Latest / Ctrl-Alt-Speech / Meta Had A Lotta Scams, Lotta Scams, Lotta Scams
Transcript
- 0:00Ben Whitelaw: Jeff, just because you're a co-host of Ctrl-Alt-Speech and a guest of ours, doesn't mean you don't get subjected to the same question that I ask Mike every single week, which is, what fun thing have you seen on the internet this week?
- 0:10Jeff Horwitz: All right.
- 0:11Jeff Horwitz: Two answers here.
- 0:12Jeff Horwitz: the most basic one, is just that there is, uh, somebody on Twitter, I guess X, that, is posting regularly mazes they've built for puppies, where puppies try and then hilariously fail to get through extremely basic mazes to a pile of treats.
- 0:30Jeff Horwitz: Uh, like they are up to the 28th configuration of the mazes.
- 0:35Jeff Horwitz: it's beautiful.
- 0:36Jeff Horwitz: It's beautiful.
- 0:36Jeff Horwitz: but the thing that I would cite that I, I really loved, was, again, this was on, X.
- 0:42Jeff Horwitz: a woman basically gave her dot, agent, the ability to go plan a evening with a friend, and, just basically call all the shots, like full control, wasn't gonna veto.
- 0:53Jeff Horwitz: She was just gonna like do what the bot said.
- 0:56Jeff Horwitz: And, this went hilariously awry.
- 0:59Jeff Horwitz: I mean, like it had some very good, very good impulses.
- 1:03Jeff Horwitz: it also like badgered the hell out of a restaurant for absolutely no reason, and then decided that it needed to make the menu gluten-free, despite the fact that that was not a thing that like was even remotely suggested.
- 1:15Jeff Horwitz: And I think it's like, while hilarious, it's also an indication of where we are currently going, which is like we're just gonna trample over a whole bunch of social norms.
- 1:23Jeff Horwitz: Namely, like when someone emails me historically, unless it's like a spam marketing email, I assume that someone like took the time to interact with me as a human being, and that is like not a safe assumption going forward.
- 1:36Jeff Horwitz: And, and I don't like that world.
- 1:38Jeff Horwitz: I really don't wanna live in that world, but that is definitely the world we are all going to be living in, thanks to the wonders of technology.
- 1:44Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, it, indeed.
- 1:45Ben Whitelaw: What a, what a, broad gamut of, fun things you've found this week.
- 1:49Ben Whitelaw: I wasn't expecting puppies in mazes, to be honest.
- 1:51Ben Whitelaw: and so that's, that's a very nice image you've conjured for us at the start of Ctrl-Alt-Speech.
- 1:55Ben Whitelaw: my kind of fun thing, just for your, benefit is, actually kind of much more mundane than any of those.
- 2:00Ben Whitelaw: It's a, a newsletter that I've discovered called WikiPop, and it is a, a really kind of quite perfect daily email that you get sent of the most visited article on Wikipedia the previous day.
- 2:12Ben Whitelaw: And it's kind of like, it's perfect in so many ways because it's, it's social proof at a Wikipedia scale, right?
- 2:19Ben Whitelaw: It's, the best things about the internet for me.
- 2:20Ben Whitelaw: It's like community-driven.
- 2:22Ben Whitelaw: It's Wikipedia, which I love, and, you know, should be protected at all costs, and it's informing in a way that, many of the feeds that I inhabit otherwise are not.
- 2:30Ben Whitelaw: So, I would recommend WikiPop if, if you don't already subscribe.
- 2:33Jeff Horwitz: Oh, I, I like that.
- 2:34Jeff Horwitz: That's nice.
- 2:35Jeff Horwitz: And yeah, no, Wikipedia is, uh, one of the, internet nonprofits that I, regularly give money to out of guilt.
- 2:41Jeff Horwitz: They just like get me every, every three to six months with the like, Hey, are you sure you're paying your share?" Uh, you know, note.
- 2:49Jeff Horwitz: And I'm like,"Ah, hell." Like, it's been a while.
- 2:52Ben Whitelaw: It's got me.
- 2:52Ben Whitelaw: It's got me again.
- 3:03Ben Whitelaw: Hello, and welcome to Ctrl Alt Speech, the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation, and the future of the internet.
- 3:11Ben Whitelaw: it's October 22nd, 2026, and this week we're talking about the US state going after Meta's bad ads, the promise of AI audits, and for our extended Patreon episode, TikTok's child safety reckoning.
- 3:25Ben Whitelaw: Ctrl Alt Speech is the never heavily advertised podcast of Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Techdirt, and me, Ben Whitelaw, the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation.
- 3:33Ben Whitelaw: But this week we're joined by a very special guest, Jeff Horwitz.
- 3:36Ben Whitelaw: Welcome to Ctrl Alt Speech as our guest host for this week.
- 3:39Jeff Horwitz: Oh, thanks for having me
- 3:40Ben Whitelaw: for those who don't know Jeff's work, which many of you will do, Jeff is a, an investigative reporter and author who's currently working for Thomson Reuters, but whose work at Wall Street Journal is very, very well known.
- 3:53Ben Whitelaw: He was the leading reporter on"The Facebook Files," which was a tranche of reporting that was based upon the leaked documents of Frances Haugen.
- 4:04Ben Whitelaw: And if you've heard me talking on the podcast or writing on, on Everything in Moderation in recent weeks, that work was central to the recent film,"The Social Reckoning," which, features Jeff being played by Jeremy Allen White.
- 4:18Ben Whitelaw: Which I know you've got a lot of questions about previously, Jeff.
- 4:21Ben Whitelaw: Uh, I'm not gonna ask you those'cause they're, very much kind of below the level of this podcast.
- 4:25Jeff Horwitz: He's got better abs
- 4:29Ben Whitelaw: I wasn't gonna ask.
- 4:30Ben Whitelaw: Um, and we're not gonna, try and prove that.
- 4:32Ben Whitelaw: I, I do wanna ask though, like, have you been reading the reviews of"The Social Reckoning?" and what has the last couple of weeks been like as the film has come out and, people have been talking about it?
- 4:40Jeff Horwitz: Reading reviews, no.
- 4:42Jeff Horwitz: I tried to keep myself sort of distant from this process.
- 4:46Jeff Horwitz: I was extremely excited it happened and really flattered that this was something that, like, anyone wanted to try to make a movie about.
- 4:54Jeff Horwitz: and, I had some early consulting just in terms of like my experience reporting it out early on.
- 5:01Jeff Horwitz: But the movie was fictionalized and, while I did attend the premiere, I've sort of like tried to keep movie Jeff separate from real Jeff and, part of that has been, trying not to indulge too heavily in, in reviews.
- 5:14Jeff Horwitz: my general read is that they have been, um, mixed, so
- 5:18Ben Whitelaw: I think that's, I think that's fair, but I think that, you know, to be talked about at all in this day and age is, is a good thing.
- 5:23Ben Whitelaw: And, you know, I, I wrote for Everything in Moderation that this is almost like media literacy for millions and millions of people.
- 5:28Jeff Horwitz: it is, and I, I think that was like one of the things that was really exciting about, the interest in this from Sorkin was that like, look, I spent seven years writing about Meta and, the choices that it was actively making that governed the experience of billions of people and what was talked about, what was shared, what perceptions of reality were.
- 5:50Jeff Horwitz: you know, so I was blue in the face.
- 5:51Jeff Horwitz: And so I think it, was like really enticing to have someone sort of take a fictionalized approach to this to present it to a different audience.
- 5:59Jeff Horwitz: And like, to some degree, like If what people who are not exposed to this world day in and day out take away is that actually platforms do have massive control, over what happens, not necessarily by like, you know, moderating each and every post, but simply by how they have designed their systems, that I feel like would be a big win.
- 6:20Jeff Horwitz: because like, I just can't, go on if we're just gonna keep on talking about well, you know, how's this different than, AT&T?
- 6:27Jeff Horwitz: They carry phone calls.
- 6:28Jeff Horwitz: They're an information provider.
- 6:29Jeff Horwitz: Like I just, I can't, I can't do that.
- 6:32Jeff Horwitz: So I, I am, delighted that, there is a movie out there that sort of makes that point even if some of the details are, fictionalized.
- 6:40Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 6:40Ben Whitelaw: But it makes conversations with family and friends a bit easier now that that film is out in the world.
- 6:45Jeff Horwitz: Little bit, little bit, yeah
- 6:46Ben Whitelaw: I wanted to ask, obviously kind of still on the technology beat.
- 6:49Ben Whitelaw: You're working at Thomson Reuters now.
- 6:51Ben Whitelaw: We're gonna talk a bit about some of your reporting over the last year, still on, on Meta, but I think with a slightly different focus or slightly kind of narrower, focus maybe.
- 6:59Ben Whitelaw: how do you kind of think about covering Meta now after seven years, you still as kind of resolutely focused on them as you were?
- 7:07Ben Whitelaw: How do you think about the kind of social media era now that we have these AI behemoths emerging as well?
- 7:12Jeff Horwitz: Yeah, I mean, I am trying to, uh, broaden significantly beyond Meta these days.
- 7:18Jeff Horwitz: it's been a long time, and, uh, I have been, um, kind of a one, one-trick pony in terms of the corporate reporting.
- 7:25Jeff Horwitz: mean, mind you, it's been a great trick, and I, I just, I just love, I, I love the trick.
- 7:28Jeff Horwitz: Um, but, Look, I think there's a lot more, similar than different, in the new age, right?
- 7:34Jeff Horwitz: you know, Meta was formed by basically, a land grab in social media, and in particular, a land grab you know, with the new form factor of, phone-based content.
- 7:43Jeff Horwitz: and, LLMs and the devices in which they operate are providing the exact same kind of Cambrian explosion of, new services and technologies and features.
- 7:55Jeff Horwitz: And, they're being built in the same extremely rapid pace, where, it's kind of a, you know, winner-take-all, first-mover advantage, set of pressures.
- 8:05Jeff Horwitz: And people are doing things that I think, as they are saying themselves, as they are doing them, they're not wholly comfortable with.
- 8:11Jeff Horwitz: so I mean, to some degree, maybe we're, like, a little further ahead than we were with the social media era in the sense that, like, Meta circa, 2014, 2015, it was like,"We just make the world be-better by connecting people all the time." Whereas, the current, crop of sort of new actors are sort of along the lines of like,"We think we might be making the world better, but, we could be dooming us all," right?
- 8:33Jeff Horwitz: And, like, that's not the most, I think, useful frame.
- 8:36Jeff Horwitz: To some degree, I'd, I'd like to see the AI industry get a little more granular and less ex-risk focused.
- 8:43Jeff Horwitz: But, like, at least there's, like, an openness to the downside that isn't going to require, you know...
- 8:48Jeff Horwitz: people are going to recognize bad things when they happen, I think sooner than they did in the social media era.
- 8:53Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 8:54Ben Whitelaw: I, I've been surprised by how quickly we've moved into talking about AI safety, so soon after the kind of technology has emerged.
- 9:00Ben Whitelaw: And like you say, there's, different tenors to the conversation, but, it's out there and it's, it's kind of front page news.
- 9:05Ben Whitelaw: I wanted to delve into one of the things you said on, on X/Twitter, a few weeks ago about how AI employees are talking about these safety concerns in a way that was similar to folks at Meta.
- 9:18Ben Whitelaw: and you kind of almost feel a sense of deja vu about that.
- 9:22Ben Whitelaw: what are the implications of that, do you think?
- 9:24Ben Whitelaw: And what, what might we learn from your experience of tracking the, concerns of Frances Haugen and other whistleblowers?
- 9:30Jeff Horwitz: Yeah.
- 9:31Jeff Horwitz: look, I think that, the way that I have traditionally gotten sources, inside Meta was people who are working on things with giant societal ramifications.
- 9:42Jeff Horwitz: In many instances, like, their job is to guard against certain bad outcomes, but they're not the center of power in the company.
- 9:50Jeff Horwitz: they get overruled.
- 9:51Jeff Horwitz: And there is, no faster way to radicalize someone than to tell them that their job is to prevent a calamity or harm to human beings.
- 10:01Jeff Horwitz: pay them really well for that, incidentally, and then disregard when they tell you to stop or to change course.
- 10:09Jeff Horwitz: and the difference I see right now is that, like...
- 10:12Jeff Horwitz: And I think early on, like if you go back to like 2016, 2017, there were definitely plenty of people saying, What Facebook is doing is not great.
- 10:21Jeff Horwitz: I have great qualms." It was in the same way that people leaving Anthropic and OpenAI keep on saying things like, I have serious reservations about how management is proceeding." and those things back then, as now, did get a lot of attention, but they're kinda dead ends.
- 10:39Jeff Horwitz: I think the thing that, I realized with Meta reporting was particularly in a kind of degraded news ecosystem.
- 10:48Jeff Horwitz: To really get past the, like, kind of he said, she said element of things and to hold attention, you needed granular examples of the specific trade-offs, and also you needed to demonstrate that the company understood what was happening.
- 11:04Jeff Horwitz: It can't just be that bad things happened, whoops.
- 11:07Jeff Horwitz: it has to be okay, like this is the cost of doing business, element of things.
- 11:13Jeff Horwitz: 'Cause if you learn about thing and you're fixing it, and you're fixing it, I mean, that was for years, that was Meta's line, is like, You know, we always try to do better, right?
- 11:19Jeff Horwitz: And I think that one of the things with the Facebook Files was like, some of that stuff undercut the idea that they were always trying to do better.
- 11:27Jeff Horwitz: Uh, it actually turned out that they were doing as well as they wanted to, thank you very much, and actually growth was more important.
- 11:33Jeff Horwitz: So I think kind of the definition of what a whistleblower looks like is, in the AI field, maybe still evolving.
- 11:41Jeff Horwitz: and a part of me is a little bit like, wake me up when, people are, willing to discuss the specific, shortcuts taken in post-training, that, they consider problematic.
- 11:52Jeff Horwitz: I mean, I think like something that like And you could tell that OpenAI got very concerned when there was the, leak that, basically that they were reducing monitorability, to boost performance, uh, is the short version of it.
- 12:03Jeff Horwitz: Like that particular thing, That they care about.
- 12:06Jeff Horwitz: People saying like,"I am gravely concerned that the technology might end the world," that's not something that gets you fired, it turns out.
- 12:13Jeff Horwitz: Uh, it's like, giving away the detail that they have gone back on something that in previous blog posts they've said is really important.
- 12:22Jeff Horwitz: that's something that, know, I think the companies kind of rightly are more sensitive to.
- 12:26Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 12:26Ben Whitelaw: Interesting.
- 12:27Ben Whitelaw: One of the stories we'll talk about today actually is, is in that discrepancy between what companies said publicly and what they did in practice, which I think is why it's such a great week for you to be on the podcast talking about these things.
- 12:38Ben Whitelaw: we could go on and on about, your likeness to Jeremy Allen White or, you know, all of those other things that I'm sure listeners wanna talk about, but we're here to talk stories.
- 12:46Ben Whitelaw: so I wanna, get us into those big stories this week, we're very lucky actually that just before we started recording, your latest big story for Thomson Reuters it's been published about Meta, and it's, that kind of longstanding story about scam ads that you've reported on.
- 13:02Ben Whitelaw: If people don't remember, there was a really great piece of reporting that many people who I speak to refer to, about how Meta's 2024 revenue was essentially gonna be made up to, a significant degree by revenue from scam ads and ads that were based upon banned goods.
- 13:19Ben Whitelaw: And so you, found this out, Jeff, from previously undisclosed documents.
- 13:24Ben Whitelaw: Before we get into this new story and, and, what a state in the US is doing about it, do you wanna just kind of explain why you decided to focus on ads as a particular point?
- 13:34Ben Whitelaw: Because it's not something that your average, Facebook user or, news reader will necessarily care about, but it's how the company makes
- 13:41Jeff Horwitz: to engage in a little bit of self-criticism here, the fact that it took me five years of writing about Meta, to really get into the core of the ads business and the choices being made there is, um...
- 13:53Jeff Horwitz: I can't say that's flattering to me.
- 13:55Jeff Horwitz: Um, I, did a, a, lengthy project last year, we won a Pulitzer, yay, on, how Meta approached, scam advertising.
- 14:04Jeff Horwitz: and the answer was not by, harshly cracking down on it.
- 14:07Jeff Horwitz: turns out that they were, doing, about$7 billion a year in what they, refer to as higher legal risk scam ads.
- 14:16Jeff Horwitz: in other words, stuff that they, like, could credibly be detecting and it looked bad.
- 14:21Jeff Horwitz: They were hiding that from regulators, or at least, I'm sorry, they were, they were making it harder to find in the ad library, was a stated goal.
- 14:29Jeff Horwitz: they, were leaving up advertisers unless their systems were more than 95% certain that, the advertisers were, fraudulent.
- 14:39Jeff Horwitz: so like 94% was not an issue.
- 14:41Jeff Horwitz: They were charging a premium to discourage scammers.
- 14:44Jeff Horwitz: So in other words, they'd actually charge presumed but not certain scammers more money in ad auctions.
- 14:50Jeff Horwitz: and, they were also allowing, their business partners in China to, like, sell whitelisted, so enforcement-protected accounts to basically anyone.
- 15:01Jeff Horwitz: we actually demonstrated that by, buying some, protected whitelisted accounts from these Chinese intermediaries and, then running, extremely scammy ads with, great success.
- 15:12Jeff Horwitz: so it was, kind of an indication that where the company was at in terms of scam enforcement, particularly at a time when, like, our knowledge of scam enforcement and how gruesome it is in terms of overseas scam compounds, you know, if anything, getting your savings ripped off in the US is the much better version of that.
- 15:30Jeff Horwitz: So, you know, you're on the luckier side compared to the guy that is, literally getting cattle prodded if he doesn't manage to rip off your savings, in a Cambodian scam compound.
- 15:39Jeff Horwitz: So, they were not doing perhaps all that many outsiders might have assumed they should do.
- 15:44Jeff Horwitz: and that was kind of the, gist of the reporting.
- 15:47Ben Whitelaw: And it was, it was very well received, it's worth saying.
- 15:49Ben Whitelaw: Not, not just because it was a Pulitzer winning, but, a lot of trust and safety professionals who I've spoken to, read it and, got in touch.
- 15:56Ben Whitelaw: there was a big conversation at Trust Con, the big conference of trust and safety professionals, in the summer.
- 16:01Ben Whitelaw: So it was really a great piece of reporting.
- 16:04Ben Whitelaw: And, and today, Jeff, uh, you were kind of rushing to get this tied up before we started recording.
- 16:09Ben Whitelaw: But today sees a, the first US state you believe to take that reporting and, bring a case against Meta for it.
- 16:15Jeff Horwitz: Yeah, Rhode Island just sued.
- 16:17Jeff Horwitz: so, it does draw significantly on the documents that, Reuters obtained.
- 16:23Jeff Horwitz: and, you know, that's always gratifying to see.
- 16:26Jeff Horwitz: Uh, that said, there's definitely some angles in there that, clearly they are, moving in discovery already past things that I could obtained.
- 16:34Jeff Horwitz: There is a suggestion that perhaps, some of this stuff is tied into a tolerance for fake accounts.
- 16:39Jeff Horwitz: there is also, some heavily redacted material, related to, how the banking industry, responded to this stuff.
- 16:48Jeff Horwitz: And, it seems like, there is, I, I'm looking forward to seeing that stuff, if it ever gets unsealed, a great deal as, you know, I heard, rumblings that, Meta was, shall we say, extremely aggressive in pushing back, on financial institutions that were, angry that Meta wasn't doing enough to protect their customers.
- 17:06Ben Whitelaw: Interesting.
- 17:07Ben Whitelaw: And so, so this is the first state to have gone down this route.
- 17:11Ben Whitelaw: I mean, Meta has, not commented on this particular story.
- 17:13Ben Whitelaw: It's very, very fresh.
- 17:14Ben Whitelaw: are you expecting there to be other states that take a similar approach depending on, the kind of outcome of this?
- 17:21Jeff Horwitz: I don't want to forecast these things.
- 17:24Jeff Horwitz: I will say that when I was doing this work, on scam advertising, I was kind of comparing it in the back of my head to previous work I did on child safety that was fairly...
- 17:37Jeff Horwitz: Some of it was fairly central to the state AGs' actions, against Meta.
- 17:41Jeff Horwitz: Like, they opened up the trial, the class action or the, uh, the mass state action, that recently settled, opened up with Arturo Bejar, who was, uh, a whistleblower I, I took public.
- 17:51Jeff Horwitz: and I kept thinking to myself, if like this is something that is gonna lead to years of litigation and billions of dollars on the child safety front, it doesn't even involve money.
- 18:03Jeff Horwitz: This stuff is like very directly involves consumer harm and in some ways seems like it's almost maybe even an easier lift to make an argument about in terms of that, you know, Meta has done a thing that benefited itself at the cost to users.
- 18:19Jeff Horwitz: So I, you know, I don't, I don't wanna like predict it.
- 18:21Jeff Horwitz: I will say that Santa Clara County has also, filed on this, independently.
- 18:26Jeff Horwitz: they were the, the first to do that.
- 18:28Jeff Horwitz: and you know, I, I wouldn't be shocked, again, given sort of the timeline for sort of, mass litigation, I wouldn't be shocked if there are other states that come out of the woodwork.
- 18:37Jeff Horwitz: I don't have a specific knowledge of anybody that's about to file or anything.
- 18:41Ben Whitelaw: Got it.
- 18:42Ben Whitelaw: I mean, it's, it's a really interesting time for Meta, not least because we'll come onto a story, about the, another case that many people will know about in a sh- second.
- 18:51Ben Whitelaw: But they have seemingly done a lot of work over the last year and a bit since this story that you published came out to combat scams and fraudulent ads.
- 19:01Ben Whitelaw: you know, you don't have to go that far back in its kind of newsroom, press release system to see, its kind of public, positions on the work it's done.
- 19:10Ben Whitelaw: there was one post from earlier this year that said,"We've removed 159 million scam ads."
- 19:15Jeff Horwitz: Oh, nominal, large nominal numbers.
- 19:18Jeff Horwitz: The friends of tech platform t-, uh, press releases.
- 19:21Jeff Horwitz: They love them.
- 19:22Jeff Horwitz: Yes
- 19:23Ben Whitelaw: Exactly.
- 19:23Ben Whitelaw: And it's, it makes a g- for a good headline.
- 19:25Ben Whitelaw: You know, there's, been a clear concerted effort to show themselves to be kind of on top of this.
- 19:30Ben Whitelaw: do anybody who's kind of used the platform either as an advertiser or as a user can probably see that it's not improved a great deal.
- 19:37Ben Whitelaw: What are your senses of, how they've gone about trying to improve the ads space on the platform?
- 19:43Jeff Horwitz: I, I-- look, I can see the announcements made.
- 19:46Jeff Horwitz: they have, certainly, had some very public crackdowns on, specific things.
- 19:53Jeff Horwitz: I will say that, it does appear from what Rhode Island is alleging that Rhode Island is having absolutely no problem finding many of the exact same problems.
- 20:03Jeff Horwitz: the thing that I think many Meta people who are working on this internally flagged as being, a foundational first step, to combat scams and something which I might add, Google has basically largely done for pretty much all advertisers, which is verification.
- 20:20Jeff Horwitz: it's really hard to police scams if you don't know who you're taking money from in the first place.
- 20:25Jeff Horwitz: And like, this is something that say, in the financial services industry, you don't sell financial products to an entity if you don't know who they are.
- 20:34Jeff Horwitz: that's just like, it's just not done.
- 20:36Jeff Horwitz: ad sales, on the other hand, there are no such rules.
- 20:40Jeff Horwitz: And so like, a problem that Meta was having repeatedly per the internal stuff was, you know, they'd, boot bad advertisers and they'd just go right back to the same Chinese intermediaries, buy some fresh accounts, and be right back on the platform that same afternoon.
- 20:54Jeff Horwitz: And so I think what I would wanna see, and if I were a regulator, I'd wanna see would be what Meta is actually doing, not in terms of like nominal takedowns, but, okay, what are the thresholds for, removing an account?
- 21:08Jeff Horwitz: how many, predicted scam ads, is Meta, allowing, per country?
- 21:13Jeff Horwitz: cause they, I mean, they absolutely have classifiers that, do that.
- 21:15Jeff Horwitz: you know, what are they doing in terms of using the signals coming out of scam compounds, for enforcement?
- 21:22Jeff Horwitz: Because there's absolutely, signatures of that sort of activity.
- 21:26Jeff Horwitz: There's like a lot of sort of granular stuff that is much more process-based than we took down a whole bunch of accounts or, you know, we've committed to a policy or, things like that.
- 21:36Ben Whitelaw: Right.
- 21:37Ben Whitelaw: Interesting.
- 21:38Ben Whitelaw: So the discovery, is gonna be very telling in that regard.
- 21:41Ben Whitelaw: I mean, it, it comes in the same week, Jeff, as, many people will know, just yesterday in fact, that New Mexico I mean, a New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay$25 billion for lying about, the, use of data in the, the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and, misleading the public about what the company did as far as handling misinformation and hate speech on the platform.
- 22:07Ben Whitelaw: New Mexico is the one state that didn't settle in the big settlement that you alluded to, a second ago.
- 22:13Ben Whitelaw: And so a jury found Meta, guilty in, September, and the judge has since been working out how, it would pay, and we've landed on this 25 billion number.
- 22:24Ben Whitelaw: it's funny just to kinda think about how they arrived at that.
- 22:27Jeff Horwitz: Well, the, the judge, the judge said that it was like, should have been well over$200 billion if they were strictly applying the law.
- 22:33Jeff Horwitz: But like, I guess he was gonna cut them a break.
- 22:35Jeff Horwitz: Um, but I don't think Meta sees it that way.
- 22:38Ben Whitelaw: No, no.
- 22:39Ben Whitelaw: I It's still one of the largest fines leveraged against a U-US corporation, as far as I understand, for something like this.
- 22:45Ben Whitelaw: And it's, you know, it's more than the 18 billion pounds that the, multi-state settlement concluded.
- 22:51Jeff Horwitz: You said pounds, not, uh, dollars.
- 22:55Ben Whitelaw: my Britishness getting in the way there.
- 22:56Ben Whitelaw: Um, that would be even worse, I
- 22:59Jeff Horwitz: Yeah, exactly.
- 23:00Jeff Horwitz: Yeah
- 23:01Ben Whitelaw: but it's a big moment in the sense of, you know, again, further kind of entrenching the idea that Meta, were misleading the public in a number of different ways as to what they were doing or prepared to do, which I think, I guess, is kind of what we have seen, in other cases as well
- 23:15Jeff Horwitz: Yeah, I think, one takeaway from this, and this applies to the child safety stuff, it also applies to the scam litigation.
- 23:21Jeff Horwitz: is that the most dangerous words a platform can possibly say is,"We are handling this responsibly." if you say that publicly and it turns out you are not, then you have opened yourself up to what I think is increasingly being viewed as a potential end run around 230 protections.
- 23:41Jeff Horwitz: which is that, you know, your platform can be as awful and as, you know...
- 23:45Jeff Horwitz: how awful your platform is doesn't matter, but if you're saying that it's safe, you are misleading consumers and therefore you are at risk.
- 23:53Jeff Horwitz: So like, I mean, honestly, like the legally safest response to any criticism, from a platform does appear to be it is what it is.
- 24:00Jeff Horwitz: I don't know we're gonna seeing that in, press releases anytime soon, but like, you know, Cambridge Analytica obviously, uh, it never dies.
- 24:06Jeff Horwitz: our children will be discussing, ongoing litigation involving Cambridge Analytica, I suspect.
- 24:11Jeff Horwitz: but, you know, I think, yeah, it, it's, uh, a lot of this is always comes down to, what the company said, its standards were versus, what, a court might later find them to have been at the time.
- 24:21Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 24:22Ben Whitelaw: And, and this kind of growing trend to see platforms as, products, as, products with risks and, litigating them- against them a- accordingly.
- 24:30Ben Whitelaw: there's probably not too much more to say on the No Me- New Mexico piece.
- 24:33Ben Whitelaw: I think it will, will have,
- 24:35Jeff Horwitz: I mean, that thing's gonna get challenged.
- 24:36Jeff Horwitz: I, When I saw it, I was like, wow.
- 24:38Jeff Horwitz: One, you know, New Mexico really seems very comfortable going it alone and seems to be, like, pulling down results that, if I were another state's AG, I might be a little jealous of.
- 24:48Jeff Horwitz: but like, it's also...
- 24:50Jeff Horwitz: I, I don't know.
- 24:50Jeff Horwitz: I, I sometimes have a hard time imagining that,$25 billion, is going to get paid to New Mexico's schoolchildren, which would be a, uh, You know, those are gonna be some really nice schools given New Mexico's population, if that is in fact the case.
- 25:04Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 25:04Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, their budget is, I think, a s- a number of billion dollars below that
- 25:08Jeff Horwitz: Yeah, the, the, and the, the entire state's budget is, yeah, is far less.
- 25:12Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 25:13Ben Whitelaw: so, so, maybe it's time to move to New Mexico.
- 25:15Ben Whitelaw: Um, is worth noting the kind of New Mexico Attorney General, Raul Torres, he's on a bit of a run.
- 25:21Ben Whitelaw: Um, I think in, in the States you call it three to zero, three to O, in sporting terms.
- 25:26Ben Whitelaw: But, you know, there's been two other cases this year that New Mexico have won.
- 25:29Jeff Horwitz: And they've got a lot outstanding still against TikTok, Snap, they are by no means done
- 25:34Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, no, it's true.
- 25:36Ben Whitelaw: so I, I wonder what other states will, will end up learning from, from their success.
- 25:40Ben Whitelaw: And, and the, the other thing to note is just how this has been kind of this judgment has been kind of created, made to be by the company, less of a consumer protection judgment, but a, a speech story.
- 25:52Ben Whitelaw: And I was noting about in one of the articles I read how Meta's chief legal officer called the result an attempt to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online, which is a, it's a kind of felt like a bit of a dog whistle to the US administration, at the very worst, and at the very best felt like a kind of conflation of or an intentional conflation of what this judgment really is about, which is clearly about, data privacy.
- 26:18Jeff Horwitz: yeah, I feel like we, we-- there is probably an angle in reducing any criticism of platforms, to, help their attacking speech.
- 26:27Jeff Horwitz: cause yeah, I mean, the, details of, Cambridge Analytica, and again, I, I sometimes get a little lost in how the damages occurred from the Cambridge Analytica leak, and like what the concrete harms were.
- 26:40Jeff Horwitz: but, that said, it's not a speech question.
- 26:43Jeff Horwitz: I mean, unless we're calling like shipping off user data in violation of your own terms of service as speech, which I don't think Meta is doing.
- 26:51Jeff Horwitz: But, you know, at a high level, yeah, sure, call it an attack on speech
- 26:54Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 26:54Ben Whitelaw: and what's notable about that, which is the kind of third story in this little Meta triumvirate, is the fact that that legal officer, CJ Mahoney, is gonna be playing a larger role in a world without Joel Kaplan, Meta's, chief public policy officer, who this week stepped down after 15 years in various public policy roles at the company.
- 27:16Ben Whitelaw: Kaplan is a, kind of Republican darling, I would say.
- 27:19Ben Whitelaw: W- you know, a, friend of the administration, a long-term, pal of Zuckerberg, and was given a kind of very warm send-off by the CEO of Meta in some of the kind of public comments.
- 27:31Ben Whitelaw: you can kind of read too much into some of these departures, Jeff, I think.
- 27:34Ben Whitelaw: But I think after obviously the revelations in Sarah Wynn Williams' book, which, were not proven or Meta disputed and, and Joel Kaplan disputed and also these New Mexico judgments, I wonder if there's a, an element of, somebody taking up the reins who just isn't Joel Kaplan.
- 27:52Jeff Horwitz: I mean, I, I don't, it doesn't feel like they are, short of people who are friends, with the administration.
- 27:58Jeff Horwitz: There's, uh, Dina, Powell McCormick.
- 28:01Jeff Horwitz: There is, Kevin Martin, who is, the long-term deputy of Joel, is, you know, still very central to things.
- 28:08Jeff Horwitz: So, like, I don't, I don't know that I see this as, like, a, change in direction.
- 28:13Jeff Horwitz: Kaplan had been there for a long time, and certainly oversaw concerns that the company might be, needed to sort of get along better with the administration, with the current administration, during, both of President Trump's terms.
- 28:25Jeff Horwitz: I don't know necessarily that, like, he was always beloved by people on the right.
- 28:31Jeff Horwitz: I think, you know, there are people who are more vociferously outspoken.
- 28:35Jeff Horwitz: but, I don't know I'd, I'd read much into it either way, in terms of it feels like it is, uh, more of a internal intrigue than a shift in direction for the company.
- 28:43Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 28:44Ben Whitelaw: Fair.
- 28:44Ben Whitelaw: So in many senses, you know, those three stories I think demonstrate that, all is normal at Facebook.
- 28:50Ben Whitelaw: Everything is the same.
- 28:51Ben Whitelaw: Nothing has changed.
- 28:52Ben Whitelaw: We we, we, we continue as were, and you will still have, interesting stories to dig into at the big blue, I would say.
- 29:00Ben Whitelaw: we're gonna move on now, Jeff, to talk a bit about, a couple other interesting stories, some eye-catching stories that, caught our eye, in our feeds this week.
- 29:07Ben Whitelaw: and then we're gonna move on to our Patreon section for supporters of the podcast.
- 29:11Ben Whitelaw: let's start, Jeff, with a story that you saw by NBC News about YouTube in schools,'cause there's, something really nice about the treatment of this story and also the, topic of it.
- 29:23Jeff Horwitz: Yeah, I, I can't say enough positive about this story.
- 29:27Jeff Horwitz: and in fact, I'm, annoyed at myself that I didn't think of it,'cause I've, I've done, I've done stuff like this before, right?
- 29:33Jeff Horwitz: Like, I think in a world in which, external access to platforms is extremely limited, you know, you just gotta throw sort of first-person testing at it.
- 29:43Jeff Horwitz: I've done this with Meta's sexy chatbots for kids.
- 29:47Jeff Horwitz: I've done this for, their recommendation systems, if you follow, say, gymnasts.
- 29:53Jeff Horwitz: uh, that was extremely ugly.
- 29:55Jeff Horwitz: Like, I've done this for sort of ad targeting things, for scams.
- 29:58Jeff Horwitz: Like, just actually using the damn platform is like shockingly not done by reporters or academics as much as you would expect.
- 30:07Jeff Horwitz: So like what NBC did here was just, they went to parents and teens, and they got, their YouTube histories, and then they matched up what they were watching, during school hours.
- 30:18Jeff Horwitz: and um, it is a-about as ugly as you would expect, perhaps.
- 30:23Jeff Horwitz: but Ben, you are like, what you would expect and what listeners would expect is perhaps different than what other parents might expect because, you know, Google has pitched YouTube as being an educational tool that really belongs in schools.
- 30:36Jeff Horwitz: And like it turns out that if you're looking at what is actually consumed, on, a small number of individual students', YouTube accounts during school hours, you're gonna see a lot more like watermelons being blown up with handguns and, lascivious dancing than you are going to see like explanations of, physics and, algebra.
- 30:55Jeff Horwitz: So, it just is like extremely basic and I just when reading it, I was like,"Damn, that's good," and also, how the hell is it 2026 and this hasn't been done, in like a clinical academic setting, previously?
- 31:11Jeff Horwitz: and like I, I just feel like it, that we're still kind of approaching platform stuff sometimes without actually like using the damn things like a normal person would or looking at how a normal person does use that data.
- 31:23Ben Whitelaw: totally agree.
- 31:24Ben Whitelaw: And, you know, some of the best, some of the best reporting on, on platforms generally I think almost straddle that line into academia and it would be something that, a researcher would do, which I think is, is very telling.
- 31:34Ben Whitelaw: I mean, the, just the numbers, of some of these pupils is, is shocking.
- 31:37Ben Whitelaw: You know, one pupil, just to give an example, looked at 4,700 videos during school time over a year period, and, like, less than 5% were educational.
- 31:48Ben Whitelaw: You know, the numbers were, were shocking and, and the, the piece does a really good, job I think of visualizing that through some nice infographics and kind of talks you through it, again, in a way that I think is, is very powerful and that is likely to get noticed,
- 32:00Jeff Horwitz: the same thing could be done, right?
- 32:02Jeff Horwitz: We are, like, still in the, we're in the middle of a national debate over, phone access in schools, um, at school.
- 32:07Jeff Horwitz: Like, There is no reason why one could not forensically audit what was being consumed at what particular times, in a cohort of children's devices, and try to address the question of well, is or isn't it a good idea for kids to have access to phone in schools?
- 32:24Jeff Horwitz: 'Cause I think we can, like, kind of generally all agree that you are probably not learning at your best if, like, Reels is currently streaming or, like, you are, actively taking Snapchat, you know, sending pictures on Snap or, you know.
- 32:38Jeff Horwitz: Like, this feels like it's, like, kind of a, maybe the result's obvious, but, like, if we need to have that conversation to discuss, the question of okay, are phones good or bad for education?
- 32:49Jeff Horwitz: I mean, there's two ways you can go about it, right?
- 32:51Jeff Horwitz: One, you can, like, run long-range causal studies, in which you withhold things.
- 32:55Jeff Horwitz: The other one is you could just, like, look at what the hell people are doing on their phones, and that is gonna give you, I would argue, a pretty good sense of, whether this is helping out or harming education
- 33:07Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 33:07Ben Whitelaw: and I think this will, this will be taken up as a story by parents and school boards and educators in, droves.
- 33:15Ben Whitelaw: I think this will inspire a really strong conversation.
- 33:18Ben Whitelaw: So
- 33:19Jeff Horwitz: Yeah, it's just like, I just wish that like, somebody needs to do this work in a little more thorough of a fashion.
- 33:24Jeff Horwitz: And again, that's, that's some self-criticism on, on my part.
- 33:27Jeff Horwitz: I could have proposed this to academics and tried to partner with them on it.
- 33:30Jeff Horwitz: I've done plenty of those things, but I haven't done this.
- 33:32Jeff Horwitz: And like, yeah, man, field's wide open in, you know, year of our Lord 2026.
- 33:37Jeff Horwitz: what the hell are kids doing on their devices during school hours?
- 33:40Jeff Horwitz: It remains a, like, interesting unanswered question.
- 33:44Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, exactly.
- 33:45Ben Whitelaw: reporting the better.
- 33:46Ben Whitelaw: let's move on to another, another eye-catching story now.
- 33:49Ben Whitelaw: It's, it's much more of a tragic case that, is worth talking about.
- 33:52Ben Whitelaw: we're gonna briefly mention suicide here for any listeners who, need to be told in advance.
- 33:57Ben Whitelaw: But there is a, uh, a story that's been, published, by actually a, an, a union for, online workers, the UNI Global Union, about the suicide of a woman in France who had been previously working as a content moderator for Meta in Barcelona, where there is a large outsourced moderation community and several large BPOs work there.
- 34:22Ben Whitelaw: this is a tragic story in which the family the, the moderator believes that her death was linked to the work she was doing, and they're preparing a legal claim, on the back of that.
- 34:32Ben Whitelaw: in many ways, Jeff, this is something we've seen a number of times before.
- 34:36Ben Whitelaw: There have been too many stories, I'd say, in which a content moderator whose, job it is to, you know, ensure that our feeds and our, our social media products that we use every day are, are safe and abide by the kind of policies that we all know about.
- 34:48Ben Whitelaw: And we're still, unfortunately seeing the psychological and traumatic effects of doing that work even as, in a kind of different corner of the internet, people are heralding the advent of AGI and this kind of new AI dawn.
- 35:03Ben Whitelaw: it's kind of chilling to me that we still have people who are doing this work, often without commensurate pay or wellbeing support and who are kind of suffering trauma.
- 35:14Ben Whitelaw: Now, there's almost certainly gonna be other elements at play here, but the fact that her family have kind of linked the two is very notable and, does follow a trend of, of people who have suffered in this way.
- 35:25Jeff Horwitz: it's understandable, right?
- 35:26Jeff Horwitz: I mean, this, this issue goes back to, like, Casey Newton, I wanna say 2019.
- 35:32Jeff Horwitz: I was just starting out on"The Beat" when he was, racking up some really good stories on, on this subject.
- 35:38Jeff Horwitz: I mean, it's kind of like, the, Ursula Le Guin, Omelas,""The Ones Who Walk Away," story, except, instead of a child being tortured to guarantee the happiness of everyone, one, everyone's not happy, and two, at least it's an adult and they're being paid.
- 35:51Jeff Horwitz: But, like, This stuff is, just so awful.
- 35:54Jeff Horwitz: I can hardly imagine, doing that day in and day out as a shift.
- 35:59Jeff Horwitz: Like, I am protected to some degree by a sense that, like, when I end up being exposed to really awful stuff, I feel like it's for a higher purpose.
- 36:08Jeff Horwitz: It's not just, like, maintaining a status quo.
- 36:10Jeff Horwitz: If anything, it's, the opposite.
- 36:12Jeff Horwitz: but man, on, on the child safety stuff, like when I was, you know, reviewing content that Meta was serving to people who follow, who just follow gymnasts, don't do anything else, just follow some child gymnasts, my wife would wake me up in the middle of the night because I was screaming or, like, crying, uh, in my sleep, and that's, like, not something that is normal for me.
- 36:33Jeff Horwitz: and so, like, I, I, I do think that there likely are going to be gains from really good LLM-based classifiers.
- 36:44Jeff Horwitz: I do think it's underappreciated how significant some of those tools would likely be for the moderation business and already are inside some of the big companies, and people are a little reluctant to talk about that to some degree because it raises the question of maybe why things aren't getting better faster.
- 37:00Jeff Horwitz: But, to some degree, there's like, I don't see a world in which, we are not, basically paying some people to consume stuff that, just really, is never going to leave your head because it's so awful.
- 37:13Jeff Horwitz: I mean, I, very much understand how people who do this for a living, could end up with PTSD within days.
- 37:18Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 37:19Ben Whitelaw: I think to be honest that the BPO industry is still something that's, that's undercovered in the kind of social media space, right?
- 37:26Ben Whitelaw: Is there was a period where, as you say, Casey and others did a really kind of forensic look in it, but it's still an essential part
- 37:32Jeff Horwitz: and then they just moved it...
- 37:33Jeff Horwitz: to, India and Kenya and, places where bluntly, people weren't gonna file lawsuits when the psychological impacts became apparent
- 37:41Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 37:42Ben Whitelaw: and also where, you know, the work has been kind of recategorized as, data labeling or model, labeling and, and the work is the same but, in a different coat basically.
- 37:51Ben Whitelaw: And, there has been some fight back and, and I'm, I'm glad to see that in parts of Kenya and Germany and Turkey and other places.
- 37:58Ben Whitelaw: And it's being joined up in ways that is, I think, uh, better for not only the people doing that work, but also in terms of kind of bringing about change.
- 38:05Ben Whitelaw: But it's not.
- 38:05Ben Whitelaw: it's slow, hard work, and we should kind of recognize that, I think, as an industry.
- 38:10Jeff Horwitz: Yeah, I think-- I mean, I do think that, like, what I was saying earlier, just that one of the things that helped me when doing it was a sense that things might be changing, that it wasn't just treading water.
- 38:19Jeff Horwitz: I think that, the bleakness, some of the bleakness I think just comes out of like, I will be watching child abuse today, and I will be watching child abuse tomorrow, and I will be watching child abuse until I leave this job, because the child abuse will never stop, just so impossibly grim.
- 38:34Jeff Horwitz: I, I have a hard time getting my head around it.
- 38:37Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 38:37Ben Whitelaw: the faster that can change, the better, through improved labor rights and also AI moderation.
- 38:42Ben Whitelaw: that's my line on it.
- 38:43Ben Whitelaw: Geoff, we wanna quickly mention a story that we both like the look of but we don't really have time to go into, which is this, story that Anthropic is giving third-party auditors employee-like access to audit its AI.
- 38:54Ben Whitelaw: this comes on the back of a whole tranche of, whatever you call rogue attacks, breakout incidents.
- 39:01Ben Whitelaw: there's various different ways of referring to it, not all of them necessarily very accurate.
- 39:05Ben Whitelaw: But, do you wanna say something very briefly on, on, that?
- 39:07Jeff Horwitz: yeah.
- 39:07Jeff Horwitz: this is obviously good.
- 39:09Jeff Horwitz: and I mean, I think it's something that with social media companies, researchers have never really had that privilege again, I'm gonna take Anthropic at its word here that it will be unencumbered access.
- 39:19Jeff Horwitz: My question is what happens if the researchers want to talk about things that they are seeing that are really problematic, what the limitations of that are?
- 39:27Jeff Horwitz: Because There are going to be a lot of devils and a lot of details.
- 39:30Jeff Horwitz: and, I think the history with Meta here is illustrative, which is that the company did, I think, head into doing some research partnerships, in good faith, with, uh, you know, Social science one was the first one.
- 39:41Jeff Horwitz: There was an elections partnership.
- 39:42Jeff Horwitz: There's been other stuff.
- 39:43Jeff Horwitz: I think it is, People have good intentions going in perhaps, but it turns out that letting other people rummage through your stuff and, criticize you publicly is, um, not something that everyone in the organization is perhaps gonna be fully comfortable with.
- 39:58Jeff Horwitz: And, and so I, I guess I'm, like, kinda counting down until some issues arise, even if the intentions are great.
- 40:05Ben Whitelaw: Yeah,
- 40:06Jeff Horwitz: and even if this is, like, a, thing that should be celebrated as a step forward and a good transparency thing, it, it absolutely should
- 40:12Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
- 40:12Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, exactly.
- 40:13Ben Whitelaw: The cynical journalist in us need to, uh, take a
- 40:16Jeff Horwitz: Yeah.
- 40:17Jeff Horwitz: But, but it's gonna, but it's gonna be a problem, right?
- 40:19Jeff Horwitz: I mean, like, there's, there's, there's no way that, like, this is a stable thing where six years from now, like, there's, like, a steady team of people who are just, saying whatever the hell they want while having full access to the company's data.
- 40:30Jeff Horwitz: Like, just that's, that's not gonna be the way it works out, right?
- 40:33Jeff Horwitz: Okay.
- 40:33Jeff Horwitz: Yeah.
- 40:34Ben Whitelaw: We can dream.
- 40:34Ben Whitelaw: We can dream.
- 40:35Ben Whitelaw: Um, so we're gonna transition now, Jeff, to our, Patreon segment for our paying supporters.
- 40:41Ben Whitelaw: listeners, if you liked today's episode, you want a bit more of Jeff and I talking about a story that, is eq- equally important in the platform governance world, then join us for that.
- 40:49Ben Whitelaw: We're gonna be talking about TikTok and some very kind of revelatory details about its child safety approach.
- 40:55Ben Whitelaw: So we'll dive into that now
- 40:58Announcer: That's the end of this week's free edition of Ctrl Alt Speech.
- 41:02Announcer: To hear the extended episode with additional coverage, become a Patreon supporter at patreon.com/ctrlaltspeech.
- 41:09Announcer: That's C-T-R-L Alt Speech.
- 41:12Announcer: If your organization is interested in sponsoring the podcast, contact us via our website at ctrlaltspeech.com.
- 41:19Announcer: Thanks for listening