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Do Not Leave a Fake Review for this Podcast · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Ben Whitelaw: I've always been a bit of a lurker on Quora, Mike.
• 0:02
  Ben Whitelaw: I've never contributed my expertise.
• 0:04
  Ben Whitelaw: You won't be surprised to know that, but maybe the reason why I've never gone to posting is because the prompt isn't really speaking to me.
• 0:11
  Ben Whitelaw: So I'm going to test it out on you.
• 0:13
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 0:13
  Ben Whitelaw: The core prompt is.
• 0:16
  Ben Whitelaw: What do you want to ask or share?
• 0:18
  Ben Whitelaw: So ask or share away.
• 0:21
  Mike Masnick: I want to ask if we are contractually required to talk about Elon Musk every week.
• 0:28
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't know how much he's putting into your bank account, but, uh, or the terms of that, but it feels like we're going to have to do again.
• 0:34
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm afraid.
• 0:36
  Mike Masnick: Unfortunately, do you have anything you would like to ask
• 0:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, I'd like to share that everything in moderation, the newsletter that I've been running, on the side for a while now has just had its sixth birthday.
• 0:47
  Ben Whitelaw: So I I'm not in the Mike Masnick, tech, uh, You know, 20 plus years of time that I've been running something, but Hey, it's something.
• 0:59
  Mike Masnick: now that we're, in August, August is the anniversary.
• 1:02
  Mike Masnick: This would now be, I think we, I'm going to try and do the math wrong on the fly.
• 1:09
  Mike Masnick: This would be 27 or years of doing TechTurt.
• 1:13
  Mike Masnick: I think as of.
• 1:15
  Mike Masnick: Perhaps this week, or next week, it's around
• 1:17
  Ben Whitelaw: We're content moderation, online speech side project twins.
• 1:24
  Mike Masnick: There we go.
• 1:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Hello and welcome to Ctrl-Alt-Speech.
• 1:35
  Ben Whitelaw: Your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation.
• 1:42
  Ben Whitelaw: This week's episode is brought to you as ever with financial support from the future of online trust and safety fund.
• 1:47
  Ben Whitelaw: My name is Ben Whitelaw.
• 1:48
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm the founder and editor of the six year old everything in moderation newsletter, and I'm back with, the much longer in the tooth tech founder.
• 1:58
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm, I'm, I can't stop explaining how, old Tector is.
• 2:02
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm I'm just, got to stop after doing
• 2:05
  Mike Masnick: How old I am.
• 2:06
  Mike Masnick: You just, just make it before we started this podcast, we were actually talking about birthdays and age and, how it's a state of mind.
• 2:14
  Mike Masnick: And I am still trying to feel young, but you're, you are consistently pushing me to, recognize my age my old manhood.
• 2:23
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm it's only cause I'm impressed.
• 2:25
  Ben Whitelaw: I believe me.
• 2:26
  Ben Whitelaw: It's no other reason.
• 2:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, Hey Mike, we've got, a sparkling new.
• 2:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Sponsorship page on ctrlaltspeech.Com, which I think is worth celebrating.
• 2:35
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, it's not quite, it's not quite birthday ready, but, we've got a brand new page where you can go and listen to examples of sponsored chats that we've done with really interesting folks within the trust and safety industry.
• 2:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Having kind of topical and timely conversations that we've been able to work with them on.
• 2:53
  Ben Whitelaw: And, I think it's a great addition.
• 2:54
  Ben Whitelaw: It's got some of our best hits so far, but we're hoping to have many more in the future, aren't we?
• 2:58
  Mike Masnick: yeah, absolutely.
• 2:59
  Mike Masnick: And, for folks who are listening, you know, we try and have sponsorships work in a way that are actually interesting to our audience.
• 3:08
  Mike Masnick: This is really important to us.
• 3:10
  Mike Masnick: You know, this is a, very focused podcast of people who are interested in online speech and trust and safety.
• 3:16
  Mike Masnick: And we want to make sure that any sponsorship we do is interesting to these people.
• 3:20
  Mike Masnick: We are not selling mattresses.
• 3:22
  Mike Masnick: We are not, you know, whatever the new hot podcast advertising topic is of the week.
• 3:28
  Mike Masnick: We are looking for sponsors who actually have something interesting to say, you know, we did the recent sponsorship.
• 3:34
  Mike Masnick: That discord did, which had people working on the, open source, trust and safety tools.
• 3:41
  Mike Masnick: We want these conversations to be interesting.
• 3:42
  Mike Masnick: We want people to listen to them.
• 3:44
  Mike Masnick: we, we need more sponsors.
• 3:46
  Mike Masnick: So, so, uh, if you are listening to this and you happen to work for a company that is doing something interesting.
• 3:52
  Mike Masnick: Maybe you've released a report, maybe you have some news, a new product that you think is interesting to the world of trust and safety, people who are interested in online speech, we're looking for you.
• 4:03
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and
• 4:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Not in a creepy way.
• 4:05
  Mike Masnick: not in a creepy way.
• 4:07
  Mike Masnick: But please check out the website.
• 4:08
  Mike Masnick: If you just click on the sponsor, the podcast link, we have a new page that has some more information, and we will be happy to talk to you.
• 4:15
  Mike Masnick: And, uh, we'd be happy to have you sponsor the podcast and get you on for an interview, or it doesn't have to be you from your company directly as well, but it, can be, and if you listen to some of the example sponsorships that we've done, hopefully you get a sense of how we like these things to work.
• 4:32
  Mike Masnick: And so, uh, we'd love to hear from
• 4:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, ctrl alt speech.
• 4:36
  Ben Whitelaw: com we'll add the link in the show notes.
• 4:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike, let's get going with today's stories.
• 4:41
  Ben Whitelaw: We've got a whole smorgasbord of different, takes to bring to our listeners.
• 4:46
  Ben Whitelaw: We're going to start off with the aforementioned M word.
• 4:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, he, you know, we, we said in last week's podcast, we wouldn't mention him.
• 4:54
  Ben Whitelaw: It was, literally never going to happen.
• 4:56
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's taken less than like literally seven days.
• 4:59
  Ben Whitelaw: I can't believe it.
• 5:01
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, Musk has gone from pissing off UK politicians to going back to his old job of pissing off politicians in the EU.
• 5:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Hmm.
• 5:21
  Mike Masnick: happening in the UK and how, violence had broken out and how they were concerned about all of the different issues around, What was happening there this week, Elon Musk interviewed Donald Trump on spaces, which is the, you know, the live audio component of X, uh, which is now famously done multiple failed technical difficulty interviews with Republican politicians.
• 5:48
  Mike Masnick: And leading up to that, there was a lot of hype around this interview between Elon and Donald Trump.
• 5:53
  Mike Masnick: and a few hours before it came out, Terry Breton, who is another person we probably talk about way too much, but who is the EU commissioner in charge of the internal markets, which is all the sort of digital portfolio, DSA related stuff.
• 6:08
  Mike Masnick: sent this open letter, which he posted to X.
• 6:11
  Mike Masnick: I don't know if it was, posted anywhere else.
• 6:15
  Mike Masnick: And there is this question of like, if you're really trying to, limit X's power, like, why are you posting it directly to X instead of elsewhere as well?
• 6:23
  Mike Masnick: Um, but he posted this open letter, which was, weird in a few ways, I think I would say.
• 6:28
  Mike Masnick: And, sort of, you know, Talking about the interview and effectively saying you have requirements under the DSA, and I am just reminding you of them, to not allow for harmful content to spread and then a bunch of other stuff that actually is in the DSA.
• 6:44
  Mike Masnick: The harmful content part is not Really technically in the DSA and goes beyond what most people believe the DSA says.
• 6:54
  Mike Masnick: And in fact, there's been a lot of discussion because like in the run up to the DSA, there were concerns, some of which I have raised myself and others have raised that how this law would be used to target lawful content and try and get for the removal of lawful content.
• 7:12
  Mike Masnick: Lots of people put in a lot of effort to try and.
• 7:14
  Mike Masnick: They told us, limit that possibility to write the DSA in a way that it was not meant for that, it was not meant for censorship, and yet here you have Pertone going out and saying, you have to limit harmful content, and in this context it came off particularly Particularly poorly because this is, one of the candidates for president in the U S giving an interview, having a European official come in and basically say, you have to be ready to not allow some of what he says to be spread online because I believe it is harmful.
• 7:51
  Mike Masnick: comes off badly.
• 7:54
  Mike Masnick: it certainly came off badly to lots of people in the U.
• 7:56
  Mike Masnick: S.
• 7:56
  Mike Masnick: It came off badly to Elon, who posted a meme from the movie Tropic Thunder, which was, something to the effect of take a step back and go fuck yourself in the face.
• 8:10
  Mike Masnick: Very diplomatic.
• 8:12
  Mike Masnick: I'm shh.
• 8:13
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 8:15
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 8:16
  Mike Masnick: Absolutely.
• 8:17
  Mike Masnick: but there is this element of.
• 8:20
  Mike Masnick: You know, it looks bad.
• 8:22
  Mike Masnick: the Trump campaign came out and said, Hey, we don't want Europeans interfering in American elections, which it does kind of look like that.
• 8:31
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you can argue that, Trump is a unique individual in all sorts of ways and creates unique challenges in all sorts of ways, but still it felt really inappropriate.
• 8:42
  Mike Masnick: And the really interesting thing to me was that a lot of Europeans came out and said the same thing.
• 8:48
  Mike Masnick: There, there was, I will note, some knee jerk reactions of Europeans, who insisted that this was all above board and all good.
• 8:57
  Mike Masnick: I got yelled at, for complaining about this letter because I apparently do not understand that the EU does not have a First Amendment, and so that's like the common complaint whenever I point out Problems with speech in the EU.
• 9:09
  Mike Masnick: People tell me, Oh, it's just fine.
• 9:11
  Mike Masnick: But the interesting thing to me was that various officials in the EU and the EU commission itself, though none of them put their names on it, came out and said, uh, yeah, this was bad.
• 9:22
  Mike Masnick: We shouldn't have done this.
• 9:24
  Mike Masnick: Breton did this on his own.
• 9:26
  Mike Masnick: He did not run it by anyone.
• 9:28
  Mike Masnick: the FT had an article that went through people saying, we had no idea that this was actually going to happen.
• 9:34
  Mike Masnick: Politico in the EU had quite a quote that was like pretty stunning for me again, anonymous, but it was an EU official saying, the EU is not in the business of electoral interference.
• 9:47
  Mike Masnick: DSA implementation is too important to be misused by an attention seeking politician in search of his next big job.
• 9:56
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 9:58
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 9:59
  Ben Whitelaw: I bet whoever wrote that story was that, that was a really good get.
• 10:04
  Ben Whitelaw: I think it was Mark Scott.
• 10:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Who's very good at the
• 10:06
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 10:06
  Mike Masnick: It is.
• 10:07
  Ben Whitelaw: it's a great quote.
• 10:09
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, it's a fantastic quote and it, didn't get nearly as much attention as I thought it would, because that is, that is pretty, you know, that's a direct
• 10:18
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 10:18
  Ben Whitelaw: So, so, so what is behind.
• 10:22
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that's the kind of question, the next question, right.
• 10:23
  Ben Whitelaw: It's like, if the commission doesn't know that this is going to happen, if it's a little bit outside of kind of what the DSA.
• 10:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Scope is, what do we think kind of Breton's doing here?
• 10:37
  Ben Whitelaw: other than kind of maybe placing himself in the prime position for his next job, which is just what some people have claimed.
• 10:46
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, you know, I mean, he has, since he's been in this job, he has not shied away from, One, constantly making the story about himself, which, has always struck me as more of an American style political move.
• 11:03
  Mike Masnick: Uh, but, you know, I've joked, repeatedly that it is very difficult to find a social media post that Breton has ever posted that does not have a photo of himself with it.
• 11:15
  Mike Masnick: Whatever he's talking about, this is happening in the EU.
• 11:18
  Mike Masnick: It always has a picture of himself with it.
• 11:20
  Mike Masnick: It's, it's, it's odd.
• 11:21
  Mike Masnick: I don't get it.
• 11:23
  Mike Masnick: but you know, some people like to do that.
• 11:25
  Mike Masnick: he's a selfie kind of guy.
• 11:27
  Mike Masnick: But the bigger thing is that he really has, from the beginning, seemed totally unconcerned about those larger concerns about how the DSA might be used to impact
• 11:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Hmm.
• 11:40
  Mike Masnick: there are lots of other European officials who I think have been very thoughtful and very careful and talked about how We have to be careful with the DSA to make sure that it is not a tool for suppressing speech, that it is really about process, and it is about best practices, and it is about those kinds of things, and then you have Pertone sort of doing this, like, uh, You know, there's like the, the Leroy Jenkins meme of just like, you know, whatever your plans are, the best laid plans, just rush in and just be like, you know, I'm doing it the way I want to do it.
• 12:15
  Mike Masnick: and he's acting as though, he is the official determinant of what is good and bad content online.
• 12:23
  Mike Masnick: And part of that is making the story about himself.
• 12:25
  Mike Masnick: Part of it is that I'm sure he legitimately believes.
• 12:28
  Mike Masnick: That, Trump has a very high likelihood of saying something that could inspire, mass activity, potentially violence.
• 12:38
  Mike Masnick: And there is a history there, obviously.
• 12:40
  Mike Masnick: And he's legitimately concerned about it.
• 12:42
  Mike Masnick: And so is what he thinks he's supposed to do.
• 12:45
  Mike Masnick: I think that's wrong.
• 12:46
  Mike Masnick: And I think it's counterproductive in all sorts of ways.
• 12:48
  Mike Masnick: And it does, you know, as the person the anonymous official who was quoted in the political story, no, it's like it really takes away, I think it actually harms the EU's position and it's sort of moral leadership on regulating internet companies when that tool is then being used by the person in charge of enforcing it to some extent, In this manner.
• 13:09
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, seems like a kind of odd move from him, particularly as no one else seemed to see it coming.
• 13:15
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, I, it tells me about the importance and the difficulty that the DSA is having around implementation.
• 13:23
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, like this, it's, I wondered to what extent Breton is kind of using his letters to Musk and the kind of theater that comes with posting them on X slash Twitter as a kind of interim implementation or.
• 13:38
  Ben Whitelaw: means of, you know, like basically softening him up for, the day when he X in Twitter, we'll have to really abide by these rules formally.
• 13:46
  Ben Whitelaw: And the investigation is still pending as we know.
• 13:49
  Ben Whitelaw: there's this longstanding beef between the commission and Twitter.
• 13:53
  Ben Whitelaw: And I wonder if this is a kind of him trying to do his own kind of soft, soft regulation via his social media account, which obviously is not a good thing, but kind of tactically and politically.
• 14:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Maybe that's part of it.
• 14:06
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 14:07
  Mike Masnick: But I mean, I think there was a related story this week, which, was, one that, that you had called out, which is that your mayor, Sadiq,
• 14:16
  Ben Whitelaw: London's mayor, not just my, my own personal mayor.
• 14:19
  Mike Masnick: yeah, but you live in London, so it's your mayor.
• 14:22
  Mike Masnick: I can say that.
• 14:23
  Mike Masnick: Uh, called out the online safety act as, not being able to handle, what is going on.
• 14:30
  Mike Masnick: And, and we've talked about the situation in the UK and the violence and everything that is happening there, but the, There is this element of the UK passed the Online Safety Act, Europe has the DSA, Australia has its, everybody's passing these internet laws, and we're sort of figuring out the implementation, and where I and other, civil society folks have been concerned is how Even when, officials are saying they're writing these things carefully in manners to not be used for censorship, as soon as there's bad content or bad things happening, it becomes a really easy tool for politicians to do the, we have to do something, like we have to stop this and it's understandable and it's like, I'm not criticizing it as a reaction because it's a, Instinctual, like bad things are happening and you want to stop it.
• 15:19
  Mike Masnick: And as a politician, the first thing you do is you sort of reach for the tools that you have.
• 15:24
  Mike Masnick: the reality is often a lot more complex, but it worries me that, we're already seeing both in the UK and in Europe, this idea that like, we need to crack down on speech, which is effectively the underlying theme.
• 15:37
  Mike Masnick: in both of those
• 15:38
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 15:39
  Mike Masnick: and that is exactly what, I've been worried about, what lots of people have been worried about, because that's kind of how this always happens.
• 15:46
  Mike Masnick: As soon as you start to regulate speech in some form or another, it becomes a really tempting opportunity.
• 15:53
  Mike Masnick: because like bad things are
• 15:54
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 15:55
  Mike Masnick: but, you know, they're bad things in very complex ways.
• 15:58
  Mike Masnick: And the, sort of simplistic tool of like, you have to prevent this from happening, tends not to work very well and tends to, cause other problems that people are not considering.
• 16:07
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 16:08
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's what makes, speech regulation so interesting.
• 16:11
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 16:11
  Ben Whitelaw: Is that in other forms of regulation, there aren't these moments like the UK riots or like, things like Capitol Hill where.
• 16:20
  Ben Whitelaw: All of a sudden, online speech gets put in the headlights in that way so directly, and you have politicians calling out whether they know much about the trade offs that they're talking about, but they're, they're wading in on these topics and they're potentially undoing years and years of work.
• 16:37
  Ben Whitelaw: That's, parliamentarians and also regulators behind the scenes have done to create this kind of very steady methodical way of putting together the act.
• 16:47
  Ben Whitelaw: So yeah, it's, it's what makes this fascinating.
• 16:49
  Ben Whitelaw: The political nature of, you know, speech generally and how things like the UK riots and the EU elections and things like even just Donald Trump joining spaces for a chat with a CEO can really just like all of a sudden create this interest around it.
• 17:07
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 17:08
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you know, one of the things that I've been sort of talking about this, I might write about at some point that I keep thinking about is how, politics ruins policy is, is this theme that I've been thinking about a lot because it keeps coming up where it's like thoughtful policy.
• 17:21
  Mike Masnick: is great.
• 17:22
  Mike Masnick: And we have politicians who create policy and sometimes they try and create thoughtful policy, but the politics so frequently gets in the way and whether it's pandering to a base, whether it is, making a deal with, other parties in order to get something through the politics of, the situation often messes up good policy.
• 17:44
  Ben Whitelaw: and I think, yeah, that will be an interesting place to read because every week we're kind of touching on that same story to an extent.
• 17:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, we should move on.
• 17:52
  Ben Whitelaw: We are cracking through the stories this week.
• 17:55
  Ben Whitelaw: We've been a little longer in.
• 17:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Previous episode.
• 17:57
  Ben Whitelaw: So, the story I want to bring to you, Mike is a interesting Washington post piece about the accuracy of deep fake detection tools.
• 18:06
  Ben Whitelaw: Now, this is a really interesting story in that it really breaks down how AI detection tools work and has kind of taught me something that I didn't know before around the different models that go into determining whether a video of Kamala Harris is real or not.
• 18:24
  Ben Whitelaw: And.
• 18:25
  Ben Whitelaw: The story kind of goes through, and it's one of those kind of interesting scrolly stories that breaks down visually different aspects of, a topic, but it goes through six different images that many of our listeners will know, including the Pope and his puffer jacket, including, Taylor Swift with the Trump one Democrats cheated flag.
• 18:45
  Ben Whitelaw: And it basically highlights that of the eight image detection tools that these photos are put through.
• 18:51
  Ben Whitelaw: None of them.
• 18:52
  Ben Whitelaw: None of them were able to decide whether they were fake or otherwise.
• 18:57
  Ben Whitelaw: So, you know, there was, there was some consensus on some of the photos.
• 19:02
  Ben Whitelaw: No one got an eight out of an eight.
• 19:04
  Ben Whitelaw: So the, there was, only one tool managed to know that the Taylor Swift picture was fake, which is fascinating.
• 19:15
  Ben Whitelaw: And I don't know if you remember the Olympics recently, there was that amazing photo of an Olympic surfer standing in the air.
• 19:21
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, there was two that thought that was fake.
• 19:24
  Ben Whitelaw: So like very quickly, this piece shows how difficult it is to really unpick whether a picture is fake or not.
• 19:31
  Ben Whitelaw: And it goes through exactly how the tools work by demonstrating.
• 19:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Where, by looking like at a face and whether the face of the person in the picture or the video has changed, these models will look at the lip movements and see whether the, that's been manipulated in some way.
• 19:47
  Ben Whitelaw: And if they're potentially not saying something that.
• 19:50
  Ben Whitelaw: They're saying it looks at the audio in various ways, including whether there are kind of strange pauses.
• 19:55
  Ben Whitelaw: it even looks at the kind of pixels and whether there's any strange compositions of pixels.
• 19:59
  Ben Whitelaw: And it just does a really nice job.
• 20:01
  Ben Whitelaw: I think of, demonstrating, how these tools are meant to work whilst also pointing out that actually.
• 20:07
  Ben Whitelaw: They're not very accurate.
• 20:08
  Ben Whitelaw: And this is something we've known for a while.
• 20:10
  Ben Whitelaw: The story doesn't add anything in that regard that the accuracy is somewhere between 25 percent and 80 percent for these tools, the story notes.
• 20:18
  Ben Whitelaw: So there is this massive, caveat, I guess, when using these tools that I think is really important for readers and the public to know about that.
• 20:26
  Ben Whitelaw: Yes, you can be trying to detect whether a photo is fake or not, but actually you're not likely to get a very solid answer, so I really like this piece for kind of how it, breaks down something that many of us are going through, whether trying to work out whether a picture or a video is real or not and the treatment of the story, really, I think more.
• 20:45
  Ben Whitelaw: More media outlets should be doing more stories like this, I think it's a nice way of bringing to life some of the, the issues we talk about in the podcast.
• 20:52
  Mike Masnick: I think it's, it's really well done.
• 20:53
  Mike Masnick: It's really interesting.
• 20:54
  Mike Masnick: It really does a great job of, demonstrating directly, the nature of both false positives and false negatives within these detection systems it's very educational in terms of talking, as you said, sort of going through the details of what the, detectors are doing.
• 21:09
  Mike Masnick: The thing that struck me as, kind of interesting about it is that, I'm, I'm always a little concerned about how quick people are to assume that these kinds of tools work much better than they do.
• 21:20
  Mike Masnick: So I think it's useful to highlight that they don't work all that well, though I don't think that's going to change like.
• 21:27
  Mike Masnick: People will still take them as truth.
• 21:28
  Mike Masnick: And we've had this issue for a long time, even going back before the current generative AI boom, were people who had these various tools that tried to determine who were bots on Twitter.
• 21:39
  Mike Masnick: You know, I remember those and they were awful.
• 21:41
  Mike Masnick: I mean, they were absolutely terrible and, you know, would judge all sorts of very real people as if they were bots.
• 21:48
  Mike Masnick: And it just became this whole, you know,
• 21:50
  Ben Whitelaw: did you ever get classified as a bot?
• 21:53
  Mike Masnick: I did on one of them, on one of them, I was called a bot.
• 21:56
  Mike Masnick: Um, but you know, it's like all of these things are, it's so subjective.
• 22:03
  Mike Masnick: And so my fear though, is that when you have a tool, like it implies, or people just mentally take it as if it's like
• 22:11
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 22:12
  Mike Masnick: form or another.
• 22:13
  Mike Masnick: especially if like some of them score stuff, right.
• 22:15
  Mike Masnick: They give like a percentage and human brains are just not really good at recognizing like what percentages mean, like we have this sort of natural inclination to take.
• 22:26
  Mike Masnick: If it says like 55 percent likely to be a bot, you're like, yeah, it's a bot,
• 22:31
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah,
• 22:32
  Mike Masnick: like our brains round up.
• 22:34
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah.
• 22:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 22:35
  Mike Masnick: and so I'm a little concerned about that people are going to take these things too seriously.
• 22:39
  Mike Masnick: And we've already seen like, there are some, regulatory proposals here in California, for example, that require companies to release detection systems that will detect their AI, which is impossible.
• 22:50
  Mike Masnick: Even the companies themselves that are making the AI tools.
• 22:55
  Mike Masnick: to think that they can create a detector.
• 22:56
  Mike Masnick: OpenAI released their own detector at one point, and I think for a while pulled it.
• 23:02
  Mike Masnick: and I'm not sure if it's back, but even like when they released their own detector, they were very clear that it made a lot of mistakes.
• 23:10
  Mike Masnick: It says that our classifier correctly identifies 26 percent of AI written code.
• 23:17
  Mike Masnick: Texts.
• 23:17
  Mike Masnick: So the true positives were 26 percent of the time, which is not great.
• 23:23
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 23:24
  Ben Whitelaw: like anything, like any kind of large language model, it's only as good as the data that you feed it.
• 23:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 23:30
  Ben Whitelaw: so my sense from this story is that because the Pope in the puffer jacket story, which is one of the photos has been around for a while and has been kind of used as almost like the archetypal.
• 23:42
  Ben Whitelaw: Example of deep fakes, like that's why so many of the tools got it right.
• 23:47
  Ben Whitelaw: Whereas the stories that have had the photos that had less exposure tended to be wrong.
• 23:51
  Ben Whitelaw: And I think that's something that comes through in the story.
• 23:53
  Ben Whitelaw: It's like, if the data is.
• 23:55
  Ben Whitelaw: And some of these are relatively small companies producing these detection tools and don't have the scale and the ability to kind of create large data sets to feed into the models.
• 24:07
  Ben Whitelaw: Then naturally they're not going to be that accurate.
• 24:09
  Ben Whitelaw: And, should there be a, basically a kind of accuracy number for these models?
• 24:14
  Ben Whitelaw: That we, I don't know, flag when users are using these tools.
• 24:17
  Ben Whitelaw: Or again, you, you're right that you have to do that and expect people to still, still just use it anyway.
• 24:25
  Ben Whitelaw: But I wonder how many of it's compounding the, an already bad
• 24:29
  Mike Masnick: is tricky.
• 24:29
  Mike Masnick: I mean, the, the other element in all of this is that, the underlying issue behind so much of this is whether or not these deep fakes matter, right?
• 24:40
  Mike Masnick: So there's obviously a lot of concern and discussion about, you know, Deepfakes and what impact it will have, especially within the election context.
• 24:48
  Mike Masnick: And as we've discussed before on the podcast, a lot of these are not having an impact.
• 24:53
  Mike Masnick: People recognize that they are, you know, almost every deepfake is being called out as a deepfake.
• 25:00
  Mike Masnick: There aren't too many stories of deepfakes having an impact.
• 25:04
  Mike Masnick: And in fact, again, as I think we've discussed in the past, the one thing that seems to be happening much more is people claiming real photos are fake.
• 25:13
  Mike Masnick: And we just had an example of that this week with Donald Trump claiming that a crowd at a Kamala Harris rally was faked when it wasn't.
• 25:22
  Mike Masnick: And so there was all sorts of back and forth on that, where it's, it's sort of enabling people to claim true things are false rather than.
• 25:30
  Mike Masnick: Tricking people into believing false things are true.
• 25:32
  Mike Masnick: And so there is this question of like, obviously having detector tools short, that's great, but how much is that really needed when it seems that the true detector are human beings looking at this stuff and saying, no, I was there.
• 25:47
  Mike Masnick: That really did happen.
• 25:48
  Mike Masnick: Or no, I wasn't there.
• 25:49
  Mike Masnick: That didn't happen rather than using a technology solution.
• 25:52
  Mike Masnick: So there's a little bit of like technology solutionism jumping in where it might not be necessary.
• 25:58
  Ben Whitelaw: fear not, because in, in the UK at least, the story came out this week that the new Labour government is planning to introduce, some lessons in which kids will be taught how to spot misinformation and extremist content in all kinds of lessons.
• 26:15
  Ben Whitelaw: So in.
• 26:16
  Ben Whitelaw: computer science and in English, and they're going to have different lessons introduced to do exactly that, I think.
• 26:22
  Ben Whitelaw: So I think this is something that actually you, you called for in last week's control or speech.
• 26:28
  Ben Whitelaw: You wanted immediate literacy to be kind of higher up on the agenda.
• 26:31
  Ben Whitelaw: And it sounds like the UK government has been listening and they've, done exactly as you've asked in the space of a few days,
• 26:38
  Mike Masnick: because of us.
• 26:39
  Mike Masnick: Absolutely.
• 26:40
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 26:40
  Mike Masnick: No, I mean, you know, some people will make fun of the idea.
• 26:44
  Mike Masnick: You know, media literacy is often the answer that comes up, but it's like the one thing that has been shown to be effective.
• 26:49
  Mike Masnick: Of course, that also means it is now becoming a target on the political side of things, which is that when we've seen some of these media literacy programs pushed, we're seeing them.
• 26:57
  Mike Masnick: The people who want to get away with pushing disinformation, claiming that the media literacy campaigns are actually propaganda campaigns.
• 27:05
  Mike Masnick: but yes, I think it's, it's a good thing.
• 27:07
  Mike Masnick: I think, teaching people how to determine true things from false things, propaganda from, reality, all of this stuff I think is really important and it has to come.
• 27:17
  Mike Masnick: It has to be the people who figure it out.
• 27:19
  Mike Masnick: we can't rely on anything but human brains to actually understand this
• 27:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, for sure.
• 27:24
  Ben Whitelaw: And on that topic of treating true from fake, that leads us neatly onto our next story.
• 27:29
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, I mean, Google results are an area where most folk would probably say that they trust.
• 27:37
  Ben Whitelaw: The answers and the information that are, are there.
• 27:39
  Ben Whitelaw: But you found a kind of interesting story that, that says that maybe actually that shouldn't be always the case.
• 27:44
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, so this was, an Axios story that I thought was really interesting also in sort of raising some of the different issues that come up in trust and safety and content moderation questions, which is that the Kamala Harris campaign has been buying Google ads, the search ads.
• 28:00
  Mike Masnick: So when you do Google search that the ads show up and they're, marked in a way that says that they're
• 28:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Mm
• 28:06
  Mike Masnick: and what you normally think of when you see ads is that the ads are to like a campaign page or, you know, for a product page or service page, it goes to that page.
• 28:16
  Mike Masnick: What the Harris campaign has been doing is buying ads that link to new stories.
• 28:21
  Mike Masnick: And then because you get to write the text of the ad, they're effectively changing the headlines of those stories to be more favorable to them.
• 28:29
  Mike Masnick: So they're not the actual headlines of the article.
• 28:32
  Mike Masnick: They're framing the article in a way that is positive to the Harris Walsh campaign, and that's it.
• 28:39
  Mike Masnick: Interesting.
• 28:40
  Mike Masnick: And it's this sort of interesting affordance that Google ads allows you to do, which is that you can, buy an ad that links to something that is not your own and you get to put in the text of the ad.
• 28:50
  Mike Masnick: And so some people are complaining that this is misleading.
• 28:54
  Mike Masnick: Because, you know, it implies that, if they're linking to a Guardian article and they're putting a headline that is very favorable to the Harris campaign, it implies sort of an endorsement from the Guardian in, in that, in that kind of
• 29:08
  Ben Whitelaw: So the article itself, is, would that have a different headline to the one that users see on Google?
• 29:13
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 29:14
  Mike Masnick: so basically you would see the ad.
• 29:16
  Mike Masnick: And so like they had examples of, VP Harris's economic vision, lower costs and higher wages, right?
• 29:26
  Mike Masnick: Talks about that.
• 29:26
  Mike Masnick: That was to an AP article.
• 29:29
  Mike Masnick: The actual headline was not that I don't know exactly what it was, but this is presenting the story in a light that is, you know, is important.
• 29:37
  Mike Masnick: And, one of the things that I certainly know in writing Tector is that how you.
• 29:43
  Mike Masnick: Frame a headline often really has a major impact, a surprisingly large impact on how people read the article itself.
• 29:52
  Mike Masnick: The influence of a headline can be quite stunning.
• 29:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 29:57
  Ben Whitelaw: No, for sure.
• 29:57
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, the story, Axio story points this out, but Facebook in 2017 stopped.
• 30:04
  Ben Whitelaw: The ability for page owners to change the image and the text headline text when posting to, it's followers.
• 30:12
  Ben Whitelaw: So I was running a few different pages at the time and it radically altered our ability to drive people to the story because we were having to then kind of go back and change the article headline.
• 30:24
  Ben Whitelaw: Which wasn't kind of designed for social and wasn't as catchy.
• 30:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Wasn't as kind of eye catching or click baity as you might say.
• 30:31
  Ben Whitelaw: And so,
• 30:32
  Mike Masnick: I was about to accuse you of clickbait, so I'm glad you admit it.
• 30:36
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, that's one of the worst things I've done.
• 30:39
  Ben Whitelaw: I'll be honest.
• 30:39
  Ben Whitelaw: There's, um, So that, that is something that it's funny that it still exists, you know, six, seven years after Facebook decided to make that change.
• 30:48
  Ben Whitelaw: It still exists in the form of advertiser tools and the publishers don't know anything about it.
• 30:55
  Ben Whitelaw: So the story went to each of the publishers that Harris's campaign features.
• 31:00
  Ben Whitelaw: They had no clue that their articles were being used.
• 31:03
  Ben Whitelaw: They had no idea that the headlines were being changed.
• 31:05
  Mike Masnick: yeah, and, some of them are upset about it, but, you know, there is this element of, is it that bad and sort of Google's response to all of this is like, this is within our policies.
• 31:14
  Mike Masnick: This is, we allow them to do it.
• 31:15
  Mike Masnick: And there is this element of like, if someone has written an article about your campaign or a policy that you're pushing and you want to sort of highlight a key point from that article, Is it that bad if that's the point that you, turn into the headline?
• 31:32
  Mike Masnick: and so I, I, I kind of see both sides of it.
• 31:36
  Mike Masnick: Like, I'm not sure this is that bad, but there is this element of like, I could see how this could be really abused.
• 31:41
  Mike Masnick: And it creates one of these really interesting challenges on a content moderation, trust and safety standpoint of like, should this be allowed?
• 31:50
  Mike Masnick: and if so, what are the limitations or what should be allowed?
• 31:53
  Mike Masnick: And How sensible are these different approaches between like Google saying this is totally fine and meta saying like, no, you can't do this at all.
• 32:02
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah.
• 32:02
  Ben Whitelaw: You would have thought that some of the publishers would have been glad to have had traffic funneled to their sites,
• 32:07
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 32:07
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 32:08
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it is driving, it should be driving traffic, you know, it's people taking ads out, sending people traffic to your site for free.
• 32:15
  Mike Masnick: That's free advertising.
• 32:17
  Mike Masnick: And so, I sort of understand conceptually where the complaints are coming in from the news publishers, but.
• 32:23
  Mike Masnick: not sure it really makes sense.
• 32:25
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, I was joking that I think, I think, I think if you're positioning yourself as an impartial objective view on us politics, it's kind of hard to make that claim whilst one of the presidential candidates also uses you for.
• 32:39
  Mike Masnick: Yes, but I mean it like presidential campaigns will do ads that show, you know, a news article all the time, right?
• 32:48
  Mike Masnick: Or like quote, a news article.
• 32:50
  Mike Masnick: And very selective, right?
• 32:52
  Mike Masnick: So you'll see like a TV commercial that will take like, three words out of an article saying like, Harris is great, or whatever it might be.
• 33:01
  Mike Masnick: You know, that goes back forever.
• 33:03
  Mike Masnick: And people sort
• 33:04
  Ben Whitelaw: this is the same.
• 33:05
  Mike Masnick: you know, I sort of feel that this is kind of the same.
• 33:08
  Mike Masnick: Each of these ads say, paid for by whom, though it is noted in the article that apparently at one point there was a glitch that potentially may have hidden that, disclosure, but most of these do seem to reveal sponsored and by whom.
• 33:23
  Mike Masnick: So again, like if there's media literacy from the people reading these things in theory, they should recognize kind of what's going on here.
• 33:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, no fair.
• 33:33
  Ben Whitelaw: going back to the clickbaity headlines, I've got one for you.
• 33:38
  Ben Whitelaw: which is our next story.
• 33:40
  Ben Whitelaw: I feel like this is, no, one's not going to want to read this next story, which has the headline, the friendliest social network you've never heard of.
• 33:48
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, that's like all the kind of, that's like Buzzfeed back in the day.
• 33:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 33:53
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, that's curiosity gap to its finest.
• 33:56
  Mike Masnick: I was going to say, or Or upworthy,
• 33:59
  Ben Whitelaw: Or up worthy.
• 34:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 34:01
  Ben Whitelaw: Even before that.
• 34:02
  Ben Whitelaw: So this is a Washington Post story.
• 34:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Again, basically a profile of a forum called Frontport Forum, which is a Vermont based kind of social network, come new site, come community forum, which, is being profiled by the Washington Post basically because it has a ranked really, well for, making kind of users feel engaged civically.
• 34:30
  Ben Whitelaw: So new public who we've featured before on the podcast a few times, did some research and, did a questionnaire with users across a number of different sites from porch forum ranked really highly for making people feel like they were kind of connecting with people online in a civil way.
• 34:45
  Ben Whitelaw: And so the piece kind of runs through, exactly what it is and it's, It's, it's a really nice kind of quite quaint profile of, of a site that's clearly not designed to be a competitor to the other social platforms.
• 34:58
  Ben Whitelaw: It's very niche.
• 34:59
  Ben Whitelaw: It's the classic.
• 35:00
  Ben Whitelaw: local stories.
• 35:01
  Ben Whitelaw: You've got things like people sharing, lost cats.
• 35:05
  Ben Whitelaw: You've got things like people trying to sell couches.
• 35:08
  Ben Whitelaw: and the really interesting part, I guess, for us is how French porch forum moderates.
• 35:13
  Ben Whitelaw: And it moderates every single contribution that comes onto the site.
• 35:18
  Ben Whitelaw: Has a very, very strict.
• 35:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Moderation policy, and that allows it before it's
• 35:23
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, that's, that's the important part.
• 35:25
  Mike Masnick: It's not that everything is reviewed, but everything is reviewed before it goes live.
• 35:28
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 35:29
  Ben Whitelaw: So there's, no expectation from the user side that a post would appear imminently, everything is, it goes for review by its team of moderators.
• 35:37
  Ben Whitelaw: And, founder and CEO, Michael Wood Lewis talks about how the site is designed to kind of foster actual real world Conversations and, interactions.
• 35:48
  Ben Whitelaw: It's not really about engagement in the sense that social platforms have always been the case.
• 35:51
  Ben Whitelaw: It's about creating social capital and to kind of, really interestingly talks about wanting to hold people's attention for just 10 minutes a day, and make that time really worthwhile rather than have them engage for hours and hours at a time.
• 36:03
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's a really nice piece.
• 36:05
  Ben Whitelaw: I liked it as well because I spoken to the guys at front porch forum a few years ago.
• 36:10
  Ben Whitelaw: I was really impressed with the way that they thought about some of these issues, the very conscious way that the site is designed, it's very kind of privacy focused.
• 36:19
  Ben Whitelaw: even back then I wasn't, allowed to even have a test account to go into some of these community forums because they're very, very precious about who gets to go in, you have to show that you're part of the, the towns or the areas that you're involved in.
• 36:34
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's, it's very much linked to geography.
• 36:36
  Ben Whitelaw: And since then I've, I know they've been really thinking about how to update their policies as times change.
• 36:42
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's a really nice piece basically.
• 36:44
  Ben Whitelaw: And I know we've talked a bit about some of these issues in the past, but to kind of look back on this again.
• 36:50
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 36:50
  Mike Masnick: And I sort of joked that the headline sounded like Upworthy and that's in part because New Public is Eli Pariser, who was the founder of Of Upworthy.
• 36:59
  Ben Whitelaw: Of course.
• 37:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 37:01
  Mike Masnick: this was, this was, uh, you know, Washington Post piece.
• 37:03
  Mike Masnick: And it's really interesting.
• 37:05
  Mike Masnick: there were a couple of things that I thought were worth calling out, obviously the fact that everything is pre vetted moderated, leads to some interesting issues, you know, in terms of like, a large portion of the small staff for front porch forum are moderators who are reviewing everything.
• 37:24
  Mike Masnick: People know that it is, there's a, a slowness to it, which I think might take away some of the vitriol as well.
• 37:30
  Mike Masnick: It's not the sort of, you know, these.
• 37:32
  Mike Masnick: Things sort of ratchet up, you know, there are questions about how scalable this is, it is mostly dealing with smaller communities, towns with a, maybe a few thousand people at most.
• 37:42
  Mike Masnick: but it, you know, it does strike me as like, this is sort of the anti next door, um, where, I have next door and occasionally I will log very occasionally I will log in and just learn that.
• 37:54
  Mike Masnick: Gosh, my neighbors who I thought I liked all seem really awful, whereas, From Porch Forum really feels like a way to, have like much more civic engagement.
• 38:04
  Mike Masnick: There are questions, of course, when you're pre moderating everything about, They are directly gatekeepers at this point.
• 38:12
  Mike Masnick: And so there are always questions when you have gatekeepers, are they gatekeeping certain viewpoints or certain perspectives?
• 38:18
  Mike Masnick: obviously in this case, it feels like they're very thoughtful about this, but you could see somebody trying to set up the same thing and not having that kind of thoughtfulness and issues.
• 38:27
  Mike Masnick: And so, there are interesting lessons there.
• 38:29
  Mike Masnick: Um, I don't know how replicable they are, on a broader scale, in terms of, is this something that is useful for other sites?
• 38:37
  Mike Masnick: Maybe, it's worth learning about.
• 38:38
  Mike Masnick: It's worth knowing that there is this process.
• 38:40
  Mike Masnick: You can do this thing where you absolutely do moderate every post.
• 38:44
  Mike Masnick: It means a smaller, more focused kind of social network, but it's an interesting story.
• 38:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 38:51
  Ben Whitelaw: No, I'd like to kind of.
• 38:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Rereading some of their, and there was a similar piece by the verge in 2019, looking at them.
• 38:57
  Ben Whitelaw: And, uh, it's nice to see them still getting some press.
• 39:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Cool.
• 39:01
  Ben Whitelaw: So onto our next story now, Mike, this is a, an FTC ruling that you've spotted this week on your travels, which looks at online reviews and maybe something to clamp down on, on that practice.
• 39:13
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 39:16
  Mike Masnick: issue for a long time in the question of are they real or not, and we know that a ton of them are not real, and here the FTC is putting in place, it's, it's an ongoing process for this to actually happen, but it was a unanimous vote by the FTC, 5 0, to move towards putting in place rules that say that it violates the law to do fake reviews.
• 39:39
  Mike Masnick: And there's a number of different elements to it in terms of, buying fake reviews, using AI for reviews.
• 39:45
  Mike Masnick: There are questions around, buying negative reviews for your competitors, whether or not there are insider reviews.
• 39:52
  Mike Masnick: So if you're, just having yourself write reviews and pretending that you're a customer, all of these Kinds of things they're sort of calling out as, unfair business practices, which once the rule goes into effect, we'll allow the FTC to potentially take action.
• 40:07
  Mike Masnick: Some of these rules could be challenged in court.
• 40:09
  Mike Masnick: We now in the U S have, because of the Supreme court in the last term, which changed the way independent agencies can make rules effectively, there'll now be a question of whether or not the FTC can actually do this under its authority.
• 40:22
  Mike Masnick: And I.
• 40:23
  Mike Masnick: I think the Supreme Court might say that this rule is not allowed, um, which I think would be unfortunate.
• 40:29
  Mike Masnick: But there are, online reviews are really influential.
• 40:32
  Mike Masnick: and I will take a quick break to say we haven't gotten many new reviews lately on our podcast and we are not asking for fake reviews and we are not.
• 40:43
  Mike Masnick: Going to fake anything and we do not pay for reviews FTC.
• 40:47
  Mike Masnick: I want them to understand this.
• 40:48
  Mike Masnick: We don't do anything, but we can request nicely for anyone listening to this.
• 40:52
  Mike Masnick: If you would like to review the podcast, please, please, go ahead.
• 40:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 40:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 40:56
  Ben Whitelaw: I was going to say, we're going to have to stop posting fake reviews now that this has come into place.
• 41:02
  Ben Whitelaw: I know, but we don't do that.
• 41:02
  Ben Whitelaw: We don't do that.
• 41:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Hmm.
• 41:04
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, we're going to get a subpoena now.
• 41:06
  Mike Masnick: I mean, look at what you've done, Ben.
• 41:07
  Mike Masnick: Um, but no, you know, I think it's, good that they're trying to crack down, but at the same time, to get back to one of our earlier stories about the AI detection, it is not always that easy to determine what is fake reviews and what is not, and there have been tools for a long time that have tried to call out and distinguish, what is a fake review and I've seen these tools.
• 41:27
  Mike Masnick: And I don't think they're that.
• 41:30
  Mike Masnick: Good in terms of detecting what is a fake review and what is not.
• 41:34
  Mike Masnick: And then there, there are some other like edge cases.
• 41:36
  Mike Masnick: So there's an author, Rob Reed, he's an entrepreneur and an author, and, uh, he's a really interesting guy.
• 41:44
  Mike Masnick: He's founded a few companies in Silicon Valley, and then he's written some really great novels.
• 41:48
  Mike Masnick: and at one point.
• 41:50
  Mike Masnick: He was, I guess, bored.
• 41:52
  Mike Masnick: I don't know exactly what the story was, but he was sort of looking for a creative outlet and he decided that Amazon reviews were going to be his creative, outlet.
• 42:02
  Mike Masnick: And so he started finding just random products that had no reviews that were not that important and he would.
• 42:08
  Mike Masnick: Write these long, he created a persona.
• 42:12
  Mike Masnick: Uh, I'm forgetting the name of the persona.
• 42:15
  Mike Masnick: He created these long, winding reviews that had very, maybe started about the product and then wandered off into very entertaining worlds.
• 42:26
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and so he did that.
• 42:27
  Mike Masnick: And then about 10 years afterwards in his novel after on, which is a very funny sort of comic novel about Silicon Valley, he, uh, wrote a book.
• 42:36
  Mike Masnick: Brought that character and the reviews into the book.
• 42:40
  Ben Whitelaw: Whoa.
• 42:41
  Mike Masnick: And so you can read this novel and it has stories about the character who wrote the reviews and some of the reviews.
• 42:48
  Mike Masnick: And then if you go on Amazon, assuming Amazon has not yet taken them down, you can still find some of those reviews.
• 42:55
  Mike Masnick: And so.
• 42:55
  Mike Masnick: You know, I look at things like these FTC rules and I wonder like, is, is Rob violating these FTC rules?
• 43:02
  Mike Masnick: They're fake reviews.
• 43:04
  Mike Masnick: They're not impacting whether or not people will purchase these.
• 43:06
  Mike Masnick: They are sort of just like a, sort of performance art kind of piece that then show up in his novel.
• 43:12
  Mike Masnick: so I always wonder about like edge cases like that.
• 43:14
  Mike Masnick: Like maybe that doesn't matter.
• 43:15
  Mike Masnick: Like, okay, if Rob can't.
• 43:17
  Mike Masnick: Do his funny reviews.
• 43:19
  Mike Masnick: but there is this element of like, you know, you have to be careful about what it is that you're allowing and not allowing.
• 43:25
  Ben Whitelaw: I think there's, there's some really interesting stories that came out last year about people who.
• 43:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Made a living from writing these reviews, right?
• 43:32
  Ben Whitelaw: And they had a whole theory around how much they should write.
• 43:35
  Ben Whitelaw: And the kind of slightly shorter reviews tended to be seen as less fake or got taken down less often because the longer ones suggest that somebody has like way too much time on their hands.
• 43:47
  Ben Whitelaw: And maybe that's, that's not so, so there's all these kind of like interesting theories that the reviewers have, which again, plays into this idea of.
• 43:54
  Ben Whitelaw: How do you predict what it is a fake review is I think what, this reminded me just how much of the internet is potentially fake reviews and how much emphasis I put on the reviews when I buy something.
• 44:06
  Ben Whitelaw: there was some UK gov research, I think last year that said that up to 15 percent of all reviews were fake between, between 11 and 15%, which is fast.
• 44:15
  Ben Whitelaw: And so, yeah, it feels right that.
• 44:17
  Ben Whitelaw: The FTC is kind of paying attention to this, even though we think that maybe it's not as important or as severe, kind of internet harm as
• 44:25
  Mike Masnick: I, I mean, I, I think it can be, it certainly can be a big thing because people do put weight in reviews in the same way that like, again, unlike the AI detector stuff, I, you can't not be influenced by like the number of stars that a product has, you know, you look at it and you see like different comparable ones.
• 44:41
  Mike Masnick: It's like, you're not going to go with the one that has three stars.
• 44:44
  Mike Masnick: If there's one that has five stars
• 44:45
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 44:46
  Ben Whitelaw: and I didn't realize this, but you need five, five star reviews to make up for a one star review.
• 44:51
  Mike Masnick: really
• 44:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 44:53
  Ben Whitelaw: So to kind of get you back up into the higher echelons of the kind of fours, you need to really over index in fives, which I had no idea about.
• 45:01
  Ben Whitelaw: And obviously demonstrates why
• 45:03
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 45:03
  Mike Masnick: And so it's, it's a challenge.
• 45:05
  Mike Masnick: It's just, the question is how do you really determine it?
• 45:07
  Mike Masnick: And I think what this rule will really let, the FTC do is go after the really egregious cases.
• 45:12
  Mike Masnick: And there have been some egregious cases where it's just, flooding, reviews with fake reviews or, flooding competitors with fake reviews.
• 45:19
  Mike Masnick: You know, I also wonder, how does this rule apply with situations where people use it as a sort of protest tool.
• 45:25
  Mike Masnick: If a company does something badly or acts badly, people will flood their reviews on Yelp or on Amazon with negative reviews, not because of the product, but because the company or the president of the company or whatever, did something bad.
• 45:38
  Mike Masnick: And that is like, that is a kind of expression.
• 45:41
  Mike Masnick: Um, and you can argue that it's, maybe it's not the appropriate way to do it, but like, is that something that the FTC should be looking at?
• 45:48
  Mike Masnick: I don't think they would go after those kinds of things, but does raise these questions of how are those sorts of situations going to be handled?
• 45:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 45:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 45:57
  Ben Whitelaw: I want to keep an eye on.
• 45:58
  Ben Whitelaw: And so we'll wrap up today, Mike, with less of a story than more of a kind of public service announcement for me of, of a, of something I read this week, which I wanted to bring to listeners.
• 46:08
  Ben Whitelaw: I never got to see Del Harvey's 2022 TrustCon presentation about, trust and safety as a kind of healthcare intervention, and this week she has put Published it on her site and we'll include it in the show notes.
• 46:24
  Ben Whitelaw: Del Harvey, for those who don't know, is the head of trust and safety at Twitter for a long time.
• 46:28
  Ben Whitelaw: She left in 2021 and this was the presentation that she gave soon after she left and has done a subsequent number of times you've actually, I think, seen her do this presentation, right, Mike?
• 46:40
  Ben Whitelaw: you thought it was interesting.
• 46:41
  Ben Whitelaw: Basically, she kind of looks at, the similarities between trust and safety and healthcare intervention levels and kind of maps different ways that platforms and kind of intermediaries can have a, impact on internet health, much like The healthcare system does for, people in real life.
• 46:59
  Ben Whitelaw: And so I won't go into it in detail here now, but I find it really interesting.
• 47:03
  Ben Whitelaw: My partner is a doctor.
• 47:05
  Ben Whitelaw: We talk a lot of the time about how infectious diseases and, harm on the internet are quite similar.
• 47:10
  Ben Whitelaw: And I, I really, I hadn't seen this before and I really liked it.
• 47:13
  Ben Whitelaw: What it was trying to suggest.
• 47:15
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 47:15
  Mike Masnick: It's a really interesting framing.
• 47:17
  Mike Masnick: Even if just to think about whether or not you agree with it, I think it's worth thinking about just this idea of, you know, within the healthcare realm, there's been so much more emphasis lately on preventative healthcare.
• 47:28
  Mike Masnick: It's about, stopping you from getting to the situation where, you need health, you know, direct interventions.
• 47:34
  Mike Masnick: Whereas in the past healthcare was viewed as well, once something bad happens, then we intervene.
• 47:40
  Mike Masnick: And so.
• 47:41
  Mike Masnick: Thinking about trust and safety in that same way, like how can we structure incentives and, everything so that we don't have to intervene at that later stage when things have already gotten out of hand, there are some real benefits to thinking about trust and safety in that manner.
• 47:56
  Mike Masnick: So it's absolutely worth reading.
• 47:57
  Mike Masnick: I don't know what's really changed from when she was presenting it a few years ago, but it's, it is really, we're thinking about for people who are, trying to think big picture trust and safety.
• 48:07
  Mike Masnick: How do we approach this?
• 48:08
  Mike Masnick: What does it mean?
• 48:09
  Mike Masnick: How can we build a safer internet in general?
• 48:13
  Mike Masnick: I think it is really, really good.
• 48:15
  Mike Masnick: is this element and I believe strongly in this, that like incentives.
• 48:19
  Mike Masnick: Determine everything and thinking about thinking about everything in terms of incentives.
• 48:24
  Mike Masnick: And I'm working on a big long paper that I've been working on for years.
• 48:28
  Mike Masnick: So I cannot promise when it will ever come out about like regulatory approaches to like, how, how should we think about regulating the internet?
• 48:36
  Mike Masnick: And it just keeps coming back to incentives rather than like.
• 48:40
  Mike Masnick: direct mandates and structure because those keep leading to really bad outcomes.
• 48:44
  Mike Masnick: Whereas if you can structure things that just align incentives better, you often get better results.
• 48:51
  Mike Masnick: and I think this is, a sort of similar way of thinking about it.
• 48:54
  Mike Masnick: It's really well laid out, very thoughtful, it's worth thinking about for people who are in the trust and safety space.
• 48:59
  Mike Masnick: If you haven't seen it, if you haven't seen Dell present it, absolutely worth checking out.
• 49:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 49:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Great.
• 49:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Now you've talked about that paper, Mike, we're going to expect it.
• 49:08
  Ben Whitelaw: It's going to,
• 49:09
  Mike Masnick: I, it's, I've, I've been getting pressure from people I've, I've talked to about it lately that I need to get it out there.
• 49:16
  Mike Masnick: And so it's one of the things that I'm really, really trying to carve out time for, but you know, you keep dragging me back here each week to, to do this podcast.
• 49:24
  Mike Masnick: And that's, that takes, it takes away, way away from my ability to get to it.
• 49:29
  Mike Masnick: But I, I will, it is one of the things that I'm really trying to complete this fall if I can.
• 49:34
  Ben Whitelaw: makes sense.
• 49:34
  Ben Whitelaw: We'll look forward to that.
• 49:35
  Ben Whitelaw: You're also going to be not only doing your share of the podcast next week, you're going to be doing, uh, bit more than that, because I'm not going to be here next
• 49:43
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 49:44
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 49:44
  Mike Masnick: we'll have a guest, uh, and it should be excellent.
• 49:46
  Mike Masnick: We're already, I was going to say, I think.
• 49:49
  Mike Masnick: We may have already found a story that we'll be doing because as we were recording this podcast, Ben, breaking news, breaking news, uh, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals here in California has come out with a decision in the Net Choice vs.
• 50:02
  Mike Masnick: Bonta case, which is about the California age appropriate design code.
• 50:08
  Mike Masnick: Uh, I have talked about, yes, somewhat controversial, the lower court had struck it down and, uh, Uh, Rob Bonta, who's the attorney general here in California, had appealed, and I am just skimming it because we've been talking, uh, so I have not been able to read it, but I think it will be interesting.
• 50:27
  Mike Masnick: It does look as though the Ninth Circuit has upheld, affirmed the district court's injunction blocking the law from going into effect because of First Amendment concerns.
• 50:38
  Mike Masnick: And, um.
• 50:40
  Mike Masnick: And I will note that I had filed a, declaration in this case explaining how this law would have a really negative impact on TechTurt in that I thought, for TechTurt, it was basically there was no way to comply with this law.
• 50:54
  Mike Masnick: and so I filed the declaration in the case pointing that out.
• 50:57
  Mike Masnick: Um, and so I'm sort of happy to see that the law will not be going into effect.
• 51:02
  Mike Masnick: Uh, but something, something to discuss perhaps next week.
• 51:06
  Ben Whitelaw: indeed.
• 51:06
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, I will look forward to listening to you and our co host for next week.
• 51:11
  Ben Whitelaw: Talk through that.
• 51:12
  Ben Whitelaw: That sounds like a really interesting discussion.
• 51:13
  Ben Whitelaw: that wraps us up for this week.
• 51:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Thanks to everyone for listening.
• 51:16
  Ben Whitelaw: Take care.
• 51:16
  Ben Whitelaw: As Mike said, so subtly, if you enjoyed the podcast, and want to review us and see us climb the algorithms on the platforms, which is my only aim in life, really, then please do
• 51:28
  Mike Masnick: Authentic, authentic reviews, no fake reviews.
• 51:33
  Mike Masnick: We would not want to send the FTC after you.
• 51:37
  Ben Whitelaw: no, you're right.
• 51:37
  Ben Whitelaw: You're right.
• 51:38
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm too pretty for that.
• 51:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Um,
• 51:40
  Mike Masnick: And, and, uh, again, a reminder, check out the sponsorship page, the new sponsorship page.
• 51:46
  Mike Masnick: If you are interested in sponsoring an episode or multiple episodes, we have lots of information there for you to check out.
• 51:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Good to speak to you.
• 51:57
  Ben Whitelaw: I'll let you get back to your paper, uh, and I'll, uh, bid farewell to our listeners.
• 52:02
  Ben Whitelaw: Thanks all for listening.
• 52:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Take care.
• 52:03
  Ben Whitelaw: See you soon.
• 52:08
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• 52:10
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• 52:25
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