Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Big Tech & Free Speech" with Jordan Guiao

Transcript

"Big Tech & Free Speech" with Jordan Guiao · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, you guys. This is your safe space for dangerous ideas. Do you ever think that
• 0:07
  social media is getting a little out of control? Do you ever find yourself just scrolling?
• 0:13
  Oh, just I'll just quickly check Instagram while I'm sitting on the toilet and then you
• 0:17
  realize, oh, eight minutes has gone by. I guess I didn't really need to sit on the toilet
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  for that long, but something hooked me. Something got its little anchors into the tendrils of
• 0:27
  my brain and kept me there. Today, Jordan Gowr, who is a, he's written a book called Disconnect
• 0:34
  why we get pushed to extremes online and how to stop it. He's a former digital strategist,
• 0:40
  so he knows his stuff. He worked at the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and
• 0:44
  he was the head of social media for SBS, the special broadcasting service, which is another
• 0:49
  public broadcaster in Australia. So he's actually run social media platforms. He has, well,
• 0:55
  not the platform, social media accounts, and he's been the digital strategist for Australia's
• 1:01
  main public broadcaster. He's worked in Silicon Valley. He gained a lot of insights there into
• 1:07
  technology there in the tech capital of the world. He's now a research fellow at the Australia
• 1:12
  Institute's Centre for Responsible Technology. All of the profits from this book will be
• 1:17
  plowed back into the Australia Institute, which is a think tank to try to address some of the
• 1:22
  issues that he raises in the book. It's an interesting structure to the book. He basically goes
• 1:27
  through these archetypes of humans who are being negatively impacted by big tech. Firstly,
• 1:35
  the online conspiracy theorist, then the COVID-19 anti-lockdown freedom fighter, then the social
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  media narcissist, then the hateful troll, then the dating app pest, then the screen addict,
• 1:49
  and then the naive futurist. We jump around all of these archetypes, well, not all of them,
• 1:56
  but as many ones as we could fit into this conversation. I hope you find it as stimulating as I did.
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  Enjoy it. The one and only Jordan Gown.
• 2:04
  Every time that goes, when you're talking to people who are techno optimists.
• 2:20
  I think they secretly agree, but they're just not allowed to say so, out loud,
• 2:28
  and so people like me are fortunate to be able to say those things out loud for them.
• 2:34
  Right. What's that line about? It's very hard to convince someone of something when their livelihood
• 2:39
  depends on them not believing it. Exactly. I don't begrudge anybody for that. I've been in that
• 2:45
  position before too. I can completely understand, but I think we do need a shift in that attitude,
• 2:52
  and there's certainly enough evidence to be able to publicly talk about these things.
• 2:59
  And when you say you think that they basically do agree, what is it that you're saying that you
• 3:03
  think they agree with? I think there's an increased recognition of the harms facilitated by digital
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  platforms, and that in particular, it's a handful of small companies, and I call that out a lot.
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  It's basically Facebook and YouTube. If your job deals with them anyway, it's obviously very
• 3:27
  difficult to point the finger so explicitly, but whether it's a professional capacity or personal
• 3:35
  capacity, I think people are acknowledging that, yes, there are a lot of harms in those environments,
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  and we need to have a chat about what to do about them. It's kind of an overwhelming subject to
• 3:46
  even start to get our hands around in a conversation because those harms can be so scattered,
• 3:51
  and sometimes people can be a bit vague about what harms they're talking about. So some people
• 3:54
  will talk about extremism at hate speech. Some people will talk about the impact that it has on
• 4:00
  bullying amongst young people. Some people will talk about the impact it has on privacy and data
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  collection. Some people will talk about the impact of screens, choir screens, as if there's
• 4:11
  something magically bad about a digital device that is not bad about a book, where do you begin?
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  I think that's a really great point, and so the way I structured the book is around these personas,
• 4:24
  and the personas encapsulate a specific issue facilitated by digital platforms. For example,
• 4:32
  we have conspiracy theorists online, we have freedom fighters who protest lockdown mandates,
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  we have hateful trolls, social media narcissists, screen addicts, and so on. I think, as you pointed
• 4:47
  out, the issues are so broad and diverse that they can get quite overwhelming, but if you frame it
• 4:54
  through a person that you might know, a cousin who's all of a sudden an anti-vaxxer and a tenant
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  lockdown protest, a friend who's become a bit of a troll, all of a sudden those issues start to
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  feel very real and very tangible, and people can start to understand them a little bit better,
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  which is why the book is structured around those characters. And there's, of course, overlap between
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  these characters, the conspiracy theorists and say the anti-lockdown freedom fighter, and to give
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  them their due, the counter critique to your critique could be, we've lived for a long time
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  under a regime in which very small handful of so-called experts were able to disseminate
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  information to all of us, mostly old white men who would police and gatekeep the information
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  that we were able to have, and now we have a more democratic consumption of information,
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  and sometimes that will get things wrong in the case of science misinformation, for example,
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  but sometimes it will perform a useful role in pushing back against some stodgy narrative that
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  is backed by big farmer and big drug companies and governments and so on, that, for example, maybe
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  there were concerns about myocarditis and young men that were overlooked or downplayed by
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  traditional media and by governments and drug companies in their zeal to get everybody vaccinated,
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  and maybe there was too little criticism of the human rights impacts of some of the more
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  extreme lockdown measures like curfews or things that may not have been, have had epidemiology
• 6:34
  behind them, and that these mechanisms that Facebook and YouTube have platforms on which people
• 6:39
  can dissent, and that dissent is a powerful thing in a democracy. Yeah, it certainly is.
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  I think what I would challenge is the idea that that plurality actually holds. So, you know,
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  the utopian vision we had for the internet is that it would indeed do that and democratise all
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  these voices, but what's happened, particularly over the last, I'd say, 10 years, is that plurality
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  has actually shrunk, and the internet is now dominated by a very small handful of particular
• 7:11
  companies, in particular Alphabet, slash Google and Meta, slash Facebook. So, what we're seeing now
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  is the shrinking of that plurality, and those companies that now dominate have a very particular
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  set of objectives that aren't necessarily aligned to that utopian vision. So, what I mean by that
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  is that their full-profit companies, they decide that, you know, the value that they want from
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  people is to keep them on their platforms, so engagement at all costs, and what that results in
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  is a particular set of outcomes for people using that environment and for people transacting
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  in those platforms. And so, that's what we're seeing the harms come through is that, you know,
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  yes, it's okay to be on YouTube for, you know, fun little cat videos, but, you know, it's not
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  just that that we use it for now. We use it for everything, like a big part of our information
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  ecosystem, so that all of a sudden takes into account a lot of other harms, and through these
• 8:14
  platforms, those harms are being magnified. So, I guess the overall theme is I would challenge that
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  the tech neutrality idea, and those platforms constantly use that as an excuse, you know,
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  we're just the foundation, you know, we're not the ones doing all these things, but actually,
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  the way they build their platforms, the way they build their algorithms are very deliberate,
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  and none of those things are neutral because they actually insert values into those software
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  services. Right. I mean, let's be clear then about what we mean by neutral and what we mean by values,
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  because when you say there's a shrinking of diversity because you've got these two gigantic
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  companies, you know, Alphabet, which owns Google, which owns YouTube, and Meta, which owns Facebook
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  and Instagram, and WhatsApp, the, there may be a shrinking of corporate diversity, but the very
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  people who champion social media misinformation and who applaud the greater diversity of voices,
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  even if that means there are conspiracy theories and misinformation, they would be the ones who
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  are the most keen to say that there shouldn't be any deep platforming for people for ideological
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  reasons, that they may be a shrinking of corporate diversity, but not of ideological diversity,
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  and to the extent that there is a thumb on the scale by these social media companies,
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  they're generally doing it in a woke or politically correct direction by, you know,
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  banning Donald Trump, or, and so on. I mean, this is one of the reasons why Elon Musk has been
• 9:46
  successful, and so committed to taking over Twitter, right, a kind of a free speech crusade where
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  you should tolerate a higher level of hate speech and misinformation on these platforms in the
• 9:56
  interests of free speech. So when you're talking about neutrality and you're talking about values,
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  you're not talking about the companies proactively deciding what kinds of ideas and posts should
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  be prioritized or not. You're talking about something deeper or more sinister, which is the mindless
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  wearing algorithms that favor some types of content over others. Yes, that's right. So it's,
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  it's all in the design of the software, and what I'd add to that is, you know, you mentioned earlier
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  about the previous media ecosystem, if you like, the gatekeepers, you know, and they will also run
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  and continue to be run by a particular set of people, and that the idea that the social platforms
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  kind of provide an alternative to that. However, that ecosystem still has, while it's very imperfect,
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  still has an environment of regulation of policies and rulemaking around it that
• 11:00
  constrain it in some ways. And like I said, quite imperfect, but the difference with these
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  platforms is there are no rules around them, or very, very few rules. So, you know, there's
• 11:11
  general copyright rules, but other than that, it's a bit of a free for all, and that the preferred
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  modus operandi are the platforms, particularly when it comes to what they choose to put on there.
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  So editorializing, if you like, or moderation, if you like, it's to be completely hands off.
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  And so what we have is an environment basically free of any type of constraints or rules. So
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  naturally, it's going to be chaos. So yeah, like I said, while a previous media ecosystem
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  is, has a lot of issues, at least we retain a degree of control, and there were active forces
• 11:50
  that sought to moderate that. But just to clarify, I mean, the criticism of the libertarian right
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  of the social media companies is precisely that they don't have the Wild West that you're saying
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  there is. You know, Kanye was banned. Donald Trump was banned. Right. So they are, they are doing
• 12:08
  a bit of that. They've started to, that's right. They've started to, after a great degree of
• 12:14
  public pressure, I guess, from, from tech critics. And they've started to do that.
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  Is that a good thing? Should they be doing more of it, more editorializing, more treating
• 12:22
  themselves like their publications rather than platforms? Yeah, I think the overall
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  idea is whether these platforms should moderate content or not. And so really tricky question
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  to try and unpack. And the other layer I would add to that is, you know, like the Elon Musk's
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  of the world and the Kanye's of the world, you know, they're, they're sort of buying these platforms
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  as fees for political influence. And they sort of exist, but they're not elected, so they're not
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  government officials. So I guess what I'm saying is, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a tricky
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  environment to try and place rules around, but we have to start to try and do that. I don't have
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  a clean answer about whether they should editorialize or not. Other than to say that, you know, the
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  platforms have gotten to the scale and the size where, you know, maybe it's even impossible to do
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  that. So, you know, I mean, just in terms of the manpower that you would need to be
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  learning. I always find that that's a little bit cute when I hear Zuckerberg say it, you know,
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  they're, we have a billion more users on how many they've got now. You know, how many posts are
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  going up? How many YouTube videos there are? We couldn't possibly make sure that they're all,
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  you know, kosher before they got, well, hang on a second. Imagine if, you know, McDonald's, for
• 13:57
  example, said, do you have any idea how many burgers we produce? We can't make sure that every single
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  burger doesn't make somebody sick and doesn't have salmonella in it. You would say, that's a ridiculous
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  cop out. It's, you know, it's got your big gold marches on it. If I go and eat a burger, even if
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  it, even if you don't own it, if it's a franchisee, then I should have an expectation that I'm not
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  going to get sick. And you know what? You don't, you don't get sick from salmonella as a rule going
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  to McDonald's. They manage to, they employ however many people they need to employ and they
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  impose the quality management standards that are necessary to make sure that if you eat a McDonald's
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  burger, it may not be good for you, but it's not contaminated and it's not poisoned. And similarly,
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  if Facebook needs to multiply by 10,000, the number of employees that it's got in order to make sure
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  that posts don't go up, that shouldn't go up, then it could. Now, then we come to the question,
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  which you're, you're being, you know, diplomatic and ambivalent about, which is, would it be a good
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  idea to do that? And do you want, you know, from where does Zuckerberg get the right, you know,
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  since he's not democratically elected to determine the rules and the content of the speech that
• 15:06
  all of us are making to each other? That's right. And I think part of the issue is that we've
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  let these platforms get so big and so pervasive to the point that that moderation issue is tricky,
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  as you said, when, you know, like we perhaps we should, you know, think about alternative platforms
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  that aren't so big or that, you know, the idea that there's a single online experience for the
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  entire world, homogenizing everybody's culture, everybody's way of communicating into one platform
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  online. It's just ridiculous. And so, you know, that's what platforms like Facebook and Google are
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  trying to do. And it's obviously not working. And so, you know, thinking about how do we control
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  that situation is, has become really tricky because it's gotten to the point where their size is
• 15:58
  so big. So perhaps the first issue is that we need to get those platforms back into a manageable
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  size. And there are live, you know, antitrust cases against them, where, you know,
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  legislators are thinking about how to do that properly. That's a very least, do you mean splitting
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  apart some of the apps from the parent company like White as WhatsApp have to be owned by the same
• 16:22
  company that owns Facebook? Precisely. That's right. So that our entire information ecosystem isn't
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  reliant on just one or two things. And if we start to break them down into more manageable chunks,
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  maybe the moderation conversation all of a sudden is viable because they're not so huge and
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  all pervasive. I mean, Zuckerberg says it's kind of a, it's always a fiction to think that big
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  goliaths remain big goliaths. You know, my space was the goliath and then all of a sudden it wasn't,
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  history is littered with the corpses of big companies that weren't agile enough to keep up with
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  with their competitors. He points to Snapchat, he points to TikTok, he points to all of these,
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  you know, and even Instagram, which of course now he owns as well. But nonetheless, you know,
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  the way things look in 2035, you know, we may be looking back on this conversation going,
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  it was ridiculous that we thought that Facebook would be the universal sort of wet mode of communication
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  that was so passe. Yeah, that's right. And we see platforms like TikTok emerging very quickly
• 17:22
  and being popular. And obviously Facebook and others are nervous about it. But, you know,
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  should we wait for that decline point to happen before we start to address these things? I think,
• 17:34
  I think that's the sort of challenges. And part of the intention of the book is to surface these
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  voices that aren't necessarily being heard. So, you know, we can talk about these things in the
• 17:46
  abstract, like through antitrust or surveillance capitalism. But there are real people being heard
• 17:52
  by these platforms. And so, you know, we shouldn't have to wait for market forces to correct itself
• 17:59
  or for a platform to all of a sudden, you know, not be so popular anymore to address some of these
• 18:04
  harms. And particularly when, you know, these companies are starting to talk about the next phase
• 18:10
  of the internet, which is, you know, things like the Metaverse and Web3. And they're already
• 18:15
  staking their claim on that future when we haven't even resolved the issues from this version.
• 18:21
  You know, we can't keep letting these sort of powerful, two powerful companies shift the
• 18:27
  goalposts and keep building, you know, ahead of us. And they're just leaving all the issues for us
• 18:33
  to deal with ourselves. You dropped a piece of jargon in there, Jordan Surveillance Capitalism,
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  which is a good one. We're coined by Shishana Zuboff, I think, who wrote a book called Surveillance
• 18:44
  Capitalism. What is it? What's Surveillance Capitalism? So, it's essentially about harvesting all
• 18:50
  our data and profiting from that. So, YouTube and Facebook are free. That means the transaction
• 18:58
  cost is actually you us and our data. So, you know, habits, preferences, movements, what we do
• 19:06
  every day, all that is then packaged up to sell to advertisers against those preferences. So,
• 19:13
  because the product is free, we are essentially the product. And so, it marries the surveillance of
• 19:20
  our data and our habits into a capitalist transaction. And when we talk about data, I can just hear
• 19:28
  the audience's eyes glazing over a little bit because there have been so many data hacks. And,
• 19:33
  you know, like, I don't really know why I should care, per se. So, what is data? When we talk about
• 19:42
  my data, I mean, so the best I understand it, data is just the digital exhaust fumes of me going
• 19:50
  about my life, right? I leave a trail, I leave ripples, I leave a wake. And there are little bits of
• 19:56
  information about my shopping habits, about places that I've called, about, you know,
• 20:01
  insurance that I may or may not have applied for, you know, in addition to my private information.
• 20:06
  But I mean, all of that, all of those, that behavioral matrix, that network of data points about
• 20:12
  my life, that was just going unobserved. I mean, I've always been doing, Adam, we've always been
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  been, if someone had wanted to spy on us before the digital age, they could have pieced together
• 20:25
  all of these things. Oh, he went to Woolworth's at this particular time. You know, he,
• 20:28
  if you had a private eye tracking you, they could have put all of that together. So, what's so bad or
• 20:34
  so insidious about big companies noticing that basically in order to deliver me more accurate ads?
• 20:41
  Yeah. So, I think the, the, what's, what's different now is the scale and the pervasiveness of
• 20:49
  that data capture. So, you know, in your earlier example, if somebody wanted to spy on you,
• 20:55
  pre internet that had to follow you around, that's quite laborious. But now that's just happening
• 21:01
  by default. So, there are digital spies, if you like, everywhere all the time happening. And you
• 21:08
  know, if, if it's, you know, if it serves the purpose of serving you the toothpaste that you want,
• 21:14
  that's a fairly benign kind of an outcome. However, if it starts to get into the kinds of data points
• 21:21
  that sensitive and things you may not want to be revealed, like you may have a health condition
• 21:27
  or you may be, you know, pregnant if, if you're a woman or you may have, you know,
• 21:34
  something else that you actually don't want someone to know about, there's often no choice
• 21:40
  in that data harvesting if it's ubiquitous. And so, that starts to become a problem and it starts
• 21:45
  to become an incursion of our privacy in our data agency when those things are being used and
• 21:50
  targeted against us. And the other side of it is at scale, like, you know, we humans are very
• 21:57
  bad at scale and imagining scale and because we're little and we have limited capacities. And so,
• 22:04
  you know, big data, if you like, can sort of discern patterns of behavior and trends that we have
• 22:13
  no conception of but is essentially profiting from us. And so, what I mean by that is, you know,
• 22:19
  for example, Google, let's say, knows where you like to go to the gym, knows where you
• 22:28
  your preferred restaurant and individually that feels quite benign. But what if, you know, they start
• 22:35
  selling or they get sponsored by a restaurant that is a competitor to the one that you like,
• 22:41
  you know, will they start serving that competitors restaurant every time you log on to your
• 22:46
  preferred one. And where is your data agency in that? So, it starts to enter into behavioral
• 22:53
  manipulation rather than just behavioral targeting. And that's where it becomes really problematic.
• 23:00
  Let's talk about another thing you said, which is engagement at all cost. So, when we were talking
• 23:04
  about the shrinking of diversity in these big companies and I was making the point that, you know,
• 23:11
  there may be only a few companies, but nonetheless, in an ideal world or what some people's vision of
• 23:17
  an ideal world, they're not putting their thumb on the scale of what I can say. Nonetheless,
• 23:23
  their algorithms are reliably favoring information and posts that generate the largest
• 23:29
  amount of engagement. They want us on the site for one second longer than we would otherwise be.
• 23:35
  They want us commenting. They want us clicking like. They want us either getting outraged or
• 23:40
  feeling satisfied. They want us sharing content. They basically just want us staying.
• 23:46
  So, what does that do? How does that exert a bias even in the absence of anyone trying to exert a bias?
• 23:54
  Yeah, I mean, that can lead to a whole host of issues. So, you know, there are studies that
• 23:59
  found that obviously, you know, negative or sensational content is more engaging than
• 24:06
  mutual ones. And so, we therefore get a bias against that type of a content. And at scale, if that's
• 24:18
  all we see, we start to go down these rabbit holes. So, for example, if Facebook decided that you
• 24:25
  were slightly into conspiracy theories, even if it's a benign one, it'll keep feeding you
• 24:32
  conspiracy-like content. Until, you know, you get to the point where every time you log on,
• 24:38
  that's all you see. And it feeds you that same sort of content buffet style. And so, obviously,
• 24:43
  those things start to become a problem. And the way that relates to engagement at all costs is
• 24:48
  because that's what the algorithm is trained to do. So, it thinks you like this thing. Therefore,
• 24:54
  it'll keep giving you an even, and it doesn't differentiate between the point at which that
• 25:00
  becomes harmful to you. It's just doing its job, essentially. So, you know, that's an example
• 25:05
  of the kind of values we attribute to those algorithms. And, you know, obviously, it doesn't judge
• 25:12
  for itself. But that's, you know, if your favorite engagement at a lot costs, those sorts of harms
• 25:17
  start to exert itself. Right. And I mean, you don't even have to have started out by demonstrating
• 25:24
  an interest in conspiracy theories. If you just type into YouTube, what happened on 9-11,
• 25:29
  some of that, and usually the, the videos that get the most engagement will be
• 25:34
  slightly conspiratorial about things not adding up. And then once you've watched that one,
• 25:40
  because you liked that one, they're going to deliver you something in their suggested videos
• 25:45
  column that is a little bit more extreme and a little bit more extreme. I mean, I remember reading
• 25:50
  this study about anorexia videos on YouTube. Do you know about that? I think it was on TikTok.
• 25:56
  So it was actually there was a four corners investigation where this, this younger who she was
• 26:02
  generally health conscious. And so she started out watching just fitness videos. And then all of
• 26:08
  a sudden, in a very short period of time, I think it was weeks, she started getting anorexia videos.
• 26:14
  Like from people who are pro anorexia, who think that it's a, that the medical establishment is
• 26:20
  taking an unnecessarily negative view of self-starving. Exactly. Yeah. So there is a very quick
• 26:28
  escalation from that initial interest because of the way these systems are set up. And
• 26:35
  on the chapter on trolling, you know, there was a point in sort of the early notice where trolling
• 26:41
  was a bit, you know, just for lulls is the term. So it's, you know, just having a joke at some
• 26:46
  of these expense. But now, you know, the environment is very radicalizing. So I actually spoke to a guy
• 26:56
  who was a reform neo Nazi. And he started out as a bit of a troll. And he was reflecting on, there
• 27:04
  was a grooming process, both formal and informal online where, you know, they were able to test
• 27:14
  these young men's, usually young men's receptivity to some of these ideas. And so you might start
• 27:19
  off with a page on, you know, patriotism or just, I love Australia. And then if you keep liking
• 27:26
  those things, all of a sudden, weeks later, you're in a group with fully fledged neo Nazis. So
• 27:33
  because of these engagement or costs, sort of algorithms, you know, like an escalation in a
• 27:40
  radicalization is taking place kind of all around us. And it's because of how these things are
• 27:46
  designed. This sort of brings us to the chapter after the chapter on conspiracy theorists and
• 27:52
  anti lockdown freedom fighters, which is social media narcissists. You know, there is something,
• 27:57
  isn't there about the way that we're using the platform? The, I don't know, I mean, I sometimes
• 28:04
  think that that one of the aspects of social media that we don't tend to talk about that much,
• 28:10
  because it's difficult to put your finger on is the ineffable way in which it's sort of corrosive
• 28:17
  to your experience of being in the present to constantly have another avatar of yourself standing
• 28:25
  on your shoulder, watching what you're doing and trying to curate your own existence for the benefit
• 28:28
  of other people to look at. And that does encourage a kind of reflective narcissism. You know, the girl
• 28:39
  who wants to get skinny and ends up watching anorexia videos. And the guy who just thinks that
• 28:45
  he's a patriotic Australian and ends up consorting with neo Nazis. In some way, there is a grandiosity
• 28:53
  to that that seems like it's encouraged by social media.
• 28:58
  Yeah, there's a huge performative aspect of our Instagram profiles and, you know, our Facebook
• 29:04
  profiles. And it encouraged that kind of showboding. And, you know, those things aren't you, like
• 29:12
  in the book I talk about, you know, in the 1600s, Dutch merchants would commission paintings
• 29:19
  of themselves with, you know, like peacocks and things like that. So in a way, we've been doing it
• 29:24
  for a very long time. That's what I want to change my Instagram avatar. My profile pictures are just
• 29:31
  like an Elizabethan painting of me surrounded by peacocks shirtless, obviously.
• 29:36
  Yeah, obviously. But what's different is the scale at which this is happening. So because
• 29:44
  those systems are always on because they reach, you know, global audiences, that
• 29:50
  performativity and the things that result from it, including, you know, the insecurity that
• 29:55
  results from it, the pressure to feel like what you have to present is constantly perfect,
• 30:00
  is heightened and starts to become really problematic. And I also call out social media
• 30:08
  influences. And there, there are a bit of a pet hate of mine. And I differentiate, by the way,
• 30:13
  between people who just happen to be influential and are on social media and people who primarily
• 30:19
  identify as influences. So basically people who, you know, pose shirtless and just kind of showbode
• 30:26
  and don't really have any qualifications other than they may be semi-good-looking and, you know,
• 30:32
  pose online. And so that social media influence, I think, is a symptom of where that's gone wrong,
• 30:39
  where, you know, rather than a platform to inspire, it's become commoditized grandiosity,
• 30:47
  as you say. And it's resulting in all sorts of things like, you know, people wanting facelifts so
• 30:56
  that they look like they're filtered version of themselves and, you know, just body issues left
• 31:02
  right in the center. So like with a lot of the other things, it's the scale and the ubiquity of it
• 31:09
  that becomes problematic. I know a lot of influencers who don't call themselves influences anymore,
• 31:13
  but call themselves content creators. So there's this middle ground, I suppose, between the
• 31:20
  fatuous shirtless, like beach picture influencer on the one hand. And at the other hand, on the
• 31:27
  other end, you have people who are legitimately famous for doing things that have made them
• 31:33
  justifiably successful and just happen to have a lot of followers. But in between, there's a class
• 31:37
  of health bloggers, Instagram mommies with tips on parenting, Abby Chatfields and Flex mommies and
• 31:46
  people who have like, who are producing content that people actually want and might find
• 31:51
  intellectually stimulating, but never had a platform until these apps came into existence. What do
• 31:57
  you make of that field? I find that group very, very problematic. So there's two things I want to
• 32:03
  say on that. Q and on's, which is the mega conspiracy theory that kind of ushered in the world
• 32:11
  where we are now actually found a really great partner in those influences during the pandemic,
• 32:17
  because these conspiracies became so amorphous that it started to absorb all these random theories
• 32:24
  around it. And so the wellness influences in particular are kind of natural science skeptics and
• 32:30
  natural vaccine skeptics. So they preach wellness and natural therapies and all those things.
• 32:36
  And so they, during the pandemic, they tended to absorb Q and on or Q adjacent, they call
• 32:43
  theories without really thinking about where they come from or whether this is scientifically
• 32:48
  sound. And so, you know, if those people start talking about advice that should really be left
• 32:57
  to somebody with qualifications like doctors and nurses and that's when it starts to become
• 33:03
  a huge issue. And, you know, it's that blurring of the personal and the professional
• 33:09
  and, you know, that blurring of expertise that is a challenge. So they, they're called pastel
• 33:19
  Q and on. I can't remember. There was a journalist who dubbed that term, but basically that group was,
• 33:26
  was a huge super spreader of conspiracies. And they gave a really attractive new face to the
• 33:33
  conspiracies that we're seeing online. So I think that that group is actually one of the groups
• 33:38
  that really need to be moderated because they are, they do provide content that are
• 33:43
  this sea as valuable, but there should be a line from benign or passive content, if you like,
• 33:52
  all to active advice that should really be left to medical professionals with qualifications.
• 34:00
  Yeah, I'm not crazy about the term pastel Q and on or invoking Q and on because I'm just a
• 34:05
  allergic to smearing people by association. I think if you don't, if you don't believe that Q
• 34:12
  is an oracle who is a legitimate source of information, then we probably shouldn't be calling
• 34:17
  you Q and on or Q and on adjacent, but I take your point that there's a universe of conspiracy theories
• 34:23
  where I mean, hasn't there been legislation about health advice on social media within the
• 34:30
  past couple of years in Australia? Yeah, so the latest one was from the TGA, the therapeutic
• 34:35
  goods administration. I think it was earlier this year where they actually said you, you can't be paid
• 34:42
  to endorse health products. And so that only came about this year. So before that, we saw problems
• 34:48
  with people like Pete Evans selling like light therapy things to sell in pseudo-scientific
• 34:56
  mumbo jumbo. So there's definitely a more attention being paid to that group, but they can still
• 35:04
  air their rumors about vaccines causing having side effects or something like that. That's right.
• 35:11
  And what's what's tricky as well is sort of that middle group where they have maybe tens of
• 35:16
  thousands of followers. I'm not the really big ones because regulators can only really pay attention
• 35:21
  to the bigger fish, if you like. And so there's this middle group of influences that can still kind
• 35:30
  of get away with whatever they want. I mean, I'm torn Jordan because when I hear you say stuff like,
• 35:34
  you know, they can get away with whatever they want and regulators can't catch them. Look,
• 35:40
  we live in a democracy man. I mean, we live in a society that is supposed to be extremely
• 35:47
  cautious. Like if you look over the grand sweep of human history in all cultures and political
• 35:53
  situations throughout most of time, like the greatest threat to human flourishing has not been
• 36:01
  the fact that some, you know, your neighbor was full of shit. It's been the fact that the church
• 36:06
  or the government, people in positions of power and authority were enforcing what they regarded
• 36:11
  as being the correct way of thinking on everybody. So regulators coming in and insisting that
• 36:17
  only medical professionals, the people who they deemed to be medical professionals who are advised
• 36:22
  by drug companies are allowed to, you know, control the narrative and that anyone who spouts the
• 36:29
  incorrect worldview and misspeaks should be banned from the platform or punished or fined or
• 36:35
  something. Like if it's total bullshit, you're saying 100 percent bullshit, maybe I kind of
• 36:41
  understand it. But there's a lot of shifting sands in all of this. You know, remember there was a
• 36:47
  time, there was a long period of time when we were being encouraged not to wear masks at the beginning
• 36:51
  of the pandemic by the official health authorities. And I knew doctors who were saying I'm wearing a
• 36:55
  mask in the shopping center because I'm assuming that a respiratory illness is airborne. And we
• 37:01
  will encourage not to. It turned out the reason that it was too is because they wanted extra masks
• 37:05
  for frontline, you know, for people in hospitals and so on. So what room is there for the
• 37:11
  boisterous, you know, town hall of ideas where people are allowed to be rolled?
• 37:16
  Yeah. And we definitely want to be careful about where that balance is at. And, you know,
• 37:23
  we definitely don't want to discourage dissenting voices and diverse ideas because that's very
• 37:29
  important for our information ecosystem. But I think what's different in our current environment
• 37:37
  is that the balance between recognized official and credible information, if you like,
• 37:47
  can be drowned out by the opposite. And so there's a huge world, there's a huge gray area in
• 37:54
  between that. But overall, we, you know, we should want that most of the information that we consume
• 38:01
  is from official sources that we trust in and that's credible. And again, we don't live in a perfect
• 38:09
  society, but as a group for us to function, we need to trust in the institutions that we've built.
• 38:16
  We need to trust that the government will generally, particularly in a democratic government,
• 38:21
  will generally do right by us. And so if that trust is corroded away, then it's kind of just chaos
• 38:28
  and it becomes a bit of a free for all. And so I think the point I want to make is that these
• 38:35
  platforms have started to corrode that trust in those institutions. So it's less about my
• 38:42
  neighbor who's full of shit and they're right to say that it's more about at scale. There's
• 38:47
  something happening that is, you know, decreasing our trust in institutions and it's facilitated
• 38:55
  through this digital platform. Right. And it's not just my neighbor who's full of shit anymore. It's
• 38:59
  that my neighbor, I suppose, is a part of a tidal wave of some kind of viral meme about, for
• 39:06
  example, vaccines where it's wrong to sort of think of it as a problem with my neighbor talking
• 39:11
  shit because everyone in the town, there's a mob stampede towards some piece of misinformation
• 39:16
  that's gaining virally precisely because of the algorithms, exactly towards what we like to
• 39:23
  click on. Exactly. And in the physical world, there would be circuit breakers to that neighbor.
• 39:29
  You know, nobody would really listen to them. But online, that neighbor can connect with all the
• 39:35
  other neighbors from all around the world together and make it feel like there's a movement behind
• 39:42
  it. So those social and physical and real circuit breakers that we employ in the real world don't
• 39:47
  exist online. Right. I mean, I do think part of the problem of the corrosion of trust is not just
• 39:52
  that we now have social media as an alternative, but that the institutions have hardly covered
• 39:57
  themselves in glory in the past few decades either. Like, there is a problem, there's a problem
• 40:03
  of group thinking journalism, I think. There's a problem of aloofness in government and bad
• 40:09
  communication from bureaucracy. There's a problem of rigidity and a lack of openness to other ideas
• 40:17
  in the medical establishment. You know, these are also reasons that leave people primed to be
• 40:24
  susceptible to the bullshit that's online. Yeah, absolutely. And I am not at all excusing
• 40:31
  you know, current institutions and particularly if, if you know, they're part of the problem of
• 40:36
  that corrosion of trust. I think though what's happening is that that balance has been recast.
• 40:46
  And so again, that point I made earlier about even though the media ecosystem has issues,
• 40:54
  we, you know, there are lots of rules to try and correct that imbalance. And you know, it's obvious
• 41:02
  when people abuse that. Whereas online, we just don't have that same facility to course correct
• 41:10
  because it's a complete free role. What would the course creation look like?
• 41:15
  I think there's a number of things. So the book looks at two types of recommendations for each chapter.
• 41:23
  What we can do as individuals is one and then what we can do as a group. So, you know, as governments,
• 41:29
  as institutions, as civic society. And for the most part, I definitely think it has to happen
• 41:36
  in at the group level because it shouldn't be up to us as individuals to try and navigate all
• 41:41
  these issues. However, I included the first part because I wanted people to feel like they had
• 41:47
  some sort of agency over the situation. If your loved one is a conspiracy theorist, are you going
• 41:53
  to wait until the next version of the online CFD Act is enacted and the regulators get the act
• 41:59
  together and try and sort something out? Of course not. So I think there's individual actions that
• 42:05
  we can take and group actions we can take as well. There's a lot to do and there is no perfect
• 42:12
  answer, but, you know, I tend to focus on the role of technology because I do think that the
• 42:20
  digital platforms are what sort of escalated a lot of these issues. And so if we start from that
• 42:26
  place where we look at how we rebalance the power, a symmetry between digital platforms and
• 42:34
  everything else, how we regulate their ability to spread information that isn't correct, how we
• 42:43
  basically make sure that they admit their culpability for the online harms that they produce
• 42:51
  and do something about it, we can start to shift that balance. So one radical, very radical idea
• 42:59
  in the book was, you know, what if we charge digital platforms for the harms that they call.
• 43:06
  So for example, if an oil company, you know, has a massive oil spill, you know, we'd want them
• 43:11
  to clean that up, right? But for these digital platforms, we sort of just go, you know, you can
• 43:17
  just carry on doing what you're doing. And so what the book tries to do is highlight the fact that
• 43:23
  these harms are real. They're all around us and they're people that we know and care about that are
• 43:31
  being hurt by these platforms. And so they really need to take responsibility for it.
• 43:38
  What's the oil spill in the analogy? I guess all the, you know, the characters that I've spoken
• 43:48
  about could be, you know, all the poor, you know, like birds covered in oil. It's the freedom
• 43:55
  fighter that, you know, because their lives blew up during the pandemic, they were looking for
• 44:00
  answers. And so YouTube fed them all these conspiracy theories to the point that they became
• 44:04
  anti-vexes. Or it's, you know, the the troll who is a little bit of an angry nerd gamer who found
• 44:13
  neonaties, you know, it's the screen addict who, you know, ignores life because they're addicted
• 44:21
  to the screen. So all the personas could be like little oil spills sort of happening everywhere.
• 44:27
  And there's just a lot of them and it's creeping and growing. I mean, it's tricky, isn't it,
• 44:32
  because with an oil spill, you've got the tanker with the name of the company emblazoned on it. And
• 44:37
  there's no upside to an oil spill, whereas you can imagine the tech companies saying it's less
• 44:43
  like an oil spill. And it maybe it's a bit more like, I don't know, a car manufacturer where,
• 44:48
  you know, some people are going to drive really fast and they're going to crash their cars and kill
• 44:51
  people or, you know, or a, I don't know, a lolly manufacturer or a chocolate, a chocolate year,
• 44:58
  whereas some people are going to just eat way too much and their lives are going to be
• 45:01
  deranged by their addiction to chocolate. But the vast majority of people are using these things
• 45:05
  in healthy ways and they're not becoming neonaties and they're not becoming trolls and so on.
• 45:10
  A, what do you say to that? And B, is there a sense in which a lot of this is closing a lot of
• 45:16
  barn doors after the horse has, has bolted? I mean, this, I'm, I keep coming back to what you
• 45:21
  said earlier, engagement at all costs. If you could change the profit, if you could change the way
• 45:27
  they make money, if you could say, like, I don't know, you know, I'll have to make money from ad revenue
• 45:32
  anymore. You have to charge users of fee and you can't, you can't use how long they're spending on
• 45:37
  the site as a way of determining what you deliver them. Wouldn't all of this just evaporate in the
• 45:43
  sense that they might as well just go back to a reverse chronological feed without having the
• 45:47
  algorithms that encourage engagement in the first place. Yeah, you wouldn't have to go around
• 45:52
  mopping up all of these negative externalities from their behavior. I, I do like the, the, the
• 45:58
  car analogy. So, you know, we, we give out licenses so people know how to drive properly. We mandate
• 46:05
  seat belts so people are protected and we have speed limits and road rules. I think that's a really
• 46:10
  useful one to think about digital platforms. If we have, if we build these protections in place,
• 46:16
  then people are for the most part able to navigate them safely. The other one is kind of pharmaceuticals
• 46:23
  where, you know, we, there's a lot of regulation around what's helpful, what's healthy and what's not.
• 46:29
  So, I think that system level thinking is exactly what we need to do is like, how do we make sure
• 46:35
  that we can operate these platforms as safely and as competitively and as democratically as possible.
• 46:44
  And to your point about the business model, I think there's a really important one.
• 46:50
  And so, one of the people I interviewed was this great technologist, her name is Michaela. And she
• 46:57
  has been, you know, tinkering with the web for since the very, very early days. And she remarked
• 47:03
  upon when it switched from the purely researched based not-for-profit model of the internet to
• 47:12
  the commoditized version that we see now, that was a really huge leap. So, I think there's a lot
• 47:17
  to be said about the business models of the big platforms and what to do. You know, we don't, I mean,
• 47:25
  I've worked for media organizations before and I see the value of advertising. So, I'm not gonna
• 47:32
  sort of wholesale say we changed that overnight. But, you know, the more extreme ends of that feature,
• 47:41
  for example, we can regulate. So, for example, micro targeting. So, you know, do we really need to
• 47:46
  know, you know, how often you go to the gym versus you happen to like going to the gym? You know,
• 47:53
  you know, it's like what part of our data and our behavior is safe to include versus, you know,
• 48:02
  like all the sort of hidden parts of it that really shouldn't be targeted and capitalized on.
• 48:10
  I mean, I just think if you start going around saying you're allowed to look at this, but you're
• 48:13
  not allowed to look at that. You're allowed to look at whether I like gyms, but you're not allowed
• 48:16
  to look at how many times I go to the gym, then it's just gonna become an endless game of whack-a-mall
• 48:21
  where regulators are just wasting a huge amount of time on a subject that they will never understand
• 48:27
  as well as the software engineers understand it and they will always get around it a little bit
• 48:31
  like finance like Wall Street's always gonna get around regulations because they understand the
• 48:36
  system better than any regulator does. And so, you have to sort of reform the underlying incentives
• 48:42
  so that the companies just no longer have an interest in doing it, but I don't know what that looks
• 48:46
  like other than as I say having a monthly subscription where the user pays and that's the way that
• 48:50
  they get their revenue. But I don't even know how you structure that. Yeah, like different models
• 48:54
  will certainly help. And you know, the other idea is should we build alternative types of digital
• 49:01
  platforms? And so one of the projects we had was called the Public Square Project where, you know,
• 49:08
  rather than relying on Facebook and YouTube, et cetera, for our everyday communications, could
• 49:14
  we have a digital platform that it doesn't have a profit imperative? So, you know, when we're talking
• 49:21
  about the more civic side of our information ecosystem, it's not subject to that same level of
• 49:27
  commercially. And we have broadcasters like the ABC who are for that, but more and more,
• 49:34
  the digital platforms and social media sort of usurping a lot of those functions. And so it should
• 49:40
  be built online versions of that, but that are not actually privately owned. So like, what might a
• 49:48
  public Facebook look like, for example? Interesting. What do you think of Elon buying Twitter?
• 49:57
  I think it's quite problematic. And I mean, the thing about Elon is he's just so volatile.
• 50:07
  And so, you know, I'm loath to predict what will actually happen, but, you know, Twitter has become
• 50:13
  really important for our information ecosystem. It has a lot of faults. I actually wrote a piece
• 50:19
  a couple of weeks ago kind of saying, maybe it's for the best because we've gotten so
• 50:24
  reliant on Twitter for our daily news and information, even though it's not actually that great.
• 50:32
  You know, it's like Twitter facilitates this kind of hostile back and forth. It facilitates
• 50:38
  snarkiness. You know, it's pretty hard to have a new ones conversation in tweet form in general.
• 50:44
  And so maybe it'll force us to look at an environment that's a little bit healthier than that.
• 50:50
  But in general, I'm obviously not a fan of billionaires buying public square platforms because they
• 50:59
  want that power and influence. I think it's very problematic.
• 51:04
  You end the book with a chapter about the naive futurists. I guess you were talking about the very
• 51:10
  beginning of the podcast as well. If you cast, if you put on your prognosticators hat and think
• 51:16
  about the future, when my preschool age children are middle aged, what will the internet look
• 51:26
  like? I mean, it even sounds silly to say the internet. Of course, there's not going to be an
• 51:30
  internet. It's just everything will be networked. Yeah. I think what it looks, what it could look like
• 51:36
  is being decided today. I actually think we're in a really important and quite scary milestone
• 51:43
  about that tech future. And so if we allow the current tech barons to define what that future
• 51:51
  looks like, I think we're going to get more of the same times 10 of the harms because the
• 51:57
  incentives will be the same. The harms will be magnified. The inequality will be more stark,
• 52:05
  which is in the chapter, you know, I sort of call out that we should really, you know, be worried
• 52:12
  when the medicine staked a claim on the metaverse. And you know, Jack Dorsey has staked a claim on
• 52:18
  cryptocurrency and Google has staked a claim on hyper advanced AI. So, you know, it's like where,
• 52:25
  what is what will it mean for every day person to be in that world where it's controlled by just a
• 52:32
  small handful of people? I think we need to make sure that that power imbalance and the harms that
• 52:39
  highlighted in the book are addressed now so that those future versions, whatever it looks like,
• 52:45
  doesn't carry over the problems that we're seeing today. The book is disconnect while we get pushed
• 52:52
  to extremes online and how to stop it. Jordan, thanks so much for being here. Thank you very much for
• 53:01
  uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postumer. Follow me, Josh Zeps on Twitter and
• 53:06
  Instagram for all the latest, may your day be fruitful, your mind humble, your enemies generous
• 53:13
  and your conversations perfectly, sparklingly, delectably, uncomfortable.