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Transcript

This Episode is Broadly Safe to Listen To · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Ben Whitelaw: So Mike, I was reading this ft piece this week about a 23-year-old or roundabouts buying a dumb phone and what his reflections were after 12 months of using this phone.
• 0:09
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 0:10
  Mike Masnick: Okay.
• 0:11
  Ben Whitelaw: It made me reflect on my own phone usage and I checked never a good thing.
• 0:18
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, I blame this, you know, upstart 23-year-old for making me do that.
• 0:22
  Ben Whitelaw: but I looked at the stats and I'm gonna go back to one sec.
• 0:25
  Ben Whitelaw: The app that helps you kind of like it purports to kind of cut your screen time in half.
• 0:30
  Ben Whitelaw: And I've used it in the past.
• 0:31
  Ben Whitelaw: It's pretty good.
• 0:32
  Ben Whitelaw: You can set time, barriers for use of certain apps.
• 0:36
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's pretty good for like stopping you using Instagram if that's your thing or whatever it is.
• 0:41
  Ben Whitelaw: it asks you to add an intervention when you go onto the app, and I thought it'd be a great way to kind of start today's episode of Controlled Speech.
• 0:50
  Ben Whitelaw: What would you add an intervention for?
• 0:53
  Mike Masnick: Oh, now that is a good question.
• 0:55
  Mike Masnick: I don't think I'm quite ready to add an intervention yet for this, but in the last, few weeks I've gotten really into Claude Code and have gone super deep in discovering the.
• 1:09
  Mike Masnick: somewhat scary but impressive power of what Claude Code can do for you, whether it's making apps or just doing stuff for you.
• 1:17
  Mike Masnick: and yeah, I guess it sort of has a built in intervention in that it limits how much you can do in four hours, and I will sometimes kind of start to max that out while continually reloading the page.
• 1:29
  Mike Masnick: That tells me how close I am to running out of, uh, uh, tokens to do stuff.
• 1:34
  Mike Masnick: I, could see me getting to the point where I need an intervention to stop me from using cloud code.
• 1:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 1:40
  Mike Masnick: What about you?
• 1:41
  Mike Masnick: What, what intervention are you adding?
• 1:43
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, I, I'm not there yet with using Claude code, but I am frantically refreshing, blue sky for January transfers for my football team.
• 1:52
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's, got obsessive, I'm, I'm like every transfer window, I'm desperate to find out what they, who they've signed, how it's gonna help us stay up.
• 2:00
  Ben Whitelaw: So, it's too much.
• 2:01
  Ben Whitelaw: I want, I want an intervention, for that.
• 2:04
  Mike Masnick: I will say I'm, this is the same, same season in baseball as well, and I've been doing that as well which is a nice thing that Blue Sky is becoming very much a sports app.
• 2:12
  Mike Masnick: So I will, uh, mention that as well.
• 2:16
  Ben Whitelaw: Agreed.
• 2:16
  Ben Whitelaw: Agreed.
• 2:17
  Ben Whitelaw: there is hope for our sports themes yet maybe.
• 2:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Hello and welcome to Control Alt Speech, your weekly roundup.
• 2:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Hello and welcome to Control Alt Speech, your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation.
• 2:42
  Ben Whitelaw: It's January 22nd, 2026, and this week we are talking about how to make a constitution in 20,000 words, YouTube safety flex and why.
• 2:51
  Ben Whitelaw: Maybe just maybe.
• 2:52
  Ben Whitelaw: We just start feeling sorry for Pav ov.
• 2:55
  Ben Whitelaw: My name is Ben Whitelaw.
• 2:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Wait and see.
• 2:59
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, my name is Ben Whitelaw and I'm the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation.
• 3:03
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm joined with Mike Masnick, founder of Tech, and we are not in Davos.
• 3:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike, we are not invited.
• 3:11
  Ben Whitelaw: We are not there.
• 3:12
  Mike Masnick: We are not the elite, Ben, we are the sub elite.
• 3:15
  Mike Masnick: I actually, I had posted this to, blue sky, earlier this week.
• 3:18
  Mike Masnick: I, I, you know how like everybody, it was sending out like year end notification.
• 3:22
  Mike Masnick: This is, you know, everything you did last year, blah, blah, blah.
• 3:25
  Mike Masnick: I got an email last week from you.
• 3:27
  Mike Masnick: Some hotel property, and I don't even know which one it was.
• 3:30
  Mike Masnick: I must have stayed there on some trip.
• 3:32
  Mike Masnick: and it said, you know, like, your stats for 2025, it says you've been a member for all of zero years.
• 3:39
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and in that time you have reached non-elite status.
• 3:46
  Mike Masnick: And I was like.
• 3:47
  Ben Whitelaw: how damning,
• 3:48
  Mike Masnick: Yes, I am officially a non-elite according to some random hotel chain that I probably stayed at once.
• 3:56
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah.
• 3:56
  Ben Whitelaw: How do you feel about that?
• 3:57
  Ben Whitelaw: Is that
• 3:57
  Mike Masnick: I feel good, you know, this is a anti-elite era, and so, so, you know, if I were elite then maybe I would be at Davos.
• 4:06
  Mike Masnick: But, as a, confirmed via this hotel chain, non-elite, I am not invited and not allowed.
• 4:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I mean, I'm still waiting for my invite.
• 4:16
  Ben Whitelaw: Maybe it'll come next year, I think.
• 4:18
  Ben Whitelaw: one thing I, I would say we're gonna talk a bit about a couple of things that have been discussed and announced at Davos in today's episode.
• 4:24
  Ben Whitelaw: But one thing I think we would be good for at Davos is drumming up sponsorship.
• 4:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Interest in control or speech.
• 4:32
  Ben Whitelaw: I bet there's a load of people at Davos who would be very up for sponsoring this fair podcast that we, painstakingly handcraft each week.
• 4:41
  Ben Whitelaw: what do you think about that?
• 4:42
  Ben Whitelaw: Do you think we should be there selling our wares?
• 4:45
  Mike Masnick: well, yes, maybe because we do have, certainly, if we are not elite, Ben, I do feel like we have a lot of elite listeners,
• 4:51
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 4:52
  Mike Masnick: of whom I, I would imagine we have plenty of people at who are at Davos who listen to this podcast regularly.
• 4:57
  Mike Masnick: hopefully as soon as it comes out, first thing, it should go right to the top of your, your player.
• 5:02
  Mike Masnick: yes, you know, as we've discussed before, we survive on sponsorship.
• 5:07
  Mike Masnick: Revenue that allows us to do this.
• 5:09
  Mike Masnick: We put a lot of time into everything that we are doing and, uh, we're, making an another sort of call for sponsorships right now.
• 5:16
  Mike Masnick: So, if you are listening to this and you happen to work at an organization, of any kind, that is interested in seeing control alt speech continue to be the wonderful thing that it is, we would love to have you on as a sponsor and again.
• 5:33
  Mike Masnick: We feel that our, our sponsorship setup is one that is, unique but also really beneficial for everybody, including the listeners.
• 5:42
  Mike Masnick: We really feel that our form of sponsorship can be a win-win win, where the most common form is that we get to do.
• 5:50
  Mike Masnick: Some sort of interview with you or someone that you designate.
• 5:54
  Mike Masnick: And it can be a very interesting, it has to be an on topic interview.
• 5:59
  Mike Masnick: It is not designed to be super salesy, but rather to let you demonstrate something interesting and powerful and thought provoking, in a way that, is interesting to us and interesting to our audience.
• 6:10
  Mike Masnick: And I think that is unique and fun.
• 6:13
  Mike Masnick: Uh, but we always need more sponsors.
• 6:16
  Mike Masnick: I know we have, we have some, we've, done some really great ones already.
• 6:20
  Mike Masnick: and we have some more coming up.
• 6:22
  Mike Masnick: But, uh, we're putting out our plea for sponsorship help and we may have a, a unique sponsorship opportunity.
• 6:30
  Mike Masnick: For people who want it right now.
• 6:32
  Mike Masnick: This is a, very short term offer, which is if you are a regular listener to controlled speech, you know that we discussed in our first episode of the year, our 2026 Bingo card, and one of the things that I did with Claude Code as I revealed my new addiction,
• 6:50
  Ben Whitelaw: O, other, other coding tools are available.
• 6:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Claude.
• 6:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Claude is not one of the sponsors of this podcast, although it probably should be.
• 6:56
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, yeah, we can, we can work on that.
• 6:59
  Mike Masnick: but I have, built a Bingo app, a control alt speech bingo app, which we will be putting up on the webpage at some point soon.
• 7:08
  Mike Masnick: and we are open to having somebody sponsor that.
• 7:12
  Mike Masnick: And so it would be a thing that all the regular listeners of controlled speech every week may open it up, or we have a version that you can print out, including sponsorship information.
• 7:23
  Ben Whitelaw: Mm.
• 7:24
  Mike Masnick: if you are a sponsor, you could get your name or some idea in front of all of the listeners of Controlled Speech basically every week that we release a podcast as they play along with our Bingo game.
• 7:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, you'd be so good on QBC Mike.
• 7:39
  Ben Whitelaw: That is like the perfect, like this is a limited time only offer for a Bingo card
• 7:45
  Mike Masnick: the phones are ringing now.
• 7:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Get it while it's hot.
• 7:50
  Ben Whitelaw: People, don't delay.
• 7:51
  Ben Whitelaw: This, this won't happen until January, 2027.
• 7:54
  Mike Masnick: Exactly.
• 7:54
  Mike Masnick: There is a, a short term offer.
• 7:56
  Mike Masnick: We would like to, we will get this on the site relatively soon and it would be nice if, when we officially announced that it is available on the site if we already have a sponsor in place.
• 8:07
  Mike Masnick: So time is limited.
• 8:09
  Mike Masnick: Call now.
• 8:12
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 8:12
  Ben Whitelaw: Oh 800 Bingo card.
• 8:15
  Ben Whitelaw: That, that's, that's not a, that's a fake number.
• 8:17
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, think the, the point about having.
• 8:20
  Ben Whitelaw: Really great listeners is also true.
• 8:22
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, I spoke to a bunch of people this week, somebody from a, a regulator, one of our favorite regulators, a great, fantastic regulator, as Donald might say.
• 8:32
  Ben Whitelaw: I, I spoke to somebody at a platform, you know, senior within the trust and safety scheme.
• 8:37
  Ben Whitelaw: I spoke to a, a lawyer for a firm who, works with a bunch of other platforms.
• 8:42
  Ben Whitelaw: We have a, a really great listenership and our sponsors will be.
• 8:46
  Ben Whitelaw: perfectly situated within our, our episode to reach those.
• 8:49
  Ben Whitelaw: So, and again, you know, it's what keeps the episodes coming out every week.
• 8:53
  Ben Whitelaw: It's what keeps us able to do the research and be able to of record this each and every week.
• 8:57
  Ben Whitelaw: So, yeah, if you're interested, get in Touch podcast that control alt speech.com.
• 9:02
  Ben Whitelaw: Get it while you can.
• 9:05
  Ben Whitelaw: just one thing before we, jump into, one of the Davos kind of news items today, Mike, just on that ft piece that I mentioned at the top of today's episode, we'll include it in today's show notes, but did you know that there's a, dumb phone called the Sunbeam Juniper?
• 9:19
  Mike Masnick: I had not heard of, I have seen a, a few like attempts at, creating dump phones or flip phones or whatever, but I had not heard of that particular one.
• 9:27
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's a makeup I've never heard of.
• 9:29
  Ben Whitelaw: it basically stood out for me because it sounds like a vape flavor.
• 9:34
  Mike Masnick: they know their audience.
• 9:35
  Mike Masnick: They're targeting the, you know, gen Z folks and
• 9:38
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 9:39
  Ben Whitelaw: and it's a really interesting piece.
• 9:40
  Ben Whitelaw: It speaks to a lot of the, under 16 social media ban, the kind of antis smartphone campaigns that we've been chatting about in recent weeks.
• 9:47
  Ben Whitelaw: worth separately going to have a read of that if you're interested business.
• 9:51
  Ben Whitelaw: but yeah, let's get, let's get started, on today's news.
• 9:54
  Ben Whitelaw: Obviously the world's kind of great, good and some kind of less favorable people are in Switzerland this week, as part of the World Economic Forum's, Davos convening.
• 10:04
  Ben Whitelaw: And one of the people who has been there and been talking, he is Anthropic, CEO, Dario Modi, where he's announced updates to, one of its foundational elements, safety elements.
• 10:13
  Ben Whitelaw: Which kind of underpins a lot of how Claude prevents users encountering harm.
• 10:18
  Ben Whitelaw: And Mike, you thought this was a really kind of pivotal moment in, trust and safety landscape, and you wanted to, to talk a bit about why.
• 10:24
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 10:25
  Mike Masnick: So, anthropic is a really interesting company, for a variety of reasons.
• 10:30
  Mike Masnick: I think a lot of people sort of consider it the little brother to open AI in many ways.
• 10:34
  Mike Masnick: And it was sort of a bunch of people who had worked at OpenAI left and, and went to create Anthropic.
• 10:39
  Mike Masnick: And, the sense, and, and some of this is always marketing speak, was like, oh, they're gonna.
• 10:44
  Mike Masnick: build safe AI in a better way.
• 10:46
  Mike Masnick: They've talked for years about the idea of constitutional AI and that they are training.
• 10:53
  Mike Masnick: Claude with a Constitution, and they had released something a few years ago that was, uh, a couple thousand words, basically sort of laying out their framework for thinking about things.
• 11:03
  Mike Masnick: But what they did this week was they released the new Constitution that apparently they've been working on for some time.
• 11:10
  Mike Masnick: And it is a massive document.
• 11:12
  Mike Masnick: I believe it's like 23,000 words or something like that.
• 11:15
  Mike Masnick: I forget the exact count.
• 11:17
  Mike Masnick: I saw the announcement and I saw, somebody else refer to it as Claude has released its soul to the public.
• 11:24
  Mike Masnick: Uh, they put it under a, CC zero license, effectively putting in the public domain, basically saying, anyone can go use this without permission, or without even crediting them if you want.
• 11:35
  Mike Masnick: But, but they, put a lot of work into the, the document and I started reading it and realized.
• 11:41
  Mike Masnick: I hadn't gotten very far after a fair bit of time getting through it and looked at the scroll bar on the side and said, oh, wow, wait, I'm, maybe 5% into this document, and, and realized how, how long.
• 11:52
  Mike Masnick: It's, as they say, they created this for Claude itself.
• 11:58
  Mike Masnick: It is written for an AI and not a human.
• 12:01
  Mike Masnick: Now, I've seen different reactions to this, including some people saying, oh, they're acting as if.
• 12:08
  Mike Masnick: AI or the LLM is human, which is something that, anthropic sometimes does.
• 12:16
  Mike Masnick: They sort of blur the line between what an LLM is and what a human is.
• 12:20
  Mike Masnick: but what struck me as really interesting about this is that it is one of the most sort of deeply involved documents, exploring values around trust and safety and helpfulness.
• 12:33
  Mike Masnick: The thing that, people in the trust and safety field have talked about for years, right?
• 12:38
  Mike Masnick: Like, how do you, not just define values, but put them into practice?
• 12:42
  Mike Masnick: How do you determine, what you are trying to do?
• 12:45
  Mike Masnick: How do you deal with the different trade-offs?
• 12:47
  Mike Masnick: How do you set all of these things up?
• 12:49
  Mike Masnick: but operationalizing that has always been, one of the big challenges of trust and safety, and this is an attempt to do that, in the AI era, and I think it's sort of, it's a moment worth marking.
• 13:02
  Mike Masnick: And we're thinking about the fact that have written out this, novella sized document of.
• 13:09
  Mike Masnick: How they think about their values and how they define those values.
• 13:13
  Mike Masnick: and even the values themselves struck me as really, really.
• 13:16
  Mike Masnick: Interesting and thought provoking.
• 13:18
  Mike Masnick: I don't know if they're good, but they're, it's thought provoking because they have sort of these four key values that they talk about, and even the way they define them is fascinating.
• 13:30
  Mike Masnick: 'cause they say broadly safe, broadly ethical.
• 13:33
  Mike Masnick: Then compliant with ANTHROPICS guidelines and then finally genuinely helpful.
• 13:38
  Mike Masnick: And so the compliant with ANTHROPICS guidelines, like that feels like sort of a weird catchall kind of thing.
• 13:44
  Ben Whitelaw: Mm
• 13:45
  Mike Masnick: but the other three were like, the fact that you say broadly safe, right?
• 13:49
  Mike Masnick: Like the typical thing that you would see for most companies is like safe, right?
• 13:53
  Mike Masnick: Just you define it and then you have this thing and you sort of set up this idea like, we are the safe platform and safety is our, main virtue or whatever it is.
• 14:02
  Mike Masnick: And then you sort of try and operationalize that.
• 14:04
  Mike Masnick: And what everyone in the trust and safety field realizes at some point is like there are trade-offs and safe for whom?
• 14:10
  Mike Masnick: Safe for what?
• 14:11
  Mike Masnick: Safe and what context safe over what time period.
• 14:13
  Mike Masnick: There are all of these different variables that make it very.
• 14:16
  Mike Masnick: Difficult to figure out.
• 14:17
  Mike Masnick: What do you mean by safe?
• 14:18
  Mike Masnick: You can say safe, but How do you operationalize that in a realistic way?
• 14:22
  Mike Masnick: Dealing with all of the trade offs, but by starting out, by just saying broadly safe, you're sort of.
• 14:28
  Mike Masnick: Opening up this conversation and then of course within the document you have however many 5,000 words on what do you mean by broadly safe and what do you mean in a way that a non-human LLM can understand what you mean and make decisions based on the different trade offs?
• 14:46
  Mike Masnick: To me, this is fascinating.
• 14:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 14:49
  Ben Whitelaw: And so this, these 20,000 words, 23,000 words, essentially shape all of Claude's outputs, right?
• 14:55
  Ben Whitelaw: So if a user comes to Claude and asks it to generate csam or to generate, terrorist material, it would essentially look it up against a constitution and kind of provide a response based on that.
• 15:06
  Ben Whitelaw: that's how it works,
• 15:07
  Mike Masnick: yeah, it is part of it.
• 15:09
  Mike Masnick: You know, there are a number of different things, right?
• 15:11
  Mike Masnick: There's the system prompt and there's all the training and all these other things.
• 15:15
  Mike Masnick: But yes, this is a part of what defines how Claude works and, sort of what kinds of broadly, broadly safe, uh, features are, baked in to the underlying system.
• 15:29
  Ben Whitelaw: Interesting.
• 15:30
  Ben Whitelaw: I wanna talk a bit about how it came to be.
• 15:31
  Ben Whitelaw: 'cause there's, it's probably an interesting story behind that, but it's interesting.
• 15:35
  Ben Whitelaw: I remember in 2023 when they first started talking about the constitution that it was.
• 15:38
  Ben Whitelaw: Basically based on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a, a few other kind of things sprinkled in.
• 15:46
  Ben Whitelaw: it had some, I think some rules, created by Google.
• 15:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Some of its own research, which was obviously in its early stages.
• 15:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Then actually I think had Apple's terms of service kind of looped in as well, but it wasn't a very.
• 15:58
  Ben Whitelaw: It wasn't a very big or kind of detailed document, how much of that human rights emphasis is still in there from what you've read about it and the bit that you've read?
• 16:07
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think that is definitely there.
• 16:09
  Mike Masnick: I think it is a, a part of the, larger thinking.
• 16:12
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think what has happened over the last few years are a few different things.
• 16:16
  Mike Masnick: And one is, anthropic realizing the limitations of what they had written a few years ago and the different challenges and trade offs inherent in all of these decisions.
• 16:27
  Mike Masnick: And so the rewrite of this document was to take The general concepts, the, the broad concepts that were included in the original document, and try to make them more concrete for an LLM to understand, right?
• 16:43
  Mike Masnick: Because, and they say this over and over again.
• 16:45
  Mike Masnick: You know, the document is, it is human readable.
• 16:48
  Mike Masnick: It's absolutely human readable.
• 16:50
  Mike Masnick: You can read the whole thing and you could understand it, but you can see elements in there that.
• 16:56
  Mike Masnick: you know, are from people who have spent a lot of time working with LLMs and realizing where they go wrong.
• 17:03
  Mike Masnick: And often where they go wrong is where they don't.
• 17:06
  Mike Masnick: There's some element of humanness that they miss.
• 17:09
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 17:10
  Mike Masnick: the extreme versions of it are, you know, it will take something way more literally than it needs to.
• 17:16
  Mike Masnick: Right?
• 17:17
  Mike Masnick: And that, can create problems and, create difficulties.
• 17:19
  Mike Masnick: And there are ways to tune that.
• 17:20
  Mike Masnick: And you can set the different models to sort of have more creative responses or more strict responses.
• 17:27
  Mike Masnick: But this is an attempt to figure out, like, is there really a way that.
• 17:32
  Mike Masnick: As these technologies are becoming more and more ingrained in our lives, is there a way to really define values for.
• 17:40
  Mike Masnick: These non-human, entities.
• 17:43
  Mike Masnick: and with companies, you know, you see things like statements of values and you have training and you're training humans and to do things, and you have correctives when things go wrong and there's a whole sort of process involved.
• 17:57
  Mike Masnick: But as LLM models are becoming.
• 18:00
  Mike Masnick: Really integrated in all sorts of ways.
• 18:01
  Mike Masnick: Some good, some bad.
• 18:02
  Mike Masnick: I'm not saying, you know, I'm not one of those people who thinks like everything needs to turn into ai, but I do think it is a really powerful tool.
• 18:09
  Mike Masnick: And as it is becoming more and more embedded in, in different ways, there is a bigger question of how do you embed the values?
• 18:16
  Mike Masnick: And I think, you know, some of the, there are lots of reasonable criticisms of ai.
• 18:22
  Mike Masnick: There are some less reasonable criticisms of ai.
• 18:25
  Mike Masnick: But, I think one of the legitimate, reasonable criticisms is as certain companies are turning over more and more decision making to these different tools in some form or another.
• 18:36
  Mike Masnick: How are they able to actually build in the values?
• 18:39
  Mike Masnick: And Anthropic is in some ways a step ahead in that they are really trying to think through how they're doing it.
• 18:46
  Mike Masnick: And their answer is these 23,000 words.
• 18:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Mm-hmm.
• 18:50
  Mike Masnick: to me it's just fascinating to see that as this evolution of thinking about trust and safety in an AI era.
• 18:59
  Mike Masnick: Very different than what we've seen in the past.
• 19:02
  Mike Masnick: Even if the end goal is somewhat similar, I mean, I think this is, I don't think they would call this a trust and safety document, but to me this is very much a trust and safety document.
• 19:12
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I mean, it's certainly an AI governance, initiative, document, whatever you wanna call it.
• 19:16
  Ben Whitelaw: and increasingly the lines between trust and safety and kind of AI governance ethics standards are blurring.
• 19:23
  Ben Whitelaw: I, I wanna kind of get into.
• 19:25
  Ben Whitelaw: Who has had a role in shaping this document?
• 19:27
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, listeners might be thinking, okay, it's, all well and good that you have this document that it exists.
• 19:32
  Ben Whitelaw: It's a reference point for within the model, but kind of what do we know about the people who've created this document and who's shaped it to date, do you know?
• 19:41
  Mike Masnick: they do say, and at the very top of the document, they, mention the people involved.
• 19:46
  Mike Masnick: To be honest, I don't know very much about them.
• 19:50
  Mike Masnick: You know, I've met a few people at Anthropic, and they, they've always struck me as very thoughtful, sometimes overly earnest about how they, how they look at these things.
• 20:00
  Mike Masnick: but it does sound like it's a group of people within Anthropic who've been thinking about these things.
• 20:06
  Mike Masnick: They have, you know, because of.
• 20:09
  Mike Masnick: partly the way they've always framed the company, they've always had people whose job it is at Anthropic to sort of think through the different challenges and, try to be forward looking in terms of where might things go wrong and how, how might we prevent that.
• 20:23
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I had a conversation last year with, an employee at Anthropic on the ethical issues of.
• 20:30
  Mike Masnick: whether or not you should ever be able to shut down an AI and effectively, like, is that the equivalent of killing a living being,
• 20:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 20:39
  Mike Masnick: which was, you know, a little bit out there,
• 20:42
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 20:43
  Mike Masnick: but someone's job at Anthropic is to sort of think through these kinds of ethical issues.
• 20:48
  Mike Masnick: They have a number of people who spend a lot of time trying to think through values and ethics related to the technology and.
• 20:55
  Mike Masnick: it's easy to sort of mock some of that and plenty of people are, and it's easy to be cynical about that.
• 21:01
  Mike Masnick: But compared to the alternative, which is like we don't care and we're just building stuff and stop making us try and think through consequences.
• 21:11
  Mike Masnick: I find this really.
• 21:13
  Mike Masnick: Unique and there's value in that even if, maybe there are parts of it that are, are strange or I, I might not agree with.
• 21:21
  Mike Masnick: I'm impressed by the fact that, they've shown up as having a corporate value that the technology should not be doing harm.
• 21:28
  Mike Masnick: and they're trying to figure out ways to build that in, in a way that, Actually works that it's not just a poster on the wall that you're supposed to look at and make your decisions based on, but that you've actually built it into the systems and technologies that you're building.
• 21:44
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, we will see how, how it actually works out in practice.
• 21:48
  Mike Masnick: But to me, I think this is, just a, a key notable moment in how the concept of, technology safety is evolving.
• 21:57
  Ben Whitelaw: Mm.
• 21:57
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 21:57
  Ben Whitelaw: Really interesting.
• 21:58
  Ben Whitelaw: and, and you know, it would be particularly interesting if in future.
• 22:01
  Ben Whitelaw: Iterations of that, they allow external parties or external, institutions, bodies, experts to input on this as well.
• 22:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 22:09
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm sure there are, there are elements of it that are informal right now, where the team responsible for are of soliciting ideas for the, the kind of constitution.
• 22:18
  Ben Whitelaw: But, It could be a, a situation where you kind of actively seek ideas for the Constitution in a, in a way of building a kind of more representative, document, right?
• 22:27
  Ben Whitelaw: That underpins a model and that that could have both safety benefits, but also benefits in terms of attracting a user base that cares about these things.
• 22:35
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, you could even imagine a world where, like the US Constitution, in theory, you can add amendments to it that you know, you need to get sort of democratic support for, right?
• 22:45
  Mike Masnick: So you could see a system like that happening.
• 22:48
  Mike Masnick: I also think the fact that it is that they put in the public domain is interesting because in theory you could see other models or other systems try and adopt it or modify it to their own needs and it would be interesting to see if other.
• 23:02
  Mike Masnick: open source models or whatever, try to take this and change it and adjust it and see what kind of results we get from it.
• 23:09
  Mike Masnick: it'll be interesting.
• 23:10
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think this is probably so specific to Claude that I'm not sure, but Claude has honestly, you know, such a good reputation among the different LLMs that it wouldn't surprise me if some of the models, or even honestly some of the open source Chinese models that are.
• 23:26
  Mike Masnick: Coming on the market might try and adopt this just to sort of improve the, quality of their systems.
• 23:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 23:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, it would be, uh.
• 23:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Interesting to see who picks it up.
• 23:35
  Ben Whitelaw: let's move on now to, someone who is probably at Davos based upon his previous attendance record And the platform that he, is chief of, Neil Mohan and YouTube.
• 23:45
  Ben Whitelaw: in previous years, he has, been at, in Davos, he's been talking about YouTube's, growth and in some cases it's safety, credentials as well.
• 23:53
  Ben Whitelaw: but there's been a kind of flurry of really interesting updates that YouTube has been putting out in the last couple of weeks.
• 23:59
  Ben Whitelaw: and a large part of that has come from him who, you know, he writes this.
• 24:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Annual letter, which acts as a kind of communication to both creators on the platform, but also, viewers as well as kind of other stakeholders and, and the media.
• 24:13
  Ben Whitelaw: So you can kind of get into it and understand a bit about where its focus is.
• 24:17
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm really interested in YouTube, Mike, because it's often aligned for its trust and safety practices, as well as getting away with not a lot of coverage for,
• 24:25
  Mike Masnick: I was gonna say that second part is the big one, right?
• 24:28
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 24:28
  Mike Masnick: I mean, for all the complaints about every social media platform people have said like, YouTube wears a magic cloak.
• 24:35
  Mike Masnick: That that seems to, they get a pass on so much stuff.
• 24:38
  Mike Masnick: It's, it's kind of amazing.
• 24:40
  Ben Whitelaw: exactly.
• 24:40
  Ben Whitelaw: so, so the, the kind of the flurry of announcements and the activity is, is I think, notable.
• 24:45
  Ben Whitelaw: And so last week it was, putal a blog post saying that it was refining its approach to parental controls, particularly around the way, viewers were able to, change how they looked at shorts.
• 24:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Shorts is their kinda short form video format.
• 24:57
  Ben Whitelaw: It's very, very, popular.
• 24:59
  Ben Whitelaw: a bit of a competitor to the Instagram reels.
• 25:01
  Ben Whitelaw: And, it's kind of developed a set of principles where, parents can now specify how much, reels content their children can consume on the platform.
• 25:10
  Ben Whitelaw: Interestingly here, they said.
• 25:13
  Ben Whitelaw: That one of the principles is that you as a parent, can set the limit of reels content to zero.
• 25:18
  Ben Whitelaw: So, you know, I don't want my child to watch any reels content whatsoever.
• 25:21
  Ben Whitelaw: They can watch longer form YouTube content.
• 25:23
  Ben Whitelaw: And YouTube believe that this setting to zero is an industry first.
• 25:28
  Ben Whitelaw: That, that there is no parental control.
• 25:30
  Ben Whitelaw: That means you can set a specific kind of, content to zero, which I found fascinating.
• 25:36
  Ben Whitelaw: I was pretty surprised by that.
• 25:37
  Ben Whitelaw: I felt like that should be Baked into some of the, the settings.
• 25:41
  Ben Whitelaw: anyway, like it was a signal, I think to, to people that, they are making some effort to improve the way that, particularly under sixteens and, children consume content on the platform.
• 25:52
  Ben Whitelaw: then there was Neil Mohans letter, which came out a couple of days ago.
• 25:56
  Ben Whitelaw: He has been kind of.
• 25:58
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, this is basically a strategy for 2026 and beyond, and there's a big focus on creators and helping creators monetize their content on the platform.
• 26:07
  Ben Whitelaw: there's a big focus on AI, as you might expect, but sprinkled in somewhat surprising.
• 26:11
  Ben Whitelaw: There are a couple of safety elements in there too.
• 26:14
  Ben Whitelaw: So, one of them is that, they want to improve parental controls, which is the blog post that was announced last week.
• 26:21
  Ben Whitelaw: And also that they want to remove what he calls harmful synthetic media that violates YouTube's guidelines.
• 26:28
  Ben Whitelaw: and he kind of details a little bit about how.
• 26:31
  Ben Whitelaw: YouTube are using the spam and clickbait systems that they have used to reduce low quality content in the past to then also address AI content.
• 26:39
  Ben Whitelaw: So again.
• 26:40
  Ben Whitelaw: Within this kind of big glitzy letter in which he name drops a bunch of creators and, explains about how YouTube is gonna be the TV of the future and somewhat already is there are like strong safety messages in there as well.
• 26:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Now I'm gonna say, Mike, there are some sort of cynical reasons for this.
• 26:57
  Ben Whitelaw: You could argue that it's about like anticipating a regulatory response here and making YouTube seem.
• 27:02
  Ben Whitelaw: Like the good guy in case anything goes wrong in many of the jurisdictions where it's likely to face heat over the coming years, you could say it's about kind of aligning with the pressure, to keep children safe and, to avoid, endangering children in the way that so many people are caring about.
• 27:17
  Ben Whitelaw: I think it's about cash.
• 27:19
  Ben Whitelaw: I think this is.
• 27:21
  Mike Masnick: You cynic.
• 27:23
  Ben Whitelaw: I think this is about cash I say this because Mohan kind of outlines the three ways that kind of YouTube is moving towards creators, towards a connected TV future and towards a education play.
• 27:35
  Ben Whitelaw: And now there's are three areas that are famously, incompatible with harmful content.
• 27:42
  Ben Whitelaw: I dunno about you, but like trying to get YouTube into education settings or into the living room of your family home without some sort of like.
• 27:51
  Ben Whitelaw: strong safety guidelines is gonna be really, really tough.
• 27:55
  Ben Whitelaw: And so there is clearly a commercial impetus to do this, right?
• 27:59
  Ben Whitelaw: he's not saying explicitly, we're doing this because we want to grow, but you can see from the letter that these two things are connected.
• 28:05
  Ben Whitelaw: And then if you factor in another kind of announcement this week, about the BBC making a bespoke content for the platform, I think this only backs up my point.
• 28:15
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, big media organizations, particularly public broadcasters like BBC, are not gonna start creating content that they only put on YouTube or that they first put on YouTube before putting on, their own platforms.
• 28:27
  Ben Whitelaw: If they can be assured that they're not gonna appear next to some sort of like, terrorist video or beheading, like there was in the mid 2010s, they're gonna need to have strong reassurances that.
• 28:39
  Ben Whitelaw: when they're directing people to watch content on YouTube, those people are not gonna be recommended, content that they shouldn't be watching or that's gonna cause them harm.
• 28:47
  Ben Whitelaw: So I think all of these kind of signals together point to a.
• 28:50
  Ben Whitelaw: two things.
• 28:51
  Ben Whitelaw: I think YouTube is probably taking safety a bit more seriously than maybe we think, or maybe we give them credit for.
• 28:56
  Ben Whitelaw: whether or not they're, doing that right is another question.
• 28:59
  Ben Whitelaw: But also the, the kind of commercial impetus of trust and safety.
• 29:02
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, there are business reasons, good business reasons to care about safety measures and, clearly Neil Mohan has, has realized that.
• 29:11
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, I, I think, I've tried to make this argument for years is that, trust and safety, having a.
• 29:17
  Mike Masnick: trustworthy and safe platform is a good business decision and anyone who thinks of it as a cost center is really missing the big picture because you are, will drive people away.
• 29:28
  Mike Masnick: And I think there, you know, I would say YouTube has actually recognized that for, quite some time.
• 29:33
  Mike Masnick: And there have been different studies.
• 29:34
  Mike Masnick: You know, there are all of the, the.
• 29:35
  Mike Masnick: Sort of early reports when the, recommendation algorithm on YouTube is first becoming very popular about, how it was driving people towards potentially extremist content or, or whatnot.
• 29:45
  Mike Masnick: And YouTube actually appeared to take that fairly seriously and there have been multiple studies.
• 29:51
  Mike Masnick: I think going back about six or seven years showing that, these days it's almost impossible to get YouTube to sort of push you down a dangerous rabbit hole unless you start in a dangerous spot.
• 30:04
  Mike Masnick: And so, a few of the studies basically said yes if you are.
• 30:08
  Mike Masnick: Driven to certain YouTube videos via outside sources.
• 30:11
  Mike Masnick: So some substack, someone on X pointing you to things like it might start taking you to similar kinds of videos.
• 30:19
  Mike Masnick: But if you just go to YouTube straight and watch some videos, it tends to push you more towards the, commercial happy, good videos.
• 30:28
  Mike Masnick: And he mentions somewhere in this, the thing that is, I think.
• 30:34
  Mike Masnick: Totally true.
• 30:35
  Mike Masnick: Or becoming true, or already became true, which is that YouTube is TV today.
• 30:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Mm.
• 30:40
  Mike Masnick: unlike traditional TV where there were giant gatekeepers involved, you had the television studios, which would pick the few shows that they would allow each year, and there would be millions of dollars.
• 30:52
  Mike Masnick: Production that goes into it.
• 30:53
  Mike Masnick: The incredible thing about YouTube is that it effectively has a minor leagues and a and a professional, uh, space that they can play together.
• 31:03
  Mike Masnick: And you, if you're very good at your content, you can move up in the world.
• 31:08
  Mike Masnick: and it's a great thing for YouTube itself because they don't have to go through the risk and, capital expenditure of a tv, studio.
• 31:15
  Mike Masnick: To figure out what to invest in.
• 31:17
  Mike Masnick: You can just sort of see naturally who's building an audience and, the tools are getting, cheaper and cheaper in terms of good cameras, good microphones, good lighting.
• 31:26
  Mike Masnick: the ability to make professional level content, has really democratized in all sorts of ways.
• 31:30
  Mike Masnick: And so I think he's realizing that, that the, or realized that a while ago, but is expressing it here, that if you want to have a really successful platform that continues to grow, you need really good professional content and you need people to feel safe on that platform.
• 31:46
  Mike Masnick: And that's people of all ages.
• 31:47
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think one of the things that comes through in all this is he talks a lot about.
• 31:51
  Mike Masnick: The appropriate kinds of content for all different ages and all different kinds of people that you can sort of find the, niche that works for you and build from there.
• 32:01
  Mike Masnick: And then that includes this idea of like, not removing necessarily, but limiting the appeal and the, the recommendations of content that.
• 32:11
  Mike Masnick: takes you away, away from that.
• 32:12
  Mike Masnick: So they talk about AI slop, he literally calls it AI slop and the clickbait and other things.
• 32:19
  Mike Masnick: And sort of, you know, there is a real focus on trying to build out the platform as a place that people feel comfortable going.
• 32:27
  Mike Masnick: can question whether or not, you know, how well does it actually work in practice.
• 32:31
  Mike Masnick: And of course, with.
• 32:32
  Mike Masnick: However many billions of users they have.
• 32:35
  Mike Masnick: You know, sometimes it fails and sometimes it, doesn't quite work.
• 32:38
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 32:39
  Mike Masnick: but, I think it is, as you said, it is this clear recognition of, there is a, business case, a strong business case for having a trustworthy and safe.
• 32:50
  Ben Whitelaw: what do you think this shift towards, more professionalized creators?
• 32:56
  Ben Whitelaw: What impact does that have on trust and safety on the platform?
• 33:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Because in tv you know, you have, editorialized practices, you have, a fairly kinda homogenous set of, ways of doing things.
• 33:09
  Ben Whitelaw: and you have a very centralized way of deciding what gets shown.
• 33:12
  Ben Whitelaw: You don't have that in YouTube and so.
• 33:14
  Ben Whitelaw: You have all of these creators you can kind of go and follow and subscribe to.
• 33:18
  Ben Whitelaw: As as many, creators as you want, each of them will have very different approaches to not only content, but the way that they address comments and the way that they manage their own corner of YouTube that a kind of part of the trust and safety ecosystem that we haven't really contended with yet is how the creators think about these questions.
• 33:38
  Mike Masnick: Maybe, but I'm not sure.
• 33:40
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you know, it's funny, he addresses in the, in the letter, the days of considering YouTube to be a user generated content platform are over.
• 33:48
  Mike Masnick: You have these professional, content creators who are part of the platform.
• 33:52
  Mike Masnick: I think, I mean, it does matter to them, right?
• 33:55
  Mike Masnick: content creators are always concerned about, what kinds of content they're near and, what else is showing up and what kinds of users, and always have questions about the comments and, and all of that kind of stuff.
• 34:05
  Mike Masnick: I think all of that applies, but I don't, I don't, it doesn't strike me as all that different than the trust and safety questions from before.
• 34:13
  Mike Masnick: you do have elements of.
• 34:15
  Mike Masnick: The brand safety questions become a little bit bigger rather than I mean, brand safety is always a part of trust and safety, but it becomes a larger element in terms of like, which parts of the.
• 34:26
  Mike Masnick: Trust and safety ecosystem, or you're looking at making sure that, someone who's built up a huge, valuable brand doesn't have that undermined by, problematic content appearing next to them or something along those lines.
• 34:39
  Mike Masnick: but it strikes me as part of the continuum.
• 34:42
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I just wonder if there's the potential for a replica of the meta system, There was a VIP content moderation system, right, that came out in some of Jeff Horowitz's reporting, for the Wall Street Journal five or six years ago.
• 34:58
  Ben Whitelaw: And, you know, celebrities and sports people and global superstars and probably some, creators with large, Facebook page followings got special treatment.
• 35:10
  Ben Whitelaw: In some cases being allowed to kind of overturn content decisions and being able to kind of have access to policy
• 35:15
  Mike Masnick: this is the the famous X Check system.
• 35:17
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 35:18
  Ben Whitelaw: check exactly there is a risk of something similar happening if it doesn't already happen again,
• 35:24
  Mike Masnick: I, I am maybe, I mean, I think the X Check system was basically Facebook was overwhelmed and this was klugy solution like.
• 35:33
  Mike Masnick: We need to duct tape something to deal with the fact that I think it, it even started because like the, Barack Obama page got, blocked, for violating policy, but it wasn't really violating policy.
• 35:44
  Mike Masnick: It was basically like there are some accounts where like a human should review it rather than automated systems automatically making the decision and they just sort of duct tape that on, to some extent.
• 35:54
  Mike Masnick: I actually think that the YouTube trust and safety setup may be a little bit more professional, a little bit more organized, that they have better systems in place.
• 36:01
  Mike Masnick: A lot of the bigger accounts, perhaps all the bigger accounts, I don't know what the thresholds are, but they often have YouTube representatives.
• 36:07
  Mike Masnick: So it's not just like the sort of typical trust and safety set up is.
• 36:11
  Mike Masnick: user's sort of blind to it.
• 36:12
  Mike Masnick: It happens behind the scenes nobody knows who the trust and safety people are with YouTube.
• 36:17
  Mike Masnick: Any larger account has a representative that they can reach out to and talk to.
• 36:21
  Mike Masnick: So there's, more of a relationship building there.
• 36:23
  Mike Masnick: And maybe that is something that is different that has, come up from the more professionalized content is the ability to like actually work on.
• 36:29
  Mike Masnick: You partnerships and relationship building and you know, when you hit certain numbers, they send you like physical, loose sight awards and everything.
• 36:37
  Mike Masnick: so, you know, it is different to some extent.
• 36:40
  Mike Masnick: I don't necessarily think we'd see like an X check thing, just in part because I feel like YouTube is maybe a little bit more competent.
• 36:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Famous last words.
• 36:49
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I know, I know.
• 36:50
  Mike Masnick: That's gonna come back to haunt me, isn't it?
• 36:53
  Ben Whitelaw: somebody clip it.
• 36:54
  Ben Whitelaw: Somebody clip it.
• 36:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, that's a really good segue onto I think the first of a, a couple of, quick stories that we'll talk through to round up today's episode.
• 37:01
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike, people with I influence, contacting people within platforms and trying to kind of, move the needle on content that they don't like.
• 37:11
  Ben Whitelaw: This week.
• 37:12
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, this is crazy.
• 37:14
  Mike Masnick: Rand Paul, you know, US Senator from Kentucky has been, historically he's actually been pretty good on internet policy.
• 37:22
  Mike Masnick: and in particular he's been one of the, few remaining senators who has been a strong supporter of section two 30 and the value of section two 30 and, and.
• 37:29
  Mike Masnick: Putting liability in the right place.
• 37:31
  Mike Masnick: we found out this week that that was all a facade.
• 37:34
  Mike Masnick: he wrote this long whiny article in the New York Post basically saying he's completely changed his mind on section two 30 and he was wrong and he didn't realize the implications and why.
• 37:46
  Mike Masnick: Because there was a video on YouTube claiming that he had taken money from Nicholas Maduro the, kidnapped, uh, former president of Venezuela, I guess.
• 37:58
  Mike Masnick: Uh, you know, and, and that is apparently false, and I believe that it is false and defamatory and Rand Paul reached out to Google and demanded that they take down this video and they said, no, we're not the arbiters of truth.
• 38:10
  Mike Masnick: We're not gonna determine whether or not something is true or false.
• 38:13
  Mike Masnick: And he completely lost his shit, basically.
• 38:16
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and, he did legally threaten the person who uploaded the video and they took it down, which is exactly how the system is supposed to work.
• 38:25
  Mike Masnick: And I found it unique for a variety of reasons.
• 38:27
  Mike Masnick: One, this idea that like, oh, you have all these principles, and then suddenly there's a video about you and you flip your principles, that means you didn't have.
• 38:33
  Mike Masnick: Principles in the first place.
• 38:34
  Mike Masnick: Also, Rand Paul had introduced a bill that did not pass a few years ago about jawboning, which would've made it completely illegal for any government official to speak to any platform about removing any content, which is exactly what he did.
• 38:48
  Mike Masnick: And there are all sorts of things.
• 38:50
  Mike Masnick: And I wrote an article about this sort of like.
• 38:52
  Mike Masnick: Picking apart all the different pieces of how incredibly Unprincipled and Hypocritical Rand Paul is in this.
• 38:59
  Mike Masnick: But I think it's actually a really bad sign for section two 30 as well.
• 39:02
  Mike Masnick: This idea that one of its remaining supporters in the Senate is like, oh no, somebody said something mean about me on the internet.
• 39:09
  Mike Masnick: I'm going to now shut down the open in.
• 39:12
  Mike Masnick: was a very frustrating thing.
• 39:14
  Mike Masnick: I would guess that it has to do with different people working in Rand Paul's office.
• 39:18
  Mike Masnick: A lot of these things are driven by staffers, not the senators themselves.
• 39:22
  Mike Masnick: And I do know that, one of the strongest section two 30 supporters who worked in his office no longer works there, and suddenly this comes out of it.
• 39:31
  Mike Masnick: So that sucks.
• 39:32
  Mike Masnick: I'm disappointed in him.
• 39:33
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I, I've long been disappointed in Rand Paul for a variety of reasons, but here's one more reason.
• 39:38
  Ben Whitelaw: We, we had on our Bingo card politician demands magic automated system.
• 39:43
  Ben Whitelaw: We didn't have politician demands, video of them to be taken down.
• 39:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Maybe we should add that too.
• 39:50
  Mike Masnick: that's that's a possibility.
• 39:51
  Mike Masnick: Absolutely.
• 39:53
  Ben Whitelaw: if, if you have ideas, listeners for the bingo card, reminder to get in touch with us, blue Sky LinkedIn, or podcast@controlspeech.com.
• 40:01
  Ben Whitelaw: Interesting.
• 40:01
  Ben Whitelaw: So a bit of hypocrisy there.
• 40:03
  Ben Whitelaw: I wanna shine a light on a story in, the Moscow Times, Mike, which is not a, often media source that we include
• 40:09
  Mike Masnick: Yeah,
• 40:10
  Ben Whitelaw: controlled speech.
• 40:11
  Ben Whitelaw: But it's, interesting to note that, the Russian kind of regulator, well that's Commodore.
• 40:17
  Ben Whitelaw: I think it's probably pronounced very badly.
• 40:20
  Ben Whitelaw: Um.
• 40:20
  Mike Masnick: say it's way better than I would've done so.
• 40:23
  Ben Whitelaw: tell us if I'm wrong, uh, there have been reports about the regulator threatening telegram, about some of its content moderation decisions and potentially throttling the app.
• 40:33
  Ben Whitelaw: And, users have reported the fact that they have struggled to get messages and the kinda app has been very slow.
• 40:39
  Ben Whitelaw: This is me.
• 40:40
  Ben Whitelaw: I, I've never thought I'd say this, but I feel sorry for Telegram, Mike.
• 40:43
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, in all honesty, this is the kind of story of like an app that has basically become too close to a state, and who's tried to kind of thread the line between being principled in its content moderation decisions.
• 40:56
  Ben Whitelaw: And, I wouldn't agree with those content moderation decisions, but it's long said that.
• 41:00
  Ben Whitelaw: It would not, have kind of established trust and safety processes in place.
• 41:05
  Ben Whitelaw: that was why its CEO Pav OV was apprehended, in France, last year, in a long running saga that we talked about.
• 41:14
  Ben Whitelaw: but it has also tried to kind of tread that line in a sense of being used.
• 41:17
  Ben Whitelaw: Globally, but with a strong emphasis in Russia.
• 41:20
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's used by Russian state officials.
• 41:22
  Ben Whitelaw: It's used by kind of activists there.
• 41:24
  Ben Whitelaw: It's used by people who are you know, sharing kind of Russian propaganda.
• 41:28
  Ben Whitelaw: It has lots of very large channels in there related to the Russia, Ukraine, war, and,
• 41:34
  Mike Masnick: I will note really quickly it's, it's a little bit crazy because, Paval Dav was the founder of vk, which was sort of like the Facebook clone in Russia, and he fled because the Russians were demanding things of him that he didn't wanna do.
• 41:47
  Mike Masnick: And so he left Russia and basically got rid of VK and handed it off to somebody else, and then started Telegram outside of Russia.
• 41:55
  Mike Masnick: So it always struck me as weird.
• 41:57
  Mike Masnick: How much Russia has embraced Telegram since, he had been on the outs?
• 42:02
  Mike Masnick: It appeared, but maybe I, who knows?
• 42:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 42:06
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and it seems like they have kind of maintained that interest, I guess, with the view to controlling, in effect Telegram.
• 42:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 42:14
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, they, have said that they haven't, Affected the app.
• 42:18
  Ben Whitelaw: They haven't kind of reduced speeds.
• 42:19
  Ben Whitelaw: but it seems like, it seems like that is the case according to these reports.
• 42:22
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and basically, you know, for all telegrams leaning between, trying to be principled in its content, moderation decisions and establish a global user base, it's, it's ended up being, a slow almost unusable app according to users, in this report.
• 42:36
  Ben Whitelaw: So I, I feel a bit, sorry.
• 42:37
  Ben Whitelaw: Basically, you know, this is.
• 42:40
  Ben Whitelaw: I never thought I'd say that.
• 42:41
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, and I don't condone, some of the content on the app,
• 42:43
  Mike Masnick: I wonder if there's more stuff going on here.
• 42:46
  Mike Masnick: You know, I, I don't know if I trust the reporting on this, but it feels like something is happening, but the Russia is now denying that they're, trying to throttle it.
• 42:56
  Mike Masnick: it'll be interesting.
• 42:56
  Mike Masnick: I think this will be an interesting story to follow.
• 42:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 42:59
  Ben Whitelaw: And let's round up then, Mike with uh, your last story, which is a story which is.
• 43:03
  Ben Whitelaw: I think at the end of today's podcast was, it is a bit of, a bit of a joke.
• 43:06
  Ben Whitelaw: It's a bit of a, I I also, I, I thought this was in April Fools when I read it.
• 43:10
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, this announcement at Davos of a new, new Microblogging platform called W, not X.
• 43:17
  Mike Masnick: It's w.
• 43:21
  Mike Masnick: Uh, we'll see this.
• 43:23
  Mike Masnick: So it was announced, and it's a former eBay executive who was there for over a decade, worked on, privacy, related things.
• 43:30
  Mike Masnick: It feels, and I've heard from multiple people that this is like the most Davos brained approach to, to social media.
• 43:37
  Mike Masnick: they announced it like, oh, we need a new platform.
• 43:40
  Mike Masnick: And it's the same thing that we've heard with like new Twitter.
• 43:42
  Mike Masnick: And like all of these, everyone who comes up with this idea is just like, we're gonna do it better'cause we have integrity as if nobody thought of that before.
• 43:52
  Mike Masnick: There was a strangeness to the original announcement in that they said a new platform, and I am famously in favor of protocols instead of platforms.
• 44:01
  Mike Masnick: So I was a little bit like, oh, come on, we don't need a new silo.
• 44:05
  Mike Masnick: It has since come out that they are most likely potentially using at protocol, and they have a staging site that is effectively.
• 44:15
  Mike Masnick: a wrapped version of Blue Sky.
• 44:17
  Mike Masnick: and so I'm all for experimentation and if they wanna experiment on a protocol, and it doesn't have to be at protocol, it could be Activity Pub or whatever else, I'm happy to see that kind of experimentation.
• 44:29
  Mike Masnick: They also talked a lot about like, every user's gonna be verified, every user's gonna have to upload an id, and that kind of stuff I think is very problematic and makes you a target and, a risk.
• 44:39
  Mike Masnick: And, and I'm not sure that people are actually really going to embrace this, but, you know, it's an experiment.
• 44:46
  Mike Masnick: it strikes me as one that probably won't work, but I do actually appreciate the fact that they're trying to do it on an open social system.
• 44:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 44:52
  Ben Whitelaw: And explain to listeners why it's called W
• 44:57
  Mike Masnick: I, I mean, they've come up with a few different reasons, but like, one is to make fun of X, but then also they, the w split into two Vs.
• 45:05
  Mike Masnick: Which was like verification and values and
• 45:08
  Ben Whitelaw: oh.
• 45:09
  Mike Masnick: like, it's, uh, it's, I'm, I'm not even gonna, and there was also, what was the last one?
• 45:14
  Mike Masnick: There was like, it was for like.
• 45:15
  Mike Masnick: We, I, I can't even remember what the third reason was.
• 45:18
  Mike Masnick: They had all these reasons.
• 45:20
  Mike Masnick: They also like launched it with like a Star Wars scroll in like 1990s rock music.
• 45:25
  Mike Masnick: It was, it was very out of touch with the youth of today, I would say.
• 45:29
  Mike Masnick: So we'll see what happens with it.
• 45:31
  Mike Masnick: I think it'll be an interesting experiment.
• 45:32
  Mike Masnick: apparently they ha they're well funded, so we'll see what that means.
• 45:35
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 45:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Maybe well funded enough to sponsor an episode of control or
• 45:38
  Mike Masnick: There we go.
• 45:39
  Mike Masnick: We're always open to that.
• 45:41
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, however silly your idea.
• 45:43
  Ben Whitelaw: No, that's not true.
• 45:44
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, Mike, that, that rounds us up neatly for today's episode.
• 45:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Thanks very much for giving us your, Fun and unfiltered opinion on this week's news.
• 45:52
  Ben Whitelaw: thanks everyone for listening.
• 45:53
  Ben Whitelaw: It's been great to have you.
• 45:55
  Ben Whitelaw: and thanks to all the outlets that we've featured this week.
• 45:57
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• 45:58
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• 45:59
  Ben Whitelaw: We couldn't do without them.
• 46:00
  Ben Whitelaw: And, thanks very much for listening this week.
• 46:02
  Ben Whitelaw: We'll see you soon.
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