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Moderation has a Well-Known Reality Bias · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Mike Masnick: So one of the OG social media sites that we all know and love, I guess, was LiveJournal.
• 0:07
  Mike Masnick: and right before we started recording, we just spent way too long trying to figure out what LiveJournal's prompt was.
• 0:14
  Mike Masnick: but Kate, in the spirit of LiveJournal, what is your current mood?
• 0:18
  Kate Klonick: I'm feeling angsty, which I think was mostly what I was feeling every single day that I had a LiveJournal account, when I was in high school.
• 0:26
  Kate Klonick: but what, what is your current mood, Mike?
• 0:28
  Mike Masnick: think, I think it has to be angsty, right?
• 0:31
  Mike Masnick: Is that, but in the, in the interest of, I'm feeling a little bit, uh, overwhelmed, uh, I think would be my, my current mood.
• 0:39
  Mike Masnick: There is so many things going on and so much stuff to cover that it's impossible to keep up with everything right now.
• 0:46
  Kate Klonick: we have a lot of stories, a lot of stories, and a lot that we're not even going to get to.
• 0:50
  Mike Masnick: Yep.
• 0:59
  Mike Masnick: Hello and welcome to Ctrl-Alt-Speech, your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation.
• 1:08
  Mike Masnick: This week's episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust and Safety Fund, as well as this week's sponsor, TaskUs.
• 1:15
  Mike Masnick: So please stay tuned at the end for my really, really fascinating talk with Marlon Savio, who's a researcher at TaskUs.
• 1:23
  Mike Masnick: As we talk about their recently released study, looking at the impact of severe content on moderators.
• 1:29
  Mike Masnick: There's a lot of really interesting stuff in there.
• 1:31
  Mike Masnick: So please stay tuned for that.
• 1:33
  Mike Masnick: I am Mike Masnick, the founder and editor of TechDirt.
• 1:37
  Mike Masnick: as you may have noticed, Ben is off this week.
• 1:40
  Mike Masnick: I know that last week I was off.
• 1:42
  Mike Masnick: So we are ships passing in the night.
• 1:46
  Mike Masnick: Ben will be back next week, but instead we have a wonderful replacement for Ben.
• 1:51
  Mike Masnick: we are joined by Kate who hopefully many of you listening will know she's a professor at St.
• 1:56
  Mike Masnick: John's, and is currently in France as a visiting professor at Sciences Po.
• 2:01
  Mike Masnick: I can't pronounce the French.
• 2:03
  Mike Masnick: That's my high school French coming back.
• 2:05
  Mike Masnick: She is there as a Fulbright scholar studying the DSA and the DMA, and is one of the most thoughtful, most knowledgeable people on all sorts of things related to online speech and regulations and Trust and safety and has written some of the most wonderful enlightening pieces on it from her original, the new governors to her work in the New Yorker.
• 2:31
  Mike Masnick: And just everywhere that Kate shows up, you will learn something about online speech and trust and safety.
• 2:37
  Mike Masnick: So I am thrilled to have you on the podcast and welcome.
• 2:41
  Kate Klonick: Well, thanks so much, Mike.
• 2:43
  Mike Masnick: so since you are in the EU and studying the EU, before we get into all of the many stories this week, I did want to ask you what, what's going on in the EU.
• 2:55
  Kate Klonick: Yeah, I could give you kind of a roundup of various things that have been happening that you can read in the headlines, but I can kind of, I think the more interesting thing is like, what am I hearing from the people I talk to, that are working at companies like the big tech companies and small tech companies in the US that are working for the various regulators that are charged with, enacting the Digital Services Act and stuff.
• 3:18
  Kate Klonick: And I think that, like, I guess.
• 3:21
  Kate Klonick: The man on the street that I will give you a woman on the street, is kind of like the, the, things that I'm hearing the most about are kind of the concerns about innovation and all of this regulation really hurting, um, European regulation.
• 3:34
  Kate Klonick: And really this question of whether or not these products are going to still be any good in Europe and whether or not Europeans are going to notice if like, they end up getting really, really shitty.
• 3:47
  Kate Klonick: Um, and.
• 3:48
  Kate Klonick: And so this has kind of been, the conversations that have been circulating in my European tech circles, for a while, but this is, uh, you know, with all of the fines and everything else that's been happening recently, this is the.
• 4:00
  Kate Klonick: By far the thing that's kind of pulling away from the pack as the long term effects.
• 4:05
  Kate Klonick: and what will happen with the kind of that giant game of chicken.
• 4:08
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 4:09
  Mike Masnick: I mean, and it's interesting timing wise because not really going deep on this story this week, but you know, one of the stories that just came out yesterday, that we did.
• 4:18
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 4:18
  Mike Masnick: Talked about covering, but I think it's a little bit maybe early to cover it was there was this consumer fairness fitness check that came out of the, EU in which they're basically, it was looking at different things like dark patterns on the internet and basically saying, even though that we now have the DSA and we have the DMA and we have the AI act and everything that.
• 4:39
  Mike Masnick: We probably need another law around things like dark patterns and other things under the banner of consumer fairness and the idea that this is unfair to consumers and sort of my first reaction to that was.
• 4:51
  Mike Masnick: it just feels like, yes, there are legitimate concerns about dark patterns ideas, though often feel that that because it's so broad and people aren't entirely clear what that means, it allows for people to say anything I don't like is a dark pattern, which I think is problematic, but the EU is now sort of talking about creating another regulation on that.
• 5:09
  Mike Masnick: and I'm wondering if it feels like regulation for regulation's sake.
• 5:13
  Kate Klonick: Yeah, I mean like I just feel as if there is just a ton of redundancy.
• 5:18
  Kate Klonick: regulation here.
• 5:19
  Kate Klonick: It's just this like, it's part of the reality of kind of the situation.
• 5:24
  Kate Klonick: I mean, the e commerce directive existed and then they passed the GDPR and now they have the DSA and you know, and there's like, and all of these things do kind of, feed into each other and build on each other.
• 5:34
  Kate Klonick: But I do think that there is going to be in general, especially with kind of the fines being levied and the rollout of some of the longer term cost stuff, that's going to be coming in the DSA, like the out of court dispute bodies that are going to start kind of getting rolled out in the next couple of months.
• 5:52
  Kate Klonick: I, I just think it's going to become, Europe is the next largest market after North America.
• 5:58
  Kate Klonick: Obviously, I'm sure this is something your, your listeners know.
• 6:01
  Kate Klonick: Um, but it's By like a lot, uh, North America is like four times the average rate per user that the EU is, and it's becoming a giant, giant, giant cost center.
• 6:12
  Kate Klonick: And so I don't think it's going to get to the state that like, you know, so you either make your product worse and invest less in it, or they make it so that it's so expensive to operate there that you just don't bother.
• 6:23
  Kate Klonick: And I just think that that actually is like, these companies mint money, but they have bottom lines and you're not gonna, you know, I just, so we'll see, we'll see.
• 6:33
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 6:33
  Mike Masnick: No, it's interesting.
• 6:34
  Mike Masnick: It's definitely gonna be something that's really interesting to watch.
• 6:36
  Mike Masnick: I keep waiting for, Elon to take X out of the EU because I feel like that might make the most sense for him.
• 6:44
  Mike Masnick: And
• 6:44
  Kate Klonick: a hundred percent.
• 6:45
  Kate Klonick: Yep.
• 6:46
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 6:46
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 6:46
  Mike Masnick: Well, let's, move on to stories that we're going to talk about this week.
• 6:49
  Mike Masnick: There's a whole bunch, as we were saying, we're, you know, we spent a lot of time sort of going through.
• 6:52
  Mike Masnick: There's so many different things to talk about, but we want to start with the study that came out in nature, this week, which is really interesting.
• 6:59
  Mike Masnick: Sort of, I think in some sense, confirm some of the things that we've thought, but actually with some empirical data to back it up, which is really nice.
• 7:05
  Mike Masnick: So it's the study on differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions, which is a.
• 7:12
  Mike Masnick: Very sort of academic way of saying, Republicans lie a lot more than Democrats.
• 7:18
  Mike Masnick: And so if you're seeing, results of moderation that seem to say that Republicans are getting suspended or right leaning accounts, conservative accounts are being suspended more often than left leaning, accounts, it's not because of bias within the moderation.
• 7:33
  Mike Masnick: It's an asymmetry within the quality of the content that they're sharing.
• 7:38
  Mike Masnick: So, Kate, what, what was your take on this particular study?
• 7:42
  Kate Klonick: So first of all, so this is a, Rand and Penny Cook's study.
• 7:46
  Kate Klonick: They have been doing great work, in this area.
• 7:49
  Kate Klonick: I think they're both at Yale.
• 7:50
  Kate Klonick: Um, they've been doing great work on this stuff for a while.
• 7:53
  Kate Klonick: So this was kind of, I was excited to see this from them.
• 7:55
  Kate Klonick: Cause I do think it's really robust.
• 7:57
  Kate Klonick: And, as I said to you, uh, before we started, I was like, well, this is the study that just proves empirically what I have been telling people since.
• 8:05
  Kate Klonick: 2016, who are conservatives, which is essentially like, listen, they put out nets that were like three standard deviations away from the mean.
• 8:15
  Kate Klonick: and the conversation moved to the nets.
• 8:18
  Kate Klonick: And so like the conversation got more extreme, it got more violent the whole mean moved and so like all of a sudden we're catching more stuff and now, you could say, well, you only put the nets on one side of things, but that's also just, the nature of kind of this type of speech is that there is, you know, you don't have violent speech or low quality speech or these low quality, um, sources for information.
• 8:45
  Kate Klonick: That are giving the same type of news.
• 8:48
  Kate Klonick: And so, yeah, it's like basically the opposite of causality is what this is showing.
• 8:53
  Kate Klonick: reliably found that there is no causality between wanting to take down more Republican speech or conservative speech and that instead it was that like Republicans follow people who lie more and Republican.
• 9:04
  Kate Klonick: I mean, it's essentially like if you had banned a bunch of National Enquirer stories but like, it turns out that 70 percent of the National Enquirer's readership is Republican.
• 9:15
  Kate Klonick: Like, right.
• 9:16
  Kate Klonick: Do you know what I mean?
• 9:17
  Kate Klonick: It's not because they're Republicans that you ban the National Enquirer, you ban it because it's the National Enquirer, and by the way, it turns out that they're Republicans.
• 9:24
  Kate Klonick: So that's, I mean, these are, this is a really important causality point that I feel like a lot of people have missed in the last eight years.
• 9:31
  Kate Klonick: Oh my god, eight years.
• 9:32
  Kate Klonick: And I'm like thrilled that there's finally a study that you can point to about this.
• 9:37
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 9:38
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 9:38
  Mike Masnick: I mean, had released, I think it was a preprint of this story like two years ago, and they've since done a lot more research on it.
• 9:44
  Mike Masnick: And I think it's really useful.
• 9:44
  Mike Masnick: And one of the things that I thought was really nice about specifics in the research was, people might raise questions about, well, who's determining, like, what is the low quality content?
• 9:55
  Mike Masnick: And they engage with a bunch of, sort of neutral fact checkers to do that.
• 9:59
  Mike Masnick: But then they Also had a group of Republicans determine what was low quality content and then run the same study based on what the Republican said was low quality content and found the same result.
• 10:11
  Mike Masnick: So even when you sort of bias the system that way, where you say like, let the Republicans determine what is the low quality content and then run the same analysis, you still get that Republican.
• 10:22
  Mike Masnick: Content is more likely to be banned because it is low quality.
• 10:26
  Mike Masnick: And so, the key finding here is that the number one predictor of whether or not an account would be suspended was not whether or not they were Republican or Democrat.
• 10:35
  Mike Masnick: It was whether or not it was low quality content.
• 10:38
  Mike Masnick: And it just so happens that because Republicans are more likely to share the low quality content, that's, that's what you got.
• 10:43
  Mike Masnick: And so.
• 10:44
  Mike Masnick: it's really useful.
• 10:45
  Mike Masnick: I don't think this is going to change the minds of people who run around claiming that there is, you know, anti conservative bias.
• 10:51
  Mike Masnick: and the other thing that it struck me as interesting about this is that, there's this element of, have been these other reports, not studies, but reports that a lot of the platforms actually, rather than having an anti conservative bias in their moderation policies, actually Sort of bent over backwards to let, you know, sort of the MAGA world break the rules more because they were afraid of being accused of having an anti conservative bias.
• 11:15
  Mike Masnick: And so there could be this world in which, I think this is a description of reality based on all of this, that the platforms actually did set the rules so that, Conservatives were more able to break the rules and get away with it.
• 11:29
  Mike Masnick: And yet, because they share so much more low quality content that they end up being much more likely to be suspended.
• 11:35
  Mike Masnick: So even though the rules favor them, they still end up being suspended more.
• 11:40
  Mike Masnick: And so, the idea that this is an anti conservative bias is actually the opposite.
• 11:44
  Mike Masnick: From that.
• 11:44
  Mike Masnick: And so the report sort of makes that really clear.
• 11:46
  Mike Masnick: I think it's really nice, useful data points on that.
• 11:49
  Kate Klonick: Yeah, it's really robust, and I think that they do an excellent job, but I think that that is, unfortunately, also as a, as someone who like trained in cognitive psychology for a long time, I, an empirical psychology, which so do authors here, and so that's what this area is.
• 12:02
  Kate Klonick: I think that you would, you would, your point that this isn't going to change minds is unfortunately very true.
• 12:08
  Kate Klonick: I mean, this is motivated reasoning all the way down.
• 12:11
  Kate Klonick: People are, you know, this, and so, I mean, we'll see if it gets pickup.
• 12:16
  Kate Klonick: We'll see if it does anything, but I don't think so.
• 12:18
  Kate Klonick: Everyone kind of thinks that all of these elite schools are in the bag and everything else.
• 12:22
  Kate Klonick: So it just kind of, you know, that's, that's just.
• 12:26
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 12:27
  Mike Masnick: Well, I think I might bring this back up again in the later story that we're going to cover.
• 12:31
  Mike Masnick: But for now, I want to move on to our second story here, which this is one that I've actually kind of wanted to talk about for a while.
• 12:39
  Mike Masnick: Over a month now and couldn't quite fit it in.
• 12:42
  Mike Masnick: And there's been some more news since, since the original story that I saw.
• 12:46
  Mike Masnick: And this is, all about gift CT, which is, I hope a lot of our listeners know what it is, but it's the global internet forum to counter terrorism.
• 12:55
  Mike Masnick: It's an organization that was set up by a bunch of the, tech companies.
• 13:00
  Mike Masnick: And it was really in response to anger and demands from regulators going back a while about.
• 13:08
  Mike Masnick: Specifically terrorist content.
• 13:10
  Mike Masnick: Appearing online.
• 13:11
  Mike Masnick: And the idea was that this group would work together and, create hashes of particular terrorist content and share that around so that, each platform didn't have to discover on their own, you know, Oh, ISIS is pushing this particular thing.
• 13:25
  Mike Masnick: Kind of material, but they could share that and share signals to each other so that, you know, if ISIS is doing a beheading video, that everybody can, take it down together very quickly.
• 13:36
  Mike Masnick: when this came about, I was initially somewhat concerned about it.
• 13:40
  Mike Masnick: because whenever you have all these groups getting together and creating hashes of content that is getting taken down, and there's not much transparency about it, there are reasons
• 13:50
  Kate Klonick: could go wrong, Mike?
• 13:51
  Mike Masnick: could go wrong, right?
• 13:52
  Mike Masnick: There are reasons to worry about how that, could very much go wrong.
• 13:56
  Mike Masnick: And specifically we like terrorist content has always been this sort of weird category of content for me.
• 14:01
  Mike Masnick: and I've talked about this going back ages.
• 14:04
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I remember then Senator Joe Lieberman absolutely going apeshit over terrorist content on YouTube in the late.
• 14:12
  Mike Masnick: You know, sort of 2008, 2009 timeframe and demanding that they take it down and threatening them if they didn't take it down.
• 14:19
  Mike Masnick: And then, of course, like the first account that YouTube took down.
• 14:22
  Mike Masnick: in response to Lieberman doing that was like a Syrian human rights group that was documenting war crimes by terrorist groups.
• 14:30
  Mike Masnick: And they got taken down because content that documents war crimes is also the same content that terrorists are, you know, the context really matters.
• 14:39
  Mike Masnick: And especially when you're doing like hashing and sharing these things, it's impossible to share.
• 14:45
  Mike Masnick: Context with it as well.
• 14:47
  Mike Masnick: and so that was always my concern and sort of the lack of transparency around this.
• 14:50
  Mike Masnick: And so this week there was this wonderful, really thorough, article in wired sort of looking at it says two years of turmoil at give CT and the reason I said I wanted to cover before was about a month and a half ago, there was an article in the, times of London talking about how there was turmoil because of the four founding members, one of them is
• 15:14
  Kate Klonick: For finding company members, you should, you know, Meta, MetaX, uh, YouTube, and Microsoft.
• 15:21
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 15:22
  Mike Masnick: And X being the concern there, because since Elon took over, he basically was ignoring give CT.
• 15:28
  Mike Masnick: They weren't contributing back to it, and they weren't using the hashes anymore.
• 15:32
  Mike Masnick: But because of the structure of how it was founded they were sort of a permanent board member, and that made for a very awkward situation.
• 15:40
  Mike Masnick: And so the news that's revealed this is that X has left the board.
• 15:44
  Mike Masnick: but also a bunch of other things that tick tock wanted to join, and was rejected, that, the parent company of Pornhub wanted to join and was rejected and there were a bunch of other concerns.
• 15:55
  Mike Masnick: So I don't think this is a really thorough, really interesting article about some of the trouble that gives CT has, had, over the last few years.
• 16:03
  Mike Masnick: was your take on it?
• 16:04
  Kate Klonick: okay, so I think that we also have to mention the fact that in trying to get talk about this for the last couple of weeks, you asked some of the smartest people in the room who, who I know, know about GIFS CT, but do not feel like they know anything about GIFS CT.
• 16:17
  Kate Klonick: And when we started talking about this, about talking about this today, I was like, uh, I, you know, um, the, uh, you know, like, I guess I can talk about GIFS CT.
• 16:27
  Kate Klonick: and, I want to say that, that that's an important thing.
• 16:30
  Kate Klonick: My, I'm.
• 16:31
  Kate Klonick: Um, I don't know a lot about governance structures that have existed, uh, they study them specifically, ones that are started by for profit companies, around speech and content moderation, and, I have on my, like, long term to do list to figure out what the hell is going on with GIF CT and its governance, um, and its founding and governance, because GIF CT really was, like, there was, like, a friendlies chat that, like, existed for a long time that was just, like, Former trust and safety who had worked at the companies that passed hashes back and forth to each other under the table.
• 17:07
  Kate Klonick: think there's eight people that are employed, according to like their website right now who actually worked for the company.
• 17:20
  Kate Klonick: And then it has a board, um, which is also strange.
• 17:23
  Kate Klonick: and then it has these four founding members.
• 17:26
  Kate Klonick: To me, very unclear how any of the, like, who pays for what and who then has governing power for what.
• 17:35
  Kate Klonick: And so apparently, it was the decision of the four founding members, not the board.
• 17:41
  Kate Klonick: of like advisors that listed on their website, not the eight staff members, that is also listed on their website, but the four pay to play players, like whether or not they were going to let TikTok in.
• 17:53
  Kate Klonick: And so they decided to not let TikTok in.
• 17:55
  Kate Klonick: And you can't wave your xenophobic, wand and just make me think that, what makes sense in any given situation here is that you just have to exclude TikTok from everything because China and human rights policies, especially when you have a very straightforward, like, you would know and be able to check.
• 18:15
  Kate Klonick: The hashes that they were adding to the database.
• 18:18
  Kate Klonick: And they're the largest video platform in the world.
• 18:21
  Kate Klonick: Like, why would you not want them using the technology that is provided it, it makes no sense.
• 18:27
  Kate Klonick: not like a bidirectional risk to let TikTok in.
• 18:31
  Kate Klonick: Like there isn't it doesn't make any sense.
• 18:33
  Kate Klonick: so that's crazy And then like the Wired article basically blows up the fact that it turns out only two of the members made the decision at all and then quietly acts left the board and that there's just like no Transparency on this incredibly important Incredibly important, like, all of your points about how difficult it is, what terrorist content means, and blah, blah, blah, aside, it's still an incredibly powerful thing, and people just, it is a tool that people use out of the box for all different sized platforms, and we don't know, why does it exist as a non profit entity, is it a non profit?
• 19:09
  Kate Klonick: Why is a non profit just accepting four million dollars a year from four major tech companies, and then not paying?
• 19:17
  Kate Klonick: I just don't understand how that works as like any type of legitimate tax structure.
• 19:23
  Kate Klonick: And then like, why has it like not done more?
• 19:26
  Kate Klonick: mean it has all this money from these companies.
• 19:29
  Kate Klonick: Why hasn't it done more?
• 19:30
  Kate Klonick: Why isn't the hash database more open and transparent?
• 19:32
  Kate Klonick: Like why would that be terrible?
• 19:34
  Kate Klonick: This is also the same problem that we see with photo DNA and ncmec.
• 19:40
  Kate Klonick: And it is this weird, weird little, and like NCMEC got its own kind of first amendment issues, um,
• 19:47
  Mike Masnick: about on the podcast.
• 19:48
  Kate Klonick: which was one of the reasons we don't talk about ncmec.
• 19:51
  Kate Klonick: It's like the first rule of like, you know, but this is, I mean, this is less.
• 19:57
  Mike Masnick: at least with Nick, Mick, where you're talking about CSAM, where it is like clearly illegal content, terrorist content.
• 20:02
  Mike Masnick: It, It depends.
• 20:03
  Mike Masnick: And there, there's a whole bunch of questions and oddities.
• 20:05
  Mike Masnick: The other thing that sort of surprised me about the articles, I think they said there are 25 members of GIF CT, but only 13 have access to the hash database.
• 20:14
  Mike Masnick: And it's like, well, why, who, like, how does, who, who makes that determination?
• 20:18
  Mike Masnick: Like if you're a member and you don't have access to what, what, what are you doing?
• 20:21
  Mike Masnick: and so there's all of these concerns.
• 20:23
  Mike Masnick: and I was concerned already about the idea of like, What if content that is borderline or not clearly, you know, in context, shouldn't be hashed.
• 20:30
  Mike Masnick: And yet in this article, they talk about how they discovered two years ago or last year that there were, false things in there, including the song, never going to give you up the
• 20:44
  Kate Klonick: the yeah, the Rickroll song, and it had
• 20:46
  Mike Masnick: song got into the database as a hash.
• 20:50
  Mike Masnick: I mean, that's crazy.
• 20:52
  Kate Klonick: yeah, so like, one of the things that is frustrating about this is, this is this area of immense power and non visibility hashing.
• 21:01
  Kate Klonick: It is an incredibly powerful tool, to identify and, from publication.
• 21:07
  Kate Klonick: Yeah.
• 21:07
  Kate Klonick: entire world of content.
• 21:09
  Kate Klonick: and people just don't get excited about it.
• 21:12
  Kate Klonick: So this is like this incredibly kind of salacious story where they worked on it for 2 years, these reporters at wired and did an incredible job reviewing what is kind of it.
• 21:21
  Kate Klonick: really dry stuff, frankly.
• 21:23
  Kate Klonick: And, I don't know that this is gonna like, you haven't seen this in like the news at all.
• 21:28
  Kate Klonick: This is still like market and industry, like but this is what people should be worried about.
• 21:32
  Kate Klonick: And like, this is where we should have a focus.
• 21:35
  Kate Klonick: If we want good governance policies, like why can't we have Hash governance?
• 21:39
  Kate Klonick: why can't we have something that, revolves around having some type of, skiff of individuals that, like, has a governance, like, a legitimate kind of governance system in which they get put into place that, like, does review this content and figures out what goes in and what isn't.
• 21:55
  Kate Klonick: And I just don't understand.
• 21:56
  Kate Klonick: It's Anyways.
• 21:58
  Kate Klonick: Except to say that all of these systems, as you know, got built to put out fires and that there's no, yeah, there's no grand plan.
• 22:06
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 22:07
  Mike Masnick: And we're not saying that there's no usefulness here because there are things, you know, when they're talking about things where, people are live streaming.
• 22:16
  Mike Masnick: Attacks where they're killing a whole bunch of people.
• 22:18
  Mike Masnick: Like there are obvious reasons why companies want to learn about that content very quickly and be able to take it down.
• 22:23
  Mike Masnick: And there are reasons why it is useful to share stuff, but there's a whole bunch of questions and there's just so little transparency about this.
• 22:31
  Mike Masnick: And the fact that, we didn't know that Tik TOK tried to join and couldn't.
• 22:34
  Mike Masnick: We didn't know that the Rick roll was in there.
• 22:36
  Mike Masnick: We didn't know any of this.
• 22:38
  Mike Masnick: We don't know how companies are using it.
• 22:39
  Mike Masnick: We don't know who has access to it.
• 22:41
  Mike Masnick: It's just.
• 22:42
  Mike Masnick: this complete, darkness over how this system is working.
• 22:45
  Mike Masnick: And yet it has an impact on the kind of speech that we can see online.
• 22:49
  Mike Masnick: And so, yeah, there's a transparency element that's really missing here.
• 22:52
  Kate Klonick: A huge transparency element that's missing and I'm going to say one last thing about it, but I know we have to kind of move on, but I am just going to say that, there is a job voting issue here because this is also on their list of board members and from their advisory committees are a bunch of governments.
• 23:09
  Kate Klonick: there's Australia, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand.
• 23:13
  Kate Klonick: Okay.
• 23:13
  Kate Klonick: Like there are governments.
• 23:14
  Kate Klonick: And so like.
• 23:15
  Kate Klonick: I don't understand how they're not having some type of say and like what is determined to be terrorist content.
• 23:20
  Kate Klonick: And those aren't countries that are like hugely affected by terrorism.
• 23:24
  Kate Klonick: you know what I mean?
• 23:25
  Kate Klonick: Like, I mean, domestic terrorism or international terrorism.
• 23:29
  Kate Klonick: And so, why isn't, like, Somalia represented on that list?
• 23:33
  Kate Klonick: Like, I don't understand why they don't have a say the type of, terrorist content that, like, their entire, country is living under.
• 23:41
  Kate Klonick: anyways, so that is my last kind of point, but there's something a little bit rotten in this, all the way down in an organization that should be, really has every reason to be a, pretty like, neutral good of the content moderation, trust and safety world.
• 23:58
  Kate Klonick: it could do better and that is, I guess how we'll wrap on this story.
• 24:02
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, yeah, I hope it leads to more transparency.
• 24:04
  Mike Masnick: I hope stories like this actually do lead them to to, something be more clear and transparent and have their governance structure be a lot more clear as well.
• 24:12
  Mike Masnick: But we'll see definitely something to follow.
• 24:15
  Mike Masnick: Um, moving on from that, there was a story I wrote about this week, which was very frustrating to me.
• 24:20
  Mike Masnick: I think I increased my blood pressure, uh, sitting there writing about it.
• 24:25
  Mike Masnick: it had to do with, for the last few months, there have been stories making the rounds that.
• 24:29
  Mike Masnick: Apparently, hackers from Iran, trick some, Trump campaign officials, into, sharing information and then allowed them to hack into the Trump campaign and get a bunch of information.
• 24:40
  Mike Masnick: and the hackers have been pushing it to news organizations.
• 24:43
  Mike Masnick: And the main thing they were pushing was the internal dossier that the Trump campaign had put together on JD Vance about where he might be problematic.
• 24:51
  Mike Masnick: and people had talked about, you know, a lot of people had seen it.
• 24:54
  Mike Masnick: And a lot of reporters had seen it and said they weren't reporting on it because one, there wasn't that much that was newsworthy in it.
• 25:00
  Mike Masnick: And two, they didn't want to sort of assist the Iranian hackers, which is somewhat understandable.
• 25:05
  Mike Masnick: But of course, when you have something like that, eventually someone is going to bite.
• 25:08
  Mike Masnick: In this case, the independent reporter, Ken Klippenstein, decided to post it on his sub stack, and promoted it widely.
• 25:16
  Mike Masnick: And it got a bunch of attention.
• 25:18
  Mike Masnick: Now, this story seems remarkably similar to me to a story from four years ago, which was that some folks got access to Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, got access to a laptop that he had left at a computer repair shop and went around shopping the information from that hard drive, to a whole bunch of news sources.
• 25:37
  Mike Masnick: And many of them were, All turned it down because they didn't quite know the provenance of this.
• 25:41
  Mike Masnick: And they were worried that maybe it was also a sort of similar hack and leak kind of operation.
• 25:46
  Mike Masnick: and eventually the New York post bit on it and reported on it.
• 25:50
  Mike Masnick: And that became a big deal because due to the concerns about the provenance of this information, where it came from, Twitter first decided that they would block.
• 25:59
  Mike Masnick: links to that new york post story and they locked the new york post twitter account so that they couldn't post until they deleted that tweet and they did this under their hacked materials policy which had existed before had been used before people claim that it was made up there on the spot that's not true it had existed it had been used in fact it had been used against a much more left leaning news source a few months earlier and so it was not an ideological thing but it has since become You gospel among the sort of MAGA Republican crowd that this was Twitter trying to influence the election right before the 2020 election and that they censored this story and didn't allow it to be talked about for two weeks, which is not true.
• 26:41
  Mike Masnick: Twitter did block access just to the links for 24 hours.
• 26:45
  Mike Masnick: Then they admitted that that was a mistake and they changed the policy.
• 26:48
  Mike Masnick: They adjusted the policy and they said that the links could be shared and all of that.
• 26:52
  Mike Masnick: Also, if you look at, as soon as they did decide to block it, searches for that story went way up on Google and apparently drove a lot more traffic to that particular story, all this kind of thing.
• 27:03
  Mike Masnick: Anyways, we have a very similar situation, a dossier related to a campaign for president, all this stuff.
• 27:08
  Mike Masnick: And, Elon Musk had cited the Hunter Biden laptop New York Post story is one of the reasons why he had to buy Twitter to never allow that to happen again.
• 27:17
  Mike Masnick: He claimed that was one of the worst things that happened.
• 27:20
  Mike Masnick: And so clearly he would allow the J.
• 27:22
  Mike Masnick: D.
• 27:22
  Mike Masnick: Vance story to go forward, right?
• 27:25
  Mike Masnick: Of course not.
• 27:26
  Mike Masnick: No, he blocked all links to it.
• 27:29
  Mike Masnick: he not only froze Ken Klippenstein's account, he suspended the account.
• 27:34
  Mike Masnick: Any link to his sub stack was blocked, even links, not to his story.
• 27:39
  Mike Masnick: And so you can say, well, okay, that's Elon being a total hypocrite.
• 27:42
  Mike Masnick: Not all that surprising.
• 27:43
  Mike Masnick: That's what he does.
• 27:44
  Mike Masnick: And of course he's, all in the tank for Trump and Vance this year, but then also.
• 27:50
  Mike Masnick: Meta started blocking links to the story and Google would not allow you to, share links.
• 27:55
  Mike Masnick: If you uploaded it to Google drive, it would not allow you to share links to the dossier.
• 28:00
  Mike Masnick: And this came just a week after both Meta and Google had appeared before the Senate.
• 28:06
  Mike Masnick: And we're quizzed by Senator Tom Cotton about the New York Post Hunter Biden story.
• 28:11
  Mike Masnick: And would you ever do that again?
• 28:12
  Mike Masnick: And Nick Clegg from Metta said, no, we would never ever do that again.
• 28:17
  Mike Masnick: And Kent Walker from Google said, we didn't block the original Hunter Biden story.
• 28:22
  Mike Masnick: We didn't see a reason to, and we wouldn't do it if it happened again.
• 28:25
  Mike Masnick: And yet here they were a week later with basically the same fact pattern and they both blocked it.
• 28:31
  Mike Masnick: And so this to me.
• 28:33
  Mike Masnick: It's just like so much hypocrisy and Kate, I'm, I'm curious, I've been talking now for a while, like, what's your reaction to this particular story?
• 28:41
  Kate Klonick: I mean, same old shit, like, I don't know, like, why are we, I guess, I, this is partly why I'm just, like, uh, I've enjoyed watching you get excised, uh, on this, as we've, as you've been describing it, I can, like, literally see, like, you're turning into, like, a little emoji, with, like, your cheeks getting redder, but no, but I'm serious, I think that this is, unfortunately, like, yeah, I'm not surprised.
• 29:02
  Kate Klonick: Like, I'm not surprised.
• 29:03
  Kate Klonick: Like, why, why would you be surprised?
• 29:05
  Kate Klonick: Like, there hasn't been, there is one way of understanding content moderation governance, that is one of just, uh, just who has the power.
• 29:14
  Kate Klonick: And one of the oldest Things before all of the Hunter Biden stuff and keeping stuff up and taking stuff down was like the friends of Sheryl Sandberg, right?
• 29:23
  Kate Klonick: things that the Foss and one of the, best known stories at Facebook that people talk about, in which they had kind of the no insides on the outside rule around violence and that they decided to break that because there were news headlines, during the Boston Marathon bombing and pictures, attached to those news headlines that had people's legs blown off.
• 29:42
  Kate Klonick: And it was against Facebook's policy of content moderation policy to have the insides on the outside shown, it just, they wouldn't show it.
• 29:48
  Kate Klonick: And like,
• 29:49
  Mike Masnick: just explain the insides outsides for people who
• 29:51
  Kate Klonick: Oh, sorry.
• 29:52
  Kate Klonick: Yes.
• 29:52
  Kate Klonick: the, the shorthand instrumentation of the, the nonviolence rule for nonviolent content rule, at Facebook was kind of instrumentalized as a, if you can see the insides on the outside, then it comes
• 30:09
  Mike Masnick: of a person.
• 30:09
  Mike Masnick: So
• 30:10
  Kate Klonick: The insides of a person on the outside, like if you can see like, and so there were certain kinds of exceptions for that, like medical videos or um, images from things, but whatever, but if you could see the insides, it came down, but when there was a bombing Boston, And it was huge news, um, and Facebook wasn't running Boston Globe stories where a guy's leg was blowing off and you could see the bone and like the muscle, and there was no newsworthiness exception.
• 30:35
  Kate Klonick: And like, you know, Cheryl made a call that was like, no, we're putting this up.
• 30:39
  Kate Klonick: Okay.
• 30:39
  Kate Klonick: Well, like, sorry to be cynical about this, but like, there's always been a moment that the people, like, that there is just a lot of, as, uh, my dad used to like to say, there's a lot of power at the end of a nightstick.
• 30:49
  Kate Klonick: It's like, a lot of power in just having, like, having the enforcement button, you know, or the non enforcement button, and so it's like, I guess that's how my reaction to this.
• 30:58
  Kate Klonick: Sorry to be so kind of blasé about it, but.
• 31:03
  Mike Masnick: mean, I think there's something interesting which gets at the sort of newsworthy question, right?
• 31:08
  Mike Masnick: You know, there's a lot of these things where people say, well, there's like a, you have to have sort of a newsworthiness exception.
• 31:13
  Mike Masnick: But then there's a question of like, what is newsworthy?
• 31:15
  Mike Masnick: That's totally subjective standard,
• 31:17
  Kate Klonick: And like, nothing is, nothing was newsworth, I mean, uh, beheading by a Mexican cartel is like Certainly newsworthy, but they didn't show it, right?
• 31:27
  Kate Klonick: They had a rule that that was not something they were going to show.
• 31:30
  Kate Klonick: And that is why newsworthiness cannot be this anything Trump's card.
• 31:34
  Kate Klonick: like newsworthiness has, is, and has always been a very soft, very, very subjective, very messy, type of excuse to kind of break rules or not apply them in a principled fashion, in my opinion.
• 31:48
  Kate Klonick: And so that's.
• 31:49
  Kate Klonick: So you have to come up with something better, I think.
• 31:51
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 31:52
  Mike Masnick: And to sort of tie this back to the nature study that we talked about the beginning, right?
• 31:55
  Mike Masnick: I mean, this, to me, this is just like another example where the rules are sort of different.
• 31:59
  Mike Masnick: if anything, the bias is not an anti conservative bias.
• 32:02
  Mike Masnick: It's the other way.
• 32:03
  Mike Masnick: Right?
• 32:03
  Mike Masnick: And this, this seems to be an example of that, where it's not just Elon Musk, who you sort of would expect to do this, but the fact that Google and Meta also were willing to block this content.
• 32:13
  Mike Masnick: And again, like literally a week after they promised it.
• 32:15
  Mike Masnick: under oath in a Senate hearing that they wouldn't block similar content and nobody's making a big deal out of it other than me.
• 32:22
  Mike Masnick: Like, that's the thing that gets me is that, you know, nobody's willing to recognize the hypocrisy here.
• 32:27
  Mike Masnick: And I know that, I think Elon claimed that, this was the most egregious form of doxing they had ever seen, which I mean, is bullshit.
• 32:37
  Mike Masnick: First
• 32:38
  Kate Klonick: This coming, from the guy who like personally targeted former employees of his, and like, yeah, great,
• 32:44
  Mike Masnick: drove, drove, drove them from their homes
• 32:46
  Kate Klonick: Yes, exactly.
• 32:48
  Kate Klonick: Okay.
• 32:49
  Mike Masnick: Anyways.
• 32:50
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 32:50
  Mike Masnick: All that's me getting out my rant of the day.
• 32:54
  Mike Masnick: So, let's move on.
• 32:56
  Mike Masnick: there's a really interesting article in four, four media, talking about meta smart glasses.
• 33:02
  Mike Masnick: and some students.
• 33:05
  Mike Masnick: Basically, as a demonstration, like knowing that this was problematic, but to demonstrate how problematic it could be, they took meta smart glasses and they built an app for it that would, connect to PIM eyes, which is a publicly available facial recognition engine and some other sources.
• 33:23
  Mike Masnick: And so you could be walking down the street.
• 33:25
  Mike Masnick: With these glasses, take a picture of someone without them knowing it and get back all sorts of information about them, including sometimes their address and their social media feeds and everything like that.
• 33:35
  Mike Masnick: And this was designed to alert people to the idea that something like metaglasses and this kind of app could exist and people could be walking down the street and identifying who you are and information about you.
• 33:47
  Mike Masnick: you.
• 33:48
  Mike Masnick: Had thoughts on this as we were talking about it beforehand.
• 33:52
  Mike Masnick: So do you want to give quick summary of, how you reacted to this particular story?
• 33:56
  Kate Klonick: I mean, privacy is something that's so hard to define, famously hard to define and famously hard to like, it's, it's an ever moving target how we define it.
• 34:05
  Kate Klonick: And so, like, on the one hand, I thought that this is obviously like, of course this is going to happen, because of course it's going to happen, like, obviously this is something that was going to happen, and I've heard actually that it was actually a feature that Facebook thought of putting in the glasses, and like, having actually with the glasses and someone like was like, absolutely not.
• 34:23
  Kate Klonick: so that's good.
• 34:24
  Kate Klonick: but I think that there's like, I did this experiment with my students once for in my information privacy class.
• 34:30
  Kate Klonick: the number of years ago.
• 34:31
  Kate Klonick: And I wrote about it in an op ed for the New York times.
• 34:34
  Kate Klonick: But, uh, I asked them, I said, without eavesdropping, if just people are having a conversation loud enough, To hear in public, and using identifiable things that are printed on their clothing or where they went to college or like whatever else, or like, things like that.
• 34:50
  Kate Klonick: And using only your smartphone and Google, see if you can not dox, but de anonymize a person in public, like figure out their name.
• 34:59
  Kate Klonick: And this was actually very easy for my students to do.
• 35:03
  Kate Klonick: And they were very.
• 35:04
  Kate Klonick: The most of them were able to do it with someone over the course of a week, just it was like a thing to do if you're like sitting on the subway or sitting on a train, sitting in an airport.
• 35:12
  Kate Klonick: I think I gave it over spring break.
• 35:13
  Kate Klonick: So they all were kind of traveling and in places where this was particularly kind of like, there were moments where you were going to kind of have these opportunities, But it's not that different.
• 35:20
  Kate Klonick: there's a level of friction between like typing some, key word searches into Google and having someone's face and their name pop up next to you.
• 35:29
  Kate Klonick: but, I think that this is, technology that we have unfortunately been very, very close to for a very long time.
• 35:37
  Kate Klonick: I don't know what we're going to do about it.
• 35:38
  Kate Klonick: Like, I don't know how you're going to, like, I mean, that's awful.
• 35:41
  Kate Klonick: it's awful.
• 35:42
  Kate Klonick: we don't want this.
• 35:43
  Kate Klonick: But I don't know how you stop it.
• 35:45
  Kate Klonick: Like, I actually can't think of, can you?
• 35:47
  Kate Klonick: And I'm also kind of curious of, like, You said you were going to surprise me with what your reaction was to it.
• 35:52
  Kate Klonick: And so now I'm like, maybe Mike, maybe this is one of like Mike's libertarian, like kind of like, let them do their thing.
• 36:00
  Kate Klonick: Don't try to stop progress.
• 36:01
  Kate Klonick: And I'm like, no, De anonymizing glasses are not progress.
• 36:05
  Kate Klonick: Like Mike, like,
• 36:07
  Mike Masnick: No, no, no, no.
• 36:08
  Mike Masnick: I'm not, I'm not that evil.
• 36:10
  Mike Masnick: Uh,
• 36:11
  Kate Klonick: Well, I gave you the opportunity.
• 36:13
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 36:14
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 36:14
  Mike Masnick: No, I mean, I read this story.
• 36:16
  Mike Masnick: I had, I had sort of a similar reaction to, reading Kashmir Hills book from last year.
• 36:22
  Mike Masnick: face belongs to us, which was this great book, mostly about Clearview AI, which is this facial recognition company.
• 36:29
  Mike Masnick: And it really does a great job sort of presenting this as this impossible situation where the technology has become so easy.
• 36:36
  Mike Masnick: Like one of the key things in that book is like Clearview AI is sort of considered this big, scary facial recognition company.
• 36:42
  Mike Masnick: But the reality was it was just like some random dude with very little technical skill sitting in a cafe in somewhere in Manhattan, downloading code off of github and just training it on way too much data that he could, scrape from different social media sites and was able to do that.
• 36:59
  Mike Masnick: And if he was able to do it, tons of people are able to do it.
• 37:01
  Mike Masnick: And so eventually, even if it's somehow cabined off and considered, you know, kept secret, one of the other things in that book was that, google and Meta had basically both invented the same thing and both of them decided it was too problematic to release to the public, but eventually somebody does.
• 37:17
  Mike Masnick: And so this is another example and PimEyes has been out for a while and there's been a lot of concern about PimEyes and it's run by just like some dude somewhere, I forget where he is.
• 37:27
  Mike Masnick: Maybe in Russia or Ukraine or somewhere.
• 37:30
  Mike Masnick: and it is not, is, you know, sometimes it's responsive to concerns that people raise and sometimes isn't.
• 37:36
  Mike Masnick: And so yeah, I don't, I don't have a good answer to this.
• 37:40
  Mike Masnick: this technology is coming and it's definitely going to be there.
• 37:42
  Mike Masnick: And like, I remember, when Google had their Google glasses.
• 37:46
  Mike Masnick: And, people were getting beat up from wearing them because it was really obvious you were wearing them.
• 37:51
  Mike Masnick: And where this becomes trickier is as the glasses become less and less obvious.
• 37:55
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, meta smart glasses, if you're looking closely, you can see them, but I talk to people and not realize they were wearing the meta smart glasses.
• 38:04
  Mike Masnick: Like they're, pretty close to looking like normal glasses.
• 38:08
  Mike Masnick: And so you could see this being done in ways that are really, really creepy.
• 38:12
  Mike Masnick: And The demo video that these students put together included them going on the subway and identifying random people on the subway.
• 38:20
  Mike Masnick: And I don't have a good answer.
• 38:21
  Mike Masnick: I don't know how you deal with that in any way.
• 38:24
  Mike Masnick: You know, there's some people who make the argument that like, if you're out in public, it's not private anyways, but connecting all of this information together suddenly is really, really challenging.
• 38:37
  Mike Masnick: And so I don't know how you deal with that.
• 38:39
  Mike Masnick: Yeah,
• 38:40
  Kate Klonick: having conversations, Kash, Kashmir Hill is a friend and we used to be journalists together way back in the day.
• 38:47
  Kate Klonick: And we've talked about this for years, like, talk to his friends and just kind of people who watch the space.
• 38:53
  Kate Klonick: And, you know, one of the things I remember her saying to me at some point was like, you know, one of the things that people always say to me was that it will normalize.
• 38:59
  Kate Klonick: norms will respond to and enforce these bad actions.
• 39:03
  Kate Klonick: And these things will start to sort themselves out.
• 39:06
  Kate Klonick: Like, it'll just be Bad karma to do this type of thing or like people will judge you and people just won't do it.
• 39:11
  Kate Klonick: Norms are thin.
• 39:13
  Kate Klonick: Norms are a very thin, very, very, Soft type thing to rely on for something that is as incredibly invasive as we're talking about in this article with like the ability to facially recognize people walking down the street and I think that the other part that I think that you it's worth mentioning that you kind of point out which is like you could see the people are wearing google Glasses and you get beat up.
• 39:37
  Kate Klonick: It's like you can't see the people or anything.
• 39:39
  Kate Klonick: Wait till they have contact lenses, you know, like wait till there's some type of thing where it's just like you can't, you can't know, you can't know if you're being considered in order to opt yourself out of it.
• 39:49
  Kate Klonick: And, you know, so, you know, and I know that Cash often talks about the arms race also of some type of technology that would like exempt your face from Yeah.
• 39:59
  Kate Klonick: But like, I, that seems also just like a cat and mouse game I'm not interested in starting to play.
• 40:04
  Kate Klonick: But, maybe we'll have to.
• 40:06
  Kate Klonick: I don't know, it's just
• 40:07
  Mike Masnick: yeah, there are really
• 40:08
  Kate Klonick: ever a not depressing podcast?
• 40:12
  Kate Klonick: Actually.
• 40:12
  Mike Masnick: are times there
• 40:13
  Kate Klonick: Okay.
• 40:15
  Mike Masnick: Um, but yeah, I mean, there are real questions about, are there legal ways to deal with it?
• 40:19
  Mike Masnick: And I'm not sure that there are effective ones or how much of this is just norms.
• 40:23
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 40:24
  Mike Masnick: and how do we build norms in society that recognize like, Hey, this is not cool.
• 40:28
  Mike Masnick: I don't know.
• 40:29
  Mike Masnick: I don't know.
• 40:31
  Mike Masnick: Anyways, moving on our next story.
• 40:34
  Mike Masnick: this was really interesting.
• 40:35
  Mike Masnick: This is from, Katie Harbath, who's a friend of both of ours.
• 40:39
  Mike Masnick: had this wonderful sub stack post this week, where she was able to work with, Sarah Hunt at the Rainey center, who was doing a poll, of Americans on a bunch of different topics and allowed Katie to, drop in a few interesting questions having to do with tech policy and related issues.
• 40:58
  Mike Masnick: And so she got some really interesting answers in particular about the top tech issues, that people were concerned about this election season.
• 41:07
  Mike Masnick: And so, Kate, do you want to talk a little bit about what Katie found from the results of this survey.
• 41:12
  Kate Klonick: Yeah, totally.
• 41:13
  Kate Klonick: I will just say that the name of her sub stack is anchorchange.
• 41:16
  Kate Klonick: substack.
• 41:17
  Kate Klonick: It's very good.
• 41:18
  Kate Klonick: and Katie, is one of the most kind of pragmatic, and even handed people who has been working and knows exactly what it, Like, you know, just she's one of my go to people if I like need anything on like, what's happening in like the Wisconsin general election for governor and like what's happening in the Mexican election and like what's happening in and also what is what is the most recent update on like Tick Tock stance on political speech and like she knows it all.
• 41:45
  Kate Klonick: And so her sub stack is great.
• 41:47
  Kate Klonick: but, there were a couple of things that I think were kind of super interesting.
• 41:50
  Kate Klonick: One was that the top tech issues are kind of predictably child safety, election integrity and privacy.
• 41:58
  Kate Klonick: And like lagging behind were like cyber attacks and disinformation and censorship.
• 42:03
  Kate Klonick: And content moderation was like, I think that content moderation is still a buzzword that people don't 100 percent know.
• 42:09
  Kate Klonick: so I don't, you know, but, I guess, I think that censorship was a little bit at, like, 20 percent or something, and child safety was, like, around, like, 55 or 60 percent, so that was kind of, the, to give you the idea of the spread of what people were concerned about, like, you know, 65 percent of respondents thought that kid safety was really important, 55 percent thought election integrity was, 50 percent thought privacy, and then after that, like, Only 20 percent thought censorship was the most important issue.
• 42:38
  Kate Klonick: I guess I'm optimistic about that.
• 42:40
  Kate Klonick: Like, I'm glad that, we're actually So that's something to be optimistic about on this, damn podcast.
• 42:45
  Kate Klonick: Uh, is, um, I'm optimistic But I guess I would say that I'm a little pessimistic because although I understand that people are concerned with kid safety, I'm concerned about it being a, a tool for which to jam through a bunch of bad regulation on other things like censorship broadly.
• 43:05
  Kate Klonick: so that wasn't surprising, but I thought that that was an interesting, study.
• 43:08
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I was wondering how much, because like the kid safety topic has been really a mainstream story the news for the last year.
• 43:17
  Mike Masnick: Like if people really centered around it now, I've had many conversations on this and talked about.
• 43:22
  Mike Masnick: I think a lot of the discussion around kid safety is really a moral panic.
• 43:27
  Mike Masnick: It's not actually supported by the data, but it's a really nice narrative for politicians in the media, especially.
• 43:33
  Mike Masnick: In fact, this week there was also a giant New Yorker story and I wrote an article about it on TechTrip where I went through, it was this 10, 000 word story by Andrew Solomon, Giving all of these horrible, traumatic, heart wrenching stories about kids, who took their own lives, and suggesting that social media was to blame.
• 43:53
  Mike Masnick: And it took 71 paragraphs, and I counted twice to make sure it was actually 71 paragraphs, before the New Yorker article included some experts who all were there saying, no, there's no evidence that this is because of social media.
• 44:08
  Mike Masnick: so the kid safety narrative, is very, very popular.
• 44:12
  Mike Masnick: And so seeing that at the top of the list was a little bit concerning, I think is driven by sort of the media.
• 44:18
  Mike Masnick: And yes, I fear that it leads to really bad legislation.
• 44:23
  Mike Masnick: We've talked about COSA and we've talked about other sort of kid safety focused legislation on the podcast before, which I think are really misguided.
• 44:31
  Mike Masnick: And so it doesn't surprise me, but yes, it also concerns me that in the name of kid safety, we will lead to problematic regulations.
• 44:39
  Mike Masnick: I think, somebody was talking about recently, like, the four horsemen of, internet regulation is like kid safety, terrorist content.
• 44:47
  Mike Masnick: I forget what the others were, but like just this idea of like, If you want to create sort of a moral panic to put in place bad regulation, you bring up these sort of horrible list of horribles.
• 44:58
  Mike Masnick: and so the fact that kid safety was at the top of this list was not surprising, but I, I am still concerned about it.
• 45:05
  Mike Masnick: I did think the fact that censorship is sort of at the bottom of this list and content moderation sort of suggests that the attempts by.
• 45:11
  Mike Masnick: Very disingenuous people to turn those into stories that that is not really sticking outside of a small crew.
• 45:18
  Mike Masnick: Probably again, to go back to what is now becoming the theme of this podcast, kind of a MAGA, right wing dishonest crew of people that they're trying to make that a story and they haven't been successful in doing that, but it is still really interesting to see which issues are really sticking with people and which ones aren't.
• 45:34
  Kate Klonick: Yeah, 100%.
• 45:35
  Kate Klonick: And I thought that, this was a good little collection of, data.
• 45:39
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 45:39
  Mike Masnick: So interesting stuff.
• 45:41
  Mike Masnick: we'll have a link to it in the show notes of course.
• 45:43
  Mike Masnick: And yes, definitely check out Katie's blog.
• 45:46
  Mike Masnick: because it is always wonderful and she's always thoughtful on
• 45:48
  Kate Klonick: Anchor change.
• 45:50
  Mike Masnick: Anchor change.
• 45:50
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 45:52
  Mike Masnick: And so, Kate, thanks so much for, jumping on and, taking Ben's place and giving us the view from that side of the Atlantic Ocean, when I'm stuck on this side of the Atlantic Ocean really appreciate all of your insights thoughts on all of these stories.
• 46:06
  Kate Klonick: It is always really fun to hang out and talk to you and we should do it more often.
• 46:11
  Mike Masnick: Yes, absolutely.
• 46:12
  Mike Masnick: Well, we will have you back on the podcast at some point soon.
• 46:16
  Mike Masnick: And for folks who are listening, please stay tuned.
• 46:18
  Mike Masnick: We have a really, really interesting conversation.
• 46:21
  Mike Masnick: There are some really interesting findings in this study about, how content moderators who are exposed to severe content, how they're dealing with it, what is the most stressful situations that they're dealing with?
• 46:31
  Mike Masnick: it was really eyeopening to me.
• 46:33
  Mike Masnick: And so I was really excited to talk to Marlon Savio from Task Us.
• 46:37
  Mike Masnick: And so we will have that now.
• 46:48
  Mike Masnick: So you have this new research report out perceptions and experiences of severe content in content moderation teams, which is a qualitative study.
• 46:59
  Mike Masnick: can you describe just the basics of the research and what it is that you found?
• 47:04
  Marlyn Savio: Sure, Mike.
• 47:04
  Marlyn Savio: Thanks for having me.
• 47:05
  Marlyn Savio: First off, very excited to be here.
• 47:07
  Marlyn Savio: and I'm very happy to discuss, this particular study.
• 47:11
  Marlyn Savio: So on a high level, just as the title you read out reflects, this study focused on, uh, moderators lived experiences of, you know, reviewing different types of content.
• 47:21
  Marlyn Savio: And this brought out a very interesting finding that, less severe content, tended to be potentially more distressing for moderators to work with, and that it calls for proactive wellness support.
• 47:34
  Marlyn Savio: So kind of going into the specifics, as the research project set out, we were interested in finding out how moderators discern, what content seems more difficult for them to work on and the impact the different types of content leaves on them.
• 47:49
  Marlyn Savio: Right.
• 47:50
  Marlyn Savio: But we also additionally surveyed professionals who support moderators and this includes team leaders, learning trainers and wellness experts, because we wanted to understand the kind of support that moderators most often sought from these support professionals.
• 48:07
  Marlyn Savio: And we did this in two regions, the US and the Philippines.
• 48:11
  Marlyn Savio: We noted that groups in both regions somehow had very similar concepts of what they thought was, extreme content and what was not.
• 48:20
  Marlyn Savio: So for instance, uh, you know, violence, gore, abuse, all of this clearly to them was egregious or severe content, while, material that involved more political or hate based themes, tended to be considered as content of moderate severity.
• 48:37
  Marlyn Savio: This in no way, was their intention to kind of understand that, you know, this is not harmful or whatever, but it was more about that the shock element or the immediacy of action needed was, less as compared to severe content.
• 48:51
  Marlyn Savio: And interestingly, all our participants, regardless of, what content severity they were working on, there was this consensus, for the need for formal wellness support on the job.
• 49:02
  Marlyn Savio: and you know, as part of Task Assist Frontline First Provisions, We prioritize preventative wellness screening and interventions for moderators right from the recruitment point.
• 49:12
  Marlyn Savio: and our participants expressed that without this sort of active wellness support, it would be difficult for them to first get adjusted to the job as well as for them to meaningfully process and come to terms with, you know, whatever it is they were seeing, hearing, reading, and by and large witnessing, you know, as part of their work.
• 49:32
  Mike Masnick: It's really interesting.
• 49:34
  Mike Masnick: are a bunch of different things that are worth sort of dwelling, you know, diving into a little bit more and, thinking about, which of the findings you, you mentioned.
• 49:42
  Mike Masnick: some surprise in the sort of, less severe content, sometimes creating more stress.
• 49:49
  Mike Masnick: Was that the most surprising finding or were there other, findings that were the most surprising to you?
• 49:55
  Marlyn Savio: sure.
• 49:55
  Marlyn Savio: I can get into that.
• 49:57
  Marlyn Savio: So, yeah, like you rightly pointed out, it truly caught us by surprise when, you know, moderators seem to be more bothered by moderate severity content.
• 50:05
  Marlyn Savio: So how this went about was that while our participants, knew and understood that, severe content is truly problematic and, you know, needs to be, removed and all of that.
• 50:14
  Marlyn Savio: They seem to be working more efficiently while reviewing these type of content, right?
• 50:19
  Marlyn Savio: there was this conviction already in them that this is wrong and needs to, be acted upon immediately.
• 50:24
  Marlyn Savio: So, you know, there's that chop chop sort of thing.
• 50:26
  Marlyn Savio: action immediately.
• 50:27
  Marlyn Savio: On the other hand, when it came to working with moderate content, however, you know, the typical gray areas, they felt a lot more affected and under strain.
• 50:37
  Marlyn Savio: This was because they ended up spending a lot more time and thinking in deciding the appropriate action for this particular sort of ambiguous content.
• 50:46
  Marlyn Savio: and if, if I have to add another layer or nuance to this finding was The participants reporting that the risk of inaccuracies when it came to moderate content review.
• 50:57
  Marlyn Savio: Was higher when compared to severe content decisions, right?
• 51:01
  Marlyn Savio: and if I think back to what our participants disclosed, they would say something like graphic content, is easier because there, the violation is explicit.
• 51:09
  Marlyn Savio: You know, what action there is to do and so on, but on moderate content queues.
• 51:14
  Marlyn Savio: There was a need for more engagement with the material itself, and this, by extension, took a lot more time away from them as well as, you know, exerted a lot more tool.
• 51:25
  Marlyn Savio: so we sensed that they needed psychological safety here because there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of volatility when it came to making decisions about this, as well as healthy coping skills, you know, just as much as someone on a severe content cue would require.
• 51:39
  Marlyn Savio: So, if I have to kind of sum this up.
• 51:41
  Marlyn Savio: We understood that there's, there's a need to kind of move beyond this, fixation with, oh, egregious content is the one that's harmful.
• 51:48
  Marlyn Savio: No, there's more than this, you know, one big C called content that plays a role in moderator's well being as well as their performance, really.
• 51:56
  Marlyn Savio: And this then cascades into the quality of moderation, moderation outcomes and whatnot.
• 52:01
  Marlyn Savio: Right.
• 52:01
  Marlyn Savio: can, in fact, think of a couple more Cs, right?
• 52:04
  Marlyn Savio: So moderators require clarity right from day one, right?
• 52:07
  Marlyn Savio: In terms of the processes, in terms of policies, in terms of what they need to do when it comes to ambiguous content.
• 52:14
  Marlyn Savio: Also how the content moderation team itself manages change, right?
• 52:19
  Marlyn Savio: Because change is a constant in trust and safety as, you know, You are very well aware of, right?
• 52:23
  Marlyn Savio: There's always policy revisions, there's workflow updates.
• 52:26
  Marlyn Savio: So, when all of these are present, how does the team overall cope with this?
• 52:30
  Marlyn Savio: How does it manage change?
• 52:31
  Marlyn Savio: How is it communicated?
• 52:32
  Marlyn Savio: How is it implemented?
• 52:33
  Marlyn Savio: All of these play a role.
• 52:35
  Marlyn Savio: And finally, of course, we're talking of coping skills, That moderators, regardless of what kind of, or what severity of content they are working on, egregious, benign, whatnot, All of these together work in tandem, so there's, clarity, there's change management, there's scoping, much beyond what we talk of and focus on, that is content, That plays a role.
• 52:57
  Mike Masnick: if, um, because the assumption is always that it's the most egregious content that's the problem, and yet I wonder if, if people working in that, while it's obviously distressing, they sort of steeled themselves to that, they're sort of ready for that, they understand what they're getting into, when it's more moderate content, and also, There is the lack of clarity, as you were describing.
• 53:19
  Mike Masnick: It's just, it's a lot more involved.
• 53:20
  Mike Masnick: Like, am I making a mistake?
• 53:22
  Mike Masnick: What decision is the right one?
• 53:23
  Mike Masnick: It just involves a lot more.
• 53:25
  Mike Masnick: And I think that sort of plays out in one of the, the sort of other findings that I took as really interesting out of the report was this idea that the sort of protocols and guidance, are often.
• 53:37
  Mike Masnick: Just as important as, the content.
• 53:39
  Mike Masnick: So some of the, biggest stressors that, you found in this research were when content moderators felt that they didn't have clear protocols or clear guidance on how to deal with things.
• 53:50
  Mike Masnick: And that stress was actually greater than the stress from the content itself.
• 53:53
  Mike Masnick: Again, a little bit of a surprising finding to me, because most people think about the content being the main thing.
• 53:59
  Mike Masnick: and this sort of raised a different issue, but in some ways sort of related.
• 54:03
  Mike Masnick: Is that, is that your take on it?
• 54:05
  Marlyn Savio: Yeah, I agree.
• 54:06
  Marlyn Savio: But I also want to kind of, bring in another, detail here, right?
• 54:10
  Marlyn Savio: When we say that, egregious content is easier to work with, there are some circumstances within which that happens, right?
• 54:17
  Marlyn Savio: And, um, course we talk about, time is an important factor.
• 54:21
  Marlyn Savio: People take this amount of time to kind of habituate to it and whatnot.
• 54:25
  Marlyn Savio: But, It's what you do with that time, right?
• 54:26
  Marlyn Savio: You cannot just sit back and say, oh, time will heal it all.
• 54:30
  Marlyn Savio: Moderators will find a way to, cope and adjust with this.
• 54:33
  Marlyn Savio: That really can be counterintuitive and, can fire back.
• 54:36
  Marlyn Savio: Because whether moderators really meaningfully habituate or just on plane indifferent to the content I think will make a difference in the long term, both for their well being as well as, you know, their performance and whatnot for the organization as a whole.
• 54:50
  Marlyn Savio: for instance, at Tasker's, we use an entire employee lifecycle sort of focused well being approach, right?
• 54:56
  Marlyn Savio: So even at the point of, uh, hiring candidates, we use a scientifically or psychometrically validated, um, uh, data.
• 55:03
  Marlyn Savio: pre higher screening instrument called CARES, which allows us to look for traits that can set these candidates up for success in content moderation environments.
• 55:12
  Marlyn Savio: So already there, we have already kind of identified people who can, you know, thrive in these environments, right?
• 55:18
  Marlyn Savio: So that's one.
• 55:19
  Marlyn Savio: And then this, along with sort of a proactive intervention program, we have found has been successful in bringing down this kind of startled response that moderators have, right?
• 55:30
  Marlyn Savio: and we have actually been able to see that this has come down from, say, six months, which is considered the norm for, you know, moderators to adjust to that kind of work.
• 55:39
  Marlyn Savio: And, uh, And we've seen it happen within like two to three months.
• 55:41
  Marlyn Savio: If you have proactive wellness support along with, the whole people first kind of provisions, the culture, the leadership, all of this playing the role and not just, oh, you know, it is content.
• 55:52
  Marlyn Savio: I've taught you what content you're going to see.
• 55:53
  Marlyn Savio: You're trained in this and you're ready to go.
• 55:56
  Marlyn Savio: No, I don't think it works that way.
• 55:58
  Marlyn Savio: It's more important for us to become more intentional, understand.
• 56:01
  Marlyn Savio: For one, we can never say that, policies and guidelines will stay static, right?
• 56:05
  Marlyn Savio: Uh, it would be very naive to think of that in a trust and safety environment, but we need to also understand that moderators are functioning in this constantly evolving dynamic, right?
• 56:15
  Marlyn Savio: So are we inoculating them enough to, you know, not just function, but to really thrive, to add value to the work that, they're doing, and to really contribute overall, will come when we consider all of these factors, beyond content.
• 56:28
  Marlyn Savio: So yeah, what I wanted to highlight here is that yes, for egregious lines as well, they can work well, but it's under conditions.
• 56:35
  Marlyn Savio: It's conditions apply, right?
• 56:37
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 56:37
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 56:38
  Mike Masnick: No, I think that's, that's a really good, good point to reinforce.
• 56:41
  Mike Masnick: So, one of the other things I think was great about this is that, you know, you did this research, you, published it.
• 56:47
  Mike Masnick: publicly for anyone to read.
• 56:49
  Mike Masnick: Which I think is great.
• 56:50
  Mike Masnick: And I'm, sort of curious, what's next.
• 56:52
  Mike Masnick: Are you planning more research?
• 56:54
  Mike Masnick: Is there going to be more things that are, you don't have to say what it is necessarily, or if you want to, um, but you know, uh, getting the research out there for other people to learn from, I think is really important, especially in this space where everybody's still trying to figure things out and the world is changing rapidly.
• 57:09
  Mike Masnick: so what's next for the, the research efforts there?
• 57:11
  Marlyn Savio: Yeah, sure.
• 57:12
  Marlyn Savio: I mean, uh, our mission as a team.
• 57:14
  Marlyn Savio: So we are a dedicated research team at Taskers focused entirely on, wellness of frontline staff, and, we really want to bolster employee well being.
• 57:24
  Marlyn Savio: And this happens by bringing about data and evidence.
• 57:27
  Marlyn Savio: that we can use to influence business decisions.
• 57:30
  Marlyn Savio: But our hope also is that we're able to influence the industry's perception and approach to psychological safety, we have generally been at the forefront of, establishing these business decisions.
• 57:41
  Marlyn Savio: Best practices for well being, especially when you think of trust and safety, there's always new jobs that are emerging.
• 57:46
  Marlyn Savio: It's not just new content, right?
• 57:48
  Marlyn Savio: earlier, it was, you know, a certain type of audio visual content.
• 57:50
  Marlyn Savio: Now you're having AI and whatnot.
• 57:52
  Marlyn Savio: So there's safety and trust needed in all of these spheres, but how, the frontline staff in each of these spheres adjust to the job, the kind of well being support they need.
• 58:02
  Marlyn Savio: Differs.
• 58:03
  Marlyn Savio: across these, and for all of that, you need research to come through.
• 58:06
  Marlyn Savio: So for instance, earlier this year, we came out with a white paper where we spoke about, We gave well being recommendations for AI safety annotators, right?
• 58:16
  Marlyn Savio: We thought that would be similar to content moderation, but it's not.
• 58:19
  Marlyn Savio: it has a lot more active involvement with the content.
• 58:21
  Marlyn Savio: You're working with a model, which is non human, uh, all of this factors, right?
• 58:25
  Marlyn Savio: So when you consider all of that, there is research needed.
• 58:27
  Marlyn Savio: And, we're hoping that not just that we conduct research internally, but we're, How we do it is also important.
• 58:35
  Marlyn Savio: We're keen on, research collaborations, we have always, since the inception of our, team, we have tried to work with, academic institutes.
• 58:43
  Marlyn Savio: We've worked with industry partners, like, for instance, even, Recently, we came up with a preprint on how disinformation has an impact on moderators, right?
• 58:52
  Marlyn Savio: Because they're constantly exposed to, firsthand, to all of this unfiltered content, right?
• 58:57
  Marlyn Savio: And how best we can mitigate this.
• 58:58
  Marlyn Savio: We did this, in concert with MIT, uh, Boston, and Google.
• 59:03
  Marlyn Savio: So, yeah, these are ways where we can, you know, expand this outreach, make sure that, you know, the industry as such is, you know, Maturing in terms of the practices that we have, because all of our guidelines and policies, interest and safety cannot just be about legality, cannot just be about regulation.
• 59:18
  Marlyn Savio: It needs to consider this human perspective.
• 59:21
  Marlyn Savio: Right?
• 59:21
  Marlyn Savio: And that can come from, incorporating all of the learnings that come from research studies and whatnot, So the what is, yes, we wanna look at innovative tech.
• 59:29
  Marlyn Savio: Uh, for instance, how can AI be, be used or how its potential can be harnessed to.
• 59:35
  Marlyn Savio: Promote well being for moderators, the use of variables, even virtual reality, if that can be used for, well being, interventions, right?
• 59:43
  Marlyn Savio: All of these things can be looked at, but, we would definitely, uh, look for collaborations and they're already doing that, but, uh, the hope is that the industry as a whole picks this up.
• 59:55
  Mike Masnick: I said, the research is really fantastic.
• 59:56
  Mike Masnick: It's really interesting.
• 59:57
  Mike Masnick: I'm glad you're, you're doing the work and I'm glad that you're releasing it publicly and now out here talking about it as well.
• 1:00:02
  Mike Masnick: So, uh, Marilyn thanks so much for doing the work and then for joining us on the podcast as well.
• 1:00:08
  Marlyn Savio: Thank you so much, Mike.
• 1:00:09
  Marlyn Savio: Thanks a lot.
• 1:00:09
  Marlyn Savio: This has been wonderful chatting with you.
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