Latest / Ctrl-Alt-Speech / Live at TrustCon 2025

Transcript

Live at TrustCon 2025 · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Mike Masnick (Intro): Hello.
• 0:00
  Mike Masnick (Intro): You are about to listen to the live recording of Control Alt speech at Trust Con 2025, but I just wanted to pop in really quickly before we go to the live recording to let you know a few quick things.
• 0:12
  Mike Masnick (Intro): First of all.
• 0:13
  Mike Masnick (Intro): Our sponsor for this week is Modulate, so check out the absolutely fascinating bonus chat that I had at Trust Con with Mike Pappas, the founder and CEO of Modulate, which is at the end of this podcast.
• 0:26
  Mike Masnick (Intro): Please do not miss it.
• 0:27
  Mike Masnick (Intro): We talk about all the different.
• 0:29
  Mike Masnick (Intro): Kinds of voice scams that are happening today, including social engineering scams and how Modulate tries to detect those in real time.
• 0:37
  Mike Masnick (Intro): As someone who is obsessed with understanding how these scams work and all the tricks that the scammers use, it was one of the most interesting conversations I had at Trust Con overall of all the conversations I had, and we actually got to record it, and now you get to listen to it as well.
• 0:51
  Mike Masnick (Intro): So that was really, really fun.
• 0:55
  Mike Masnick (Intro): Also, if you wanna see a video version of the live recording at.
• 1:00
  Mike Masnick (Intro): Trust con.
• 1:01
  Mike Masnick (Intro): We will be putting that up on YouTube, but it is going through a bit of an edit, to make it look nice and, uh, do the multicam effects to focus on who is speaking at which time.
• 1:12
  Mike Masnick (Intro): so that probably won't be up for a few days and hopefully sometime, next week or so from when this audio podcast is being released.
• 1:21
  Mike Masnick (Intro): But you should go check it out'cause it was really fun and it was fun to do it in front of a crowd and to see everyone.
• 1:27
  Mike Masnick (Intro): also another programming note.
• 1:29
  Mike Masnick (Intro): Ben and I are both traveling quite a lot through much of August and so control alt speech will be going on a mini break, I guess from our usual schedule and our usual format.
• 1:41
  Mike Masnick (Intro): but over the next few weeks we will be having a few special episodes dropped in here or there.
• 1:46
  Mike Masnick (Intro): So.
• 1:47
  Mike Masnick (Intro): we will not let you miss us for too long.
• 1:49
  Mike Masnick (Intro): Uh, these will have a slightly different format, including some behind the scenes details about control, alt speech, and, those conversations have been really fun to record and really interesting, and we hope that you will enjoy them as well.
• 2:03
  Mike Masnick (Intro): But for now, here is control Alt speech, live at Trust Con 2025.
• 2:15
  Mike Masnick: Hello.
• 2:16
  Mike Masnick: And welcome to Control Alt Speech, live at Trust Con 2025.
• 2:21
  Mike Masnick: Woo.
• 2:29
  Mike Masnick: That was great.
• 2:29
  Mike Masnick: We should do this all the time.
• 2:31
  Mike Masnick: Uh, this is your weekly podcast on the news about online speech, trust and safety, internet regulation, and all things.
• 2:40
  Mike Masnick: Of that nature.
• 2:41
  Mike Masnick: Uh, folks who are regular listeners to the podcast will note that normally the intro is done by Ben and his wonderful British accent.
• 2:52
  Mike Masnick: Ben is not here, as you'll notice, uh, we have talked about it on the podcast that he won't be here, but he did send in this picture of the reason why he is not here, that has Ben and his brand new, uh, lovely child wearing a one z.
• 3:10
  Mike Masnick: With the control alt speech logo on it, and it says, uh, just a baby.
• 3:15
  Mike Masnick: But this is for people who are listening to the podcast.
• 3:18
  Mike Masnick: I'm explaining the visual imagery, uh, but already into speech podcasts.
• 3:23
  Mike Masnick: So, uh, Ben cannot make it.
• 3:24
  Mike Masnick: He sends his apologies for not making it.
• 3:27
  Mike Masnick: He is definitely suffering from FOMO based on the number of text messages I have received from him today.
• 3:34
  Mike Masnick: Uh, but instead of Ben, we have a lovely panel here.
• 3:38
  Mike Masnick: Um, I will switch Ben off the screen and back to our logo.
• 3:42
  Mike Masnick: Um, we were supposed to have, uh, four panelists.
• 3:45
  Mike Masnick: Unfortunately, one of our panelists had to drop out at the last minute.
• 3:49
  Mike Masnick: Uh, but.
• 3:50
  Mike Masnick: I think we can fill the space just fine with who we have here.
• 3:53
  Mike Masnick: So,
• 3:54
  Alice Hunsberger: and say, we'll do our rest.
• 3:56
  Mike Masnick: You'll, you'll do fine.
• 3:58
  Mike Masnick: Uh, so, uh, again, I don't know if I said, I'm Mike Masnick, uh, from Tech Dirt and, uh, KPI Institute, and we have Alice Hunsberger, who again, everybody knows you here, right?
• 4:09
  Mike Masnick: Woohoo.
• 4:14
  Alice Hunsberger: If you don't know me, uh, you should subscribe to everything in moderation, which is.
• 4:19
  Alice Hunsberger: Ben's newsletter who he lets me write for.
• 4:23
  Alice Hunsberger: Um, so yeah.
• 4:25
  Alice Hunsberger: Yes.
• 4:26
  Alice Hunsberger: That's how you can learn more about who I am if you don't know.
• 4:29
  Mike Masnick: And then at the end we have Ash Kazarian, and, um, now I feel like I have to say what you write, but you do everything.
• 4:38
  Mike Masnick: So do you wanna talk, just give a quick intro on Sure.
• 4:41
  Mike Masnick: Your current work.
• 4:43
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Uh, I'm a First Amendment lawyer, which means I'm having a great time in the year of 2025.
• 4:48
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And most of my work focuses on digital free speech at the future of free speech at the Vanderbilt University.
• 5:00
  Mike Masnick: All right, so regular listeners of the podcast will know the way this works is that we generally have a discussion about things that have happened in the news this week.
• 5:08
  Mike Masnick: Um, we have picked out a bunch of articles that we.
• 5:12
  Mike Masnick: Have decided are interesting and that where there are complicated things where we don't have easy answers for them, I think will be the quick upfront summary of the things we are about to discuss.
• 5:22
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and we are going to try to make sure that towards the end of this we will have some time for user questions.
• 5:28
  Mike Masnick: There are microphones on the side and so we will give you a little bit of heads up and people can line up.
• 5:34
  Mike Masnick: There are very bright lights shining in our eyes, so we will try to be able to see my eyesight is.
• 5:39
  Mike Masnick: Not as good as it used to be, but, uh, hopefully we can see you and have you answer a question, uh, or ask a question.
• 5:45
  Mike Masnick: We will do the answering already.
• 5:47
  Mike Masnick: I'm messed up with all the lights.
• 5:49
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 5:50
  Mike Masnick: So, uh, we're gonna start with a story or a couple of stories that Ash you found, um, having to do with.
• 6:00
  Mike Masnick: Our favorite property to talk about, uh, which is X and, uh, the gr ai that is on X.
• 6:07
  Mike Masnick: So do you wanna give a quick summary of, of the stories that you found?
• 6:11
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Sure.
• 6:11
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: I'll be very quick.
• 6:12
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Uh, one of the stories from Al Jazeera talks about how much GR has been used by.
• 6:18
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: PE users for fact checking.
• 6:20
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, and they mostly draw on two events in our history.
• 6:25
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: One being National Guard, being in LA and, uh, governor of California where we are Newsom, uh, posting two pictures and then a lot of users.
• 6:34
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Using Grok to see if the pictures were real and grok incorrectly saying that they warned.
• 6:40
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And then the fallout from that.
• 6:42
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And then the second one had to do with Elon Musk making a statement about the president and the Epstein files and the fallout from that.
• 6:51
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, and overall, I think the article talks about how more and more, because grok is integrated into social media platform like X, um, users use it more and more for fact checking and.
• 7:03
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Quick answers and then rely on that and the upsides and downsides of that.
• 7:09
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, and, and I thought this was really interesting, both of'em in fact, because, you know, there's been all this talk for years about the importance of fact checking and like, you know, there's a lot of miss and disinformation as people at this conference are very well aware of, and we're always saying like, oh, you know, better fact checking is important and here's a tool that in theory.
• 7:31
  Mike Masnick: Helps people fact check.
• 7:32
  Mike Masnick: And then, you know what the, the Al Jazeera article was noting was that it, it was, you know, giving wrong answers.
• 7:39
  Mike Masnick: It wasn't fact checking.
• 7:40
  Mike Masnick: It was doing the opposite of it.
• 7:41
  Mike Masnick: But I also thought what was interesting was the fact that so many people are using the tool that way.
• 7:48
  Mike Masnick: The, the like grok is it true response to any particular piece of information is becoming something that a lot of people.
• 7:55
  Mike Masnick: Are using.
• 7:57
  Mike Masnick: And I thought it was just sort of like an interesting element that, that there's at least some element of people wanting to get a FactCheck, wanting to try and get some sort of confirmation or some way to know if what they're looking at is true.
• 8:11
  Mike Masnick: And I thought that was a positive, but the fact that that grok sometimes responds with nonsense Yeah.
• 8:16
  Mike Masnick: Is a problem.
• 8:17
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: I just, I was looking for a number between June 5th and June 12th, Brook was called on 2.3 million times, which is.
• 8:25
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: A wild number.
• 8:26
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: I did not realize that.
• 8:27
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: I see it all the time on my feed and I judge people who do it, to be honest.
• 8:32
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: But yeah, that's a number I did not imagine.
• 8:35
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 8:36
  Mike Masnick: Do you have?
• 8:37
  Alice Hunsberger: Yeah, I mean, I, I always have thoughts.
• 8:41
  Alice Hunsberger: Uh, I think it speaks more widely.
• 8:45
  Alice Hunsberger: I mean, we all know if we use AI every day like I do at my job, um, we know where you have to fact check the ai, even if it's supposed to be fact checking for you.
• 8:57
  Alice Hunsberger: Like, I always take this extra step to check.
• 9:00
  Alice Hunsberger: And I think this sort of speaks to a lack of media literacy and AI literacy.
• 9:05
  Alice Hunsberger: Generally, and I wonder in the trust and safety.
• 9:09
  Alice Hunsberger: Space, what is our responsibility to try to teach people how to use these tools and understand what the limitations are and how much is something that like we as a society, more generally have to do?
• 9:20
  Alice Hunsberger: And it's really not like a trust and safety issue so much is it is just new technology that people haven't figured out yet.
• 9:29
  Alice Hunsberger: And so.
• 9:30
  Alice Hunsberger: I have a couple stories coming up next that I, I also speak to the same similar theme, so,
• 9:36
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: and as a First Amendment lawyer, uh, I also feel very con, you know, conflicted about this.
• 9:41
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: But first and foremost, I think it's an additional tool that some of our institutions can use and.
• 9:48
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Hopefully perfect.
• 9:50
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And maybe it's not just grok, maybe our social media platforms implement something like that.
• 9:54
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: We now see community notes being the most popular way to do some of the content moderation around this.
• 10:00
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: So I think it's.
• 10:01
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Just another tool in a toolbox as we are, we keep adapting to new information ecosystem.
• 10:08
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, and as long as it's not the government that tells grok what to do, I'm okay with that.
• 10:14
  Mike Masnick: Well, uh, yeah, I mean, the government made some statements about AI today, um, which may not influence, but I, I think it actually does raise a larger point, which is.
• 10:23
  Mike Masnick: Who has control over the AI systems, which is something that people don't think about.
• 10:28
  Mike Masnick: And I know, you know, with Grok in particular, I think there was a, a post that Elon made today that I, I think it was today, it was one of these things that went across my feed.
• 10:35
  Mike Masnick: I haven't fact checked it.
• 10:37
  Mike Masnick: I could be wrong.
• 10:38
  Mike Masnick: Uh, but where, um, someone was saying it was like yelling at Elon, like, you have to get the bias out of grok.
• 10:45
  Mike Masnick: And he said, we're working on it.
• 10:46
  Mike Masnick: And there's this element to all of this, which is, you know, who.
• 10:50
  Mike Masnick: Is controlling the tools that you're using for these purposes.
• 10:53
  Mike Masnick: And that's, I mean, that's always been an element of any of these things.
• 10:57
  Mike Masnick: Like when, when we had, you know, back when there was fact checking on social media and, uh, meta had, you know, fact checking RIP Yes.
• 11:07
  Mike Masnick: Uh, had, had there fact checking programs in place.
• 11:10
  Mike Masnick: There were still questions about it and people would say, well, you know, oh, but they would disagree with this fact check.
• 11:15
  Mike Masnick: You know, it depends on what context you're adding or, or how you're looking at it.
• 11:19
  Mike Masnick: But now we have these tools like, like Grok, and there's a question of who is in charge of the dials in terms of how those things are being tuned and what they're being tuned for.
• 11:29
  Mike Masnick: And obviously, you know, a few weeks ago, grok was referring to itself as Mecca Hitler, which, you know, do you trust Mecca Hitler to be your accurate fact checking thing?
• 11:41
  Mike Masnick: You know, hopefully not that many people in this audience, uh, would, would assume that that would be a good fact checking thing.
• 11:47
  Mike Masnick: But I, I think there's this, this element of like, it's one thing to say, okay, yes, you should be, um, checking on things and you should be curious and you should be trying to figure out, you know, is this a trustworthy source?
• 11:59
  Mike Masnick: And so it's good to see people, you know.
• 12:02
  Mike Masnick: Trying to find that, but the fact that they're then relying on an untrustworthy source to determine whether or not the sources they're looking at are trustworthy leads to this sort of inception level of, of do your own research.
• 12:14
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: At the same time, I do wanna say, I don't think this is like a new problem.
• 12:17
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Maybe the scale is different just because of the internet and its scale is humongous, but at the same time.
• 12:23
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: 20 years ago, 10 years ago, if you were watching Fox News versus watching M-S-N-B-C, you were maybe getting slightly different version of the events and description of the events.
• 12:33
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And same applies to newspapers and book publishers.
• 12:36
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And the question of who your audience is and who, where do you go to get information, adjust how you get that information and what's in that information.
• 12:44
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: So I do wanna reiterate that this is not a new problem.
• 12:48
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, but is it, is it different in a way?
• 12:52
  Mike Masnick: Because it's one thing to say about, okay, yeah, I'm gonna pick, you know, I'm gonna watch Fox News, or I'm gonna watch M-S-N-B-C, or I'm gonna watch CNN, or whatever.
• 12:59
  Mike Masnick: But there's something different about the, the fact that it's like an AI and even.
• 13:03
  Mike Masnick: The fact that people believe because it's like, oh, it's an ai, it's an algorithm that there's some sort of truth behind it.
• 13:10
  Mike Masnick: And, and I, I mean, this is just what I'm noticing, people sort of, and this is going to come up in, in later stories that we're talking about today as well.
• 13:18
  Mike Masnick: There's this sense that like, people know to not always trust a human, but they seem to be, in some cases, at least, certainly not always, but perhaps more willing to trust.
• 13:28
  Mike Masnick: Well, you know, the, the, the machine told me.
• 13:31
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, it's, it's got some sort of, uh, you know, qualitative, some nature that makes people, you know, believe that it must be true,
• 13:41
  Alice Hunsberger: I think too.
• 13:43
  Alice Hunsberger: And yes, and we'll talk, we'll talk about that.
• 13:46
  Alice Hunsberger: And also, um, there's something about truth and facts that is very interesting right now.
• 13:55
  Alice Hunsberger: And I think a lot of it is kind of.
• 13:57
  Alice Hunsberger: Self-reinforcing.
• 13:58
  Alice Hunsberger: And so for a lot of people, they're looking, they're really looking for reinforcement of their own beliefs in their own worldview, more so than actually wanting the truth to challenge them.
• 14:12
  Alice Hunsberger: And so there's this feedback mechanism that can get pretty sketchy if it goes too far down any one direction.
• 14:20
  Alice Hunsberger: And what I've said for a long time is I think trust and safety teams are like.
• 14:26
  Alice Hunsberger: The way that companies put their values into action.
• 14:31
  Alice Hunsberger: So if X believes in whatever Elon Musk believes in and wants his worldview to be out in the world, and gr is checking Elon Musk's tweets to like reinforce that in the bot, like.
• 14:45
  Alice Hunsberger: That's kind of what people are coming to X for and they're being pretty upfront about that, and we're seeing all the ways that it comes out wrong, but it's also the values of the company, even if some of us don't agree with that.
• 15:01
  Alice Hunsberger: Yeah.
• 15:01
  Alice Hunsberger: And so it's an interesting thing to think about, like is it, is it a feature, is it a bug or is it both like hard to say
• 15:10
  Mike Masnick: and, and there's an element of confirmation bias in the users too, right?
• 15:13
  Mike Masnick: Because.
• 15:14
  Mike Masnick: You know, in some cases users are looking for, this is something that I think is somewhat underexplored, just even in the social media space where people talk about concerns about filter bubbles or echo chambers, or whatever you wanna call it.
• 15:26
  Mike Masnick: But a lot of it is people searching out confirmation bias, looking to sort of reinforce their own beliefs rather than necessarily being, you know, um, you know, impacted by the algorithm as people say.
• 15:38
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: I would be very curious to see a study done, uh, that looks into that.
• 15:43
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Two different camps because I have, you know, anecdotally have seen a lot of people be very scared of ai, right?
• 15:49
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And everything that they don't like, they say, oh, that's ai.
• 15:52
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Like that's not real.
• 15:53
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And then there was like this big contingency that now rely on AI for everything on what they eat for breakfast.
• 15:59
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: To, to, you know, how they're gonna travel.
• 16:02
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And I think the solution to this is the most boring solution, which is digital citizenship.
• 16:07
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Uh, educating our society, everyone from like fourth grade on how to, uh, sparse information, how to analyze it, how to critically think, which is the hardest part of that.
• 16:17
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 16:18
  Mike Masnick: Well, that's a, a perfect segue Yes.
• 16:20
  Mike Masnick: Into Alice, some stories that you found this week.
• 16:22
  Mike Masnick: So if you wanna talk about the, the stories that you had.
• 16:25
  Alice Hunsberger: Yes.
• 16:26
  Alice Hunsberger: Um, so I have two stories.
• 16:28
  Alice Hunsberger: I'll talk about'em super briefly and then we can Yeah, we can, we've already kind of made the point, which is like, yes, teach no.
• 16:36
  Alice Hunsberger: If you have kids, teach them how to think critically, please.
• 16:39
  Alice Hunsberger: Um, so.
• 16:41
  Alice Hunsberger: For anybody who doesn't know.
• 16:42
  Alice Hunsberger: I was worked at dating apps for 13 years and a lot of the work that I did there was sort of grappling with this expectation for users of really strong safety mechanisms, which were really useful.
• 16:54
  Alice Hunsberger: And also kind of lack of control of like, well, humans are gonna be human and they're gonna do really weird stuff.
• 16:59
  Alice Hunsberger: And especially if they're meeting in person, like we can't really control that.
• 17:02
  Alice Hunsberger: And you know.
• 17:04
  Alice Hunsberger: All the things that can come with those issues.
• 17:07
  Alice Hunsberger: And now we're seeing some of that with ai, which is like, you can put safety guardrails in ai and that's really important.
• 17:13
  Alice Hunsberger: And that's actually like a lot of what I do in my day job in the subi is thinking about those things and humans are gonna be weird.
• 17:20
  Alice Hunsberger: And there has to be this balance between, um, letting people explore and use AI in creative ways and also having guardrails.
• 17:30
  Alice Hunsberger: So there's two stories.
• 17:32
  Alice Hunsberger: One is from Rolling Stone, um, which is people who have body dysmorphia are using AI to like brutally rate their look and explain to them all the things that are wrong with them.
• 17:46
  Alice Hunsberger: And it was just like obviously causing harm, uh, for those folks.
• 17:52
  Alice Hunsberger: And so the article is sort of like.
• 17:54
  Alice Hunsberger: You know, where's the responsibility to prevent this kind of harm?
• 17:59
  Alice Hunsberger: And this is, again, like you were saying, some of these problems are not new.
• 18:01
  Alice Hunsberger: Like people in trust and safety have been dealing with eating disorders and, and other harm types for forever.
• 18:09
  Alice Hunsberger: But now you have this like interaction with, with a bot that is reflecting back what you wanna hear, even if it's really dangerous.
• 18:18
  Alice Hunsberger: Um, so that was one.
• 18:20
  Alice Hunsberger: And then the others in Forbes and, um.
• 18:24
  Alice Hunsberger: I was announcing that, uh, one of the co-founders of Casper is starting an AI therapy company and talking about how so many people don't have access to mental health and you can really revolutionize things by using ai, which is great.
• 18:39
  Alice Hunsberger: And like I've personally used AI for like, oh my God, my son just had like an hour long meltdown and I don't know what to do and what, what can I try tomorrow to try to calm him down easier and also use AI for like.
• 18:53
  Alice Hunsberger: Hey, help me figure out like healthy, balanced meals and how many calories are in them.
• 18:58
  Alice Hunsberger: And, um, you know, those are really, really good.
• 19:03
  Alice Hunsberger: And also, you know, the trust and safety side of me is like, no, like, don't use AI for therapy.
• 19:10
  Alice Hunsberger: Like that is gonna go so wrong.
• 19:12
  Alice Hunsberger: Um.
• 19:13
  Alice Hunsberger: But, uh, and similarly like, don't use AI to count calories like that.
• 19:17
  Alice Hunsberger: It's gonna send people down rabbit holes like we saw with the body dysmorphia thing.
• 19:21
  Alice Hunsberger: So I think the common thread here is like, is the users, the person able to think critically and recognize how to put up their own safety guardrails and how to kind of think critically and be like, oh, this isn't so good for me.
• 19:36
  Alice Hunsberger: And unfortunately, especially in the us, like that is not something that we.
• 19:42
  Alice Hunsberger: Teach or support or celebrate with people at all.
• 19:46
  Alice Hunsberger: At all.
• 19:47
  Alice Hunsberger: Um, we're kind of just like left out.
• 19:50
  Alice Hunsberger: To find scraps of, you know, how to learn these things.
• 19:54
  Alice Hunsberger: And now we we're faced with this unprecedented technology that can mirror all of those problems back at you so quickly.
• 20:02
  Alice Hunsberger: So I don't have answers.
• 20:04
  Alice Hunsberger: I don't like the idea of having such strict controls with, uh, any tech.
• 20:13
  Alice Hunsberger: Technology that like it becomes so restrictive.
• 20:15
  Alice Hunsberger: People can't use it for good and for helpful reasons is like the free speech advocate in me.
• 20:21
  Alice Hunsberger: Um, and also as a safety professional, I'm like, we really need those guardrails and we really need to figure it out.
• 20:27
  Alice Hunsberger: And I don't know how to reconcile it.
• 20:30
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, I think this is the theme of the podcast since we started it, which is like, gosh, there are no easy answers here.
• 20:36
  Mike Masnick: There's just a whole bunch of complexities and trade-offs, and I think these two stories were like really good examples of that because you can look at both of those stories.
• 20:45
  Mike Masnick: The, the body dysmorphia one is a little bit trickier, but see where like there are benefits to using the technology to, to help people when it's used well.
• 20:56
  Mike Masnick: And the problem is that there are all sorts of examples of it not being used well.
• 21:00
  Mike Masnick: And then the question is, what do you do about it?
• 21:01
  Mike Masnick: And there is the, the sort of.
• 21:05
  Mike Masnick: Um, instinctual reaction, which is like, well, if it can be used badly, we have to figure out a way to stop it.
• 21:09
  Mike Masnick: But the only way you're really going to stop it is to then.
• 21:13
  Mike Masnick: Take away a whole bunch of the good uses as well.
• 21:16
  Mike Masnick: And as you said, you know, if you were trying to use it for checking calories or something in a good way, and some of the AI systems that you were using wouldn't let you do that.
• 21:25
  Mike Masnick: And you know that that's because there's a, a safety professional who looked at it and said, well, oh no, no, we have to make sure that the AI is not encouraging, um, you know, eating disorder behavior.
• 21:38
  Alice Hunsberger: Yeah.
• 21:38
  Alice Hunsberger: But then it also feels really frustrating.
• 21:40
  Alice Hunsberger: Yes.
• 21:40
  Alice Hunsberger: Restricting as a user, it's like, I'm not, you know, I, I just wanna.
• 21:44
  Alice Hunsberger: Figure out how to eat healthier breakfast without like, totally overeating today.
• 21:48
  Alice Hunsberger: But yeah, it's tricky.
• 21:51
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: This is, again, most of my job is fighting with a government, so I'm just gonna talk about fighting with a government.
• 21:56
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, a few years ago, a California state legislator.
• 22:00
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, introduced a bill that didn't go anywhere, but the bill wanted to fight Buddy dysmorphia and all the problems a lot of young girls faced, um, by forcing social media companies to somehow figure out when someone uploads a picture, if it was photoshopped, uh, didn't go anywhere.
• 22:19
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: I had to spend a lot of time explaining why that A doesn't work, B doesn't help.
• 22:24
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, and I feel like it's stuff like that, but like, okay, we have this issue with.
• 22:28
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Chatbots and them probably triggering a lot of issues that people have.
• 22:32
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Or maybe even, you know, maybe someone doesn't have an issue and that like leads them down the rabbit hole, you don't know.
• 22:39
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: But at the same time, I know I sound like a broken record, but I grew up, I'm a nineties kid.
• 22:46
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: I was, all of my body image issues came from TV and newspapers and magazines telling me that Jessica Simpson was bad when she was size six.
• 22:56
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, so again, like it's a repetitive thing where maybe trust and safety teams at generative AI companies can figure out what is the model that they wanna offer, and then we as users figure out which model do we wanna use.
• 23:12
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think, I think there's, there's.
• 23:14
  Mike Masnick: You know, there are a whole bunch of diff different issues at play here, which also makes it more complex and more confusing in terms of how do you, how do you deal with it?
• 23:22
  Mike Masnick: Because all of these issues have, you know, parallels that predate.
• 23:26
  Mike Masnick: AI predate the internet, you know, uh, issues with eating disorder.
• 23:32
  Mike Masnick: Go back.
• 23:33
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: There's a forum on Reddit, I'm pretty sure where you upload your photo and you ask others to rate you.
• 23:37
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 23:38
  Alice Hunsberger: Well, does anybody remember hot or not.com forever?
• 23:41
  Alice Hunsberger: If you're my age?
• 23:42
  Alice Hunsberger: Probably.
• 23:42
  Alice Hunsberger: Yeah.
• 23:43
  Alice Hunsberger: Like I totally use that.
• 23:44
  Alice Hunsberger: It was terrible.
• 23:44
  Alice Hunsberger: I was a teenager.
• 23:45
  Alice Hunsberger: Bad idea,
• 23:47
  Mike Masnick: but, so then what, what, what I think, you know, and so there are, there are definitely people who will say, well, but the technology makes it different.
• 23:54
  Mike Masnick: The fact that the technology company is there as an intermediary, then put some level of responsibility on the technology company.
• 24:01
  Mike Masnick: I don't think any of us think that the technology company should be like, well, we're not gonna do anything.
• 24:07
  Mike Masnick: But I, I think that there's this over focus on the, the intermediary of the technology company to solve this problem.
• 24:15
  Mike Masnick: And there's this idea that, oh, if only.
• 24:18
  Mike Masnick: The company could, you know, magically step in, they could fix it so that the good uses no problem, the bad uses will be blocked.
• 24:25
  Mike Masnick: And I think that's an unrealistic expectation.
• 24:28
  Mike Masnick: Um, and I don't know how you, how you deal with that because there's always going to be, there's always going to be some problem and there's always going to be.
• 24:37
  Mike Masnick: Um, and forgive my profession, but there's always gonna be some journalist who's gonna write a story that is like, oh, here's this big, huge scandal.
• 24:44
  Mike Masnick: There's always going to be politicians who are going to say, oh my gosh, there was this horrible thing that happened.
• 24:48
  Mike Masnick: You need to do something.
• 24:49
  Mike Masnick: How could you have let that happen?
• 24:52
  Mike Masnick: I mean, how do we And, and I, my, my concern about all this is that I still think, and I get yelled at, and people in the audience are free to yell at me if you want.
• 25:01
  Mike Masnick: Uh, we did say you could heckle.
• 25:03
  Mike Masnick: So, um, that, um.
• 25:08
  Mike Masnick: I lost my train of thought, but I, um, my, my, my fear is that in, in doing that and getting to the point where the, all of the decisions are being made because someone gets angry.
• 25:19
  Mike Masnick: There's a media or a politician who says something.
• 25:23
  Mike Masnick: We take away from the discussion about like, how do we teach people to use these tools properly in the first place?
• 25:29
  Mike Masnick: You know, is it citizenship?
• 25:31
  Mike Masnick: Is it, you know, the, the media literacy?
• 25:33
  Mike Masnick: Is it technology literacy?
• 25:35
  Mike Masnick: Is it, you know, when and how in schools do we do, we train people to, to better understand, to be appropriately skeptical, when they should be appropriately skeptical, to be willing to test out and try and experiment in ways that is useful for them to learn and experiment.
• 25:52
  Mike Masnick: You know, and sometimes learn where things go wrong.
• 25:54
  Mike Masnick: I think all of those things are important, and yet that discussion gets pushed away in favor of, oh my gosh, there's this horrible thing happening that needs to stop.
• 26:04
  Mike Masnick: And like, so I, you know, I, on this podcast many times, I've talked about the importance of like media literacy, and I've had people yell at me saying that, well, that takes too long.
• 26:16
  Alice Hunsberger: Yes, but takes too long.
• 26:19
  Mike Masnick: Thank you.
• 26:20
  Alice Hunsberger: But.
• 26:21
  Alice Hunsberger: We've also had these kinds of scapegoats for forever.
• 26:25
  Alice Hunsberger: Yeah.
• 26:25
  Alice Hunsberger: So when I was a teenager it was like, you know, heavy metal music and Dungeons and Dragons were gonna like, make everybody terrible.
• 26:34
  Alice Hunsberger: I think I turned out okay.
• 26:35
  Alice Hunsberger: But you know, it's like that um, scapegoating of social responsibility and saying like, we as a society are doing just fine.
• 26:44
  Alice Hunsberger: It's just this one thing that's turning everybody bad, I think is.
• 26:49
  Alice Hunsberger: Like a natural thing and we're gonna keep seeing it and there's gonna be something else next time.
• 26:55
  Alice Hunsberger: And if we have been providing some of these tools and some of these skills the whole time, or like proper mental health support for everybody, universal health insurance, cra crazy ideas, um, then it might not be such a big problem.
• 27:11
  Alice Hunsberger: But I think, you know, it's normal for, for.
• 27:14
  Alice Hunsberger: People in charge of the government to kind of want to make it somebody else's problem and not their own.
• 27:21
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Yeah.
• 27:21
  Alice Hunsberger: My
• 27:21
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: parents
• 27:22
  Alice Hunsberger: wouldn't
• 27:22
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: let me
• 27:22
  Alice Hunsberger: have
• 27:22
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: a tamagotchi because they saw on TV that like two kids killed themselves when their Tamagotchi died.
• 27:30
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And I still want one.
• 27:32
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: If anyone has one, um, just let me know.
• 27:35
  Mike Masnick: I was gonna say and look how you turned out.
• 27:37
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, but I, I feel like that's really.
• 27:39
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Brings me to the idea of like, with great power comes with great responsibility, but the responsibility should be on us, right?
• 27:44
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Like we have this great power of generative AI now at our hands, and the responsibility shouldn't be in the tool, it should be on us.
• 27:52
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And that's the hard media literacy law it takes for everything.
• 27:56
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: But no matter how much you limit the tool, it will always have problems because humans always have problems.
• 28:02
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Yeah.
• 28:04
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 28:04
  Mike Masnick: With that, I wanna move on to our, our last story.
• 28:06
  Mike Masnick: And this is not officially about ai.
• 28:08
  Mike Masnick: There, there's always an AI element to absolutely everything these days.
• 28:12
  Mike Masnick: Um, this we thought would be a really good story to sort of close out the discussion and to close out trust con, uh, because it was a, a really interesting, sort of thought provoking piece in Tech Policy Press by Dean Jackson.
• 28:25
  Mike Masnick: Um, I'm a huge fan of, of Dean.
• 28:28
  Mike Masnick: I think he does some really, really great.
• 28:30
  Mike Masnick: Um, reporting and is very, very knowledgeable on, on trust and safety issues, including a lot of the, the nuances.
• 28:36
  Mike Masnick: But this one, I was like, I'm not sure I agree with it.
• 28:39
  Mike Masnick: And because it's one of these things where I'm not sure I agree with it, it's, it's fun to talk about it with people.
• 28:44
  Mike Masnick: Um, and so it's called a realist perspective on trust and safety and, uh, it's, it's worth going and reading.
• 28:50
  Mike Masnick: I have a couple quotes from it, but part of what he's arguing is that.
• 28:54
  Mike Masnick: Over the last four or five years with things like Trust Con and TSPA and Integrity Institute and all of these other organizations that have sprung up to sort of support the trust and safety field, there was this feeling of this sort of groundswell of support for like, oh yes, let's make the internet safe, and that maybe has changed a bit.
• 29:15
  Mike Masnick: Uh, in the last year, some of you may have noticed, uh, it may have infected some of the way that people have felt about this conference and the conversations that we're having, certainly a part of the discussion.
• 29:26
  Mike Masnick: And so his argument is like, if you take a realist perspective on this, this idea that these, this effort to build up these organizations to help, you know, make the internet safer and in a way that doesn't involve necessarily the government coming in and telling people how to do things that, that, that may have failed.
• 29:43
  Mike Masnick: Um, and it's sort of suggesting that we have to take a realist view and, and suggest that that experiment is over.
• 29:49
  Mike Masnick: And so one quote he has that a realist assessment of the current moment suggests that, um, instead of that, the one force capable of moving tech titans in a better direction, it says perhaps the only force short of a mass consumer movement is state power.
• 30:07
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and then he, he addresses this, but it strikes me as.
• 30:12
  Mike Masnick: At a moment when we're, uh, some of us in this audience are quite concerned about the nature of state power and where it is today and how it is being used, and how many things that, you know, may have been put in place for good reason are being weaponized to target people who are, um, challenging the, the, you know, the, the lines or, or.
• 30:34
  Mike Masnick: Policies of this administration that the idea of saying, well, we can't do it collectively as, as a group here, the only answer is state power.
• 30:43
  Mike Masnick: Um, I hope that's not true, and I'm hoping that there, there are other ways to deal with this.
• 30:48
  Mike Masnick: And that kind of what I'm hoping we can discuss a little bit, you know, how, how, how did you, I know, you know, I sent this to you and I had both of you read it.
• 30:56
  Mike Masnick: What was your reaction on, on reading Dean's piece?
• 31:00
  Alice Hunsberger: I think.
• 31:01
  Alice Hunsberger: Similar to you, there's some regulation that we've seen that is helpful and sort of refer back and say, look, give me more resources.
• 31:09
  Alice Hunsberger: I have to do it.
• 31:10
  Alice Hunsberger: Um, and that can be really good.
• 31:11
  Alice Hunsberger: I think also similarly, especially in the US if you read, um, some of the things that are happening, it's like all pornography is totally evil and some of the goals to like shut it down.
• 31:22
  Alice Hunsberger: Completely for everybody and not only for adults.
• 31:25
  Alice Hunsberger: And, you know, it's like we can't rely on, on government to be sensible, especially when it comes to protecting marginalized groups.
• 31:33
  Alice Hunsberger: So I agree.
• 31:34
  Alice Hunsberger: I I'm worried about that.
• 31:35
  Alice Hunsberger: I think the other part of it is, um, one of the points that he makes in, in the article is sort of this idea that, um, proving the ROI of trust and safety didn't work.
• 31:46
  Alice Hunsberger: Like people tried to make that argument and it just ended up that like nobody.
• 31:50
  Alice Hunsberger: Okay, like the business motive for investing in trust and safety just isn't there because you see companies like X who are Remo, you know, laying off tons of people and really cutting down, and so therefore it's proof, like people still use it, so why do it in the first place?
• 32:08
  Alice Hunsberger: I don't think that's the full story.
• 32:10
  Alice Hunsberger: I think for a long time we've seen, especially the big global platforms have these one size fit all policies.
• 32:17
  Alice Hunsberger: They're all kind of, they were the same.
• 32:19
  Alice Hunsberger: They had like very generic, everybody's welcome, everything's cool, but they weren't gonna take hard stances.
• 32:24
  Alice Hunsberger: Now we're seeing x.
• 32:26
  Alice Hunsberger: Go off in one direction, but we're also seeing other companies start to like take a really solid stance and say like, no, trust and safety is really important and we're gonna use that as a differentiator and we're gonna invest in our teams.
• 32:39
  Alice Hunsberger: Our CEO E is gonna talk about trust and safety openly.
• 32:42
  Alice Hunsberger: Um.
• 32:44
  Alice Hunsberger: Some of it might just be PR stunts.
• 32:45
  Alice Hunsberger: Like I don't work for these companies, so I don't know for sure.
• 32:49
  Alice Hunsberger: Um, but like Roblox is the sponsor of, um, you know, the main sponsor here.
• 32:54
  Alice Hunsberger: I also see other people who are talking like Pinterest, CEO talks a ton about trust and safety and I find it really fascinating because a few years ago that was like not something that CEOs would talk about that much.
• 33:06
  Alice Hunsberger: So I think there is.
• 33:08
  Alice Hunsberger: I think the business case is still open.
• 33:11
  Alice Hunsberger: Um, and I would love to see more companies differentiate themselves in that way.
• 33:16
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I, I, I think, um, the, I think the story on the business case has, has not been told yet.
• 33:22
  Mike Masnick: I think it's way too early.
• 33:23
  Mike Masnick: I mean, trust con is, you know.
• 33:26
  Mike Masnick: Been around for four years.
• 33:28
  Mike Masnick: The, the term trust and safety as generally applied to the field is a, was like about that long.
• 33:34
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 33:34
  Mike Masnick: I remember a few conferences before Trust Con existed and the, the trust and safety was not even sort of widely accepted as a term.
• 33:41
  Mike Masnick: The idea of like figuring out metrics and ROI on it is not there yet and it's one of these things that I think, I hope.
• 33:48
  Mike Masnick: Maybe this is wishful thinking that, you know, companies will sort of naturally realize that yes, there are these efforts to like, and, and I know like last year I tried to go to a panel on ROI on trust and safety and I couldn't get in'cause it was packed and I showed up early.
• 34:03
  Mike Masnick: Um, so there's obviously a lot of interest in sort of figuring that out, but I think it, it is still early and people are still trying to figure that out.
• 34:10
  Mike Masnick: But, but we have a parallel which is the sort of, uh, customer support.
• 34:16
  Mike Masnick: That many companies, you know, in the eighties and nineties people, a lot of companies viewed customer support as a cost center.
• 34:23
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, you wanted to get, make it as cheap as possible, offshore as much as possible.
• 34:28
  Mike Masnick: You know, give people, uh.
• 34:31
  Mike Masnick: You can only be on the phone for 30 seconds.
• 34:33
  Mike Masnick: You have to get people off the phone as quick as possible.
• 34:35
  Mike Masnick: And then some, some companies smartly began to realize like, wait, this is like one of our major customer touchpoints.
• 34:42
  Mike Masnick: We should be viewing this more as a marketing function than and, and a beneficial function rather than a cost center that we have to try and minimize.
• 34:50
  Mike Masnick: And we're seeing, I think as you noted, some companies are recognizing that for trust and safety as well.
• 34:56
  Mike Masnick: So I think it's, it's a little premature to say, well, the, you know, the whole attempt to prove ROI, you know, was a failure.
• 35:02
  Mike Masnick: I think.
• 35:03
  Mike Masnick: I think there's still still time on that.
• 35:05
  Alice Hunsberger: And also, not to set you up for a big rant here, but there's a lot of really promising stuff happening with, um, vol, like user based moderation or decentralized platforms like Discords doing a lot of really cool stuff.
• 35:23
  Alice Hunsberger: Blue skies doing a lot of really cool stuff.
• 35:25
  Alice Hunsberger: You see a lot of clap.
• 35:26
  Alice Hunsberger: Yeah.
• 35:26
  Alice Hunsberger: That, that was, that was, and Ben, Ben
• 35:28
  Mike Masnick: is not here with a bell, but I, I am on, Mike is on the board.
• 35:32
  Mike Masnick: Mike is on the, I'm the board of our guy, so.
• 35:34
  Mike Masnick: Consider revised.
• 35:36
  Alice Hunsberger: Yeah.
• 35:36
  Alice Hunsberger: Uh, no, but I think like we're getting the tools finally for people to be involved, like you were talking about before, like give users choice, give users autonomy over their own experience, give them tools.
• 35:49
  Alice Hunsberger: Those are finally technically possible now, and that's setting up, I think, for hopefully this like consumer revolution where people are like.
• 35:58
  Alice Hunsberger: I, I can have a hand in creating my own experience in making things better, and that's trust and safety, not just as like a centralized function within a company, but also as like a back and forth with users, which I think is really promising.
• 36:14
  Alice Hunsberger: We're like.
• 36:14
  Alice Hunsberger: Super at the beginning of possibilities there.
• 36:18
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: I was having a lot of cognitive dissonance when I was like, okay, so this piece says, love you, Dean.
• 36:24
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: This piece says, um, this is the issue.
• 36:27
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Trust and safety has been suffering because of the current political climate and everything that has happened.
• 36:33
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: So solution is to give a government that currently I'm criticizing power.
• 36:38
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Over this.
• 36:39
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: So that was the part that I was like really struggling with understanding.
• 36:43
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, but the second piece is, um, depending on business model of course, but even if maybe platforms are not advertising or saying in DC loudly that they're pro trust and safety, they still have advertisers, they still have money to make.
• 36:58
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And if there is something hateful or horrible next to an ad, probably the advertiser is not gonna want that.
• 37:06
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And that's gonna be another piece of, uh.
• 37:09
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Kind of influence over them, and maybe we are in the, currently the mood and the vibe is bad, right?
• 37:17
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Like, historically, we're just like, here, whatever the, like, lowest point is, um, on Earth.
• 37:22
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Like, it's like some, some, what is, what is it called in English?
• 37:25
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: It's starts with an m.
• 37:28
  Speaker 4: I don't know.
• 37:28
  Speaker 4: No.
• 37:28
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 37:29
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Trivia for Thank you.
• 37:31
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, but yes, we're here, but like historically, we're probably gonna go up, like when you hit the bottom and you knock, then you go up.
• 37:39
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, so maybe the mood around trust and safety is gonna change.
• 37:41
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And, uh, if we don't wait for it to change or for this discussions, we want them to stop and then give the government the power to decide, like, then we're really screwed.
• 37:51
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 37:51
  Mike Masnick: I, I think there's an element of.
• 37:54
  Mike Masnick: You know, I think, and everybody does this, and I certainly do this, where you sort of over-index on the way things are now and sort of assume that we're in a steady state and that the world isn't changing, but the world is changing and the world continues to change and these things do cycle and there is some sort of pendulum.
• 38:10
  Mike Masnick: And so yes, obviously I think, you know, within certain circles, trust and safety is looked down upon, um, or considered the enemy of progress in, in certain circles.
• 38:20
  Mike Masnick: Um, but.
• 38:22
  Mike Masnick: I, I don't think it needs to stay that way.
• 38:24
  Mike Masnick: And I think there are these other forces at play, and it's, some of it is advertisers, but it's also the users.
• 38:29
  Mike Masnick: And again, like Dean, actually, he, he makes this point in there that like, you know, he seems a little skeptical that the users will actually stand up and do things.
• 38:37
  Mike Masnick: But I am hopeful also, and again, bias, whatever, like with, with things like Blue Sky and, you know.
• 38:46
  Mike Masnick: Which has custom feeds and, and, you know, third party, uh, ability to create different moderation systems and all of these other tools, people are beginning to discover that you can do it.
• 38:58
  Mike Masnick: And I've said this a few times before, but like we've had, you know, 15, 20 years of these centralized systems where people were sort of taught and, and became accustomed to the idea that.
• 39:10
  Mike Masnick: You were not in control of your online experience that someone else was in control and they might not have your best interest at heart, but there wasn't much you could do about it other than maybe use that, those same tools to yell at the people who run those platforms or to yell at the government to make the people who run those platforms change it.
• 39:28
  Mike Masnick: Um, whereas we're beginning to see.
• 39:32
  Mike Masnick: These elements that are showing up where like, wait, you can make a difference yourself.
• 39:36
  Mike Masnick: You can take some control over it, or third parties can come in and, and build other services on top of it that can take control.
• 39:43
  Mike Masnick: And that creates this element of there's, there's innovation.
• 39:46
  Mike Masnick: So you can see like different approaches to dealing with these things and decide that you might like the way somebody else wants to handle moderation or, or handle these things.
• 39:56
  Mike Masnick: And that will spur more people to begin to recognize.
• 39:59
  Mike Masnick: This is theoretical, this is hopeful, but like we'll begin to recognize that there are other ways to do this, rather than saying, you giant company has to solve this, or you, government has to tell the company how to solve this thing.
• 40:12
  Mike Masnick: I agree.
• 40:14
  Mike Masnick: You're supposed to yell at me about that.
• 40:16
  Mike Masnick: Um, I think that that's a good sign that we can start moving to audience questions.
• 40:21
  Mike Masnick: Um, if anyone wants to.
• 40:24
  Mike Masnick: Gosh, you guys are nervous.
• 40:27
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Any content moderation stories from the past week or two weeks that you guys wanna discuss?
• 40:32
  Mike Masnick: There?
• 40:32
  Mike Masnick: There are microphones.
• 40:33
  Mike Masnick: I'll remind people there are microphones over on either side.
• 40:36
  Mike Masnick: I see at least one person running to a microphone.
• 40:39
  Mike Masnick: Um, and so we will, we, we can take questions.
• 40:42
  Mike Masnick: We have another 10 minutes or so, I believe.
• 40:45
  Mike Masnick: Um, so we have somebody lined up the microphone.
• 40:47
  Mike Masnick: You there Go first.
• 40:49
  Audience Member: Hi, I am Ann Collier with the Net Safety Collaborative and I think partly it's just we're all very tired.
• 40:56
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 40:57
  Audience Member: But, um, thank you all.
• 40:58
  Audience Member: This is a fascinating discussion and I just wanted to follow up on that last point.
• 41:04
  Audience Member: I am such a fan of decentralized.
• 41:07
  Audience Member: I think that we need to give, we need to empower the user more and I think we need to even get down to giving individual users their own, um.
• 41:18
  Audience Member: Their, their very own bots or their very own AI to do their own personal content moderation.
• 41:26
  Audience Member: But then there's children, right?
• 41:29
  Audience Member: And we do need to empower them as well.
• 41:33
  Audience Member: But I'm not sure, decentralized or, you know, having these fantastic sort of, um, third party apps in a decentralized space is gonna keep them safe.
• 41:44
  Audience Member: So I was just wondering if you all.
• 41:45
  Audience Member: I could comment on that.
• 41:48
  Audience Member: Um, those who aren't properly educated yet, um, to take control and also to, to keep adults from taking too much control so that they don't have their own agency and freedom of expression.
• 42:07
  Mike Masnick: I can start on, on that and then, um, yeah, I think, you know, it's, that gets back to the discussion that we had as in the, in the first part, the first two parts of, of this where it's like these technologies can be used for good and bad.
• 42:21
  Mike Masnick: And, and really sort of, a lot of what it comes down to is, is you know, helping people understand, um, you know, teach them how to use it well.
• 42:32
  Mike Masnick: Also part of that is not, not expecting that everyone will use it perfectly, but that there is this sort of learning experience.
• 42:39
  Mike Masnick: And this is something that like, you know, a lot of us who are older, um, ancient, you know, learned as a child is that, you know, you're, you, you sort of learn as you grow about things that are appropriate, sort of age appropriate as you go.
• 42:55
  Mike Masnick: And sometimes you make mistakes.
• 42:57
  Mike Masnick: And part of growing up is learning, is making those mistakes and, and learning.
• 43:01
  Mike Masnick: Now it's not saying like, well, it should be a free for all and that, you know, well, kids will learn, they'll, they'll mess up and encounter terrible things and they'll learn from that.
• 43:09
  Mike Masnick: No, not always, right?
• 43:11
  Mike Masnick: But like I think that there's an approach that has to do with not just like the tech companies being responsible or the AI bot companion being responsible, but family society schools sort of saying, we're going to teach you how to use these things appropriately, and we're going to, we're not going to.
• 43:29
  Mike Masnick: Lie to you that everything is perfect online, that you have to be aware that occasionally you might come across issues and sort of figuring out, you know, in an age appropriate way, begin to to train people to learn how to use these tools properly.
• 43:42
  Mike Masnick: And I think that.
• 43:44
  Mike Masnick: You know, it's not a, it's not a sexy solution.
• 43:46
  Mike Masnick: It's not an easy solution and it's not gonna work perfectly, but I think it's the, the most reasonable solution.
• 43:52
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: The two things as we have that discussion, very important discussion that I wanna flag is currently the government is trying to mandate airification, um, and basically get rid of anonymous speech online and encroach on a lot of other rights.
• 44:05
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, and I think a centralized system in the name of kids, a lot of really bad.
• 44:10
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Laws are being passed in the name of kids.
• 44:12
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, so just keep that in mind.
• 44:14
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Have that conversation.
• 44:15
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: When you have that conversation, discuss this piece too.
• 44:21
  Alice Hunsberger: Yeah, I think we can go to that.
• 44:23
  Mike Masnick: We can go on to next.
• 44:25
  Audience Member: Uh, hi everybody.
• 44:26
  Audience Member: Um, my question might be a bit, uh, strange.
• 44:28
  Audience Member: Um, uh, I remember, uh, during, uh, the sort of takeover of, of Twitter, uh, and all the changes and, and the shift that went away.
• 44:38
  Audience Member: The users were leaving and looking for something else, and someone made a comment, why are we trying to replace Twitter?
• 44:45
  Audience Member: Um, isn't the problem maybe systemic in digital systems?
• 44:49
  Audience Member: How they work, how they remove.
• 44:52
  Audience Member: Humanity in, in conversation, in interactions.
• 44:55
  Audience Member: Um, could that be the answer then to just embrace more offline community?
• 45:02
  Audience Member: And if that is the case, then how would you suggest that happen?
• 45:07
  Alice Hunsberger: I, I mean, again, no, no easy answers at all.
• 45:14
  Alice Hunsberger: Um, I think there's some element of, you know, yes, like go touch grass and live in the world.
• 45:23
  Alice Hunsberger: Uh, I moved to the middle of the woods so that I would have a nice balance of my online life and my offline life.
• 45:30
  Alice Hunsberger: Uh, and also.
• 45:32
  Alice Hunsberger: You know, I remember being a teenager in the South who was like figuring out my sexuality and feeling really out of place and feeling really lonely.
• 45:44
  Alice Hunsberger: Nobody understood me and people on the internet understood me and gave me support, and that's where I found who I was and found, you know, myself, able to express myself in a way that felt authentic where I couldn't in person.
• 45:58
  Alice Hunsberger: And then I became.
• 46:00
  Alice Hunsberger: Brave enough to also do it in person, but it took a while and it was the internet and I think like a ton of people have those experiences.
• 46:07
  Alice Hunsberger: And going back to the child safety issue, like especially as teenagers, and so you have to kind of balance these things, especially as our.
• 46:16
  Alice Hunsberger: IRL lives become more polarized and people become more close-minded and more hateful.
• 46:23
  Alice Hunsberger: Um, it may become harder and harder and harder for people to find that support and acceptance that they need in their own communities.
• 46:31
  Alice Hunsberger: And so I wish that wasn't true.
• 46:33
  Alice Hunsberger: I, I wish we, you know, didn't have that problem.
• 46:37
  Alice Hunsberger: But while we do have that problem, like the internet is a solution as much as it is a problem.
• 46:43
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: It was Tumblr for me, I think, um, for Twitter, yes, there's this very specific community that exists that sometimes is still very fun.
• 46:52
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: But like astronomer, CEO thing, that was a great day on the internet.
• 46:55
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, I'm sorry to him, whatever he's going for.
• 46:59
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, but at the same time, I think, for example, I'm a millennial.
• 47:03
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: My younger siblings are all like.
• 47:05
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Very Gen Z.
• 47:07
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: They're not on Twitter.
• 47:08
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: They have their own communities on discord, on TikTok that have completely different dynamics that maybe there's an exodus from one of those communities They like.
• 47:17
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: They face similar questions.
• 47:19
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: So I think it's also a generational thing where it's let, like Twitter's gonna be around it listed in this form forever.
• 47:25
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: I think it's like technology comes and goes and people find community online.
• 47:30
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, the only thing I'll add is that sometimes, you know, technology can also help people meet in real life and go outside and all those kinds of things.
• 47:37
  Mike Masnick: Uh, I wanna go to the question over here.
• 47:39
  Audience Member: Sure.
• 47:39
  Audience Member: So, a, a lot of the latter part of the discussion was I think, kind of selling the idea of empower users, let them choose.
• 47:47
  Audience Member: Create competition, essentially.
• 47:49
  Audience Member: I mean, there's definitely a, I think, a, a strong kind of critique of that view.
• 47:54
  Audience Member: Not that it's not a good idea, it's a great idea.
• 47:56
  Audience Member: Um, just that it, it's really difficult to happen in practice when your friends are in certain places.
• 48:00
  Audience Member: Like if your friends are on TikTok, you're not gonna go to Twitter.
• 48:02
  Audience Member: You're not, you.
• 48:03
  Audience Member: I mean, it has to do, it's, it's very difficult to move.
• 48:06
  Audience Member: Um, and, and options like Blue Sky are really good, but it's still difficult for people to move.
• 48:12
  Audience Member: Um, one of the areas where maybe state intervention.
• 48:16
  Audience Member: Could be considered is in terms of like mandating, say, competitive interoperability.
• 48:21
  Audience Member: And I wonder if that's something you've thought about, um, if you have reflections on, on that.
• 48:26
  Mike Masnick: Um, yeah, we have like two minutes left.
• 48:29
  Mike Masnick: I could go on for about an hour on that particular subject.
• 48:32
  Mike Masnick: Um, the really quick version is, um.
• 48:37
  Mike Masnick: I, I, I think incentives work better than mandates.
• 48:40
  Mike Masnick: And there, there are attempts to mandate those kinds of things.
• 48:43
  Mike Masnick: And I think what will be found is that they fail.
• 48:46
  Mike Masnick: And if they fail badly, they'll be damaging to the, the wider space And the idea of doing these things where.
• 48:54
  Mike Masnick: If, if you put in place a mandate for like interoperability or, or data portability, companies will often figure out the least friendly way to do it, the way to comply as opposed to the way to actually make it useful.
• 49:07
  Mike Masnick: And so I fear where that ends up, even though I sort of appreciate the, the, the thinking behind it and, and like, yes, we're trying to get there.
• 49:16
  Mike Masnick: I would love to think through and I have, as I said, probably an hour on this of like ways to create better incentives to, to make companies think it's a great idea for them to do that without it being the government saying, you absolutely have to do it this way.
• 49:31
  Mike Masnick: But that's a, a much longer story.
• 49:32
  Mike Masnick: I think we have time for one more relatively quick question and then we will close up and let everybody go to happy hours and drinks.
• 49:40
  Audience Member: Thanks so much.
• 49:41
  Audience Member: Um, you mentioned earlier that advertisers, you know, hold the significant power.
• 49:46
  Audience Member: In recentering the importance of trust and safety and you know that their spending can have this major influence.
• 49:52
  Audience Member: Um, I was at a recent brand safety conference and I heard a very high profile.
• 49:58
  Audience Member: Um.
• 49:59
  Audience Member: Brand suggests that actually, you know, audience tolerance has shifted and we're no longer quite as concerned.
• 50:07
  Audience Member: You know, the tolerance level isn't there.
• 50:08
  Audience Member: So when you mention our ad, our ad for our product appearing aside around content, that would previously have been an absolute no go, that they're more open to it.
• 50:19
  Audience Member: What is your response or reaction to that kind of narrative?
• 50:26
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: I think if that's true, if, I mean maybe someone is just trying to get a big bonus back here by being original, but if that's true, if that really reflects where the society in that country is maybe.
• 50:39
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: That's what it is.
• 50:40
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: I grew up in Russia.
• 50:41
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, I'm Armenian myself.
• 50:43
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: There's so many different cultural things that have changed over the course of my life and what society accepts.
• 50:48
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And then I moved here and I learned a lot of new things and a lot of new words.
• 50:51
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, so I think there's just like something about if that, um, statement is true.
• 50:57
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Um, then they, when, and they're ahead of the curve.
• 51:00
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And if it's not, their business model fails as advertisers.
• 51:04
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: And,
• 51:04
  Speaker 5: uh, there is a big, we've seen this a lot of, just for context, and you don't have to include this on the podcast, but that was Unilever.
• 51:12
  Speaker 5: Fascinating.
• 51:13
  Speaker 5: Um,
• 51:14
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: um.
• 51:15
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: Well, but we've seen a lot of times, uh, society negatively react to advertisers thinking it's going one way and then it's going the other way.
• 51:23
  Ashkhen Kazaryan: For example, there's always conversation about tra wives and how that's like very mainstream right now, and I actually don't know if there's enough data to say that it is.
• 51:32
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I think I, I think it's an interesting question and I think we'll see how, you know, society is changing, the culture is changing, and sort of how people re respond to it.
• 51:40
  Mike Masnick: It is something that we're, we're all gonna learn together and, but we're all sort of able to influence that in our own ways as well.
• 51:48
  Mike Masnick: And, and so I think, you know, we'll, we'll sort of see how that goes.
• 51:52
  Mike Masnick: Um, we, we are out of time and, but before we close, I do, uh, this is, this is, Alice had told me she was going to do this at the beginning and then I forgot at the beginning.
• 52:02
  Mike Masnick: I forgot at the beginning.
• 52:03
  Mike Masnick: Can I do it now?
• 52:03
  Mike Masnick: So you can do it now.
• 52:04
  Alice Hunsberger: Okay.
• 52:04
  Alice Hunsberger: Yes.
• 52:05
  Alice Hunsberger: Um.
• 52:06
  Alice Hunsberger: Before we go, huge thank you to TSPA and everybody involved in Trust Con, all the volunteers who have been making this possible.
• 52:18
  Mike Masnick: And then thanks to all of you for coming out, we are the final thing at Trust Con and we assume that many people, you know, wanna leave early and not hang out.
• 52:27
  Mike Masnick: And so we are incredibly grateful to a crowd this big coming out to see us and, and to cheer and yell and occasionally heckle.
• 52:35
  Alice Hunsberger: Yeah.
• 52:35
  Alice Hunsberger: Not as much heckling as I hoped.
• 52:37
  Alice Hunsberger: So
• 52:37
  Mike Masnick: next year?
• 52:38
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, next year.
• 52:39
  Mike Masnick: Come with Heckles.
• 52:40
  Alice Hunsberger: Thank you.
• 52:58
  Mike Masnick (Intro): I hope that everyone enjoyed listening to that as much as we enjoyed recording it.
• 53:03
  Mike Masnick (Intro): And now stay tuned to hear me talking with Mike Pappas from Modulate regarding different kinds of voice scams and what to do about them.
• 53:22
  Mike Masnick: Welcome back to the podcast again, Mike.
• 53:24
  Mike Masnick: It is great to see you Of course.
• 53:26
  Mike Pappas: Great to be here in person this time.
• 53:28
  Mike Pappas: Time Mike.
• 53:28
  Mike Pappas: Yes.
• 53:28
  Mike Pappas: Yes.
• 53:29
  Mike Pappas: It's always
• 53:29
  Mike Masnick: fun to do it in person.
• 53:30
  Mike Masnick: We don't do it in person very often, but we are obviously recording live from Trust Con.
• 53:36
  Mike Masnick: so first of all, how's your trust con been?
• 53:37
  Mike Pappas: It's been busy as always, but wonderful conversations through and through.
• 53:42
  Mike Pappas: And we're only on day one, so I'm sure many get to come.
• 53:45
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 53:45
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, it is, crazy and hectic and, all of that fun stuff.
• 53:50
  Mike Masnick: I know.
• 53:51
  Mike Masnick: So today we wanted to talk more about modulates voice fraud detection.
• 53:56
  Mike Masnick: back in May we had you on to talk about how you had you know, moved into doing things from.
• 54:02
  Mike Masnick: Detecting toxicity through voice and all of those kinds of things into fraud detection.
• 54:07
  Mike Masnick: And then a few weeks later, your CTO and co-founder Carter Hoffman was on to talk about some specifics of how it's possible to detect fraud by voice.
• 54:16
  Mike Masnick: Mm-hmm.
• 54:17
  Mike Masnick: Because I think that's something different.
• 54:19
  Mike Masnick: People haven't really thought about it as much.
• 54:21
  Mike Masnick: and I will say.
• 54:22
  Mike Masnick: Of all the bonus chats we've done, that's the one that we've heard the most feedback on.
• 54:27
  Mike Masnick: People loved it.
• 54:28
  Mike Masnick: It was really interesting.
• 54:29
  Mike Masnick: It was very different.
• 54:29
  Mike Masnick: It was absolutely fascinating.
• 54:31
  Mike Masnick: the stories about things like intonation and pauses and, the different trade offs involved in all of this, we're absolutely fascinating.
• 54:38
  Mike Masnick: But now you're back, to talk even more about fraud, our most fascinating subject, including how you're seeing very different types of voice fraud that maybe go beyond what I think people normally think of when they're thinking about fraud.
• 54:52
  Mike Masnick: So can you explain some examples of what you mean?
• 54:56
  Mike Pappas: Yes, absolutely.
• 54:57
  Mike Pappas: So, excited to be back.
• 54:59
  Mike Pappas: I'll do my best to live up to Carter's legacy here.
• 55:01
  Mike Pappas: Um, but.
• 55:02
  Mike Pappas: When we've talked about fraud before Carter really went into the idea of sort of deep fakes and synthetic voices, how do you detect that kind of stuff?
• 55:11
  Mike Pappas: So when most people think of voice fraud, they're either thinking of that kind of deep fake detection, or they're thinking of, you know, metadata analysis.
• 55:19
  Mike Pappas: This call is coming from the Philippines and it's not supposed to be, or something like that.
• 55:23
  Mike Pappas: Right.
• 55:23
  Mike Pappas: What I wanna talk about today is what about actually listening to what's being said in that conversation?
• 55:29
  Mike Pappas: What kinds of things can that reveal to you?
• 55:32
  Mike Pappas: You don't have the magic bullet of, oh, I know for a fact that thing you're claiming is a lie and no one's coming into the call saying, I'm about to fraud you.
• 55:40
  Mike Pappas: Right?
• 55:40
  Mike Pappas: Um, but there are giveaways that you can look for in the actual sort of conversational back and forth, and that's the other big part of what we're trying to introduce.
• 55:50
  Mike Pappas: Pulling again from that heritage of understanding conversational dynamics in social settings for sort of toxic or positive behavior.
• 55:58
  Mike Pappas: so happy to dive straight into a couple examples of that, or
• 56:01
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 56:01
  Mike Masnick: Let's, let's get into examples.
• 56:03
  Mike Masnick: 'cause I think, yeah, I think practical examples would be really helpful to sort of.
• 56:06
  Mike Masnick: Lock in what you mean by all this.
• 56:08
  Mike Pappas: Awesome.
• 56:08
  Mike Pappas: So probably the broadest example is sort of the concept of social engineering in general.
• 56:13
  Mike Pappas: Mm-hmm.
• 56:14
  Mike Pappas: So there's a broad set of, applications of social engineering out there, but usually it involves something like, I'm going to try and apply pressure to you and create sort of a hot seat that inclines you to deviate around some process.
• 56:29
  Mike Pappas: Sometimes that pressure is me pulling on something social.
• 56:32
  Mike Pappas: So you and I are now best friends and I've convinced you, or you know, I've told you this tragic story about my children and you really wanted to do your best to help me.
• 56:41
  Mike Pappas: Sometimes it's more sort of direct and antagonistic.
• 56:44
  Mike Pappas: Hi, I'm definitely calling from the IRS and you are about to be in grave trouble if you don't do this right now.
• 56:51
  Mike Pappas: All of those techniques though, we can look both at the specific claims being made and say, Hey, are these in fact pressure tactic?
• 56:58
  Mike Pappas: X.
• 56:59
  Mike Pappas: We can hear that both from the actual content of what's being presented, but we can also hear the agent on the other side saying things like, I really need to check with my manager about that, or, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to do that this way, and especially look for the response of that person who's trying to manipulate you.
• 57:18
  Mike Pappas: Really trying to push past those with some practice techniques.
• 57:22
  Mike Pappas: Of course, there's emotional aspects of this as well.
• 57:25
  Mike Pappas: You hear the sort of use of things like anger and aggression.
• 57:28
  Mike Pappas: Or kind of overplayed tragedy in some cases.
• 57:32
  Mike Pappas: Mm-hmm.
• 57:32
  Mike Pappas: To try and trick people into kind of letting themselves open up and stepping around that policy that it turns out was there for a reason.
• 57:41
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it's interesting, right, because and we've talked about this on the podcast a bunch, you know, the way that these kinds of social engineering things work is that there's sort of like tried and tested.
• 57:52
  Mike Masnick: manipulation methods that, get past people's defenses, but that also means that there's some sort of pattern there.
• 57:58
  Mike Pappas: Exactly, yeah.
• 57:59
  Mike Masnick: so is that what you guys, you're sort of training on the kinds of patterns that have been proven to, commit fraud?
• 58:05
  Mike Pappas: Yes.
• 58:06
  Mike Pappas: Both at the sort of literal script level.
• 58:09
  Mike Pappas: Mm-hmm.
• 58:09
  Mike Pappas: So this is obviously not real, but if someone wanted to bring up that they were a Nigerian prince, we sure would recognize that.
• 58:16
  Mike Pappas: but it's also more kind of at the meta level of the pattern is how are you navigating the conversational flow?
• 58:22
  Mike Pappas: Are you jumping straight into these kinds of appeals?
• 58:26
  Mike Pappas: Are they actually coming up organically in the conversation or does it feel like you are using them in a strictly weaponized way?
• 58:34
  Mike Pappas: We can tell from how the conversation evolved and say, okay.
• 58:39
  Mike Pappas: Even though you're acting is spot on, the way you're actually introducing this into the conversation makes it feel like you're trying to work around.
• 58:49
  Mike Pappas: And of course we'll never know for sure, but when we notice this, we can be doing things like giving that agent an alert, or if they're particularly junior, giving an alert to their supervisor saying, Hey, there's a call happening right now that seems suspicious.
• 59:03
  Mike Pappas: That seems like it might be using these manipulative tactic.
• 59:06
  Mike Pappas: You might want to listen in and see if you need to step in and support your junior agent or junior agent.
• 59:12
  Mike Pappas: You want to take a moment to really reflect on this before you actually authorize.
• 59:16
  Mike Pappas: Maybe you wanna run an extra identity check or some other kinds of things.
• 59:20
  Mike Pappas: It doesn't have to be black and white, as long as it's sort of pointing you in the right direction of how to mitigate that risk.
• 59:27
  Mike Pappas: Now that we've identified it,
• 59:28
  Mike Masnick: right, it's not about 100% necessarily identifying everyone, but if you can raise a flag and warn people and, and say like, maybe this, this needs a little bit more attention.
• 59:38
  Mike Pappas: Exactly.
• 59:39
  Mike Pappas: another sort of classic example that we're thinking a lot about is protecting the elderly from a lot of these scams.
• 59:45
  Mike Pappas: Mm-hmm.
• 59:45
  Mike Pappas: And again, deep fakes are a big part of that scam strategy.
• 59:49
  Mike Pappas: but you frankly don't even need deepfake sometimes if you're trying to scam someone who's in that vulnerable position, really not gonna understand.
• 59:57
  Mike Pappas: Well, one of the things that we've been looking into, and obviously we need the right partners for this, but we have the detection capability to say, okay, you know, Mike, you are claiming that you are on the phone right now with your mother and it's you who just broke your leg and you need her to wire you a bunch of money.
• 1:00:16
  Mike Pappas: ASAP.
• 1:00:17
  Mike Pappas: One of the things we could do is recognize that that's you making that claim and actually prompt a notification to the real Mike Masnick right.
• 1:00:27
  Mike Pappas: Saying, Hey, FYI, you're on the phone with your mother right now claiming this.
• 1:00:32
  Mike Pappas: If that's not true, you are best positioned to convince your mother that that's not true and prevent something bad from happening.
• 1:00:39
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 1:00:40
  Mike Masnick: Interesting.
• 1:00:41
  Mike Masnick: And so in a case like that, though.
• 1:00:43
  Mike Masnick: where does your system lie?
• 1:00:44
  Mike Masnick: Like how, how does that get into the process?
• 1:00:46
  Mike Pappas: Yeah.
• 1:00:46
  Mike Pappas: So that, that example is why I mentioned we do need the right partners for this, right?
• 1:00:50
  Mike Pappas: Um, so we're having some conversations both at the sort of telco level.
• 1:00:54
  Mike Pappas: Mm-hmm.
• 1:00:55
  Mike Pappas: Is there an opportunity for us to make this offering?
• 1:00:57
  Mike Pappas: You obviously can't be listening to every conversation.
• 1:01:00
  Mike Pappas: That's a huge privacy violation.
• 1:01:01
  Mike Pappas: But for the right users who are in that vulnerable space and who might opt in to say, I want that extra layer of protection, could we offer that for them?
• 1:01:11
  Mike Pappas: we're looking into, is there a way for us to even sort of stand up an isolated app or something like that?
• 1:01:17
  Mike Pappas: but there's a number of technical complexities there.
• 1:01:20
  Mike Pappas: I think realistically though, you could spin this and say, all right, what if you're not talking about the elderly?
• 1:01:25
  Mike Pappas: What if you're talking about a intern or a junior employee who's being pressured into going and buying gift cards on behalf of their CEO or any of these kinds of stories and say, all right, now you can apply that same logic.
• 1:01:37
  Mike Pappas: But in this enterprise setting, right.
• 1:01:39
  Mike Pappas: And now we are hooked directly into the enterprise phone lines.
• 1:01:42
  Mike Pappas: We do have consent to be listening to all of that, and we know exactly how to route it to everyone.
• 1:01:47
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 1:01:48
  Mike Masnick: There's, there's a part of me that, that wonders if, you could just build that, that just a text like, buy a, a gift card like the, the term gift card.
• 1:01:56
  Mike Pappas: I, I'll admit, I have almost never heard someone legitimately say, we need to go buy a bunch of gift cards.
• 1:02:03
  Mike Pappas: Um, but I mean, I, and you know, modulates been subject of a number of these scam attempts I'm sure.
• 1:02:09
  Mike Pappas: Um, I recently had a surprisingly compelling one, masquerading as one of our investors basically coming in and saying, Hey.
• 1:02:17
  Mike Pappas: I just need to do a quick call.
• 1:02:18
  Mike Pappas: We're trying to actually update our investment profile here, but we need to move some money around.
• 1:02:24
  Mike Pappas: And would you be willing to do X, Y, Z for me?
• 1:02:26
  Mike Pappas: once we got into the weeds of it, it started to become pretty obvious, right?
• 1:02:30
  Mike Pappas: But I was actually impressed at the amount of Polish that the kind of initial outreach did.
• 1:02:35
  Mike Pappas: They clearly had learned something about how investors communicate.
• 1:02:39
  Mike Pappas: Um, just sort of the writing style and the way that they presented it.
• 1:02:42
  Mike Pappas: so yeah, there's, there's a lot of sophistication in this stuff these days.
• 1:02:45
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, it's fascinating.
• 1:02:47
  Mike Masnick: And then the idea is that, it's basically what is done if you detect something, is sort of up to the partner in terms of like what kind of level of response or what type of response.
• 1:02:56
  Mike Pappas: That's right.
• 1:02:57
  Mike Pappas: So again, going back to the toxicity world that we started in, it was, Hey, we've noticed this person seems to be violating your code of conduct.
• 1:03:04
  Mike Pappas: Do you want to review that for yourself?
• 1:03:06
  Mike Pappas: Do you want to take action on it?
• 1:03:07
  Mike Pappas: In the case of fraud, it's again, Hey, we see this person is trying to perpetrate fraud or likely to be trying to perpetrate fraud.
• 1:03:15
  Mike Pappas: Do you want to take us at our word and immediately shut that down?
• 1:03:19
  Mike Pappas: Do you want to provide a warning?
• 1:03:21
  Mike Pappas: Do you want to get a supervisor in?
• 1:03:23
  Mike Pappas: All of those options are in play, but the really important part is that this is happening in real time, right?
• 1:03:28
  Mike Pappas: So we're not saying after the fact, man, it's a shame that that conversation happened, but we're actually giving you that opportunity to intervene.
• 1:03:36
  Mike Masnick: And do you have a sense now of like, how do you balance the sort of false positive, false negative thing?
• 1:03:42
  Mike Masnick: You know, in terms of determining any of this, this is the problem that all of trust and safety has, right?
• 1:03:46
  Mike Pappas: Yeah, I think the false positive, false negative trade-off comes down to what kinds of interventions you're deploying.
• 1:03:52
  Mike Pappas: so for instance, with some of our partners in the insurance space, they're really worried about these organized sort of cabals of fraudsters that are coming in and saying.
• 1:04:02
  Mike Pappas: I'm definitely Mike and my house is definitely burned down and you need to pay me at this new bank account address, right?
• 1:04:09
  Mike Pappas: For something like that, the real failure mode is they actually execute a transaction and so we have kind of a good amount of time to dig in and so it's okay for us to say, Hey, we're not super sure yet that this is definitely fraud, but we wanna recommend that you look a little closer and we wanna recommend that you look a little closer Still.
• 1:04:32
  Mike Pappas: And all we need to be sure of is by the time you're making the transaction, that's where we need to be ready to actually get in and stop you.
• 1:04:41
  Mike Pappas: But we don't need to be very disruptive until that point.
• 1:04:45
  Mike Pappas: Whereas with, you know, Hey intern, go my me some gift cards.
• 1:04:48
  Mike Pappas: That's something that's happening in a much faster interaction.
• 1:04:51
  Mike Pappas: So for that, we want to be disruptive if we're doing anything at all.
• 1:04:56
  Mike Pappas: So we need to be more erring on the side of high precision.
• 1:05:00
  Mike Pappas: Even at the risk of missing a little bit on the recall side, which is why, of course you still train your team and you still provide all these other tools and don't just rely on our ability to catch it.
• 1:05:11
  Mike Pappas: because as good as we are, the more the stuff rolls out, the more fraudsters will find new and creative ways to, you know, work around this stuff.
• 1:05:19
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 1:05:19
  Mike Masnick: They're, they're, fairly clever.
• 1:05:21
  Mike Masnick: yeah, I, I mean, this is, this is all really fascinating.
• 1:05:23
  Mike Masnick: Is there anything else that we didn't cover that you wanted to,
• 1:05:26
  Mike Pappas: No, I mean there, there's so many different subtypes of this stuff that we could get into.
• 1:05:31
  Mike Pappas: Um, you know, we talked about insurance and those kind of suspicious things.
• 1:05:36
  Mike Pappas: Yeah.
• 1:05:36
  Mike Pappas: We've talked a lot about vishing.
• 1:05:37
  Mike Pappas: what are the other categories that we look at Here is what we call return fraud.
• 1:05:42
  Mike Pappas: so there's different manifestations of that.
• 1:05:44
  Mike Pappas: It could be literally, Hey, your delivery never showed up at my doorstep, and you definitely owe me money even though I have it in my hands right here.
• 1:05:52
  Mike Pappas: or it could be more sort of abstract.
• 1:05:55
  Mike Pappas: So we see a lot in the, food delivery space.
• 1:05:58
  Mike Pappas: Something like, Hey, I just placed this order and the app charged me a hundred bucks, but it only registered 50 bucks worth of my order.
• 1:06:07
  Mike Masnick: So you
• 1:06:08
  Mike Pappas: delivery man, need to go into the restaurant and get the other 50 bucks worth of food for me.
• 1:06:13
  Mike Pappas: And if you don't, then you're gonna show up to my doorstep with the wrong amount of food and I'm gonna be angry and you don't want to take that risk.
• 1:06:21
  Mike Pappas: Wow.
• 1:06:21
  Mike Pappas: So you'd better go do this for me.
• 1:06:23
  Mike Pappas: That's really tough.
• 1:06:24
  Mike Pappas: 'cause the delivery apps, they don't see that, right?
• 1:06:26
  Mike Pappas: They don't have the ability to protect, but because there's going to be that physical interaction, there's a much greater sort of threat, right?
• 1:06:34
  Mike Pappas: That compels these drivers to just say, look, you know, it's ultimately not my money that's getting scammed.
• 1:06:40
  Mike Pappas: I'd rather just do the thing that makes me safe.
• 1:06:42
  Mike Pappas: So, right.
• 1:06:43
  Mike Pappas: I think.
• 1:06:44
  Mike Pappas: Just, again, there's so many different kinds of these manipulative conversations.
• 1:06:49
  Mike Pappas: Yeah, and especially in the world of things like gig economy or sort of multi-party insurance setups and things like that, you end up with so many different people involved in the process.
• 1:07:00
  Mike Pappas: It's easier and easier for fraudsters to find someone who.
• 1:07:04
  Mike Pappas: Has downside risk if they don't listen to the fraud star.
• 1:07:08
  Mike Pappas: Right.
• 1:07:08
  Mike Pappas: But it doesn't actually cost them to be defrauded.
• 1:07:12
  Mike Pappas: So even if they kind of know something sketchy, they might be more inclined to just let it happen to protect their own sort of personal bottom line.
• 1:07:20
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 1:07:21
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 1:07:21
  Mike Masnick: I mean that's where those scams are like the most successful, where you align the incentives.
• 1:07:25
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 1:07:25
  Mike Masnick: So that it's easier for them to, to take part in the scam than, than anything else.
• 1:07:29
  Mike Masnick: This is, again, I mean this is absolutely fascinating.
• 1:07:32
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think it's a space that, I'm not sure people have thought about as much and yet is you know, really, really fascinating.
• 1:07:38
  Mike Masnick: Really, really interesting and, uh, exciting to, to hear that you guys have come up with a solution for, because I think it's, feels like one of these things that has been taking over more and more of people's lives and there's more and more of these stories of, of these kinds of scams.
• 1:07:50
  Mike Masnick: And, and sometimes it felt like, especially with like the voice communications and the social engineering, it's like, well, how do you, fight back against that?
• 1:07:57
  Mike Masnick: And so having a solution that can sit in there and, and do something is, is really, really interesting.
• 1:08:01
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 1:08:02
  Mike Pappas: Well, appreciate it.
• 1:08:02
  Mike Pappas: We're excited to be, you know, able to have more and more of an impact in the space and
• 1:08:07
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 1:08:07
  Mike Pappas: always love the opportunity to be here and hear your insightful questions and dig a little deeper into what we're doing.
• 1:08:13
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 1:08:15
  Mike Masnick: And that's great and, and people can find out more on the Modulate website
• 1:08:17
  Mike Pappas: as always.
• 1:08:18
  Mike Pappas: Yep.
• 1:08:18
  Mike Masnick: And so, uh, check that out and we'll have a link in the show notes as well.
• 1:08:22
  Mike Masnick: So thanks again for joining us.
• 1:08:23
  Mike Pappas: Yeah, thanks for having me, Mike.
• 1:08:28
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