families where they are, and says ultimately what we need to do is open up space for something better.
• 20:12
  Cori Crider: there are different ways you can do that.
• 20:13
  Cori Crider: One is that you try and structure the market, and you make it more condition- like make this a conditionality.
• 20:17
  Cori Crider: So let's say that you actually play by the rules, and you don't tend to run, let's say, an engagement maximizing super addictive algorithm them.
• 20:25
  Cori Crider: or you, don't have kind of infinite scroll autoplay, some of the other features that taken together do tend to add up to a bit of an attention trap.
• 20:34
  Cori Crider: then you can be exempted in some way from it.
• 20:38
  Cori Crider: and that means that you don't then necessarily have to age gate either, by the way.
• 20:41
  Cori Crider: And I know that age gating pisses everybody off because it's a very complicated, difficult piece of technology to develop in a way that, A, works, and B, isn't hideously invasive, right?
• 20:49
  Cori Crider: We're, you know, that's a developing area.
• 20:50
  Cori Crider: We're not there yet, you know, but it, but people are working on it with these kind of zero knowledge proofs, et cetera.
• 20:55
  Cori Crider: But, but, uh, th- let's hand on heart say that the- that we are engaged in a, in a bit of a social trade-off at the moment.
• 21:01
  Cori Crider: but that feels like at least a slightly more tailored version of it.
• 21:03
  Cori Crider: and then we, we'd really like to see, is to use this wave and to say,"You need to make these services talk to one another." you need to see interoperability, not simply as like a market opening play, although it is that, but also a safety play.
• 21:17
  Cori Crider: So to give you a specific example of what I mean by that,'cause there's different kinds of interoperability, of course.
• 21:23
  Cori Crider: We went and we did a little bit of research just seeing what kinds of apps were out there already in the Android Play Store.
• 21:28
  Cori Crider: It's easier to look at the download numbers in Android than it is for Apple.
• 21:32
  Cori Crider: and there were apps like OneSec or No Scroll, not specifically targeted to kids, but very specifically targeted to helping people, like, deal with their addiction, which have actually millions of downloads already, for which people seem to be prepared to pay, right?
• 21:47
  Cori Crider: I mean, you know, these are the, like, it's, people are basically,"Please, you know, help me." Uh, you know, not a lot, but, uh, but there's some, some latent market demand there.
• 21:55
  Cori Crider: But all of those apps at the moment exist totally at the whim of the dominant player, right?
• 22:01
  Cori Crider: Like, they could be shut down just like, you know, TweetDeck got shut down or CrowdTangle got shut down, right?
• 22:06
  Cori Crider: And because they don't have the right in law, at least here in Europe, to plug in, right?
• 22:11
  Cori Crider: So our version of like the tailored ban, the smarter ban, and again, the democratic pressure for banning is absolutely overwhelming, you know?
• 22:20
  Cori Crider: And so you've gotta, you do have to kind of meet democracy where it is, is some combination of those two.
• 22:25
  Cori Crider: Target toxic features, try and clear some space in the market for something better to emerge, but also build users a bridge out to something better via interoperability.
• 22:33
  Cori Crider: Now, Australia's not doing that.
• 22:34
  Cori Crider: but they have targeted features
• 22:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 22:37
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and just on the point of kind of algorithm, I'm trying to think what Mike would say at this point.
• 22:40
  Ben Whitelaw: We know, gotta make it interesting.
• 22:42
  Ben Whitelaw: So he, he, he would say that, you know, a- algorithmic feeds are designed to surface the best content to the user based upon their preferences of some kind.
• 22:50
  Ben Whitelaw: and again, I'm not necessarily always in agreement with Mike, so I am trying my best to represent his views.
• 22:55
  Ben Whitelaw: and he actually wrote a piece this week on Tector about, kind of EU's muddied thinking about algorithms.
• 23:01
  Ben Whitelaw: what is a kind of toxic algorithm to you, and what is a useful algorithm?
• 23:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Because I think there is a, a distinction a lot of the time, and sometimes we forget that, like, purely chronological I isn't, isn't a great place to be
• 23:12
  Cori Crider: or it's also an algorithm, right?
• 23:13
  Cori Crider: Chronological plus followers isn't, like there's no, like, Let me acknowledge for your users, I know that there's no such thing as a non-algorithmic feed.
• 23:20
  Cori Crider: Like, you know, the, somebody has to write a computer program that determines in what order the material will appear.
• 23:24
  Cori Crider: Yes, we all know that.
• 23:25
  Cori Crider: but the question is, And, and this is where I would, and I feel bad'cause I feel like I'm having an argument with a dude who's not in the room, right?
• 23:31
  Cori Crider: But, like, I think where I would quarrel with the way that Mike characterizes it is that he says, Nothing in this is what we think you should look at next is by definition a full-throated endorsement of the content.
• 23:43
  Cori Crider: It's literally based on other stuff you've looked at and our own weights and priorities," a phrase that I would argue is doing a lot of work there.
• 23:50
  Cori Crider: Here's what you should look at next." Okay.
• 23:53
  Cori Crider: Now, let's pause and let's think about the world that we have, the economy that we have, and what that in fact means, right?
• 24:00
  Cori Crider: Because I think he's like,"Well, that's totally different from a newspaper." And I'm like,"Mate, I'm not so sure that I agree," because I think that's like a, a newspaper maybe isn't endorsing the contents of the things that it's producing.
• 24:11
  Cori Crider: It's producing information in a certain order, right?
• 24:14
  Cori Crider: According to, sure, maybe a judgment about newsworthiness or whatever.
• 24:18
  Cori Crider: Maybe a judgment about, what you will engage with, what you will click on, what will keep your attention, and therefore, what is economically valuable to the publisher of the newspaper.
• 24:26
  Cori Crider: Um, there's a beautiful old movie, uh, His Girl Friday, I think, about, uh, newspaper publishers and just the kind of venal way in which they, promote this stuff.
• 24:34
  Cori Crider: But, you know, the idea that they were doing something other than like trying to keep you there and sell and shift goods and shift paper, I think it, like, maybe posits a slight naivety about the way that frankly the news business works.
• 24:44
  Cori Crider: but the fact that the, it's like,"Oh, well, we're just, you know, we're prioritizing stuff that you yourself engaged with, so what's the problem here?
• 24:51
  Cori Crider: That's in no way editorial." And I'm like,"No, that is.
• 24:53
  Cori Crider: that's a value judgment and a weighted decision," and I, you know, absolute common ground that a lot of times it's been done simply so that you're there, so that your eyeball is on the screen for longer, so that you s- click on the ad for longer.
• 25:04
  Cori Crider: But we also all know, and indeed, the documents that have come out in discovery from Meta's various trials show that Meta damn well knows, that that leads to all kinds of pretty unsavory outcomes, right?
• 25:16
  Cori Crider: Like, it tends to be polarizing.
• 25:18
  Cori Crider: Lies travel.
• 25:18
  Cori Crider: People engage with it, right?
• 25:20
  Cori Crider: and it's incredibly profitable.
• 25:22
  Cori Crider: So is that, like, is that editorial?
• 25:24
  Cori Crider: I mean, I actually think it probably is a form of editorial judgment at this point, right?
• 25:27
  Cori Crider: Like the l- like, the fact of the matter is at this point that like the kind of granularity idea that like, algorithmic kind of control and knobs and whistles is such that if you are down ranked, you don't get seen.
• 25:38
  Cori Crider: You just don't get seen.
• 25:39
  Cori Crider: And you know, what's interesting about this particular point is that act hasn't tended to be partisan, right?
• 25:45
  Cori Crider: Like in other words, you know, first it was the Republicans who were all mad because they thought that Twitter was woke and was shadow banning them and now, let's be honest, why did Elon Musk spend$43 billion of Morgan Stanley's money on a loss-making social media enterprise?
• 26:00
  Cori Crider: Why did he do that?
• 26:01
  Cori Crider: Did he do that because he thought that he could turn a profit with it?
• 26:04
  Cori Crider: I don't think so.
• 26:05
  Cori Crider: I'm gonna, I'm gonna offer that he did that because he thought that he would be able to do some knobs and whistles and promote what he would describe as free speech, and I would describe as white nationalism, uh, and anti-democratic sentiment, and he understood implicitly that with$43 billion of Morgan Stanley's money, he could go and exercise some form of editorial-like control over what had at one point been kind of the bar where journalists hang out.
• 26:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 26:32
  Ben Whitelaw: he showed a very, um, very obvious dislike of, journalists and media in the get-go.
• 26:37
  Ben Whitelaw: You remember he actually called out some of the CBS"60 Minute" journalists, I don't know if you remember that, and said that they should be thrown in jail for characterizing Donald Trump in a particular way in one of the documentaries that came out soon after he bought it.
• 26:49
  Ben Whitelaw: He, He got rid of accounts from"The New York Times," from CNN.
• 26:52
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, it was pretty flagrant.
• 26:53
  Ben Whitelaw: so yeah, I don't think he cares much for, media.
• 26:56
  Cori Crider: No, indeed.
• 26:57
  Cori Crider: And so I think, look, I, Because I did grow...
• 27:00
  Cori Crider: I'm originally from Texas.
• 27:01
  Cori Crider: I grew up in the United States.
• 27:02
  Cori Crider: I do share the American skepticism for, um, incredibly granular forms of, let's say, speech regulations.
• 27:11
  Cori Crider: But it is true that the democratic norms on that in Europe are different from the United States, so there's that.
• 27:16
  Cori Crider: But there's another point, which is that I think that gets missed, with love in the pages of TechDirt all the time, which is it kind of imagines that there's like...
• 27:23
  Cori Crider: I, I don't know.
• 27:23
  Cori Crider: It's almost like they think that everybody's like that dude in"The Matrix," like, that's the G-Man and, right, he's controlling the state.
• 27:29
  Cori Crider: And that otherwise, like, the information would just be flowing freely according to what you clicked on, and that's no form of control.
• 27:35
  Cori Crider: And I think that's...
• 27:36
  Cori Crider: Like, at best, it's naive.
• 27:38
  Cori Crider: At best, it's naive, right?
• 27:39
  Cori Crider: Because this, the prioritization has been, it is serving aims.
• 27:43
  Cori Crider: Some of them are merely profit-making aims, and some of them, I would say at this point, are pretty nakedly ideological
• 27:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, think that's fair.
• 27:51
  Ben Whitelaw: I would like to see a podcast with you and Mike at some point in the future.
• 27:54
  Cori Crider: if, if he'll do it, if it, if he'll do it, I'll go on.
• 27:57
  Cori Crider: I mean, I appreciate the work.
• 27:57
  Cori Crider: Again, there's so much common ground, right?
• 27:59
  Cori Crider: Like, protocols not platforms, absolutely correct.
• 28:02
  Cori Crider: Totally incredibly important paper.
• 28:04
  Cori Crider: Like, I think that what's happening on the AT protocol, as I believe he does, is the most exciting thing happening in internet development right now.
• 28:10
  Cori Crider: So there's loads of common ground, and then there are these other parts where I'm just like,"Nobody.
• 28:13
  Cori Crider: No, it is just not 1997 anymore." Anyway, and you've lost people.
• 28:19
  Cori Crider: And, and, and I just wanna say, like, to all of y'all who feel this way, By sitting here saying,"Look, there's no problem here.
• 28:25
  Cori Crider: The answer to speech is more speech," you have lost the public.
• 28:29
  Cori Crider: by denying that there's a problem here, by basically saying that everybody who wants to see something a little bit more, I dunno what I would, what I'd like...
• 28:39
  Cori Crider: To see a little bit less kind of polarized, algorithmically slopified discourse is Tipper Gore, if we were about like, you know, or Hillary Clinton, whomever, like one of these other kind of hopeless people.
• 28:50
  Cori Crider: I think, you know, actually just look at the numbers, guys.
• 28:54
  Cori Crider: Like, look at the numbers
• 28:56
  Ben Whitelaw: It's shifted.
• 28:57
  Ben Whitelaw: It's definitely shifted.
• 28:58
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, we, so we talked a bit about their, like, social media bans in, in Aus and where things are at, and there is this sense that, you know, if it's not working now, it might work for the next generation, the kids who are six, seven, eight years old now who aren't quite at the cusp of joining social media platforms.
• 29:13
  Ben Whitelaw: We should judge it on a kind of long-term basis.
• 29:15
  Ben Whitelaw: that's one way of going about it.
• 29:17
  Ben Whitelaw: there's also a suggestion of, of a better type of ban, and we saw last week in G- Germany a commission, an independent commission of experts there come out and posit a few ideas for what their, national kind of social media ban might look like.
• 29:30
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's different to what's, emerged in-- Well, there's elements of it that are different to what's emerged in, in Australia and the UK.
• 29:37
  Ben Whitelaw: one of them, one of the big kind of recommendations is it should be for, there should be a strict ban on under 13s only with tiered, feature access to 13-year-olds and upwards up until the age of 18.
• 29:49
  Ben Whitelaw: And then there's ano- an alternative view that says actually it should be a, a kind of feature-specific ban, or a platform-specific ban.
• 29:56
  Ben Whitelaw: So much more like the kind of Canada model that we've talked about recently.
• 29:59
  Ben Whitelaw: you've been privy to some of the kind of conversations in Spain as well, Cory, about what their ban looks like.
• 30:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Are, are we seeing a kind of evolution of what a, ban looks like particularly in Europe?
• 30:09
  Cori Crider: I think so.
• 30:10
  Cori Crider: I think that's right.
• 30:10
  Cori Crider: I think that the original iteration of this, you know, be- and maybe because it comes out from a conversation from, let's say, the political class who are meeting the demand of their constituents, it's like,"Well, we need to do something.
• 30:21
  Cori Crider: People want a big, visible, headline-grabbing policy.
• 30:23
  Cori Crider: Let's ban some shit." and so it'll be a blanket knee-jerk ban.
• 30:27
  Cori Crider: We want a bright line so that I can go back to the public and say something.
• 30:29
  Cori Crider: And then what happens is, like, they go down and they talk to, you know, civil servants and technologists and others, they're like,"Wow Actually, it's a bit more complicated.
• 30:37
  Cori Crider: People tend to get around it.
• 30:38
  Cori Crider: Also, like, that actually just leaves the toxic business model intact.
• 30:42
  Cori Crider: So maybe, maybe we should look at, like, actually targeting certain kinds of functionalities, like ways in which something would behave.
• 30:50
  Cori Crider: And then if they dial that stuff down, then maybe we don't have to age gate.
• 30:54
  Cori Crider: B- And, and, just to engage another point, which is, well, still there'd be some age gating, and doesn't that mean the kids are gonna get around it anyway?
• 30:59
  Cori Crider: Which is what somebody might still say.
• 31:01
  Cori Crider: I think if there's more room for something better to persist, that if kids are still able to, like, connect in something that is a bit less toxic, then you start to reduce the incentive for circumvention, if you know what I mean, right?
• 31:12
  Cori Crider: Like, it's one thing to just say you can't have it all together, and then, you know...
• 31:15
  Cori Crider: I mean, I, m- kid is eight, so I don't have a teenager yet, but, you know, I was one once, and I've kind of observed their behavior.
• 31:20
  Cori Crider: And the, the vibe that I get off of teen behavior is that the harder that you, you know, the harder you push, like, the more likely they are to kind of try and resist and get round.
• 31:28
  Cori Crider: But if there's a measured thing where you have a conversation with people that says, like,"This is quite bad, but we know that you need, one, you, you wanna hang out, you wanna gossip, you wanna share a stupid meme.
• 31:36
  Cori Crider: Like, here's a way in doing it that's actually fine," then maybe you m- maybe...
• 31:42
  Cori Crider: I don't think we know.
• 31:42
  Cori Crider: I think we have to have the humility to acknowledge that this is a democratic experiment that we're gonna have to learn from and iterate, then maybe the kids have less of an incentive to try and run round, right?
• 31:51
  Cori Crider: So, what we understand that German proposal from the commission to do is, uh, the, the German expert commission to do, and what we understand actually even Sanchez, who came out of the gate real strong, right?
• 32:01
  Cori Crider: But who have refined now, today in a, in an amended proposal with the legislation, is to zoom in and, to target features and to offer things like in the Spanish case, maybe to offer an exemption.
• 32:11
  Cori Crider: Which is to say,"Well, actually, if you can show that you've dialed down some of the most problematic aspects of Monopoly Social, then seems to us like probably you're okay." And what will be interesting to observe, assuming that goes through, I mean, there's a whole other thing that I don't know if your users are interested in about, like, the tension between, like, member state law and EU law, and whether ultimately this is all gonna be sucked into the commission with a kind of, one-size-fits-all approach, which is, I think, where we're actually ultimately gonna get, end up.
• 32:38
  Cori Crider: And we, we can have a conversation about the tension between the member states and Brussels at some point if you want.
• 32:42
  Cori Crider: But like, what these guys are doing is like, think of it as like a Spanish cattle prod, right?
• 32:46
  Cori Crider: It's like,"Well, if y'all Brussels are not gonna do this, then my constituents are demanding that I do something.
• 32:51
  Cori Crider: Here's what we're doing." But even within, let's say, the most agro provo of the legislative m- moments, which I would say is Spain, France, actually they're...
• 33:01
  Cori Crider: I would say that they're more, like, out front than Germany.
• 33:04
  Cori Crider: But even there, you're starting, like at least in Spain as of today, you're starting to see a refinement and a sharpening of the position towards targeting features rather than just this blanket kind of cliff edge age ban.
• 33:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 33:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, let's talk about the, tension between national and kind of block-wide legislation then, because, we know that there's an independent EU-wide commission who's gonna be reporting back actually in, in about 10 days' time their views on what the, Europe-wide approach should be.
• 33:29
  Ben Whitelaw: And it actually came out today, in a story from Euractiv that the announcement from, President Ursula von der Leyen is gonna happen on the 16th of September.
• 33:39
  Ben Whitelaw: So they've already kind of set a date for the announcement.
• 33:42
  Ben Whitelaw: They still don't know what, what options are,
• 33:44
  Cori Crider: Back to school, right?
• 33:45
  Cori Crider: Back to school.
• 33:45
  Cori Crider: I mean, let's be clear about the political calendar here, right?
• 33:48
  Cori Crider: It's like we want something for families for back to school
• 33:51
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 33:51
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and also the fact that they're announcing the, that they're trailing the announcement date ahead of actually knowing the options also shows the pressure that they're under.
• 33:59
  Ben Whitelaw: The, the, prod is working, right?
• 34:01
  Ben Whitelaw: who's gonna be the winners and losers in that kind of fallout between national and, bloc-wide, legislation?
• 34:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Like, is it gonna make sense to have a kind of blanket approach, is Macron gonna be furious because he hasn't got his own approach?
• 34:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Like, how do you see that shaping up?
• 34:17
  Cori Crider: So For those of your listeners who do not live in the European Union and who are American, the way that I think of the European Union is a bit like our civics class from American high school.
• 34:26
  Cori Crider: Like, before the United States, was the United States, we existed under the sta- the, colonies existed under something called the Articles of Confederation.
• 34:35
  Cori Crider: And the thing that we're always taught in like American high school is like,"Ah, it didn't work,"'cause like everybody had their own kind of...
• 34:41
  Cori Crider: I mean, at the moment we have a euro, so this is not true.
• 34:43
  Cori Crider: But they had their own currency, and like there's too much power that was delegated and like, you know, supposedly it was gonna centralize, but they, they just couldn't agree on all this stuff, and like the central part didn't have enough power.
• 34:53
  Cori Crider: So eventually they said,"Screw it.
• 34:55
  Cori Crider: Screw it.
• 34:55
  Cori Crider: We need a, we need a mulligan, we need a do-over, and we just need to be a country." Anyway, Europe is that, right?
• 35:00
  Cori Crider: Like, so you've got this, the, you've got this constant tension between people who wanna see something consistent for the sake of economic unity and because, let's be honest, a union of 450 million relatively affluent citizens is a hell of a lot harder to bully, and it has a hell...
• 35:16
  Cori Crider: Like, that's a very serious market, uh, as compared to, you know, like an individual nation of even 50 or 60 million.
• 35:23
  Cori Crider: but then at the risk of sounding like, I don't know, Nigel Farage or something, like the democratic levers within Brussels are weak enough.
• 35:30
  Cori Crider: Like those guys are not directly elected.
• 35:31
  Cori Crider: General- Well, the MEPs are, but like the Commission isn't.
• 35:34
  Cori Crider: they don't quite have the democratic touchpoint that the national leaders of Spain or France or Germany or the Netherlands have.
• 35:40
  Cori Crider: And so, so you get this constant power struggle, not just in tech policy, but just in kinda anything, right?
• 35:45
  Cori Crider: Where stuff that is maybe gonna have an EU-wide effect, which obviously tech policy issues do, is supposed to be harmonized and supposed to be consistent.
• 35:55
  Cori Crider: And so there's a kind of, at best, an open question about whether the member states even have the legal authority to do what they're doing.
• 36:02
  Cori Crider: but what you, what you can see them doing is testing it.
• 36:05
  Cori Crider: They're, they're pushing it right up to the limit because frankly, they are responding, I would say rightly in some sense, to unbelievable democratic demand, right?
• 36:13
  Cori Crider: And so you've got your s- your, as I say, the Spanish cattle prod or whatever, and I would say it's clearly more desirable to have like a rational, EU-wide response to this.
• 36:23
  Cori Crider: Do I think that Brussels would be moving as they now are moving without that member state pressure?
• 36:29
  Cori Crider: Absolutely not.
• 36:30
  Cori Crider: I really don't think that they would be.
• 36:31
  Cori Crider: So I think although this, I, you know, and I've seen exchanges, like pretty heated exchanges between senior off- I won't say who, but between senior officials at European, member states and people who are like in the legal part of the Commission being, you know.
• 36:44
  Cori Crider: And the people in the Commission are like,"If you fragment this, it's very dangerous for the union." And people from the individual member state will be like,"Well, look, you move or we're gonna." that's the nature of the debate right now, basically.
• 36:55
  Cori Crider: It's like we understand that you'd quite like a very perfect European consistent, harmonized process, like it's your purview or whatever But ultimately, like, I've got constituents.
• 37:06
  Cori Crider: We serve our voters, and if you don't move, we're gonna...
• 37:08
  Cori Crider: And so that has created this overwhelming pressure.
• 37:11
  Cori Crider: and you can see von der Leyen, I think von der Leyen is well as that, which is as well as, like, wanting to make sure people don't steal the march, and she doesn't have this kind of mess on her hands'cause it's well over a dozen states that are now looking at legislating on their own steam, regardless of whether they in fact have the authority to do so.
• 37:27
  Cori Crider: I think she is genuinely moved by this issue.
• 37:29
  Cori Crider: She's got s- I, I kinda didn't know this rec- until quite recently.
• 37:32
  Cori Crider: She's actually got seven kids of her own, you
• 37:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Wow.
• 37:34
  Cori Crider: Yeah.
• 37:35
  Cori Crider: Like sh- you know, I
• 37:36
  Ben Whitelaw: She's more affected than anybody.
• 37:38
  Cori Crider: Yeah.
• 37:39
  Cori Crider: Well, they're all adults now.
• 37:40
  Cori Crider: I guess some of them worked for Google or at some point, by the way.
• 37:43
  Cori Crider: Anyway, that's a whole other deal.
• 37:44
  Cori Crider: But anyway, but like, she's been pretty visibly, I think, and sincerely moved by this as a policy issue.
• 37:51
  Cori Crider: She's chosen to stake some reputation on it.
• 37:54
  Cori Crider: but so have some of the European leaders.
• 37:56
  Cori Crider: You mentioned Macron.
• 37:57
  Cori Crider: So has Macron, so has Sanchez, you know.
• 37:59
  Cori Crider: And so,
• 38:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Stammer as well
• 38:01
  Cori Crider: get...
• 38:01
  Cori Crider: Yeah.
• 38:02
  Cori Crider: Uh, well, I mean, yeah, the artist formerly known as the prime minister.
• 38:05
  Cori Crider: No, but Burnham or whomever will pick it up, right?
• 38:07
  Cori Crider: I mean, like, people...
• 38:08
  Cori Crider: because again, people believe, I think rightly, that they will harvest some political benefit from being seen to stand up to the platforms on behalf of families.
• 38:15
  Cori Crider: And so how that plays out in European power, like, for example, do they set aside and let kind of these European member states go first so that they, you know, announce their solution?
• 38:24
  Cori Crider: And then say,"Ah, yes, and now we will have a harmonized European solution, so nobody needs to worry." I dunno.
• 38:29
  Cori Crider: I mean, you can imagine a sequencing like that, and it may well be that, like, why announce this, right?
• 38:35
  Cori Crider: Exactly as you say.
• 38:35
  Cori Crider: Like, somehow we're waiting on the recommendations of the commission, but we're saying that we're gonna say what the policy is by the 16th of September.
• 38:40
  Cori Crider: What's that about?
• 38:41
  Cori Crider: Maybe it's about a clear signal to the member states that lets them do whatever positioning they're gonna do in two and a half months.
• 38:48
  Cori Crider: it's like,"Here's your window.
• 38:49
  Cori Crider: Go."
• 38:50
  Ben Whitelaw: have fun then will come in.
• 38:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 38:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, so we're in for an, an interesting couple of months.
• 38:55
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, and oh, if, if you, you're an MEP or a politician generally hoping to have a break over the summer, yeah, good luck with that.
• 39:01
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, I think you've probably got a lot on your hands.
• 39:03
  Ben Whitelaw: I wanted to kind of move on, to, a story that we'll, we'll touch on before we go into our Patreon only section, Corey.
• 39:11
  Ben Whitelaw: we talked about kind of building a bridge to something better.
• 39:13
  Ben Whitelaw: you talked about the need to create, platforms that people want to move to.
• 39:17
  Ben Whitelaw: I think an element of that is, the incentives to move there and the reasoning, the network, the social graph, the content as well is also a thing.
• 39:25
  Ben Whitelaw: And you, you picked up on a story from, I guess work that you've been closely aligned with, with Eurosky and a German public broadcaster working more closely together.
• 39:32
  Ben Whitelaw: just give us a kind of overview of that and why you think it's important.
• 39:35
  Cori Crider: Yeah.
• 39:35
  Cori Crider: So basically just to explain what EuroSky is.
• 39:38
  Cori Crider: EuroSky isn't an app itself.
• 39:39
  Cori Crider: I mean, they have just put out one called Mew with some kind of cute cat memes and things for those of you who wanna check it out, I would recommend it.
• 39:45
  Cori Crider: It's a kind of Bluesky-esque.
• 39:47
  Cori Crider: but it's the infrastructure, it's the roads, it's the rails, it's basically host your data completely in Europe, govern it completely in Europe.
• 39:55
  Cori Crider: So the, it's, it's the basis on which fully European social media could be generated, and it is open protocol, so it's all on the AT Protocol.
• 40:04
  Cori Crider: And yes, full disclosure, we know the people, who are developing it.
• 40:07
  Cori Crider: Sharif El-Sayed Ali was one of-- was the original ED of Foti.
• 40:11
  Cori Crider: I mean, we even helped behind the scenes a little bit with like a crowdfunder to try to get them like, we're not talking about big money on this space here.
• 40:17
  Cori Crider: Like, we're trying to help them get like 100K or something.
• 40:19
  Cori Crider: I mean, really, this is really kind of granola, knit your own muesli level of funding at this point.
• 40:24
  Cori Crider: It's very DIY.
• 40:26
  Cori Crider: but anyway, so but they do have a partnership with this, content network which is a kind of German broadcasters basically.
• 40:32
  Cori Crider: Because if you think about of the entities who have an interest in there being a better kind of social media, it's definitely journalists and news publishers, right?
• 40:39
  Cori Crider: Like first Google ate their lunch because it took all the ad revenue, and Facebook did the same.
• 40:44
  Cori Crider: And then as we all know, like all of the social media, algorithmically service, services suppress outlinks, because again, bad for your ad revenue, right?
• 40:52
  Cori Crider: So if you're a journalist and you want people to go and read your content, and you try to put a link, if you put it in the first post, I mean, tons of reporters know this, like it's like it didn't exist.
• 41:01
  Cori Crider: It's like it didn't happen.
• 41:02
  Cori Crider: It's just you screaming into the wind.
• 41:05
  Cori Crider: and that's sad, right?
• 41:06
  Cori Crider: Because actually one of the things that used to be great about Twitter before it turned into the bin fire that now is, like I said, it was the bar where journalists hang out.
• 41:13
  Cori Crider: It was places where news would break and people would debate the news and, ac-actually very senior reporters would engage with it.
• 41:20
  Cori Crider: Subject matter experts were all there.
• 41:21
  Cori Crider: It was a really, you know, it was a very interesting public square.
• 41:25
  Cori Crider: So anyway, so the partnership with, Funk, I guess is about saying look, we as broadcasters, we as, journalists, we as news, we need to recognize that just hanging out on the old platforms is not gonna serve us anymore.
• 41:40
  Cori Crider: It's not gonna serve news consumers anymore.
• 41:42
  Cori Crider: It's not-- It doesn't serve from, like, a journalism and informing the public standpoint on the one hand, and it actually doesn't serve us from a business side anymore, right?
• 41:49
  Cori Crider: So, and I think there's lots of other cool stuff like SIL There are lots of really, really interesting groups and experiments being developed on the AT protocol basically to try to plug this gap, to say that like, look, journalism on the monopoly internet, just is dying.
• 42:08
  Cori Crider: It's absolutely dying.
• 42:09
  Cori Crider: But people still have a need to both get real fact as it is happening and to debate that fact.
• 42:15
  Cori Crider: and that, that discussion is moving.
• 42:17
  Cori Crider: I don't think that it's coalesced around any given site.
• 42:20
  Cori Crider: People still argue about the news on Twitter, of course they do.
• 42:22
  Cori Crider: Excuse me, X.
• 42:24
  Cori Crider: Um, but, in my mind, I just want-- It just...
• 42:26
  Cori Crider: Twitter won't go out.
• 42:27
  Cori Crider: Like it will just always be Twitter.
• 42:29
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm the same.
• 42:29
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm the same
• 42:30
  Cori Crider: I just can't.
• 42:31
  Cori Crider: I just can't.
• 42:31
  Cori Crider: Anyway, so like I said, so I guess what's exciting, what's really exciting about kind of EuroSky, but also just the whole family of apps, BlackSky, you know, like as I say, SIL, all these others, is that there is true experimentation going on, with what social media can be, how we can connect, how we can present content to one another.
• 42:50
  Cori Crider: rather than just assuming that Well, we can just have the same kinds of websites that we've had before, but maybe slightly less evil." Like, people will experiment with form and shape, and I think that'll be great.
• 43:00
  Cori Crider: and if you want to move to EuroSky, you don't even have to be in Europe.
• 43:03
  Cori Crider: You know, you might well be an American who wants to host your data in Europe, so you know.
• 43:06
  Cori Crider: it does take a few minutes.
• 43:08
  Cori Crider: I would be lying if I said it was, you know...
• 43:10
  Cori Crider: But it only takes a couple of minutes, right?
• 43:12
  Cori Crider: Like if you're a tech-savvy audience, you ought to be able to do it, frankly.
• 43:15
  Cori Crider: I, I could do it and I'm let's say a relatively unsophisticated user of digital technology
• 43:21
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm, I plan to do it after this recording, don't worry.
• 43:24
  Ben Whitelaw: Um,
• 43:24
  Cori Crider: minute, any day now.
• 43:26
  Cori Crider: Good, good, good.
• 43:27
  Cori Crider: You should.
• 43:27
  Cori Crider: And try Mew as well.
• 43:29
  Cori Crider: The...
• 43:29
  Cori Crider: Yeah.
• 43:29
  Cori Crider: Anyway
• 43:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Love a cat meme.
• 43:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, so I think that's an interesting, development.
• 43:34
  Ben Whitelaw: I th- To be honest, I think there's, there's a broader discussion which we won't have time for today about how institutions that are beyond media interact with AT Protocol and, and other, protocols because I think there's not been enough, interest in them, there's not been enough commitment to them, and I think that will start to shift behaviors over time.
• 43:51
  Ben Whitelaw: so I'd, I'd love to kind of have you back on in a, few months or so to see how that changes'cause I think that's a big lever that's still yet to be pulled.
• 43:57
  Cori Crider: I'd love to talk, I mean, if we ever had time another time, I'd love to talk about just kind of business models, and why we don't see it, right?
• 44:03
  Cori Crider: Because again, I think I, you know, God love Mike, but like this kind of we can just build things.
• 44:07
  Cori Crider: It's like, well, you can, but you can also build things a hell of a lot better if people will pay to do it.
• 44:11
  Cori Crider: And people will pay you to do it if they can see that there's a space for their investment to grow, and if they believe that it is in a kill zone because market regulators who have allowed the kill zone to develop, then the investment dries up, right?
• 44:22
  Cori Crider: I mean, you don't, you don't need to take that from me.
• 44:23
  Cori Crider: You take it from somebody like Y Combinator, right?
• 44:26
  Cori Crider: Not a noted kind of lefty statist.
• 44:27
  Cori Crider: I mean, even Y Combinator wrote a letter to Donald Trump being like,"I know, I know, I know Europe, they're very annoying, but hands off the Digital Markets Act.
• 44:34
  Cori Crider: It's the best that we've got." That would...
• 44:35
  Cori Crider: You don't, you know, don't take that from me.
• 44:37
  Cori Crider: Take that from Y actual Combinator, right?
• 44:40
  Cori Crider: Like they
• 44:41
  Ben Whitelaw: breeding ground for many startups, US
• 44:44
  Cori Crider: Yeah, exactly.
• 44:44
  Cori Crider: It, uh, exactly.
• 44:45
  Cori Crider: And you know, and the whole point is like we can't make as many bets because too much of the playing field is foreclosed.
• 44:52
  Cori Crider: That's the basic point.
• 44:53
  Cori Crider: And look, have the like 80 people who enforce the DMA right now managed to like create paradise and overnight?
• 44:59
  Cori Crider: absolutely not.
• 45:00
  Cori Crider: Of course they haven't.
• 45:01
  Cori Crider: it is difficult, and there aren't enough of them, and they need more technologists, quite frankly.
• 45:05
  Cori Crider: But should we try to push that law to meet its promise for the sake of clearing space for the people trying to build other stuff?
• 45:11
  Cori Crider: Absolutely, we should.
• 45:13
  Cori Crider: We absolutely should.
• 45:13
  Cori Crider: But yeah, we need more of them.
• 45:15
  Cori Crider: I phoned the, just as a kind of gag, I phoned the, Brussels parking enforcement agency the other day, and I said,"How many people you got giving out parking tickets in Brussels basically?" I think they said it took a, maybe three weeks to get back to me.
• 45:27
  Cori Crider: And they came back and they said, We have 79, parking enforcers," if I remember correctly.
• 45:31
  Cori Crider: which is like basically the size of the DMA enforcement team.
• 45:34
  Cori Crider: So like parking tickets, the opening up of the digital market for Europe's 450 million citizens have roughly the same number of enforcers, in Brussels.
• 45:43
  Ben Whitelaw: I wonder which the public care more about, though.
• 45:45
  Ben Whitelaw: I'd hate to say.
• 45:46
  Ben Whitelaw: okay, great.
• 45:46
  Ben Whitelaw: So that's That's a good point I think to draw a line this week on our free episode, Cory.
• 45:51
  Ben Whitelaw: I think we've, covered, all the major social ban stories, and also a little bit more.
• 45:55
  Ben Whitelaw: there is more to say.
• 45:56
  Ben Whitelaw: We're on this week's Ctrl Alt Speech Plus we're gonna be talking about, a story that's very close to your heart actually, I think.
• 46:02
  Ben Whitelaw: moderators who are having, their jobs cut at major platforms, as a result of a move to AI moderation.
• 46:09
  Ben Whitelaw: This is a story that I've been following very closely for Everything in Moderation, and we touched on in Ctrl Alt Speech.
• 46:15
  Ben Whitelaw: it's a story that I don't think will, be stopping anytime soon.
• 46:18
  Ben Whitelaw: We see AI moderation become increasingly the norm for platforms nowadays.
• 46:22
  Ben Whitelaw: And so I think it's a really important one to delve into, particularly with Cory with us on the podcast.
• 46:26
  Ben Whitelaw: so we're gonna wrap up there, and we'll see our Patreon listeners on the other side.
• 46:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Thanks everyone.
• 46:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Take care.
• 46:33
  Announcer: That's the end of this week's free edition of Ctrl Alt Speech.
• 46:37
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• 46:44
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• 46:47
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• 46:54
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