Latest / Ctrl-Alt-Speech / Regulate, Rinse, Repeat

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Regulate, Rinse, Repeat · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike, I'm in the midst of some house renovation, right?
• 0:03
  Ben Whitelaw: And I'm a complete novice at DIY.
• 0:05
  Ben Whitelaw: So I've been listing the help of some of those apps like TaskRabbit.
• 0:10
  Ben Whitelaw: And I've gone to TaskRabbit and it asked me this, this question, right?
• 0:14
  Ben Whitelaw: So I want to, I'm going to pose it to you.
• 0:15
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 0:16
  Ben Whitelaw: the app prompts me with, I need help with
• 0:21
  Mike Masnick: Oh, that's a long, that's a long list, Ben.
• 0:24
  Mike Masnick: That is a big list.
• 0:27
  Mike Masnick: Uh,
• 0:28
  Ben Whitelaw: Give me one.
• 0:29
  Mike Masnick: I think what I will say is that, um, right before we started recording, we did some prep and then we took a little break and I started my laundry and I think we're going to be discussing laundry in a few different contexts today.
• 0:41
  Mike Masnick: So, uh, I will say I will need help with folding my laundry after this podcast is done.
• 0:47
  Ben Whitelaw: Nice.
• 0:48
  Mike Masnick: How about you?
• 0:48
  Mike Masnick: How about you?
• 0:49
  Mike Masnick: What do you need help with?
• 0:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, likewise, apart from, you know, understanding how to paint and to tile and all the rest of it, I need help with understanding when there's a block, not a block.
• 1:01
  Ben Whitelaw: and when does Elon get to decide?
• 1:03
  Ben Whitelaw: That's what I need help with.
• 1:13
  Ben Whitelaw: and welcome to Control Alt Speech.
• 1:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation.
• 1:21
  Ben Whitelaw: This week's episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust and Safety Fund and sponsored by Modulate, the pro social voice technology company, making online spaces safer and more inclusive.
• 1:33
  Ben Whitelaw: We've got a really exciting chat with Mike Papas, Modulate's CEO later on today.
• 1:37
  Ben Whitelaw: He's going to be talking about the interesting question of whether to build or buy trust and safety tools, which is a growing topic of conversation in the space.
• 1:45
  Ben Whitelaw: but right now I'm here with Mike Masnick, the other Mike, the original Mike.
• 1:52
  Ben Whitelaw: And
• 1:52
  Mike Masnick: old mic.
• 1:54
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm not making any, uh, jokes about your age.
• 1:57
  Ben Whitelaw: I know how that goes down.
• 1:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, how are you doing?
• 1:59
  Ben Whitelaw: How's, how's your week been?
• 2:01
  Mike Masnick: Oh, it's been good.
• 2:01
  Mike Masnick: Uh, it's been, um, super busy, lots of stuff going on as always.
• 2:07
  Mike Masnick: and, uh, yeah, it's just, just, you know, everything's been, kind of great.
• 2:12
  Mike Masnick: Crazy and nonstop.
• 2:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, we were kind of saying before we started recording that we could have recorded two podcasts about the number of stories we had this week.
• 2:22
  Ben Whitelaw: There's an awful lot, even more than usual, I'd say, and lots of really quality reporting and interesting stories to talk
• 2:28
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 2:28
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 2:29
  Mike Masnick: So we were saying at some point, you know, we're going to have to add the midweek special extra episode.
• 2:35
  Mike Masnick: But for now, I do think we have plenty of good stuff cover in the meantime.
• 2:40
  Mike Masnick: But oh, and we should mention, by the way, I think it's important to note, next week, we are going to be off.
• 2:47
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 2:48
  Mike Masnick: We have been able to do a podcast every single week, even the week we had planned to take off in July, uh, for July 4th, because the Supreme Court forced us or forced me into a motel room to record a quick special episode.
• 3:02
  Mike Masnick: But, uh, next week we'll be off, but we'll be back, the week after.
• 3:06
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, right.
• 3:06
  Ben Whitelaw: And this is confirmed.
• 3:07
  Ben Whitelaw: We won't be doing a midweek podcast.
• 3:09
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm worried that listeners will think they've got to catch up even, even more content moderation news, which isn't the case, but there's a lot going on.
• 3:16
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, We've also had some really, nice reviews again this week, Mike, and we've had a bunch of people get in touch, in response to my request for info about where they listen to control or speech and what they're doing while they're listening,
• 3:30
  Mike Masnick: laundry comes up.
• 3:31
  Ben Whitelaw: it keeps coming up, right?
• 3:32
  Ben Whitelaw: It keeps coming up.
• 3:33
  Ben Whitelaw: And I think it's probably because podcasts.
• 3:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Generally are an accompaniment to boring tasks like laundry.
• 3:40
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't think it's just controllable speech, but there's a few other ones as well.
• 3:43
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, we've got some nice responses from folks saying they, they went on, long walks while listening to the podcast.
• 3:49
  Ben Whitelaw: And, my favorite one was a listener who said that they were deboning a turkey carcass in preparation for Thanksgiving.
• 3:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, they were making a soup.
• 3:57
  Ben Whitelaw: So I thought it was a kind of nice, nice selection of responses.
• 4:01
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 4:01
  Mike Masnick: Can you imagine listening to us while de boning a turkey?
• 4:05
  Ben Whitelaw: do you think that the person imagines us as, as the Turkey,
• 4:11
  Mike Masnick: I don't know if, I don't know if I want to go there.
• 4:14
  Ben Whitelaw: I also got some really nice responses from folks about the pedestrian flags, so I'd never seen these pedestrian flags and we had a few listeners.
• 4:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Thanks.
• 4:23
  Ben Whitelaw: Thanks, John, for sending in photos of some pedestrian flags from Seattle.
• 4:26
  Ben Whitelaw: They actually exist.
• 4:27
  Ben Whitelaw: You weren't pulling my leg.
• 4:28
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 4:29
  Mike Masnick: I was being entirely honest with you.
• 4:31
  Mike Masnick: I have seen them in multiple places and, yeah, they exist.
• 4:34
  Mike Masnick: And now you've seen pictures of them at least, but at some point I, I have to imagine that they must exist somewhere in the UK also.
• 4:42
  Mike Masnick: Um,
• 4:43
  Ben Whitelaw: don't know.
• 4:43
  Ben Whitelaw: I will make a pledge to, if there is pedestrian flags in the UK, I will find them and I will, I
• 4:49
  Mike Masnick: we'll get we'll get a picture of you standing waving a flag.
• 4:52
  Mike Masnick: I think that's that's where we need to go.
• 4:54
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 4:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 4:55
  Ben Whitelaw: great stuff.
• 4:56
  Ben Whitelaw: So yeah, if people want to share where and how they listen to control of speech, get in touch with us.
• 5:01
  Ben Whitelaw: we've got some messages on blue sky.
• 5:03
  Ben Whitelaw: We also got some emails, podcast at control alt speech.
• 5:06
  Ben Whitelaw: com.
• 5:06
  Ben Whitelaw: We will get back to you.
• 5:08
  Ben Whitelaw: and we thank you for your inputs as ever.
• 5:10
  Ben Whitelaw: Right, Mike.
• 5:11
  Ben Whitelaw: So we are jumping straight into the many stories that we have this week.
• 5:15
  Ben Whitelaw: we both like a good news story, you know, we both like a kind of interesting, relevant, news lead, but we also like, stories that are a bit more interactive, a bit more interesting.
• 5:26
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't know if you remember the days of Snowfall, the New York Times is very interactive piece from 2012.
• 5:32
  Ben Whitelaw: your first one is, not dissimilar to that, I'd say.
• 5:35
  Ben Whitelaw: Is it?
• 5:35
  Ben Whitelaw: it's a great tale and it's told really nicely online.
• 5:38
  Ben Whitelaw: Talk us through what that is.
• 5:39
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, so this is from NBC News and it's by Brandy Zdrozny, who, if you don't know, hopefully listeners of this podcast know Brandy.
• 5:46
  Mike Masnick: She's one of the best reporters out there on misinformation and has done ton of amazing work on that over the years.
• 5:53
  Mike Masnick: Um, so this is a, a brand new article that just came out this week.
• 5:57
  Mike Masnick: On how Russian propaganda reaches and influences the U.
• 6:00
  Mike Masnick: S.
• 6:00
  Mike Masnick: And it's a very interactive, well done piece in that snowfall style, the modern version of snowfall.
• 6:07
  Mike Masnick: and it's just talking about how Russian disinformation campaign start and basically like how they are creating all sorts of, different things bits of nonsense and just sort of sending it out into the world through this process, creating fake videos, sometimes AI generated.
• 6:25
  Mike Masnick: Sometimes it appears maybe hiring actors to play roles of people, you know, sort of confessing things and just making up complete nonsense stories.
• 6:34
  Mike Masnick: And then it sort of follows through as to where those stories go and how they filter onto, fake news sites that Russian folks have set up.
• 6:43
  Mike Masnick: How they find various trolls on the site formerly known as Twitter.
• 6:49
  Mike Masnick: and then often it sort of launders its way up through the chain until eventually someone like a JD Vance or a Donald Trump might repeat them.
• 6:58
  Mike Masnick: And so it actually follows one particular story, that was completely made up, regarding Ukrainian, officials that are close to, Zelensky buying very expensive yachts and sort of implying that U.
• 7:12
  Mike Masnick: S.
• 7:12
  Mike Masnick: money that is going into Ukraine is being laundered Through, various people to, purchase expensive yachts for Zelensky, and that then sort of, you know, filtered its way through and again laundered its way up the chain to the point that at one point J.
• 7:30
  Mike Masnick: D.
• 7:31
  Mike Masnick: Vance sort of mentioned it on some podcast that he was on that we shouldn't, you know, like, why, why are we sending more money to Ukraine for them to buy expensive yachts, which was a thing that did not happen.
• 7:41
  Mike Masnick: Um, but because it sort of, started from Russian disinformation and, made its way along through, nonsense, peddling American trolls on Twitter, eventually JD Vance picks it up because that's kind of the world that he lives in.
• 7:54
  Mike Masnick: And then suddenly there's like this legitimate question of, Oh wait, are Ukrainian officials buying yachts with American funding?
• 8:02
  Mike Masnick: it's a really well done story and it's, really like, again, it's a very interactive presentation.
• 8:08
  Mike Masnick: The presentation is really fantastic, and they sort of show like how they're doing this with a whole bunch of stories and most of which aren't, catching on at all, but a few of them are, are actually breaking through.
• 8:18
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 8:19
  Ben Whitelaw: this is what's so wild about this piece is the scale at which, this group is, doing this work, and the systematic nature of it right it's, it's huge in terms of scale and like you say, Not many stories make it through, but when they do, they really hit.
• 8:34
  Ben Whitelaw: the story that's, mentioned as well about, a kind of Ukrainian man who's a kind of actor, who apparently confesses to trying to assassinate Tucker Carlson for 4, 000.
• 8:45
  Ben Whitelaw: Wow.
• 8:45
  Ben Whitelaw: Tucker Carlson's in Moscow, absolutely wild and comes with a whole array of like fake images of, burner phones and pictures of Tucker Carlson in Moscow and all packaged up in a really, you know, if you don't know any different, believable way.
• 9:00
  Ben Whitelaw: what do we know about this kind of group that's behind this and, and how, kind of concerning is it that so many stories are getting through into the mainstream, do you think?
• 9:09
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 9:10
  Mike Masnick: So, you know, there have been a few different sort of groups related to doing all these things people know about, like the Internet Research Agency, which was the one that sort of became famous eight years ago.
• 9:21
  Mike Masnick: This one in particular is from this group called Storm 1516.
• 9:25
  Mike Masnick: And they're creating a bunch of these things.
• 9:27
  Mike Masnick: And there's somehow, you know, connected to, Russian officials, but it seems like there's not that much information directly on the group, but they're able to produce these really impressive things.
• 9:39
  Mike Masnick: And then, the example you gave of, the Tucker Carlson story, like that got picked up by a bunch of American sources.
• 9:46
  Mike Masnick: And.
• 9:46
  Mike Masnick: Interestingly, there was a story about a month ago, which, I don't think we actually covered it on the podcast about, you know, U.
• 9:53
  Mike Masnick: S.
• 9:54
  Mike Masnick: officials charged, uh, people associated with RT, Russia, Today, the sort of, you know, Russian propaganda news outlet.
• 10:02
  Mike Masnick: and they had been funding these American YouTube influencers like Tim Poole and Benny Johnson and folks like that, to ridiculous amounts.
• 10:11
  Mike Masnick: maybe we did mention it
• 10:13
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, I think we'll be there
• 10:13
  Mike Masnick: we did.
• 10:14
  Mike Masnick: We briefly mentioned it.
• 10:15
  Mike Masnick: and those are, you Notably in this story, those are the same, same people who picked up on this story about Tucker Carlson supposedly being targeted for assassination.
• 10:26
  Mike Masnick: and they all ran with it.
• 10:28
  Mike Masnick: And so there's this whole ecosystem that has been created to sort of launder this Russian propaganda.
• 10:34
  Mike Masnick: And, there's a little bit.
• 10:35
  Mike Masnick: that I hesitate when talking about this story, because we heard there were similar arguments made, over the last eight years, really nine years, about like Russian propaganda and who it influences.
• 10:47
  Mike Masnick: And there's evidence that it doesn't.
• 10:50
  Mike Masnick: It doesn't actually do much to influence people in some ways, but the thing that it, seems clearly to do, and as the campaigns are becoming more sophisticated, I think the real sort of takeaway from this is that the campaigns are being more sophisticated, but it really shows how much of the disinformation world is really about confirmation bias.
• 11:10
  Mike Masnick: It is so much about not necessarily convincing people.
• 11:15
  Mike Masnick: But taking people who already think this must be happening or these bad things must be going on and giving them something to feed off of and just say, like, yes, well, this story confirms my priors and therefore it feels true and therefore it must be true.
• 11:31
  Mike Masnick: And I think.
• 11:32
  Mike Masnick: people have made this point before, but I think it's one that's worth reminding people and thinking about it.
• 11:36
  Mike Masnick: Last week, we were talking about like risks versus harms, but I think, you know, sort of a related issue is the confirmation bias at the heart of so many of these discussions about, online speech and dis and misinformation is that it's really all about confirmation bias and people looking for content to support what they want to believe.
• 11:55
  Mike Masnick: And what we're creating.
• 11:57
  Mike Masnick: In this ecosystem right now are tools to support anyone's bias, and to give them content that allows them to accept it.
• 12:06
  Mike Masnick: And we're all guilty of it.
• 12:07
  Mike Masnick: Like lots of people would say like, oh, well, you know, I'm, I'm better than that.
• 12:11
  Mike Masnick: But it's not true.
• 12:11
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think everybody at some point falls for some nonsense because they want it to be true and it fits with their prior beliefs on something.
• 12:19
  Mike Masnick: But here, what we're seeing when the campaigns get this big and this advances, it gets easier for people who want to believe these things to take them and to, expand them further.
• 12:30
  Mike Masnick: And because they're so sophisticated and because they're so advanced and they're creating these videos with all the supporting documentation, even though it's all 100 percent fake and 100 percent made up easier for these things to sort of catch on become stories in some form or another.
• 12:45
  Mike Masnick: Okay.
• 12:45
  Mike Masnick: And then the one other interesting thing that I think is coming out of it is that none of these stories, even the ones that have broken through.
• 12:51
  Mike Masnick: And a lot of these stories, they note like just didn't catch on at all, but even the few that did catch on didn't go huge.
• 12:57
  Mike Masnick: Like they weren't like these big disinformation campaigns, but they just sort of like creep in.
• 13:01
  Mike Masnick: Like even I mentioned JD Vance mentioning the Ukraine, Ukrainian yachts or whatever.
• 13:06
  Mike Masnick: He just mentions that in passing in a podcast.
• 13:08
  Mike Masnick: It doesn't become a major story, But it's just one of these things where he's making these arguments about the funding for Ukraine right now and saying like, Oh, do we want that funding to go towards, more Ukrainian yachts?
• 13:18
  Mike Masnick: that's not the major point of the story, but it just sort of filters into the general narrative.
• 13:23
  Ben Whitelaw: Is there, apart from people being more immune to narratives like this and being aware of how stories get laundered through this system, which is really clear from this, piece, are there other ways that we could kind of like slow, the spread information through this chain, do you think, are there ways of, of spotting it, you know, dots that we can trace maybe in the system, because it's really tough for anybody to be, so on top of all of the different narratives out there that they're not.
• 13:49
  Ben Whitelaw: captured by one of the many many narratives that have been perpetuated by these Russian organizations.
• 13:55
  Ben Whitelaw: How can we slow this down a bit more or stymie some of the spread?
• 13:58
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think there's a few different things.
• 14:00
  Mike Masnick: So one, and this is the thing that I always go back to, and it always feels like sort of a cheap shot, but Media literacy is incredibly important.
• 14:06
  Mike Masnick: And again, I just said like confirmation bias, everybody falls prey to it at some point.
• 14:11
  Mike Masnick: I've done it.
• 14:11
  Mike Masnick: I'm sure you've done it.
• 14:12
  Mike Masnick: Like there are stories that you just want to believe.
• 14:14
  Mike Masnick: And so you fall for it, but having general media literacy and sort of recognizing like, is this coming from a trustworthy source?
• 14:21
  Mike Masnick: What are the details?
• 14:22
  Mike Masnick: Who is reporting it?
• 14:23
  Mike Masnick: really matters and learning like when to be skeptical, especially if things that confirm your priors is a really important skill.
• 14:31
  Mike Masnick: It's not one that anyone will ever be perfect at, but.
• 14:33
  Mike Masnick: Training people on that, I think is important.
• 14:35
  Mike Masnick: The second thing is just sort of recognizing media ecosystems.
• 14:38
  Mike Masnick: And this is something that, is really, really important in the sort of reality based world.
• 14:47
  Mike Masnick: I
• 14:47
  Ben Whitelaw: Sounds fun.
• 14:48
  Mike Masnick: I, I'm trying to choose words diplomatically here, but like in the reality based world, mistakes are made.
• 14:54
  Mike Masnick: Reporters make mistakes, news organizations make mistakes, we recognize that, but when those mistakes are discovered, they tend to recognize that, admit that, talk about it, make corrections, and do things like that.
• 15:09
  Mike Masnick: In the sort of pure nonsense peddling world, which now exists, what they will do is not do that, right?
• 15:18
  Mike Masnick: I mean, they will spin stories, they will take fake stories, they will take real story.
• 15:22
  Mike Masnick: I mean, a lot of these stories will come with a grain of truth behind them, because that allows them to sort of obfuscate present these things in a way that, presents a darker picture than the reality says.
• 15:31
  Mike Masnick: I mean, we've seen that with things like the Twitter files and the Hunter Biden laptop, which, you know, has been totally misrepresented over time.
• 15:40
  Mike Masnick: But those sort of start with a grain of truth.
• 15:42
  Mike Masnick: But the ecosystems that are pushing those messages, you'll notice that they don't issue corrections.
• 15:48
  Mike Masnick: They don't hold each other to account.
• 15:51
  Mike Masnick: They don't, admit when they have these kinds of failings, they sort of try and cover it up.
• 15:56
  Mike Masnick: They don't mention it again, or they, they sort of dismisses like, Oh, well, you know, we, we had just heard that, you know, we were just reporting what somebody else said rather than admitting that there was a mistake made.
• 16:07
  Mike Masnick: So.
• 16:08
  Mike Masnick: I think there's an element of like watching the media ecosystem that you are engaged with and seeing how they handle when mistakes are made or when false things are reported or misleading things are reported.
• 16:20
  Mike Masnick: And that, that is a key indicator for me.
• 16:23
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 16:23
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, there's a couple of great quotes in this piece from the kind of The right wing grifters who not only have made money by being paid directly by Russia through, through the fake company that you mentioned, but also making money, obviously, through the monetization of videos about rumors like this, they're benefiting twice, but there's some great quotes, you know, where they say we actually reported it as being a pox and we noted at the time that it wasn't possible to verify the claim.
• 16:48
  Ben Whitelaw: It's like, that would have been a, if anything, a.
• 16:51
  Ben Whitelaw: Scintilla of, um, of a second in which they mentioned it and then they would have moved on and they would not have gone back to it.
• 16:57
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, I think of the quotes someone said at one point was like, you know, they reported on it and then at the end they were just like, you know, we have no real way of verifying this, but, you know, we thought it was important.
• 17:07
  Mike Masnick: It's like, that is not, that is not really a good way to handle this
• 17:11
  Ben Whitelaw: no, and there's, there's a bigger conversation which we should come back to.
• 17:13
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm really interested in, from the work I do in my day job around, what are the kind of signals that content creators and, influencers, inverted commas, what kind of, ethics and transparency should they have and how should the platforms rank them or distribute them according to those kind of journalistic principles is something that I think a lot, a lot of platforms are thinking about.
• 17:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Great.
• 17:35
  Ben Whitelaw: share that story in the show notes.
• 17:36
  Ben Whitelaw: It's definitely something to go and have a read of.
• 17:38
  Ben Whitelaw: It's really interesting, to kind of scroll through and see the different elements.
• 17:41
  Ben Whitelaw: But we'll move now onto, our second story about laundry and about laundering.
• 17:46
  Ben Whitelaw: piece that, came out this week as well, really fantastic piece by, Daphne Keller from Stanford who stood in for me a couple of weeks ago on the podcast.
• 17:55
  Ben Whitelaw: She's written for Lawfare about the rise of the compliant speech platform.
• 17:59
  Ben Whitelaw: and it's a long read.
• 18:01
  Ben Whitelaw: It's definitely worth spending time with.
• 18:02
  Ben Whitelaw: There's lots of great elements to it.
• 18:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Essentially, Daphne speaks to.
• 18:06
  Ben Whitelaw: around a hundred kind of trust and safety experts.
• 18:08
  Ben Whitelaw: And she's pulled together all the insights from that to basically make the argument that content moderation is becoming a compliance function, much like, banks have compliance functions and factory floors have to be compliant to kind of keep workers safe, Trust and safety is now moving in that direction, and her argument is that the regulation that has been introduced over the last few years, the Digital Safety Act, the Digital Services Act, the Online Safety Act, and the Code of Practice for online services in Singapore have created these conditions where platforms are essentially having to be able to report on everything they do, all the decisions that they make, they're having to standardize how they work.
• 18:49
  Ben Whitelaw: They're having to make all of the decisions trackable.
• 18:51
  Ben Whitelaw: That's a big part of the DSA is that the takedown decisions are recorded in a database.
• 18:57
  Ben Whitelaw: And that's.
• 18:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Creating a whole ecosystem around, auditing those decisions and tracking whether those processes have been followed correctly, and she kind of makes the case that this is essentially compliance and she goes on to say that there are a bunch of downsides to this, which, are ones that we talk about a lot on the podcast, which are definitely worth noting and somewhat concerning around government having overdue influence into speech rules on platforms about how, there's a kind of overdue focus on, on metrics and following the right process, even if the outcome isn't the, the best for users or for society as a whole.
• 19:32
  Ben Whitelaw: And so, you know, it's a really great kind of original piece of reporting, I'd say, which we both read and we both thought, yeah, this is great.
• 19:39
  Ben Whitelaw: and we have to talk about it on the podcast.
• 19:40
  Ben Whitelaw: So here we are.
• 19:41
  Mike Masnick: yeah, yeah.
• 19:43
  Mike Masnick: No, I think it's, it is a really valuable contribution to the way of thinking about this understanding all of these things.
• 19:50
  Mike Masnick: And, um, I, I think like Daphne have some concerns about it.
• 19:55
  Mike Masnick: there's an argument I can't remember again, if I've made this argument directly on this podcast before that, I think that there's an important role in, having companies and top executives at companies thinking of trust and safety specifically, as a really important, uh, component.
• 20:15
  Mike Masnick: sort of marketing function that is important, centrally to the company.
• 20:20
  Mike Masnick: I think that a lot of companies think of trust and safety as a cost center.
• 20:25
  Mike Masnick: And we see that like there are layoffs all the time.
• 20:27
  Mike Masnick: You have to hire a whole bunch of people and it's a pain that is frustrating to many Company executives and that comes through when you see them testify or when they talk about these things or Mark Zuckerberg's recent Comments on this stuff.
• 20:40
  Mike Masnick: I think he sees trust and safety as just a nuisance and a cost center for meta And it reminds me of the way that companies 20, 30 years ago viewed customer service.
• 20:53
  Mike Masnick: It was a cost center.
• 20:54
  Mike Masnick: You have to spend all this money on people who answer calls from angry customers.
• 20:59
  Mike Masnick: And you know, you want to get them off the phone as quickly as possible and not have to deal with their complaints.
• 21:05
  Mike Masnick: And then some companies began to come around to the idea that wait a second, like this is one of the major touch points we have between our company and our customers.
• 21:16
  Mike Masnick: This is where they are interacting with us.
• 21:18
  Mike Masnick: This is where they're communicating with us.
• 21:20
  Mike Masnick: Customer service itself is actually a marketing function.
• 21:23
  Mike Masnick: It is a way for us to present a, good side of what we do to our customers.
• 21:28
  Mike Masnick: And therefore, we should invest in it because that will come back in the future in support.
• 21:34
  Mike Masnick: And the argument I keep making is that We need to move trust and safety to that kind of role where it is seen as we are making this platform better.
• 21:42
  Mike Masnick: And in the long run, that means more users, more advertisers, more whatever, because we are making the platform better.
• 21:49
  Mike Masnick: That's what a trust and safety role should be.
• 21:51
  Mike Masnick: It should be seen as an investment, not as a cost sink.
• 21:55
  Mike Masnick: And my worry is That as trust and safety moves more and more into being a compliance function, it goes further and further away from that.
• 22:03
  Mike Masnick: It is again, seen as like, okay, these are boxes we need to check to make the regulators happy, not this is what is actually best for our users.
• 22:12
  Mike Masnick: This is what is going to create a better internet, a better service, a better, whatever overall.
• 22:18
  Mike Masnick: Whereas if we could get the companies to recognize that this is in their best interest, not because the auditors say so, not because the regulators say so, but because it is actually better for the long term health of the wider Internet and the services themselves, that would be better.
• 22:34
  Mike Masnick: So my reaction to this is I think it's great contribution and I think it's accurate and really important, but I worry that This sort of, capitulation to the idea of it being a compliance function actually takes us further from the world that we want.
• 22:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 22:49
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, I do like the idea of.
• 22:51
  Ben Whitelaw: trust and safety being like customer experience and it going in that direction, but what's the downside?
• 22:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Do you think of it being more like compliance?
• 22:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Like if it doesn't go that way.
• 23:00
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 23:00
  Mike Masnick: I mean, some of this comes out.
• 23:01
  Mike Masnick: It's kind of funny as you read Daphne's piece that, like everybody is tiptoeing around the idea that like, we're not setting the rules.
• 23:08
  Mike Masnick: We're not telling you what to leave up or take down.
• 23:11
  Mike Masnick: But like, you know, we have all these things that you need to do in order to make it work.
• 23:17
  Mike Masnick: and so.
• 23:18
  Mike Masnick: What happens when you have that sort of situation, you have auditors involved, what everyone is trying to do is basically just cover their ass.
• 23:26
  Mike Masnick: So that if there's a lawsuit, they can say, well, we did everything by the book.
• 23:31
  Mike Masnick: You know, we did the things that the auditors told us to do, that the regulators indicated were okay.
• 23:36
  Mike Masnick: Or in some cases, where there have been previous court cases or previous, fines, we followed the rules that everybody else laid out.
• 23:45
  Mike Masnick: And so then it's just a, issue of checking boxes as opposed to actually doing what's right.
• 23:50
  Mike Masnick: It is what is, going to decrease the liability on us?
• 23:53
  Mike Masnick: What is going to decrease the legal risk when you have auditors involved?
• 23:56
  Mike Masnick: That's what you're talking about.
• 23:58
  Mike Masnick: Not what is actually going to be the best for the internet and for the users of the internet and for their speech.
• 24:04
  Mike Masnick: And there is.
• 24:05
  Mike Masnick: The potential.
• 24:06
  Mike Masnick: that those two things align that what the government wants, what the auditors suggest, and what is best for the users and for speech align.
• 24:14
  Mike Masnick: But historically, we haven't really seen that play out.
• 24:17
  Ben Whitelaw: hmm
• 24:17
  Mike Masnick: And so that's, that's where my fear is.
• 24:19
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, I mean I Daffy mentions banking in her piece and I wonder if compliance is actually that bad.
• 24:28
  Ben Whitelaw: And if banking hasn't shown us that compliance isn't that bad.
• 24:31
  Ben Whitelaw: So I slightly disagree with kind of where you're coming from.
• 24:34
  Ben Whitelaw: And I just want to explain why.
• 24:35
  Ben Whitelaw: So banks pre 2008 were not dissimilar to tech platforms in some sense, right?
• 24:41
  Ben Whitelaw: They had a lot of users.
• 24:43
  Ben Whitelaw: They were processing a lot of personal data.
• 24:45
  Ben Whitelaw: They were going through millions of transactions every day.
• 24:48
  Ben Whitelaw: they had a lot of kind of wealth and money involved, and they were very central to people's lives.
• 24:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Not, not hugely dissimilar platforms in some sense.
• 24:56
  Ben Whitelaw: 2008 happens, the trust in banks kind of completely disappears.
• 24:59
  Ben Whitelaw: There's course of regulation, and naturally there's pushback from the banks and so they will start to say things that we actually have heard quite recently, right?
• 25:08
  Ben Whitelaw: So that they, you know, Regulation would affect the bank's ability to lend to consumers and would affect the growth of, economies and businesses, it would make it difficult to, sustain their own operations because there'd be an administrative burden on regulation and you know, it would make it easy for larger banks to sustain a place in the market because smaller banks wouldn't be able To kind of comply in the same way.
• 25:33
  Ben Whitelaw: And then what happened was all of these regulations got introduced, right?
• 25:37
  Ben Whitelaw: So you had all of these frameworks introduced for systemic risks.
• 25:41
  Ben Whitelaw: You had a bunch of transparency required around certain markets.
• 25:45
  Ben Whitelaw: You had consumer protection for certain products.
• 25:48
  Ben Whitelaw: And now we all know and understand that banks are regulated.
• 25:53
  Ben Whitelaw: and I wonder if, that is a not dissimilar place to where, where we are now, which is compliance, is a cost of doing business.
• 26:03
  Ben Whitelaw: If you want to get into the speech space, you have to do all of these things.
• 26:07
  Ben Whitelaw: And actually it's only because there is a big pushback against it, that we actually think differently about, speech and about the kind of state of online speech right now.
• 26:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Your thoughts.
• 26:22
  Mike Masnick: Oh boy.
• 26:22
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 26:22
  Mike Masnick: So, um, yeah, I, think there are a lot of differences.
• 26:27
  Mike Masnick: And so one, the banking space was very heavily regulated before that.
• 26:31
  Mike Masnick: Yes, the regulations have changed and they have certainly advanced, but it was certainly not a Wild West of regulation free stuff that the, the banking industry has long been a heavily regulated industry.
• 26:42
  Mike Masnick: Also, many of the concerns that were raised about some of those banking regulations have actually proven true.
• 26:47
  Mike Masnick: I mean, we are now a year and a half since Silicon Valley Bank, which is the bank with which, my company, did business was.
• 26:56
  Mike Masnick: All their accounts were frozen and all my company's money was frozen.
• 27:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Oh shit.
• 27:03
  Ben Whitelaw: I didn't realise that.
• 27:04
  Mike Masnick: It was, it was, quite an experience.
• 27:06
  Mike Masnick: It was actually, this is the funny story was the day that happened was, a day that we had an offsite to work on the trust and safety tycoon game, which came out last year with lots.
• 27:19
  Mike Masnick: And so we had
• 27:20
  Ben Whitelaw: game.
• 27:20
  Ben Whitelaw: Great game.
• 27:21
  Ben Whitelaw: Go and play it.
• 27:21
  Ben Whitelaw: Bye.
• 27:22
  Mike Masnick: I've gone up north, uh, to this very nice house that a friend of ours had rented, uh, with this amazing view, and, in the morning before I left to drive up, I saw the news about Silicon Valley Bank, basically being shut down.
• 27:36
  Mike Masnick: Freaked out and that was not a, comforting offsite.
• 27:39
  Mike Masnick: And we did not get as much work done because I spent a whole bunch of time in this beautiful house on the phone, trying to figure out if our bank accounts was available to
• 27:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah,
• 27:50
  Mike Masnick: So, you know, and since then, of course, there's been a lot of look at, it looks into what's happening with the U S banking system and how poorly targeted some of those regulations were and how they actually have, you know, the end result of this was like Silicon Valley bank got taken over by a larger bank and other larger banks also have sort of, you know, there's been a lot of consolidation and.
• 28:10
  Mike Masnick: it has actually slowed down certain things and it has created some problems.
• 28:14
  Mike Masnick: And on top of that, the even more important thing is like, you know, Even though in some cases, and I know this is one that like sets people off in some cases, money can be equated with speech and expression.
• 28:26
  Mike Masnick: That's a whole other area that we are not about to go down into.
• 28:30
  Mike Masnick: But in general, money and speech are not the same.
• 28:33
  Mike Masnick: The same thing.
• 28:34
  Mike Masnick: And so regulating money and how people hold money is a wholly different thing than regulating how people can speak and how they can communicate.
• 28:42
  Mike Masnick: And so I think that the analogy breaks down after a certain point.
• 28:46
  Mike Masnick: And as soon as you're talking about compliance and regulations around speech, the end result, and this is a point that Daphne definitely makes, is that you are going to lead to suppression of certain kinds of speech.
• 28:55
  Mike Masnick: And that is always at the core, the concerns that I have about these regulations.
• 29:00
  Mike Masnick: Is what happens because as soon as you get into that area, almost always happens is that the speech that is most heavily regulated and suppressed is speech from marginalized groups, marginalized individuals, people with less power, and the more powerful ones, folks are fine.
• 29:17
  Mike Masnick: But people who, have more controversial opinions, but important ones, are kept out of it.
• 29:22
  Mike Masnick: I mean, we've talked about this where there are, Attempts to regulate kinds of disinformation that what happens.
• 29:28
  Mike Masnick: It leads to pulling down information on LGBTQ content.
• 29:32
  Mike Masnick: It leads to pulling down information on health care, uh, things around abortion.
• 29:37
  Mike Masnick: All of these kinds of topics get targeted.
• 29:40
  Mike Masnick: By these speech regulations.
• 29:41
  Mike Masnick: And from the company standpoint, if the idea is just to comply, the easiest thing to do is just say, we're not going to do that.
• 29:47
  Mike Masnick: And we're seeing that to some extent, not, you know, this is not getting all the way there, but there is a story that we had talked about doing, which we didn't do though now I'm bringing it up around, like how meta Instagram and threads are handling, political content and they're sort of pushing it, they're down ranking it and trying to not have it apply, you know, not show up as much within the conversations.
• 30:09
  Mike Masnick: And that is a direct result from all the shit that meta is getting for how it moderates political content.
• 30:15
  Mike Masnick: And so they've sort of thrown their hands up and said, it's easier for us not to deal with this content at all.
• 30:21
  Mike Masnick: And therefore we're going to sort of push it down the algorithm.
• 30:23
  Mike Masnick: We're not going to block it, but we're not going to have it promoted as widely.
• 30:26
  Mike Masnick: And that's a direct response to like people complaining about which content they did promote in the past.
• 30:31
  Mike Masnick: And then just saying, we just don't want to deal with this anymore.
• 30:34
  Mike Masnick: The further and further you get towards creating regulations and compliance burdens for the speech, the more it's going to lead to this kind of speech being suppressed because it's just not worth it.
• 30:43
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah.
• 30:43
  Ben Whitelaw: And I do, I do buy the idea that, There is going to be an unnecessary blocking, deranking, downranking of speech and that concerns me.
• 30:53
  Ben Whitelaw: but I imagine that probably Banks said similar things in 2008.
• 30:57
  Ben Whitelaw: And my question is like, in 10 years time, You know, 15 years time, however far we are from from those regulations, kind of context that users are banking in better than then?
• 31:09
  Ben Whitelaw: And can you see a situation when this regulation, this compliance agenda when that actually takes hold and it looks like it will, because we're seeing more and more, regulation, government regulation about speech all the time.
• 31:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Can you see a situation where the people would adjust to the context and in 10 or 15 years time have processes to better understand, mitigate in a way that isn't just about downranking or blocking speech as we're worried about?
• 31:35
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, you know, we'll see, like, people always adjust to the reality that they have around them.
• 31:39
  Mike Masnick: and so I don't think that that is, you know, yeah, I mean, people will adjust and you don't know what you don't have.
• 31:45
  Mike Masnick: So, you know, whatever, whatever world we live in, people will say like, yes, this is normal.
• 31:50
  Mike Masnick: And this is okay.
• 31:51
  Mike Masnick: But I think, the idea of That, all the regulations around finance, and I'm not, let me be clear, because it was about to sound like I was saying, like, oh, get rid of banking regulations.
• 32:02
  Mike Masnick: I am not saying that.
• 32:03
  Mike Masnick: Not saying that.
• 32:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Do you keep all of your money under the floorboards now because of what happened?
• 32:08
  Mike Masnick: yeah, but, we are still living in a, in a world today where financial scams are massive and all over the place.
• 32:16
  Mike Masnick: And, You can say that maybe some of the regulations on banking led to the rise in like crypto scams.
• 32:23
  Mike Masnick: And now we're talking about pig butchering, which, you know, sort of relies on crypto scamming.
• 32:27
  Mike Masnick: there are a bunch of different things like this stuff sort of oozes out somewhere else in the system.
• 32:33
  Mike Masnick: The idea that we can sort of perfectly regulate these things is not true because humanity is messy, and society is messy, and the way that people interact is messy.
• 32:42
  Mike Masnick: and, so much of these regulations, and again, I'm not making the argument for no regulations.
• 32:47
  Mike Masnick: I'm not saying get rid of them, but I'm saying recognize that there are consequences to these regulations and the unintended consequences lead to, you know, the problems ooze out somewhere else.
• 32:57
  Mike Masnick: And, and we should be very careful about where and how those problems ooze out.
• 33:01
  Mike Masnick: And don't assume that just because like the world itself doesn't collapse, that these approaches are necessarily the right way to do it.
• 33:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 33:09
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 33:09
  Ben Whitelaw: As you can see from the discussion we've had, it's a great piece.
• 33:12
  Ben Whitelaw: I definitely recommend listeners go and have a read.
• 33:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Daphne's done a great job of adding something new.
• 33:17
  Ben Whitelaw: And we could go on and talk about, it for, a lot longer, but we, we have other stories to get to.
• 33:23
  Ben Whitelaw: We've, we've gone, Mike, from there, from a, uh, a very thoughtful, well argued piece by somebody who's really trying to add to the debate to somebody who is the antithesis of that.
• 33:35
  Ben Whitelaw: We're back talking about Elon Musk.
• 33:37
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, we're back talking about Elon Musk.
• 33:39
  Ben Whitelaw: And what's he done this week?
• 33:40
  Ben Whitelaw: What should we, what can we be angry about?
• 33:42
  Mike Masnick: Well, I was about to say, because, you know, I wrote an article about this and I think we're going to link to my article in the show notes.
• 33:48
  Mike Masnick: So I thought you were about to say, we went from a thoughtful piece by Daphne to a terrible, stupid piece by you, Mike.
• 33:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Never.
• 33:55
  Ben Whitelaw: I'd never say that.
• 33:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Don't do it,
• 33:58
  Mike Masnick: But Elon has continued his, belief in changing what used to be called Twitter to his liking and without any thought whether or not it actually makes sense.
• 34:06
  Mike Masnick: And so he did two big things this week.
• 34:09
  Mike Masnick: One is changing the terms of service, that will go into effect in mid November, in ways that have, um, For the time being, I'm going to just raise some eyebrows.
• 34:16
  Mike Masnick: But the bigger one, the more noticeable one is that, while he's talked about this in the past, they've announced officially, that they are changing how the block feature works on x.
• 34:27
  Mike Masnick: Where formally, you know, when you block someone, they can't see what you're doing and they can't interact with you.
• 34:33
  Mike Masnick: And if anyone else interacts with, you know, it's all, it's all blocked.
• 34:37
  Mike Masnick: He's never liked that.
• 34:38
  Mike Masnick: And so now the way it is going to happen is that if someone blocks you, you can still see their content.
• 34:44
  Mike Masnick: You just won't be able to interact with it.
• 34:46
  Mike Masnick: You won't be able to reply.
• 34:46
  Mike Masnick: You won't be able to retweet it.
• 34:48
  Mike Masnick: But you can still see it.
• 34:50
  Mike Masnick: And there is to give him a very, very, very tiny amount of
• 34:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike.
• 34:57
  Ben Whitelaw: Don't do it.
• 34:58
  Ben Whitelaw: no need.
• 34:59
  Mike Masnick: there is a non crazy way to think about this.
• 35:05
  Mike Masnick: And that is basically when people are posting to a public.
• 35:09
  Mike Masnick: system, that content is public and anyone can see it, right?
• 35:14
  Mike Masnick: If I post something to tech dirt, I can't ban someone from seeing what I've written.
• 35:20
  Mike Masnick: If you write something and everything in moderation, you can't ban someone from seeing it.
• 35:24
  Mike Masnick: It is public.
• 35:25
  Mike Masnick: And therefore there's just a general sense that anyone can see it.
• 35:28
  Mike Masnick: And this is the point that everyone always raises with the way that Twitter does blocks or did blocks, which is that.
• 35:34
  Mike Masnick: You know, if somebody blocks you, you can just go into incognito mode and you can see that content because it's public.
• 35:39
  Mike Masnick: And so block is sort of a weird function on social media.
• 35:45
  Mike Masnick: So the theory is like, well, this changes that because it's public, it remains public, but the reality is very different than the theory on this.
• 35:53
  Mike Masnick: And the reality is that that friction that the block function adds makes a real difference in slowing down abuse and harassment a variety of different kinds of.
• 36:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, it's a first, it's a first line of defense in a lot of cases, isn't it, to, people being, targeted in some way.
• 36:09
  Mike Masnick: Exactly.
• 36:09
  Mike Masnick: And it's not perfect by any means, but it's not meant to be.
• 36:12
  Mike Masnick: It is just an attempt to add some friction.
• 36:14
  Mike Masnick: And often, not always, often that amount of friction is enough to make a difference in very important ways.
• 36:21
  Mike Masnick: And so, it works for some element of what it is trying to deal with, and not everything.
• 36:29
  Mike Masnick: And what Musk is doing is sort of removing it for a large segment of the population for which it actually does work.
• 36:35
  Ben Whitelaw: Mmm.
• 36:36
  Mike Masnick: And so, the history here is also important, which is that 11 years ago, Dick Costello, who was CEO of Twitter at the time, had the exact same idea and had the exact same thought that Block is stupid and we should And he did the same thing.
• 36:52
  Mike Masnick: He turned it so that you couldn't interact with people, but you could still see people who blocked you.
• 36:59
  Mike Masnick: It lasted for, I think, two hours before the revolt was so loud and so angry and so public that they rolled it back and never spoke about it again.
• 37:11
  Mike Masnick: As far as I know, there was never any like, you know, postmortem.
• 37:14
  Mike Masnick: There was no discussion of it.
• 37:15
  Mike Masnick: There was a, we're rolling it back.
• 37:17
  Mike Masnick: We're sorry.
• 37:17
  Mike Masnick: We're going to rethink this.
• 37:18
  Mike Masnick: And then it was never mentioned again.
• 37:20
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 37:20
  Ben Whitelaw: Elon doesn't do postmortems.
• 37:22
  Mike Masnick: no, no, no.
• 37:24
  Mike Masnick: And, I mean, Elon at times will roll stuff back.
• 37:26
  Mike Masnick: So it'll be interesting to see if that.
• 37:28
  Mike Masnick: I am pretty sure that Elon has no idea that Twitter tried this before and that it failed miserably and was a complete disaster and an embarrassment for Twitter at the time.
• 37:40
  Mike Masnick: and we are starting to see there is pushback.
• 37:43
  Mike Masnick: I have even seen, people who are normally big supporters of Elon have been screaming about what a stupid idea this is.
• 37:49
  Mike Masnick: and we're seeing a big exodus from Twitter to other sites.
• 37:55
  Mike Masnick: And so people are recognizing that this is a problem and they don't like the way the site works.
• 38:00
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, you were saying before we started recording that blue skies had this massive, uh, Surgeon users, which we're kind of tallying with the changes to block.
• 38:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 38:08
  Ben Whitelaw: And we, this is where I ring the, uh, you know, Mike
• 38:10
  Mike Masnick: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
• 38:12
  Mike Masnick: Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.
• 38:14
  Mike Masnick: I am on the board of blue sky.
• 38:16
  Mike Masnick: I am associated with blue sky.
• 38:18
  Mike Masnick: Consider me biased.
• 38:19
  Mike Masnick: Do not take what I'm saying as impartial for the next section here.
• 38:25
  Ben Whitelaw: I know he can't block people on the platform for you or unban.
• 38:29
  Ben Whitelaw: You don't get in touch with them.
• 38:31
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 38:31
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 38:32
  Mike Masnick: Uh, yeah, please don't.
• 38:34
  Mike Masnick: but yes, blue sky has seen a massive influx in users.
• 38:37
  Mike Masnick: like even bigger, you know, blue sky saw a huge influx of users when, Brazil, uh, Band twitter and a whole, you know, basically, you know, we jumped up about 4 million users the course of a couple of weeks, from that band.
• 38:52
  Mike Masnick: This is larger than that as of right now.
• 38:55
  Mike Masnick: I don't know if it will last as long, but, right before we started recording, I looked at the U S app store, iPhone downloads and blue sky was the number four app.
• 39:06
  Mike Masnick: four free app.
• 39:08
  Mike Masnick: being downloaded, which is pretty impressive.
• 39:10
  Mike Masnick: We were one ahead of TikTok, ahead of Instagram, ahead of WhatsApp, ahead of Gmail.
• 39:16
  Mike Masnick: the only ones that we were behind were threads, which also, I believe lots of people are probably going to threads, uh, ChatGPT and Google.
• 39:24
  Mike Masnick: So, having BlueSky, this very small player in the space, Being the fourth most downloaded app almost, and, it was reported, this is not me revealing anything, uh, internal that, that I'm aware of, but it was reported publicly that within BlueSky, they refer to, EME, which are Elon Musk events that suddenly lead to a massive influx of users on the platform.
• 39:48
  Mike Masnick: And so it's interesting.
• 39:50
  Mike Masnick: to see like how these traces and I'll note again, bias, all of that, all the caveats.
• 39:56
  Mike Masnick: you know, blue sky implements block in a very different way.
• 39:59
  Mike Masnick: And in fact goes further than, Twitter did before, you know, it is referred to as the nuclear block on blue sky, where when you block someone, it obliterates every interaction that you have with that person.
• 40:12
  Mike Masnick: Whereas with blocks on Twitter, the way they, you know, have worked for, A very long time is that even if you block someone, other people can still track, the conversation that you had, they can sort of see what happened on blue sky.
• 40:24
  Mike Masnick: Basically disappears and it is effectively impossible to track down and it stops harassment campaigns cold.
• 40:31
  Mike Masnick: Like it is a very, very impactful way of doing it.
• 40:34
  Mike Masnick: There are some ways around some of it, but they throw a lot more friction into the gears and it has been, it's really powerful.
• 40:43
  Mike Masnick: And it's.
• 40:43
  Mike Masnick: sort of clued me into how these very small changes and how these things are implemented have huge impact in terms of how harassment campaigns can and cannot work on different platforms.
• 40:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, and are we taking the influx of users to blue sky to mean that people are interested in how platforms think about safety?
• 41:03
  Ben Whitelaw: it something that we think is a kind of conscious decision for users or do you think there's people are just shopping around for alternatives?
• 41:09
  Mike Masnick: I don't know the answer.
• 41:10
  Mike Masnick: And so this would be purely speculation.
• 41:13
  Mike Masnick: You know, I think that it's just a sense that, Yes, that some of the safety features matter.
• 41:18
  Mike Masnick: I mean, we saw this early on with blue sky, you know, when blue sky first launched as a beta, it was a private beta invite only the first sort of controversy was that they hadn't yet implemented block at all.
• 41:30
  Mike Masnick: And this was, they were just sort of testing out the system.
• 41:32
  Mike Masnick: And there were like 5, 000 people on the platform and people were so angry.
• 41:36
  Mike Masnick: How could you launch this without block?
• 41:38
  Mike Masnick: Like block was like a, is now considered a fundamental feature of social media, which is kind of surprising because it was not originally, that was a, a later addition to all of this.
• 41:48
  Mike Masnick: And as we see, even Twitter sort of was rethinking how it works, but in our minds now people have sort of learned to associate blocking as a fundamental feature.
• 41:58
  Mike Masnick: Key safety feature of social media that social media needs, then how it's implemented really matters.
• 42:05
  Mike Masnick: And whereas blue sky is gone for this nuclear block, Twitter or X is now moving in this opposite direction of the loosest level of block that you could possibly imagine.
• 42:14
  Mike Masnick: Something is much more akin to the concept of muting rather than blocking.
• 42:18
  Mike Masnick: And so.
• 42:19
  Mike Masnick: it's really interesting, and I hope that we'll find out more of the reasons why people are switching, but, that seems to be the clear reason why we're seeing this massive, massive influx to BlueSky, and I am assuming that Threads and also Mastodon are probably seeing a similar influx of people.
• 42:36
  Mike Masnick: And, uh, You know, I think it's great.
• 42:38
  Mike Masnick: I think, exploring all these different systems and recognizing that now you have choices in terms of which systems do you think are going to do the most to keep you safe and make you feel comfortable on a platform.
• 42:49
  Mike Masnick: I think that's, that's actually a really good thing.
• 42:51
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, no, it's, it's great that there's alternatives out there that people feel they can even try.
• 42:56
  Ben Whitelaw: obviously last week we had a story about threads and Instagram moderation being below par.
• 43:02
  Ben Whitelaw: there being a lot of oddities to the moderation process as a result of presumed moves to AI.
• 43:07
  Ben Whitelaw: And actually this is a kind of nice segue onto what will be a, probably a final story for this week, Mike, but.
• 43:13
  Ben Whitelaw: a bit of an update to the explanation for that, those technical glitches.
• 43:18
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 43:19
  Mike Masnick: So they came, they came out and said that, you know, we, did our whole discussion on it and talked about how it was, obviously AI because it was so stupidly done and like blocking everyone who, who used the word cracker, you know, without understanding any of the context and how like cracker jacks are a snack food and not a racial insult.
• 43:37
  Mike Masnick: So we, assumed naturally that it was an AI driven thing, because that was the only thing that made sense.
• 43:42
  Mike Masnick: But Instagram came out and Adam Asari came out and said that it was a human reviewer problem and that they had not properly instructed human reviewers on how to handle certain kinds of context and things like that.
• 43:53
  Mike Masnick: And I'm not sure I believe them.
• 43:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, I mean, there's, there's a few parts to this, like don't believe him, right?
• 43:59
  Ben Whitelaw: And so you think he's putting the emphasis on humans because it makes, it's in his interest to like disown The human part of this moderation process, I think actually there's something here about the kind of tooling that the humans were, enabled with, like he mentioned about that the tools didn't give it the human's context.
• 44:16
  Ben Whitelaw: Humans aren't going to be able to kind of moderate effectively if they don't have context about something.
• 44:21
  Ben Whitelaw: whether or not you're right it's a tooling aspect, it's not the fact that there's people involved in the process.
• 44:26
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 44:27
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, that is true.
• 44:28
  Mike Masnick: And, and, you know, we know that the tools do matter, but again, like, you know, kind of what we said last week was that it is insane that, meta, the sort of most experienced and the, you know, largest resourced player in trust and safety would have tools that were so bad.
• 44:45
  Mike Masnick: And we were talking about on the AI front, but if that's also true in terms of like the tools for the moderators, that they don't have the context.
• 44:53
  Mike Masnick: I understand like.
• 44:54
  Mike Masnick: Tools for context are a difficult thing, and it's, something I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about it's difficult because context can come in all different ways and could be external to, the content that you're looking at could be external to the platform itself, but not knowing that Crackerjack is a It's not a slur
• 45:17
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 45:17
  Ben Whitelaw: The tool has to have been designed very badly in the first place for that to happen.
• 45:23
  Mike Masnick: yes, yes.
• 45:24
  Mike Masnick: That is my take on it is, is I don't like, that seems like a huge mistake.
• 45:28
  Mike Masnick: And for a company as big, like I could see like a very small player pulling a kind of off the shelf tool somewhere and not really implementing it.
• 45:36
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 45:36
  Mike Masnick: Like having that issue.
• 45:38
  Mike Masnick: I have that issue a little bit now with like moderating comments on TechDirt.
• 45:41
  Mike Masnick: Our tools are not.
• 45:43
  Mike Masnick: Perfect.
• 45:44
  Mike Masnick: And there are a couple of things where like context would be really useful that I don't have, and I have to take a few extra steps to look at like, Oh, who's this person replying to?
• 45:51
  Mike Masnick: Because that actually matters,
• 45:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 45:53
  Mike Masnick: but you know, we're tiny, right?
• 45:56
  Mike Masnick: And so like meta is not right.
• 45:59
  Mike Masnick: I I'm, I am amazed that they would not have tools in place that could handle basic context
• 46:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 46:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Agreed.
• 46:05
  Ben Whitelaw: And I'm not, I'm not a big fan of the headline of this article, which will include in the show notes.
• 46:09
  Ben Whitelaw: Cause it does, it does suggest that he doesn't row back on, on that initial claim and he, he does.
• 46:15
  Ben Whitelaw: So anyway.
• 46:16
  Ben Whitelaw: it's a complex issue as always with content moderation and trust and safety.
• 46:20
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't know if we've solved any of the issues today, Mike, in, in the time we've been talking, but it's been
• 46:25
  Mike Masnick: I will say, this is actually a really good lead into the bonus chat that I have with Mike Pappas, where this question of buy versus build, there are some issues about, how do you choose which things and like, what features do you want and how customized do they need to be?
• 46:40
  Mike Masnick: And that's some of what Mike and I talk about in this bonus chat, because, these are not easy questions.
• 46:46
  Mike Masnick: these are really, really important ones.
• 46:47
  Mike Masnick: And so, I, I think Mike and I get into that in this bonus chat.
• 46:51
  Mike Masnick: And so actually we didn't plan it this way, but it leads in really nicely to the bonus chat between, uh, myself and Mike Pappas from Modulate.
• 47:09
  Mike Masnick: So Mike, welcome back to the show.
• 47:11
  Mike Masnick: Always good to have you here.
• 47:12
  Mike Masnick: Always good to catch up.
• 47:13
  Mike Masnick: we wanted to talk today.
• 47:14
  Mike Masnick: You, you recently wrote this blog post on the modulate site on the issue of building versus buying, technology for trust and safety purposes.
• 47:22
  Mike Masnick: And in particular around voice moderation, which I think is an issue that really comes up a lot in all sorts of contexts around trust and safety right now, and it's, a topic that.
• 47:31
  Mike Masnick: I heard a lot about at TrustCon and I hear about in all sorts of, other contexts as well when thinking about this stuff.
• 47:37
  Mike Masnick: And I was just kind of curious, like, what made you want to write about that topic in the first place?
• 47:42
  Mike Pappas: thanks for having me back, Mike.
• 47:43
  Mike Pappas: Always enjoy having these conversations.
• 47:45
  Mike Pappas: the answer to this is in some sense pretty mundane.
• 47:48
  Mike Pappas: We are a trust and safety tools vendor.
• 47:50
  Mike Pappas: So this is an inherent sort of existential question for us is, does it make sense for people to buy externally?
• 47:58
  Mike Pappas: we're very sort of mission driven, ethics driven company.
• 48:01
  Mike Pappas: We have a lot of deep internal conversations about how do we want to think about marketing and sales strategy.
• 48:07
  Mike Pappas: We don't want to trick someone into buying our product if it's not actually a good fit for them.
• 48:12
  Mike Pappas: So I think what's more interesting here is really looking at it from that lens of.
• 48:18
  Mike Pappas: Can we add a kind of value by being an external organization that you cannot get from sort of spinning up an internal team to build the same tool?
• 48:29
  Mike Pappas: And I think what's interesting is that we do feel like there's a couple of areas where we can provide value that way.
• 48:35
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things, and, and, and, This comes up in all sorts of contexts, again, like not just within trust and safety field.
• 48:41
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think there's lots of areas where everyone is always having that build versus buy conversation.
• 48:46
  Mike Masnick: And one of the things that comes up a lot is this idea of like how central is the thing to your business.
• 48:52
  Mike Masnick: and the general sense being, you know, if something is more central to your business, you tend to lean more towards building versus buying.
• 49:00
  Mike Masnick: But not always sure that's true, right?
• 49:02
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think there are times where, even if something is central, there is value in.
• 49:07
  Mike Masnick: if there is an expert who has the ability to do more because of scale or because of expertise or something else, it actually makes more sense to partner with that vendor.
• 49:17
  Mike Masnick: And so sort of curious where you, how do you, how do you feel about that?
• 49:20
  Mike Masnick: Or how do you think through those things yourself?
• 49:23
  Mike Pappas: Yeah, I mean, electricity is vital to my business.
• 49:26
  Mike Pappas: That doesn't mean I build it myself, right?
• 49:28
  Mike Pappas: To, to your point, there's a lot of things that are essential components.
• 49:33
  Mike Pappas: And because of that essentialness, you cannot afford to get it wrong.
• 49:39
  Mike Pappas: And I think as we've seen over the last several years, you know, trust and safety has long been seen as kind of this cost center, this must we do it.
• 49:48
  Mike Pappas: And we'll try to do it as little as possible.
• 49:51
  Mike Pappas: And as.
• 49:52
  Mike Pappas: Both sort of regulation, consumer sentiment, and frankly, just platforms that care that are being built around that perspective of caring are all sort of looking at this and saying, no, actually, we really should treat this as essential.
• 50:06
  Mike Pappas: I actually see that coinciding with more of them starting to perk their ears up a little bit and say, Let's take a closer look at what else is out there and think about is it worth getting that really premium offering as opposed to just trying to slap something together to check a box?
• 50:24
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, it's, it's interesting.
• 50:25
  Mike Masnick: I, I've been thinking about this in a slightly different context and I didn't realize I was going to go down this path when we started this conversation, but You bringing up the idea of people thinking of it as a cost center.
• 50:35
  Mike Masnick: This is something that I've actually thought a lot about lately as well, where, years ago, I remember there was this whole debate over like call centers and customer support and a lot of companies viewing that as a cost center and then somebody.
• 50:50
  Mike Masnick: You know, had the bright idea, like, wait, this is the main touch point that many of our customers have with our company or their service or products.
• 50:59
  Mike Masnick: Maybe we should realize that like, customer support is actually a marketing function rather than a cost center that is just, causing, headaches for us and then we try and keep as, cheap as possible.
• 51:10
  Mike Masnick: And in that situation too, right.
• 51:12
  Mike Masnick: I mean, a lot of people choose to still outsource it because they know that even, though it is.
• 51:16
  Mike Masnick: really important feature of their business.
• 51:18
  Mike Masnick: It still makes sense to outsource it because you can do that at a much better rate.
• 51:23
  Mike Masnick: do you think of it as sort of similar to that?
• 51:25
  Mike Pappas: Yeah, I think that's right.
• 51:27
  Mike Pappas: And I think it's, partly, you know, why, why we really enjoy working with the kinds of businesses that we do is because they have that conception of this is not just a cost center.
• 51:38
  Mike Pappas: I mean, games are often built by people who are, you know, visionaries trying to create this particular experience that it's really emotionally important to them to realize the experience that they had when they Wanted to create and this is part of it.
• 51:53
  Mike Pappas: If as soon as you step into that wondrous world, someone's calling you the N word.
• 51:58
  Mike Pappas: It's not so wondrous anymore, right?
• 52:01
  Mike Pappas: and I think even with some of the enterprise platforms that we've been working with more recently, we see similarly.
• 52:07
  Mike Pappas: It comes from the culture and mentality of the business that if you're the kind of organization that says we want to win by treating people well and by allowing that to elevate them and help them create something even more wonderful, then you're going to start treating trust and safety more as a core component of your business.
• 52:30
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 52:31
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, I think it's interesting, this comes out in the blog post that you wrote, that there are some things that are very specific to the, voice space and the work that you do.
• 52:41
  Mike Masnick: And you know, it's funny cause I'm, I read your blog post on, building versus buying and I'm just like, All of the things that you have to do to do voice moderation.
• 52:52
  Mike Masnick: Well, it seems horrifying to me, right?
• 52:54
  Mike Masnick: It's just like this huge list of things.
• 52:57
  Mike Masnick: And so not that I'm in the space where I need voice moderation, but like, for me, it's an easy call.
• 53:02
  Mike Masnick: There's no way I want to build, so do you want to talk a little bit about some of the specifics that you sort of discussed in that blog post about, what companies should be thinking about specifically in the voice moderation space.
• 53:14
  Mike Pappas: sure.
• 53:14
  Mike Pappas: Yeah.
• 53:14
  Mike Pappas: I, I think broader than voice moderation, it really comes down the builder by decision to three major components.
• 53:22
  Mike Pappas: There's the data.
• 53:24
  Mike Pappas: What decisions do you want to make?
• 53:26
  Mike Pappas: How can you make the best decisions?
• 53:28
  Mike Pappas: There's the technical capability to actually, build those tools and have them function.
• 53:33
  Mike Pappas: And then there's sort of the user interface.
• 53:35
  Mike Pappas: What's the experience of this?
• 53:36
  Mike Pappas: Do we know how to make that efficient?
• 53:38
  Mike Pappas: In voice, each of those things kind of takes on an extra level, right?
• 53:42
  Mike Pappas: In order to get good data, you You first of all need it to be voice native data.
• 53:47
  Mike Pappas: If you're just looking at transcripts, we've worked with some platforms that took text transcripts and then sent them to, you know, Amazon Mechanical Turk or something and had someone try to read the transcript, you're not getting the emotion, you're not getting any of what we're actually looking for in that voice to really understand that.
• 54:05
  Mike Pappas: So if you want to build a proper voice moderation tool, you need data that's native to.
• 54:11
  Mike Pappas: Real conversations between people.
• 54:14
  Mike Pappas: This is also where I think you get a benefit from working with an external partner, because we see what's happening across so many different platforms.
• 54:25
  Mike Pappas: We can see emerging new trends that haven't reached your ecosystem yet.
• 54:29
  Mike Pappas: We can get much broader data sets to be more robust to different kinds of accents and languages.
• 54:35
  Mike Pappas: We just have a lot more ability to do that kind of stuff because of the cross section we see.
• 54:40
  Mike Pappas: The technical sort of capability.
• 54:43
  Mike Pappas: I don't think I need to spell out too much there.
• 54:45
  Mike Pappas: Processing voice is really complicated.
• 54:47
  Mike Pappas: You need a specialized team on that.
• 54:49
  Mike Pappas: but just on the user interface piece, I'll call out for voice and for a lot of content moderation, but it really becomes extra true in voice.
• 54:57
  Mike Pappas: Moderator mental health.
• 54:59
  Mike Pappas: is a consideration you have to make, right?
• 55:01
  Mike Pappas: if you're not just seeing this awful stuff, but hearing it over and over again over the course of a day, that can be really brutal, and it can actually lead to physical issues, such as tinnitus.
• 55:12
  Mike Pappas: So being able to actually process that audio and make sure that if people are listening to it, they're doing it as little as possible.
• 55:20
  Mike Pappas: You're pre processing it so it's not causing physical damage.
• 55:23
  Mike Pappas: So, That kind of extra stuff is also easily missed when someone is just thinking, oh, how can I, you know, spin something up as quickly as possible here?
• 55:33
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 55:33
  Mike Masnick: I think that's, that's interesting.
• 55:34
  Mike Masnick: There's, I mean, there's a few things that are obviously specific to the voice world that I just never even would have thought of, as well.
• 55:40
  Mike Masnick: Um, it's kind of interesting.
• 55:41
  Mike Masnick: You know, a lot of this discussion is really, and obviously, as you mentioned, you're in the vendor space.
• 55:46
  Mike Masnick: And so this is an existential question for you, but I'm sort of curious.
• 55:50
  Mike Masnick: not as a devil's advocate kind of question, but in which situations do you think it actually does make sense for companies build, build their own
• 55:58
  Mike Pappas: I think the, biggest reasons are sort of where they get an edge on one of those dimensions.
• 56:04
  Mike Pappas: So, uh, On the data dimension, if you have a really unique kind of experience, or you have some way that people are interacting that really is not reflected in other situations, maybe it makes more sense for you to say, Hey, we need to train on our own data because that has truly nothing to do with anything else.
• 56:23
  Mike Pappas: I'm honestly struggling to come up with a good example of that, but I've, I've looked at some very niche apps of, you know, this is specifically.
• 56:30
  Mike Pappas: Chess camp only for like four to six year olds, which is a very different vibe of how to have a conversation.
• 56:37
  Mike Pappas: Maybe something very niche like that.
• 56:39
  Mike Pappas: I think it's more commonly true that it's a technical advantage.
• 56:43
  Mike Pappas: that's not true for things like text and voice that are standardized, images as well, but UGC, obviously coming from gaming, this kind of moderation is a big topic that we hear about a lot, and usually when you're thinking about what are people building in my game, You can't just print out an image of it and say, Oh, run that through the Is It Genitalia filter.
• 57:05
  Mike Pappas: You have to look at it from different angles.
• 57:07
  Mike Pappas: You have to think about how things can compose together.
• 57:10
  Mike Pappas: You have to think about are they actually writing something in the game universe?
• 57:14
  Mike Pappas: Or all of those factors are going to be very specific to your ecosystem and require access to your ecosystem at a deeper level than just grabbing the text or grabbing the audio clips of what's being sort of said.
• 57:29
  Mike Pappas: So I think those are the situations where it makes more sense to try to build in house when just you have access to that in a deeper way than an external partner would be able to.
• 57:40
  Mike Masnick: very interesting.
• 57:41
  Mike Masnick: One sort of final question here.
• 57:42
  Mike Masnick: And this, this is something that has come up when I've had this discussion with people as well, in terms of thinking about it is one of the fears that some people have around doing the outsourced by decision is that it leads to sort of Homogenization of the tools that if everybody's using sort of the same tool, then it, gets stuck with just, you know, one or maybe two, two or three players in the space.
• 58:08
  Mike Masnick: Do you have any thoughts on, on that or how to think through that issue?
• 58:13
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 58:15
  Mike Pappas: I really buy it to be honest.
• 58:17
  Mike Pappas: Um, you know, If you're building one thing internally, that itself is an echo chamber.
• 58:25
  Mike Pappas: If you're pulling from external tools, if there was only one external tool that everyone was using, yes, I would have some concerns.
• 58:33
  Mike Pappas: Now, of course, there's configuration options and all that, but I would still have some concerns.
• 58:37
  Mike Pappas: But we're so amazingly far from that world.
• 58:40
  Mike Pappas: We are very much in a competitive ecosystem where there's a lot of different tools out there, bringing different approaches, different mentalities, handling different kinds of harms, some focused on the financial stuff, some focused on interpersonal.
• 58:55
  Mike Pappas: I don't think we're in any risk of everything calcifying into the exact same environment there.
• 59:02
  Mike Pappas: And I think by.
• 59:04
  Mike Pappas: Having more platforms talking openly to folks like vendors that do sort of operate in that in between space.
• 59:12
  Mike Pappas: That actually sort of up levels the whole conversation we're having as a collective industry because now we're seeing all those different perspectives being gathered together in one place.
• 59:23
  Mike Masnick: Cool.
• 59:24
  Mike Masnick: Very, very interesting.
• 59:25
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 59:25
  Mike Masnick: This is such a fascinating topic.
• 59:27
  Mike Masnick: And I think it's something that a lot of people are thinking about.
• 59:30
  Mike Masnick: So, I'm glad you wrote the blog post.
• 59:32
  Mike Masnick: I'm glad you're coming on the podcast to talk about it as well.
• 59:35
  Mike Masnick: And I'm sure there will be many more conversations along this line but, thanks for joining us today.
• 59:40
  Mike Pappas: Yeah, thanks again for having me.
• 59:41
  Mike Pappas: Always happy to chat.
• 59:45
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