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The (Content Moderation) Eras Tour · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Ben Whitelaw: So Mike, there is nothing worse in my mind than reconnecting with my graduating class.
• 0:07
  Ben Whitelaw: I, I honestly couldn't care less what most of the people, almost all of them are doing right now,
• 0:13
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I, I, recognize that feeling.
• 0:17
  Ben Whitelaw: glad it's not just me.
• 0:18
  Ben Whitelaw: but there used to be.
• 0:20
  Ben Whitelaw: social network, one of the very early ones that you're gonna tell us a bit about today, that actually was designed for that very purpose.
• 0:27
  Ben Whitelaw: So Classmates, was a kind of nineties network and we've gone back through the archives, dusted off some of the marketing material, and we found that classmates used to kind of, sell the idea of, of its network by saying that every yearbook was a window into the past,
• 0:45
  Mike Masnick: Oh,
• 0:46
  Ben Whitelaw: sounds like a kind of reason to not use the, the platform to be honest.
• 0:50
  Mike Masnick: It's poetic.
• 0:52
  Ben Whitelaw: So, let's use that as our starting point for control or speech today.
• 0:56
  Ben Whitelaw: what yearbook would you most like to look through the window of?
• 1:01
  Ben Whitelaw: Or, or, or, or not, frankly.
• 1:04
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 1:04
  Mike Masnick: There, there's probably a few that I, I would not want to revisit Everett when you phrase it that way, but No, I, I, what I was going to say is that I do think that in the world of tech, it often feels that.
• 1:20
  Mike Masnick: We are so focused on like the now and then the future, right?
• 1:24
  Mike Masnick: That is the nature of tech innovation is, is always changing and everyone is either trying to explain what is happening now or looking towards the future.
• 1:31
  Mike Masnick: What is this all going to mean?
• 1:32
  Mike Masnick: And because of that, we very rarely actually look at the past and an understanding of how did we get here?
• 1:39
  Mike Masnick: And I actually think that's really important because many of the discussions that we have about today and the future.
• 1:44
  Mike Masnick: If you don't understand the past and how we got here, that's really problematic.
• 1:48
  Mike Masnick: And, and hopefully today we're gonna do a little bit of, uh, looking backwards through that window into the past.
• 1:54
  Mike Masnick: What about you?
• 1:55
  Mike Masnick: What, uh, what year are you looking at?
• 1:59
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, I'm primarily interested in 2003 onwards.
• 2:03
  Ben Whitelaw: not because that was when, you know, I just about started secondary school and was straightening my hair and gen generally being very emo.
• 2:11
  Ben Whitelaw: But, um, that's the kind of point at which I think the relationship between media organizations and.
• 2:17
  Ben Whitelaw: Platforms started to get really interesting and so hopefully we're gonna use that as a point in time to, to yeah, go back and revisit some of those dynamics in ways that I think is important for not only where we are now, but but where we're going, in the future.
• 2:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Hello and welcome to Control Alt Speech, your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation.
• 2:47
  Ben Whitelaw: This episode is coming out on the 5th of March, 2026.
• 2:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Due to some scheduling gymnastics.
• 2:52
  Ben Whitelaw: This is actually a prerecorded edition of Control Alt Speech timed for the upcoming release of a exciting new book that we're gonna be talking about today.
• 3:01
  Ben Whitelaw: My name is Ben Mike Law.
• 3:02
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm the founder and editor of Everything and Moderation, and I've dragged Mike Masnick, founder, an editor of Tech up back into the virtual Control Al Speech Studio.
• 3:11
  Ben Whitelaw: Where he's, been AWOL for some time.
• 3:13
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, my listeners, listeners are gonna have forgotten what you sound like.
• 3:17
  Mike Masnick: I know, I know.
• 3:19
  Mike Masnick: I've been gone.
• 3:19
  Mike Masnick: I've been, I am constantly traveling.
• 3:21
  Mike Masnick: And I was gonna say since this is a prerecorded episode, and we are focused on the past, this is us coming from the past to, to, to March 5th.
• 3:31
  Mike Masnick: Uh, hopefully nothing.
• 3:33
  Mike Masnick: Crazy happens between us recording this and when this episode comes out.
• 3:37
  Mike Masnick: But yeah, no, I, I've been, constantly on the road traveling, pretty much nonstop, which has been a little bit tiring.
• 3:45
  Mike Masnick: and as we're recording this, I still have more travel coming up.
• 3:48
  Mike Masnick: Literally, very, very soon.
• 3:50
  Mike Masnick: I have to get on an airplane.
• 3:51
  Mike Masnick: So,
• 3:52
  Ben Whitelaw: are you leaving shortly?
• 3:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Is it, is it that, are you going today?
• 3:55
  Mike Masnick: it's tomorrow morning.
• 3:56
  Mike Masnick: Uh, so we're, we're, but I, I need to pack as soon as.
• 4:02
  Ben Whitelaw: The, unglamorous realities of being a podcast host.
• 4:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Hey,
• 4:06
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 4:07
  Ben Whitelaw: have somebody who can pack for you.
• 4:09
  Ben Whitelaw: That's, that's terrible.
• 4:13
  Ben Whitelaw: well, I'm glad you're still here.
• 4:14
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm glad we, we managed to pen you down to this conversation because, you and Teta have been around for the whole of the kind of.
• 4:20
  Ben Whitelaw: Eras we're gonna talk about today.
• 4:22
  Ben Whitelaw: You've really charted the dynamics of, platforms and being one of the media.
• 4:25
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that has been a kind of cornerstone of some of what we've seen, which is important that you're here, this is why we've, we've done it in at such a time where you can, participate between flights.
• 4:36
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, just give you a bit of background to listeners.
• 4:39
  Ben Whitelaw: this book that we're gonna talk about today is a book called Trust, safety, and the Internet.
• 4:44
  Ben Whitelaw: We share.
• 4:45
  Ben Whitelaw: It's a, an academic book of sorts.
• 4:47
  Ben Whitelaw: It's being published by Routledge in, the coming months, and it's bringing together a lot of really interesting insights from people who worked in trust and safety, who are charting how the kind of Internet has evolved over time and how trust and safety decisions have been made.
• 5:04
  Ben Whitelaw: And I think, it's been pulled together by the Trust and Safety Foundation, which is the kind of foundation arm of the TSPA, the Trust and Safety Professional Association, which is a industry body that, has been kind of creators to bring together people who work in trust and safety.
• 5:21
  Ben Whitelaw: they run the, the famous trust con.
• 5:24
  Ben Whitelaw: Which we met at, and which we go back to every year and do our live episode.
• 5:27
  Ben Whitelaw: So there's been a kind of effort by the TSPA and and the Trust and Safety Foundation to.
• 5:33
  Ben Whitelaw: in this moment, I guess, with everything that's going on and the chaos that's happening, in internet safety to kinda mark this moment and capture some, stories and narratives encapsulate, I guess what's been going on in the last 20, 25 years of the internet.
• 5:47
  Ben Whitelaw: and so the book is, from the bits I've read, as I've been part of the process, been, it's a really great encapsulation of all of that.
• 5:54
  Ben Whitelaw: And we're gonna talk a bit more about that today.
• 5:56
  Mike Masnick: it really looks, wonderful.
• 5:58
  Mike Masnick: I mean, just looking, you can look through the, the table of contents on the website about it, and everything that's gonna be in there.
• 6:03
  Mike Masnick: There'll be a, if you work at all in trust and safety, there should be a whole bunch of really familiar names, including.
• 6:10
  Mike Masnick: One of the co-host of this podcast, which is you, Ben, contributed a chapter to this particular book.
• 6:18
  Mike Masnick: and I think that is what we're going to explore today.
• 6:20
  Mike Masnick: I think the idea is that we're gonna, have a discussion specifically about your chapter, because I found it absolutely fascinating.
• 6:27
  Mike Masnick: but again, it's a big book.
• 6:29
  Mike Masnick: I saw somewhere it said how many pages they're expecting 368 pages.
• 6:33
  Mike Masnick: This is, this is, you know.
• 6:36
  Mike Masnick: You put this on your coffee table, you, you, you show off this book.
• 6:39
  Mike Masnick: This is, this is not something you hide somewhere else.
• 6:43
  Mike Masnick: Right?
• 6:43
  Mike Masnick: This is a, a big weighty book.
• 6:45
  Mike Masnick: but, it, it looks like it's, it's really gonna be fantastic.
• 6:48
  Mike Masnick: But we wanted to talk today about the particular chapter That you contributed, which is specifically about the three eras of content moderation in the media, and then what comes next.
• 7:02
  Mike Masnick: And as you noted in the intro, you start this paper in around 2003, and I, you know, there's, there's, you know, but also as we talked about right there, were.
• 7:13
  Mike Masnick: Sort of proto social media before that.
• 7:17
  Mike Masnick: and there's an interesting aspect to this that, that I've been trying to think about, which is how I think everyone sort of judges the.
• 7:25
  Mike Masnick: evolution of the internet from the sort of era where they got into, onto the internet, right?
• 7:32
  Mike Masnick: And, or even like, you look back a little bit, right?
• 7:34
  Mike Masnick: Because, so like I really got on the internet for the first time in 1993.
• 7:39
  Mike Masnick: Um.
• 7:40
  Mike Masnick: And yeah,'cause I'm old.
• 7:42
  Mike Masnick: Uh, you know, but at that time when I got on, I thought I had missed all the excitement, of the, the internet of the late eighties and early nineties.
• 7:52
  Mike Masnick: I was late to the party, and worried about missing stuff and, note that I got on the internet before the worldwide web was really there and existed.
• 8:01
  Mike Masnick: And in fact, I remember, A year or two after I first got on the internet, I had met a bunch of people through the internet, through IRC and Usenet, which were sort of two of the early communications protocols, and met some people who were at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne, which happened to also be where Mark Andreessen was and where he created the first graphical.
• 8:25
  Mike Masnick: Web browser, which was Mosaic.
• 8:28
  Mike Masnick: And so they were telling me, Hey, there's this project that people that we work with are working on.
• 8:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Wow.
• 8:35
  Mike Masnick: and Mark was not a part of the, group of folks that I was talking to.
• 8:38
  Mike Masnick: but these other people were, some of whom I'm actually still friends with now, many, many years later.
• 8:43
  Mike Masnick: and I set up to download the original Mosaic.
• 8:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Whoa.
• 8:50
  Mike Masnick: You know, soon after it first came out based on that, and that was like, beginning to get into the worldwide web.
• 8:56
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, you know that what this kinda reminds me of, it's like, it reminds me of how you could have stopped Voldemort.
• 9:05
  Ben Whitelaw: It feels like you had it.
• 9:06
  Ben Whitelaw: It feels like, like how Harry could have prevented Voldemort from kind of becoming an evil.
• 9:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Being like, it feels like you had the chance to make that stop, Mike, and you, you missed the opportunity.
• 9:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Or like the, the kind of timings didn't kind of line up.
• 9:21
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and now we, we have kind of Mark Andresen
• 9:26
  Mike Masnick: as Vold, as EU shall not be named.
• 9:30
  Ben Whitelaw: I see.
• 9:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Quite right.
• 9:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Quite right.
• 9:34
  Mike Masnick: Uh, yeah.
• 9:35
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I, who knows, but, um, I mean, it's interesting.
• 9:40
  Mike Masnick: it is interesting to me to like look at the, past through you know, and this even comes up with, with all the stuff, because I just did another interview on a, on a different podcast about, the whole like decentralization stuff that obviously I've been focused on the protocols, not platforms, paper, and how much of that actually came out of.
• 9:59
  Mike Masnick: My early experiences with the internet and Usenet and IRC and these things that were protocol based before these sort of more centralized services came up.
• 10:08
  Mike Masnick: And it, it is interesting to me and I wonder how much our brains anchor in like, the internet that you first joined as being that's the real internet
• 10:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 10:19
  Mike Masnick: and everything after that is a distortion.
• 10:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:23
  Ben Whitelaw: No, I, I, I probably am guilty of that.
• 10:25
  Ben Whitelaw: but I think the nature of the platforms that kind of arose in the early.
• 10:28
  Ben Whitelaw: 20 zeros.
• 10:30
  Ben Whitelaw: you know, that that does kind of constitute the internet for a lot of people now.
• 10:32
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 10:33
  Mike Masnick: Yeah,
• 10:34
  Ben Whitelaw: and they've spawned to, to such a kind of degree that it's almost impossible not to think of them as cornerstone of the internet
• 10:40
  Mike Masnick: I actually think that's exactly right and that is really important.
• 10:44
  Mike Masnick: Where, the internet that I grew up with was mostly small companies and everything was constantly changing.
• 10:51
  Mike Masnick: I think that started to change right around where you start this paper in 2003.
• 10:56
  Mike Masnick: just as an example of this, I will say, you know, I talked about IRC and Usenet, which were two of the protocols that I used when I first got online.
• 11:04
  Mike Masnick: A third one that I used was, Gopher.
• 11:07
  Mike Masnick: and I don't know if you're familiar with Gopher at all, but Gopher was sort of an earlier kind of web-like protocol, but it was basically all texts.
• 11:16
  Mike Masnick: So I remember.
• 11:18
  Mike Masnick: I would log into a gopher server, like you would sort of like a URL, but you would log into a server, and there would be different things that you could get on that server.
• 11:27
  Mike Masnick: So I would log into a new server and a weather server.
• 11:31
  Mike Masnick: And get, you know, the news and weather.
• 11:33
  Mike Masnick: It was all text-based at the time, and when the web came along, I saw it as, okay, this is an obvious progression from Gopher, which was text-based.
• 11:42
  Mike Masnick: And then when I downloaded Mosaic, I suddenly had graphical stuff and I just figured that, okay, this is the nature of the internet.
• 11:49
  Mike Masnick: We start with Gopher and then we'll have the worldwide web that'll last a few years, and then the next thing will come along and the web will fade away, just like Gopher will fade away and then the next thing will come along.
• 11:59
  Mike Masnick: And so in my head I, I sort of like was expecting that sort of progression, like we're always going to get like the new thing and instead starting somewhere in the two thousands as you sort of detailed a little bit in the paper, suddenly you had these big giant internet companies that took over and it wasn't.
• 12:14
  Mike Masnick: You know, the, the nature of the innovation changed.
• 12:16
  Mike Masnick: And so for most people, you know, certainly people who are younger than me now, that is the internet for better or for worse.
• 12:23
  Mike Masnick: And I think some of what you describe is, is getting into that.
• 12:27
  Mike Masnick: So let's, let's, jump into your, your paper here and, talk about like, why, why did you decide, well, why did you decide to write it, I guess, and frame it this way?
• 12:38
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 12:38
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, I suppose, I am interested in the way that media and platforms interrelate and, how they've worked.
• 12:46
  Ben Whitelaw: Together and, and increasingly kind of work against each other.
• 12:49
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that's because I started my career in a big newsroom as I worked in the Times of London have to say that for our US user, for us listeners.
• 12:59
  Ben Whitelaw: and one of my jobs was actually to, liaise with.
• 13:02
  Ben Whitelaw: Facebook X, Twitter as was, and YouTube about how we as a newsroom could utilize these kind of emerging tools.
• 13:12
  Ben Whitelaw: And so an example of what, what I did was, give a list of journalists who should be verified on Twitter.
• 13:19
  Ben Whitelaw: so before, kind of just as verification was being launched.
• 13:23
  Ben Whitelaw: a re, you know, an outreach from the company and they said, we want to verify journalist.
• 13:28
  Ben Whitelaw: Who would you like to be verified?
• 13:30
  Ben Whitelaw: And so there was this clamor in the newsroom to have this verification.
• 13:33
  Ben Whitelaw: It was, it was supposedly you had to have your Times email address on your Twitter account as part of the verification process.
• 13:42
  Ben Whitelaw: So there was kind of some manual work being done by everyone in the newsroom to kinda change the email addresses that they'd set up their Twitter account with two a times email address.
• 13:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Some people actually created Twitter accounts because they wanted to be verified weirdly.
• 13:54
  Ben Whitelaw: So they, they weren't on the platform, but they wanted the status and that was like one of a number of different kind of, I guess, ways that, the newsroom that I worked in tried to work with platforms to spread the journalism that we were producing to find new audiences.
• 14:07
  Ben Whitelaw: And that was really the ethos in that first era, I would say, that started in kind of 2003 and, The idea was that Newsom could gain a lot from being on these platforms, that they could find new audiences, that they could, spread their journalism in ways that wasn't possible before.
• 14:25
  Ben Whitelaw: And there was this kinda excitement and, potentially a bit of naivety about that.
• 14:28
  Ben Whitelaw: Um.
• 14:29
  Ben Whitelaw: But there was lots of ways that it kind of tried to, it it manifested itself.
• 14:33
  Ben Whitelaw: There was the verification, but there was also, instant articles.
• 14:36
  Ben Whitelaw: I dunno if you remember that, where Facebook would pull content created by platforms that were partners with the goal of trying to surface that journalism to a wider group of people whilst also serving the platform's goals of engaging people in the newsfeed.
• 14:51
  Ben Whitelaw: there was the famous pivot to video, which everyone
• 14:54
  Mike Masnick: The
• 14:55
  Ben Whitelaw: refers to.
• 14:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 14:57
  Ben Whitelaw: It's people.
• 14:58
  Ben Whitelaw: People still have the scars of that where again, news organizations were incentivized to create video that would keep users engaged.
• 15:07
  Ben Whitelaw: On the platforms, but would also, you know, serve the purpose of kind of monetizing the journalism that the, kind of news organizations were creating.
• 15:15
  Ben Whitelaw: And there was all these different ways that, The, of platforms sought to ingratiate themselves with, with traditional legacy news media, and I think tried to kind of capitalize off the back of the brand and the heritage of a lot of these big companies.
• 15:29
  Ben Whitelaw: you know, there was a legitimacy that comes from having journalists on the platform.
• 15:32
  Ben Whitelaw: the journalists tended to use the platforms a lot.
• 15:35
  Ben Whitelaw: you know, you'll know this very well, but, you know, journalists, used it for sourcing.
• 15:38
  Ben Whitelaw: They used it for, for sharing content.
• 15:40
  Ben Whitelaw: It was, that's what made.
• 15:42
  Ben Whitelaw: Twitter at the time, the place to go for, for news, it was the kind of, the town square was in part'cause people, cause journalists were there and they were, they attracted a lot of, users who potentially wouldn't have otherwise been on the platforms.
• 15:56
  Ben Whitelaw: So kind of relationship really got me interested.
• 15:58
  Ben Whitelaw: 'cause I saw it firsthand and I saw that it wasn't always equitable or even, and.
• 16:03
  Ben Whitelaw: you know, it obviously changed subsequently, which we can talk about, but, you think back to that time, Mike, how do you characterize it?
• 16:10
  Ben Whitelaw: What was kind of tech dirt's role in that phase?
• 16:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Really?
• 16:15
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean it's, it's interesting and part of what I, I try and break apart too is, is I think that I, I was talking a little bit about the sort of pre 2003 era, and I do think that there is an element of that, that, matters to this discussion too, which was not so much the, like classmates.com or, or the early.
• 16:34
  Mike Masnick: Social media things or Usenet or whatever.
• 16:37
  Mike Masnick: But actually the rise of blogs, I think predates a bunch of this stuff.
• 16:41
  Mike Masnick: Right?
• 16:41
  Mike Masnick: and Tech Dirt before the word blog even existed.
• 16:45
  Mike Masnick: And, and actually there was a period of time where people would refer to it as the Tech Dirt blog.
• 16:49
  Mike Masnick: And I would resist that and say, no, no, no, we're not a blog.
• 16:52
  Mike Masnick: Blog is those.
• 16:52
  Mike Masnick: There's other things that other people do.
• 16:55
  Mike Masnick: and so there was this period of time where suddenly people discovered that you could publish yourself in some way.
• 17:02
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 17:03
  Mike Masnick: in the, the early days there was, you know, a few early versions of blogging, software and blogger being probably the, the biggest one at the time.
• 17:11
  Mike Masnick: And then there were a few others, that showed up.
• 17:13
  Mike Masnick: And so suddenly you had these independent voices and I think.
• 17:17
  Mike Masnick: That there was discussion about that, but that really took off post nine 11, when you had suddenly this rise of like political bloggers that the mainstream media actually started to pay attention to, and a lot of them got absorbed into the mainstream media.
• 17:33
  Mike Masnick: So, you know, the Washington Post and the New York Times sort of picked off these different.
• 17:38
  Mike Masnick: Bloggers and so there was this element of, like the legitimization of the internet as a medium for publishing, but still at that time, even the act of blogging was somewhat tricky.
• 17:52
  Mike Masnick: You had to set it up, you had to, get a server somewhere and you had to do all these things.
• 17:56
  Mike Masnick: And even as some of the services made it.
• 17:58
  Mike Masnick: Easier.
• 17:59
  Mike Masnick: there was a lot of work involved, and I think where social media kind of stepped into the fray was they made it super, super easy to express yourself in some form or another, though you were doing it on somebody else's system.
• 18:12
  Mike Masnick: And then they added in this one simple element that the blogging revolution had mostly missed, which was the concept of the follower.
• 18:21
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 18:21
  Mike Masnick: And, and.
• 18:22
  Mike Masnick: connecting a, a feed and a follower and all of this kind of stuff together so that you had a more.
• 18:29
  Mike Masnick: Their audience.
• 18:30
  Mike Masnick: In the blog era we had RSS feeds and those still exist and they're still important.
• 18:35
  Mike Masnick: They're still useful and I still make use of them.
• 18:37
  Mike Masnick: But it was a different sort of thing.
• 18:39
  Mike Masnick: There was a really interesting, I think mostly forgotten company and had this terrible name called my blog log.
• 18:46
  Mike Masnick: Um, and it basically tried to create a social media.
• 18:51
  Mike Masnick: Element to blogs and that it allowed you to create like blogs you followed and it created like follower lists and it added that sort of, social graph element to blogs.
• 19:04
  Mike Masnick: I don't even remember what happened to'em.
• 19:05
  Mike Masnick: I think maybe they got sold at some point, but disappeared.
• 19:08
  Mike Masnick: But there were all these elements and it really came together with.
• 19:12
  Mike Masnick: Twitter in particular, and obviously Facebook much larger, but Facebook initially, like they didn't have that, the newsfeed concept and, Twitter sort of, I think really got across, especially to the media, this idea that news happens there.
• 19:29
  Mike Masnick: And like my own story of like where Twitter hit for me, I think.
• 19:35
  Mike Masnick: was really important to me.
• 19:36
  Mike Masnick: Like I, I got on Twitter in 2007 and I, I didn't fully get it at first, and I sort of played around with it and I was like, I don't, I don't know, I don't quite see the point.
• 19:45
  Mike Masnick: I, like, my first two tweets were something silly and I think the second one was basically like, yeah, I don't get this.
• 19:51
  Mike Masnick: which is interesting in retrospect.
• 19:55
  Mike Masnick: Um, but I remember in January of 2008.
• 20:00
  Mike Masnick: The thing that convinced me that Twitter was two things convinced me that Twitter was, was fascinating.
• 20:04
  Mike Masnick: One was that I was actually, I was traveling, I was actually over in your fair country.
• 20:11
  Mike Masnick: and I went on Twitter and I just got into this random conversation with someone who I didn't even really kind of know.
• 20:17
  Mike Masnick: I sort of, you know, knew through Twitter, but I didn't know him well or something.
• 20:21
  Mike Masnick: When we were talking, it turned out that like, we both really liked this.
• 20:25
  Mike Masnick: Very small, but really good restaurant in New York City that I'm a huge fan of.
• 20:30
  Mike Masnick: and somehow that came out in a conversation and I remember I was in the UK and I mentioned like, oh, you know, I'm gonna be in New York in two weeks.
• 20:39
  Mike Masnick: And he was like, well, let's meet for lunch at this place.
• 20:41
  Mike Masnick: And I was like, oh, that's fascinating.
• 20:43
  Mike Masnick: Like making this connection.
• 20:45
  Mike Masnick: We actually did meet for lunch and it was very nice lunch.
• 20:47
  Mike Masnick: Um, but Then that same month, January of 2008 was the, beginning of the 2008 presidential election in the US and the beginning of the presidential election process is the Iowa caucuses.
• 21:02
  Mike Masnick: And, I was trying to find out what was going on with the Iowa caucuses, again, these are things that are lost to history, but at the time, Hillary Clinton was basically considered the leading candidate.
• 21:13
  Mike Masnick: and probably the, the second candidate that people were talking about was John Edwards, and the third candidate was this upstart Barack Obama.
• 21:23
  Mike Masnick: People didn't really think he could, he could win.
• 21:25
  Mike Masnick: so I was like, I opened up CNN and CNN was giving these like, you know, exit poll interview kinds of things from the caucus.
• 21:32
  Mike Masnick: The caucus process is really weird'cause it's not voting.
• 21:34
  Mike Masnick: It's like this group.
• 21:36
  Mike Masnick: Agreement process, it's not worth getting into.
• 21:38
  Mike Masnick: but CNN was reporting like, oh, it's a, it's a dead heat.
• 21:42
  Mike Masnick: Hillary's probably gonna win.
• 21:43
  Mike Masnick: but it's really a dead heat between Hillary and John Edwards and this Barack Obama guy is getting some, some notice or whatever.
• 21:51
  Mike Masnick: so I had that on CNN and then I went on Twitter and somebody had set up.
• 21:57
  Mike Masnick: this is like before there were retweets or whatever and before there were like lists and feeds.
• 22:01
  Mike Masnick: I don't know how this person did it, whatever, but they just said like, basically we're just going to like repost or highlight everything from people talking about Iowa caucuses.
• 22:11
  Mike Masnick: So I just started following that feed and it was reporting, it was people in the rooms, in the caucus rooms.
• 22:18
  Mike Masnick: Over and over again saying Barack Obama is winning.
• 22:22
  Mike Masnick: Like everybody loves him.
• 22:23
  Mike Masnick: Barack Obama is winning.
• 22:25
  Mike Masnick: They're win.
• 22:25
  Mike Masnick: He's winning, he's winning, he's winning.
• 22:26
  Mike Masnick: And like, so I'm watching CNN say, ah, you know, Hillary's probably gonna win dead heat.
• 22:31
  Mike Masnick: You know, it's not really clear.
• 22:33
  Mike Masnick: And then Twitter, people like in the rooms saying, people love this Obama guy.
• 22:38
  Ben Whitelaw: Wow.
• 22:39
  Mike Masnick: Then you watch across the night, it was like later in the night where CNN finally was like, oh, actually it looks like Obama is actually gonna win the Iowa caucuses, which we didn't.
• 22:48
  Mike Masnick: It was a surprise,
• 22:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 22:50
  Mike Masnick: and like that was the moment where I was like, oh wait, this is powerful, more powerful than CNN, which was like, the top of the heap in terms of like powerful media at the time.
• 23:01
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 23:02
  Mike Masnick: I was like, oh, this, there's news here.
• 23:04
  Mike Masnick: Like there's real news here.
• 23:07
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah.
• 23:08
  Ben Whitelaw: that for me was really interesting.
• 23:09
  Ben Whitelaw: 'cause then you still, you saw news media then try to hop on the back of this phenomenon.
• 23:16
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 23:17
  Ben Whitelaw: and there's a really interesting, I mean, when I was kind of leaving university in 2010.
• 23:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Around that time, I'd just done a kind of master's in journalism.
• 23:25
  Ben Whitelaw: I dunno why that was.
• 23:26
  Ben Whitelaw: It was a stupid idea.
• 23:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, particularly'cause it was newspaper journalism.
• 23:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Who the hell is doing a newspaper journalism masters in 2010?
• 23:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Like, come on.
• 23:35
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, but the, but the, but the people who were really interesting were these journalists who were using, who were texting from the ground via text message, but sending those out via Twitter.
• 23:46
  Ben Whitelaw: you know, that was kind of before many people had smartphones or before they were a ubiquitous.
• 23:51
  Ben Whitelaw: And there's some guys from Sky and The Guardian and NPR and Reuters, and they were doing some really cool kind of experiments on breaking news and building really large followings.
• 24:02
  Ben Whitelaw: Like we, we see similar things now.
• 24:04
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, many mean it's is a kind of playbook for creating a large social media following.
• 24:09
  Ben Whitelaw: It's almost like a kind of 10 step process.
• 24:11
  Ben Whitelaw: People, people will sell you a PDF for$50 to do it.
• 24:14
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, that's right.
• 24:16
  Ben Whitelaw: but back in the day, like it was, it was very, very new and.
• 24:19
  Ben Whitelaw: I was having conversations in my newsroom that was like, you know, why should I be on Twitter?
• 24:23
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, I write for one of the foremost newspapers in the uk.
• 24:27
  Ben Whitelaw: gets sent to all corners of the globe.
• 24:29
  Ben Whitelaw: Like, I don't need to be spending time on my, on my phone or texting or whatever it is you're telling me to do.
• 24:35
  Ben Whitelaw: Stupid upstart, graduate.
• 24:37
  Ben Whitelaw: as I was.
• 24:38
  Ben Whitelaw: so there was a kind of really interesting dynamic there.
• 24:41
  Ben Whitelaw: Playing out in the newsroom was like people wanted to be using these tools.
• 24:45
  Ben Whitelaw: In one hand to kind of reach new audiences.
• 24:47
  Ben Whitelaw: And at the same time, a whole bunch of people were saying, this is, this is pointless.
• 24:50
  Ben Whitelaw: And then in the background, I dunno if you remember, Rupert Murdoch tried to buy MySpace,
• 24:56
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, he did buy MySpace.
• 24:58
  Ben Whitelaw: He did buy MySpace.
• 24:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 24:59
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, he,
• 24:59
  Mike Masnick: and a bunch of other internet properties too.
• 25:01
  Mike Masnick: He had, there was this period of time where he had like a pretty large internet empire.
• 25:07
  Mike Masnick: that I, somewhere I should dig it out on Tech Turt.
• 25:10
  Mike Masnick: I have an article where at one point where I was like, it actually seemed like he had a real strategy around the time that he bought MySpace.
• 25:20
  Mike Masnick: And I had written something that was kind of like, this is surprising, but it felt like, because other people were trying to build internet empires, but they were all doing a really bad job of it and just like screwing it up.
• 25:31
  Mike Masnick: Whereas initially.
• 25:33
  Mike Masnick: This changed pretty quickly, but initially it did look like Murdoch had a, a very like internet savvy approach to building out internet services and buying MySpace.
• 25:42
  Mike Masnick: Was part of that.
• 25:43
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 25:44
  Ben Whitelaw: and I think in this time as well, if we think about the way that platforms did content moderation, you know, the focus from a platform's point of view was on illegal harms.
• 25:55
  Ben Whitelaw: You know?
• 25:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 25:56
  Ben Whitelaw: In the early days, it was terrorist content, CS a.
• 25:59
  Mike Masnick: Well, I, I, I would go back before that even, which was, it was all copyright.
• 26:03
  Mike Masnick: I mean, before the terrorist content.
• 26:05
  Mike Masnick: I mean, CSAM is, has always been an issue, but like before the terrorist content issue came up, copyright was the bigger thing.
• 26:11
  Mike Masnick: And if you talk to like the old school trust and safety folks, almost all of them, started in the like, copyright enforcement side of it.
• 26:19
  Mike Masnick: And that's what the, you were getting take downs.
• 26:21
  Mike Masnick: You had the DMCA and, in the US obviously, and, The terrorist stuff actually came later.
• 26:26
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, but when it.
• 26:29
  Ben Whitelaw: The way that the media thought about platforms though, they were very happy for platforms just to concentrate on those, on copyright and on terrorist content and CSA, right?
• 26:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Because the idea of hate speech was not a firmly.
• 26:43
  Ben Whitelaw: Understood thing.
• 26:45
  Ben Whitelaw: you know, a lot of the publishers probably spouted a lot of hate speech themselves.
• 26:49
  Ben Whitelaw: but they were, they were kind of happy to let the platforms do their thing because they were gaining from it in terms of eyeballs and, and reach.
• 26:58
  Ben Whitelaw: And then I think everything kind of changed around 2016.
• 27:02
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that's when the kind of
• 27:03
  Mike Masnick: happened in 2016, Ben?
• 27:06
  Ben Whitelaw: everything went to pot.
• 27:09
  Ben Whitelaw: Disintegrated,
• 27:11
  Mike Masnick: Well, as, as, American baseball fans know, that's the year that the Cubs finally broke their curse and won the World Series, uh, after nearly a hundred years.
• 27:21
  Mike Masnick: and I think that fractured the rest of the universe.
• 27:24
  Ben Whitelaw: that was like a kind of, uh, a chasm in the kind of, in the ecosystem.
• 27:29
  Ben Whitelaw: Everything kind of shifted as a result of
• 27:31
  Mike Masnick: I, I think, I think there's a very strong argument that the Chicago Cubs are to blame for everything and not social media, but that's, that's a separate discussion.
• 27:40
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 27:40
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean that as well as the Cubs.
• 27:43
  Ben Whitelaw: you had Brexit, you had Donald Trump's election.
• 27:46
  Ben Whitelaw: There was the kind of Cambridge Analytica, scandal that emerged in the kind of years afterwards.
• 27:51
  Ben Whitelaw: And I think that started to, awaken.
• 27:54
  Ben Whitelaw: Media organizations to the power of these platforms.
• 27:58
  Ben Whitelaw: and I kind of argue in the paper that this the fascination of the first, let's say 10 or 15 years kind of turned into fury.
• 28:05
  Ben Whitelaw: all of a sudden you had publishers who were pushing platforms to, focus on misinformation and hate speech, not just those illegal harms that, of characterize the first period.
• 28:16
  Ben Whitelaw: they saw not only that the platforms were kind of acting irresponsibly in their eyes, but they were kind of taking business away from them.
• 28:22
  Ben Whitelaw: They were taking ad revenue in ways that obviously we've seen Grow and, and perpetuate since.
• 28:27
  Ben Whitelaw: And so they kind of turned on the platforms in that time and, did a lot of investigations into the way the platforms worked.
• 28:35
  Ben Whitelaw: There was a famous one in the uk, at the times where I was at the time.
• 28:41
  Ben Whitelaw: an investigation was done into terrorist content appearing, next to ads of kind of very large advertisers.
• 28:49
  Ben Whitelaw: This idea that you couldn't, you didn't have any kind of brand safety as an advertiser on the platform.
• 28:53
  Ben Whitelaw: You, you didn't know where you were showing up.
• 28:55
  Ben Whitelaw: And so, you know, that was a really potentially damaging problem, if you were an advertiser, that that led to a big change in the way that brand safety was viewed.
• 29:03
  Ben Whitelaw: And YouTube and other platforms gave a lot more control to advertisers about what they could and couldn't kind of, uh, show up against.
• 29:10
  Ben Whitelaw: But there were other investigations into platforms at that time.
• 29:14
  Ben Whitelaw: And I, I'm thinking about in the years afterwards, some of the work that Casey Newton did, uh, when he was at The Verge and the work that Jeff Horowitz did for the Wall Street Journal.
• 29:22
  Ben Whitelaw: famously the Facebook files, uh, which fundamentally kind of changed the way we think about Facebook and actually changed the company's name.
• 29:30
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, there was, they, they were all kind of characteristic of, media.
• 29:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Turning on on platforms, I think, and using the weapons, you know, using what they have, the ability to investigate institutions and power to, try and address what they saw as I think these platforms becoming too powerful.
• 29:47
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, and I think, I think there are bunch of different stories in there.
• 29:50
  Mike Masnick: And I wanna go back a little bit before 2016 too, because I think it's an important part of the story is the Arab Spring, which, became this big news story.
• 30:00
  Mike Masnick: And even, I mean, I sort of mentioned a little bit, but The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was seen as, oh, he embraced social media and in particular Facebook and Facebook, sort of helped his campaign, reach different voters.
• 30:15
  Mike Masnick: And, and so there was this period from like 2008 then, the Arab Spring, sort of 2012 ish.
• 30:22
  Mike Masnick: timeframe, 2010, 11, where people are like, oh, the, this internet is this powerful force for free speech and democracy.
• 30:32
  Mike Masnick: that got a lot of attention.
• 30:34
  Mike Masnick: And then you mixed into it the fact that yeah, some of the more traditional media properties began to suddenly realize like, oh wait, the internet is.
• 30:42
  Mike Masnick: Causing problems for our business.
• 30:46
  Mike Masnick: and the blame game would shift.
• 30:47
  Mike Masnick: You know, there was this period of time where it was like, oh, it's all Craigslist's fault that the news media is dying.
• 30:55
  Mike Masnick: And then it shifted to, oh, it's all Google's fault.
• 30:57
  Mike Masnick: And then it shifted to it's all Facebook's fault.
• 31:00
  Mike Masnick: and you know, there are bits and pieces that I think are maybe accurate, but I think sort of overplayed.
• 31:04
  Mike Masnick: And then you're right that you had these big moments of Brexit and Trump being elected a few months separated from one another.
• 31:12
  Mike Masnick: And a lot of people, especially in the media, wanted someone to blame for those two things, and it was very easy.
• 31:20
  Mike Masnick: To blame social media for both of those things.
• 31:23
  Mike Masnick: And like, you know, if you looked, so obviously like Cambridge Analytica stuff, which came out, really the details of that came out a couple years later but started to leak out.
• 31:31
  Mike Masnick: But you could find people on social media saying obviously false stuff and spreading disinformation.
• 31:39
  Mike Masnick: so it was easy to blame though the actual.
• 31:42
  Mike Masnick: Causal relationship I don't think was ever really shown.
• 31:45
  Mike Masnick: I don't think it could have been shown,'cause I still don't think it had that big of an impact.
• 31:49
  Mike Masnick: But that's editorializing on my part.
• 31:53
  Mike Masnick: but suddenly, yeah, it really did feel that the media completely shifted and a lot of that, it's tough to separate, like how much of that was driven by.
• 32:04
  Mike Masnick: professional jealousy versus actual concern about these things.
• 32:09
  Mike Masnick: And there could be elements of both of those at play, but it felt that, there was this immediate shift from, oh, the internet is this force for good and free speech to the internet is this force for disinformation and evil and must be stomped out.
• 32:24
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 32:25
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and I think my sense, from writing the chapter is that there was, that in the kind of first phase in the, in the phase where.
• 32:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Media was using platforms to reach new audiences.
• 32:36
  Ben Whitelaw: was a kind of, a pact that they were prepared to make.
• 32:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, but I think the, from academia that I've written, I've read around it, the idea of basically the kind of structural dependency of the.
• 32:47
  Ben Whitelaw: platforms became too, too great.
• 32:49
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that's kind of what happened is that they became not something that you kind of experimented on or innovated on, or, you know, texted from the ground as a fun way to gain followers and try to kind of reach new people.
• 33:00
  Ben Whitelaw: It actually became a core part of the business of these media organizations and, and they kind of, maybe they woke up from the fact that actually.
• 33:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Not only were they key for their businesses, but they had a massive role in society, um, in a way that they didn't recognize in those early years because they were kind of too busy having fun with it.
• 33:18
  Ben Whitelaw: And, generating loads of page views.
• 33:20
  Ben Whitelaw: And, you know, a lot of media businesses were built on the back of Facebook traffic.
• 33:24
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, you Buzzfeed is the, perfect example.
• 33:27
  Ben Whitelaw: you could almost kind of create a media from scratch and if, if you play by Facebook's rules, and there's a reason why all of those.
• 33:33
  Ben Whitelaw: types of publishers have died out now because Facebook and other platforms move the goalposts.
• 33:37
  Ben Whitelaw: So rose tinted spectacles kind of came off.
• 33:40
  Ben Whitelaw: I think around that time
• 33:42
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 33:42
  Mike Masnick: And I think, there were a few of'em there.
• 33:44
  Mike Masnick: And now I've, for very long time have argued that news organizations lost track of what business they were really in.
• 33:52
  Mike Masnick: and in in particular that, if you look at the history of.
• 33:55
  Mike Masnick: news organizations is that they've always been in the business of building community, but they thought that they were in the business of distributing news and mistaking that led to some really bad situations, one of which you've written about separately and which we discussed not that long ago about comment sections where I always thought the common sections on news for news orgs was an area where they could build real community and build loyalty.
• 34:21
  Mike Masnick: Instead, they, a lot of news organizations either shut those down or, or worse outsource them to Facebook
• 34:29
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 34:30
  Mike Masnick: and became really reliant on this other platform and really lost control over the one thing that they had that was unique.
• 34:38
  Mike Masnick: And then they were so reliant on traffic from Facebook.
• 34:41
  Mike Masnick: they had no loyalty.
• 34:42
  Mike Masnick: Like you, you had a, you know, then eventually we get to the algorithmic stage where then you need them to, to get into the algorithm.
• 34:49
  Mike Masnick: I remember, I had a conversation in 2015.
• 34:53
  Mike Masnick: I'm working backwards to where the conversation was to figure out the year, but it was definitely in 2015, had a conversation with someone who told me that well.
• 35:04
  Mike Masnick: We've all sort of referring to the media, we've all figured out how to get that free 1 million visits from Facebook every month.
• 35:13
  Mike Masnick: And I was sitting there thinking, I haven't, like, what are you talking about?
• 35:19
  Mike Masnick: Like we, you know, for better or for worse and probably for worse in some situations, but maybe in the long run for better Teter never focused on.
• 35:28
  Mike Masnick: Chasing any of these fads.
• 35:31
  Mike Masnick: I do remember when the whole like pivot to video thing happened.
• 35:34
  Mike Masnick: I did have a conversation with like, I, I spoke to, I can't remember which platform it was.
• 35:39
  Mike Masnick: I spoke to one of the platforms where it was like, you know, would you, would you fund us to do video stuff?
• 35:43
  Mike Masnick: And it went nowhere.
• 35:44
  Mike Masnick: And I was like, okay, it's probably, probably a good thing.
• 35:47
  Ben Whitelaw: You escaped.
• 35:48
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 35:49
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, though now everything is coming back around to video.
• 35:51
  Mike Masnick: but.
• 35:52
  Mike Masnick: we never really play that game.
• 35:54
  Mike Masnick: And I always focus on like keeping a loyal community.
• 35:57
  Mike Masnick: And I always, you know, every year I do a report at the beginning of each year, about the previous year, about where traffic comes from.
• 36:04
  Mike Masnick: And the thing that is most important to me is, is how much of it is direct, because that is, that is a sign of loyal, as opposed to relying on some sort of algorithm or some, some other sites to send you traffic.
• 36:15
  Mike Masnick: But so many other people just, they outsourced all of the important stuff.
• 36:19
  Mike Masnick: They outsourced the community, they outsourced that, and then they lost the loyalty.
• 36:22
  Mike Masnick: And so when these companies began to change their focus or their business model or, realize that, you know, they had faked their video numbers or whatever it was, they lost all that and they had nothing else to rely on.
• 36:34
  Mike Masnick: And so I think that definitely then contributed to the general.
• 36:38
  Mike Masnick: Dislike, the media organizations had for social media.
• 36:43
  Mike Masnick: Obviously there's a lot of other stuff going on in the world, but it's very easy to just sort of see these two things and say, oh, that must be connected and therefore we can, we can blame it.
• 36:51
  Mike Masnick: That said, like there was.
• 36:53
  Mike Masnick: Really some bad stuff happening as well and some of the reporting, and you mentioned like Casey Newton at the Verge and like his original reporting on, trust and safety workers, I think was really eye-opening for a lot of people who, even as they were saying like, oh, we want these platforms to clean up, you know, there's bad content that needs to be cleaned up.
• 37:13
  Mike Masnick: They didn't realize what that actually means, which is like hiring a bunch of people and exposing them to nonstop terrible content.
• 37:20
  Mike Masnick: to block it from you, and is that, is that worth it?
• 37:24
  Mike Masnick: to, put people in that position, I think was sort of a, a real reckoning moment as well.
• 37:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 37:30
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and not only were kind of journalists acting in their traditional role as, reporting on and, and investigating these platforms, but they, in this period there's this also this kind of interesting role that they played in basically working as unpaid content moderators.
• 37:46
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, and, and
• 37:47
  Mike Masnick: is a huge point.
• 37:48
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 37:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, this is, this has really got me what got me interested in the relationship between media and platforms in the first place.
• 37:54
  Ben Whitelaw: 'cause we still see this now in a story about a platform doing something egregious or leaving up some harm.
• 38:04
  Ben Whitelaw: the journalists will go to the platform and ask for a comment and.
• 38:08
  Ben Whitelaw: The platform will, having not taken down that content through all of the kind of human or automated means so far, would then take down the content because they've been asked, they've been contacted by the journalist about it, and this still happens.
• 38:21
  Ben Whitelaw: I, I make a running list of, of examples when I see this and it's, it's fascinating, right?
• 38:25
  Ben Whitelaw: Because.
• 38:26
  Ben Whitelaw: platforms have very advanced trust and safety functions.
• 38:29
  Ben Whitelaw: They have, like I say, human and automated, systems in place.
• 38:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Like if it gets to the place where a journalist is contacting you about some content, you probably just wanna kind of stand by your decision or justify it in some way.
• 38:42
  Ben Whitelaw: Taking it down suggests some sort of, you know, that something has gone wrong.
• 38:45
  Ben Whitelaw: And the guys who, who've now founded 4 0 4 Media, which we refer to a lot in the podcast, Jason Coler and, and Joseph Cox.
• 38:52
  Ben Whitelaw: They used to work for Vice and this used to happen to them a lot.
• 38:55
  Ben Whitelaw: and so there's this kind of secondary role that journalists played in this era.
• 39:00
  Mike Masnick: It's the moderator of last resort.
• 39:02
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, basically the kind of last, last line of defense,
• 39:06
  Mike Masnick: I have a slightly different perspective on that, which is like, I do think that, that, like, it's a really sort of, it's a good story.
• 39:13
  Mike Masnick: but I do question how accurate a story it is.
• 39:16
  Mike Masnick: I do think like, yes, journalists find stuff that is bad and then the companies take action.
• 39:21
  Mike Masnick: And the question that people always ask is like, well, look, okay, if, Joseph Cox can find this terrible stuff, why didn't the company find that terrible stuff?
• 39:29
  Mike Masnick: And.
• 39:30
  Mike Masnick: There is an answer to that, which is like, yes, the company has a large trust and safety team in all these processes, and they're looking for a very large set of really terrible things and trying to deal with it, and they're catching an awful lot of it, which I think, you know, the companies and the trust and safety teams never got enough respect or or credit for.
• 39:51
  Ben Whitelaw: true.
• 39:51
  Mike Masnick: Yes, they're going to miss some of that because you have malicious actors who are trying to get around these systems and are doing all sorts of things.
• 39:59
  Mike Masnick: and so yes, it feels not great that journalists had to call these things out and make the companies take action.
• 40:06
  Mike Masnick: But I think that downplays how much effort.
• 40:09
  Mike Masnick: Had it already gone into the trust and safety, function and how much content they had caught and had pulled down and how much work they were doing, because it's always easy to say, but all we did was this search for this one keyword.
• 40:22
  Mike Masnick: And it's like, yeah, but there's like 50,000 other keywords that other people are searching on and that they're catching a whole bunch of this stuff.
• 40:30
  Mike Masnick: And yes, some stuff gets through because you can't always get all of it.
• 40:33
  Mike Masnick: but I do think that is, it is a really interesting element.
• 40:36
  Mike Masnick: How much.
• 40:37
  Mike Masnick: even like trust and safety policy later got driven by reporting.
• 40:42
  Mike Masnick: So like, if this makes us look bad, suddenly like, okay, now we have to change the policy that we didn't think through all the implications or we play down the implications of this policy.
• 40:53
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and I spoke to, I, I did a piece of work a couple of years ago.
• 40:56
  Ben Whitelaw: That's when I interviewed about a dozen trust and safety workers, and they talked consistently amongst all of them about how media.
• 41:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Played a role in how policies were developed and also then what happened in specific cases.
• 41:09
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, they would share articles that, probably you wrote and the others wrote about how they did trust and safety and it would act as a lever.
• 41:18
  Ben Whitelaw: sometimes they'd use it to get their bosses, to give them more resources, right.
• 41:22
  Ben Whitelaw: It's not a bad thing necessarily.
• 41:24
  Ben Whitelaw: Sometimes they would use it to kind of change the way that they approach a, particular harm.
• 41:28
  Ben Whitelaw: so media has always been one of the kind of ways that platforms address how they work.
• 41:35
  Ben Whitelaw: nowadays, obviously we have.
• 41:37
  Ben Whitelaw: Regulation playing a really key role.
• 41:40
  Ben Whitelaw: we've always had advertisers, playing a really important role.
• 41:43
  Ben Whitelaw: the rivals of that, of, of any platform is another factor in that process.
• 41:47
  Ben Whitelaw: But media is almost the kind of fourth pillar in that.
• 41:50
  Ben Whitelaw: and I think the work that was done by a lot of journalists in this time showed that you could shape platforms, By alerting not only politicians, but also the general public to the ways that these companies were working internally.
• 42:05
  Ben Whitelaw: And I think that directly, to be honest, Mike led to a lot of the regulation that we, have seen since.
• 42:09
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 42:10
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, there's this phase where the kind of media outlets went really hard, going really deep, doing really solid investigative journalism.
• 42:16
  Ben Whitelaw: And that in turn has led to the kinds of, I guess, the number of eyes that are now on these platforms and, and the regulation that has since emerged.
• 42:23
  Ben Whitelaw: And that's kind of the, the third phase, the third era.
• 42:27
  Ben Whitelaw: I would say the, the Musk era, unfortunately named.
• 42:32
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 42:33
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 42:33
  Mike Masnick: No, I mean, I think, the sort of impact of the sort of, you know, 2016 post, 2016 era where suddenly it went from, happy promoting innovation, free speech, whatever, to, oh wait, there are consequences to all of this, and we need to think through this to the modern era, which turned into sort of the, the regulatory era.
• 42:55
  Mike Masnick: the thing I'm curious and, and.
• 42:56
  Mike Masnick: Love your take on this.
• 42:58
  Mike Masnick: so you frame your, third era, as that sort of regulatory era of 2021 to the present.
• 43:06
  Mike Masnick: Do you think, and I know you wrote most of this last year, perhaps early-ish last year, um, do you think.
• 43:16
  Mike Masnick: there's a new era going on in the post-Trump second term where, you know, I mean, you mentioned this in your, your piece, but like Mark Zuckerberg.
• 43:27
  Mike Masnick: doing his video basically saying we got trust and safety wrong.
• 43:30
  Mike Masnick: We're going back to this like more laissez-faire, freewheeling, which was is nonsense.
• 43:35
  Mike Masnick: And we've talked about how it's nonsense.
• 43:37
  Mike Masnick: and you have the Elon Musk sort of full mask off kind of thing.
• 43:43
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you described this as the mask off era, but I'm sort of wondering if the mask off era really started in 2025 as opposed to 2021.
• 43:51
  Mike Masnick: To me, there's an argument that the 2021 to 2024 era is the like, let's just try to regulate stuff and all these bills come out.
• 44:02
  Mike Masnick: A few of them make it through, but not that many.
• 44:04
  Mike Masnick: And now the 2025 era.
• 44:07
  Mike Masnick: Becomes the like purely transactional, give me what I want or I'm gonna do bad things to you, kind of era, which we're seeing sort of on a global stage, not just in the us.
• 44:18
  Mike Masnick: In the US it's just so blatantly explicit.
• 44:21
  Mike Masnick: But I think a lot of the regulations that have come about, now are like, well, we're gonna punish you do this, or we're gonna punish you.
• 44:29
  Mike Masnick: kind of regulations.
• 44:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I mean I think, I think certainly in terms of the way that platforms.
• 44:35
  Ben Whitelaw: Think about the media or think about journalism.
• 44:38
  Ben Whitelaw: I think we're in a, we're in a kind of continuation of, of that era.
• 44:42
  Ben Whitelaw: but it's got so much more worse than I could have expected, to be honest.
• 44:45
  Ben Whitelaw: Like if you think about when, Elon Musk took over Twitter, he not only, you know, this was the journalist platform of choice.
• 44:52
  Ben Whitelaw: He got rid of trust and safety.
• 44:54
  Ben Whitelaw: do you remember he took down the accounts of, journalists working for the New York Times?
• 44:59
  Ben Whitelaw: The Washington Post and CNN and Voice of America.
• 45:02
  Mike Masnick: the night, the night that he did that where he started banning all these journalists was the night that I turned my account to private and has never come back from That
• 45:10
  Ben Whitelaw: Really?
• 45:11
  Mike Masnick: the night that I, because I thought he was going after anyone who was mentioning this stuff and I was like, oh, I'm probably next.
• 45:17
  Mike Masnick: and I just switched my account to private and that
• 45:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Oh, interesting.
• 45:20
  Mike Masnick: the end for me on Twitter.
• 45:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 45:22
  Ben Whitelaw: never looked back.
• 45:24
  Mike Masnick: Nope,
• 45:25
  Ben Whitelaw: No.
• 45:25
  Ben Whitelaw: but you know, he, he did that.
• 45:26
  Ben Whitelaw: He did.
• 45:27
  Ben Whitelaw: there was A-A-C-B-S show, 60 Minutes, which did a piece on Donald Trump, that featured a source who kind of refuted Trump's idea that the election was interfered with.
• 45:39
  Ben Whitelaw: And Musk called for the people who produced that show to receive a long jail sentence.
• 45:46
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 45:46
  Ben Whitelaw: Like he, he, he was like anti-media, anti journalism from the get go, and I think that allowed other platforms to do similar things.
• 45:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Meta removed a lot of its funding of journalistic and media programs that, did a lot of actually quite good work in previous years.
• 46:03
  Ben Whitelaw: They took out, you know, a lot of politics and news content from newsfeeds, which obviously.
• 46:09
  Ben Whitelaw: The famous Mark Zuckerberg video last year, actually kind of somewhat readdressed under the guise of civic content, inverted commas.
• 46:17
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, and so that led to a big tanking in Facebook traffic, which saw the demise of some of those traffic focused new sites, and which a lot of new sites haven't really, resolved from.
• 46:27
  Ben Whitelaw: But then, you know, to now have, I guess the kind of friends of the, president being installed in prominent positions of.
• 46:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Big us media companies, like no one could have really foreseen that, I don't think.
• 46:38
  Ben Whitelaw: and some of the issues that kind of Stephen Colbert has had and, and some of these other, individuals who do really strong journalism, we've talked about on the podcast, it is almost impossible to have that on the Bingo card.
• 46:49
  Ben Whitelaw: it's almost beyond belief.
• 46:51
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 46:51
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, I mean, it's funny, you know, we started out early on, I, I talked about like Mark Andreessen, and I think back to an interview that he gave last year, which was, to me somewhat disconnected from reality where he discussed that there was this deal.
• 47:06
  Mike Masnick: That basically if you worked in tech, the media praised you and said really nice things about you and built you up and only said good things and talked about how wonderful all this innovation was, and this was the deal.
• 47:16
  Mike Masnick: And then because of that, you got really, really rich.
• 47:18
  Mike Masnick: And then when you got old, you gave away the money.
• 47:20
  Mike Masnick: And then they celebrated you for being a philanthropist.
• 47:23
  Mike Masnick: And, and he was furious that the media had supposedly broken this deal that never existed and was always a lie.
• 47:30
  Mike Masnick: and how much of his sort of reactionary.
• 47:32
  Mike Masnick: stance today is a result of like the media criticizing him at one point, and it was such a eye-opening, openingly bizarre situation where like, he seemed to think that, he was owed praise from the media.
• 47:46
  Mike Masnick: And the second the media took a critical look at things that he did, and admittedly, some of it was unfair.
• 47:53
  Mike Masnick: Absolutely.
• 47:53
  Mike Masnick: And I've called out unfair journalism over and over again because I think a lot of it is unfair, but to completely like blow up democracy because of that and to embrace, sort of fascism seems bad,
• 48:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 48:09
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 48:09
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's, I'm, I'm putting that at your door now that I know that you had the chance to change the course of history back in 1993 or whatever it was.
• 48:17
  Mike Masnick: you know, but I do think it is, it is a noble moment in sort of showing how much.
• 48:21
  Mike Masnick: The position of the media coverage impacted some of the people who were building these technologies and how absolutely offended they were that they didn't get universal praise and adoration from the media.
• 48:33
  Mike Masnick: you know, and you can argue that both sides of that equation went too far.
• 48:37
  Mike Masnick: Like the praise and adoration was maybe too much, and the backlash was probably too much.
• 48:41
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, lost nuance and, and miss things.
• 48:44
  Mike Masnick: But like to then reorient your worldview that the most evil thing in the world is the media, I think is also a huge mistake and really problematic and leads to a lot of the problems that we're in where Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Andreessen and Peter Thiel have all decided that the media is, is so evil and must be destroyed.
• 49:03
  Mike Masnick: That that has completely reoriented their worldview and taken it away from like.
• 49:07
  Mike Masnick: What these technologies were actually supposed to be enabling, which was, you know, more speech, which should mean more press, which was that sort of early story that we were talking about in the earlier eras.
• 49:17
  Mike Masnick: And so it is sort of weird how like enabling the media to do more than cause them to flip out.
• 49:24
  Mike Masnick: And yeah, they now frame it as in like, oh, but we're enabling like, individuals to be the media to replace the evil mainstream media or whatever.
• 49:32
  Mike Masnick: But like, I mean, there's always nonsense.
• 49:34
  Mike Masnick: I mean there's always, Wanting people to praise them and wanting to punish those who didn't.
• 49:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, and I, and I think, um, that is the way.
• 49:42
  Ben Whitelaw: The media should work, right?
• 49:44
  Ben Whitelaw: It's kind of how it's designed.
• 49:45
  Ben Whitelaw: It's just that, some of these billionaires haven't been, been told that.
• 49:48
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and, and that's, that's, that's really the kind of point of this, of the paper, I think, is to show that, there is this relationship between media coverage and the way that platforms work in lots of different ways.
• 50:00
  Ben Whitelaw: It's not kind of like, for like, it's not necessarily kind of causal, but I think that.
• 50:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Good coverage, good nuanced coverage of what platforms are doing broadly, but also regards to user safety is important and that's, that's to bring it back to kind of what we do every week.
• 50:18
  Ben Whitelaw: that's what's important about control alt speech and about tech there and about everything in moderation as well, is that, You need to be able to dish out criticism or critique or analysis when it merits it.
• 50:27
  Ben Whitelaw: But you also need to reflect the fact that this is a very difficult industry to be in, particularly if you're in trust and safety, these are not easily solved challenges, particularly at the scale that these platforms work.
• 50:40
  Ben Whitelaw: And I think we, we do a fairly good job, at least our listeners tell us, Mike, that we do a fairly good job of, of
• 50:46
  Mike Masnick: Speaking of which review the podcast.
• 50:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, review the podcast.
• 50:51
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, so I think that kind of, if I just wanted to kinda sum up, I guess, what the paper is designed to do and, how that reflects in our work.
• 50:59
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that would be, that would be the takeaways, that good nuanced media coverage of what platforms are doing, matters.
• 51:05
  Ben Whitelaw: And yes, more media I think could do that.
• 51:09
  Ben Whitelaw: we're not perfect either and we are constantly trying to improve, so.
• 51:12
  Ben Whitelaw: do rate and review us if you like the work we do, do sponsor the podcasts.
• 51:17
  Ben Whitelaw: if you're an organization or an institution that wants to reach important decision makers in the tech industry.
• 51:23
  Ben Whitelaw: and yeah.
• 51:25
  Ben Whitelaw: keep listening, basically.
• 51:26
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, I think the important thing here, the real point is that this is an ecosystem and that the internet and the media ecosystem impact each other and having a good understanding and a thoughtful understanding of what is happening and how these things work together is really important.
• 51:40
  Mike Masnick: And we go through phases and sometimes it's, they're, better, than others.
• 51:43
  Mike Masnick: And sometimes they're more nuanced than others, and sometimes they're, simplistic.
• 51:47
  Mike Masnick: And what we're really trying to do here is to, to cover that and that intersection of media and internet and innovation in a way that leads to, better understanding and a real understanding of like, the challenges and the safety questions that come up in all of this.
• 52:02
  Mike Masnick: And I think, understanding that history.
• 52:04
  Mike Masnick: That you laid out in this paper is really, really important.
• 52:07
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 52:07
  Ben Whitelaw: And um, that's a good point to, to kind of wrap up today, Mike.
• 52:10
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, great to be able to kind of talk off script in a way that is different to our usual episodes.
• 52:15
  Ben Whitelaw: I hope our listeners get a chance to have a read of the paper.
• 52:18
  Ben Whitelaw: We'd love to hear people's thoughts podcast@controlaltspeech.com.
• 52:22
  Ben Whitelaw: And yeah, keep listening.
• 52:23
  Ben Whitelaw: thanks for taking part today and we'll speak to you soon.
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