Latest / Ctrl-Alt-Speech / Have Yourself a Very Meta Christmas

Transcript

Have Yourself a Very Meta Christmas · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Ben Whitelaw: So, as regular listeners know, Mike, the user prompt is the way we start all our episodes of Controllable Speech.
• 0:06
  Ben Whitelaw: we have a kind of special, has a special place in our hearts for the fact that it's so key for getting users of the internet to say what they think, to write in, you know, little boxes online.
• 0:16
  Ben Whitelaw: and so, we do it every single week, but because it's the festive season, we've decided to use a Christmas-y app and we've decided to go for the portable North Pole app.
• 0:25
  Ben Whitelaw: which, yeah, which is, uh, is not one that I use regularly, I must say.
• 0:31
  Ben Whitelaw: but I want you to kind of respond to its prompt, which is talk to Santa, ask your questions.
• 0:36
  Mike Masnick: oh, well that is, an interesting prompt.
• 0:39
  Mike Masnick: as a Jew, I don't often talk to Santa.
• 0:45
  Ben Whitelaw: Not a big, not a big user of the uh, portable North Pole app.
• 0:49
  Mike Masnick: no, no.
• 0:49
  Mike Masnick: But, but you know, you know, if I have a chance, uh, given this opportunity, I, but you usually don't ask questions of center, right?
• 0:57
  Mike Masnick: You ask for things.
• 0:58
  Mike Masnick: So, so I think what I would like is, some time this holiday season to just recoup and regather and, catch upon sleep and have nothing crazy happen in the world at large, let alone the world of online speech and trust and safety.
• 1:14
  Mike Masnick: Could use a little break.
• 1:16
  Mike Masnick: Ben, I'm exhausted.
• 1:17
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I feel you.
• 1:19
  Ben Whitelaw: I feel you.
• 1:19
  Ben Whitelaw: I think if I was to ask, if I was to ask sense of something, it would be what is the best way to get rid of man flu quick.
• 1:29
  Ben Whitelaw: cause I've come down with something and, you know, I've dragged myself out bed to come and record control or speech and, you know, I sound like Pat Butcher, which is a very niche, UK reference for, for our,
• 1:41
  Mike Masnick: idea.
• 1:43
  Ben Whitelaw: for British based, listeners.
• 1:44
  Ben Whitelaw: But, it, hasn't done well for my, my vocal chords.
• 1:47
  Ben Whitelaw: So we'll see how this goes.
• 1:49
  Ben Whitelaw: This could go any direction.
• 1:50
  Mike Masnick: this, between the two of us.
• 1:52
  Mike Masnick: I'm exhausted.
• 1:53
  Mike Masnick: You're sick.
• 1:53
  Mike Masnick: This is gonna be a great episode.
• 1:57
  Ben Whitelaw: Buckle up everyone.
• 2:07
  Ben Whitelaw: Hello and welcome to Control Alt Speech, your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation.
• 2:14
  Ben Whitelaw: It's December the 18th, 2025, and this week we're talking about why meta seemingly hates women, why meta seemingly hates the internet at large and for something a little bit different, why Meta is doing what Meta is doing to keep children safe online.
• 2:28
  Ben Whitelaw: I promise you there are other stories as well.
• 2:32
  Ben Whitelaw: My name is Ben Whitelaw.
• 2:34
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation.
• 2:36
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm desperately, desperately sick, but I'm here to support my co-host Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Tech who sounds like you, you'd rather be somewhere else doing other things.
• 2:49
  Mike Masnick: No,
• 2:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Why?
• 2:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Why is it?
• 2:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Why is it that this year, this time of year, is such a chaotic kind of crazy time of year?
• 2:55
  Mike Masnick: I mean, there's always just the, like, everybody trying to get certain things done by the end of the year.
• 2:59
  Mike Masnick: And then I think this year is just overwhelming in general.
• 3:01
  Mike Masnick: There's obviously a lot going on in the world, and then yeah, lots of people are sick.
• 3:06
  Mike Masnick: I think I have a very low level, maybe sickness that like, I have this like, sort of small lingering headache in the back of my head, but not, not anything more serious than that.
• 3:17
  Mike Masnick: it's just a lot's going on and, and it's just, uh, but no, no, I, I am happy I am here'cause this is, this is a definitely a highlight of the week always to get to talk to you and I appreciate you dragging yourself out of your sick bed
• 3:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Look at us bringing the Christmas chair.
• 3:35
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 3:35
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 3:35
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 3:36
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 3:38
  Ben Whitelaw: doing our best.
• 3:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, we have got, a few meta stories to talk about this week, Mike, which I think is an appropriate way to end 2025.
• 3:46
  Ben Whitelaw: This is our last episode of Control Speech.
• 3:48
  Ben Whitelaw: gonna take a few weeks break, I think, understandably, from what we've both shared.
• 3:52
  Ben Whitelaw: but back in January, you'll remember that we spent the first probably few episodes at least, talking about Mark Zuckerberg's big gold chained, big watched announcement about how, you know, meta was moving into a kind of world of free expression, getting rid of censorship.
• 4:09
  Ben Whitelaw: so the fact we're covering them so in depth today, I think is an appropriate bookend to this year.
• 4:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Wouldn't you say?
• 4:15
  Mike Masnick: Oh yeah, absolutely.
• 4:17
  Mike Masnick: 'cause it's, it's kind of a chance for us to check in on how much Mark Zuckerberg is living up to the ideals that he laid out in January.
• 4:25
  Mike Masnick: Very exciting.
• 4:26
  Mike Masnick: New, Facebook, new meta, new Mark Zuckerberg.
• 4:30
  Mike Masnick: How's that going?
• 4:31
  Mike Masnick: We're about to find out.
• 4:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Can't wait to see, we will be back in the new year with, actually a really interesting, episode.
• 4:37
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that we'll, we'll set out the year ahead.
• 4:40
  Ben Whitelaw: We're gonna do a bit of a kind of forward looking episode where we try and preempt what's happening.
• 4:43
  Ben Whitelaw: It's not a prediction episode.
• 4:45
  Ben Whitelaw: we don't really do predictions
• 4:47
  Mike Masnick: we have no crystal balls.
• 4:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 4:50
  Mike Masnick: We, just, we have some insights perhaps.
• 4:53
  Ben Whitelaw: yes.
• 4:54
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, exactly.
• 4:55
  Ben Whitelaw: so yeah, listeners will have to, use this episode, and drag it out for the course of the holiday season.
• 5:00
  Ben Whitelaw: but they can also spend their much, Needed downtime by leaving a review or a rating for the podcast wherever they get their, podcasts.
• 5:10
  Ben Whitelaw: apple, Spotify, you know, the niche platforms that I know Listen on Mike.
• 5:14
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, they're all places where, where we need ratings and reviews to help us get discovered Going into 2026.
• 5:20
  Ben Whitelaw: I think it's gonna be a big year for online speech and content moderation.
• 5:24
  Ben Whitelaw: And so your support is very, very, valued.
• 5:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Very, very welcome.
• 5:28
  Ben Whitelaw: Thank you to everyone who's been listening this year.
• 5:30
  Ben Whitelaw: but yeah, make sure you, you leave a rating review when you can.
• 5:33
  Ben Whitelaw: So let's move into our first story, this week, Mike.
• 5:37
  Ben Whitelaw: this is Meta's kind of first strike, I'd say.
• 5:40
  Ben Whitelaw: in the Controlled Speech podcast this week, as you know, in the content moderation enforcement systems, you get a number of strikes if you're a, a user who doesn't follow policies.
• 5:50
  Ben Whitelaw: and I would class this as its first strike today.
• 5:54
  Ben Whitelaw: it's a story that, I think kind of went a bit under the radar, didn't get a lot of, traction as far as I saw.
• 5:59
  Ben Whitelaw: but a really interesting one.
• 6:01
  Ben Whitelaw: It, could be from Any year, really in the past 10 years.
• 6:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike, this, this is a story that could have come in 2024 when Instagram users got restricted from sharing content about, L-G-B-T-Q rights issues.
• 6:15
  Ben Whitelaw: It could have been in a story that came in 2022 when, meta removed posts related to abortion bills on the back of Roe versus Wade.
• 6:22
  Ben Whitelaw: And it could even be a post that, you know, you could almost trace back to the free the nipple protests in 2013, such as the, kind of, feels like we've been talking about this kind of story forever and ever.
• 6:33
  Ben Whitelaw: This latest version is meta restricting and removing hundreds of accounts, related to over 50 organizations across the world, providing help and support and information regarding abortion L-G-B-T-Q, access, information about women's health and.
• 6:51
  Ben Whitelaw: As of October, a lot of these organizations are seeing their accounts shadow banned, the reach restricted, and in some cases being taken off the platform completely.
• 7:00
  Ben Whitelaw: It is a piece of work done by an organization in nonprofit called Repro Uncensored.
• 7:05
  Ben Whitelaw: And, they have essentially got a process by which these organizations can notify them when something like this happens.
• 7:12
  Ben Whitelaw: And so they've, produced this report of all of the different, reports that they've received over the course of, the last few months.
• 7:18
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's a pretty shocking, shocking document, Mike.
• 7:22
  Ben Whitelaw: it's been covered by the Guardian, who often write up some of these stories about meta's most egregious, I guess, policy fails.
• 7:30
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's a pretty shocking thing.
• 7:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Basically, the, a lot of these organizations are very small.
• 7:35
  Ben Whitelaw: They're not just, organizations you maybe haven't heard of or, or based in kind of parts of the world where this is more likely to happen.
• 7:41
  Ben Whitelaw: Many of these organizations are from Europe, from the uk, some in the US as well.
• 7:46
  Ben Whitelaw: And, again, it's, It's quite a shocking, state of affairs.
• 7:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Repro and center are saying that this is kind of part of what meta, has been kind of undergoing in the last year, which is its Trump era approach to women's health and L-G-B-T-Q issues.
• 7:59
  Ben Whitelaw: And they've also flagged the fact that many of these organizations haven't been able to get in touch with meta or, had their appeals or questions answered appropriately.
• 8:08
  Ben Whitelaw: And in some cases have been kind of totally blanked, but it's left.
• 8:12
  Ben Whitelaw: lots of, women, lgbtq plus people and marginalized groups, essentially unable to get the information they need because of sudden decisions made in the background to, to take of accounts down.
• 8:25
  Ben Whitelaw: in the kind of like, is this a kind of story that will never, never die?
• 8:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Are we gonna have to contend with this for the rest of the time?
• 8:33
  Mike Masnick: Well, let me remind you, Ben, that content moderation at scale is impossible to do.
• 8:37
  Mike Masnick: Well,
• 8:39
  Ben Whitelaw: I wonder who came up with that.
• 8:41
  Mike Masnick: it's a, it's a phrase I've, I've heard it somewhere.
• 8:44
  Mike Masnick: Um, so this is, I mean, it's interesting in a variety of ways.
• 8:49
  Mike Masnick: Obviously there's a story here and I think the Guardian covers it well, and, repro and censored has some data to back up what they're claiming about these things being taken down.
• 8:58
  Mike Masnick: It's always difficult to evaluate some of these stories because, you know, so meta's response to all of this is, well, in most cases, we are just enforcing our rules.
• 9:07
  Mike Masnick: If organizations violate our rules, they can face, temporary suspensions or bans, and that's all this is.
• 9:13
  Mike Masnick: And in a few cases, they said we made a mistake that they since corrected.
• 9:17
  Mike Masnick: And that is the same story that we have always heard about content moderation, going back forever.
• 9:23
  Mike Masnick: And some of that is probably true.
• 9:25
  Mike Masnick: I don't, think that they're, being disingenuous in saying that because there's always some story behind this.
• 9:32
  Mike Masnick: And one of the reasons why content moderation at scale is impossible to do well unless you sort of.
• 9:38
  Mike Masnick: Believe in the, the new Dave Wilner approved approach that he's going to fix that, you know, Is that something happens that we don't know.
• 9:47
  Mike Masnick: You know with each of these accounts, like it's easy to present them in a way that sounds bad.
• 9:51
  Mike Masnick: You don't know what they presented or specifically what rule was violated, and that creates a problem.
• 9:55
  Mike Masnick: Now in the article themselves?
• 9:56
  Mike Masnick: some of the organizations complain, it's like, well, they don't tell us exactly what we did wrong, so we don't even know what we did wrong.
• 10:02
  Mike Masnick: And then it is also one of the big challenges of content moderation that happens all the time, which is that that is its own struggle because how transparent do you want to be?
• 10:12
  Mike Masnick: In one sense, you want.
• 10:13
  Mike Masnick: Organizations to be transparent and say you did this, this violated a rule, and therefore that's why we had to ban you.
• 10:20
  Mike Masnick: But we also know that that becomes really problematic when you have bad actors who come back and sort of rules lawyer you, or use that information to figure out how they can just sort of tiptoe around the rules and still do bad things without actually tripping the wire.
• 10:36
  Mike Masnick: And so, a lot of companies get to this point where they sort of give you a general sense of, you violated this rule or this part of our terms of service and you know, we're not gonna deal with it because it sucks if you're a good actor who gets caught in that.
• 10:51
  Mike Masnick: But if you're a bad actor, you don't want to give them necessarily too much information.
• 10:57
  Mike Masnick: Now, the other part of this is that for all the talk, especially over the last, let's say, eight years of anti-conservative bias.
• 11:08
  Mike Masnick: In content moderation.
• 11:10
  Mike Masnick: The reality has always been, in some sense the opposite.
• 11:14
  Mike Masnick: The reality has always been that marginalized groups are much more likely to get caught in various bans and for violating rules, whether legitimate or not.
• 11:24
  Mike Masnick: And a lot of that just comes down to the, determination of how do you interpret and how do you enforce these rules?
• 11:29
  Mike Masnick: But often things around, you know, abortion for example, there's a bunch of ways that discussions around abortion can trip various rules and they can be, Perfectly benign sounding rules, you know, like, advertising medicine online, right?
• 11:46
  Mike Masnick: That can trip a bunch of different rules.
• 11:48
  Mike Masnick: there are a whole bunch of areas where, rules can get broken even from well-meaning groups, and that has to be dealt with.
• 11:55
  Mike Masnick: And how do balance those things and how do you figure those things out?
• 11:57
  Mike Masnick: But the reality is that historically rules get enforced against marginalized groups.
• 12:04
  Mike Masnick: Much more often.
• 12:05
  Mike Masnick: the whole like, oh, they're just targeting conservatives was always nonsense.
• 12:09
  Mike Masnick: In fact, what we found out was that, especially with both Meta and Twitter for years, was that they sort of had two sets of rules and gave, better treatment to high profile political conservative accounts to try and avoid the appearance of bias.
• 12:23
  Mike Masnick: Even though the reality was that, they much more frequently broke the actual rules.
• 12:28
  Mike Masnick: But, the marginalized groups, you know, groups for LGBTQ plus, et cetera, weren't as high profile would get banned all the time and, you know, didn't have the same recourse.
• 12:40
  Mike Masnick: and some of it is just like, yes, they may actually legitimately be, be violating the rules.
• 12:44
  Mike Masnick: Some of it may be accidents, but like it is really tough to tell from the outside what is actually happening.
• 12:50
  Mike Masnick: Now the one other element in all of this, tying it all together and bringing it back around to Mark Zuckerberg at the beginning of this year, saying, we were too quick to be banning all these folks, and that was a mistake.
• 13:03
  Mike Masnick: And we're taking this new approach and we're really gonna lean away from doing bans and we're going to allow much more speech.
• 13:08
  Mike Masnick: And if people have problems, we're gonna have this wonderful new community notes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 13:13
  Mike Masnick: And the fact that we are now still here and it's still marginalized groups, L-G-B-T-Q groups, all of that, and they're still getting banned.
• 13:22
  Mike Masnick: It makes me question how, honest and genuine.
• 13:27
  Mike Masnick: Mark Zuckerberg was being at the beginning of the year.
• 13:29
  Mike Masnick: Now I have lots of other reasons to question how, how how earnest he was in those comments, and how much of it was really, targeted for an audience of one.
• 13:38
  Mike Masnick: The same guy who three months earlier had said he wanted to put him in jail for the rest of his life, But I think this highlights, even if we say this is, unfortunately this is sort of standard fair for how trust and safety works, is that these groups often face excessive targeting and excessive rules violations for whatever reason.
• 13:58
  Mike Masnick: The fact that Zuckerberg went out there and claimed that they were changing their ways to make sure that there were fewer accidental bans, I mean, that was part of the point.
• 14:06
  Mike Masnick: He is like, oh, we were too aggressive.
• 14:07
  Mike Masnick: We're gonna roll back those rules so that we're, banning way fewer people.
• 14:11
  Mike Masnick: But like these groups are not seeing that.
• 14:14
  Mike Masnick: And so I think the real story here is calling out how much nonsense Zuckerberg's statement was and how that was really just evidence of even further, because again, like there's evidence going back basically a decade now that they bent over backwards to have a separate set of rules for, conservative, high profile political accounts, and now the real announcement from Zuckerberg was that they were taking that even further and would do less to ban those, but everybody else still gets screwed.
• 14:44
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, it does feel very familiar, doesn't it?
• 14:47
  Ben Whitelaw: and as you say, it's a kind of weird deja vu back to that moment at the start of the year, which I thought we'd been done talking about.
• 14:55
  Mike Masnick: Oh, that, that, that image haunts my dreams, Ben.
• 14:59
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah.
• 15:00
  Ben Whitelaw: And so, the question is like, is meta kind of doing this on purpose?
• 15:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Is this baked in to the product and the policies?
• 15:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Is it part of the way that the platform works now?
• 15:12
  Ben Whitelaw: Because you could argue this is kind of systematic, you know, this is a, I get that doing it hard at scale.
• 15:19
  Ben Whitelaw: I is a
• 15:20
  Mike Masnick: Impossible at scale, Ben?
• 15:21
  Ben Whitelaw: Impossible.
• 15:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Not just hard.
• 15:24
  Ben Whitelaw: I get that it's impossible, but there's, it is.
• 15:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Not really following its own rules here.
• 15:29
  Ben Whitelaw: Some of the, accounts, some of the organizations who had their accounts taken down were reinstated as the report from Repro Uncensored makes clear.
• 15:37
  Ben Whitelaw: And, EFF has done some really good work in the past 18 months or so, documenting cases where meta hasn't followed its own rules.
• 15:46
  Ben Whitelaw: And so when that is the case that suggests that there is something that is not written down in the policies or is not necessarily kind of, about enforcement because some of the enforcement is wrong and has been kind of repealed, that's what kind of makes people think that it's systematic and baked in.
• 16:03
  Ben Whitelaw: And that's where I think a lot of people end up in their views about metas concept moderation policies.
• 16:09
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I, I tend to, on that one point, I tend to give meta the benefit of the doubt that I doubt.
• 16:16
  Mike Masnick: I very much doubt that this is systematic and done on purpose.
• 16:19
  Mike Masnick: I don't think this was a case where the company in any way, shape, or form said like, we're targeting these groups.
• 16:27
  Mike Masnick: And, some of the argument that is being made, and as mentioned in the, in the Guardian article is this idea that, this is sort of.
• 16:35
  Mike Masnick: you know, going in the other extreme, pro Trumpian, we're going to take down these groups that tend to be against Trump and against Omega.
• 16:43
  Mike Masnick: I don't think there's like a conscious decision of we're going to, suppress these groups.
• 16:48
  Mike Masnick: I do think that they, as an organization, they are trying to enforce their rules.
• 16:53
  Mike Masnick: It's just that they're not very good at it.
• 16:55
  Mike Masnick: They've never been all that good at it.
• 16:56
  Mike Masnick: And at scale you're going to have a bunch of these problems and, mistakes and, and it's possible too that, you know, part of the process that was talked about in, Zuckerberg's talk was, effectively saying that they were going to, lessen the need for trust and safety.
• 17:12
  Mike Masnick: There have been lots of trust and safety layoffs that we know of in the last year.
• 17:16
  Mike Masnick: it is possible they just have fewer people there who can review these things and catch the mistakes.
• 17:21
  Mike Masnick: I don't think it's, it's a ideological attack.
• 17:25
  Mike Masnick: I think it's, know, a, a combination of general incompetence and, and maybe lower staffing levels.
• 17:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 17:33
  Ben Whitelaw: too big to get it right.
• 17:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Not interested in, trying to get it right, I think is how I'd sum it up.
• 17:38
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I think that's fair.
• 17:39
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 17:39
  Ben Whitelaw: it made me think about the importance of user appeals and we talked about this quite a lot in relation to the Digital Services Act in Europe, but there is this almost like magic article, article 21, which is about user appeals.
• 17:54
  Ben Whitelaw: There are these user appeal bodies being set up now in Europe.
• 17:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Where, organizations like the ones affected in this, case, if based in Europe, would be able to go to these user appeal bodies and have them essentially kinda mediate with the platforms in order to get a response.
• 18:11
  Ben Whitelaw: this is kind of why I got excited about user appeals in the first place.
• 18:14
  Ben Whitelaw: They're only relevant to Europe.
• 18:16
  Ben Whitelaw: which is I think one of the issues.
• 18:18
  Ben Whitelaw: But does stories like this make you think that that is the kind of way forward?
• 18:22
  Ben Whitelaw: and, and does it kind of give you hope in a way that some of these organizations will be able to get some kind of, there'll be some sort of adjudication happening if, if they decide to go down the user appeal route?
• 18:32
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, conceptually, it's interesting and the Article 21 stuff has always been interesting in, in the eu, not in Europe entirely, because Ben, I believe you are in Europe, but no longer a member of the eu.
• 18:46
  Ben Whitelaw: Don't, don't remind me.
• 18:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Don't remind me.
• 18:49
  Mike Masnick: But, um, yeah, I mean part of what comes across here and that I do think is important is that, you know, a lot of these groups said they reached out to people at meta and basically didn't get any answers, or didn't get any response or any clarity.
• 19:03
  Mike Masnick: And the appeals seem to go nowhere.
• 19:05
  Mike Masnick: And that often happens.
• 19:06
  Mike Masnick: That is also not a new thing that is sort of a system-wide problem across almost all of social media in that internal appeals processes are a complete mess, and every single company is completely overwhelmed and it is often very difficult to do appeals in a new reasonable manner.
• 19:24
  Mike Masnick: And that means that even the appeals that do reach some sort of adjudication are often, done badly.
• 19:30
  Mike Masnick: You know, it's, it's a mess.
• 19:32
  Mike Masnick: And so the idea, that is now in place in the EU of a third party of a set of third party adjudication bodies is actually really exciting as a different kind of approach that could be useful.
• 19:45
  Mike Masnick: But I think as we've seen.
• 19:46
  Mike Masnick: We may have talked about on the podcast, I can't remember, I can't remember last week, let alone everything we've talked about this year, but, uh, you know, it doesn't feel that that many people are actually, making use of these bodies and the fact that they're there and they're staffed up and they're ready to go, and the number of people actually trying to make use of these appeals bodies feels very low.
• 20:09
  Mike Masnick: I wonder if that will change.
• 20:11
  Mike Masnick: I don't know if that is just like a knowledge thing.
• 20:13
  Mike Masnick: More people need to understand that these, these things are there, or, you know, quality people, because there's, there are options.
• 20:20
  Mike Masnick: People don't know which one to go with.
• 20:22
  Mike Masnick: And so you have the sort of paralysis of choice in terms of deciding, well, do I appeal to this body or that body?
• 20:27
  Mike Masnick: I don't know.
• 20:28
  Mike Masnick: I still think it's an interesting thing and if it does lead to more thoughtful appeals processes, or even if it just forces the companies to take appeals more seriously, I think that could be valuable.
• 20:40
  Mike Masnick: But I don't think we've seen it as successful yet, in part because there just isn't the usage there to, have the data to know whether it's successful or not.
• 20:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I had a, I think it was one of the few times you were away this year, Mike, I got Thomas Hughes from the, one of the appeals bodies to come in and co-host the podcast.
• 20:59
  Ben Whitelaw: And he had just published a report about the number of people who'd used Appeal Center, Europe, ACE as it's known.
• 21:06
  Ben Whitelaw: And it was in the kind of, low tens of thousands, probably just above 10,000, if I remember rightly.
• 21:12
  Ben Whitelaw: And then a lot of those, a good chunk of them were not eligible to be.
• 21:15
  Ben Whitelaw: processed by Ace.
• 21:17
  Ben Whitelaw: So if you multiply that across the, I think probably 10 or 11 appeals bodies there are now, it's still a relatively small number and yeah, the, the awareness is not there.
• 21:28
  Mike Masnick: I do hope that more people will start to take advantage of them and then we can get a real sense of, is this a way forward?
• 21:34
  Mike Masnick: Because conceptually it's a really interesting idea.
• 21:37
  Mike Masnick: And having third party adjudication systems, think is really compelling when done well.
• 21:43
  Mike Masnick: it can fall down really badly as, as we have discussed a few times on this podcast.
• 21:48
  Mike Masnick: my educational background was in, industrial and labor relations, and that included, one of my favorite classes was on arbitration, which is this concept of a third party adjudication system.
• 22:00
  Mike Masnick: And sort of learning how that works and also where it fails was a really, really interesting process.
• 22:06
  Mike Masnick: Now that my education on that is now way too old.
• 22:09
  Mike Masnick: I'm not about to do math in my head.
• 22:13
  Mike Masnick: I'm a bit
• 22:13
  Ben Whitelaw: tell him how old you,
• 22:15
  Mike Masnick: bit out of date.
• 22:16
  Mike Masnick: but this idea of setting up third party adjudication processes can be really compelling and it can be a useful system, but it has to be done well and people have to use it.
• 22:27
  Mike Masnick: And so we just haven't gotten there yet at the numbers that are necessary to make it to, to, to have it make a real differe.
• 22:35
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, yeah.
• 22:36
  Ben Whitelaw: one of the big themes I think will, will be next year is how this appeals process expands.
• 22:41
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm looking forward to it, even though I'm not in Europe and I can't, I'm not, I'm not
• 22:45
  Mike Masnick: You, you're, oh boy.
• 22:49
  Ben Whitelaw: and I can't take advantage of it.
• 22:50
  Ben Whitelaw: So, lucky you.
• 22:52
  Ben Whitelaw: EU users.
• 22:54
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, let's go onto another story now, Mike, which I, I would say also questions, meta's supposed pro free expression stance.
• 23:03
  Ben Whitelaw: this is, this feels like a kind of get rich quick scheme that the, that the meta decided to run.
• 23:11
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, talk us through what it is and why it's so mad.
• 23:14
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 23:15
  Mike Masnick: This is, this is a bizarre one.
• 23:17
  Mike Masnick: Uh, this is, and it was discovered by this guy, Matt Nevara.
• 23:20
  Mike Masnick: and Meta has sort of said, this is a test.
• 23:23
  Mike Masnick: This is nothing more than a test.
• 23:24
  Mike Masnick: Do not read too much into this.
• 23:26
  Mike Masnick: But effectively for Facebook, for a segment of Facebook users who have professional accounts.
• 23:34
  Mike Masnick: So this is not, you're just on Facebook to send pictures to your grandmother or whatever.
• 23:41
  Ben Whitelaw: Not that anybody does that now, Mike, let's be honest.
• 23:44
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, perhaps.
• 23:46
  Mike Masnick: I have no idea.
• 23:46
  Mike Masnick: I haven't used Facebook in years, so I have no idea what people use it for anymore.
• 23:50
  Mike Masnick: But if you have a professional account and therefore, you know, doing something sort of business related for some users, meta appears to be testing a limit on how many external links you can.
• 24:03
  Mike Masnick: Post on your page.
• 24:04
  Mike Masnick: and that test seems to be taking a number of different forms.
• 24:08
  Mike Masnick: This is because it is a test.
• 24:10
  Mike Masnick: but it appears that if you post more than a certain number of links, they don't appear as links, but rather they will appear as plain text.
• 24:19
  Mike Masnick: there are a few different variations on this that have been reported.
• 24:23
  Mike Masnick: Matt Navarra, who, who first sort of, posted about this, he's been getting more and more examples from people.
• 24:29
  Mike Masnick: So he keeps updating it and showing different versions of what he's seeing.
• 24:34
  Mike Masnick: And so some people were able to not post links in their post, but then in a comment they would do it, which has become quite common across social media as Facebook threads, LinkedIn, Twitter, or x have all sort of down ranked posts that have links to external sites because they want to keep you in the site.
• 24:55
  Mike Masnick: So this seems to be a sort of.
• 24:57
  Mike Masnick: Cranking up the level of that where it used to be, if you put a link, we're going to down rank you and you're not, your posts are not gonna show up here.
• 25:04
  Mike Masnick: It's taking it even farther and saying, you can only post two links before we block you unless you pay.
• 25:09
  Mike Masnick: And so this is then ties into another story that we have talked about in the past, which is the paid for verification.
• 25:17
  Mike Masnick: Right?
• 25:17
  Mike Masnick: So this was something that Elon Musk, innovated on, let's say, uh, with Twitter where he turned, verification, which had been a process for helping users understand who they were communicating with and where they legitimate into what he thought was the cash cow business model does not seem to have worked out that way.
• 25:38
  Ben Whitelaw: Also, it's incurred in a rather large hundred 30 million Euro fine from, from the eu, so
• 25:45
  Mike Masnick: which,
• 25:46
  Ben Whitelaw: doubly bad for business.
• 25:48
  Mike Masnick: Yes, very, very bad for business, but just, you know, changing the very nature of what verification is into one, that it became, can you pay X amount of money and then we'll give you a blue check on your account.
• 26:01
  Mike Masnick: And Mark Zuckerberg actually fairly quickly followed suit and said, oh, hey, here's something we can do.
• 26:07
  Mike Masnick: And so they added a paid for verification system as well.
• 26:11
  Mike Masnick: And the way this appears to work is that if you are in the paid for verification system, you have unlimited links that you can add to your posts, which basically means, hey, you need to pay to link outside of Facebook, which is quite a move, right?
• 26:30
  Mike Masnick: I mean you know, there's always been this issue of Facebook and going back a decade or more sort of trying to convince the world that.
• 26:38
  Mike Masnick: The entire internet is contained within the walls of Facebook and you never should need to go elsewhere.
• 26:44
  Mike Masnick: And every app or service or content you should need, you can say, right?
• 26:49
  Mike Masnick: I mean they had, their free basics program for a while where they're providing internet service to people in various countries where you only got access to Facebook, you could get on not the internet, but on Facebook's internet.
• 27:03
  Mike Masnick: and this is sort of, it feels like a continuation of that kind of thinking of we want to keep everybody in our walled garden and it is a very siloed place that we control.
• 27:15
  Mike Masnick: And if you want to do anything external, you need to pay us more money.
• 27:18
  Mike Masnick: This just seems so counter to everything that the Open Web is supposed to be about.
• 27:24
  Mike Masnick: it feels incredibly cynical.
• 27:26
  Mike Masnick: It feels.
• 27:27
  Mike Masnick: I understand that it's just a test and they might not continue it, but it just feels like yet another marker.
• 27:33
  Mike Masnick: you know, one of many that we're seeing of, what used to be the open web and the idea of, linked to anything linked to anyone travel around.
• 27:42
  Mike Masnick: We just, you know, last week on the podcast we talked about the, linked taxes that are now showing up around the world that was in our bonus chat
• 27:51
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 27:52
  Mike Masnick: you know, that is becoming a bigger and bigger thing around the world as well.
• 27:55
  Mike Masnick: And all of these are sort of one by one bit by bit attacks on the concept of the open web and the freedom to link and the freedom to, click and go from this website to another website is something that should be core to our concept of an open web.
• 28:12
  Mike Masnick: And we're just seeing more and more examples of it being shut down and this, this being one of them.
• 28:17
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, if I was a small business user if I had accounts on all of the platforms that Meta had, and I used that to generate business as meta, have encouraged for the last 15 years, plus, I would be so pissed at this.
• 28:31
  Ben Whitelaw: I'd be so pissed at this, you know, if I had like a, I don't know, let's say a, a tiny bell making company,
• 28:40
  Mike Masnick: Oh boy.
• 28:43
  Ben Whitelaw: you know, obviously you'd buy one.
• 28:45
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, and, and yeah, for the use on the podcast, but if I had a tiny bell making company and I, you know, had an e-commerce store and I linked to that Obviously on Instagram, they don't really care about links.
• 28:58
  Ben Whitelaw: They've always kind of, you know, shied away for links.
• 29:00
  Ben Whitelaw: But, and Facebook increasingly, as you say, they make you kind of put the links in comments, but WhatsApp, WhatsApp, links are not downgraded.
• 29:09
  Ben Whitelaw: There is less of a penalty for posting links as they're on, on those other platforms.
• 29:14
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and it's an increasingly big way that small businesses, communicate with their customers.
• 29:19
  Ben Whitelaw: and so this would be such a major change the way that that works.
• 29:23
  Ben Whitelaw: I, I very much expect this to be just a test and never to kind of roll out any further.
• 29:29
  Ben Whitelaw: because I, I can't see anybody in that, like, really paying 15 pounds is the lowest you can pay for verified, but it goes up to guess what?
• 29:37
  Mike Masnick: I'm afraid to ask.
• 29:39
  Ben Whitelaw: $350 a month for some businesses.
• 29:43
  Ben Whitelaw: so businesses that want more seats, that want more accounts that are verified need to pay up to$350.
• 29:50
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's very much, I guess, targeting those big business.
• 29:53
  Ben Whitelaw: There's, businesses have already, already got, a kind of presence on the platforms, but yeah, like you say, it's, it's, stuffing everyone else as a
• 30:00
  Mike Masnick: it's, yeah, it's value extraction, right?
• 30:02
  Mike Masnick: like, this is the nature of, Corey Rio's concept of in acidification, which is that early on, these platforms are all about providing value and you get more value out of it than, you know, you, like, that's the whole reason why everyone flocks to these platforms.
• 30:15
  Mike Masnick: But then over time they have demands of Wall Street or whatever, and they begin to twist the knobs.
• 30:20
  Mike Masnick: And the first knob is like.
• 30:22
  Mike Masnick: value extraction from you, the user.
• 30:24
  Mike Masnick: Now that you're on there, we're gonna try and extract some value, and that can be ads and data and all this kind of stuff.
• 30:29
  Mike Masnick: But then the next stage, as Corey described it, is then, then we start to extract value from our business partners.
• 30:35
  Mike Masnick: And this seems like an example of that, where it's just like, we have you in the system, we have you locked in, you can't leave easily, you rely on us, you're dependent on us.
• 30:44
  Mike Masnick: Now we can start twisting the knob and making more money.
• 30:47
  Mike Masnick: In theory, if there was like, an FTC that functioned, this is the kind of thing that they might normally look into where you're sort of trying to abuse your position in the market in order to extract more value from users, You know, we will see, I think you're right, that the backlash to this, if it became more common would be pretty loud.
• 31:07
  Mike Masnick: But, um, I don't know man, I, I thought that there would be more backlash.
• 31:12
  Mike Masnick: to paid verification and it sort of become pretty widely accepted.
• 31:16
  Mike Masnick: And so I feel like, you know, and I do think since this is under the banner of their verification system, they're sort of trying to figure out can we goose the numbers on, you know, there's a chance, I, I have no idea, but there's a chance that there's some product manager who has a profit and loss, goals that he needs to make on how much verification is making.
• 31:36
  Mike Masnick: And he's like, how can we juice those numbers so that I can show that number going up and, and meet my, annual, uh, targets.
• 31:45
  Mike Masnick: And one thing to do is like, well, we have to, make it more valuable for people to do that.
• 31:49
  Mike Masnick: And there's two ways to make something more valuable and one is to actually add more value to it.
• 31:54
  Mike Masnick: And the other is to restrict you if you don't pay.
• 31:57
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah,
• 31:57
  Mike Masnick: And so they may have gone with that path, um.
• 32:01
  Mike Masnick: I, you know, maybe we'll find out at some point.
• 32:03
  Mike Masnick: But yeah, it seems this is just a, a bad idea.
• 32:06
  Mike Masnick: I understand where it comes from, but I think it's a really bad idea.
• 32:09
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, no, exactly.
• 32:10
  Ben Whitelaw: And also the, announcement makes it clear that publishers are not part of this group of pages who would be restricted in this test.
• 32:19
  Ben Whitelaw: but, I don't fully believe Mets ability to judge who is a publisher and who isn't a publisher.
• 32:25
  Ben Whitelaw: Is it just the traditional guys?
• 32:27
  Ben Whitelaw: What about the kind of local
• 32:28
  Mike Masnick: there's that, that raises a lot of questions and I think what that gets to honestly is like they know they're currently already fighting.
• 32:36
  Mike Masnick: The publishers on paying for links in the other direction and like doing this would sort of send that into overdrive and, and they don't, probably don't wanna fight that fight right now.
• 32:45
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 32:45
  Ben Whitelaw: for sure.
• 32:46
  Ben Whitelaw: okay, well that's, that's a fairly good amount of time that we've beaten meta.
• 32:51
  Ben Whitelaw: We've, we've got another story that I think is, is worth pointing out.
• 32:55
  Ben Whitelaw: This is, we don't have anything kind of necessarily negative per se to say about this yet.
• 33:00
  Mike Masnick: Oh, oh.
• 33:01
  Mike Masnick: Give me a chance.
• 33:03
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, let's see how you do.
• 33:04
  Ben Whitelaw: So this is, the news, um, reported by the ft.
• 33:07
  Ben Whitelaw: The meta has adopted a new age check system as part of its efforts to meet the kind of plethora of, age, verification mandates that are built into a lot of the global regulation around safety this year.
• 33:20
  Ben Whitelaw: we've seen lots of platforms announce who they're partnering with.
• 33:24
  Ben Whitelaw: I've been making a list and, this is
• 33:27
  Mike Masnick: Are you checking it twice?
• 33:30
  Ben Whitelaw: know who's naughty and who's nice Mike.
• 33:32
  Mike Masnick: go.
• 33:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, and it's interesting, you know, because Meta have such a big share of the market.
• 33:38
  Ben Whitelaw: It's, it's Facebook, it's Instagram, it's WhatsApp.
• 33:41
  Ben Whitelaw: And so it's very notable that, a company called KID have, been given the kind of, I guess the pleasure of, being in charge of the new age verification process across all its apps, certain parts of Meta did use Yoti, a kind of British based, their age verification tool for a while, as primarily on Instagram as far as I'm, I'm known.
• 34:00
  Ben Whitelaw: so this is I think an effort to kind of consolidate their efforts and, and make it so that, users only have to kind of log in or verify themselves once and then be able to use all of the different platforms.
• 34:12
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm not very familiar with the kind of past keys approach, Mike, but you were quite interested in the kind of technical element of what, meta have used KID for.
• 34:23
  Ben Whitelaw: Talk us through why that is.
• 34:25
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, so, so they're using, something called Age Key, which is a relatively new, it just was announced last month, this initiative, and it's an open initiative built on the Passkey standard.
• 34:37
  Mike Masnick: And, passkey are something that's been around for a little while and it's sort of was an outgrowth of, right.
• 34:43
  Mike Masnick: So let's take a few more steps back, right?
• 34:47
  Mike Masnick: So for years you logged in with a password and we all realized that like, password based authentication has its limits.
• 34:55
  Mike Masnick: there've been all these attempts over the years to sort of broaden us beyond password based authentication because it was never the most secure one.
• 35:02
  Mike Masnick: Everybody would just reuse the same passwords.
• 35:05
  Mike Masnick: Passwords would leak.
• 35:06
  Mike Masnick: And then, you know, certain companies were not good about storing passwords.
• 35:09
  Mike Masnick: There were all sorts of problems with it.
• 35:11
  Mike Masnick: Everybody knows they've had accounts hacked, all this kinda stuff.
• 35:13
  Mike Masnick: So we've leaned into a variety of different solutions, and two factor or multi-factor authentication became more and more popular.
• 35:22
  Mike Masnick: And sometimes that was like, we'll send you an email and then you click, or we'll send you a text message with a number.
• 35:28
  Mike Masnick: and then we've had things where there's like authentication apps where you, you know, when you first get an account, you scan a QR code and it'll give you a new, six or seven digit number every 30 seconds.
• 35:40
  Mike Masnick: And, and then there have been was a whole process that, became a standard by, Fido, where you can like use a fingerprint.
• 35:48
  Mike Masnick: You stick a USB key into your device and you put your finger on it.
• 35:53
  Mike Masnick: there There are all of.
• 35:54
  Mike Masnick: these different attempts at sort of multifactor authentication to make things more secure.
• 35:59
  Mike Masnick: Many of them are really good, some of them are too complicated, and only us crazy people who go overboard start playing around with them.
• 36:08
  Mike Masnick: More recently, that has evolved into past keys and it's also a standard and it comes from the same people who are doing the, the little USB keys that you could stick into your computer and put your fingerprint on.
• 36:18
  Mike Masnick: and it is a somewhat clever, but somewhat confusing, standard to try and make things more secure, but still keep them easy where you are storing a pass key on a device or in a password manager or some sort of.
• 36:35
  Mike Masnick: Secondary factor that will sort of, vouch for you.
• 36:39
  Mike Masnick: It's technically very clever and very interesting, and they're becoming more and more common, but because a lot of people are confused by them, they don't actually use them.
• 36:49
  Mike Masnick: But I do think that they're actually very interesting.
• 36:51
  Mike Masnick: Now this is something called age key and they're basically building on the passkey standard, which is very interesting because passkey is becoming more of a standard and is being more widely used.
• 37:02
  Mike Masnick: And basically it appears they're trying to build this system that basically uses the same thing, but instead of giving you just the pure, this is me, this is who I am, it also throws in a and I am of age and I'm over 16 or 18 or, or whatever.
• 37:18
  Mike Masnick: and so that is technically very interesting.
• 37:22
  Mike Masnick: Now part of this though, and where I'm still somewhat concerned about it, is that in some ways this is also an effort to kind of, separate out different layers of the age verification stack to push further and further away the problematic parts.
• 37:38
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 37:39
  Mike Masnick: So the age key itself, like, oh, it's fascinating.
• 37:41
  Mike Masnick: From a technological level, it's really interesting.
• 37:43
  Mike Masnick: It's an approach that is, an attempt at a standard.
• 37:46
  Mike Masnick: KID who put it together actually purchased another organization that was building it and sort of brought it in-house.
• 37:53
  Mike Masnick: But it is an open standard that anyone can use.
• 37:55
  Mike Masnick: but there's still at the end of the line, there still has to be that verification part.
• 38:01
  Mike Masnick: That creates this token that goes into the age key thing.
• 38:05
  Mike Masnick: And this is in some ways, it's kind of a way to obfuscate that and hide the fact that, yeah, you know, you still have to scan your ID or scan your face or do something to prove how old you are.
• 38:16
  Mike Masnick: that is always a risk.
• 38:17
  Mike Masnick: And that is where there's always the concerns about who's doing that.
• 38:22
  Mike Masnick: How is that being kept, is that being kept private?
• 38:25
  Mike Masnick: What other concerns does that lead to?
• 38:26
  Mike Masnick: Are you locking out people, people who don't have an id, you know, there are all sorts of potential problems with this where you are limiting the ability of certain people to access certain content.
• 38:39
  Mike Masnick: So I'm still concerned about all of that, but from a technological standpoint of how they're approaching it, it's interesting that it's this open standard.
• 38:47
  Mike Masnick: It's done in a way that it strikes me as fairly clever.
• 38:50
  Mike Masnick: but I think much of that is done in service of obfuscating the problematic parts and kind of handing them off to somebody else and say, you deal with this.
• 38:59
  Mike Masnick: We're just gonna be this nice little token provider in the middle.
• 39:02
  Mike Masnick: And then we can sort of whitewash the fact that there's still bad stuff happening at the point of verification itself.
• 39:09
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah.
• 39:09
  Ben Whitelaw: So, so essentially kind of rather than meta having the, data, the personal data will be KID
• 39:15
  Mike Masnick: Or a third party itself who's doing like, the initial verification that can then send Ks, the PAs key in some form that says, you know, so, and, and you, well, the, to be clear, like the age key itself will be device specific, so you will store it on your device, but they're sort of providing the token in the first place.
• 39:33
  Mike Masnick: There's, we, we don't need to get into the, the weeds here, so it's not that they're storing anything.
• 39:39
  Mike Masnick: KID doesn't need to store anything as I, as I understand this, this setup.
• 39:43
  Mike Masnick: but it's, it is a way of sort of, demonstrating that, that you are of age, but there's still, I think it's hiding a bunch of the other problems behind it.
• 39:51
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 39:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 39:53
  Ben Whitelaw: And, but interesting as well, I thought because there is an attempt to make the kind of age key, somewhat, the kind of way that all users of, of all apps verify the age, right?
• 40:03
  Ben Whitelaw: So there's this kind of effort to consolidate, all of the age verification efforts or, or, obligations and to have it all in one place, which I think is obviously beneficial for platforms.
• 40:13
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 40:14
  Mike Masnick: And, and,
• 40:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Also probably better for better for
• 40:16
  Mike Masnick: better for users than having to give their, identification to every single app and every single service that they use.
• 40:22
  Mike Masnick: Certainly having one single one is, probably fundamentally better though also then becomes a sort of a single risk point, a single target, uh, you know, of potential problems as well.
• 40:32
  Mike Masnick: but conceptually, yes.
• 40:33
  Mike Masnick: Probably better.
• 40:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 40:35
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and that digital ID space is something we don't really talk about.
• 40:40
  Ben Whitelaw: We, we kinda increasingly doing so, but there's a lot of really interesting stuff happening in, in loads of different countries, particularly in the uk, which I'm most familiar
• 40:48
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 40:48
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 40:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, which again we won't get into today, but I think we'll probably touch on in that first episode in January.
• 40:55
  Ben Whitelaw: but yeah, nothing bad to say, per se about meta at this stage.
• 40:59
  Ben Whitelaw: Not making any judgements.
• 41:01
  Mike Masnick: Oh, I'm making judgments.
• 41:02
  Mike Masnick: Ben.
• 41:03
  Ben Whitelaw: you actually seem quite impressed.
• 41:04
  Ben Whitelaw: So, you know, I think we're
• 41:05
  Mike Masnick: I, I, I am, I am.
• 41:06
  Mike Masnick: I am impressed by the technology.
• 41:09
  Mike Masnick: I am.
• 41:09
  Mike Masnick: I'm still not happy with the age verification.
• 41:11
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 41:12
  Ben Whitelaw: Yes.
• 41:12
  Ben Whitelaw: To be clear.
• 41:13
  Ben Whitelaw: To be clear.
• 41:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, cool.
• 41:15
  Ben Whitelaw: So, a few other stories we wanna, we wanna mention, in the course of today's episode, Mike, a country that doesn't get a lot of airtime, uncontrolled speech, mainly because their approach to online speech is fairly restrictive, let's say.
• 41:28
  Mike Masnick: You don't have any is their approach to online speech.
• 41:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Exactly.
• 41:32
  Ben Whitelaw: But that's why you felt this story's worth a mention.
• 41:35
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, this is a non meta story we are moving off of meta for, for now.
• 41:39
  Mike Masnick: Uh, this is about Roblox, who we've talked about in other contexts, but this is about Roblox in Russia.
• 41:47
  Mike Masnick: So Russia recently banned Roblox now has been sort of suggested.
• 41:52
  Mike Masnick: Russia is sort of famously bans lots of apps and lots of speech.
• 41:56
  Mike Masnick: They are not a free speech friendly country and they are not shy about letting you know that they don't believe in free speech and they don't care about your free speech.
• 42:05
  Mike Masnick: but the interesting thing here was that they banned Roblox and it has led to protests in Russia, which is also very rare because the country does not believe in free speech and sort of has a fairly long and somewhat famous track record of cracking down on free speech and doing all sorts of bad things to people who speak out.
• 42:24
  Mike Masnick: So the fact that, a group of people, it's described as several dozen people in the Reuters report on this in a city in Siberia, so way out there, middle of nowhere, Siberia being the, the term that people use generally for the middle of nowhere.
• 42:41
  Mike Masnick: But this is actually in Siberia.
• 42:43
  Mike Masnick: You had a few dozen people who went out with signs protesting the fact that Roblox was banned and calling out the fact that, you know, how ridiculous they thought this was.
• 42:53
  Mike Masnick: and that just struck me as, as notable, right?
• 42:56
  Mike Masnick: Just the fact that people are protesting any kind of internet ban in Russia at all is a statement.
• 43:03
  Mike Masnick: The fact that it's because the ban is of Roblox is kind of interesting and just a, a sign of, how frustrated people get When certain services that they like are being banned and you know, where they don't feel that there's a good reason for the ban.
• 43:17
  Mike Masnick: you have to be pretty pissed off to go protest in Russia.
• 43:22
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and especially about Roblox.
• 43:25
  Mike Masnick: It's kind of kind of an interesting statement that you would get of people willing to go out in the snow, and, and speak up about this.
• 43:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, it does look awfully cold.
• 43:34
  Mike Masnick: Yes, it does.
• 43:36
  Ben Whitelaw: God, that's, that was not my main thought, but it was one thought.
• 43:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, are you surprised by this, I mean I, I wasn't aware that Roblox had such a large user base in Russia.
• 43:47
  Ben Whitelaw: I think it's, the second country in terms of the kind of users for the platform.
• 43:52
  Ben Whitelaw: It's got a really large, base, but I was still surprised to see, see this, actually turn into a kind of in the streets in the snow protest.
• 44:01
  Ben Whitelaw: we like to see more of this, do you think in future.
• 44:03
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, I, I do kind of feel that like, as governments get more and more aggressive about cracking down on different aspects of internet speech, that, people are, are getting more and more angry and there is this sort of general sense of like, who are you really protecting here and what are you doing?
• 44:17
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, this is gonna bubble up in all sorts of interesting and different ways.
• 44:21
  Mike Masnick: And this one, it struck me as worth commenting on just because the oddity of actually seeing protests in Russia and, you know, it's not protesting about Putin or the fact that they're, sending everybody off to war, uh, uh, in Ukraine and, and, and whatnot.
• 44:37
  Mike Masnick: But about Roblox being banned.
• 44:40
  Mike Masnick: It just, it's a sign of something of, of people getting mad, like really mad, about the government stepping in and, blocking an internet service they liked.
• 44:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 44:48
  Ben Whitelaw: In some ways I like the fact that systems are getting more clued up about their digital rights and, what censorship is in real terms, and, and maybe, you know, how they, they can kind of push back against that.
• 45:00
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that's, in some ways, it's not a bad thing.
• 45:02
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, absolutely.
• 45:04
  Ben Whitelaw: talking of kind of the blurry lines between politics and technology.
• 45:09
  Ben Whitelaw: the next story I think speaks to that.
• 45:10
  Ben Whitelaw: This is a story that, I couldn't help laugh at to be honest.
• 45:13
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and this is the news that OpenAI has hired, George Osborne, the former chancellor of Jeca, the conservative politician to spearhead its global Stargate expansion.
• 45:25
  Ben Whitelaw: This is a story in the ft this week that, I only could shake my head out Ruly.
• 45:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, and I think the reason for that before we go into, it's just the kind of conveyor belt of UK politicians, but particularly conservative party politicians who have buddied up with cozied up with and are now kind of being paid by.
• 45:45
  Ben Whitelaw: Big tech companies, the most famous of which is Nick Clegg, who recently stepped down at the start of the year, but who worked in a global public policy role at Meta for, for a long time.
• 45:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Rishi soak the, Prime Minister, for a relatively short space of time during the kind of pandemic he has become an advisor for Anthropic.
• 46:05
  Ben Whitelaw: And so George Osborne is the third in a, dirty triumvirate of conservative politicians to take the sweet, sweet tech dollar.
• 46:13
  Mike Masnick: you know the system better than I do, but, Nick Clegg was not technically a conservative, right?
• 46:17
  Mike Masnick: He was a lib dem.
• 46:18
  Ben Whitelaw: he was, yeah, you're right, you're right.
• 46:20
  Ben Whitelaw: He, he's, he was a
• 46:22
  Mike Masnick: You should know that better than I do.
• 46:23
  Ben Whitelaw: know, but he, he, he's widely kind of thought of, I think as a, a Tory in sheep's clothing in lib dem clothing.
• 46:30
  Ben Whitelaw: So, uh, you're right.
• 46:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Good pick up.
• 46:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Good pick up.
• 46:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, so this is kind of.
• 46:35
  Ben Whitelaw: I think my main takeaway.
• 46:36
  Ben Whitelaw: There's much more we could say about the, the global Stargate expansion, which feels a bit like the free basics program that you talked about a second ago, Mike, for the AI explosion, Stargate is this kind of data infrastructure project that has been rubber stamped by Donald Trump.
• 46:56
  Ben Whitelaw: It's been funded by Oracle and SoftBank, and is, you know, going to help the US become a kind of leader in, global ai.
• 47:04
  Ben Whitelaw: And, the expansion of that Stargate program is, of which Osborn is gonna lead, is about helping other countries create that same data infrastructure, in their, their own countries.
• 47:16
  Ben Whitelaw: the bit I kind of take umbrage with is this, the idea that this.
• 47:18
  Ben Whitelaw: Global Stargate, which I think it's called Open AI for countries now, is about spreading democratic ai.
• 47:27
  Ben Whitelaw: and which again, just is, this makes me, kind of, makes me feel all icky.
• 47:32
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, I, I, I'm all for democracy, but who's, why is OpenAI taking that as their job?
• 47:39
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, it, it's, uh, we don't release video of us, but Ben has just been shaking his head this entire time as he's been talking.
• 47:46
  Mike Masnick: But, but, you know, this is all political, right?
• 47:49
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you know, it's interesting because in the article announcing the hiring of George Osborne, there's a quote from, I'm not even sure how to pronounce his name, but Chris Le Hane, I think, who's a famous political operator in the US has been involved in a whole bunch of US political campaigns, and is sort of famous, is a somewhat sort of like dirty operator, you know, opposition research stuff.
• 48:11
  Mike Masnick: the thing that strikes me about this is just how political all this is becoming, right?
• 48:16
  Mike Masnick: This is not actually about technology or innovation.
• 48:19
  Mike Masnick: This is now all about politics
• 48:21
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 48:22
  Mike Masnick: and, hiring former politicians is, kind of sign of that.
• 48:26
  Mike Masnick: And I don't think that's where.
• 48:29
  Mike Masnick: You know, that's not an area you go to if you want good innovation.
• 48:33
  Mike Masnick: Uh, you know, once it becomes political, it probably becomes stupid and it becomes about horse trading and deals and not like what is actually, certainly what is not best for innovation and absolutely not what is best for the public.
• 48:46
  Mike Masnick: And so putting it under the, banner of democracy or democratic AI or whatever is pure marketing political speech and is not actually, useful.
• 48:56
  Mike Masnick: I think that there are all sorts of ways that AI is actually really important and can be really important to democracy and freedom and empowerment and all of these things if done right.
• 49:06
  Mike Masnick: But I have very little faith that this announcement is a step in that direction.
• 49:12
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, no, I agree.
• 49:14
  Ben Whitelaw: and it just makes me think, you know, I wish we'd paid, I wish we paid our politicians more when they were in, in power.
• 49:19
  Ben Whitelaw: 'cause they probably wouldn't have to go and do this afterwards, would they?
• 49:22
  Mike Masnick: Wouldn't have to cash in.
• 49:23
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 49:24
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, but yeah.
• 49:25
  Ben Whitelaw: good on you, George, for another Cushty corporate job.
• 49:29
  Ben Whitelaw: we'll round up now, Mike, on a story that's, is a slight, slight kind of, departure from our usual type of stories.
• 49:35
  Ben Whitelaw: But I think concerns one of the big platforms that we often talk about and I think is a, a nice milestone, a nice moment to reflect on, as we end the year.
• 49:43
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, this was, the story just came out yesterday that the Oscars, which for many decades, I think since the 1970s, have been presented on A, B, C, which is the channel that is owned by Disney.
• 49:55
  Mike Masnick: Are moving off of, A, B, C and are moving to YouTube.
• 50:01
  Mike Masnick: They're not moving to a different competing network TV station, but rather to YouTube.
• 50:07
  Mike Masnick: And this is a huge statement for the way that the cultural landscape has shifted.
• 50:14
  Mike Masnick: it will be streamed free on YouTube and if you are paying YouTube TV subscriber, you'll have it and everything, but it will just be, streamed through YouTube.
• 50:24
  Mike Masnick: that is, it's incredible.
• 50:25
  Mike Masnick: Like I don't think anyone could have predicted this.
• 50:28
  Mike Masnick: Now there's an interesting bit of timing, which is that this week is also exactly 20 years since Saturday Night Live uploaded the video, lazy Sunday to YouTube, which is generally considered the first viral video on YouTube that sort of showed the power of.
• 50:46
  Mike Masnick: Putting professional content on YouTube.
• 50:49
  Mike Masnick: There were a few sort of, amateur bits of content that maybe went a little bit viral, but that was the first really big, professionally produced, for NBC, bits of content that went on YouTube and went completely viral and had millions of views.
• 51:02
  Mike Masnick: And so 20 years from that to now YouTube taking over the Oscars and they have like a, it's a five year contract.
• 51:09
  Mike Masnick: I think they'll be broadcasting it for at least five years and then we'll see what happens.
• 51:13
  Mike Masnick: But it's this, it's a big statement about how much of the world of entertainment has moved to the internet.
• 51:20
  Mike Masnick: First of all, streaming services second, but YouTube in particular, as you know, it wouldn't have surprised me quite as much if it had gone to like.
• 51:29
  Mike Masnick: Netflix or something like that.
• 51:31
  Mike Masnick: But going to YouTube is, that's a statement and I think it's, worth noting about the power of the internet and online services and services that, cater to user generated content becoming so central to our cultural moment that I thought it was worth calling out and mentioning.
• 51:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, you almost think that the internet can't become any more central than it is to our lives, and then something like this happens and you realize that no, there is still some way to go.
• 52:00
  Ben Whitelaw: and if nothing else, Mike, it means that we'll likely have a job to do next year and the year after that and the year after that about kind of assessing and analyzing and critiquing how these platforms are making decisions as they become increasingly more culturally relevant and integral to people's lives.
• 52:17
  Ben Whitelaw: so yeah, useful to note and a good reason to go back and watch that Lazy Sundays video, which is always good fun.
• 52:24
  Ben Whitelaw: That brings us to the end of this week, Mike, and to the end of the year.
• 52:27
  Ben Whitelaw: thank you as ever for your fascinating analysis, breaking down the different ways of, verifying passwords.
• 52:34
  Ben Whitelaw: I had no idea actually.
• 52:35
  Ben Whitelaw: That was a very helpful, little segment and yeah, I hope you have a really restful, Christmas period, festive period.
• 52:42
  Ben Whitelaw: and come back refreshed and ready to go next year.
• 52:45
  Mike Masnick: yes.
• 52:45
  Mike Masnick: Same as you.
• 52:46
  Mike Masnick: Same, same to you as well.
• 52:47
  Mike Masnick: And, uh, rest up and, get better.
• 52:50
  Mike Masnick: Uh, so we don't have, we don't have to keep dragging you out of your sick bed.
• 52:53
  Ben Whitelaw: exactly.
• 52:54
  Ben Whitelaw: And, uh, for all listeners who, who tuned in, thank you for your following us this year, for subscribing, for sharing, for getting in touch.
• 53:02
  Ben Whitelaw: it's really made this year very worthwhile.
• 53:04
  Ben Whitelaw: we're approaching some big milestones in controlled speech.
• 53:06
  Ben Whitelaw: We've got a lot of great plans next year and, uh, we hope you'll be there for it.
• 53:10
  Ben Whitelaw: So take care and, see you next year.
• 53:15
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